When I am not living my best life as a fashion and beauty blogger I am also very much a cricket WAG (Wives & Girlfriends of professional athletes: read in WAGS MIAMI voice). The latest WAG adventure with my husband was visiting Wellington and Hamilton New Zealand (NZ) during the SA vs NZ test series. New Zealand is also known as “Aotearoa” in their native Maori language, directly translating to ‘land of the long white cloud’. Unfortunately that is all the Maori I managed to pick up in my short stay in NZ. Unfortunately I got a bit sick in Hamilton so I wasn’t able to enjoy and explore as much as I did in Welly, I think I don’t have a single photograph of our time in Hamilton.
Traveling with my husband is always special and so different to traveling on my own. We often spend weeks apart so reuniting is always special whether we are back home or in a foreign place. Being with the other WAGS is great too, since live such similar lifestyles while individually being very different. We often have long chats about life, and specifically our crazy nomadic lifestyle. We don’t get to spend as much time with our men as it seems, since they’re training and playing most days, most of the girls try to plan little activities together to fill up our days.
Wellington was not first on my list of places to visit but it was cute and city like much like Cape Town. We stayed pretty close to the harbor and walked everywhere – my step counter was LIT in Wellington to say the least. One of my favorite things to do when visiting a new place is finding all the cool hipster places to eat vegan and drink coffee. I eat vegan usually because its the closest thing I can find to halal, its a little trick I picked up from all my trips. Most vegan food spaces don’t serve alcohol or meat so it makes eating while abroad much easier for me.
I like to think of myself as a global coffee hunter – in search of the coolest spots in town. Welly was quite pricey to eat at since the dollar is very strong against our dwindling rand, so I did keep my eating out at a limit. Despite my budget, I managed to find some “gun” coffee shops as my husband would say. I was pretty inspired by a chain of coffee joints called Mojo. Each branch looked really cool and minamilst with great coffee and pastry options. I probably would have added a few cool global magazines to their tables but thats just me. If you’re ever in Wellington be sure to look them up, you can find them everywhere.
I was really impressed by New Zealand local designers on display at their boutiques. If you’re into thrifting theres definitely a lot of thrift stores stocking big designer brands but I am always keen too see what the locals are doing. The Kiwi’s certainly have some talent., if you’re around Wellington check out Good as Gold and Superette for international and local designer brands.
Besides good coffee and inspiring spaces we walked the harbor a lot and often, it reminded me of the V&A waterfront and the sea point promenade but on a wintery day! The squad had finished the test early (yay!) so we had an off day to explore the Wellington Saturday market. It was so cute, I wish we could have one just like it along the V&A’s waterfront in summer *hint to any market owners*.
Hamilton was more of a shopping trip for us, I was sick most of the time so I wasn’t keen to explore much. It’s a very quiet town with not much going on, but on the upside there were a variety of halal food places here! We kinda got addicted to a halal friendly burger place called Burger Fuel. Parny did quite bit of shopping at a local designer store called Crate and I managed to consume my fair share of green tea lattes at Starbucks.
I loved feeling safe wherever we walked in the streets. New Zealenders are really big on following the rules which I find kinda weird since Saffers live to break all the rules. The Kiwi’s don’t speed, they cross at the pedestrian crossing and walk/drive very slowly.
Xo Aisha
Check out some of our snaps from Wellington Below:
