Magic box, Bentley, Cathedral cove, hot water beach, torpedo boat, camping,
Day 76 – Feb. 16 –Whangamata to Hahei
We only know 2 people in this entire town, and when we went downtown to eat breakfast, one of them, Rosalie, drove by and tooted her horn. Made us feel like locals!
Drove all of 30 miles to the small, quaint town of Hahei. While looking for a place to stay, we noticed a beautiful maroon antique car parked on the lawn of Maggie’s B&B. We decided to check into vacancies there and she had one left. Ian and Doreen Johnstone, from Chichester, England, owned the 1938 Bentley convertible, and we got a tour of it. Doreen proclaimed that this is her car, and Ian has his own antique Bentley back home. He also has about a dozen other cars, built from 1904 to about 1940. He’s a semi-retired Eye, Nose, and Throat surgeon, who plays croquet and abhors golf and swimming. Doreen plays golf, loves to swim and abhors croquet. But they both love Bentleys, so I guess that is the glue that holds them together. Just kidding.
A 45-minute walk up and down the coastal hills from our B&B brought us to Cathedral Cove. Eons of waves pounding into a crack eventually created an inverted V-shaped arch big enough to drive a fully-loaded semi through. It is such a beautiful sight that it was used in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Everybody who comes to Hahei who can walk for 45 minutes eventually makes his way to this spot, and it must be one of the most photographed places in the country. It’s a great swimming cove, and a natural stream falls over the cliff edge just at the water’s edge. As soon as you finish your swim, you can wash the salt water off in this fresh-water waterfall. You have to chase away the seagulls from the small pool formed by the falls, for this is where they bathe and drink.
Low tide is at 7:30 pm these days and if you get to Hot Water Beach before all the good places are taken, you can dig a hole in the sand and sit in the hot water that seeps into it. When we got there, there were already about 100 people who had the same idea, and they had claimed most of the good spots. Joe wandered around in his bare feet, feeling the temperature of the sand. When he found a place that felt right to his feet, he dug a hole with the shovel he borrowed from Maggie, just big enough for him to lie down in. He had to keep digging the entire time, piling sand up on the edges of his hole to keep the waves from the sea from dumping cold water into his hole. After a half-hour of soaking and digging, he had a bathing suit full of sand and sore arms. It was a novelty, but he’ll take the spas next time.
It was late when we got back from the beach and all of Hahei’s restaurants were closed (both of them – the pizza dive and the fish and chips bar). So we drove 15 minutes and took a 5-minute ferry to Whitianga. It is on the other side of a bay that we could have swum across in about 5 minutes. It truly was only about a 6-iron from one side to the other, but it would have taken an hour to drive around. The Fireplace restaurant in Whitianga, 200 feet from the ferry dock, had some of the best BBQ’d spareribs we’ve ever had, even at Sonny’s in Florida.
Day 77 – Feb. 17 – Hahei to Kuaotunu
At breakfast with Ian and Doreen, I mentioned that I’d once owned a British car, a Lotus Europa, that was nothing but trouble. ‘Yeah’, he said,’Lotus stands for Lots Of Trouble Usually Serious.’ No kidding.
Drove up the road to the tip of a peninsula that somebody bought, built a golf course on, called it The Dunes, and planted houses around its perimeter so they could call it a resort and charge high prices for golf. When we got there, a gaggle of ladies was leaving the course, as it was ladies day, and when they were gone, the parking lot was empty except for our car. Once again, we played alone.
It was a beautiful layout, with lots of big trees lining the fairways, doglegs, water running through it. But they had been having a drought and hadn’t been watering their fairways and they were mostly bare dirt with a few tufts of grass sticking out here and there. Had to hit a lot of shots off hardpan and dead grass.
A bit further south down the coast we came to the tiny village of Kuaotunu, where we stayed in a cabin in a campground, about the only place to stay. There was no place to eat except back down the road to Whitianga, where we ate last night, about a half-hour drive away. It was already 7 pm and that didn’t sound appealing. But we didn’t have any food.
There was a party going on just across the driveway from us, and I walked over there to say hi. I also had an ulterior motive that you might guess. They were about 10 couples, all about our ages, who’d known each other their whole lives, and get together here every year the same time in their camper vans, and fish and eat and party. They were just about to sit down and dig into their dinner and they insisted that we eat with them. It wasn’t hard to convince us, though we resisted, albeit feebly. They’d caught a bunch of red snapper, and had grilled it along with sausage, chicken, and ham. The women had cooked up potatoes, rice, salads, and one had made some apricot squares. In 5 minutes it was all gone, then they headed for the beach to do some ‘torpedo fishing’.
We tagged along with them to see what it was all about. They have a 4-foot long torpedo-shaped thingie with a propellor on the back and a light on the top. They drop it in the water with a line attached to it. As it speeds through the water, straight out from shore, it unreels line from a spool. Sometime prior to this, someone has prepared some 3-foot long lines with snaps on one end and a baited hook on the other. Once the torpedo has gotten far enough out in the sea, they start clipping these lines onto the line being pulled out to sea, about 30 feet apart. Once the line has all been played out, the torpedo is about 2 kilometers out from shore. Then they sit and wait for about an hour. By now it’s nearly totally dark. They start reeling it back in to see what they’ve caught. There were only 2 red snapper that were unlucky enough to have been at the wrong place at the wrong time tonight. I figure that, at $3,000 for the torpedo, those were a couple of expensive fish. Granted, they will use it many times, but how many fish do you have to catch before it pays for itself???
Day 78 – Feb. 18 – Kuaotunu to Fletcher Bay
As we said our good-byes, one of the Kiwis said he recognized me from having seen me on television during the 2001 US Senior Am. I couldn’t believe he had that kind of retention but he insisted. ‘Kint remimbah nimes, but ah nivah fahgit a fice. Sime as me ded, he nivah fahgot a fice, eethah.’
We’re headed for the northern tip of the Coromandel Peninsula. Our friends we met on the Cape Reinga bus trip, Peter and Maureen Morrow, told us they’d camped out there and painted such a vivid and glorious picture of waking up with the sun rising over the ocean that we wanted to see for ourselves.
The road from Kuaotunu to the town of Coromandel goes straight west, from one side of the peninsula to the other, over some steep mountains, and the road twists and turns and has lots of hairpin curves. Then the mountains end abruptly and you fall out of them onto the flat plain that extends about a mile to the town. We loaded up with enough food to get us through a couple of days of camping, then headed north, bound for the northern tip. The road hugs the coast, and the views the entire way were of the many islands in the bay between the peninsula and Auckland. One island is only 150 years old, a volcano that exploded out of the water in the mid-1800s. It is still only a solid mass of lava, with not a living thing on it, no tree or shrub, and no living animals. The water here is as clear as gin, with waving kelp and rocks on the bottom clearly visible. Each big rock sitting out in the water had some kind of sea bird sitting on it, white streaks down the rock attesting to the fact that they come there often.
The road went from 2-lane paved (sealed) to gravel, then to one-lane. We hardly ever saw another car (thank heavens), but a huge motor home, with ‘Duntentin’ splashed across the back, pulled over to let us by. This area is mostly uninhabited except for the occasional farmhouse surrounded by sheep or cows. There are more beaches than people, and almost all of them are empty.
Fletcher Bay is a small, lovely crescent beach, at the very end of the road and the very tip of the peninsula. During the summer months, it is packed with campers, but we are now into fall here, so there were just a handful of other campers. We had a choice spot to ourselves, flat, grassy, perched on a small bluff right above the beach under some huge trees. Joe immediately hopped into the warm water and spent an hour or so snorkeling around. And the resident ducks immediately came over to see if I was a soft touch. I was. To the tune of a half-loaf of stale bread. A big mistake. From that moment until we drove away the next day, these 6 ducks never got more than 5 feet from one of us, usually closer. They sat, or stood, facing us, and just stared at us, quacking quietly every now and then to remind us they were there.
Below us on the beach was a one-man tent inhabited by Fred Oesch, an architect writing a book on his work, from Virginia, with whom we spent a companionable hour. Further away were 3 Kiwis and a Maori who were here mostly to drink and they had a good start on things when we wandered by. The Maori was the furthest gone, and he asked our names about once every 3 minutes.
Campgrounds are maintained by the Department of Conservation, and are always clean, have toilets, showers, and running water. Makes it convenient to camp. We spent a comfortable night, sleeping well, thanks to the soothing sounds of waves slapping the shore, but probably more due to the air mattresses we bought after our last miserable night on the ground.
Day 79 – Feb. 19 – Fletcher Bay to Stony Bay
We were awakened early by one of our web-footed friends right outside our tent letting us know he was hungry and it was time for his breakfast. I didn’t know ducks could quack that loudly. Fred said his good-byes, saying he was off to see Stony Bay before heading down the peninsula. We packed up, after tossing the rest of the stale loaf to our feathered friends, and followed Fred back the way we’d come in, then turned north again on the road to the other campground on the peninsula, Stony Bay. We met Fred again, for one split second, when we came around a very sharp curve where the road was narrow, and practically plowed into him. Scared me so badly my heart pounded for the next 5 minutes!
The Stony Bay campground was almost totally empty. We had our choice of campsites and chose one under a tree close to the very rocky beach. While Joe struggled against a tide that kept shoving him towards land (better than AWAY from land), I sat under the tree and read a book. Two men in scruffy boots with 2 border collies strode purposefully by, right past the ‘No Dogs’ signs. Soon I heard a commotion and turned around to see a sea of black cows headed straight for me, the tent, and our stuff strewn about the ground. I stood up, trying to make myself look bigger, and they parted around our tent and stuff, leaving steaming brown piles in their wake.
Pretty soon, from the other direction, came endless sheep. Rather than passing by on the road, they spread out over the entire campground, and were there to stay. The rest of our visit resonated with soft Baaaaas and the snip, snip sound as they ripped the grass out of the ground by the roots. We had to be careful where we stepped on the way to the ‘facilities’.
This campground, too, had its resident ducks, who adopted us and snuggled up to us, like their Fletcher Bay cousins, after I shared my bread with them.
After a dinner of cold chicken, pickles, and cheese, we drifted over to the next-door-campers and chatted until dark. “A cyclone is headed our way in the night”, one of them said. I’d always thought a cyclone was like a tornado, so I asked him what it meant to Kiwis. “Just a bit o’ rain and wind”. Well, early in the morning, around 4 am, it started POURING, and the wind came up. The cyclone had arrived.
Day 80 – Feb. 20 – Stony Bay to Miranda Hot Springs
The deluge was so loud it kept us awake, so as soon as it was light, and there was a slight let-up in the downpour, we leapt from the tent, unstaked it, tossed it, soaking wet, into the trunk and were off. Slipping and sliding down the wet road. Glad we hadn’t spent the night in Fletcher Bay because there are a lot of places on that road where you drove through streams, rather than over bridges. These ‘fords’ would have been so full of water that a car wouldn’t have been able to get through them and we’d have been stuck on the other side until the ‘flooding’ abated.
It rained all day, the wind blowing it sideways and tossing the car about on the road. The water that the prior days had been so clear was now a murky, angry brown, from all the sand stirred up by the waves. The islands that dot the bay were completely obscured by the low, heavy clouds. Our lovely weather has disappeared. But it’s still warm.
Joe loves to sit in hot water, so we pulled into the town of Miranda Hot Springs, that consists only of the hot springs complex. They had lost power several hours ago due to the high winds, and they were taking everything out of the ice cream freezer. We offered to take some of it off their hands, but they just laughed. They gave us a very nice room and the first thing we did was spread out our tent, rainfly, sleeping bags, and wet clothes all over the beds, tables, and chairs. Then we donned our bathing suits and headed for the hot pool, just a few feet away, for a soak in the rain.
The hot springs has its resident ducks, too, who came waddling at top speed over to our deck as soon as we stepped out onto it. I had the sliding doors open for ventilation so the camping gear would dry out faster and was sitting at the table, inside the room, eating something. A movement caught my eye and I looked down on the floor beside my chair leg and a tiny sparrow was looking up at me with a look that could only be interpreted as begging. I shooed it out the door without giving it anything. Didn’t want to encourage bad habits.
Day 81 – Feb. 21 – Miranda Hot Springs to Howich
The rain has ended but the skies are still threatening. The book said that it’s often rainy on the east side of the Hunua Range, where we are, so we’re getting out of here and looking for some good weather. We leave in 4 days, and we’re putting off getting into Auckland as long as we can. We don’t want this trip to end. There’s a golf course that the book says is international quality, and we’re off to play it. It’s close to Auckland, but still not in it. It’s the Formosa International, owned by Japanese, and is sort of a resort, with villas you can rent.
Sure enough, once we rounded the north end of the Hunua Range, the clouds parted, the sun came out, and we saw the sky again. The road between the hot springs and where the golf course is runs through hilly country, with narrow, winding roads, imagine that. It is the winter home for millions of birds, who fly down here all the way from Alaska, Siberia, and other places thousands of miles away. We saw one bird who must have had a rough trip, as he seemed to have a broken wing. He was sitting all alone on the ground, and stayed in one place for about 15 minutes, something strange for a bird to do. Every now and then he’d stretch out one wing and sort of topple over, so we think he’s one who might not make it back north for the summer.
Today they were having a bike event, and bicyclists of all sizes, shapes, ages, and abilities, riding fancy, expensive racing bikes with microscopic seats to slow, heavy, balloon-tired old-lady bikes were all over the place. Some riding side-by-side so that we had to stay behind them until any incoming cars (a rarity) got by.
The Formosa International was, indeed, a good course, and had a full parking lot (that was a first). A very rude guy in the pro shop told us we probably would have to play by ourselves, ‘The Korean couple signed up to play behind you won’t want to play with you, and the rest of the groups are foursomes’. Oh, well. We ate a delicious lunch, then teed off, alone of course, behind the Korean couple who jumped in front of us. But soon another Korean guy, very friendly, joined us, and we had a fun round with him.
We figure we might as well just play golf every day while we’re in the Auckland area until we leave in several days. So we picked out another golf course, at the northern tip of yet another peninsula, called Howich. Drove to a motel nearby and booked a room. Then drove to the course and checked it out. It’s VERY hilly, with a lot of trees, and superb views out over water in both directions.
Day 82 – Feb. 22 – Howich Layover Day
Getting a tee time was no problem, and, once again, we played by ourselves. This course was really a mountain climb, up and down, up and down, steep hills, dragging or pushing our trundlers. (I’ll never get over being amused by that word. And the grocery carts are ‘trolleys’, also humorous to me.) The fairways are lined up parallel to one another, a real shooting gallery, with trees, but not much real estate, in between the fairways. All day long we heard the sound of thwack, thump, thud as balls rammed into lumber and bounced all over the place. Several times balls rolled, ricocheted, or flew past us, dangerously close. In spite of the close calls, I was 2 under for one of the nines. Won’t talk about the other nine.
After yet another Indian dinner, we went to see the movie ‘Valkyrie’, with Tom Cruise. Joe was sitting slouched in his seat the entire time, and when we got home, he couldn’t move. His back had seized up on him, and he went straight to bed in agony. Oh, my God, and here we are just a few days from having to lug our baggage and golf clubs all over kingdom come!
Day 83 – Feb. 23 – Howich again
Joe’s back is really in bad shape. In order to get to the bathroom this morning, he had to slowly roll out of bed, which took 10 tries and 15 minutes, then crawl like a baby on hands and knees. Then, when he got to the toilet, that was yet another issue, which I won’t even go into. The whole episode took about 45 minutes. This doesn’t bode well for leaving NZ in a couple of days.
This is the day we have to get the car all cleaned up and ready to turn back to the dealer.. The owner of the motel, who is by now one of my best friends, Linda Mannix, backed her car out of her garage and let me use that space for all the preparation I’m going to do. First thing I had to do, all by myself, since Joe is out of the picture, is take everything out of the car and sort it into piles: the ‘trash’ pile, the ‘giveaway’ pile (Linda has friends, she says, who’ll take everything we don’t want), the stuff that goes in suitcase 1, 2, or3 or the golf clubs case, and the ‘I-don’t-whether-we-want-it-or-not’ pile. That took an hour.
An aside: When we first started roaming around NZ, Joe driving and me navigating, I had a pile of guide books, golf books, maps, brochures, and pens, all of which I had to deal with every time we stopped the car and got out. And back in again. I tossed them into the glove box, the door panel, the little box between the seats, tossed them on top of the dashboard, and stuffed them up above the visor. I was always looking for something that I needed and it was always in a different place. And I always had the pile, or some portion of it on my lap, for I was constantly consulting one of the things in the pile. I had Joe stop the car about every half-mile the first couple of weeks so I could take a picture, and pretty soon these shenanigans got really old.
Finally, tired to death of maneuvering the piles, I asked a motel owner if she had a cardboard box that I could have to put them in. Sure, and she reached into her garage and grabbed a box that had had coffee tins in it, just smaller than the biggest book in my pile. This made life immeasurably easier for me. We even gave it a name – the “Magic Box”. And it was the first thing I took into the room at the end of each day, and the first thing I put in the car the next day. It was always either on my lap or on the floor in front of my seat. I found I could hook a pen in the corner, so I never had to search for a pen again.
As the days went by, I hoisted the ‘Magic Box’ on and off my lap, and on and off the floor of the car, into and out of motel rooms, countless times. ‘Don’t forget the Magic Box,’ and ‘Where’s the Magic Box?’ we said a million times. I used it not only for books and maps and brochures, but to hold apricots and drink bottles and string and business cards from friends and bread to feed the seagulls. I picked up up and put it down so many times that the corners began to rip. I hoped it wouldn’t fall apart before the end of our NZ wanderings. It didn’t.
So now I’m in the final motel room, surrounded by all the stuff we plan to take home with us, and there’s the Magic Box sitting there, still loyally holding all the books, maps, brochures, and other debris we’ve piled into it over the weeks and months. We no longer need it. I take everything out of it, go through it, toss most of it, and now it’s sitting there empty for the first time since we’ve started using it. As I look at it, now empty and ragged, misshapen, with all its corners ripped and torn, I feel like I’m saying good-bye to an old, faithful friend. And I started crying! I think I must be the first person in the history of the world to cry over a cardboard box.
After emptying the car, I called around to find a place that would let us use their hose and vacuum and all the supplies we’d need to wash it ourselves. The first place I called said they could do even better than that: they would come to our motel, clean the car inside and out (and even get all the cow and sheep poop out from under it), vacuum it, using their own soap and Windex (or whatever supplies they needed) and even their own water and make it look brand-new. I’m thinking $200 US at least for all that. ‘How much’, I asked with trepidation: only $45 US!! They’d be there in 20 minutes. Life is good. NZ is wonderful!
Day 84 – Feb. 24 – Howich again
Today Joe was still unable to stand, and I’m worried that he might not get well enough in time to get on the plane. He’s taking a lot of pain killers and muscle relaxants, and staying in bed, mostly sleeping and watching rugby games on tv.
It really feels like we’re leaving NZ. Today we have to give up the car and that means we are stranded in the motel. We still have 5 more meals to get through before we leave for the airport, so I have to figure out how and what we’re going to eat. Off to get enough cash to get through the remaining hours, then drove for an hour to the other side of Auckland to return the car to the Devonport car dealer from whom we rented it. Derek, they owner, didn’t even look at the car for dents, dings, or anything. Just said it looked clean and asked how much golf we played and where. Then he took me to the ferry terminal 3 km away, I sailed across the bay to downtown Auckland, took the bus back to a spot about ½ mile away from the motel. There were a lot of shops there, so I bought food for the rest of the day.
