Thursday, September 28, 2006

We arrived back from Northland last Friday evening, 22nd September, 2006. Since then we've been taking things easy at Mission Control and making trips out around the local area. The last few days have been warm, even approaching hot, at times. This has been bringing large numbers of kids out from Auckland to Mission Bay to swim, sunbathe, play games and to consume vast amounts of ice-cream at the Mövenpick down on the corner of Tamaki Drive. Anne and I are working on strategies to take pictures of the queues without making it too obvious what we're about.

Last Sunday, we were picked up by some friends of Cathy and Laurie's, Rhonda and Barry, and taken for a highly enjoyable trip up into the Waitakere Ranges, one of Auckland's regional parks, west of the city. We had lunch up there, a cheerful little group comprising Rhonda, Barry, a jovial Australian computer whizz called Phil, Helen, who's American but lives in NZ, Anne and me. As always here, the food was good and the crisp, white NZ wine even better. We've arranged to meet Barry and his mother in Auckland on Friday evening for a concert.

On Tuesday evening, we were invited to dinner with Graham and Sue, who are also friends of Cathy and Laurie. They live high-up on one complete floor of a circular tower at Ponsonby, with the most tremendous views of everything, the harbour, the bridge, downtown Auckland and the Sky Tower, Rangitoto, Devonport, the inner harbour, everything. Like everyone we've met here, they're lovely people. The picture shows a view of downtown Auckland, taken from Graham and Sue's balcony. The camera was hand-held by me, after a couple of drinks, hence the camera-shake.

These have been the highlights of the week so far, but we have also walked down the road to St Heliers a couple of times (they have a very good butcher's shop there and I went to the barber's for a scalping). I've also be re-reading parts of the Penguin History of New Zealand, mainly about politics and relations between Pakeha and Maori, and also reading the papers trying to make some sort of sense of NZ politics. These are pretty bloody at the moment, the ruling party have been accused of fiddling election expenses and the prime minister's husband is gay, it has been said. There's a curious sub-text to this story, I think they're trying to hint that she is too. The leader of the opposition, one Brash by name, has been outed as having an extra-marital relationship with a high-profile businesswoman and he's also in trouble for having dealings with a religious-right organisation that hired a private detective to spy on the PM and her husband. In fact, it's all more complicated than this, the unfortunate Brash's affair was outed by one of his own colleagues, for example. Anyway, the New Zealand Herald is full of letters saying it's time to take personalities out of politics, et cetera, et cetera. They don't have horrible, UK-style, red-top tabloids here, but seem to manage quite well without them.

Oh, before I finish, I've started to upload pictures of our NZ trip, here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/nhopton

just in case anyone requires a spot of therapy for insomnia.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006




We left here on Monday morning, drove up to Paihia in the Bay of Islands and checked into an apartment at Allegra House, a B&B high up above the town overlooking the bay. It would be difficult to praise this place too highly; perhaps it’s enough to say that a charming Swiss chap, Heinz, and his equally charming English wife Brita run it, and that everything, but everything, works like clockwork. The town itself is very pleasant, with two or three decent restaurants. The season was just getting under way so the town was still pretty quiet, but will be busier next week when the school holidays start. There were signs of this happening when we left on Thursday.

On Tuesday, we walked from Paihia round the headland to Waitangi. This is a famous place in New Zealand history, it was here that the Treaty of Waitangi was signed that ceded sovereignty of the islands to Her Britannic Majesty, in 1840. The house of the then British resident, now known as the Treaty House still stands, though much altered, overlooking the sea, in pretty parkland and with a flagpole on the lawn. The treaty has pretty much defined the relationship between Maori and Pakeha (that’s what the Maori call us, it’s not a derogatory term) ever since, even though from the legal point of view it never carried much weight (according to the Penguin History of New Zealand). From the Treaty Ground at Waitangi we walked to the Haruru waterfalls, along a path that leads through woodland and across a boardwalk through a tidal mangrove swamp. The mangroves are not to be missed; they grow in mud in the intertidal zone of the estuary.

On Wednesday we took the ferry from Paihia over to Russell, which was the first capital of NZ. It grew out of a settlement used by English and American whalers in the early nineteenth century, at which time it was described, possibly by Darwin, as ‘the hell-hole of the Pacific’. The place still has just a bit of the frontier about it. From the town, we walked up to the flagpole and took some pictures of the town and the bay. Even the flagpole has some history to it, having been chopped down by disaffected Maori on three occasions. Some time later the very people who chopped it down rebuilt it as an act of good faith.

On Thursday we started our drive back to Mission Control, staying overnight at a motel in Dargaville, on the west coast. On the way we took a walk into a Kauri forest of the sort that used to cover much of the land here at one time to look at some notable Kauri trees. These can live for two thousand years and grow to enormous sizes. They are beautiful, which is not a word I use, in general. It’s difficult to know what to say about Dargaville; the people there are nice and they do a superb fry-up for breakfast. On Friday, returning from Dargaville to Mission Control, we stopped at the Kauri museum. Don’t laugh, this is one of the best little museums we’ve ever visited. It is devoted in the main to the Kauri tree and the things made from it, including what was once a most valuable product, gum. Most of the exhibits, old engines and other machinery were given by the descendents of early European settlers, together with lots of family documents and other artefacts. It’s difficult to imagine how hard life must have been for the loggers, gum-tappers, gum-miners (lumps of buried fossil gum were found by probing the ground with gum-spears and then dug up) and farmers in the 1860s.

The pictures at the top are (1) Nick on a boardwalk through a mangrove swamp near to Waitangi; (2) A 30-metre long war canoe at Waitangi; (3) Nick standing in front of a venerable Kauri tree; and (4) Nick, reading a notice on a building on the sea front at Russell. This is terrible, all of these pictures are of me, some of Anne to follow, it's a promise.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

View from the flagstaff at Russell.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Sunday. Pretty much a day of rest, some housekeeping and playing with the computer with a couple of walks down to the beach thrown in. I've lost track of the number of languages I've heard spoken here, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Dutch and Russian for starters, together with a bit of English. There are language schools in Auckland and the kids descend on Mission Bay in droves in their spare time. We've just come back from the cinema, Mrs Palfrey at the Clairmont, it was very good. I don't remember it being released at home. After the pictures, a walk down to the sea front to check the water between us and Rangitoto for signs of steam, but nothing yet. Tomorrow, we depart early for Northland.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Today we caught the bus into Auckland to have a look around the shops. After that, we had a bite to eat at a restaurant near the harbour (moules frites, with the most enormous green-lipped mussels) and then on to the Maritime Museum. This latter has everything you'd expect, plus one or two items you wouldn't, such as an anchor from the Bounty. I actually touched this, which is almost certainly more than William Bligh ever did.

Back at mission control a few minutes ago, I carried out the usual experiment of filling a sink with water to check which way it goes down the plug-hole. Everything they say is true, it really does go down the wrong way. Little things please little minds.

Tomorrow, we shall be planning our trip to the Northland, we're due to set off there on Monday. I've bought a 1:50,000-scale map of the area on a CD, which should help to make this task infinitely more difficult.
Yesterday, Friday, was a lazy sort of day. We drove up to the War Memorial Museum in Auckland and walked round the galleries that we missed during our visit earlier in the week. Three hours is about the limit of my ability to concentrate closely on anything. One slightly disturbing thing at the museum is a volcano exhibit in the form of a typical sitting room in a house near Mission Bay overlooking Rangitoto Island, about two miles away. By means of an imagined television news bulletin and the view through the patio windows the effects of a volcano erupting in the sea between Mission Bay and the island are examined, complete with shaking of the building and the near destruction of the Mission Bay waterfront area by pyroclastic flow across the water.

Here’s a picture of Rangitoto Island taken from the sea front at Mission Bay, just a couple of hundred yards from where we are stopping. The hypothetical volcano forms in the sea, about a mile out (hope it stays hypothetical, too). The island is itself a volcano, formed during an eruption about 600-years ago, but is now said the be extinct.

Also at the museum, a fine collection of Korean ceramics on loan from the National Museum at Seoul, many good celadons and some pieces made after the style of Song dynasty Ru-wares too.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Yesterday, Wednesday, we drove from Mission Bay along Tamaki Drive into Auckland and across the harbour bridge to Devonport. This is a very pleasant little place, just a mile or two across the water from Auckland centre. Everything here is very English and on the sea-front there is a splendid hotel called The Esplanade. We walked up Mount Victoria and looked at some old gun emplacements and took in the fantastic views of Auckland and the islands. It rained a bit while we were here, so we sat in a seaside café and listened to Abba on the wireless, what could be more English?

