Easter Sunday - museums

We visited two museums today, MOTAT (Museum of Transport and Technology) and the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

MOTAT started with a big display of aircraft, including this funny little plane developed for crop dusting. After about two hours there we moved onto the other MOTAT site to see cars, trams, steam engines etc.

The two halves of the museum were connected by a tram system, which also stopped at the zoo. As we neared our destination the heavens decided to open, and it rained heavily!! We ran for cover when we got off, and were then trapped in the pump house until the rain eased off slightly. As it was Easter Sunday a lot of the events were designed for children; great for them but less for us to see. The display of bicycles was particularly interesting, and they had a number of interesting old cars.

About 2pm we moved onto the War Memorial Museum, which had three floors of exhibits about NZ. We only managed to see about 70% of the ground floor before  closing time.

The exhibit about the Pacific Island population, and their migration to NZ was extremely interesting, especially as a lot of the information was new to us. And it was fascinating to see the similarities, and discrepancies, between the various languages from each island group.

I really enjoyed the decorated bark cloths, or tapu, of which they had an extensive collection.  The collection of Maori items was also one of the most extensive we had come across, but was basically the same sort of things as we had already seen elsewhere.

They also had lots of NZ work from the Arts and Craft movement, but I was only half way through that when they sounded the Last Post and threw us out.

A tiring day, though full of useful Information.  

Tomorrow we are back to walking, with a trip up the Rangitoto extinct volcano just across Auckland harbour and visible from our bedroom window.