jwg | Entries tagged with new zealand

When I was a kid I was a Yankees fan - I lived in NYC. My father was a NY Giants fan. We occasionally listened to games on the radio and I went with my father to several games at the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field and the original Yankee Stadium. And to several more at Yankees games with a school friend. Then I lost interest.

One summer at camp I became a Milwaukee Braves fan (was Boston Braves, now Atlanta Braves) and listened to a few games. Then I lost interest and ignored the sport.

In 1986 I remarked to Robert (

rsc) "Oh the RedSox are in the World Series - let's watch some games" and we did. Little did we know what this was going to do to us. We started paying a bit of attention to games. In 1989 we went to some games in Fenway Park and continued doing this for a few years. And in 1994 we got Season's tickets (weekday games) and shared with several other people and started going to 10-15 games each year.

We watch most games on TV - and part-time on the radio during dinner or in the car.

While travelling we have gone to games in both the completely redone old Yankee Stadium and then the new Yankee Stadiums, Giant's games in Candlestick and then Oracle park, Twins in Metropolitan Park in Minneapolis, old Tiger stadium in Detroit, Mariners at Safeco field in Seattle, Phillies at Veteran's and Citizen's Park in Philadelphia, Cubs at Wrigley field in Chicago, Mets at Shea statium (me only), Athletics at Oakland Coliseum. And the RedSox triple A team in Pawtucket. I've been in Rogers Centre in Toronto (Blue Jays) not for a game but a computer conference.

So I've seen games in 17 stadiums and been in one other.

The UserPic is for the Canterbury RedSox (New Zealand - softball) - they weren't playing when we were there.

While walking in front of the Christchurch Cathedral (which was right next to our hotel) we espied this vehicle parked right in front of the church. Apparently it belongs to the Wizard who appears in the square quite regularly. We didn't actually see him but he is a regular fixture. The car does only have one engine but there was an extra steering wheel.

The square was bustling during the day with vendors of food and trinkets and there were a fair number of people wandering about.

And of course there was a Starbucks at one corner.

His official web page has lots of information. This is apparently what he looks like according to a wikipedia picture - or alternatively...

Today was our last full day in NZ. We went to the Waiputua Forest which contains a number of Kauri trees. The Kauri is a huge native tree many of which have been cut down. Tane Mahuta is thought to be the largest one and is known as "The God of the Forest". The trunk was about 17 meters in girth and about 51 meters high. We saw several other huge ones as well. It's pretty hard to get a sense of how big it is in a photograph because you can't get too close to them. Apparently the feeding roots are close to the ground and walking around may damage them.

On the way back we drove through some pretty isolated area hoping to find lunch. Eventually we found an interesting takeout place. They had various specials such as 4 burgers, 4 sets of fries, etc. We saw several people come in to order some of these and take them away - they were wrapped in newspaper and were pretty good sized parcels. I'd assume that more than one person was going to eat them. They also had a seafood special with 1 fish, 1 oyster, 1 squid ring, 1 mussel, 1 crabclaw...

This has been a great trip but we are about ready to go home. Tomorrow (Wednesday) we drive back to Auckland (stopping to pickup the phone charger and memory card reader), turn in the car and fly back. We'll get a bit of Tuesday on the plane probably before we've gone to sleep before it turns Wednesday again. It will be a long day since this time we aren't spending the night in LA.

We left Auckland yesterday and drove up north to the Bay of Islands, staying at Paihia. There still are a couple of hundred more kilometers to get to the northern-most point but we aren't going that far. On the way up we stopped at the Hundertwasser Toilets. He lived in NZ for a while before his death and this was one of his projects. I've always been a great fan of his stuff and it was nice to see this. I took a bunch of pictures but since I left my memory card reader at the Auckland B&B I can't post them. (Conveniently we will pass by pretty close to that on the way to the airport on Wednesday and can pick it up along with the phone charger that we also left.)

Today we took a boat trip out into the islands and saw lots of dolphins (porpoises). I joked to

rsc that they weren't real - they were controlled by remote control so that tourists could see them. Probably not actually an impossible task, but I suppose they were real. We saw lots of sea birds including a few more gannets.

