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Published: February 3rd 2008
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I am writing these last couple of entries at home in Swansea. I've also revisited the Fox Glacier entry and added the photos to it. I shall now try and summarise our North Island itinerary!
Wellington
There was a marked difference in the weather on the two sides of the Cook Strait. We had left behind clear blue skies and entered grey Wellignton. After a quick check-in and freshen up at the Motel, we headed out into the town in search of a bite to eat.
Now the Lonely Planet guide highlights Cuba Street and Courtenay Place as venues where one can "enjoy NZ's best nightlife". I own that perhaps Sunday evening is not the best time to apply the yardstick to such things, but as we walked through these areas, they gave the impression that everthing was tinpot, grotty and in certain cases a little bit seedy. Most of the bars on Courtenay Place were basically furnished in the hose-it-all-down-at-the-end-of-the-night school of interior design. Windows and doorways were patchworks of bill posters. I suppose it could have been described as unpretentous and bohemian - there were certainly no poncey bars where hedge-fund managers called Sebastian might want
to be seen drinking $20 Mojitos - but I think Courtenay Place was too happy at the other end of the spectrum: all sticky floors and Hepatitis risks.
Cuba Street showed more signs that it could be quite convivial of a Friday evening, but at the end of a weekend there just wasn't the population required to dilute the concentration of down-and-outs, who were out in force. On a quiet Sunday evening they created quite an air of malevolence that just made you want to quicken your pace back to the motel and bolt the door.
We rose at a reasonable hour the next morning and headed towards the CBD area. It had been a while since we'd been in a city so we were keen to wander about taking in some light shopping and people watching, and I shall say that we were able to indulge this whim quite adequately in Wellington, even if it doesn't make great blog reading! We were happy to take it easy as we knew that the next drive to Napier was going to be another long one. We retired to the motel and passed a pleasant uneventful Monday evening reading and
relaxing - and checking the lock on the door every once in a while...
Napier
We arrived in Napier in the middle of the afternoon; an arresting town with a fine selection of Art-deco architecture and a handsome waterfront - which some numbskull has seen fit to bookend with a cement works and an aggregate plant. However you can still wander along the waterfront and lose yourself in the sights and sounds of the majestic Hawkes Bay and think pleasant thougts about the time you have ahead of you in such a charming little town.
Our accommodation was excellent in terms of both standard of facilities and quality of the location. A balcony overlooking the waterfront provided an idyllic venue for enjoying a morning coffee and some reading.
The town centre of Napier has eye-catching art-deco builings on almost every intersection; it was a great town to walk around in. As luck would have it, a tour guide was kicking off her gambit behind us as we sat on the promenade, so we were able to eavesdrop and find out how the town came to be so uniformly art-deco. Apparently, it is all thanks to huge
earthquake and a subsequent series of salt-in-the-wound fires that more or less obliterated the town centre and its narrow Victorian streets in the early 30's. The town was rebuilt in the contemporary architectural style with broader avenues, subterrenan services that did away with the needs for unsightly telegraph poles, and of course highly-stylised buildings. It was impossible to listen to this and to not be put in mind of Swansea's city centre, having also been levelled and rebuilt in the not-too-distant past, and think if only Swansea had been rebuilt in some more appealing architectural style, instead of the Kingsway!
Gisborne
We headed north from Napier to reach Gisborne. All around New Zealand I had been amused by the names that they give to the creeks and streams that pass under the roads. On this stretch, we encountered the Good: "Ace Creek"; the Bad: "Devils Creek"; and the Ugly: "Windbag". (this last one made me very happy and inspired me to promise Cath that one day I would name a river after her).
Gisborne's claim to significance is that it is the location where Europeans first set foot on New Zealand. The Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had
"discovered" the islands about a century before but was obviously not motivated to disembark from his vessel. Captain Cook on the other hand was motivated by dwindling food and water to leave the mother ship and see if they could replenish their supplies. I think the lack of success he had in fulfilling this task resulted in the area becoming known as Poverty Bay. (They had better luck in the Bay of Plenty - obviously)
History records that, on their first encounter with the natives, the Brits managed to shoot one of them dead. Based on my brief reading in the mildly diverting museum in Gisborne, this indefensibly aggressive act was dealt with in a "sorry about that, we're all a bit embarassed actually, and Charlie feels just terrible about it..." sort of way. Furthermore, it seems that it didn't take much in the way of penitent offerings to make the locals say "don't worry about it, these things happen..." so that the whole thing was brushed under the reed mat. Seems like a career in international relations would have been much easier in those days!
You may notice from that digression that I do not have that
much to say about Gisborne. It was fine really: we had a pleasant dip in the sea, a nice meal in town, took a couple of pretty photos and got up at 5:30am to watch a sunrise over the Pacific. (Which, truth be told, was not as impressive as I had hoped thanks to another bit of inspired Kiwi town planning that put a colossal timber yard on the headland, which also completely osbcured any view of the Cook monument unless you were standing 10 feet away from it.)
Tauranga and Auckland
Tauranga in a sentence: every bloke between the age of 18 and 55 thinks he is a pimp, (some even have stickers on their cars stating as much), the bars and clubs pump out commercial noise pollution until 5am and if you stay in the motel at the end of the strand there is a good chance that you will be spending the night in a garage, as we did.
On our last night in NZ we stayed in a suburb just outside Auckland called Mount Eden. First impressions were not good: the motel was another sorry affair - we had defeinitely been spoilt on
the South Island with our clean, modern studios in Queenstown and Nelson - and the propriertors saw fit to complement the depressingly appointed rooms with a depressing set of House Rules, which ranged from "don't rob us" and "don't rip us off", to the abject and frankly grotesque decree that "no guest should enter the splash pool if they have had diarrhea for the last two weeks". Well, there you go: if you're in the leisure industry and you are looking for a set of rules that will leave nothing to chance (or the imagination), then this catch-all document is a must-read. I'd be surprised if anyone wanted to enter the splash pool after reading that.
Anyway, I am happy to report that our early, grave apprehensions were swept away when we found the CBD of Mount Eden to be a charming high street with bookshops, wine merhcants and an impressive selection of independent cafes, restaurants and bars. Indeed it was a civilised way to end this visit to NZ, whilst making plans for what we would see on our next visit.
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