NZ +24: Easy like Sunday morning...

Right, anyone who knows me knows that I am not one to lay around in bed when there is stuff to be done, so I'd done some stuff before anyone else got up this morning. We have three and a half days left around Christchurch and we want to go on the Trans-Alpine train and do some horse riding, amongst other things. So, I went to the information centre and picked up all the leaflets and also managed to find a few more bits of Christchurch I can share with you.

First of all, New Zealanders obviously share my sense of humour...



...and secondly, satellite dishes have to be much bigger in the southern hemisphere to pick up the full range of channels...



...not really. Although they do all point north, rather than pointing south like they do at home. The sun is also always in the north, which would be weird if being conscious of which way north actually was was a preoccupation. Which it isn't. Oh, and the water doesn't go down the plug hole in the opposite direction, just to shatter another myth. That's an old wives' tale.

Anyway, there is an interseting memorial garden to fire fighters in the city, with this sculpture...





Which would be lovely, but the paving slabs in the garden are all sponsored and have advertising on them. Like this one...



...which sits uncomfortably with the theme of the scuplture.

I also found two more statues of conquerors and subjugators. Which I suppose is better than finding statues of conjugators...

Victoria looks a bit stern...



...but then she is probably not finding anything funny.

And James Cook...



...well, there goes my brown cheesy in Trivial Pursuit down the drain again. He has a mountain named after him. He lived in Whitby. Tell me more, someone!

And, by the way, the tram goes through a shopping centre...



Cool! (Or, just possibly, dangerous...)

NZ +23: Wellington to Christchurch

This was probably one of our longest journeys - it meant being up at 6.30. Which was fine by me but seemed to be a major problem for everyone else.

We were in Wellington at the quayside by 8.30, just in time to watch the Arahura come in to dock...



While we were waiting, we were reading the paper, and discovered that we had survived an earthquake the night before...



Admittedly, it was only a little one, and we were staying with Robin and Maureen whose house is so close to the railway line that the house shakes every time some moderate amount of freight comes through, so we probably didn't notice...

Now, the Wellington fault line runs right along the edge of the harbour, but undaunted, we got on the ferry anyway and you've already seen photos of that from when we travelled South to North, so I won't bore you with any more. Oh, go on then...



The ferry is great, just like a cross-channel ferry in size and shape, but loads more to see...



And then it was the long drag back to Christchurch...

Now, not far south from where the ferry docks at Picton is a small place called Seddon. Possibly named after a former NZ Prime Minister - a lot of places seem to be. It's a very non-descript place, but it does have the distinction of possessing a very scary looking (and crossing) bridge...



The railway line goes above the road and the road is a single track made of... wood. This, I will remind you, is State Highway 1...



There were long sections where the road deck had been replaced, or fixed back into position with huge metal bolts sticking up, which you had to swerve to avoid. I half expected any train running across the top to have hundreds of people sitting on its roof.

And then if that wasn't enough, to add to the earthquake and the third-world bridge, we had a volcano.



And if you think I am making this up, well actually I am. It was just controlled burning. Although the meaning of the word "controlled" is obviously somewhat different in the southern hemisphere. I am thinking of Photoshopping this onto the one of Mount Doom from yesterday and setting myself up as a digital effects guru (geek) ready for any fourth movie in the trilogy.

And the sun setting through the smoke was lovely...



It's great to be back with Nessie, and we all deserve a quiet day tomorrow. Which I'm sure we'll have!

NZ +22: Reading now...

Just a few more minutes left to tell you that as a Englishman touring NZ, I thought it best to find out what someone who did it the other way round thought, so I'm reading...



...the cover of which doesn't look like this on the NZ version. He's a Kiwi who loses a bet and has to earn his fare back to NZ by busking round the UK. He's already slagged off Swindon, which I don't mind per se, but he's going to Nottingham next, so he had better say nice things...

NZ +22: Wellington Chocolate and Update

This gets 8/10...



...because...

• it tasted very nice
• it came in a big tall glass
• it has a knicker-bocker glory spoon
• it was accompanied by three marshmallows (have eaten them in picture...)

There has been nothing higher than an 8 yet, and we only have 6 days left. But I am an eternal optimist!

And just a quick mention that for regular readers, I botched up the dates on the last few blog entries and have added some extra bits to a few now I have photos, so you may want to look again at the last few days...