During the afternoon we drove to some of the not-too-far away bays on the Pacific side. The scenery was just beautiful. And today the weather was absolutely perfect. In spite of putting on lots of sun block I feel a bit sunburned. We've done really well with the weather - a few days had a bit of rain, but nothing too much so we've never been prevented from doing anything. Parts of NZ have had some significant rain but always when we were somewhere else. The day before yesterday one of the towns on the South Island we were at a while ago had its roads closed. Yesterday one of the volcano craters overflowed and disrupted car and train traffic for a while near where we had been a few days before - no one was injured. They have a good warning system which is needed considering the earthquake history and vulnerability they have.

The papers are full of speculation of what will happen when the PM visits Bush this week. Last week the hot news was about the legislature that is about to pass an Antismacking bill as they call it making it illegal for parents to spank their kids. It hasn't passed yet but probably will thus creating an unenforceable law that wont solve the problem of occasional parental abuse.

Now we are in Auckland. We are staying in a nice B&B in the outskirts of the city that is just off a lively street with lots of cafes, restaurants, and other stores.The B&B is called The Great Ponsonby; I recommend it - the only drawback is that wireless doesn't work in our room which is in a separate building (its a really nice room) - much of the construction is corrugated steel so I am sitting in the dining room at the moment. Downtown is about a half hour walk away. Auckland is situated in narrow portion of the North Island with a huge working harbors on one side and a wilder seacoast on the other side. It has many tall buildings downtown - I'm glad we elected to not stay in one of the huge hotels down there. We did go to the Sky Tower to the ~200 meter observation platform for a fantastic view of the city and its surroundings. In keeping with the bungy jumping / sky diving theme one of the things you can do is to jump off the side of the tower connected to a cable. It takes about 15 seconds to reach the bottom. I can't imagine even considering doing something so crazy but we did see some people doing it.

Today we drove to the Muriwai Gannet colony (we'd skipped going to one in Napier). This was easy to get to and there were lots of Gannets easily visible including some young ones who couldn't fly but were practicing flapping their wings.

We spent two nights in Rotorua. Rotorua is in an extremely volcanic area and there are a number of tourist sites that let you wander around and see mud pools bubbling away or small ponds with steam rising from them and strong colors from the sulphur and other minerals that are in the water. Much of the area around the town smells of rotten eggs. The one we went to was called Wai-o-tapu amusingly their website is named volcanoland.

We stayed in a very nice B&B (Te Ngae) that was out of town and odorless. The owners, Sandy and Anne, were very friendly and we chatted with them at cocktail hour and breakfast for quite a while. Sandy was into botany and had a small orchard with over 40 varieties of apples. Some of the trees had 4 or 5 kinds of apples grafted on them. He also had many other fruits and a nice vegetable and flower garden as well.

The other thing that Rotorua is known for is Maori villages. We went to one of the Cutural Experiences - Mitai (where the warriors and women chanted, danced, sung, and demonstrated some of their crafts. We watched them canoe up and down a narrow river and also saw a sacred spring and had an explanation of how they used some of the trees and plants for medical and other purposes. They taught us some Maori which of course we've forgotten by now. This included a hangi, a Maori feast. Having watched Whale Rider before we came we had a pretty good idea of what we were seeing.
( Maori Warriors )

The Maoris were the first serious Polynesian settlers in New Zealand. By a treaty with the government their place in NZ society is somewhat protected and they have a few seats in parliament. They have intermarried and modernized; I'd suspect that without these show business enterprises they might lose even more of their origins to modernization. The warriors and women have many tattoos but now some of them are painted on so that they can carry on more easily.

In 1931 a 7.8 earthquake demolished Napier. They rebuilt it quite rapidly (it was during the depression) and many of the buildings are in Art Deco style. There has been a preservation movement, but some of it is kind of messed up because of signs on the marquees and buildings, but there is lots of nice detail. It is an interesting city (small with population ~50,000).
( After and Before )
This morning we went to the Napier Aquarium which was pretty neat. They had a tunnel through a tank and you could see fish including a good sized shark and a ray swim above you. They also had a dark section and we got to see a couple of Kiwis. They were in the background and since it was pretty dark it was hard to see much detail - especially their distinctive beaks.

For our afternoon's entertainment we went out into nearby wine country for some tastings of the local wine and had a sumptuous lunch at one of the wineries as well.

