Day 15 to Day 26

I’m in a bit of a quandary. Joe is also adding to our blogs, and we’re ending up writing about the same things, naturally, since we’re doing the trip together. He has a different writing style, and different friends, so rather than trying to avoid writing about the same things he writes about, I’m just writing what I feel like, and if you read the same things twice, I apologize. At least, they’ll be described differently.

Day 15 – Dec. 17 – Hamilton to Rotorua

Boogied out of Hamilton, a nothing town, headed for Rotorua, one of the 5 smelliest places on earth. It sits on a lake of the same name that exudes sulfur fumes. It is very pretty, with clear water except where the thermal (hot) area under the lake bottom exists, then it’s cream-colored. It is so acidic that nothing can live in it, but millions of waterbirds call it home. They live along its shores, wade in its waters, but leave for other parts every day to find food. Don’t know what in the world they like about it. The water eats the webbing between their toes, too, so I imagine it is hard for them to walk on lily pads.

We found a great place right on the lake, Cedarwood Lakeside Resort, and got the best suite in the place, closest to the lake with an unobstructed view of the lake across a lovely expanse of green grass. Like so many, 2 bedrooms, kitchen, dining and living room, for about $70 a night.
Before turning in for the night, went to one of the many thermal areas, saw hot pots burping out boiling water, steam vents spewing out rotten-egg fumes to gag you, and all sorts of things like you see in Yellowstone. Because I’d visited Y’stone about 10 times when I lived in Jackson Hole, I feel like I’ve seen most of the types of thermal thingies the world has to offer. Don’t need to see any of the other 10 or so places they’ve set aside as an important thermal activity area around here. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to go to Iceland someday and see what they have to offer, though.

Day 16 – Dec. 18 – Rotorua

NZ has millions of sheep, many more of them than people, and it turns out that sheep farming is a quick way to the poorhouse, according to the son of a sheep farmer who isn’t following in his father’s footsteps. Therefore, it was inevitable that some entrepreneurial sheep farmer figured out how to make a living from the tourists and still keep his sheep. So we turned tourist yet again and followed the herd to a place where they show you how the dogs herd the sheep (boy, those dogs are smart!); how they shear the sheep, card the wool after it’s sheared, and they have one of every type of sheep raised in NZ tame enough for you to pet. Wool on the hoof is really tightly-packed and feels like a wool rug, not a sweater.

At one point they had people from the audience come up and demonstrate how to milk a cow. Joe was selected, and he was asked if he wanted chocolate or white milk. Chocolate, naturally. So the emcee walked around to the back of the cow, lifted the tail, and pointed to where the chocolate comes from, eliciting howls from the audience. Joe got a certificate proving he can milk a cow. Whoopee. I’ll bet he frames that and puts it in his office!

In 1886 one of the nearby volcanoes blew its top and buried a village in ash, sort of like Pompeii. Most of the people died, most of them Maoris but a few British missionaries, too, of course, and the village was forgotten. But 50 or so years ago they began excavating the site and today it is one of the major attractions in the area. We had a guide who is a descendant of some of the Maoris who died there and he told us the story of his people, his individual ancestors, the village, and the Maori culture in such a moving way that I declared him the best storyteller I’ve ever heard. When we parted an hour later, I could hardly express to him how much I enjoyed his narration for the big lump in my throat, and I went away wiping the tears from my eyes.

That night we went to another touristy thing – an evening learning all about the Maori culture. They pronounce it Mahrie, or Mary. I thought it would be hokey, but I was enthralled. I usually steer clear of these types of things, and I’m one of those people who actually left a luau in Hawaii in mid-hula-dance out of boredom (I ate first, however).

Day 17 – Dec. 19 - Rotorua to Lake Taupo

Played a GREAT course today, Wairakei. There were bunkers all over the place. In the first hole I got into 3 of them and ended up with a double-bogey. But I played the rest of the holes in even par, so carded a 2-over 74, not bad for this geriatric, all for $82 + $2.50 for the trundler.

Day 18 – Dec. 20 - Lake Taupo

Learned the distinction between ‘lodge’ and ‘motel’. Motels are bigger and nicer, and even though the lodges usually have the same amenities, they’re just half the size of motels. So we’re dodging the lodging in the future.

Hit the golf course here, and got paired up with a couple of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet (actually, that’s true of almost every person we’ve met down here). One, Frank Collings, invited us to stay with them if we were ever in the area again. (That’s also typical.) We got rained on about 10 times off and on during the round. In the group ahead of us was a guy of about 85, riding a motorcycle and pulling his ‘trundler’ along behind him. Said that on Wednesdays, when the ‘vets’ (read: old geezers) congregate here, there are a whole herd of them riding their motorcycles and pulling their trundlers. The club stores the pair of them like our clubs store electric golf carts.