There must be some major kind of garbage pickup in this city, for beside the sidewalk outside of nearly every house was a huge mound of debris. Everything the occupant didn’t want was piled up – mattresses, large appliances, lumber, cardboard boxes, clothes, chairs, anything at all, didn’t seem to be any restrictions. I didn’t see the vehicle they used to pick up all this mess, but they must have some big arm with grabbers to wrap around the stuff and swing it around into a waiting bin. Wish we had something like that at home. We always have to rent a truck, load the stuff into the truck, drive to the ‘transfer station’ (euphemism for ‘dump’), and pay somebody to let us unload it ourselves into a number of specific bins.
The big news on national tv tonight was whether or not the name of the town Wanganui should be changed to Whanganui. The Maoris claim there is no such thing as a ‘big Wanga’ but there is a ‘big Whanga’, so it needs to be changed to appease them. Such huge issues these Kiwis have to deal with!
Day 85 – Feb. 25 - Leaving NZ
Linda, the owner of this motel, told me that a homeless man had spent the night outside of her motel and she felt sorry for him. There aren’t many homeless people in NZ, for they’re offered homes rent-free if they can’t pay, and there are places they can eat if they don’t have money. Linda went outside the next day armed with a loaf of bread so that he didn’t starve. When she offered it to him, he turned her down. “No, thanks, me lady, I’m on a diet.”
Joe’s finally ambulatory again. Thank goodness, for today we fly out of here, and I need him to help carry all our stuff. Our plane doesn’t leave until 6 pm, and we aren’t leaving here on the shuttle until 2:30, so we spent a boring day just sitting around waiting, reading, sleeping, walking out on the balcony and looking at the sky. The shuttle finally came, we tossed our luggage into the van, hugged Linda good-bye, said we’d stay in touch, and off we went to Auckland’s airport. Right on time, our plane took off, and we flew over the northeastern part of the north island, looking down on country we now know a bit. The sun was still high, and we could make out the roads we drove on and the towns we went through, the coastline we walked along, the golf courses we played. Then clouds obscured the land and we saw no more of this country that we have come to love so dearly. With a smile and a tear, I said silently, ‘Good-bye, New Zealand, see you next December.’
Friday, February 27, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
February 7 to 15
Day 67 – Feb. 7 – Otaki to Levin
It wasn’t our best night, for the ground was hard on our butt and hip bones, but it beat the first night in the tent, where the wind nearly blew us into the next county. Flying over the campground was a U.S. flag with a difference: right in the middle of it was a picture of Elvis! That would’ve been a crime in the U.S., I’m sure
Seems like nobody here wears real shoes. I’ve seen mostly hiking boots in the mountains, and on the coastal towns people wear either flop shoes (they call ‘em jandals), sandals (with a strap around your heel), or they’re barefooted. Walking down the main street on the cement sidewalks, into restaurants and retail shops, in bare feet. Must have soles like iron. Podiatrists must have offices around every corner.
On the way to Levin, we went through the town of Foxton Beach. Off the highway, dominating the skyline, was a HUGE windmill. What in the world is THAT doing there, we thought? Drove down to investigate. Turns out some guy who’s about 90 now, born in Holland, wanted to bring a bit of Holland to NZ. So he got hold of a design for a windmill, found a carpenter who’d build it for him, got the townspeople fired up about the idea, raised a bunch of money, moved the town hall off the property he wanted for the windmill, and spent several years building it. It’s a remarkable masterpiece in wood, full of weird angles. It’s actually used to grind grain, and they turn out many bags of it every day. The old man responsible for its creation lives for the windmill, and he was there. Spry as a billy goat, he bounded up the steps of the windmill, all 3 stories of it, faster than either of us could ever do it, explaining all the way the history and workings of it. Wish we’d needed some flour, but we donated money instead.
A few miles away was a long, flat beach with most of the town there, engaged in some activity or other. No conventional cars are allowed (they get stuck in the sand), so there were the quad bikes pulling little trailers filled with their fishing and picnic gear; people fishing, kayaking, jogging, sunbathing, flying kites, clamming, driving jet skis around in ever-decreasing circles, boats pulling inner tubes or skiers, motorcycles racing over the dunes. Gulls were everywhere. They run out into the surf until it’s a few inches deep, pick up some sort of shell, then fly about 50 feet into the air and drop it. It doesn’t usually break, so they swoop down, pick it up, fly back up and drop it again. Plop, plop, plop, shells were falling all around us. We never saw a single gull ever eat anything, but they must occasionally be successful, else they’d give up this pursuit as a waste of time or starve to death.
After dinner we drove to Adrian and Maria’s house for a ‘glass of juice’. Adrian met us at the door and we talked outside for about 10 minutes. When we went in, Maria was glued to the tv watching the Sevens rugby game, and we hated to interrupt her, so engrossed she was. Her grandfather kicked the very first goal for NZ to win … what? The first Sevens or something big… in 1886 or some far-off year. So rugby is in her blood.
Spread out before us, our bellies already bloated from a delicious Thai dinner, was a huge plate filled with sliced strawberries, dried mangoes and apricots, some rice cakes, candied ginger, potato chips, and 4 HUGE glasses of OJ. Undaunted, we tore into the goodies, full bellies be damned.
Ignorant of the rules and strategy of rugby, and educated along the way by Adrian’s commentary, we really got into the game, learning the names of all the players, and starting to care about which team won. When the 20 minutes, the length of a game, counted down to zero, NZ had won the game. However, even though the clock had run out, something needed to happen to actually end the game – a penalty, running or kicking the ball out of bounds, or something. But instead, a NZ player, who shall go down in history for the goof of his career, passed it to one of his teammates. Unfortunately for this poor sod, England (the opponent) intercepted the ball and ran for a goal, to win the game. We sat there in screaming, fist-pounding, bouncing-off-the-couch incredulity at this unexpected turn of events, so sure – as was nearly every fan in the Wellington stands – that NZ had already won. I’m sure the post-game hijinks were a bit subdued in the pubs that night, and I feel sorry for any Brit fan that night, not to mention the guy who passed the ball.
Day 68 – Feb. 8 – Levin layover day
After breakfast in our room, we headed for the Doigs’ house again, where we met up with Bill and Joan Matson. Bill is the former deputy Secretary of Defense for NZ. I wonder what he did, since NZ doesn’t have much of a military. Guess he determined whether one of the American wars was worth sending NZ’s finest into. Bill, Adrian, Joe and I played 18 holes at the Levin course, while Joan and Maria stayed at home and yakked. They were sitting on the 18th green when we came up and they got to see me lose my tee ball, hit one into the bunker, knock it into the next bunker, and in general have the worst hole of the day. Oh, well. Bill invited us to come to Wakanae tomorrow and play with him, but turned out the club was having some sort of do and we wouldn’t be able to get on the course.
After golf the Doigs invited us over for ‘tea’. I had to ask what ‘tea’ meant – was it a cup of tea and a cookie, heavy hors d’oeuvres, or dinner? It’s a light dinner, Adrian told me. But dinner was anything but light, in terms of the number of items on the menu. She’d just about cleaned out her garden and served up several courses of homemade zucchini muffins, some small, light pancake-y things that you eat cold with butter and jam, beans, broccoli, potatoes, carrots, and a salad chucky full of fresh-as-can-be veggies. All that was followed by the sweetest, reddest, juiciest strawberries, topped off with ice cream. One of the best meals we’ve eaten on our whole trip.
The owners of the motel-o-the-day raise birds. They have an ‘aviary’ behind their 6 units that Graeme, the owner, built for his little brood. In it are some of the most colorful birds in the world. One species has a body sectioned off into different bright colors – purple, red, orange, yellow, blue-green. Looks like a picture of a cow that’s been drawn to show the different cuts of meat, with each one in a different color. There are also about a dozen tiny Japanese quail, fully grown about the size of a fist.
Yesterday they found a baby bird that the parents had abandoned, near death, shivering with cold, and took it in in the morning and fed it by hand, put it under a heat lamp to warm it up. By evening it was eating ravenously, hopping around, trying to fly, and obviously going to make it. The little thing’s parents had 3 other chicks that they were taking good care of, and I guess this was one that fell into Darwin’s list, wasn’t fit enough, or maybe it was one too many mouths to feed. It will now make it, thanks to June’s devoted mothering. We learned all this while we sat for a couple of hours talking with the very nice owners, June and Graeme Brown, rocking on their back patio. Graeme was a 3-4 handicap golfer until recent back troubles made him quit the game, so we had a lot of fun swapping golf stories.
Day 69 – Feb. 9 – Levin to Hawera
While we’re getting so much rain here that the rivers are flooding, Queensland in Australia is having some of the worst fires in history, due to the drought. Hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and hundreds of people have been burned to death. The fires travel so fast they didn’t have enough time to get in the car and drive out the driveway before they were engulfed in the racing flames. Cars are just exploding when the heat gets to them. Houses go up in flames before the fires get to them, so hot is the air being pushed along in the hurricane winds the fires generate. When we got to the town of Wanganui, we noticed that the sky was streaked with ash from the fires in Australia.
The history of NZ is rife with stories of the Maori wars. It seems that whenever Europeans, or any other advanced culture, goes into the area of a less-advanced population that has been established for some time, the more advanced people feel they have the right to take whatever they find in the ‘new land’. Food, animals, land, regardless of the original people’s claims to them. To wit, the early American colonists’ treatment of the native American people.
The same with the Maoris, who had discovered and populated NZ in the 1200’s, had created towns all over the place, established sacred places, and were firmly entrenched. But along came the Europeans, who saw huge kauri trees, which they promptly cut down nearly to the last tree and shipped the lumber all over the world, leaving behind barren hillsides open to erosion. They discovered gold in the interior and built roads and railroads to haul it out, leaving behind huge holes in the ground, ghost towns that are being re-claimed by nature, if they’re in a moist micro-climate, or are rotting in the dry deserts if in a hot, dry micro-clime.
Few remnants of the Maori wars are still visible, but as we traveled from Levin to Hawera, along the coast, we spied a tiny sign that read ‘Historic blockhouse’. We always slam on the brakes at every ‘hysterical marker’, as we call ‘em, so we headed off into a turnip field to see what in the world a blockhouse was. Over 100 years ago, the Maoris held sway over this very beautiful piece of coastline, until the Europeans decided it was a good place, too, and moved in. The Maoris didn’t like it, so they tried to run them out, and you know how that always goes: the guys with the guns always win.
Until the Europeans killed enough Maoris to make them realize they couldn’t win and so moved on down the coast, the Europeans built a number of ‘blockhouses’ to protect themselves. They were just rectangular buildings, 20 x 40 feet in this case, with thick walls filled with clay and straw and dirt floors. In the walls were little holes that the white guys could poke their rifles through to shoot at the ‘bleck bestids’. This blockhouse is one of very few that survive, and that’s because the locals banded together and re-built it, put pictures of the European families who huddled together in the blockhouse when the Maoris went on the rampage. It sits in the middle of a turnip field over which seemingly millions of little white butterflies bounced from turnip leaf to turnip leaf, never seeming to do anything except sit on it for a few seconds, before flitting off to the next leaf.
One of the larger towns is Wanganui (nui in Maori means big, so it’s a big Wanga, whatever a Wanga is). The river by the same name is one of only 2 navigable rivers in all of the North Island, and it hits the Tasman Sea at Wanganui. It looks like a snake on the map, and begins in the interior at the town of Taumaranui (a big taumara), where we’re headed in a couple of days. A one-lane road runs along the river for a number of miles, until it peters out, and we followed it for many miles until we got bored because everything started to look the same.
At the edge of town is a cemetery, and I think the entire Maori population of Wanganui was there to bury one of their own. The deceased must have been popular, a big shot, or rich, for the cemetery was standing-room only, and cars were parked helter-skelter all over the street for blocks. We were curious to know who was the center of attention, but we didn’t ask.
One of the original paddle-wheel steamboats that plied the river up to the gold fields has been restored and was sitting at the end of the wharf. Four of the men who work on it were sitting just inside the warehouse next to the pier, eating McDonald’s hamburgers off of a pallet. I asked what their jobs were and talked to my very first ever stoker, skipper of a paddlewheel steamer, and 2 deckhands.
Learned today that NZ raised its minimum wage to $12 an hour, and gas is $3.40 a gallon.
On the map Patea looked like it would be a lovely spot, right at the mouth of a river with a long beach on either side of its mouth. But when we got there, we found a dying, poverty-stricken, run-down, dirty, tiny town. The last few hundred yards along the river, before it dumps its load into the ocean, the sand is black, and there are steep bluffs that drop precipitously into the river. Perched on the top of the bluff, where the millionaires' homes in the US would be, is an abandoned ‘freezerworks’, which is another name for a ‘slaughterhouse’. It was a huge factory, built in 1894 and has been sitting there rotting and rusting and falling apart for the past 30 years. It started out with the capacity to kill and skin 10 sheep a day, but as they got smarter about how to kill en masse, the 800 people who worked there were able to run 600,000 unfortunate cattle, sheep, and pigs a year through there.
Today the entire area is fenced off with signs that say ‘Hazardous Area, Keep Out’, and an entire herd of cattle was inside the fence, calmly munching grass, until we walked up to take a picture of the incongruity of it all and they came over to see who we were. I wonder what could be hazardous around a slaughterhouse (did it get into the meat???), and I have to wonder if the air around that cluster of buildings, through which the cows wander, still reverberates with the screams of the millions of animals that died there. I don’t think I’d want to eat the meat of the Patea cows.
The slaughterhouse was the low point of Patea, an already sad spot on this otherwise lovely island.
Patea does have a golf course, however. It’s fenced, as many are, but this fence is to keep the sheep (i.e., fairway mowers) in. All over the fairways roamed bleating, pooping sheep, with more fences around the greens to keep their cloven hooves from poking holes in them. Joe grabbed his wedge, hopped the fence, and posed for a photo op with the sheep in the background. As we were recording this comical scene, in the rain, a tiny car with a surfboard taking up most of the car's interior pulled up, a guy with matted hair and surfing pants hopped out, and snapped away, too. ‘Never see sights like this in Alaska,’ he said. He was from Homer, Alaska, hunting for the perfect wave in this hemisphere, since it’s winter up there now.
By the time we pulled into Hawera, we had spent most of the day on one-lane, curvy, hilly, gravel roads, hardly ever seeing another car. We don’t make many miles in a day, but we’re having the kinds of adventures that most tourists, who stick to the tourist spots, don’t have. We love it! And at the end of the day we found a 4+ star motel with a great room and had a delicious Indian dinner.
Day 70 – Feb. 10 – Hawera to Taumaranui
It POURED today. First rain we’ve seen in a month. We spent the entire day, 8 hours, driving in it. The whole purpose of coming this way, around the Egmont peninsula, is to see a perfect volcano. It’s supposedly like Kilamanjaro, perfectly symmetrical, with snow on the top (although I hear Kilamanjaro’s snow is gone now). But the clouds were right on the ground all day, dumping rain, and we never saw a sign of the mountain. The road around the peninsula hugs the coastline the whole way, so we saw the surf crashing on the rocks for hours. And guess who we saw at one of the surfing beaches, trying to find the perfect wave - you're right - Homer, Alaska!
We’re headed for a tiny town that has a golf course that somebody called ‘a gem’. The road was one of the most torturous yet, curving continuously, up and down, sometimes gravel, sometimes ‘sealed’, as they call their pavement. The rain had loosened the soil, so rocks had fallen down on the road in a lot of places, often on curves, so we had to be careful to dodge them, as well as oncoming cars on the very narrow road. The road had washed completely away in places, but long enough in the past that the road crews had been out to put up barricades.
This is one deserted road from Hawera to Taumaranui. We rarely saw another car, and a house was even more scarce. This is called "The Forgotten Highway", and for good reason. Nobody comes here. It really is the ‘wop-wops’, as Kiwis call the ‘sticks’. But it is lovely country, beautiful hills, pretty rivers, trees hanging over the road making a canopy overhead. Sheep and cattle as always grazing on the hillsides.
Families here who’ve lived on the land for generations have their own cemeteries, and the headstones dot the landscape near the family homesteads.
After about 6 hours of winding around these hills, in pouring rain the entire time, I started feeling the effects, so Joe had to drive really slowly for the rest of the way so I didn’t toss my cookies. By the time we finally pulled into Taumaranui, I was REALLY ready to get out of that car! After the pain of getting here, this golf course better be worth the agony of getting here!
We grabbed the first motel we saw in Taumaranui, for our guide book said there were only a couple of places to stay and this one had a vacancy. Next door were 2 British couples riding their Harleys through the countryside, so we chewed the fat with them for an hour or so. Then we toured the town on foot (by now the rain had finally stopped), which took about 15 minutes. For dinner Joe found some Chinese take-away, and brought it back to the room (looked to me as if it had been sitting under the heat lamp since 1989), and I fixed myself a PB&J, with some dill pickles and a plum - yum! Washed this gourmet delight down with L&P lemonade, whose label says "World famous in New Zealand, since a long time ago".
Day 71 – Feb. 11 –Taumaranui to Waitomo Glowworm Caves
Kiwis seem to have an aversion to multi-syllable words. They shorten them to one or two syllables, like avo, cauli, brocci, veges (what we call veggies), mossy (mosquito). I bring this up because we had mossies in our room last night, and have the welts to prove it.
Well, it was raining again when we got up, so we expected that we might have driven all this way for naught. Drove out to the course anyway, just to see it, see if we could play if it did quit raining, and, besides, we didn’t have any other plans. Found out there was a tournament going on and we wouldn’t be able to tee off for 3 hours. That was fine with us, we’d hang around, since we’d come so far. I chipped and putted, putted and chipped, Joe read his book, and we killed 3 hours. By the time we teed off, by ourselves yet again, it had quit raining.
The course was as good as our friend had said. By NZ standards, that is. (I shot 76, 3 over par, from the men’s tees, Joe had 96.) It had a good layout, but, like almost every course we’ve played, with a few exceptions, it, too, is maintained by a crew of two, and members volunteer their time and equipment to keep it in the shape it is in. People come in and cook in the kitchen, or bring stuff from home to feed the golfers. Where is the Health Department???
After golf, it was on to the Waitomo Glowworm Caves, a place we missed on the way south through the middle of the North Island. Listened to more of ‘The Bone Garden’ book on tape. It’s getting really interesting now, and we can’t wait to find out more. Interestingly, since arriving I've read "Bone People", "The Bone Collector", and now we’re listening to another bony book. What’s the deal I have going with bones???
Several centuries ago, some Maori youngsters were floating down a river on some flax stems and it disappeared into the mouth of a huge cave. Inside were thousands of tiny dots of light on the ceilings. From then on, it was part of the Maori legends, and only Maori ventured into the cave. Then, in the 1850’s an enterprising Maori told his secret to a European and the ‘pakeha’ (Maori word for European) convinced the Maori to go into business with him showing it to other pakeha for money. Ever since tourists have been coming here by the boatload.
Now there is an old hotel perched up on the hill above the cave entrance, with a great view of the hilly farmland surrounding it. We checked in and were given a room with French doors that opened onto our own private terrace that had steps down to the parking lot. After dinner we sat out there and enjoyed the sunset, leaving the doors open so the breeze could cool the room. Today was a really hot, humid day, unusual for us. Little did we know that things besides breezes wafted into our room, and by the time we came in for the night, we were surrounded by literally hundreds of huge flying creatures. They were like huge mossies, and were all over the ceiling, walls, floor, bed, table, chairs, suitcases - anywhere there was a surface in any orientation – horizontal, vertical, whatever. We spent the next hour swatting them with anything we could grab – newspaper, magazines, towels. They piled up on the floor and Joe got down on his hands and knees, flicking them with a credit card onto towels so he could toss them into the toilet. Of course, we didn’t get ‘em all, so we spent the night slapping away, the next day scratching.