When we returned to town after walking about a bit and seeing more cars we went to the historical museum. They had a film with interviews of people who had witnessed the earthquake. It was quite interesting to hear these people's accounts of this horrifying event so many years before. The museum also had pictures and other information as well as some modern art and Maori sculptures. This fellow seen on the street yesterday was neither Art Deco nor Maori!

On the road from Wellington to Napier we espied this car in front of us - fortunately

rsc was driving so I could easily photograph it.

nooks, did you suddenly move to NZ?

In Napier I've seen lots of vintage cars. This Bentley roadster was parked in our motel's parking lot. It's owner drove it away this morning wearing one of those cool leather helmets. There is a Bentley sedan in the parking lot now and I saw among other things a gorgeous Buick, and a right hand drive Fiat 600 - I didn't know they made them,
( Bentley Roadster )
( Buick )

During our stay in Wellington among other things we went to see St Paul's and Old St Paul's Cathedrals. St Paul's is a huge modern Anglican church built in 1964 but only recently finished. One of the interesting things about this building was the history of the bells. Eight of them came from a church in Northampton, England that had been demolished; a plaque from 1910 commemorated a series of 5040 changes rung in 3 hours and 14 minutes. They were installed in Old St Paul's Cathedral in Wellington and when that was decommissioned they were moved to the new church with some additional bells.

We also went to the old St Paul's, which was a beautiful building. Early plans had been to demolish it, but it was saved. It is one of the nicest old wooden buildings I've ever seen. Interestingly the two flags on the right are a US Marines flag and the US flag. It remains consecrated but has no congregation and is only used for special events such as weddings.

The Capitol is an interesting mishmash of architecture. The building on the left is called the beehive and is used for offices although there are lots of complaints about the difficulties of using a round building. The middle building is where the Parliament meets and looks like such a building. The one on the right which I thought might be a church at first but since there was no separation-between-church-and-state in this case clearly wasn't - it is a library. There are many other examples of modern architecture juxtaposed more conventional buildings or wooden sculptures.

We are staying in the Museum Hotel in Wellington. It gets its name from strange circumstances. It was built in 1987 and a NZ stock market crash in 1990 caused it to go bankrupt. The government bought it to help out the owners and leased it to some new people. Then they decided to build a museum on the site and in a very special project moved the entire building across the street to its current site where it has been expanded.

The museum, the Te Papa, is very interesting. They have lots of exhibits about earthquakes and fault lines (one of which runs right through Wellington) complete with an exhibit where you stand inside a shaking house while watching a video of an earthquake. They have lots of stuff about birds including some interactive ones where you design your own birds choosing beak, wings, legs, etc. and it then names it for you - correctly if you choose a real bird. We watched some kids creating a flying man and each time he crashed the reason would be given - not enough chest muscles, legs too fat...- and you'd get to correct them until you design worked. They had stuffed birds too such as this Fantail - several of which we've seen live.

When we first got to our room it seemed that some of the lights didn't work. The key ring also had a card that you had to insert into a slot by the light switch and then everything was enabled. The room is a mini-apartment complete with stove, washer/dryer, and dishwasher. They continue to work without the card soi you can leave the room before the clothes are done, but the AC shuts off when you take it out. Very odd - I've never seen anything like it. The room had a complex instruction manual to tell you everything about it. The washer/dryer was complex but we did manage to use it to wash a few loads of dirty laundry. Drying takes a long time and you can't open the combo front-loader until the machine decides that the clothes are dry. We haven't cooked but we did buy some breakfast food at the New World Supermarket next door. It's every bit as good as the best Whole Foods except it has even more kinds cuts of lamb than you've every heard of.

The ferry from the South to North Island (Picton to Wellington) takes 3 hours. The water was extremely calm yesterday (mar 8) during the afternoon. You'd hardly know you were on a boat from the motion. It was sunny and the views were nice. The first hour is through narrow waters and then it crosses the open Cook Strait. After that it snakes past some rocks and into the quite busy Wellington harbor.

Checking in was easy except that I had copied an extra digit in the reservation number so it took a bit of time before they found my reservation. The B&B in Nelson had a computer but no printer and no access for my laptop so I couldn't print the info when I made the reservation. Car rental in NZ works by your returning your car before you get on the ferry and then getting another one when you arrive at the other side but it is treated as one reservation. There was also a minor snafu with the reservation since the checkin person in Picton apparently had cancelled the reservation by error so it took a bit of extra time.

These passengers were probably in for a bit of trouble soon after they arrived.

We went quite far north on the West Coast of the South Island back a few days ago on Monday (Sunday for most readers). In fact we went as far as you can go by car. On the way back we stopped at Cape Foulwind, so called by Captain Cook when he encountered lots of it. It was pretty calm when we were there. We went for a walk to a lookout and on the way back encountered some of these on the path:

Needless to say there are lots of sheep in New Zealand and we've eaten parts of them quite a few times - no not these ones.

Nearby there was another lookout where you could see a seal colony. They were pretty far away and these brown and grey creatures were sitting on brown and grey rocks. There were some small pups - this one was feeding - and some of the seals were swimming. Before people came to New Zealand there were no mammals - a reason why so many flightless birds survived. But perhaps these seal ancestors were there but I guess that doesn't quite count.

In the paper today there was a picture of a new all electric car - the eMobile Zebra shown at some auto show in Italy.

A very interesting form of zebra - I'm sure there will much discussion about this between Timothy, our zebra, and Paul, our leopard.

A bit of research found that there is a battery called a Zebra. I also read there would be a tiger and leopard version so I guess this was just poor reporting.

On Saturday after our very nice train journey and after checking into the hotel in Greymouth and eating lunch we drove north a bit to what is called Pancake Rocks. If the tide is high and the surf is high there would be interesting water splashes through the blow holes but those conditions weren't true. It was still pretty nice. I did see a small brown bird in the bushes that could have been a Kiwi - except they don't come out during the day so it probably was a Kewa which is also brown, flightless, but is larger and has a shorter beak. Later when I saw several Kewas I wasn't sure about the ID because the Kewa is quite a bit larger than what I think I did see.

The rock on the right looks quite a bit like a lion.

On friday we drove south to the Franz Joseph and Fox Glaciers. It is interesting that in this quite temperate climate that is semi-tropical several hundred miles north that these glaciers flow off Mount Cook and come down pretty close to sea level. We got pretty close to them by walking down the walks. At Franz-Joseph there were some guided groups that were climbing on the glacier, but we elected to not do that. Still, all in all that day we walked for 3-4 hours in addition to the slightly greater than 400 KM drive.
( a couple of glacier views )

We started our trip with a layover in LA. On Sunday night after we got to the hotel in Venice Beach we met

pinkfish and

fj at the bar next door where they'd been watching the Academy Awards. We actually saw Helen Mirren getting her award for The Queen while obtaining our car at Budget. Of the Oscar nominees that was the only movie we'd seen this year!

The day we drove into town to see their loft, a work in progress, with a fair amount of familiarity to their old Fenway place because of much of the same furniture; we then went to lunch in Little Tokyo. They certainly live in a neighborhood with some pretty interesting shopping possibilities - clothes, fabrics, flowers, toys districts with many shops. It'll be interesting to see how that looks after 10 years of the gentrification that has already started.

After this we returned to Venice Beach - and looked around the canals and the beach. There is this little district with canals not much like the real Venice, but still it looks like a nice area.

( some birds )
Finally we went to and early dinner with

kenrudolph before getting to the airport for our 12 1/2 hour ride to Auckland. The plane left LA at about 9PM but it took quite a while to get to the International Dateline so we did get a bit of Tuesday before it turned into Wednesday.

We are about ready to go. We leave for LA tomorrow and then NZ the next day. All hotel, car, and train reservations are made, maps and directions printed. I repaired the zipper on the jacket I want to bring yesterday so I don't need a last minute trip to get another one. I think I may try packing today because I want to see if I can fit my laptop into my carry-on bag - I'm not going to take the laptop bag also. Some day Apple may make small ones - there was some gossip about this because of some patent filings and recent job postings. We still have to decide what books to take. We are taking the Rough Guide NZ guidebook.

There'd almost be enough time to watch all three of the Lord of the Rings DVDs, but then again.... We did watch Whale Rider and learned a bit more about Maori culture that way.

We had tickets tomorrow to a Dawn Upshaw concert that we were sorry to miss, but it turns out that it was cancelled and will perhaps be rescheduled later tis year. I generally don't like sopranos, but I really like Dawn Upshaw so maybe we'll actually get to see her this year.

And we are busy using up the potentially perishable food.

We will miss Tuesday this week, but then 3 weeks from now Wednesday will take two days.