NZ +22: Lord of the Things (3) and southwards...

Just when you thought you'd avoided it all, State Highway 1 south through the Tongariro National Park takes you past...



...Mount Doom! (Mount Ngauruhoe, actually).

It's actually a stunning sight from the Desert Road, as it's called. And if that weren't enough, there is the slightly higher, and more cloud-obscured Mount Ruapehu..



And then we hit Vinegar Hill, which was less snowcapped, but you could see further and as far as I know, it hasn't featured in any dwarf'n'elves films...



This view is very important, because in it are several of the best preseverved formed river plateaus in the world. But I bet you knew that.

And then just before we got back to Wellington, we had lunch in Palmerston North. Probably named after a Lord Palmer, someone will tell me, it had the distinction of being a featureless city with shops...



A bit like Portsmouth. It even has its own Tricorn Centre...



I'm being a bit cruel, because it also has some very fine art deco architecture (somewhere - didn't see any of it) and is a big student town so "buzzin'", apparently.

And I suppose the town square is impressive...



...and the sky really was that blue today!

Staying in Wellington tonight and it's an early start for the ferry back to South Island tomorrow!

NZ +21: Turangi

Right, I got the times and dates of the last few posts in the wrong order so they may have appeared to shuffle round. I've got it all right now and I'm writing about Day 21, which is the 18 August.

When we first got to Turangi we wondered exactly what we had done. We had been led to believe that the town was some sort of tourist Mecca and you could amuse yourself for days. Well, maybe you can during the summer, but on a cold winter's (August) day, you actually can't.

The town was built during the 1960's for a population of engineers working on a nearby hydro electric power station (one of those that they build actually inside the mountain so that you never see it) and it has obviously never gained that bijou village feel. Or rather, has never lost that 1960's industrial feel.

Everything shuts at 5. The woman at the Post Office virtually bundled us out of the door with cattle prods. Earlier, at the tourist information centre, the smiling lady had been very promising. We could go horse riding. We could go quad biking. We could go to the National Trout Visitor Centre.

Well, we didn't do any of that.

We went into the "town centre", the main attractions of which seemed to be..



...and...



We went to New World and I bought a bottle of nice wine and some chocolate. If was only then that the afternoon began to get better. The girl on the checkout asked me if I was over 25, because if you are buying alcohol, they have to ask by law. Now, she was either very thick, or a bit short- sighted (I'll say it before any of you do) but it cheered me up no end. And the sight of a fish and chip shop on the corner run by an Englishman cheered me up some more.

It's called Grand Central and if you ever have the misfortune to be in Turangi of a Thursday evening, it's your only hope. It even says so in the Rough Guide. I think the Maori underneath means "No Curry Sauce"



But we were warm in our fishing lodge...





...and we even ventured down to the river's edge...



I swear to you that if you zoom in, there's someone fishing in that river.

Back to Wellington and civilisation tomorrow.

NZ +21: Lord of the Things (Again)

Now, I swear I haven't been trailling round the country looking for film locations, but you may remember I mentioned that we had been to the palce where What's-her-name gallops across a dry river bed and then a huge wall of water is CGIed in to drown the baddies.

Well, today, I went to the place where they filmed the huge wall of water. It's on North Island, whereas the actual ford is on South Island. But it was all pieced together in the editing suite. He could have saved a lot of money and just used Google Images and PaintShop, surely?

Anyway, back to the story.

This is my second turn on/turn off "natural" tourist attraction in two days. They have built a dam across the river ( a bit downstream from the Huka Falls) and installed two big gates in it...



At various times each day...



The gates open...



...transforming the dry rapids below...



...into a foaming torrent...



...for about half an hour. Then they turn them off again, and the water drains out. It's like the world's biggest spa bath.

It's all for a purpose of course. The river priovides 25% (or thereabouts) of NZ's entire electricity supply...



...from various power stations along its length.

And here's this post's geothermal mention...

As well as hydro-electricity, they also generate a lot of electricity here from the geothermal stuff they fleece tourists to see. This results in landscapes of shiny piping, which looks a bit like something Blake used to chase Servalan over...



Off to Turangi later...

NZ +21: Taupo (Not seen Carol Decker yet...)

In my rush to get offline at the extraordinarily expensive internet place last night, I forgot to say that we were staying in Taupo, on the North shores of Lake Taupo, which is a giant collapsed volcanic crater and is the largest lake in New Zealand...



It was beautiful, and we would have had a lovely view of it from the apartment, but...



Perhaps that's why we got the reduced rate...

Anyway, we spent the morning today in Taupo. I went to the Museum and Art Gallery, where you weren't supposed to take photos, but I knew my dad would find this interesting, so I did anyway. The woman at the desk was about 95 and an ex-primary school teacher so I don't think she noticed.



I will wait for a comment from my Dad to tell me what it is. Model name and number etc. (My Dad is ex-Post Office Telephones and BT and will know these things..!)

Also today, been to the Aratiatia Dam and a big geothermal power station. OK, so I promised not to mention geothermal again, but it's so difficult here...

I'll put pictures of those up when I have time.

NZ +21: Things NZ gets right... and wrong... (3)

Electrical Sockets in the bathroom (-)



I'm sorry, but we don't do that in our country...

(And they are not even the right shape...)
(It's a wonder I am still alive...)

NZ +20: Hiking to Huka

This afternoon, we went to see the Huka Falls, which are where the Waikato River (in UK: River Whatever, eg. River Thames, River Itchen. In NZ: Whatever River, eg. Waikato River) carves and plunges and all those guidebook words through a narrow channel and they put up a tea room and toilet and souvenir shop. It's free to go and see the falls though. Here they are...



Now, I feel I actually did it properly, because I walked from Taupo along the bank of the river to get to them. I'm probably making it sound dangerous and daring, but there is a proper path. It's only 3km, but the others we're too wussy to do it and went in the car. Which was useful 'cos they gave me a lift back!

The photo above are the falls proper, below is the channel that lead to them...



...which, when you are actually there, is probably more impressive.

There is a bridge, quite a sturdy looking bridge, I thought, over the falls to afford the tourist a good vantage point. And I felt quite happy about being on it until I saw this man mending it with a tile adhesive gun...



I kid you not.

Anyway, not uploading more at this internet cafe, cos they fleece you per megabyte instead of per 15 minutes like everywhere else does.

NZ +20: We're staying here...

I know you are getting used to the posh places we're staying now. Like snow-capped mountains, their appeal is bginning to fade. We've reached Taupo, and we're staying here...



In the quest for the perfect place to stay, we have found Quest Apartments!

NZ +20: Geothermal... now in Colour!

Now I don't want to bore you with more geothermal stuff, but after Hell's Gate, which was very dramtic and eerie and grey, I thought I should tell you about Wai-O-Tapu, which is the same deal geothermically, but a lot more touristy and more colourful. And so really should make for better photos. There is also a geyser...



It's called the Lady Knox Geyser. She was Lady Clarence Knox and she was either the wife or the daughter of a former Governor-General of the Dominion, posted here from the Motherland to rule over the natives.

Now, what they natives had already discovered was this..

The geyser has loads of boiling hot water in it, and so it would be good for washing clothes. The bunged their clothes in and some soap and were amazed to find that roughly three minutes later, the geyser blew 15m into the air and shot their clothes over a fairly large radius.

Concentrate, here's the science bit.

The water is bubbling away under pressure in two chambers below the ground and eventually the pressure builds up enough for the geyser to explode. But it's erratic, happening roughly every two to three days. And that, a predictable tourist attraction doth not make...

Perhaps you can link together things I've already told you and work out what happens...

Every morning at 10.15 precisely, a bloke comes out and addresses an audience of about 200 people who've all paid $25 to get in...



...and he tips soap powder into the top and stands back. As the Maoris found out, soap lowers the surface tension of the water underground so it needs less pressure to burst forth. And then it does...



It's quite impressive, if a bit soapy...



Rather more impressive, and more natural, are the boiling mud pools a bit up the road. They are really unpredictable and no-one has to tip anything into them to get them to work...



Because they are unpredicatble, the really scary, big, think-I-was-going-to-get-covered-in-boiling-mud explosion was not captured on film (not that it would have been anyway, it being a digital camera).



And then it was off into the park proper, which is really the same deal as Hell's Gate, but prettier. It was really the Geothermal Park of Many Colours. Being slightly red/green colour blind and always making a hash of describing colours, I shall let you enjoy without trying to interpret...











And I promise that's all the geothermal stuff for this holiday. Probably.

Although, it's no big deal anyway. Southampton has had geothermal energy for ages and tourists don't come to see that. I wonder why?