I was on holiday in this city when I got sacked. I’ve loved it ever since

OpinionIn this series, My Happy Place, our writers reflect on the holiday destinations in Australia and around the world that they cherish the most.Travel writerJuly 30, 2026 — 5:00amHere’s a travel hack for when you’re travelling on your birthday: always tell people it’s your birthday. Otherwise, how are they going to know?I awoke on my special day in 2024 at a hotel in Ohakune, a town on New Zealand’s North Island. The staff in the breakfast room wished me a happy birthday, as did the receptionist when I checked out. Later, the sales assistant at the clothing store at the railway station wished me a happy birthday too. How did they know? Because I told them.Wellington and its locals won’t let you down.iStockI did have an excuse for this forthright behaviour: it was my 60th birthday, I was in New Zealand on that significant day because of an unavoidable assignment, and I was travelling solo. If I didn’t slip random people the prompt, who was going to wish me many happy returns?Anyway, I was happy as I stood on that station platform. I was heading “home” – and by that I mean Wellington, my adopted home when in Aotearoa, a city I’ve adored since I first set foot in it more than 20 years ago.My Wellington is really just the compact central zone which includes Wellington Central and the adjacent neighbourhood of Te Aro. This is not a big area, some three kilometres long, hemmed in by hills on one side and the harbour on the other. Though Wellington is a sizeable city – more than 400,000 in population – its residential suburbs are hidden beyond hills, giving the illusion of a compact settlement crammed with shops and restaurants. Add its cultural highlights, enhanced by its role as the national capital, and you have a mini-Melbourne blessed with a cosy walkability.Sign up for the Traveller Deals newsletterGet exclusive travel deals delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up now.Walking from my hotel along Cuba Street that evening, I stepped into Ombra – an old favourite serving Venetian-inspired food – and took a place at the high metal-topped bar. Then Wellington worked its big-hearted, small-city magic, and I got talking to a couple of artists sitting nearby. I must have let slip it was my birthday, because before I knew it, I’d been bought a drink by John and Freeman, and we were celebrating.The author (left) with artists John and Freeman at Ombra.Good old Wellington, I knew it wouldn’t let me down.My connection with the city, however, goes deeper than a fondness for its restaurants; Wellington basically kicked off my travel writing career and helped me step into a new life. When I first visited it in 2003, I was on leave from my very last job as a paid employee, writing reviews of sites for a web directory that was a holdover from the pre-Google era. We employees all knew retrenchments were on the way, and so a brief holiday in New Zealand was a last hurrah for me before the axe fell. I was in the neighbouring town of Featherston, reachable by commuter trains from Wellington station, when I received the fateful call on my mobile phone.Grim though that was, I had seen it coming and thus turned the Wellington visit into an opportunity to embrace travel writing – something with which I had previously dabbled. Within months, I’d sold two articles about the city, curiously both to New Zealand newspapers: one about Wellington’s walking trails, the other about the city’s several cafes and bars with names ironically referencing communist icons (Fidel’s, Pravda, Red Square). I’ve been writing about travel ever since.Fidel’s Cafe is still there.iStockMy Wellington romance has, if anything, deepened in recent years. In 2019, I lobbed into the city after a long train journey from Auckland, a bigger city but not a patch on my Welly. On that visit, I finally got to do the tour at the Weta Workshop HQ. Two years later I revisited Wellington in the midst of the pandemic, during the brief trans-Tasman “travel bubble” of 2021. It was my sole overseas escape during the crisis, and I had contingency plans to live in a Wellington hostel if the bubble burst and I was temporarily trapped.The true measure of your emotional involvement with a destination, however, is the fact that you have favourite haunts. Back in Wellington on Easter Sunday this year, I made my way to Fidel’s Cafe to find it had moved – but thankfully not far, and to an equally atmospheric and historic building in a side street.Things change, of course – but Fidel’s is still open, Ombra is too, and the main train station remains a grand and useful terminal. Wellington is still the little capital that could, with the welcoming streets of Te Aro cradled between hills and harbour.Something that no one mentions is that Te Aro largely exists as a useful commercial zone because of an 1855 earthquake which lifted the area and drained the swamp which once dominated it. That means that the heart of Wellington is a miracle of sorts. A miracle to which I’m always happy to return.From our partners