We thought downtown Whanganui (which by the way is best pronounced as Wanganui instead of the more common Te Reo Māori ‘Fhanganui’) was really charming.

Here’s an especially brutal brutalist building, originally it was where you went to collect your unemployment benefits, and still used by various government agencies.

That’s the Durie Hill War Memorial Tower, which we climbed the next day. Actually there’s more to it than that… first we parked somewhere at the bottom of the hill, not in the picture, and walked through a pretty long tunnel to the bottom of a rickety, er, historic, elevator. We summoned said elevator, replete with a chatty volunteer attendant, paid our money, and rode it to the top of the hill. The shorter orange tower is the elevator. Then we walked to the big tower and climbed the hundred-and-some steps to the top.

The elevator was originally built to sell houses on the other side… in the early 20th century when the area was developed, the hill was too steep for cars or horses to get up easily without taking quite a long way around. So the elevator was conceived to make it easy to walk to work and back.

The view was just as panoramic as expected. The safety bars kinda dominate the photograph but weren’t such a big problem in real life.

I would love to know how often this happens.

We only had an evening and a morning to meet Whanganui, but it seemed like a place that deserves a long weekend of its own someday.