Day 56: Waterloo at Wellington

---

I checked in to Room 523 about 6 p.m. It was fairly comfortable, though a twin, not a double. I'd been up for twelve hours and I was eager to have some supper and get to sleep.

There was just one problem -- a minor one, I thought. It had been cold all day and the temperature outside was 12. The room, which had a decent-sized window, was also rather cold. I went downstairs to the desk and politely asked for a space heater.

"I'm sure we've got one around here somewhere," the clerk said. "I'll go get it as soon as I have time."

I waited 15 minutes, and then another 15. By that time I was getting pretty hungry, and I still had to go shopping. No space heater had arrived at my room, so I thought maybe I had to go down to the desk to get it.

I went back. "Sorry, I can't find it," the clerk said.

I was horrified. I knew that wearing my breathing mask hadn't worked in Queenstown. My bronchitis was just now going dormant, after a week of the two space heaters in Picton. I didn't want to reactivate it and I was very much afraid that a night spent at 12 degrees C -- 53 degrees F -- would do just that.

I implored the other desk clerk to take another look for it. She did, and came back saying, "Sorry; I don't think we have one."

With an inward shudder at the thought of looking for other accommodations at 8 p.m. -- for so it now was -- I asked for my money back. I was told it was now too late to cancel, not only for tonight, but for tomorrow night as well.

As I stood there trying to decide whether I could afford to lose $180, on top of the even more expensive cost of two nights at a place that might have decent heat, the first desk clerk said, "Wait; we do have a room without a window. It's very hot in there; it's just over the kitchen. It might suit you."

I went there. It was The Room from Hell. It was no more than two-thirds the size of Room 523, which was already a postage stamp compared to my room at Buccaneer Lodge. It had no desk, only a double bed and a single nightstand (and two fans). The bed was hard as a rock. There was constant noise, even at 8:30 p.m., from the kitchen.

But it was warm. It was a deliciously comfortable 85 degrees or so. I sighed, for the bed in 523 had been soft and the hall had been quiet. But I thought that for my lungs' sake I had better take it.

I lugged my three suitcases down to Room 221, and once again I made up the bed there. I pushed the twins in 523 apart again. I had now been up for fifteen hours; I'd had a long and tiring ferry journey, and I hadn't even been to the grocery store to get supper yet.

I went to the store, but while there I found I was too tired to cook. I was almost too tired to move; I kept blundering into things. As I stumbled slowly along the aisles, a New World Supermarket worker noticed that my shoe was untied. As I was far too uncoordinated at that moment to bend over without falling flat on my face, I thanked her and told her I'd take care of it later.

She bent over and tied my shoe for me.

That's the only thing, for the next several hours, that kept me from crying. Room 221 was awful. The noise wouldn't quit. Worst of all, when I turned out the light, I found that a fluorescent light from the kitchen blazed straight into my room, making it almost as bright as before. I couldn't begin to get to sleep, exhausted as I was.

Finally, at 11 p.m., I went down to the desk, which closed at midnight, to ask if I might go up and try Room 523, or another room, just to see how cold it was, as I could not sleep a wink in 221. The desk clerk there was very sympathetic; he had slept in 221, which is probably usually assigned to unfortunate staffers.

He was all for assigning me to Room 409, a double. I was in favor of this. But I told him the whole story, and he went off on another futile search for a space heater. When he came back, he brought his supervisor, the night-duty manager.

The night-duty manager didn't want to send me to Room 409 because he believed me and he feared I would go into some sort of medical crisis there.
(I was a bit afraid of that too.) He said the kitchen normally closed at midnight, but he would close it early and chase everyone over to the other kitchen so I could get some sleep where I was. He did, and at 11:30 the light went out.

I struggled to get to sleep on the rock-hard bed. I may have just managed it by 12:45 a.m. -- when the light snapped on again, and someone clattered away cheerfully in the kitchen, banging pots and pans.

I went out at once and found the night-duty manager. I said I had to move to Room 409, but I begged him to let me keep the key to 221 for the night, just in case I did find myself unable to breathe. He did.

I lugged my three suitcases up to Room 409, and I made my fourth bed of the night. I had now been up for nineteen hours. Somewhere along the way I lost my conditioner, but if that was all I lost, and I think it was, I was doing well. I was half-blinded by tears, tears of fear, frustration and sheer exhaustion.

I put my breathing mask on, threw myself onto the bed in Room 409, and went to sleep. Mercifully, the mask stayed on, and I got three hours' sleep. At 5:30 a.m. I woke up, talked to Jim for a while and e-mailed Sue (I'd already e-mailed her to tell her about The Room from Hell), and then went back to sleep, getting another two hours' sleep from 6:30 to 8:30.

I woke up feeling exhausted, aching all over as though I'd been beaten. The first thing I did was to go downstairs to the desk, and ask them to contact YHA Napier, YHA Gisborne, and YHA Rotorua to ask whether *they* had space heaters. If they didn't, you see, my bookings there were worthless. I had checked the weather forecast, too, and several nights in all those places were predicted to fall below 15 in the next ten days. I couldn't count on its suddenly turning warmer in February.

To make that request comprehensible to the desk clerk, I had to retell the whole sad story. She asked, blankly, "What's a space heater?"

I did my best to describe one. "Oh!" she said. "A fan heater! But why do you call it a 'space heater'"?

"Because it heats a space," I answered. "Just a space, not a whole house. People use them as personal heaters. You know, like you might have one behind your desk there."

She looked. "Why, yes!" she said. "We do." It was in a drawer behind the desk. She brought it out to show me.

"That's it; that's it exactly!" I said. "May I please borrow it tonight?"

She let me. And that crisis was resolved. And three of the five people I had asked the previous night about that space heater had been sitting within a yard of it when I inquired.

But then, she made the phone calls, and the crisis deepened and spread and became a whole new order of magnitude of crisis. YHA Napier had heat in their rooms -- oh, yes, indeed they did. Heat on thirty-minute timers, and you had to push a button every thirty minutes to turn the heater on again. They had no fan heaters.

YHA Gisborne said they did have a fan heater I could borrow if I needed it. They added blithely that I wouldn't need it because it was 30 outside. That's 86. I refrained from pointing out that that was the daytime temperature, not the temperature at night.

YHA Rotorua said they had no heat in the hostel at this time of year and no fan heater to lend. From the look on the desk clerk's face, they also told her how stupid a question they thought that had been.

My heart sank. I had planned this trip for two years. I had researched lodging choices for a full year. I had actually booked all the lodging back in May 2010, agonizing over each choice, reading reviews, poring over town maps, and so on. I hated to make a change now. A snap change seemed so unlikely to be successful. But I could not risk having to sleep in a 12-degree room.

For a few minutes, all I wanted to do was to end the trip and rush home, home where it was warm; home where my husband Jim could take care of me and I wouldn't have to make plans that looked good on paper and failed utterly because I had made two reasonable but invalid assumptions, first that New Zealand's summer would involve temperatures that I would recognize as being summery (so far it has not), and second that any self-respecting establishment above the "Let's cram 20 people into a room built for four, and we won't tell the fire marshal" level would have something as basic as heat. I mean, I didn't ask the YHA whether their highest-rated four- and five- star hostels (the latter of which Wellington was) had electricity and flush toilets, either.

Once I had managed to remember that I couldn't rush home, not only for financial reasons but because the daytime high at home was 12, and not in Celsius either, I had to fight an equally desperate and equally heartfelt wish to take the ferry right back over to the South Island, where there are towns rather than cities and where they at least have the concept of needing a space heater, and go back to spend the rest of my trip at, say, Oamaru, watching the penguins, or Waikawa by the little bay, or Te Anau in the lovely little YHA single with its wooden beams and its wonderful heater and its woodstove in the common room.

I didn't. Instead, sometimes fighting back tears and sometimes failing to fight them back, I went down to breakfast. Over breakfast, and long after, I read the BBH hostel descriptions, looking for replacements for Napier and Rotorua.

Rotorua's was comparatively easy. Rotorua Central Backpackers sounded great, had Zenbu Internet, and had no negative reviews on the BBH site. (I'd have checked other sites and other reviews if I'd been doing my usual thorough job, but I didn't feel I had time.) After dithering a bit I placed a booking request with them, which was accepted. I took the opportunity to give myself two more days in Rotorua and two fewer in Gisborne, as I'd already begun to worry about spending six days there when I might not even be able to walk to the ocean.

Napier was harder. There was one place which was fairly expensive, and which said only "Wi-fi Internet access available," and another that was cheaper and advertised free Internet. It would have been an easy choice, except that the expensive place specifically said, "Heated rooms." I went with the expensive place. Now, of course, I'm anxious about what sort of Internet connectivity it may have. I suppose I'll find out.

When I'd finished doing all this, and booking a revised bus journey to Gisborne, two days later,
it was after noon. I Went back to the supermarket, bought a steak, and rather dazedly began to cook it, stopping to cry at intervals.

You may wonder why, at this point, I was crying. But you see, it had all fallen down, like a card house crumpling into a pack of cards. Everything I had tried to plan for the North Island, except the very end of my trip up in Paihia, had gone tumbling down, and I was having to improvise, and I hate improvising. I said long ago that if I were physically up to it I would have planned the trip so thoroughly that I would have known exactly what I would be doing in every hour of every day. And now I did not even know for sure where I was staying.
I cried and cried and fixed my steak.

Suddenly, there were two large, friendly people standing there. They were my friend Sue, with whom I will be staying in Palmerston North this week, and her friend Marianne, with whom she was staying near Wellington this weekend. They looked just like me -- about my size, about my age, both with glasses and kindly, shy smiles.

The day at once seemed brighter -- literally, in fact, as the sun suddenly came out. They had to be back at Te Papa, the Museum of New Zealand, within minutes; they had timed tickets for a special exhibition, but they had come to find me and comfort me first. We agreed to meet at Te Papa at 3:30 p.m..

I ate my steak, still in a daze, and went off to Te Papa, moving at about a quarter of my normal speed.
I got there at 3:00 p.m., and decided that I was moving so slowly that there was really no point in trying to see anything before our appointment. I went to the restroom, which took twenty minutes in my exhausted state, and then sat blankly by an interesting fountain, water pouring endlessly over a rotatable black ball, until they came.

After that, I had an absolutely wonderful time for several hours. At the museum cafeteria, Marianne treated us both to, respectively, a large hot choc (me) and a coffee (Sue). Sue told me I shouldn't leave Te Papa without seeing an experimental motorbike, so we went up to the fourth floor and looked at it. Unfortunately Te Papa did not permit pictures of items in its collection, so I could not take a picture of it. It was interesting, but I was not knowledgable enough to understand what was experimental about it.

Then Sue and Marianne took me to the Cable Car Museum. I had very much wanted to go there myself, but I just hadn't been up to it this morning. But it was still open, and we looked at all its exhibits and then rode the cable car itself.

Wellington's Cable Cars are two long red vehicles that travel up and down a steep hill. Unlike Pittsburgh's cable cars, the only ones I had previously ridden, they cover a long route, making several stops on the way. The view from the top of the route is spectacular.

We rode the car down to the bottom of the hill. Along the street, set into the sidewalks, were plaques that read "Shoreline 1840." Sue and Marianne explained that an earthquake had raised several blocks' worth of land, shrinking Wellington harbor and providing good flat land to build on.
And Wellington was certainly in need of that flat land. The cable car's hill was so steep that the larger stores on the hilly side of the street had entrances on two levels, one on the ground floor facing the street at the bottom of the hill and one on the floor above facing the next street over.

Sue and Marianne took me to see the statue of one of Wellington's founders, Mr. Plimmer. Unlike most statues, it wasn't set on any sort of pedestal. It was life-size, and at Mr. Plimmer's feet frisked his dachshund, Fritz, also rendered in stone, but with an altogether lively appearance. A plaque explained that they had often walked together on this street.

We rode the cable car back up, and then Sue and Marianne drove me to Cuba Street. There there was a comical fountain, with a quantity of buckets. Water, welling up at the top, cascaded down into four other buckets. When full, each of them would tip, spilling what it held into a bucket further below, until finally the big blue bucket at the very bottom was full enough to tip over, restarting the cycle.

Sadly, I did not get to see the buckets in action. For some reason, the fountain had been turned off. But I could see how it would have worked, had it been working, and perhaps it is for the best. I expect I would have stayed there for fifteen minutes at least, just watching, and I'd have wanted to stay a half hour.

---

Photos

YHA Wellington
Sadly, I never met the cat.

Outside seating
On a retired cable car in the museum

Statue
Mr. Plimmer and Fritz

Pouring buckets
Except they weren't pouring.

Comments

[Becky (Dr. Wolfe's)]

Oh Merideth...my heart was breaking for you as I read this one. I don't know how you have done it so far but I'm glad you are hanging in there. You do have a cheering section at home!! I have so enjoyed reading these blogs and you have inspired me to start my own blog, just about the farm here at home. I am keeping all the girls at Dr. Wolfe's office up to date on how you are doing. Hang in there...I'm praying for you, Becky P.S. I f you have time check out my blog at crossedarrowsfarm.blogspot.com

[bbaggins]

Thanks, Becky! I really appreciate your prayers and good wishes, and I'm delighted that you're still reading my blog. I'll take a look at yours as soon as I can.