All over the golf course are pipes with steam coming out of them. They’re to let the heat out of the ground so it doesn’t burn the grass on the golf course. That’s one thing our greens supe, Greg Hall, doesn’t have to worry about!

About half the people here have tattoos, all over themselves, the parts that are visible, that is. I don’t know if that’s because of the influence of the U.S. or the Maoris, who in the past wore tattooes (I just don’t know how to spell the plural of that word) just about everywhere on their bodies.

Day 19 – Dec. 21 – Lake Taupo to Whakapapa Village

Drove out to Huka Falls, one of the touristy things to do, and were we ever glad! The water was the purest blue-green we’ve ever seen. Made us want to jump right in, but we’d have drowned, it was so raging through the tight defile between the rocks.

Went to an exhibit that showed all about the volcanic history of NZ, thrilling me and boring Joe to near death.

Drove up to the jumping off place for the Tongariro Crossing, billed as the best one-day hike in all of NZ. ‘Challenging’, the brochure says, ’18 kilometres’ (that’s 12 miles, more than we’ve hiked in years). But we feel like we can’t go home and face our friends who’ve done it without doing it ourselves. So off to Whakapapa Village we go. As we got near the town, we could see the huge white lodge off in the distance, backed up to the mountains, looking like pictures of the huge lodges built in the 1920’s – Banff, Jasper, Glacier Natl Park, and others. We got there early enough in the day to get the best room in the entire lodge, with a view out one window of the entire valley we’d driven up, and out the other of the mountains we were going to climb the next day. Several years ago I priced a room in one of those lodges and it was around $300 a day. We paid only $60 for our great room. Love those NZ prices!!!

Day 20 – Dec. 22 - Whakapapa Village

Up at 6 and downed a good breakfast to get us through the day, packed a couple of sandwiches each, and headed off to catch the 8 o’clock bus to the trailhead. The bus was packed with people and when we got to the trailhead, it was crammed with buses, cars, and hundreds of people. The brochures had said it wasn’t a wilderness experience and they were right, it was more like going to one of the Seahawks games, jostling and bumping into one another along the trail. All sizes, shapes, and levels of fitness and preparation. One guy had nothing but the clothes he wore, no water, no jacket, no rain gear, no suntan lotion. After the first mile, we passed a guy coming back who was leaning on a post he’d pulled out of the ground, using it as a crutch while he hobbled back to the trailhead.

The trail was like a freeway, 10 feet wide, sometimes packed hard as iron by so many feet, other times a boardwalk with no rails, other times a staircase of 10-15 steps, each 1 foot higher than the other. After 4 hours of this, my thighs were burning, and we finally reached a flat, ½-mile wide crater, with steam seeping out of the ground. Whew, it was a relief to not be climbing for a few minutes. The next part was the one they didn’t talk about in the brochures, else nobody over 50 who wasn’t really, really fit would have attempted it. It is a near-vertical climb (at LEAST 45 degrees of slope, no kidding) that seems to never end, only several feet wide, with a drop-off on one side several hundred feet straight down into a crater (the sign says if you fall into it, you’ll never come out – encouraging). The footing: sometimes hardpack with gravel over it so you slip and slide; sometimes deep sand into which you sink several inches; sometimes pebbles that give no purchase. When we finally reached the top, panting, thighs burning, we enjoyed the view down into the crater, then started straight down the other side. Went down the slippery slope as scary, dangerous, and challenging as the slog up.

At the bottom of that slide down was a turquoise lake so lovely you wanted to linger, so we ate our lunch on its bank. I was so tired, I could only eat half my sandwich. Now begins the downhill part. Thank goodness, we thought. But the next part was nearly as hard on our feet as the up part had been on our muscles. Pound, pound, pound, again lots of hand-made steps, sometimes with a leap down of 3 feet, killers on already exhausted thighs and feet tired, tired, tired. It was one of the longest 4 hours of my life. When I finally got to the trailhead, I just dropped my pack and collapsed on the ground and didn’t move until the bus came to get us. After a shower back at the lodge, and a soak in the hot tub, Joe and I went to dinner in the lodge’s dining room. He was so tired that he put his head on the table and went to sleep while waiting for our dinner to come and I stared at the top of his sunburned head. When it finally got there, he ate it, and headed right upstairs to bed, while I sat by myself and slowly finished mine. We slept like the dead until 8 am the next morning.

Moral of the story: don’t miss the Tongariro Crossing, but only if you’re very fit and under 50.