Day 72 – Feb. 12 – Waitomo Caves to Morrinsville
Hopped onto the 10 am tour of the cave, and spent the next hour oohing and aahing over beautiful stalactites and stalagmites and the thousands of tiny larva on the ceilings of the cave that emit light to help them feed on insects. Reminded me of the song Mother used to sing to us as children: "Glow, little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer, …" Until now I never knew what a glowworm was. What kind of marketing ploy has American mothers in the 1940’s singing about NZ moth larva to their children???
Then we were off to Hamilton, to a course known as St. Andrews of NZ, for a round of golf in the humidest weather we’ve encountered yet. Felt like we were wading through tepid water. Just as we finished, the bottom dropped out of the black skies that had been threatening us all day, and treated us to a torrential downpour of Biblical proportions. We just pulled into a motel and holed up for the night.
Day 73 – Feb. 13 – Morrinsville to Waihi
We’re now on our way to the east coast of the North Island, cutting diagonally across the center of the island as we make our way back to Auckland, intersecting the route we took on the way south. Stopped off at the tiny town of Te Aroha for lunch, and were prevented from parking in the space we’d chosen by somebody waving us off, saying, "We’re filming a movie and we need to keep this space free." Well, here’s our chance to see some movie stars, we thought, so we parked across the street and walked back to where a small crowd was milling around, outside the butcher shop.
Found out that a German film company was filming some segments of a movie that will be shown on German television in a few months. About an American woman and a Kiwi who fall in love, entitled "Longing for New Zealand". When I asked one of the Kiwi women who was working in some official capacity who the stars of the movie were, she had to run back to her truck, grab a piece of paper, and look up their names. Susan Anbeh and Christian Poggenkamp (if my memory serves me, which isn’t very often these days). They did the same take over and over, though I don’t know what they didn’t like about each one. They all looked the same to me, but that’s why I’m not a director.
Further down the road was a little roadside park beside a river, and we got out to stretch our legs. As we were admiring the river, we noticed a footbridge across it and decided to go see what was over there. That led to some derelict concrete foundations of something that had once been huge, but now was in ruins. A sign explained that over 100 years ago they discovered gold in this area and they built many enormous buildings to separate the gold from the rock in which it was embedded. They spoke of using cyanide or some such poisonous chemical used in the smelting process. I had to wonder how much of that stuff is still lying around, in the rocks, the soil, the water, and plants. There were pictures of the area during the smelter’s heyday, and there wasn’t a tree or bush to be seen, just tin roofs for acres, and rocks, and the stream, lovely today but filled then with the discharge of this most polluting of all processes. Trails led up, up, up to where the many levels of the buildings had once stood, and where now sat only rusting metal rods, cement platforms, huge, cement-lined holes in the ground, rotting iron pipes 3 feet in diameter, and all manner of debris left behind when the factory was abandoned 60 years ago. From 30 feet in the air, you’d never know it hadn’t always been covered with the thick layer of vegetation that hides most of what remains.
Tunnels with narrow-gauge rails honeycomb the area, and we walked down some of the rails, one foot on each, until we came to one of the tunnels. Following it, we came to a curve, and beyond it was total darkness. In the US there would be a gate there to keep people out, or a sign warning them not to go further without a light, or something that indicated that it was safe to go further or not recommended to do so. But we had no idea whether to go further and, if we did, what we’d find, how long it would be pitch-black, whether we’d hit a wall of rock or what. We started down it, feeling our way along with our hands on one side of the tunnel wall and one foot on one of the rails. It was blacker than the insides of a whale's belly. But it got really spooky after a few minutes and we turned around. Fortunately for us, some people came along right then who had a flashlight with them, and we followed them the 50 or so yards (which doesn’t sound like much until you do it in total darkness as we did) to the far side.
The substantial town of Waihi is lined with roadside stands selling fresh corn, watermelon, blueberries, avocadoes, apricots, and tomatoes. Joe and I are both suckers for fresh corn, so we stopped and bought some ears, then enough fresh veggies to make a REAL salad (they don’t have big green salads here), got some salad dressing, butter for the corn, and steaks at the grocery store, found a motel with a BBQ outside, and cooked the first home-made meal of our trip. It was DELICIOUS!!
Before checking in we played their golf course, a good track with huge greens. We’re averaging playing golf about once every 3 days, a good way to break up constant sight-seeing.
Day 74 – Feb. 14 – Waihi layover day
Learned that Tiger Woods’ son, Charlie, was born today or yesterday.
Had the most wunnerful breakfast of watermelon, apricots, and blueberries on yogurt. Drove down to the beach and happened upon a surf boat competition. About a dozen boats, about 10 feet long, with pontoons and outboard motors, like Zodiacs, stand about waist-deep in the water, being held by somebody. A driver and an assistant for each boat stand at the edge of the surf, ready to run. When they shoot the starter’s pistol, each pair runs to his boat, hops in – one in the front and one in the back -, starts the engine, and heads straight out into the waves. The nose of the boat rises up the crest of the 4-foot waves, and, if they’re lucky, they go down the other side. At one point, they’re nearly vertical. Some boats get past vertical, since the wind is blowing on-shore, and they end up flipping over. They race around a big rectangle, marked by buoys, and, turning and sliding around the buoy nearest land, come nearly onto the beach. After 4 laps, they head straight for shore at full speed. When the boat runs onto the sand, and the prop flips out of the water, the guy in front of the boat flies out of the boat and runs full-tilt to the finish line. First one there wins, of course. A t-shirt or something.
Ate the remnants of last night’s dinner in the form of fajitas, corn on the cob, another salad. Yummmmm! Then made a tour of Waihi town. Nobody was on the streets except 4 Maoris, who stood on the sidewalk outside a bar. As we got up to them, one of them looked at me, smiled big, and said, "You’re safe, we’re Maoris." "I never thought we weren’t safe," I replied with a smile to match his.
On a hill defining the skyline of this town sits a huge cement ‘pumphouse’, no longer in operation. Over a century ago gold was discovered here and many mines were dug into the hill. At some point it was decided that it would be more profitable to just scrape the top off the mountain to get at the gold, so they started digging. Soon they encountered ground water that filled the hole, so they built an enormous pumphouse to siphon the water out of the hole. It’s still standing there, gutted for anything of value and full of holes, a monumental concrete testimony to man’s love of the glittery stuff. What used to be called ‘Martha’s Hill’ had to be renamed ‘Martha’s Mine’ (I think a better name would be 'Martha's Hole'). When we got to the top of the hill, we peered down into the bowels of the earth, a monstrous, gaping, iron-colored hole about a quarter-mile deep, with the world’s biggest earth-moving equipment looking like toys at the bottom of it.
Walking back into town in the near-dark, we were nearly bowled over by a guy staggering down the sidewalk in our direction. "Good evening," Joe said to him. He got about 30 feet past us, turned around, and said, "What kind of evening did you say? GOOD evening?" I was expecting him to haul off and slug Joe, but he came back to us and entertained us with a very friendly, surprisingly coherent conversation. Kevin MacPherson had worked the mine as an iron worker, and now lived in ‘the bush’ where he traps possums for their fur. A real ‘mountain man’, if he lived in the US West.
Day 75 – Feb. 15 – Waihi to Whangamata
Cicadas are everywhere on both islands. They live in the trees, and make noises like crickets by rubbing their back legs together. So everywhere we go, there is a loud buzzing sound that never seems to stop. Reminds me of life as a child in Florida before all the crickets were killed off by DDT or some such.
We’re officially on the Coromandel Peninsula now, the last bit of New Zealand we will see before heading back to Auckland and beginning the trip home. We began the leg by playing driving all of 30 miles to the town of Whangamata (rhymes with fondle-my-tie). It was a lovely day and we headed right for the golf course. They were having a tournament, so there were actually a lot of cars in the parking lot. They put us with a couple named Frank and Rosalie O’Neil, who live in town. He is 9 months older than I am, and she is about my age, too. He grew up in Scotland and went hitchhiking around the world in 1964. When he got to NZ, he stopped and never went home. Married a NZ gal and went into the insurance and investment business. He eventually bought the top of a mountain at the edge of town, developed it with lovely homes, picked the best site for himself, with a stupendous view of the bay and beach and islands, and says they’ll remove him feet first from his home.
After we played golf, we followed them back to their home, and sat on their patio with that million-dollar view behind them, drinking orange juice and yakking. They were meeting people for dinner and we left to head north – so we thought. But we hadn’t figured out what our next step was, and when we looked at the map, we realized our best plan was to spend the night here. We got a room in a motel, that had 2 bedrooms, a huge kitchen, living room and monstrous bath, all for $65US. Even had a full-sized refrigerator, the first we’ve ever seen in NZ motels.
Asked the motel owner for a recommendation on places to eat, and he said the best place in town is Oceana’s. "I’ll bet anything Frank and Rosalie are going there, too," I said, but we decided that we shouldn’t really let the possibility stop us from having a good meal. Our options were pizza and Chinese take-away. Sure enough, 15 minutes after we sat down, in they came!! Sat at the next table with 3 friends, and we bantered back and forth a few times during the evening, then we said our final good-byes and headed back to our home-for-a-night.
It wasn’t our best night, for the ground was hard on our butt and hip bones, but it beat the first night in the tent, where the wind nearly blew us into the next county. Flying over the campground was a U.S. flag with a difference: right in the middle of it was a picture of Elvis! That would’ve been a crime in the U.S., I’m sure
Seems like nobody here wears real shoes. I’ve seen mostly hiking boots in the mountains, and on the coastal towns people wear either flop shoes (they call ‘em jandals), sandals (with a strap around your heel), or they’re barefooted. Walking down the main street on the cement sidewalks, into restaurants and retail shops, in bare feet. Must have soles like iron. Podiatrists must have offices around every corner.
On the way to Levin, we went through the town of Foxton Beach. Off the highway, dominating the skyline, was a HUGE windmill. What in the world is THAT doing there, we thought? Drove down to investigate. Turns out some guy who’s about 90 now, born in Holland, wanted to bring a bit of Holland to NZ. So he got hold of a design for a windmill, found a carpenter who’d build it for him, got the townspeople fired up about the idea, raised a bunch of money, moved the town hall off the property he wanted for the windmill, and spent several years building it. It’s a remarkable masterpiece in wood, full of weird angles. It’s actually used to grind grain, and they turn out many bags of it every day. The old man responsible for its creation lives for the windmill, and he was there. Spry as a billy goat, he bounded up the steps of the windmill, all 3 stories of it, faster than either of us could ever do it, explaining all the way the history and workings of it. Wish we’d needed some flour, but we donated money instead.
A few miles away was a long, flat beach with most of the town there, engaged in some activity or other. No conventional cars are allowed (they get stuck in the sand), so there were the quad bikes pulling little trailers filled with their fishing and picnic gear; people fishing, kayaking, jogging, sunbathing, flying kites, clamming, driving jet skis around in ever-decreasing circles, boats pulling inner tubes or skiers, motorcycles racing over the dunes. Gulls were everywhere. They run out into the surf until it’s a few inches deep, pick up some sort of shell, then fly about 50 feet into the air and drop it. It doesn’t usually break, so they swoop down, pick it up, fly back up and drop it again. Plop, plop, plop, shells were falling all around us. We never saw a single gull ever eat anything, but they must occasionally be successful, else they’d give up this pursuit as a waste of time or starve to death.
After dinner we drove to Adrian and Maria’s house for a ‘glass of juice’. Adrian met us at the door and we talked outside for about 10 minutes. When we went in, Maria was glued to the tv watching the Sevens rugby game, and we hated to interrupt her, so engrossed she was. Her grandfather kicked the very first goal for NZ to win … what? The first Sevens or something big… in 1886 or some far-off year. So rugby is in her blood.
Spread out before us, our bellies already bloated from a delicious Thai dinner, was a huge plate filled with sliced strawberries, dried mangoes and apricots, some rice cakes, candied ginger, potato chips, and 4 HUGE glasses of OJ. Undaunted, we tore into the goodies, full bellies be damned.
Ignorant of the rules and strategy of rugby, and educated along the way by Adrian’s commentary, we really got into the game, learning the names of all the players, and starting to care about which team won. When the 20 minutes, the length of a game, counted down to zero, NZ had won the game. However, even though the clock had run out, something needed to happen to actually end the game – a penalty, running or kicking the ball out of bounds, or something. But instead, a NZ player, who shall go down in history for the goof of his career, passed it to one of his teammates. Unfortunately for this poor sod, England (the opponent) intercepted the ball and ran for a goal, to win the game. We sat there in screaming, fist-pounding, bouncing-off-the-couch incredulity at this unexpected turn of events, so sure – as was nearly every fan in the Wellington stands – that NZ had already won. I’m sure the post-game hijinks were a bit subdued in the pubs that night, and I feel sorry for any Brit fan that night, not to mention the guy who passed the ball.
Day 68 – Feb. 8 – Levin layover day
After breakfast in our room, we headed for the Doigs’ house again, where we met up with Bill and Joan Matson. Bill is the former deputy Secretary of Defense for NZ. I wonder what he did, since NZ doesn’t have much of a military. Guess he determined whether one of the American wars was worth sending NZ’s finest into. Bill, Adrian, Joe and I played 18 holes at the Levin course, while Joan and Maria stayed at home and yakked. They were sitting on the 18th green when we came up and they got to see me lose my tee ball, hit one into the bunker, knock it into the next bunker, and in general have the worst hole of the day. Oh, well. Bill invited us to come to Wakanae tomorrow and play with him, but turned out the club was having some sort of do and we wouldn’t be able to get on the course.
After golf the Doigs invited us over for ‘tea’. I had to ask what ‘tea’ meant – was it a cup of tea and a cookie, heavy hors d’oeuvres, or dinner? It’s a light dinner, Adrian told me. But dinner was anything but light, in terms of the number of items on the menu. She’d just about cleaned out her garden and served up several courses of homemade zucchini muffins, some small, light pancake-y things that you eat cold with butter and jam, beans, broccoli, potatoes, carrots, and a salad chucky full of fresh-as-can-be veggies. All that was followed by the sweetest, reddest, juiciest strawberries, topped off with ice cream. One of the best meals we’ve eaten on our whole trip.
The owners of the motel-o-the-day raise birds. They have an ‘aviary’ behind their 6 units that Graeme, the owner, built for his little brood. In it are some of the most colorful birds in the world. One species has a body sectioned off into different bright colors – purple, red, orange, yellow, blue-green. Looks like a picture of a cow that’s been drawn to show the different cuts of meat, with each one in a different color. There are also about a dozen tiny Japanese quail, fully grown about the size of a fist.
Yesterday they found a baby bird that the parents had abandoned, near death, shivering with cold, and took it in in the morning and fed it by hand, put it under a heat lamp to warm it up. By evening it was eating ravenously, hopping around, trying to fly, and obviously going to make it. The little thing’s parents had 3 other chicks that they were taking good care of, and I guess this was one that fell into Darwin’s list, wasn’t fit enough, or maybe it was one too many mouths to feed. It will now make it, thanks to June’s devoted mothering. We learned all this while we sat for a couple of hours talking with the very nice owners, June and Graeme Brown, rocking on their back patio. Graeme was a 3-4 handicap golfer until recent back troubles made him quit the game, so we had a lot of fun swapping golf stories.
Day 69 – Feb. 9 – Levin to Hawera
While we’re getting so much rain here that the rivers are flooding, Queensland in Australia is having some of the worst fires in history, due to the drought. Hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and hundreds of people have been burned to death. The fires travel so fast they didn’t have enough time to get in the car and drive out the driveway before they were engulfed in the racing flames. Cars are just exploding when the heat gets to them. Houses go up in flames before the fires get to them, so hot is the air being pushed along in the hurricane winds the fires generate. When we got to the town of Wanganui, we noticed that the sky was streaked with ash from the fires in Australia.
The history of NZ is rife with stories of the Maori wars. It seems that whenever Europeans, or any other advanced culture, goes into the area of a less-advanced population that has been established for some time, the more advanced people feel they have the right to take whatever they find in the ‘new land’. Food, animals, land, regardless of the original people’s claims to them. To wit, the early American colonists’ treatment of the native American people.
The same with the Maoris, who had discovered and populated NZ in the 1200’s, had created towns all over the place, established sacred places, and were firmly entrenched. But along came the Europeans, who saw huge kauri trees, which they promptly cut down nearly to the last tree and shipped the lumber all over the world, leaving behind barren hillsides open to erosion. They discovered gold in the interior and built roads and railroads to haul it out, leaving behind huge holes in the ground, ghost towns that are being re-claimed by nature, if they’re in a moist micro-climate, or are rotting in the dry deserts if in a hot, dry micro-clime.
Few remnants of the Maori wars are still visible, but as we traveled from Levin to Hawera, along the coast, we spied a tiny sign that read ‘Historic blockhouse’. We always slam on the brakes at every ‘hysterical marker’, as we call ‘em, so we headed off into a turnip field to see what in the world a blockhouse was. Over 100 years ago, the Maoris held sway over this very beautiful piece of coastline, until the Europeans decided it was a good place, too, and moved in. The Maoris didn’t like it, so they tried to run them out, and you know how that always goes: the guys with the guns always win.
Until the Europeans killed enough Maoris to make them realize they couldn’t win and so moved on down the coast, the Europeans built a number of ‘blockhouses’ to protect themselves. They were just rectangular buildings, 20 x 40 feet in this case, with thick walls filled with clay and straw and dirt floors. In the walls were little holes that the white guys could poke their rifles through to shoot at the ‘bleck bestids’. This blockhouse is one of very few that survive, and that’s because the locals banded together and re-built it, put pictures of the European families who huddled together in the blockhouse when the Maoris went on the rampage. It sits in the middle of a turnip field over which seemingly millions of little white butterflies bounced from turnip leaf to turnip leaf, never seeming to do anything except sit on it for a few seconds, before flitting off to the next leaf.
One of the larger towns is Wanganui (nui in Maori means big, so it’s a big Wanga, whatever a Wanga is). The river by the same name is one of only 2 navigable rivers in all of the North Island, and it hits the Tasman Sea at Wanganui. It looks like a snake on the map, and begins in the interior at the town of Taumaranui (a big taumara), where we’re headed in a couple of days. A one-lane road runs along the river for a number of miles, until it peters out, and we followed it for many miles until we got bored because everything started to look the same.
At the edge of town is a cemetery, and I think the entire Maori population of Wanganui was there to bury one of their own. The deceased must have been popular, a big shot, or rich, for the cemetery was standing-room only, and cars were parked helter-skelter all over the street for blocks. We were curious to know who was the center of attention, but we didn’t ask.
One of the original paddle-wheel steamboats that plied the river up to the gold fields has been restored and was sitting at the end of the wharf. Four of the men who work on it were sitting just inside the warehouse next to the pier, eating McDonald’s hamburgers off of a pallet. I asked what their jobs were and talked to my very first ever stoker, skipper of a paddlewheel steamer, and 2 deckhands.
Learned today that NZ raised its minimum wage to $12 an hour, and gas is $3.40 a gallon.
On the map Patea looked like it would be a lovely spot, right at the mouth of a river with a long beach on either side of its mouth. But when we got there, we found a dying, poverty-stricken, run-down, dirty, tiny town. The last few hundred yards along the river, before it dumps its load into the ocean, the sand is black, and there are steep bluffs that drop precipitously into the river. Perched on the top of the bluff, where the millionaires' homes in the US would be, is an abandoned ‘freezerworks’, which is another name for a ‘slaughterhouse’. It was a huge factory, built in 1894 and has been sitting there rotting and rusting and falling apart for the past 30 years. It started out with the capacity to kill and skin 10 sheep a day, but as they got smarter about how to kill en masse, the 800 people who worked there were able to run 600,000 unfortunate cattle, sheep, and pigs a year through there.
