NZ +25: An Informed View...

I have finished reading Justin Brown's book about the UK from a Kiwi Perspective. I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I might, partly because quite a lot of it was told in dialogue, which, unless he had a dictaphone going at all times, could not have been authentic; and partly because when he had almost got enough money to return back home, he was invited onto Richard and Judy and they let him keep his money and gave him an open air ticket back. Which rather felt like the reader had been cheated.

Anyway, I'm now reading...



...which I bought in Waterstones before I left, but was determined not to read until the last week of being here because I wanted to be able to relate to the places he was describing. He's a 45 year-old British ex-pat who has never quite got around to going back to the UK and has been in NZ for 15 years. His thinks his dog only has a few months to live and so then he won't have any ties here. He hitches round the country randomly, going where his lifts take him and tries to convince himself that he wants to stay. Will let you know how it turns out.

NZ +24: The Island

We went to the cinema again last night. (Did I already mention we had been to see The Fantasic Four? Which wasn't that Fantastic...)

Well, tonight we went to see The Island, with Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johananhansssonnn (who appears to have no discernable acting talent).



Certainly not what I expected. If I were the people who made The Matrix or, for those of us who are a little older, Logan's Run, I would be suing.

Has anyone else seen it? What did you think?

NZ +24: Is it cold in here, or is it me...?

We've been off into the chilly wastelands of Antarctica today! (Apparently if you go there really, it takes 8½ hours in a Hercules, so we opted for nearly going there instead.)

What we actually did was go back to the airport! It's from Christchurch Airport that most flights to the Antarctic leave. There is even a passenger terminal...



...but you don't need a passport because Antarctica doesn't belong to any one country. It's administered by a treaty signed by lots of nations so, if you withstand the sub-zero temperatures and look good in a parka, you can go.

This part of the airport is surrounded by big hangars looking like this...



...which is where the store all the parkas.

And (this is the bit we really went to see) they have created a Visitor Centre...



...opened by Sir Edmund Hilary who, as a New Zealander and conqueror of Everest and first man to go mechanised to the South Pole, is a bit of celebrity here.

Anyhow, inside, you see lots of audio-visual things and there are buttons to press and there's a huge orrery. I bet some of you have to look that up.

But you also get to go to the Antarctic in a little room. They give you special covers to put over your shoes and a big fleece and then shut you in a large freezer done up to look like the South Pole. (A bit like the Ice Bar in Queenstown, but without the vodka.)

You can ride on a snowmobile...



(Please note the ultra realsitic backdrop!)


...and you can go in an igloo...



(...some of which is obviously made of plastic.)

And then they make it go very dark and turn on these special wind chill fans, and suddenly, it gets what can only be described as "bloody freezing". There are no pohots of that bit, because my fingers would have dropped off - the special thermometer in there got down to -18ºC. I don't think I'm quite cut out for polar exploration, although I did like the next bit...

They have retired one of these...



...which has a special name I can't remember, and they put you in it and take you round the car park. Which is all very fine, but then they take you on the specially designed obstacle course too...



...and then down a Very Steep Hill...



...and then through 1m of water...



...and then, fortunately, back to the safety of the car park!

NZ +24: Things NZ gets right... and wrong... (4)

I don't know if you would call this right or wrong, but it's certainly different and more American than it is British. You can choose your own car number plate here, and it can be anything you like. It doesn't have to have a fixed number of numbers and letters or any numbers at all.

Consequently, in a fairly small car park at the very nice garden centre where we had lunch today, you can see...



...and...



...and...



As you can see from the last one, you seem able to add your own words and letters to make phrases. It's turned into a game now (a) spotting them - we saw SPINE, which was the number plate of a mobile chiropractor, but didn't have a camera handy - and (b) deciding what your own might be...

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.