Day 21 – Dec. 23 - Whakapapa Village to Napier

Whereas we dawdled the first couple of weeks in the Northland, stopping along the way for pictures and enjoying the views of the sea every time one cropped up, now we’re speeding up and just intent on getting places. But today was one of beautiful pastoral scenes and mountains, with lots of sheep and cows grazing on the hillsides and far-away views down valleys whose trees have been cut to allow for such vistas. The road to Napier takes us over one of the north-south mountain ranges that forms the backbone of the North Island, so it’s very twisty and curvy and not one of the major arteries. All day long on this road we passed only 10 cars until we got back to a main artery.

A number of years back one of the lakes up in the mountains that was being dammed up by a big ice dam was let loose down the mountain when the ice dam burst. All the water poured out and came down into the valley, unbeknownst to anyone, since it happened at night. It took out one of the major railroad trestles, so when the train came along the next morning, it simply went full-steam ahead right into the raging torrent and killed almost everyone on board. We stopped by the spot where it happened and felt the horror of that time, thanks to millions of pictures and pages and pages of print.

We don’t have detailed plans, we just get up in the morning and say, ‘well, where should we go today?’ and look at the map and pick our destination. The ‘Rough Guide to NZ’ has been the source of information about what there is to see and do, so we use it to choose our route. We’re sort of going down the east side of the North Island, and we’ll probably come back to Auckland for our return flight via the west side and see what we’ve missed. I think we’re seeing most of what there is to see in the North Island on the trip down, so there won’t be much to see on the way back.

My thighs are so sore that I can hardly touch them, and I spent a lot of the day massaging them to try to work out the build-up of lactic acid in them from our ‘hike’.

We reached the Art Deco town of Napier, where we checked into the only motel in town that is right on the water. We have an unobstructed view of the lovely Hawke’s Bay for only $67 a day. Walked around the downtown and oohed and aahed at all the cutesy designs they came up with for the storefronts. The town was totally destroyed by an earthquake in 1931, and when they rebuilt it, they decided to go for something unique and consistent, resulting in a charming and eye-pleasing town. I decided that when Renton (where we live) decides to upgrade itself, it should choose Art Deco as a theme for its downtown.

Day 22 – Dec. 24 - Napier

Today being the day before Christmas, everybody who can walk is downtown shopping. There wasn’t a parking spot to be had, and the streets were clogged with cars and the sidewalks with people jostling one another. Nowhere have we seen much of the sorts of Christmas revelry that we have in the US. The shops don’t have decorations, no Santas tinkling their bells to get you to toss money into a bucket, no songs blaring over loudspeakers, no ads on tv trying to get you to buy what they’re pushing, the houses aren’t decorated, nobody’s singing carols in the streets, even the people walking down the streets don’t have huge bags full of packages.

All of the towns have main streets, and a main square or part of town that’s designated as ‘downtown’. Several blocks with small stores on both sides, almost all of which are family owned, so they have unique names; no Walmarts, no huge malls, it’s very refreshing.

It rained most of the day, so we stayed in our rooms a good bit of it, reading, napping, doing laundry, things we don’t normally do on our active days, which are most of them. During a lull in the rain, we wandered out and sat at a table outside a café with a woman and her daughter. Spent about an hour in conversation, and ended up with one more invitation to come stay with them, in Wellington.

Day 23 – Dec. 25 - Napier

Today’s Christmas, but it’s so warm, it doesn’t feel like it. And it’s not Christmas yet at home, since we’re a day ahead of them. But I made some Christmas calls anyway, since we never know where we’ll be on the morrow and if we’ll have access to phones (or internet, which is really catch-as-catch-can).

Our Christmas present to ourselves was a round of golf at NZ’s most expensive course – Cape Kidnappers. It is reached via a winding, narrow track through sheep pastures, whose access is only by calling the club from a remotely-controlled gate and giving them your name and tee time, just like its sister course, Kauri Cliffs, also owned by New Yorker Julian Robertson. It was the highest price we’ve ever paid to be miserable - $550 for one round of golf. And the wind blew so hard I thought it would blow the hair off my head. I took 4 clubs more than I would have with no wind and was still WAYYYYY too short. You had to aim 40 yards to the left or right in a crosswind. Sometimes you could hardly walk against the wind. On one green as I was preparing to hit my putt, the wind blew my ball away, and when it stopped rolling, I had a 50-yard shot to reach the same spot. I shot a 98, the highest score I can ever remember having in my life. I’m sure I had such scores when I was 12 or 13 but not since then. Playing that kind of golf is no fun. Joe didn’t even keep score. The scenery and the setting of this course is as spectacular as it gets, however. The clubhouse is on the site of an old sheep-shearing shed, and it’s all done in the fashion of one, with old wooden tools that you’d find in one of the sheds, and it’s really rustic. I think it costs over $3,000 a night to stay in one of their cottages.