Today the entire area is fenced off with signs that say ‘Hazardous Area, Keep Out’, and an entire herd of cattle was inside the fence, calmly munching grass, until we walked up to take a picture of the incongruity of it all and they came over to see who we were. I wonder what could be hazardous around a slaughterhouse (did it get into the meat???), and I have to wonder if the air around that cluster of buildings, through which the cows wander, still reverberates with the screams of the millions of animals that died there. I don’t think I’d want to eat the meat of the Patea cows.
The slaughterhouse was the low point of Patea, an already sad spot on this otherwise lovely island.
Patea does have a golf course, however. It’s fenced, as many are, but this fence is to keep the sheep (i.e., fairway mowers) in. All over the fairways roamed bleating, pooping sheep, with more fences around the greens to keep their cloven hooves from poking holes in them. Joe grabbed his wedge, hopped the fence, and posed for a photo op with the sheep in the background. As we were recording this comical scene, in the rain, a tiny car with a surfboard taking up most of the car's interior pulled up, a guy with matted hair and surfing pants hopped out, and snapped away, too. ‘Never see sights like this in Alaska,’ he said. He was from Homer, Alaska, hunting for the perfect wave in this hemisphere, since it’s winter up there now.
By the time we pulled into Hawera, we had spent most of the day on one-lane, curvy, hilly, gravel roads, hardly ever seeing another car. We don’t make many miles in a day, but we’re having the kinds of adventures that most tourists, who stick to the tourist spots, don’t have. We love it! And at the end of the day we found a 4+ star motel with a great room and had a delicious Indian dinner.
Day 70 – Feb. 10 – Hawera to Taumaranui
It POURED today. First rain we’ve seen in a month. We spent the entire day, 8 hours, driving in it. The whole purpose of coming this way, around the Egmont peninsula, is to see a perfect volcano. It’s supposedly like Kilamanjaro, perfectly symmetrical, with snow on the top (although I hear Kilamanjaro’s snow is gone now). But the clouds were right on the ground all day, dumping rain, and we never saw a sign of the mountain. The road around the peninsula hugs the coastline the whole way, so we saw the surf crashing on the rocks for hours. And guess who we saw at one of the surfing beaches, trying to find the perfect wave - you're right - Homer, Alaska!
We’re headed for a tiny town that has a golf course that somebody called ‘a gem’. The road was one of the most torturous yet, curving continuously, up and down, sometimes gravel, sometimes ‘sealed’, as they call their pavement. The rain had loosened the soil, so rocks had fallen down on the road in a lot of places, often on curves, so we had to be careful to dodge them, as well as oncoming cars on the very narrow road. The road had washed completely away in places, but long enough in the past that the road crews had been out to put up barricades.
This is one deserted road from Hawera to Taumaranui. We rarely saw another car, and a house was even more scarce. This is called "The Forgotten Highway", and for good reason. Nobody comes here. It really is the ‘wop-wops’, as Kiwis call the ‘sticks’. But it is lovely country, beautiful hills, pretty rivers, trees hanging over the road making a canopy overhead. Sheep and cattle as always grazing on the hillsides.
Families here who’ve lived on the land for generations have their own cemeteries, and the headstones dot the landscape near the family homesteads.
After about 6 hours of winding around these hills, in pouring rain the entire time, I started feeling the effects, so Joe had to drive really slowly for the rest of the way so I didn’t toss my cookies. By the time we finally pulled into Taumaranui, I was REALLY ready to get out of that car! After the pain of getting here, this golf course better be worth the agony of getting here!
We grabbed the first motel we saw in Taumaranui, for our guide book said there were only a couple of places to stay and this one had a vacancy. Next door were 2 British couples riding their Harleys through the countryside, so we chewed the fat with them for an hour or so. Then we toured the town on foot (by now the rain had finally stopped), which took about 15 minutes. For dinner Joe found some Chinese take-away, and brought it back to the room (looked to me as if it had been sitting under the heat lamp since 1989), and I fixed myself a PB&J, with some dill pickles and a plum - yum! Washed this gourmet delight down with L&P lemonade, whose label says "World famous in New Zealand, since a long time ago".
Day 71 – Feb. 11 –Taumaranui to Waitomo Glowworm Caves
Kiwis seem to have an aversion to multi-syllable words. They shorten them to one or two syllables, like avo, cauli, brocci, veges (what we call veggies), mossy (mosquito). I bring this up because we had mossies in our room last night, and have the welts to prove it.
Well, it was raining again when we got up, so we expected that we might have driven all this way for naught. Drove out to the course anyway, just to see it, see if we could play if it did quit raining, and, besides, we didn’t have any other plans. Found out there was a tournament going on and we wouldn’t be able to tee off for 3 hours. That was fine with us, we’d hang around, since we’d come so far. I chipped and putted, putted and chipped, Joe read his book, and we killed 3 hours. By the time we teed off, by ourselves yet again, it had quit raining.
The course was as good as our friend had said. By NZ standards, that is. (I shot 76, 3 over par, from the men’s tees, Joe had 96.) It had a good layout, but, like almost every course we’ve played, with a few exceptions, it, too, is maintained by a crew of two, and members volunteer their time and equipment to keep it in the shape it is in. People come in and cook in the kitchen, or bring stuff from home to feed the golfers. Where is the Health Department???
After golf, it was on to the Waitomo Glowworm Caves, a place we missed on the way south through the middle of the North Island. Listened to more of ‘The Bone Garden’ book on tape. It’s getting really interesting now, and we can’t wait to find out more. Interestingly, since arriving I've read "Bone People", "The Bone Collector", and now we’re listening to another bony book. What’s the deal I have going with bones???
Several centuries ago, some Maori youngsters were floating down a river on some flax stems and it disappeared into the mouth of a huge cave. Inside were thousands of tiny dots of light on the ceilings. From then on, it was part of the Maori legends, and only Maori ventured into the cave. Then, in the 1850’s an enterprising Maori told his secret to a European and the ‘pakeha’ (Maori word for European) convinced the Maori to go into business with him showing it to other pakeha for money. Ever since tourists have been coming here by the boatload.
Now there is an old hotel perched up on the hill above the cave entrance, with a great view of the hilly farmland surrounding it. We checked in and were given a room with French doors that opened onto our own private terrace that had steps down to the parking lot. After dinner we sat out there and enjoyed the sunset, leaving the doors open so the breeze could cool the room. Today was a really hot, humid day, unusual for us. Little did we know that things besides breezes wafted into our room, and by the time we came in for the night, we were surrounded by literally hundreds of huge flying creatures. They were like huge mossies, and were all over the ceiling, walls, floor, bed, table, chairs, suitcases - anywhere there was a surface in any orientation – horizontal, vertical, whatever. We spent the next hour swatting them with anything we could grab – newspaper, magazines, towels. They piled up on the floor and Joe got down on his hands and knees, flicking them with a credit card onto towels so he could toss them into the toilet. Of course, we didn’t get ‘em all, so we spent the night slapping away, the next day scratching.
Day 72 – Feb. 12 – Waitomo Caves to Morrinsville
Hopped onto the 10 am tour of the cave, and spent the next hour oohing and aahing over beautiful stalactites and stalagmites and the thousands of tiny larva on the ceilings of the cave that emit light to help them feed on insects. Reminded me of the song Mother used to sing to us as children: "Glow, little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer, …" Until now I never knew what a glowworm was. What kind of marketing ploy has American mothers in the 1940’s singing about NZ moth larva to their children???
Then we were off to Hamilton, to a course known as St. Andrews of NZ, for a round of golf in the humidest weather we’ve encountered yet. Felt like we were wading through tepid water. Just as we finished, the bottom dropped out of the black skies that had been threatening us all day, and treated us to a torrential downpour of Biblical proportions. We just pulled into a motel and holed up for the night.
Day 73 – Feb. 13 – Morrinsville to Waihi
We’re now on our way to the east coast of the North Island, cutting diagonally across the center of the island as we make our way back to Auckland, intersecting the route we took on the way south. Stopped off at the tiny town of Te Aroha for lunch, and were prevented from parking in the space we’d chosen by somebody waving us off, saying, "We’re filming a movie and we need to keep this space free." Well, here’s our chance to see some movie stars, we thought, so we parked across the street and walked back to where a small crowd was milling around, outside the butcher shop.
Found out that a German film company was filming some segments of a movie that will be shown on German television in a few months. About an American woman and a Kiwi who fall in love, entitled "Longing for New Zealand". When I asked one of the Kiwi women who was working in some official capacity who the stars of the movie were, she had to run back to her truck, grab a piece of paper, and look up their names. Susan Anbeh and Christian Poggenkamp (if my memory serves me, which isn’t very often these days). They did the same take over and over, though I don’t know what they didn’t like about each one. They all looked the same to me, but that’s why I’m not a director.
Further down the road was a little roadside park beside a river, and we got out to stretch our legs. As we were admiring the river, we noticed a footbridge across it and decided to go see what was over there. That led to some derelict concrete foundations of something that had once been huge, but now was in ruins. A sign explained that over 100 years ago they discovered gold in this area and they built many enormous buildings to separate the gold from the rock in which it was embedded. They spoke of using cyanide or some such poisonous chemical used in the smelting process. I had to wonder how much of that stuff is still lying around, in the rocks, the soil, the water, and plants. There were pictures of the area during the smelter’s heyday, and there wasn’t a tree or bush to be seen, just tin roofs for acres, and rocks, and the stream, lovely today but filled then with the discharge of this most polluting of all processes. Trails led up, up, up to where the many levels of the buildings had once stood, and where now sat only rusting metal rods, cement platforms, huge, cement-lined holes in the ground, rotting iron pipes 3 feet in diameter, and all manner of debris left behind when the factory was abandoned 60 years ago. From 30 feet in the air, you’d never know it hadn’t always been covered with the thick layer of vegetation that hides most of what remains.
Tunnels with narrow-gauge rails honeycomb the area, and we walked down some of the rails, one foot on each, until we came to one of the tunnels. Following it, we came to a curve, and beyond it was total darkness. In the US there would be a gate there to keep people out, or a sign warning them not to go further without a light, or something that indicated that it was safe to go further or not recommended to do so. But we had no idea whether to go further and, if we did, what we’d find, how long it would be pitch-black, whether we’d hit a wall of rock or what. We started down it, feeling our way along with our hands on one side of the tunnel wall and one foot on one of the rails. It was blacker than the insides of a whale's belly. But it got really spooky after a few minutes and we turned around. Fortunately for us, some people came along right then who had a flashlight with them, and we followed them the 50 or so yards (which doesn’t sound like much until you do it in total darkness as we did) to the far side.
The substantial town of Waihi is lined with roadside stands selling fresh corn, watermelon, blueberries, avocadoes, apricots, and tomatoes. Joe and I are both suckers for fresh corn, so we stopped and bought some ears, then enough fresh veggies to make a REAL salad (they don’t have big green salads here), got some salad dressing, butter for the corn, and steaks at the grocery store, found a motel with a BBQ outside, and cooked the first home-made meal of our trip. It was DELICIOUS!!
Before checking in we played their golf course, a good track with huge greens. We’re averaging playing golf about once every 3 days, a good way to break up constant sight-seeing.
Day 74 – Feb. 14 – Waihi layover day
Learned that Tiger Woods’ son, Charlie, was born today or yesterday.
Had the most wunnerful breakfast of watermelon, apricots, and blueberries on yogurt. Drove down to the beach and happened upon a surf boat competition. About a dozen boats, about 10 feet long, with pontoons and outboard motors, like Zodiacs, stand about waist-deep in the water, being held by somebody. A driver and an assistant for each boat stand at the edge of the surf, ready to run. When they shoot the starter’s pistol, each pair runs to his boat, hops in – one in the front and one in the back -, starts the engine, and heads straight out into the waves. The nose of the boat rises up the crest of the 4-foot waves, and, if they’re lucky, they go down the other side. At one point, they’re nearly vertical. Some boats get past vertical, since the wind is blowing on-shore, and they end up flipping over. They race around a big rectangle, marked by buoys, and, turning and sliding around the buoy nearest land, come nearly onto the beach. After 4 laps, they head straight for shore at full speed. When the boat runs onto the sand, and the prop flips out of the water, the guy in front of the boat flies out of the boat and runs full-tilt to the finish line. First one there wins, of course. A t-shirt or something.
Ate the remnants of last night’s dinner in the form of fajitas, corn on the cob, another salad. Yummmmm! Then made a tour of Waihi town. Nobody was on the streets except 4 Maoris, who stood on the sidewalk outside a bar. As we got up to them, one of them looked at me, smiled big, and said, "You’re safe, we’re Maoris." "I never thought we weren’t safe," I replied with a smile to match his.
On a hill defining the skyline of this town sits a huge cement ‘pumphouse’, no longer in operation. Over a century ago gold was discovered here and many mines were dug into the hill. At some point it was decided that it would be more profitable to just scrape the top off the mountain to get at the gold, so they started digging. Soon they encountered ground water that filled the hole, so they built an enormous pumphouse to siphon the water out of the hole. It’s still standing there, gutted for anything of value and full of holes, a monumental concrete testimony to man’s love of the glittery stuff. What used to be called ‘Martha’s Hill’ had to be renamed ‘Martha’s Mine’ (I think a better name would be 'Martha's Hole'). When we got to the top of the hill, we peered down into the bowels of the earth, a monstrous, gaping, iron-colored hole about a quarter-mile deep, with the world’s biggest earth-moving equipment looking like toys at the bottom of it.
Walking back into town in the near-dark, we were nearly bowled over by a guy staggering down the sidewalk in our direction. "Good evening," Joe said to him. He got about 30 feet past us, turned around, and said, "What kind of evening did you say? GOOD evening?" I was expecting him to haul off and slug Joe, but he came back to us and entertained us with a very friendly, surprisingly coherent conversation. Kevin MacPherson had worked the mine as an iron worker, and now lived in ‘the bush’ where he traps possums for their fur. A real ‘mountain man’, if he lived in the US West.
Day 75 – Feb. 15 – Waihi to Whangamata
Cicadas are everywhere on both islands. They live in the trees, and make noises like crickets by rubbing their back legs together. So everywhere we go, there is a loud buzzing sound that never seems to stop. Reminds me of life as a child in Florida before all the crickets were killed off by DDT or some such.
We’re officially on the Coromandel Peninsula now, the last bit of New Zealand we will see before heading back to Auckland and beginning the trip home. We began the leg by playing driving all of 30 miles to the town of Whangamata (rhymes with fondle-my-tie). It was a lovely day and we headed right for the golf course. They were having a tournament, so there were actually a lot of cars in the parking lot. They put us with a couple named Frank and Rosalie O’Neil, who live in town. He is 9 months older than I am, and she is about my age, too. He grew up in Scotland and went hitchhiking around the world in 1964. When he got to NZ, he stopped and never went home. Married a NZ gal and went into the insurance and investment business. He eventually bought the top of a mountain at the edge of town, developed it with lovely homes, picked the best site for himself, with a stupendous view of the bay and beach and islands, and says they’ll remove him feet first from his home.
After we played golf, we followed them back to their home, and sat on their patio with that million-dollar view behind them, drinking orange juice and yakking. They were meeting people for dinner and we left to head north – so we thought. But we hadn’t figured out what our next step was, and when we looked at the map, we realized our best plan was to spend the night here. We got a room in a motel, that had 2 bedrooms, a huge kitchen, living room and monstrous bath, all for $65US. Even had a full-sized refrigerator, the first we’ve ever seen in NZ motels.
Asked the motel owner for a recommendation on places to eat, and he said the best place in town is Oceana’s. "I’ll bet anything Frank and Rosalie are going there, too," I said, but we decided that we shouldn’t really let the possibility stop us from having a good meal. Our options were pizza and Chinese take-away. Sure enough, 15 minutes after we sat down, in they came!! Sat at the next table with 3 friends, and we bantered back and forth a few times during the evening, then we said our final good-byes and headed back to our home-for-a-night.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
January 30 - February 6
The internet connection we have at this motel is sooooo slow that it would take us all night to download pictures with this blog, so this one is picture-less. Sorry.
Day 59 – Jan. 30 –Christchurch to Darfield
Today was overcast and cool, perfect for playing golf at the Christchurch golf course. Got paired up with a very nice young couple who brought their 8-year-old daughter, Molly, along. She had boundless energy and had a thing for sliding down the sides of bunkers on her butt into the sand, did it over and over again.
"Molly, you probably think I have an accent, but it’s YOU who has the accent, don’t you think?" I asked her. "No, you hev a rilly BEEG ekcent," she responded. Guess we do to them.
Went to see the movie that being hyped over here, "Revolutionary Road", with Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslett. Skip it unless you love to watch people screaming invectives at each other.
Don’t remember a thing about Darfield. We pulled into town after dark, got a motel and went to sleep.
Day 60 – Jan. 31 –Darfield to Maruia Springs
The memorable thing about Darfield was the strange breakfast I ate. I ordered Eggs Benedict, something they usually do really well over here. But this one was sitting on a HUGE mushroom, as well as some thick, crumbly bread, with only one egg on top of all that. To the side were a bunch of thinly-sliced pickled beets, and a baked tomato (Yuk!).
It was a gorgeous, perfect day. Drove through rolling hills stripped of their trees like so much of NZ, to make room for the 4-legged beasties, and off in the distance we saw some round gray bumps. On getting closer we saw that they were some huge boulders, just sitting on the top of a ridge. What in the world??? My geology training didn’t answer the question, so as we got closer, we realized that the entire countryside was littered with huge limestone boulders. At a pullout we joined about 50 other cars of curious people, and walked up to the boulders, about ¼ mile away. People were crawling all over them, rapelling off of them, jumping off of ‘em onto mats (Joe said they were practicing their mogul turns for the upcoming winter ski season). I wandered in and out of them, marvelling at the size of them, as large as houses and 3-story buildings.
At the top of Arthur Pass (a disappointment to me as the guide book raved about its beauty but it was just an ordinary pretty NZ sight to us and hardly high enough to warrant the term ‘pass’), we stopped for a break.. Instantly we were beseiged by several keas, those large parrots who are so mischievous. We gave them a couple of apricots that were on their last legs, but they took one bite, then headed for the rubber molding around our front windshield. One took a chunk out of it before we realized what he was doing. Now we’re among the hordes who think keas are a nuisance rather than some cute, funny little cousin of the parrot.
Remember the movie Man from Snowy River? I have seen it twice and it’s sort of one of those unforgettable movies for one particular scene – for me it’s when the hero gallops his horse (in slow motion, of course) straight down an embankment. We went flying over a tiny bridge with a placard announcing ‘Snowy River’. Slamming on the brakes, Joe stopped the car and backed up for a picture. There was also a road back to someplace by the same name, so naturally we had to go see where this Man was from. Couldn’t have been this place. It was nothing but a few houses, shabby and tiny wooden shacks, strung out along a few miles of winding track through trees. It didn’t look like it held any promise, so we gave up.
Joe loves to soak his bones in hot water so we pulled in at Maruia Springs, which boasted of hot pools. The only place there was the resort, built across the river from where the Maoris discovered the hot springs centuries ago, and today they pipe it across the small river into their pools. While he soaked, I wandered down along the river and re-connected with my soul there among the rocks and weeds and water, while the sun went down and turned everything gorgeous colors.
Day 61 – Feb. 1 – Maruia Springs to Kaikoura
Maruia Springs might be in a lovely setting, and have delightful hot water to warm your bones, but it is the sand fly capital of the world!!! We got eaten alive, and couldn’t wait to get out of there. They were all throughout the car when we drove away and we spent the next half-hour slapping and swatting, ending up with dead fly corpses all over the insides of the windows.
Today’s drive to Kaikoura is through some gorgeous country, with high mountains, and valleys whose floors are laced with streams so old they have many different stream beds, most abandoned but leaving behind a lot of pebbles and flat shelves high above the valley floor indicating where they’d been.