Added by Anne. We did have some difficulty finding our way through Auckland to Devonport, and back again to Mission Bay, partly because of my poor navigation and partly because the Auckland road signage is not very good. I’m sure it will get easier! Another beautiful day today, but showery. I’ve already learned never to go anywhere without sunscreen, sun glasses, and raingear, and we needed all of them today. No-one ever told me about the intensity of the light here – I suppose with all this water I should have known, but it has taken me by surprise. I burned in about five minutes on a not particularly nice day. Everything seems amazingly cheap here to us, we are constantly gasping at the prices, but in a good way!

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

From the menu at De Fontein I ordered a bottle of Duvel top-fermented beer, very strong, 8.5 per cent alcohol. ‘Oh, just off the shelf please, not from the chiller’ I told the barmaid. You know what’s coming next; they only do their beers chilled. Never mind, I managed to warm it up a bit with my hands and I’ll investigate the possibility of getting the management to leave a couple of bottles out on the shelf in future. In the meanwhile, a beautiful Finnish barmaid is convinced that I am a dangerous lunatic (which indeed I shall become if I have to continue to drink cold Belgian beer).

Yesterday we walked out along the seafront to St Heliers and then on to Achilles Point. The view from here is spectacular, Auckland, Rangitoto Island and lots of other islands. In the far distance it was possible to see what I think must have been the northern end of the Coromandel Peninsula, but I’m not sure about this. Near to Achilles Point we walked down to a little beach at Ladies Bay, which was warm and we both caught the sun. St Heliers is a pretty little place, with some decent shops, including a real, old-style hardware shop (I’m sure you could still buy nails by the pound here).

In the afternoon we walked up to the Savage Memorial, which is in a park overlooking Mission Bay. Savage was the first Labour prime minister of New Zealand, he died, if memory serves, in 1940. From here there are good views of Auckland centre, the harbour, Devonport and the islands.

Monday, September 11, 2006

We’ve arrived, and to prove it, here’s a picture of the fountain shown in the satellite image below.

We arrived here in Auckland at about 7.00 am on Thursday, having left Heathrow at about 4.00 pm on Tuesday. By some mechanism that I still don’t understand we managed to lose Wednesday altogether. Unfortunately, on arrival we found that our brains were still in transit, but they are now beginning to arrive bit-by-bit and with any luck the process should be reasonably complete in the next day or two. To be serious, in fact we arrived in much better condition than I thought we would, the flights were on time and our seats were comfortable. The shuttle from the airport to Mission Bay worked as it should and we were at the Phillips’ home about two hours after landing.

The major formalities at Auckland airport were concerned with bio-hazards to agriculture and we had to present our walking boots for inspection and possible decontamination (not necessary in our case because we’d cleaned them well before packing). But imagine the scene, opening cases to find the boots and packing them again after examination, with us falling about from the effects of jet-lag.

Mission Bay is as pretty as everyone says it is, north-facing (which is good, in this part of the world) and very green. Oliver stopped here, just round the corner from where we are, and loved it too. We won’t go into the reason why it’s green, beyond mentioning that they don’t have hose-pipe bans down here. Yesterday, Sunday, we took the bus up to Auckland centre for a walk round, most of the shops were open and cafes and restaurants in the harbour area were doing good business. We had a very good and by English standards, very cheap, lunch in one of them. In fact, it has to be said that almost everything here costs less than at home and quite a lot less too, in many cases.

Today, Monday, we drove down to the big museum in Auckland, the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which houses a remarkable collection of Polynesian and Maori art and artefacts and also has an interesting section on colonial Auckland, with lots more still to see. In amongst Cathy and Laurie’s collection of books is the Penguin History of New Zealand, which I’ve been reading in an attempt to start making good my woeful ignorance about this extraordinary country. Everyone here knows about what’s happening in England, for example, it makes front-page news, but we know so little about this country. This afternoon I had my usual stroll along the sea front trying to get a grip of the topography with the help of map, it’s beginning to make some sort of sense I think. This evening I think I’ll have to nip down to the local pub, it’s called De Fontein and it serves a range of Belgian beers. But wait, they couldn’t, they wouldn’t, serve it chilled, would they? Wait for the next riveting episode to find out.