Day 24 – Dec. 26 - Napier

This is Boxing Day in NZ. Don’t ask me what that is. We spent it playing golf at the Hastings Golf Club, in the town of Hastings just south of Napier. We’re using a book that describes the top 285 golf courses in NZ as our guide. The guy who took our greens fees told us to play with one of their members, ‘Patch’, so off the 3 of us went. They call him Patch because he lost one eye at age 21 in a car wreck (showed us his missing eye; wish he hadn’t.) He is a 50-year-old sheep farmer, 3rd generation. Grandfather started out with 9600 acres, he’s down to 900 due to his ancestors having to sell off land to pay the inheritance taxes (which they no longer have here). He buys lambs in the spring, fattens them up, shears them for the wool, then kills them in the fall and sells the meat. ‘How do you kill ‘em?’ ‘I pull their heads back, slit their throats, then pull their heads forward and slit their spinal cords, so they don’t feel the pain so much’. Wish I hadn’t asked.

Day 25 – Dec. 27 – Masterton to Wellington

Drove out to Lansdowne, the golf course in Masterton, that Bob Charles grew up on. He was the first leftie to ever win a majors golf tournament. It’s a bit ratty, the greens were slow as molasses, it is a sort of shooting gallery, with many fairways parallel to one another, but still a fun track. For the first time in a few rounds, I teed off from the ladies’ tees. I have been playing the men’s tees, and it makes the courses so long that it means I don’t ever feel good about my game. So today I took it easy and shot even par, which made me feel good.

Since we’re not able to catch a ferry from Wellington to the South Island for another 2 days, we’re going to hang around Wellington for a couple of days, until we can get on the ferry. We drove 3 hours, over a rugged mountain range by New Zealand standards, to the northern limit of Wellington, and went by a course people had recommended to us. Turns out it’s the only course in NZ that’s been ‘blessed’ by the Queen, so it’s been r e-named to reflect its new inflated status - it’s now the ‘Royal Wellington Golf Club’. We struck up a conversation in the parking lot with a lovely lady, Fiona Heron, who ‘would invite us to my house for dinner, but she’s meeting friends; maybe we can have lunch together tomorrow instead’. So we made arrangements to play golf with her tomorrow, then maybe go out for dinner. That’s typical NZ hospitality.

Wanted to spend the night close to the course, so as we cruised the streets, we saw a sign for lodging and followed it. Turns out it’s on the estate of one of the homes built by NZ’s equivalent of Frank Lloyd Wright – James Walter Chapman-Taylor. An interior designer, just married a week ago, bought it 12 years ago and added 2 ‘guest cottages’ to the property. We’re in one. For $70 a night we’re in a suite that looks right out of Architectural Digest. Antiques on the walls, lovely furniture, and we feel like guests in an elegant mansion. And in the fridge he put yogurt, fresh OJ, fresh strawberries, the ever-present milk, and some soda pop (he found out our faves and went out and got some for us). Perusing the guest book for this place, we found the author of a book written about the architect of this estate (as well as the book, so I read up on him), a French composer, many NZ rock stars, and all manner of famous-in-NZ people.

Day 26 – Dec. 28 –Wellington

A layover day so we headed out for golf at the Royal Wellington GC. When we went into the pro shop, we were greeted by the pro, Jack Oliver. Asked us where we were from, he told us he was from Orlando, I said I was from Leesburg, and he said, "Actually, I grew up in Leesburg, played golf at the Silver Lake Country Club (I lived next door to it!), went to Leesburg High School (so did I)." Small world, huh???

Fiona did show up with John Port in tow and off we went. Had a great game, guys vs gals, the guys won. Fiona asked where we were staying and I told her in a house that was designed by Chapman-Taylor. She yelped and said, "My husband (now deceased, a former judge) and I lived in one of his houses!" There are only 100 of them in NZ and we now have a connection to 2 of them. After golf and drinks, we got a grand tour of the clubhouse, built in 1908. John showed us 2 pictures hanging on the wall and pointed out his face among the foursome in each one; in both groups Prince Andrew’s shining face beamed out at the camera. So we were among the famous of the club today.

Because Neville, the guy who owns this estate, had offered us a tour of the ‘big house’ when we finished playing golf, and because Fiona has a big connection to this Chapman-Taylor guy, we invited her to come back with us for the tour. She took us up on it and Neville had a grand ol’ time showing off all the lovely things he’s done to this nearly-century-old house, all in impeccable taste and meeting Fiona’s approval.

Topped it all off with a delicious Turkish dinner of lamb kebabs for Joe and lamb moussakka for me. Another ‘10’ day for us.