Waitresses here have a penchant for losing our orders and today was the 5th time our order, for breakfast in Hanmer Springs, was lost. Our waitress, from Bend then Tanzania, felt bad enough about it that she let us choose something from their bakery case as apology.
Parked below the bridge we drove across on the way out of Hanmer Springs sat a jetboat. We’ve done so many things here but we’ve avoided the jetboat scene until now. The river here is stunningly beautiful, with high cliffs and gorgeous water. I wanted mostly to see the canyon the river flowed through, so we hopped aboard. I didn’t know how fast these things went, how much wind hit your face, so the first thing I did was take off my glasses to keep from having them flung off my face. Then I couldn’t see much. But it was a huge amount of fun! We flew over water so shallow the pebbles were almost sticking ot of the water. When we got to a wide spot in the river, the driver made a circling motion with his arm, the key for us to hold on tighter to the safety bar. Then he spun the boat around in a 180 by simply swapping ends, the tightest spin I’ve ever seen, while spraying water all over the rocks, or cows, whichever was at the edge of the river.
The countryside between Hanmer Springs and Kaikoura is very hilly, with the omnipresent sheep and cows pastures, very few towns or houses, lots of rivers with braided streams.
Kaikoura is a small town right on the coast, and we found a motel (our 2nd "Panorama") right on the water. It was one of the most expensive we’ve stayed in so far - $75 US. If the weather had cooperated, we would have had lovely views across a pretty bay to a mountain range on the other side. But it was windy and the clouds were so low as to obscure even the far side of the bay, let alone the mountains ringing it.
We are on a point of land, and the very tip of it, at the base of a very high cliff, is the home of a seal colony. They always pick the best views, it seems. We donned our windbreakers and headed off across the rocks that were exposed by the very low tide. We were looking mostly at our feet, to keep from falling in the many tide pools left behind when the tide receded, and suddenly there was a huge seal lying just a few feet away, sleeping with his back turned to us. Knowing how aggressive and fierce they can be if disturbed, we beat it back the way we’d come, and contented ourselves with feeding the seagulls our stale bread.
Day 62 – Feb. 2 – Kaikoura layover day
We’re counting down the days now, since we’re starting to realize this lovely vacation is really going to end one of these days. We have 23 more days on these paradisical islands, not nearly enough.
They have what they call crayfish, what we call lobster, and they sell them in restaurants for $45US for a whole one. You get the head, legs, tail and antennae all lying there staring at you.
They monitor the ultraviolet ray index and it’s in the paper every day. The range is 0 to 12, and today was a 13. Stay inside, they say.
The bath in our motel is 3’ x 4’, not including the shower. It’s one of the smallest yet.
Played golf at the local club - $15US – and it rained nearly the entire time. There was 1 car in the parking lot when we got there, and 2 when we left. Needless to say, we played alone yet again.
Day 63 – Feb. 3 – Kaikoura to Blenheim
After raining all day yesterday and all night, today dawned glorious – warm, sunny, calm – and we could, for the first time, see the Seaward Kaidoura Range, the one that’s been hiding behind a huge cloudbank for 2 days. Set out for the north end of the island, and on the way passed a huge seal colony. Below us on a large area of rocks were babies playing in a tide pool, while the very patient designated baby-sitter made sure they didn’t drown. Further out dozens of seals romped and played in the water, chased fish, fought for the same spot on the rock, and sunned themselves. We spent nearly an hour being amused by their antics before crawling back in the car.
In Blenheim, named for Winston Churchill’s HUGE family home in England, I suppose, we found a nice motel right across from a school. Kids were wandering around the grounds looking identical in uniforms complete with hats atop their heads. We drove out to the Marlborough golf course ($15US) where we had another round, in heat and lots of wind, all by ourselves on a deserted course.
This is a wine-growing area of NZ and all around are vineyards. They plant rose bushes at the ends of the rows of grapevines that grow near the main buildings seen by tourists, a nice and colorful touch when they’re all full of blooms as they are now.
Because we’re going across the Cook Strait to get back to the North Island tomorrow, we hopped on the internet to book a passage. Turns out there are 2 web sites, one official and one not so official. We went to the not-so-official one and nearly bought tickets. Just for fun, Joe checked the other, official, site and found the tickets were $75US cheaper. What a rip-off!! And most people would pay the higher price and never be the wiser.
Day 64 – Feb. 4 – Blenheim to Wellington
Being pretty anal about not wanting to miss our ferry, we got there about 2 hours early. We were so early that the gatekeeper told us we were too early for our ferry, but the one leaving in a few minutes had space on it, so we drove right on without more than a 5-minute wait in line. What a coup!
It was cool and a slight wind was blowing, and I had concerns about getting seasick. But the ship slid through the waves with hardly a blip and I never felt a moment of queasiness. It was cold and windy on deck and it was raining so we couldn’t see a thing out the windows. Joe and I spent most of the time reading and playing gin rummy.
We got into Wellington in mid-afternoon, and, because we’ve been out in the countryside for so long, away from traffic and congestion, the rush hour traffic drove us mad and we headed for the coastal town of Seatoun, thinking we might find a nice, quiet motel on the coast. But there was not a single place anyone could spend the night for several miles along the coast, only single-family homes. By the time we had driven the entire coastline, we were back in downtown Wellington, so we just headed for the first place we saw with a vacancy – the Museum Hotel right across the street from the famous Wellington Museum. I REALLY wanted to go to the museum, because Phar Lap’s bones are there. A room in a place like this would be at least $300US a night, right in the middle of town, with modern, beautiful rooms. But we got it for $95US.
It’s good to be back on the North Island, even though it means that the end of this most wonderful vacation is in view. The daughter and son-in-law of our good German friends, Inge and Axel Rexhausen – Claudia and Thomas Recker – live here and we made plans to meet for breakfast. They’re here from Germany for 3 years so Claudia can get her college degree and a different type of job back in Germany when she returns.
We wandered the streets of Wellington for a couple of hours, getting a good feel for the city and its different personalities. Dinner in a Turkish restaurant, a recommendation by a local, wonderful shish kebabs, followed by scrumptious ice cream from a gelato stand. Haven’t seen anything like that on either island, except maybe in Auckland.
Day 65 – Feb. 5 – Wellington layover day
Claudia and Thomas have a huge apartment about 3 blocks from our hotel, so we walked up there around 10 am, got the tour of their digs, then went next door to a restaurant she claimed to have delicious breakfasts (it did). Then we went our separate ways, to meet up with Claudia again at dinnertime.
We didn’t know it before coming to town, but this weekend is the equivalent of our Super Bowl. Everybody in the whole two islands comes here for rugby games called Sevens, because only 7 instead of the usual 15 (?) play against one another. So the atmosphere has taken on the flavor of Mardi Gras. People are walking down the street in all manner of getups. Two couples looked like 4 playing cards, all 7’s, heart, club, spade, and diamond, taking up the whole sidewalk. One guy jogged by with only socks on his feet, no shoes.
Many people get around here on skateboards, and I was astonished to see a man in a 3-piece suit, polished wing-tip type shoes, briefcase in hand, whisking in and out of the sidewalk traffic on one. Other people hum along on Segues, those mysterious machines that were going to transform the world several years ago, but are mostly used by city cops to get around their beats now.
Weather doesn’t get any better anywhere than it is here today: blue skies, no clouds, very slight breeze, perfect temperature for shorts. Everybody is outside today. The waterfront is the hub of the city, clean, spacious, looking out over the entire bay across to the other side. Ferries sail in and out, cruise ships, and penguins chase fish at incredible speeds right under the many footbridges that span the harbor. The water is as clear as gin so you can see the penguin and the fish as easily as if they were in the air.
Helicopters land right on the docks after taking people aloft for an aerial view of Wellington. Pontoon planes land and glide up to the wharf. Teenage boys were climbing atop the railings and doing cannonballs into the harbor water to see if they could splash water high enough to get the tourists wet. We wondered if kids in the US could get away with that and figured the cops would run ‘em off. But here they even provide showers so they can wash off the salt water when they’re finished. Kids were drawing pictures all over the sidewalks with chalk. Grandfathers down to ten-year-olds were casting lines into the water to catch their dinners.
This is a very liveable city, and if I had to live in a big NZ city, this would probably be a good one. It’s so easy to get around in, especially the downtown area, everything is within walking distance. The weather is good, except when it’s windy, and it can get VERY windy here. In fact, it’s known as Windy Wellington, for the wind comes pouring between the north and the south islands here, and the seas can get monstrous.
In fact, in 1968 a ferry called the Wahine, hauling passengers and vehicles, was caught in a storm as it entered the harbor, not far from safety, lost power and crashed onto the rocks. It was one of the worst marine disasters in NZ history. In one of the museums we wandered into today, there was a huge exhibit devoted to its fascinating but sad story.
The other museum in which we spent a good part of the day was right across the street from the Museum Hotel, where we’re staying. The Te Papa Museum, NZ’s best. The main reason I wanted to visit it was because Phar Lap’s skeleton is there. We made a beeline for it and there were the bones of NZ’s most famous horse in a glass case. He was a VERY large horse, seemingly twice as big as my little palomino quarter horse I had as a kid. I took pictures of it, before I saw signs saying no cameras. Oh, well…
We met Claudia in one of her favorite restaurants – a Malaysian/curry diner – and had a delicious meal, sharing bites. Afterwards we wandered the streets as the sun went down and watched the people getting crazy and loud in preparation for the Sevens games. We passed one guy who looked like he’d just landed from an alien planet, dressed weirdly, with a wild look in his eyes, babbling to nobody about something. "Must be high on something," I said. We conjectured what drug he might be on, as if any of us knows anything about what the kids on the street are using, and some guy in his twenties sidled up to us and said, "Oh, no, nobody uses those party pills any more. Too dangerous. Today we use something that’s really high in caffeine." So there you have it.
When we told the hotel receptionist that we’d like to stay one more night, she just laughed. "You probably can’t find a room for the next 2 nights within 100 miles of Wellington. The Sevens, you know." So we’re off tomorrow for points north, whether we like it or not.
Day 66 – Feb. 6 – Wellington to Otaki
Our friends with whom we’d played golf our first time through Wellington told us about a nice little golf course in the town of Wainuiomata, so we headed for there when we checked out of our hotel. It is over a mountain range and on the other side of the harbor from Wellington, really out of the way. Joined up with another couple, John and Kat, for a fun round.
Turns out that not only is the Sevens international competition going on in Wellington, but there’s some huge dog show somewhere around here, plus stock car races in Hamilton. So the hotel lady wasn’t kidding when she said we’d have trouble finding a room. Because we have never spent more than a few minutes looking for a vacant place to stay, we didn’t take her very seriously. So about 5 pm we started looking for a place to light for the night. First town was full, so was the second. Then we started getting nervous. Then we started following every sign for a B&B, no matter how far off the road, and we got sent on some wild-goose chases, looking for B&B’s that no longer exist but nobody’s bothered to take the sign off the highway.
We drove for 4 hours, until it was getting dark. We were headed for the town of Levin eventually, because that’s where Adrian Doig lives. He’s the man who hopped onto our blog when he was looking for a trundler to buy and the search engine sent him to our site. He invited us to play golf with him if we ever got to Levin, so we fired up the e-mail and set a date for a match tomorrow. Well, we didn’t really expect to pull into Levin a day early, but here we are almost there. The town just before Levin was totally full, but there was a campground that didn’t say No Vacancy, so in we pulled.
"I was just getting ready to put up the No Vacancy sign", the owner said. "But I’ve got one small site, big enough for a small tent, if you want it." "We’ll take it, don’t even need to see it." So we pitched our tent next to a couple of twenty-something guys from Dresden, spoke a bit of German with them, and ate the leftovers of their dinner, a horrible, lukewarm mess of noodles, red peppers, and thin spaghetti sauce.
Day 59 – Jan. 30 –Christchurch to Darfield
Today was overcast and cool, perfect for playing golf at the Christchurch golf course. Got paired up with a very nice young couple who brought their 8-year-old daughter, Molly, along. She had boundless energy and had a thing for sliding down the sides of bunkers on her butt into the sand, did it over and over again.
"Molly, you probably think I have an accent, but it’s YOU who has the accent, don’t you think?" I asked her. "No, you hev a rilly BEEG ekcent," she responded. Guess we do to them.
Went to see the movie that being hyped over here, "Revolutionary Road", with Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslett. Skip it unless you love to watch people screaming invectives at each other.
Don’t remember a thing about Darfield. We pulled into town after dark, got a motel and went to sleep.
Day 60 – Jan. 31 –Darfield to Maruia Springs
The memorable thing about Darfield was the strange breakfast I ate. I ordered Eggs Benedict, something they usually do really well over here. But this one was sitting on a HUGE mushroom, as well as some thick, crumbly bread, with only one egg on top of all that. To the side were a bunch of thinly-sliced pickled beets, and a baked tomato (Yuk!).
It was a gorgeous, perfect day. Drove through rolling hills stripped of their trees like so much of NZ, to make room for the 4-legged beasties, and off in the distance we saw some round gray bumps. On getting closer we saw that they were some huge boulders, just sitting on the top of a ridge. What in the world??? My geology training didn’t answer the question, so as we got closer, we realized that the entire countryside was littered with huge limestone boulders. At a pullout we joined about 50 other cars of curious people, and walked up to the boulders, about ¼ mile away. People were crawling all over them, rapelling off of them, jumping off of ‘em onto mats (Joe said they were practicing their mogul turns for the upcoming winter ski season). I wandered in and out of them, marvelling at the size of them, as large as houses and 3-story buildings.
At the top of Arthur Pass (a disappointment to me as the guide book raved about its beauty but it was just an ordinary pretty NZ sight to us and hardly high enough to warrant the term ‘pass’), we stopped for a break.. Instantly we were beseiged by several keas, those large parrots who are so mischievous. We gave them a couple of apricots that were on their last legs, but they took one bite, then headed for the rubber molding around our front windshield. One took a chunk out of it before we realized what he was doing. Now we’re among the hordes who think keas are a nuisance rather than some cute, funny little cousin of the parrot.
Remember the movie Man from Snowy River? I have seen it twice and it’s sort of one of those unforgettable movies for one particular scene – for me it’s when the hero gallops his horse (in slow motion, of course) straight down an embankment. We went flying over a tiny bridge with a placard announcing ‘Snowy River’. Slamming on the brakes, Joe stopped the car and backed up for a picture. There was also a road back to someplace by the same name, so naturally we had to go see where this Man was from. Couldn’t have been this place. It was nothing but a few houses, shabby and tiny wooden shacks, strung out along a few miles of winding track through trees. It didn’t look like it held any promise, so we gave up.
Joe loves to soak his bones in hot water so we pulled in at Maruia Springs, which boasted of hot pools. The only place there was the resort, built across the river from where the Maoris discovered the hot springs centuries ago, and today they pipe it across the small river into their pools. While he soaked, I wandered down along the river and re-connected with my soul there among the rocks and weeds and water, while the sun went down and turned everything gorgeous colors.
Day 61 – Feb. 1 – Maruia Springs to Kaikoura
Maruia Springs might be in a lovely setting, and have delightful hot water to warm your bones, but it is the sand fly capital of the world!!! We got eaten alive, and couldn’t wait to get out of there. They were all throughout the car when we drove away and we spent the next half-hour slapping and swatting, ending up with dead fly corpses all over the insides of the windows.
Today’s drive to Kaikoura is through some gorgeous country, with high mountains, and valleys whose floors are laced with streams so old they have many different stream beds, most abandoned but leaving behind a lot of pebbles and flat shelves high above the valley floor indicating where they’d been.
Waitresses here have a penchant for losing our orders and today was the 5th time our order, for breakfast in Hanmer Springs, was lost. Our waitress, from Bend then Tanzania, felt bad enough about it that she let us choose something from their bakery case as apology.
Parked below the bridge we drove across on the way out of Hanmer Springs sat a jetboat. We’ve done so many things here but we’ve avoided the jetboat scene until now. The river here is stunningly beautiful, with high cliffs and gorgeous water. I wanted mostly to see the canyon the river flowed through, so we hopped aboard. I didn’t know how fast these things went, how much wind hit your face, so the first thing I did was take off my glasses to keep from having them flung off my face. Then I couldn’t see much. But it was a huge amount of fun! We flew over water so shallow the pebbles were almost sticking ot of the water. When we got to a wide spot in the river, the driver made a circling motion with his arm, the key for us to hold on tighter to the safety bar. Then he spun the boat around in a 180 by simply swapping ends, the tightest spin I’ve ever seen, while spraying water all over the rocks, or cows, whichever was at the edge of the river.
The countryside between Hanmer Springs and Kaikoura is very hilly, with the omnipresent sheep and cows pastures, very few towns or houses, lots of rivers with braided streams.
Kaikoura is a small town right on the coast, and we found a motel (our 2nd "Panorama") right on the water. It was one of the most expensive we’ve stayed in so far - $75 US. If the weather had cooperated, we would have had lovely views across a pretty bay to a mountain range on the other side. But it was windy and the clouds were so low as to obscure even the far side of the bay, let alone the mountains ringing it.
We are on a point of land, and the very tip of it, at the base of a very high cliff, is the home of a seal colony. They always pick the best views, it seems. We donned our windbreakers and headed off across the rocks that were exposed by the very low tide. We were looking mostly at our feet, to keep from falling in the many tide pools left behind when the tide receded, and suddenly there was a huge seal lying just a few feet away, sleeping with his back turned to us. Knowing how aggressive and fierce they can be if disturbed, we beat it back the way we’d come, and contented ourselves with feeding the seagulls our stale bread.
Day 62 – Feb. 2 – Kaikoura layover day
We’re counting down the days now, since we’re starting to realize this lovely vacation is really going to end one of these days. We have 23 more days on these paradisical islands, not nearly enough.
They have what they call crayfish, what we call lobster, and they sell them in restaurants for $45US for a whole one. You get the head, legs, tail and antennae all lying there staring at you.
They monitor the ultraviolet ray index and it’s in the paper every day. The range is 0 to 12, and today was a 13. Stay inside, they say.
The bath in our motel is 3’ x 4’, not including the shower. It’s one of the smallest yet.
Played golf at the local club - $15US – and it rained nearly the entire time. There was 1 car in the parking lot when we got there, and 2 when we left. Needless to say, we played alone yet again.
Day 63 – Feb. 3 – Kaikoura to Blenheim
After raining all day yesterday and all night, today dawned glorious – warm, sunny, calm – and we could, for the first time, see the Seaward Kaidoura Range, the one that’s been hiding behind a huge cloudbank for 2 days. Set out for the north end of the island, and on the way passed a huge seal colony. Below us on a large area of rocks were babies playing in a tide pool, while the very patient designated baby-sitter made sure they didn’t drown. Further out dozens of seals romped and played in the water, chased fish, fought for the same spot on the rock, and sunned themselves. We spent nearly an hour being amused by their antics before crawling back in the car.
In Blenheim, named for Winston Churchill’s HUGE family home in England, I suppose, we found a nice motel right across from a school. Kids were wandering around the grounds looking identical in uniforms complete with hats atop their heads. We drove out to the Marlborough golf course ($15US) where we had another round, in heat and lots of wind, all by ourselves on a deserted course.
This is a wine-growing area of NZ and all around are vineyards. They plant rose bushes at the ends of the rows of grapevines that grow near the main buildings seen by tourists, a nice and colorful touch when they’re all full of blooms as they are now.
Because we’re going across the Cook Strait to get back to the North Island tomorrow, we hopped on the internet to book a passage. Turns out there are 2 web sites, one official and one not so official. We went to the not-so-official one and nearly bought tickets. Just for fun, Joe checked the other, official, site and found the tickets were $75US cheaper. What a rip-off!! And most people would pay the higher price and never be the wiser.
