A few of you may remember that many years ago (early 2003, to be exact) I spent 2 months travelling in New Zealand and recorded my thrilling adventures in a series of e-mails. After a seven and a half year hiatus I am finally back, this time with fiancee in tow, for the belated sequel, and whether or not anyone enjoyed reading the last set of e-mails, I enjoyed writing them so I am going to subject you all to a couple of further instalments.
Accessing facebook at all from the other side of the world has proved surprisingly difficult, as when I first signed in I was told I was in 'an unusual location' and so I had to prove my identity via a series of "tests" which included identifying seven of my friends from two of their facebook photos. I soon found out that this was a more challenging prospect than it sounded when the photos from one of my friends (whose identity is still unclear to me) consisted of one photo of themselves as an infant and one photo of a cartoon devil. Fortunately facebook makes allowances for the fact that everyone has a few friends who are instantly forgettable, so you are allowed to "pass" on two of the questions.
Anyway, digressions aside, my journey began with an excruciatingly uncomfortable 24 hour flight via Hong Kong. During the second leg of the flight I was unfortunate enough to have a doppelganger of Keith Miller from EastEnders (he looked very similar, and he also smelled roughly how I imagine Keith Miller to smell, as well as being possessed of a similar level of intelligence) sitting directly in front of me. "Keith" wasted no time in pushing his seat back as far as it would go and no amount of surreptitious sharp kicking from me could get the grotesque man to move it forward again. Julie managed to get a keyring with her name on it in Hong Kong though, so not a complete washout.
We landed in Auckland at about 7 am last Saturday, sweaty and sleep deprived (speaking only for myself, that is, Julie, being a lady, never sweats at all, and actually managed to snatch a few hours of sleep during the flight in between the seventeenth and eighteenth repeat of Family Guy). We soon perked ourselves up with a coffee by Auckland Harbour though, followed by a brief cruise around the harbour during which we were informed by our tour guide that New Zealand's biggest imports are Japanese cars, and their biggest exports are in fact onions. He didn't in fact say "sheep are soooo 2003" as he didn't happen to be a camp Californian, but I could tell he was thinking it. But more of sheep anon.
Speaking of California, Julie's conclusion was that Auckland was a bit like all the boring bits of San Francisco, so we decided not to linger, but departed for Rotorua the following morning. Our coach driver was in fact going further south, but made a big fuss of telling everyone that there would be a "driver only" change in Rotorua, in a tone that suggested that while his replacement was a "driver only", he himself was so much more than that. I half expected him to do a David Brent and follow this up with a statement that he was a friend first, a driver second, and probably an entertainer third, but mercifully he refrained from doing so. We made a brief stop off at a cafe and I was greeted by the sight of a massive cock in the garden (or at least Julie says it was a cock, I maintain that it was in fact a hen, but I thought it would be a shame to let the opportunity for a bit of childish innuendo slip out of my hands).
We arrived in Rotorua, indulged ourselves with a soak in the Polynesian Spa on the first morning, which contained a number of different hot pools each with different minerals in them, all of which were overlooking Lake Rotorua itself. It was extremely relaxing. We followed this up with a "Maori cultural evening", complete with Kiwi watching (the birds, not the New Zealanders in general, they have all gone abroad to avoid the tourists), glow worm sightings, and excellent food from a hangi. There was also a bit where one of us was chosen to be a "chief" whose job was to make a speech, following which we would all support him with a rousing rendition of a Maori chant. Eventually, after the usual awkward and embarrassing hesitation, a rather wizened old gentleman from New South Wales called John was "volunteered" as the chief. John proved to have rather a cavalier, reckless approach to leadership, in that he demanded that we performed the Maori chant without having practised it first. The result was as messy as might have been expected, and the chief Maori muttered something afterwards which I half expected to translate as "kill them all, and leave no survivors", but was in fact something surprisingly mild and sycophantic. All in all it was an excellent evening.
The next day we decided to hire ourselves a car, the roads around Rotorua being so wide and simple that Julie had concluded that even an idiot like me should be able to drive on them. It was actually my first experience driving an automatic, and once I had deduced, through a lengthy process of elimination, that "D" stood for "Drive", everything went relatively smoothly (although Julie's attempts to pronounce some of the Maori street names caused much hilarity. "Rangiuru Street" caused particular problems.) We went to see some redwood trees in the morning, then went horse riding in the afternoon. My horse was a malevolent character who went by the name of "Cossack", and not since Wendy at the Trinity Hall College Bar has anyone taken such an instant and visceral dislike to me. All I will say is that if all the cossacks had been as uncivilised as him, there would have been a lot more pogroms, and the Russian Revolution would have happened considerably earlier. But fortunately he was not given too many opportunities to kill me and it was actually an extremely pleasant ride, despite my getting occasional snorts out of him that probably translated as "just give me an opportunity to trample you underfoot and I'll crush you like the pathetic maggot you are", or something along those lines.
Our final day in Rotorua was quite a busy one. Rotorua is known by the New Zealanders, rather touchingly, as "Rotovegas". Although I haven't actually been to Las Vegas I suspect that it does not shut down quite as early on Sunday evenings as Rotorua does, but nevertheless it is true that there is quite a lot to do there, including "Hobbiton tours", which is an innovation since last I was there. We refrained from doing this one, as it happens, exciting though the opportunity to see a bunch of sheep chewing away at the mouldering remains of Mr Baggins' once proud home would have been. The tour would probably have been more accurately described as "A tour showing what would have happened if Mordor had won and all the hobbits had been exterminated".
Instead, we went to Wai-o-tapu, which has a weird and wonderful array of boiling mud pools, thermal lakes in all sorts of strange colours, and a geyser that is artificially induced to erupt at 10:15 every morning. Amazingly we managed to drag ourselves out of bed and made it with several minutes to spare. We even had enough time to look around the neighbouring gift shop first, which had various products on offer including something that was described as "Kiwi Willy Wash". I am telling the honest and unadulterated truth when I say that there was actually a sticker on it saying "Try Me". I had been told on the Maori tour that if Kiwis are touched by humans they sometimes refuse to eat for up to a week, so I can only assume that if someone tried to apply some of this unorthodox product it would probably trigger the extinction of the whole species.
That afternoon we went to my first ever sheep shearing, hosted by an extremely creepy man in a vest that was just a little bit too tight for comfort. I am pleased to say that I actually took part in these proceedings, not as a shearing "victim" but as a lamb feeder. The lamb I fed was very cute indeed, and I tried to eradicate from my mind the fact that I had probably eaten one of his close relatives that very lunchtime. We then went luging later in the afternoon and departed for Wellington the following morning after an extremely tasty waffle based breakfast. We encountered more poultry en route, as well as a very friendly fellow traveller who was half Maori, half Danish, and (obviously) went by the name of Dave!
We only had one full day in Wellington, which gave us enough time to see most of the floors of Te Papa, New Zealand's National Museum (which literally translates as "Your Daddy"), go up Wellington's cable car, get into a heated debate over whether it was technically a cable car at all or a funicular, and eat at a very good restaurant called Sweet Mother's Kitchen (twice), which is near the Embassy Theatre, which last time I was there was showing The Two Towers and had a huge statue of Gollum sticking up out of the roof. This time they were showing the the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but sadly there were no statues of depressed looking Swedish people on the roof, which I feel was a wasted opportunity.
We crossed over to the South Island this morning, and the details of what we do next will be related shortly (once we have done it!)
Oh, and we slept through the big earthquake (being on the wrong island at the time).
No comments:
Post a Comment