Day 64 – Feb. 4 – Blenheim to Wellington
Being pretty anal about not wanting to miss our ferry, we got there about 2 hours early. We were so early that the gatekeeper told us we were too early for our ferry, but the one leaving in a few minutes had space on it, so we drove right on without more than a 5-minute wait in line. What a coup!
It was cool and a slight wind was blowing, and I had concerns about getting seasick. But the ship slid through the waves with hardly a blip and I never felt a moment of queasiness. It was cold and windy on deck and it was raining so we couldn’t see a thing out the windows. Joe and I spent most of the time reading and playing gin rummy.
We got into Wellington in mid-afternoon, and, because we’ve been out in the countryside for so long, away from traffic and congestion, the rush hour traffic drove us mad and we headed for the coastal town of Seatoun, thinking we might find a nice, quiet motel on the coast. But there was not a single place anyone could spend the night for several miles along the coast, only single-family homes. By the time we had driven the entire coastline, we were back in downtown Wellington, so we just headed for the first place we saw with a vacancy – the Museum Hotel right across the street from the famous Wellington Museum. I REALLY wanted to go to the museum, because Phar Lap’s bones are there. A room in a place like this would be at least $300US a night, right in the middle of town, with modern, beautiful rooms. But we got it for $95US.
It’s good to be back on the North Island, even though it means that the end of this most wonderful vacation is in view. The daughter and son-in-law of our good German friends, Inge and Axel Rexhausen – Claudia and Thomas Recker – live here and we made plans to meet for breakfast. They’re here from Germany for 3 years so Claudia can get her college degree and a different type of job back in Germany when she returns.
We wandered the streets of Wellington for a couple of hours, getting a good feel for the city and its different personalities. Dinner in a Turkish restaurant, a recommendation by a local, wonderful shish kebabs, followed by scrumptious ice cream from a gelato stand. Haven’t seen anything like that on either island, except maybe in Auckland.
Day 65 – Feb. 5 – Wellington layover day
Claudia and Thomas have a huge apartment about 3 blocks from our hotel, so we walked up there around 10 am, got the tour of their digs, then went next door to a restaurant she claimed to have delicious breakfasts (it did). Then we went our separate ways, to meet up with Claudia again at dinnertime.
We didn’t know it before coming to town, but this weekend is the equivalent of our Super Bowl. Everybody in the whole two islands comes here for rugby games called Sevens, because only 7 instead of the usual 15 (?) play against one another. So the atmosphere has taken on the flavor of Mardi Gras. People are walking down the street in all manner of getups. Two couples looked like 4 playing cards, all 7’s, heart, club, spade, and diamond, taking up the whole sidewalk. One guy jogged by with only socks on his feet, no shoes.
Many people get around here on skateboards, and I was astonished to see a man in a 3-piece suit, polished wing-tip type shoes, briefcase in hand, whisking in and out of the sidewalk traffic on one. Other people hum along on Segues, those mysterious machines that were going to transform the world several years ago, but are mostly used by city cops to get around their beats now.
Weather doesn’t get any better anywhere than it is here today: blue skies, no clouds, very slight breeze, perfect temperature for shorts. Everybody is outside today. The waterfront is the hub of the city, clean, spacious, looking out over the entire bay across to the other side. Ferries sail in and out, cruise ships, and penguins chase fish at incredible speeds right under the many footbridges that span the harbor. The water is as clear as gin so you can see the penguin and the fish as easily as if they were in the air.
Helicopters land right on the docks after taking people aloft for an aerial view of Wellington. Pontoon planes land and glide up to the wharf. Teenage boys were climbing atop the railings and doing cannonballs into the harbor water to see if they could splash water high enough to get the tourists wet. We wondered if kids in the US could get away with that and figured the cops would run ‘em off. But here they even provide showers so they can wash off the salt water when they’re finished. Kids were drawing pictures all over the sidewalks with chalk. Grandfathers down to ten-year-olds were casting lines into the water to catch their dinners.
This is a very liveable city, and if I had to live in a big NZ city, this would probably be a good one. It’s so easy to get around in, especially the downtown area, everything is within walking distance. The weather is good, except when it’s windy, and it can get VERY windy here. In fact, it’s known as Windy Wellington, for the wind comes pouring between the north and the south islands here, and the seas can get monstrous.
In fact, in 1968 a ferry called the Wahine, hauling passengers and vehicles, was caught in a storm as it entered the harbor, not far from safety, lost power and crashed onto the rocks. It was one of the worst marine disasters in NZ history. In one of the museums we wandered into today, there was a huge exhibit devoted to its fascinating but sad story.
The other museum in which we spent a good part of the day was right across the street from the Museum Hotel, where we’re staying. The Te Papa Museum, NZ’s best. The main reason I wanted to visit it was because Phar Lap’s skeleton is there. We made a beeline for it and there were the bones of NZ’s most famous horse in a glass case. He was a VERY large horse, seemingly twice as big as my little palomino quarter horse I had as a kid. I took pictures of it, before I saw signs saying no cameras. Oh, well…
We met Claudia in one of her favorite restaurants – a Malaysian/curry diner – and had a delicious meal, sharing bites. Afterwards we wandered the streets as the sun went down and watched the people getting crazy and loud in preparation for the Sevens games. We passed one guy who looked like he’d just landed from an alien planet, dressed weirdly, with a wild look in his eyes, babbling to nobody about something. "Must be high on something," I said. We conjectured what drug he might be on, as if any of us knows anything about what the kids on the street are using, and some guy in his twenties sidled up to us and said, "Oh, no, nobody uses those party pills any more. Too dangerous. Today we use something that’s really high in caffeine." So there you have it.
When we told the hotel receptionist that we’d like to stay one more night, she just laughed. "You probably can’t find a room for the next 2 nights within 100 miles of Wellington. The Sevens, you know." So we’re off tomorrow for points north, whether we like it or not.
Day 66 – Feb. 6 – Wellington to Otaki
Our friends with whom we’d played golf our first time through Wellington told us about a nice little golf course in the town of Wainuiomata, so we headed for there when we checked out of our hotel. It is over a mountain range and on the other side of the harbor from Wellington, really out of the way. Joined up with another couple, John and Kat, for a fun round.
Turns out that not only is the Sevens international competition going on in Wellington, but there’s some huge dog show somewhere around here, plus stock car races in Hamilton. So the hotel lady wasn’t kidding when she said we’d have trouble finding a room. Because we have never spent more than a few minutes looking for a vacant place to stay, we didn’t take her very seriously. So about 5 pm we started looking for a place to light for the night. First town was full, so was the second. Then we started getting nervous. Then we started following every sign for a B&B, no matter how far off the road, and we got sent on some wild-goose chases, looking for B&B’s that no longer exist but nobody’s bothered to take the sign off the highway.
We drove for 4 hours, until it was getting dark. We were headed for the town of Levin eventually, because that’s where Adrian Doig lives. He’s the man who hopped onto our blog when he was looking for a trundler to buy and the search engine sent him to our site. He invited us to play golf with him if we ever got to Levin, so we fired up the e-mail and set a date for a match tomorrow. Well, we didn’t really expect to pull into Levin a day early, but here we are almost there. The town just before Levin was totally full, but there was a campground that didn’t say No Vacancy, so in we pulled.
"I was just getting ready to put up the No Vacancy sign", the owner said. "But I’ve got one small site, big enough for a small tent, if you want it." "We’ll take it, don’t even need to see it." So we pitched our tent next to a couple of twenty-something guys from Dresden, spoke a bit of German with them, and ate the leftovers of their dinner, a horrible, lukewarm mess of noodles, red peppers, and thin spaghetti sauce.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Antennas, footwear and air conditionig
You hear a lot about how NZ is a few decades behind the rest of the world, and there is some evidence to support that. Sure there are no freeways, but that’s because there is no need for them.. They have the same cars we do, altho because the average income here is about half or 60% of US, there are a lot of older cars. As the matter of fact we’ve seen a few cars which were made in the ‘40s being driven as regular transportation…. Not to an auto show, as far as we could tell. But that is very rare.
Houses look about what we have, altho they are a little smaller, and there is not a lot of vaiation in size and eloquence. Everybody has a house, but there are very very few McMansions. Not everyone has a satillite dish, alto if you don’t, you are really cut off from the world. There are a LOT of TV antennas, which is hard for me to figure out. Don’t you need to be near a broadcast tower?? How can you be 100 miles from a town and get anything? Yet here they are: houses with antennas.
On to footwear. If there is any. It seems like almost everyone has flip flops or jandals, as they are called here. Those who don’t wear jandlas, are just barefoot. In any town maybe 20% of people just don’t wear shoes. It’s qute interesting to see a girl in a dress and no shoes. Even on fairly stenuous hikes where we are happy to have our hiking boots, the New Zealanders are wearing their jandals. You don’t want to own a shore store here. You’ll starve,
About airconditioning. They don’t have any, except in cars.
Houses look about what we have, altho they are a little smaller, and there is not a lot of vaiation in size and eloquence. Everybody has a house, but there are very very few McMansions. Not everyone has a satillite dish, alto if you don’t, you are really cut off from the world. There are a LOT of TV antennas, which is hard for me to figure out. Don’t you need to be near a broadcast tower?? How can you be 100 miles from a town and get anything? Yet here they are: houses with antennas.
On to footwear. If there is any. It seems like almost everyone has flip flops or jandals, as they are called here. Those who don’t wear jandlas, are just barefoot. In any town maybe 20% of people just don’t wear shoes. It’s qute interesting to see a girl in a dress and no shoes. Even on fairly stenuous hikes where we are happy to have our hiking boots, the New Zealanders are wearing their jandals. You don’t want to own a shore store here. You’ll starve,
About airconditioning. They don’t have any, except in cars.
Monday, February 9, 2009
January 25 - 29
Penguins in the Antarctic Center in Christchurch
Avon River in Botanic Gardens in Christchurch
Looking down into Sumner and Christchurch in the distanceDay 54 – Jan. 25 –Timaru layover day
We didn’t do anything today of note. Joe finally got his swim in a warm ocean, and stayed in the water for at least an hour. I read the paper and watched what seemed to be thousands of runners jog past our window during a triathlon. Before they ran this leg, they kayaked out in the bay, then afterwards bicycled some number of miles. All while I read the paper.
Day 55 – Jan. 26 –Timaru to Akaroa
Along the fairways in Timaru are small, inexpensive houses, with goats and sheep in the back yards. Right in town. That is pretty common, small back yards in the middle of town being used as pasture for animals. And we often run into cows and sheep being herded along the backroads, eating down the grass between the road and the fences. Cuts down on the mowing expenses for the road crews.
In the small village of Geraldine stands a little shop with a sandwich board outside proclaiming that inside is the world’s largest jersey. I imagine most people drive on by without giving it a thought. They have missed a small miracle. It’s not a jersey cow, it’s a knitted sweater hanging on the wall of huge dimensions. But that’s not the miracle – it’s the husband of the woman who knitted it. He is one of the world’s living geniuses but you don’t learn this by reading a certificate on the wall screaming his IQ. (I have no idea what his IQ is, but it’s in the stratosphere.) We discovered this genius by spending 2 hours with him and learning how his mind works and what he’s accomplished in his 50 or so years on earth.
Using millions of tiny teeth from wool carding machines (or some sort of wool-making device), he has created a mosaic of the Bayeux Tapestry, just like the one in Bayeux, France, of the same dimensions. After gluing millions of those 1/8th of an inch metal teeth onto a sheet of some sort of backing, he then painted them the same colors as the original tapestry. The original tapestry is missing a number of panels, so he researched the history of that time and came up with a credible scenario, designed some more panels, and, more teeth, glue, and paint, he created the ‘missing panels’. It is several hundred feet long, and wraps around his ‘museum’ about 5 times, so to read the entire ‘tapestry’, you walk around the walls 5 times.
As if that weren’t enough for a lifetime, his churning mind has come up with a number of games and puzzles. Some use pieces that you manipulate around and fit together on a table. Others are computer games that could occupy you for the rest of your life.
He’s also put the entire tapestry on the computer. You can click on any object on the entire thing – a bird, horse, person, farm implement, ship, weapon – and the entire history of it, including the genealogy of a person, will be displayed. He has dozens of reference books he’s used to create all this, many of which are practically one of a kind. We spent 2 hours picking his brain and came away knowing we had been in the presence of a true genius.
After leaving Geraldine, we just headed straight for Akaroa, covering about 120 kilometers, 75 miles, one of our biggest driving days ever. That doesn’t seem like much by US standards, but because there’s so much to see and do in such a small space, we don’t cover much ground in a day.
Akaroa is at the far eastern end of a peninsula that is the drowned crater of an extinct volcano. The drive down into the town from the edge of the caldera is winding, steep, and beautiful. Found a lovely hotel right on the bay, and went exploring on foot through the town. Didn’t take very long to see it all. Our hotel had a mediocre restaurant, so we grabbed a table with an umbrella on the sidewalk and settled in to watch the tourists stroll by on this lovely evening.
A man and woman strolled by, his T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Same shirt, different day’. We could relate, sometimes wearing the same clothes several times before washing them, so we commented on it, they stopped for a chat, and soon joined us for dinner. They were from a town near the island of Sylt, in northern Germany near where we spent Christmas of 2007. He’s retired from Merck after 30 years, and they’ve lived in Cherry Hills, NJ, and South Africa, so their English was very good.
Day 56 – Jan. 27 –Akaroa layover day
We’d planned to go out on a boat to see dolphins and whales, but we woke up to rain and choppy waters, so the boats were not running. Even if they had been, you couldn’t have gotten me on one for all the lamb in NZ. So we just did other touristy things – went to the little museum, which had a big exhibit of one of the town’s sons, the man who was the captain of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance, as well as the little boat he piloted to Elephant Island to get help for the men stranded on the ice back in the Antarctic. They claim he is the person responsible for not a single man being lost. May be.
We took a drive up onto the rim of the caldera from which we could look down on the misty waters of the lovely Akaroa harbor and its islands. At one point I got sleepy and we pulled off the road for me to take a nap, while Joe wandered down the narrow little road. He met up with a man from Ipswich, England, and they found out they had identical political interests, so they had a lively discussion. When I met up with them, his wife had joined up with them, too, and we stood in the cold and wind excitedly discussing politics until they saw that I was shivering so badly I could hardly talk. We then drove back into town and finished our conversation over hot chocolate beside a fire in a cozy pub.
We’d made arrangements to meet our German friends from last night for dinner tonight at a wonderful French restaurant, C’est la Vie. All over the walls, floors, and ceilings were scribblings by thousands of patrons. There was no place for us to write anything without covering up somebody else’s musings, but I found enough place on a piece of quarter round to write ‘Bye, Bush, Go, Obama!’ since he was inaugurated just a week ago. We ordered pork and beef fillet and that was the finest, tastiest meal we’ve had in all of NZ. As we were leaving, in came our Ipswich friends, so we had another couple of minutes’ visit with them.
Day 57 – Jan. 28 –Akaroa to Sumner/Christchurch
Up early and out to Akaroa’s golf course, where today is Opening Day. Turns out that golf is a winter sport here, not a summer sport. That’s because it is usually very dry here in summer and the fairways and greens get hard as concrete, making for high scores. Sort of the opposite of our winters, in which the wet muck drives our scores up. So every couple in Akaroa who plays golf was out in full force, clogging the fairways. They were all paired up, so, once again, we played alone. But we kept bumping up against the people in front of us and behind us, and by the end of the 18, we’d become good enough friends to be invited to have drinks with them after the round.
The road out of Akaroa climbs steeply up the sides of the caldera and at the very top, with incredible views, sits a restaurant. Their hamburgers don’t equal the views, though, so unless you like mush between white buns, don’t order one there.
Lyttleton Harbor, north of Akaroa, also sits in a steep-sided, drowned caldera, left behind when a volcano blew its top. Ships leave from here to go to Antarctica, and a long line of boats of all sorts, mostly HUGE, were steaming in and out of the harbor, some escorted by tug boats that looked like ants by comparison. The views across the harbor were so stunning, we pulled over at every opportunity and just stared.
Dropping down off the caldera to the north, we ended up in the little coastal town of Sumner, where we spent the night. It’s basically a beachy-feeling suburb of Christchurch. Right in the middle of the beach sits a monstrous rock in which the waves have carved out a cave. Supposedly the Maori who came here centuries ago used it when they fished the area.
Day 58 – Jan. 29 –Christchurch layover day
We’d heard lots of raves about Christchurch, many people’s favorite town. We moved from Sumner into the heart of town so we could walk everywhere. The first place we hit was the Botanic Gardens, through which the shallow Avon River flows. In olden times the flat-bottomed cargo ships plied these waters, hauling goods into the interior of the country, but today it’s full of ducks (millions of them gorging on the bread tossed to them from the bridges by the tourists), gondolas being pushed along by (badly) singing gondoliers who are Italian opera star wanna-bees, and first-time kayakers who keep running headlong into the banks in their inexperience.
Also in the gardens was a festival in which all sorts of people with all sorts of talents (some questionable) were showing them off in different parts of the park. Kids were crowded around on the ground in front of some young women who were entertaining them with silly antics that the kids loved. Another lady folded herself up into a box about 2 feet on a side.
After sitting in an outdoor restaurant right next to the kayak rental place, watching all the soaked kayakers climbing back onto the dock, laughing all the way. Nothing for us to do but rent one, and an hour later, we, too, unfolded our bodies, soaked to the skin from the dripping paddles, and walked back to our motel to change clothes.
Anybody going to Antarctica leaves from Christchurch, and right next to the airport is a fabulous Antarctic Center (Centre to Kiwis). Inside are tiny blue penguins in a setting that’s supposed to look like a world of ice, but doesn’t really. There are about 10 of these cute little animals, all of whom have been rescued from near-death, rather than having been captured specifically for this exhibit. One little bird is blind, and barely moves, just sits on a rock with its eyes closed. Another has arthritis so badly it can hardly walk, and when it does, it is in obvious pain. Another has some neurosis that causes it to swim frantically in circles in the big tub of water, slashing at its back with its beak until the feathers (hairs?) are nearly gone. In spite of their disabilities, they were fascinating to watch from such close range, and their waddling, hunch-backed walk was laughable.
As we wandered around town (before we got soaking wet), we kept looking for the reason so many people call this their favorite town. We saw a lot of buildings of British design, that made us feel as if we were in Cambridge or London. But we are clueless as to why this city captures the hearts of so many, as it didn’t do that to us.
After yet another dinner of Indian food, we were looking for a place to grab an ice cream cone and 4 young studmuffins came towards us, all licking cones. I asked them where they got them, and we found out that they were based in Tacoma, of all places, and were flying out in the morning to Antarctica. They would land, spend about 30 minutes on the ice, take some pictures, then, without even turning off the engines since they might not get them started again, turn the plane around and head right back to ChCh (how Kiwis spell it).
We didn’t do anything today of note. Joe finally got his swim in a warm ocean, and stayed in the water for at least an hour. I read the paper and watched what seemed to be thousands of runners jog past our window during a triathlon. Before they ran this leg, they kayaked out in the bay, then afterwards bicycled some number of miles. All while I read the paper.
Day 55 – Jan. 26 –Timaru to Akaroa
Along the fairways in Timaru are small, inexpensive houses, with goats and sheep in the back yards. Right in town. That is pretty common, small back yards in the middle of town being used as pasture for animals. And we often run into cows and sheep being herded along the backroads, eating down the grass between the road and the fences. Cuts down on the mowing expenses for the road crews.
In the small village of Geraldine stands a little shop with a sandwich board outside proclaiming that inside is the world’s largest jersey. I imagine most people drive on by without giving it a thought. They have missed a small miracle. It’s not a jersey cow, it’s a knitted sweater hanging on the wall of huge dimensions. But that’s not the miracle – it’s the husband of the woman who knitted it. He is one of the world’s living geniuses but you don’t learn this by reading a certificate on the wall screaming his IQ. (I have no idea what his IQ is, but it’s in the stratosphere.) We discovered this genius by spending 2 hours with him and learning how his mind works and what he’s accomplished in his 50 or so years on earth.
Using millions of tiny teeth from wool carding machines (or some sort of wool-making device), he has created a mosaic of the Bayeux Tapestry, just like the one in Bayeux, France, of the same dimensions. After gluing millions of those 1/8th of an inch metal teeth onto a sheet of some sort of backing, he then painted them the same colors as the original tapestry. The original tapestry is missing a number of panels, so he researched the history of that time and came up with a credible scenario, designed some more panels, and, more teeth, glue, and paint, he created the ‘missing panels’. It is several hundred feet long, and wraps around his ‘museum’ about 5 times, so to read the entire ‘tapestry’, you walk around the walls 5 times.
As if that weren’t enough for a lifetime, his churning mind has come up with a number of games and puzzles. Some use pieces that you manipulate around and fit together on a table. Others are computer games that could occupy you for the rest of your life.
He’s also put the entire tapestry on the computer. You can click on any object on the entire thing – a bird, horse, person, farm implement, ship, weapon – and the entire history of it, including the genealogy of a person, will be displayed. He has dozens of reference books he’s used to create all this, many of which are practically one of a kind. We spent 2 hours picking his brain and came away knowing we had been in the presence of a true genius.
After leaving Geraldine, we just headed straight for Akaroa, covering about 120 kilometers, 75 miles, one of our biggest driving days ever. That doesn’t seem like much by US standards, but because there’s so much to see and do in such a small space, we don’t cover much ground in a day.
Akaroa is at the far eastern end of a peninsula that is the drowned crater of an extinct volcano. The drive down into the town from the edge of the caldera is winding, steep, and beautiful. Found a lovely hotel right on the bay, and went exploring on foot through the town. Didn’t take very long to see it all. Our hotel had a mediocre restaurant, so we grabbed a table with an umbrella on the sidewalk and settled in to watch the tourists stroll by on this lovely evening.
A man and woman strolled by, his T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Same shirt, different day’. We could relate, sometimes wearing the same clothes several times before washing them, so we commented on it, they stopped for a chat, and soon joined us for dinner. They were from a town near the island of Sylt, in northern Germany near where we spent Christmas of 2007. He’s retired from Merck after 30 years, and they’ve lived in Cherry Hills, NJ, and South Africa, so their English was very good.
Day 56 – Jan. 27 –Akaroa layover day
We’d planned to go out on a boat to see dolphins and whales, but we woke up to rain and choppy waters, so the boats were not running. Even if they had been, you couldn’t have gotten me on one for all the lamb in NZ. So we just did other touristy things – went to the little museum, which had a big exhibit of one of the town’s sons, the man who was the captain of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance, as well as the little boat he piloted to Elephant Island to get help for the men stranded on the ice back in the Antarctic. They claim he is the person responsible for not a single man being lost. May be.
We took a drive up onto the rim of the caldera from which we could look down on the misty waters of the lovely Akaroa harbor and its islands. At one point I got sleepy and we pulled off the road for me to take a nap, while Joe wandered down the narrow little road. He met up with a man from Ipswich, England, and they found out they had identical political interests, so they had a lively discussion. When I met up with them, his wife had joined up with them, too, and we stood in the cold and wind excitedly discussing politics until they saw that I was shivering so badly I could hardly talk. We then drove back into town and finished our conversation over hot chocolate beside a fire in a cozy pub.
We’d made arrangements to meet our German friends from last night for dinner tonight at a wonderful French restaurant, C’est la Vie. All over the walls, floors, and ceilings were scribblings by thousands of patrons. There was no place for us to write anything without covering up somebody else’s musings, but I found enough place on a piece of quarter round to write ‘Bye, Bush, Go, Obama!’ since he was inaugurated just a week ago. We ordered pork and beef fillet and that was the finest, tastiest meal we’ve had in all of NZ. As we were leaving, in came our Ipswich friends, so we had another couple of minutes’ visit with them.
Day 57 – Jan. 28 –Akaroa to Sumner/Christchurch
Up early and out to Akaroa’s golf course, where today is Opening Day. Turns out that golf is a winter sport here, not a summer sport. That’s because it is usually very dry here in summer and the fairways and greens get hard as concrete, making for high scores. Sort of the opposite of our winters, in which the wet muck drives our scores up. So every couple in Akaroa who plays golf was out in full force, clogging the fairways. They were all paired up, so, once again, we played alone. But we kept bumping up against the people in front of us and behind us, and by the end of the 18, we’d become good enough friends to be invited to have drinks with them after the round.
The road out of Akaroa climbs steeply up the sides of the caldera and at the very top, with incredible views, sits a restaurant. Their hamburgers don’t equal the views, though, so unless you like mush between white buns, don’t order one there.
Lyttleton Harbor, north of Akaroa, also sits in a steep-sided, drowned caldera, left behind when a volcano blew its top. Ships leave from here to go to Antarctica, and a long line of boats of all sorts, mostly HUGE, were steaming in and out of the harbor, some escorted by tug boats that looked like ants by comparison. The views across the harbor were so stunning, we pulled over at every opportunity and just stared.
Dropping down off the caldera to the north, we ended up in the little coastal town of Sumner, where we spent the night. It’s basically a beachy-feeling suburb of Christchurch. Right in the middle of the beach sits a monstrous rock in which the waves have carved out a cave. Supposedly the Maori who came here centuries ago used it when they fished the area.
Day 58 – Jan. 29 –Christchurch layover day
We’d heard lots of raves about Christchurch, many people’s favorite town. We moved from Sumner into the heart of town so we could walk everywhere. The first place we hit was the Botanic Gardens, through which the shallow Avon River flows. In olden times the flat-bottomed cargo ships plied these waters, hauling goods into the interior of the country, but today it’s full of ducks (millions of them gorging on the bread tossed to them from the bridges by the tourists), gondolas being pushed along by (badly) singing gondoliers who are Italian opera star wanna-bees, and first-time kayakers who keep running headlong into the banks in their inexperience.
Also in the gardens was a festival in which all sorts of people with all sorts of talents (some questionable) were showing them off in different parts of the park. Kids were crowded around on the ground in front of some young women who were entertaining them with silly antics that the kids loved. Another lady folded herself up into a box about 2 feet on a side.
After sitting in an outdoor restaurant right next to the kayak rental place, watching all the soaked kayakers climbing back onto the dock, laughing all the way. Nothing for us to do but rent one, and an hour later, we, too, unfolded our bodies, soaked to the skin from the dripping paddles, and walked back to our motel to change clothes.
Anybody going to Antarctica leaves from Christchurch, and right next to the airport is a fabulous Antarctic Center (Centre to Kiwis). Inside are tiny blue penguins in a setting that’s supposed to look like a world of ice, but doesn’t really. There are about 10 of these cute little animals, all of whom have been rescued from near-death, rather than having been captured specifically for this exhibit. One little bird is blind, and barely moves, just sits on a rock with its eyes closed. Another has arthritis so badly it can hardly walk, and when it does, it is in obvious pain. Another has some neurosis that causes it to swim frantically in circles in the big tub of water, slashing at its back with its beak until the feathers (hairs?) are nearly gone. In spite of their disabilities, they were fascinating to watch from such close range, and their waddling, hunch-backed walk was laughable.
As we wandered around town (before we got soaking wet), we kept looking for the reason so many people call this their favorite town. We saw a lot of buildings of British design, that made us feel as if we were in Cambridge or London. But we are clueless as to why this city captures the hearts of so many, as it didn’t do that to us.
After yet another dinner of Indian food, we were looking for a place to grab an ice cream cone and 4 young studmuffins came towards us, all licking cones. I asked them where they got them, and we found out that they were based in Tacoma, of all places, and were flying out in the morning to Antarctica. They would land, spend about 30 minutes on the ice, take some pictures, then, without even turning off the engines since they might not get them started again, turn the plane around and head right back to ChCh (how Kiwis spell it).
Golfing in NZ
This is the picture we've been wanting to take for quite some time. I think words will only detract!!
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Jan. 20 - Jan. 25
Mount Cook on the way to Hooker Lake
Mount Cook
Hooker Lake at Mount Cook
Hooker Lake at Mount Cook
Tenting in the Ahuriri Valley - before the wind
Clay Ciffs up close
Clay Cliffs from a distance
Joe communing with Barry's girls
Day 49 – Jan. 20 –Ranfurly to Cromwell
Had breakfast in the old hotel with a couple we’d met last night. He’s a captain of a huge yacht for some rich guy who made his millions manufacturing oil drums. His wife is the steward on the ship, serving meals and taking care of their daily needs. We seem to keep meeting people who live on boats and tie up at these islands to escape the winter storms in the Pacific.
Climbing out of Ranfurly, we drove up onto the top of a huge flat plain, dry as a bone, we could see forever. Alongside a dirt road we drove down sat the lower part of a house made out of adobe and apparently abandoned many years ago. The chimney still stood, and the walls were about 5 feet high, the windows and doors were empty holes. Huge trees encircled the property, indicating the builder had planted them at least 80-100 years ago, probably the same time he built the house, to break the wind that must continually roar across this plain.
The tiny town of St. Bathans (I’ve never heard of this saint) sat off the beaten track, on the edge of a huge crater that was created by the miners many years ago. To get at the gold in the sand here, they shot huge streams of water at the sand to break it up so they could get at the gold that was in it. The result is a huge hole in the ground that’s now filled with water that they call Blue Lake. The old hotel the miners stayed in is still there, and an old dog lay inside on the floor of the restaurant part.
This country doesn’t like dogs in general. We see signs everywhere: No dogs. That’s because dogs like to chase things and there are so many endangered species of things that can’t fly here, like kiwis, that they just don’t let dogs into any areas where at-risk animals live, and that’s pretty much everywhere.
We are headed back toward the place we love the most – Arrowtown. We got as close as Cromwell, and pulled in for the night at a B&B owned by June and her dog Guinness. It sits right above a beautiful lake that has a trail along it, so Joe and I took Guinness and went for a long walk. Guinness flushed out rabbits the whole time, and we could hear his high-pitched yipping every time he got close to one. We have a huge apartment all to ourselves, with kitchen, sitting area, bedroom, and a bathroom whose shower is about 5’ x 5’. All for $53 US!!
Tomorrow is Obama’s inauguration and is this country excited about that. It’s all anybody wants to talk about. They’re almost more enthusiastic about him than we are.
Day 50 – Jan. 21 – Cromwell to Ahuriri Valley
June made us a yummy breakfast of cereal, OJ, and homemade bread. Then we headed out to meet Barry Dawson at the Arrowtown Golf Course, the same guy we’d played with a couple of weeks ago. This time Des wasn’t able to join us, so another guy, who builds swimming pools, made up our foursome. He shot a 71, a really good golfer. Golf cost each of us $10 US because we were playing with a member.
After golf, we followed Barry to meet his ‘girls’, about 150 Jersey cows. When we drove into the pasture and got out of the car, they all came trotting over to investigate us. They wouldn’t get within arm’s reach, but stayed just out of reach and watched our every move. They have soft eyes with long eyelashes and Barry says they’re all very gentle. Unlike deer raised on deer farms, which can be very aggressive and mean, especially when they’re being herded somewhere. His friend was kicked in the temple by a deer and killed.
Obama was inaugurated today and everybody at the golf course was discussing it and asking us what we think he’s going to do to get the country back in the good graces of the world.
This part of NZ is the fruit basket and wine-producing region. They grow huge, sweet Bing and Rainier cherries, apricots, plums, and apples. Feels like eastern Washington, around Wenatchee. I’ve been eating my weight in cherries and apricots. Offsets all the French fries they serve.
We passed a golf course in Tarras that has sheep grazing on the fairways and they put fences that you have to step over around all the greens to keep the sheep off them. Cuts down on their fairway mowing expenses. We’ve played a lot of courses that have 1 employee who maintains the entire golf course. Members of the course volunteer to help him. I don’t see how they keep as many courses in business as they have in this country. Some courses only have 30 members, so there’s very little money to keep them in good shape. But NZ’ers will play anything that has fairways and greens.
We finally saw a live possum today, running across the road (successfully) in front of us. We’re sort of keeping track of the dead ones we’ve seen: so far about 100. Number of birds we’ve killed on the windshield: 2.
We didn’t want to return to Auckland and hand over our tent and sleeping bags to some total stranger, since we’re not going to haul all that stuff back home with us on the plane, without using it at least once. So we decided tonight is the night. We’re out in the boonies, and we went down a dirt road that, according to our road map, hugged a river. We drove down it for about 15 miles before we saw anything that was close to water, and that had a tree. There wasn’t a single campground, and we saw one house the whole way. It’s in a sheep pasture but the sheep aren’t anywhere near us. There is a small lake, with one tree hanging out over it, and ducks, geese, and black swans are floating on it. Perfect.
We set up our tent for the first time ever, no problem. When it started getting dark, we crawled in the tent, and the wind came up. And up. And up. Soon it was blowing like a hurricane! The tent walls were flapping like flags on a flagpole, and slapping us both in the head. The tent is so small, we have to sleep with our knees bent, so skootching down to get away from the flapping wasn’t an option. We lay there almost the entire night like this, laughing every now and then at our predicament. What choice did we have? There was no place to go to get out of the situation, so we stuck it out. I suppose sometime after 4 am the wind must have died down, because we finally did get a couple of hours sleep and woke up about 7 am. During the time we set up the tent and folded it up the next morning, only 3 cars went by.
Day 51 – Jan. 22 – Ahuriri Valley to Mt. Cook
The day after the night of the wind dawned bright, sunny, calm, and warm. Perfect. Headed for Mt. Cook, which we never did see from the west side of the island, too many clouds. Hope for better luck today. On the way were some cliffs made from clay that had weathered into bizarre shapes. We drove 10 miles down a dirt road, put $5 NZ in an honesty box, went through a gate that we had to open and shut to keep in the sheep, and drove for a couple of more miles until the road got so horrible we parked the car. We were almost right under the cliffs now. They towered several hundred feet overhead, and were eroded into very sharp and stark columns. We hiked about a mile along the front of them, all the time they loomed above us, until we got to a break in the cliff face, and we could hike back into them. We could only get about 200 yards up into them. The trail was very steep, rocky, slippery, and finally it stopped when it reached a vertical wall.
It’s geography like this that makes this country so much fun for a geology nut. Driving along the roads for me is to read the violent and tumultuous geologic past of this island, which is being torn apart by tectonic forces. The story of it is written in the roadcuts, with its lava beds telling of its volcanic outbursts, sand dunes representing the time that the sea water was locked up in the ice during the Ice Ages, the limestone indicating the times that it was all deep under the sea, and the rocky layers bespeaking of exposure to the air and erosion eating away all the layers created before.
Luck was with us. When we reached Mt. Cook, it was still perfect weather and we could see all the moraines, huge mounds of rock, pushed up on the front and sides of the glaciers by the advancing and retreating ice packs. We checked into a motel that had a stupendous view of the entire mountain and the valley leading up to it. We took an hour hike up to one of the pretty lakes backed up behind one of the moraines, then headed to the main building in the resort complex for a buffet dinner with about 100 dishes to choose from. Needless to say, we ate enough for 4 people.
Day 52 – Jan. 23 – Mt. Cook to Lake Tekapo
One company has all the concessions for the Mt. Cook National Park, with a museum, planetarium, and shops where you can buy anything you need while you’re in the park. Sir Edmund Hilary, who was the first, with Tenzing Norgay, to reach the summit of Mt. Everest, did a lot of climbs on Mt. Cook in preparation for his big climb. He was a beekeeper in the Auckland area prior to climbing Everest, and over his lifetime he spent a lot of time in the Mt. Cook area. As a result, the park has dedicated a huge amount of their space to examining his life. There is a full-length movie of his life, which we saw in its entirety, many pictures, and a lot of narrative to read. You could spend the entire day inside this museum and never be bored.
After several hours in there, we went for a 3-hour hike up to a glacial lake. It was a pretty calm day but when we got near the lake, the wind came up and by the time we actually reached the lake, it was so strong you could hardly stand up. Icebergs floated on the lake, having calved off the glacier at the head of the lake.
Day 53 – Jan. 24 –Lake Tekapo to Timaru
Some of our e-mail pals have asked if we aren’t getting tired of always packing and unpacking every day. Truth is, we’re not. We’ve got it down to a science, though, which makes it easy. We take in one suitcase for each of us, which we keep in the back seat; the computer, kept in the trunk, if there’s an internet connection; our daypacks, which are like our purses, containing everything we need in the way of ID, money, glasses, reading book, etc.; and the ‘magic box’, a cardboard box that contains all the guide books and maps that we use all the time. That’s it. Everything else stays in the car. We each have our toiletries in hanging bags, so those get unpacked and hung in the bathroom as soon as we unpack.
We have like things in large black garbage bags. Food is in one bag, which stays in the car if we’re not going to eat in the room, which is usually the case (not eating in the room). Shoes and boots, jackets, and books are in separate bags. Then we have a whole suitcase dedicated to things we hardly ever use, but might need, like snorkels, masks, fins. Camping stuff – tent, sleeping bags, and pads - are loose in the trunk, and we end up shoving it aside a lot to get to other stuff.
Today our plan was to take a gravel road for about 60 miles along a river and spend the night somewhere on the way. We don’t drive many miles in a day, as you can see. But after we’d gone about a half-hour along the road, we came to a sign that said ‘Road Closed’. That was the end of our camping plans. Change plans and head for the coast instead.
This is desolate and barren country, a flat valley full of dry stream beds and few trees and brown everywhere. Along the western edge is the Southern Alp Range, the prettiest mountains in all of NZ. But they obviously stop all the clouds and they dump their precious liquid cargo and dissipate over these mountains, so the rain rarely falls on these plains. There are a few sheep and cattle just because they are EVERYWHERE in NZ, why should this bleak place be any different?
Because the valley runs north-south, and we have turned west to hit the coast, we climb out of the valley and get into hilly country with a few trees and streams. Rounding a corner of the dirt road down which we’re driving, we see a sign ‘Monument’. Always curious about what they felt was important at such out-of-the-way spots like these, we slammed on the brakes. There was nothing but a sheep pasture, and a big tree. Under the tree was what appeared to be a typical monument to the Confederate soldiers from the Civil War. There was a gate in the fence keeping in the sheep, so we went through it, and went up to the memorial. Sure enough, out in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest town and with only one farm every 2-3 miles, surrounded by bleating sheep, is a memorial to the soldiers fallen in the first and second world wars. Way out here!! I doubt 10 people a year view this thing. Who in the world dreamed up this crazy place to put up a monument???
It appears the sheep think it’s a rare event, too, for they came up to within about 10 feet of us, eyes bugging out, ready to flee if we even looked in their direction. We looked at them, and they ran about 20 feet away, stopped, looked back, and when they saw we weren’t looking at them, they tiptoed tentatively back towards us. I told Joe that I was going to try something. I wondered if I could get up close to them if I did like the Horse Whisperer and didn’t make eye contact. So I looked in the opposite direction and walked along the front row of the sheep. They closed ranks behind me and followed me, getting to within about 3 feet of me. I stopped. They stopped. I crouched down so I would appear to be smaller and not a threat to them. They came right up to me and began sniffing me. I didn’t move for about a minute, and they stayed right close to me. When I did finally stand up, they scattered. Then they heard dogs barking in the distance, probably their personal herding dogs, and they took off in the direction of the barking, hooves flying, bleating all the way up and over the hill, leaving behind a big cloud of dust
We’ve eaten a lot of bacon and ham for breakfast but have yet to see a single pig. We’ve seen about a billion sheep, 100 million cows, thousands of farm-raised deer and elk, a handful of chickens, 10 billion wild rabbits, but no pigs. Do they hide them in barns or what??? Well, today we finally saw our first pigs. They were in a big field, each with its own little shed, to which each was tied and most were lying in the shadow of the shed, because it was pretty hot. There lay our future breakfasts.
On the map we noticed a street named "Phar Lap" on the outskirts of Timaru. When I was little, I read a book about a race horse by that name, and was so moved by his early death, thought to be caused by intentional poisoning, that I cried my eyes out. What is his connection with Timaru, NZ? When we saw a sign to the Phar Lap memorial, we turned down a side road and a few kilometers later saw a tall white statue of a horse. A plaque indicated that Phar Lap was born right on this property in 1929 and died in 1936. This is in the middle of nowhere, with a little house in the middle of a field next to the statue. When I finally got an internet connection, I looked up Phar Lap and learned that, indeed, he’d been foaled right here in Timaru, then sold to somebody in Australia. He had been poisoned by arsenic, it was presumed, by some jealous competitor, but not before he became one of the best race horses ever.
Our destination was a golf course in Timaru, billed as one of the best in this area. There were 3 cars in the parking lot. Looks like we’re going to be playing by ourselves again. Timaru GC never gets any water, so its grass is brown and dried up. It actually crunches when you step on it, and when the sun bounces off it, it feels like an oven. We decided we’d rather feel like we were in an oven than whatever the people in Seattle were going through today.
After playing a really fun round of golf, we found a motel right on the bay in downtown Timaru, overlooking a beach and park, surrounded by a lot of good restaurants. When we checked in, the guy at reception asked if we wanted ‘girl milk or boy milk’. Girl milk for my cereal in the morning. Dinner was venison meat pie, delicious, followed by a walk on the beach at sunset. A great ending to another great day in a loooooong string of great days.
Day 54 – Jan. 25 – Timaru
Woke up, at 9:30!!, to another glorious day in Paradise. We’ve decided to spend another night here. After a breakfast of cereal and a plum in the room, I read the paper whilst Joe wandered down to the beach for an hour-long dip in the ocean. It was very shallow and he had to wade out a long way before the water even came up to his waist. But it was warm and refreshing, and he finally got the water experience he’d been yearning for at least a month.
Right across the street is a huge park area that includes a beach whose sand has been trucked in from somewhere else. Before they dumped all that sand, and made a beach, the water’s edge was just clumps of grass and swamp. The sand is gray and is as fine as powder. Would love to have that in our bunkers at home!
When we got up we heard a loudspeaker touting something we couldn’t understand. Soon people in running togs were galloping past our motel, one at a time, and heading out toward the beach and up a street at the far end of the park. It went on for an hour or more. I finally asked somebody what was going on and they said today was a triathlon – running, biking, and kayaking. Joe had seen the kayaks earlier paddling like made, no doubt the first leg of the triathlon, so now it made sense to him.
Another golfing day for us, this time at HighFields right in town. When we drove into the parking lot, there was one other car. Guess this will be another day when we’re just a twosome. The clubhouse is closed, even though it’s a lovely Sunday afternooon, school is out, and what better time to play golf??? The pro shop is a separate building, like one of those you can buy at Costco, about 8 x 10 feet, baking out in the sun. Being the pro at this club probably isn’t a plum job.
As we were getting ready to tee off, a foursome walked off #18 and headed home. The first green had a sprinkler going on it. When I got to the green and saw where my ball lay, I laughed. Between me and the hole was a hose, connecting the sprinkler to the faucet in the ground. There was another hole in the green, and, even though it didn’t have a flag in it, I putted to it so I could at least have a go at making the putt. I had to make 3 attempts to putt, because every time I got up to putt, the fast-moving sprinkler would spray me. Finally I just stood in the water when it came around. The day was hot enough it felt good anyway.
This is the craziest golf course I’ve ever seen. Number 10 and number 13 use the same fairway, but in opposite directions. So if there are 2 foursomes out there at the same time, 8 people are firing shots at one another. Wonder how many people have been beaned on the noggins there? Another green is in the flight path of tee shots from the next hole. So while you’re putting, people are hitting balls over your head (in the best-case scenario). They only water the greens so the fairways crunch like paper underfoot, and some of the fairways are cracked like dried mud.
Had breakfast in the old hotel with a couple we’d met last night. He’s a captain of a huge yacht for some rich guy who made his millions manufacturing oil drums. His wife is the steward on the ship, serving meals and taking care of their daily needs. We seem to keep meeting people who live on boats and tie up at these islands to escape the winter storms in the Pacific.
Climbing out of Ranfurly, we drove up onto the top of a huge flat plain, dry as a bone, we could see forever. Alongside a dirt road we drove down sat the lower part of a house made out of adobe and apparently abandoned many years ago. The chimney still stood, and the walls were about 5 feet high, the windows and doors were empty holes. Huge trees encircled the property, indicating the builder had planted them at least 80-100 years ago, probably the same time he built the house, to break the wind that must continually roar across this plain.
The tiny town of St. Bathans (I’ve never heard of this saint) sat off the beaten track, on the edge of a huge crater that was created by the miners many years ago. To get at the gold in the sand here, they shot huge streams of water at the sand to break it up so they could get at the gold that was in it. The result is a huge hole in the ground that’s now filled with water that they call Blue Lake. The old hotel the miners stayed in is still there, and an old dog lay inside on the floor of the restaurant part.
This country doesn’t like dogs in general. We see signs everywhere: No dogs. That’s because dogs like to chase things and there are so many endangered species of things that can’t fly here, like kiwis, that they just don’t let dogs into any areas where at-risk animals live, and that’s pretty much everywhere.
We are headed back toward the place we love the most – Arrowtown. We got as close as Cromwell, and pulled in for the night at a B&B owned by June and her dog Guinness. It sits right above a beautiful lake that has a trail along it, so Joe and I took Guinness and went for a long walk. Guinness flushed out rabbits the whole time, and we could hear his high-pitched yipping every time he got close to one. We have a huge apartment all to ourselves, with kitchen, sitting area, bedroom, and a bathroom whose shower is about 5’ x 5’. All for $53 US!!
Tomorrow is Obama’s inauguration and is this country excited about that. It’s all anybody wants to talk about. They’re almost more enthusiastic about him than we are.
Day 50 – Jan. 21 – Cromwell to Ahuriri Valley
June made us a yummy breakfast of cereal, OJ, and homemade bread. Then we headed out to meet Barry Dawson at the Arrowtown Golf Course, the same guy we’d played with a couple of weeks ago. This time Des wasn’t able to join us, so another guy, who builds swimming pools, made up our foursome. He shot a 71, a really good golfer. Golf cost each of us $10 US because we were playing with a member.
After golf, we followed Barry to meet his ‘girls’, about 150 Jersey cows. When we drove into the pasture and got out of the car, they all came trotting over to investigate us. They wouldn’t get within arm’s reach, but stayed just out of reach and watched our every move. They have soft eyes with long eyelashes and Barry says they’re all very gentle. Unlike deer raised on deer farms, which can be very aggressive and mean, especially when they’re being herded somewhere. His friend was kicked in the temple by a deer and killed.
Obama was inaugurated today and everybody at the golf course was discussing it and asking us what we think he’s going to do to get the country back in the good graces of the world.
This part of NZ is the fruit basket and wine-producing region. They grow huge, sweet Bing and Rainier cherries, apricots, plums, and apples. Feels like eastern Washington, around Wenatchee. I’ve been eating my weight in cherries and apricots. Offsets all the French fries they serve.
We passed a golf course in Tarras that has sheep grazing on the fairways and they put fences that you have to step over around all the greens to keep the sheep off them. Cuts down on their fairway mowing expenses. We’ve played a lot of courses that have 1 employee who maintains the entire golf course. Members of the course volunteer to help him. I don’t see how they keep as many courses in business as they have in this country. Some courses only have 30 members, so there’s very little money to keep them in good shape. But NZ’ers will play anything that has fairways and greens.
We finally saw a live possum today, running across the road (successfully) in front of us. We’re sort of keeping track of the dead ones we’ve seen: so far about 100. Number of birds we’ve killed on the windshield: 2.
We didn’t want to return to Auckland and hand over our tent and sleeping bags to some total stranger, since we’re not going to haul all that stuff back home with us on the plane, without using it at least once. So we decided tonight is the night. We’re out in the boonies, and we went down a dirt road that, according to our road map, hugged a river. We drove down it for about 15 miles before we saw anything that was close to water, and that had a tree. There wasn’t a single campground, and we saw one house the whole way. It’s in a sheep pasture but the sheep aren’t anywhere near us. There is a small lake, with one tree hanging out over it, and ducks, geese, and black swans are floating on it. Perfect.
We set up our tent for the first time ever, no problem. When it started getting dark, we crawled in the tent, and the wind came up. And up. And up. Soon it was blowing like a hurricane! The tent walls were flapping like flags on a flagpole, and slapping us both in the head. The tent is so small, we have to sleep with our knees bent, so skootching down to get away from the flapping wasn’t an option. We lay there almost the entire night like this, laughing every now and then at our predicament. What choice did we have? There was no place to go to get out of the situation, so we stuck it out. I suppose sometime after 4 am the wind must have died down, because we finally did get a couple of hours sleep and woke up about 7 am. During the time we set up the tent and folded it up the next morning, only 3 cars went by.
Day 51 – Jan. 22 – Ahuriri Valley to Mt. Cook
The day after the night of the wind dawned bright, sunny, calm, and warm. Perfect. Headed for Mt. Cook, which we never did see from the west side of the island, too many clouds. Hope for better luck today. On the way were some cliffs made from clay that had weathered into bizarre shapes. We drove 10 miles down a dirt road, put $5 NZ in an honesty box, went through a gate that we had to open and shut to keep in the sheep, and drove for a couple of more miles until the road got so horrible we parked the car. We were almost right under the cliffs now. They towered several hundred feet overhead, and were eroded into very sharp and stark columns. We hiked about a mile along the front of them, all the time they loomed above us, until we got to a break in the cliff face, and we could hike back into them. We could only get about 200 yards up into them. The trail was very steep, rocky, slippery, and finally it stopped when it reached a vertical wall.
It’s geography like this that makes this country so much fun for a geology nut. Driving along the roads for me is to read the violent and tumultuous geologic past of this island, which is being torn apart by tectonic forces. The story of it is written in the roadcuts, with its lava beds telling of its volcanic outbursts, sand dunes representing the time that the sea water was locked up in the ice during the Ice Ages, the limestone indicating the times that it was all deep under the sea, and the rocky layers bespeaking of exposure to the air and erosion eating away all the layers created before.
Luck was with us. When we reached Mt. Cook, it was still perfect weather and we could see all the moraines, huge mounds of rock, pushed up on the front and sides of the glaciers by the advancing and retreating ice packs. We checked into a motel that had a stupendous view of the entire mountain and the valley leading up to it. We took an hour hike up to one of the pretty lakes backed up behind one of the moraines, then headed to the main building in the resort complex for a buffet dinner with about 100 dishes to choose from. Needless to say, we ate enough for 4 people.
Day 52 – Jan. 23 – Mt. Cook to Lake Tekapo
One company has all the concessions for the Mt. Cook National Park, with a museum, planetarium, and shops where you can buy anything you need while you’re in the park. Sir Edmund Hilary, who was the first, with Tenzing Norgay, to reach the summit of Mt. Everest, did a lot of climbs on Mt. Cook in preparation for his big climb. He was a beekeeper in the Auckland area prior to climbing Everest, and over his lifetime he spent a lot of time in the Mt. Cook area. As a result, the park has dedicated a huge amount of their space to examining his life. There is a full-length movie of his life, which we saw in its entirety, many pictures, and a lot of narrative to read. You could spend the entire day inside this museum and never be bored.
After several hours in there, we went for a 3-hour hike up to a glacial lake. It was a pretty calm day but when we got near the lake, the wind came up and by the time we actually reached the lake, it was so strong you could hardly stand up. Icebergs floated on the lake, having calved off the glacier at the head of the lake.
Day 53 – Jan. 24 –Lake Tekapo to Timaru
Some of our e-mail pals have asked if we aren’t getting tired of always packing and unpacking every day. Truth is, we’re not. We’ve got it down to a science, though, which makes it easy. We take in one suitcase for each of us, which we keep in the back seat; the computer, kept in the trunk, if there’s an internet connection; our daypacks, which are like our purses, containing everything we need in the way of ID, money, glasses, reading book, etc.; and the ‘magic box’, a cardboard box that contains all the guide books and maps that we use all the time. That’s it. Everything else stays in the car. We each have our toiletries in hanging bags, so those get unpacked and hung in the bathroom as soon as we unpack.
We have like things in large black garbage bags. Food is in one bag, which stays in the car if we’re not going to eat in the room, which is usually the case (not eating in the room). Shoes and boots, jackets, and books are in separate bags. Then we have a whole suitcase dedicated to things we hardly ever use, but might need, like snorkels, masks, fins. Camping stuff – tent, sleeping bags, and pads - are loose in the trunk, and we end up shoving it aside a lot to get to other stuff.
Today our plan was to take a gravel road for about 60 miles along a river and spend the night somewhere on the way. We don’t drive many miles in a day, as you can see. But after we’d gone about a half-hour along the road, we came to a sign that said ‘Road Closed’. That was the end of our camping plans. Change plans and head for the coast instead.
This is desolate and barren country, a flat valley full of dry stream beds and few trees and brown everywhere. Along the western edge is the Southern Alp Range, the prettiest mountains in all of NZ. But they obviously stop all the clouds and they dump their precious liquid cargo and dissipate over these mountains, so the rain rarely falls on these plains. There are a few sheep and cattle just because they are EVERYWHERE in NZ, why should this bleak place be any different?
Because the valley runs north-south, and we have turned west to hit the coast, we climb out of the valley and get into hilly country with a few trees and streams. Rounding a corner of the dirt road down which we’re driving, we see a sign ‘Monument’. Always curious about what they felt was important at such out-of-the-way spots like these, we slammed on the brakes. There was nothing but a sheep pasture, and a big tree. Under the tree was what appeared to be a typical monument to the Confederate soldiers from the Civil War. There was a gate in the fence keeping in the sheep, so we went through it, and went up to the memorial. Sure enough, out in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest town and with only one farm every 2-3 miles, surrounded by bleating sheep, is a memorial to the soldiers fallen in the first and second world wars. Way out here!! I doubt 10 people a year view this thing. Who in the world dreamed up this crazy place to put up a monument???
It appears the sheep think it’s a rare event, too, for they came up to within about 10 feet of us, eyes bugging out, ready to flee if we even looked in their direction. We looked at them, and they ran about 20 feet away, stopped, looked back, and when they saw we weren’t looking at them, they tiptoed tentatively back towards us. I told Joe that I was going to try something. I wondered if I could get up close to them if I did like the Horse Whisperer and didn’t make eye contact. So I looked in the opposite direction and walked along the front row of the sheep. They closed ranks behind me and followed me, getting to within about 3 feet of me. I stopped. They stopped. I crouched down so I would appear to be smaller and not a threat to them. They came right up to me and began sniffing me. I didn’t move for about a minute, and they stayed right close to me. When I did finally stand up, they scattered. Then they heard dogs barking in the distance, probably their personal herding dogs, and they took off in the direction of the barking, hooves flying, bleating all the way up and over the hill, leaving behind a big cloud of dust
We’ve eaten a lot of bacon and ham for breakfast but have yet to see a single pig. We’ve seen about a billion sheep, 100 million cows, thousands of farm-raised deer and elk, a handful of chickens, 10 billion wild rabbits, but no pigs. Do they hide them in barns or what??? Well, today we finally saw our first pigs. They were in a big field, each with its own little shed, to which each was tied and most were lying in the shadow of the shed, because it was pretty hot. There lay our future breakfasts.
On the map we noticed a street named "Phar Lap" on the outskirts of Timaru. When I was little, I read a book about a race horse by that name, and was so moved by his early death, thought to be caused by intentional poisoning, that I cried my eyes out. What is his connection with Timaru, NZ? When we saw a sign to the Phar Lap memorial, we turned down a side road and a few kilometers later saw a tall white statue of a horse. A plaque indicated that Phar Lap was born right on this property in 1929 and died in 1936. This is in the middle of nowhere, with a little house in the middle of a field next to the statue. When I finally got an internet connection, I looked up Phar Lap and learned that, indeed, he’d been foaled right here in Timaru, then sold to somebody in Australia. He had been poisoned by arsenic, it was presumed, by some jealous competitor, but not before he became one of the best race horses ever.
Our destination was a golf course in Timaru, billed as one of the best in this area. There were 3 cars in the parking lot. Looks like we’re going to be playing by ourselves again. Timaru GC never gets any water, so its grass is brown and dried up. It actually crunches when you step on it, and when the sun bounces off it, it feels like an oven. We decided we’d rather feel like we were in an oven than whatever the people in Seattle were going through today.
After playing a really fun round of golf, we found a motel right on the bay in downtown Timaru, overlooking a beach and park, surrounded by a lot of good restaurants. When we checked in, the guy at reception asked if we wanted ‘girl milk or boy milk’. Girl milk for my cereal in the morning. Dinner was venison meat pie, delicious, followed by a walk on the beach at sunset. A great ending to another great day in a loooooong string of great days.
Day 54 – Jan. 25 – Timaru
Woke up, at 9:30!!, to another glorious day in Paradise. We’ve decided to spend another night here. After a breakfast of cereal and a plum in the room, I read the paper whilst Joe wandered down to the beach for an hour-long dip in the ocean. It was very shallow and he had to wade out a long way before the water even came up to his waist. But it was warm and refreshing, and he finally got the water experience he’d been yearning for at least a month.
Right across the street is a huge park area that includes a beach whose sand has been trucked in from somewhere else. Before they dumped all that sand, and made a beach, the water’s edge was just clumps of grass and swamp. The sand is gray and is as fine as powder. Would love to have that in our bunkers at home!
When we got up we heard a loudspeaker touting something we couldn’t understand. Soon people in running togs were galloping past our motel, one at a time, and heading out toward the beach and up a street at the far end of the park. It went on for an hour or more. I finally asked somebody what was going on and they said today was a triathlon – running, biking, and kayaking. Joe had seen the kayaks earlier paddling like made, no doubt the first leg of the triathlon, so now it made sense to him.
Another golfing day for us, this time at HighFields right in town. When we drove into the parking lot, there was one other car. Guess this will be another day when we’re just a twosome. The clubhouse is closed, even though it’s a lovely Sunday afternooon, school is out, and what better time to play golf??? The pro shop is a separate building, like one of those you can buy at Costco, about 8 x 10 feet, baking out in the sun. Being the pro at this club probably isn’t a plum job.
As we were getting ready to tee off, a foursome walked off #18 and headed home. The first green had a sprinkler going on it. When I got to the green and saw where my ball lay, I laughed. Between me and the hole was a hose, connecting the sprinkler to the faucet in the ground. There was another hole in the green, and, even though it didn’t have a flag in it, I putted to it so I could at least have a go at making the putt. I had to make 3 attempts to putt, because every time I got up to putt, the fast-moving sprinkler would spray me. Finally I just stood in the water when it came around. The day was hot enough it felt good anyway.
This is the craziest golf course I’ve ever seen. Number 10 and number 13 use the same fairway, but in opposite directions. So if there are 2 foursomes out there at the same time, 8 people are firing shots at one another. Wonder how many people have been beaned on the noggins there? Another green is in the flight path of tee shots from the next hole. So while you’re putting, people are hitting balls over your head (in the best-case scenario). They only water the greens so the fairways crunch like paper underfoot, and some of the fairways are cracked like dried mud.
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