Farewells

February 15, 2002-Great Start
(Photos:Oriental Harbor,
Wellington architecture)

What a way to start the day. We looked out the window of our room & saw a horse & rider taking a practice run. They looked so intent & in sync. I hope they both had sunscreen on. According to the paper, the sun exposure today was such that if you were in the sun with no sunscreen on for 17 minutes, you would burn. Scary stuff.

The email is delivered so fast it’s amazing. We were at an Internet café sending you all email & Karen was at the café at another computer. The mail I sent appeared in her mailbox within minutes. It’s magic. They’ll be going home tomorrow. I know that the email I sent today will beat them.

Driving in New Zealand has been quite different than Australia. Drivers here don’t give way at crosswalks or yield to other cars. They’re very aggressive. I wonder if the Maori disposition prevailed over the British.

The New Zealand dollar is worth a lot less than the U.S. & a bit less than the Aussie. But money seems to fly out of our wallets at an incredible rate of speed. What the Kiwis have done is raise their prices to reflect the value. An example is that parking for a sports event near their arena is $NZ 30. That’s high given they earn in NZ dollars what we do in U.S.

I’m a frustrated person. I didn’t realize that David was superstitious about buying things for the baby before it was born. There are some really adorable things here in teeny tiny & tiny sizes, but I’ll have to restrain myself. We’ll have less money flying out of our wallets now.

Camouflage

We had a long drive to Wellington today. We started early knowing it would take about eight hours including food stops. We went by way of Lake Taupo, the largest lake in New Zealand. It was azure, sapphire, & turquoise at the same time. It’s flanked by three mountains one of which still had a bit of snow on top. Of course the requisite clouds were hovering above ready to drip on us, obscure the sun, or move aside & allow for a fleeting ray to get through.

Our quest for the day was to find a black sheep for Karen to photograph. Since the countryside was speckled with white sheep dots, we thought it would be pretty easy to spot a black one. The problem was the cows. There were lots of black ones mixed in with the sheep. We tried to convince Karen that the black cows would appear to be black sheep if photographed from the distance, but she was not buying it. It would have been a tedious drive, but the topography kept surprising us. We would be lulled by the green hills & pastures only to round a bend & see a gouged out concave hillside of granite that formed a semi-circular wall in a valley. We topped a hill & found ourselves in a desert. We were so startled that we checked the map & sure enough, it was marked as such. We did doze on & off & Ron read the paper, but sheep quest kept us alert until we found one.

We passed up the chance to use a Super Loo & went to McDonald’s for one potty stop. The rest rooms were paneled in a lovely pine. They looked like saunas. Karen wondered why Australians & Kiwis don’t get it yet about the environment. They seem to use wood lavishly.

Rocky Ending

We arrived in Wellington & found it to be a shabby city with an over-rated view. Our hotel certainly fit into the shabby description. The service was what we’d learned to expect. A woman at the desk told us our rooms were on separate floors even though the reservation card in our name showed they were next to each other. She said that the twp rooms were for us & that the Ciminis were getting another room on another floor. She then told us there was no cart or person to help us with our luggage. The manager stepped right in & rectified both issues then became our bellman. He directed us down to a dingy garage & told us we could park the van there. The aisle was so narrow & the spaces so small that David had to ask someone to park the van for him. There was no way he could back that monster into the space with right hand drive.

When we finally got up to the room, we discovered that our document folder was gone. It had our travelers checks, passports, & airline tickets in it. After we searched our luggage, we went back down to the hellhole of a garage & ransacked the car. When we came upstairs David was beside himself. I was already thinking of how to contact American Express & ask them to earn the fee we paid for their platinum card. We finally thought to ask the Ciminis if they might have picked it up while collecting all the loose stuff from the car when we took the luggage to the rooms. Sure enough, it was in the bag with their documents. What a relief that was!

We celebrated by riding the cable car up to Kelburn expecting it to be a scenic ride. What we found was that the cable car went through a series of tunnels & when it finally emerged the view was of the disjointed skyline of Wellington with the harbor as a backdrop. The newer buildings that rose up like gnarled fingers on an arthritic hand spoiled what should have been stunningly beautiful. They were singularly & collectively ugly. At the top of the cable car line was an entrance to the botanical gardens. We took an hour to walk through the gardens as we worked our way back down to town. Karen happily identified the plants for us & we thoroughly enjoyed being out of doors. Part of the park is an historic cemetery that includes an old Jewish section. The Jewish community was small & the old synagogue was on a site that is now under an off ramp of the motorway. We’d actually ridden over it on our way into town. It was an odd feeling to learn that. February 16, 2002-Lost and Found

I know that Karen & David are good friends, but I never expected her to go to the extreme of sharing a horrible experience to make David feel better about his screw-up yesterday. She knew she had consciously put their return tickets in an envelope that went in their document folder but couldn’t find them this morning. We looked in our bags & they looked in theirs. We tore the car apart. Just as they were thinking of calling Qantas, David asked to look at the envelope with the used tickets in it. There it was hidden behind the carbon of a spent ticket just waiting to be found.

We were more than ready for breakfast after that fiasco. We found a food court in a market near the Te Papa Museum. The three of them had steak & eggs, & I got a bit more adventurous. I had Indian roti (hand made flat bread) stuffed with egg & onion with a side of mild chicken curry. It was a real waker upper.

Ticky Tacky

The museum was quite modern, creative & somewhat attractive from one angle, but someone had decided to install windows that were different crayola colors on one side. It was really ugly. I’ve found Wellington to be very tacky. It’s almost as if they only buy paint remnants that no one bought the previous year. The Museum Hotel that overlooked both the museum & the harbor was painted black. There was no other color present on the entire building. An old Victorian brick structure had the bricks painted bright red & the sandstone trim was coated in stark white. Perhaps they were trying to add kitsch to the scenery, but they missed by a mile. We found that the best view of the town was when we left it to take the Ciminis to the airport. They flew home today. We drove along Oriental Parade & admired the quaint gingerbread homes that hugged the hills & clustered near each other on intimately tiny lots. It was only on our trip back through the city to catch the ferry that we got close enough to those homes to see that they were raggedy.

We did make a quick tour of the museum. We’d seen most of what it had to offer at different venues, but the interior of the museum was worth the time. Maybe the architects & designers here are better at interiors than exteriors. It hugs the harbor & spirals up six levels of well-presented exhibits. Primary signage for exhibits is bilingual in English & Maori. The explanation of how the building was constructed with quake isolators caught our attention & reminded us of what a volatile place this is.

I’m now on the Lynx Ferry, a catamaran from Wellington, North Island to Picton on the South Island. We’re crossing the Cook Strait. I’m plugged into an outlet near our reclining seats. There’s a gift shop, play area for children, & snack bars. As we searched for lunch, there seemed to be nothing that wasn’t pork. The young man serving us nodded sagely & said. “ Ah, kosher.” We were surprised he even knew the term, & as I was about to ask him, he volunteered that one of the crew was kosher. “Righty O,” he said & pointed us to a roasted veggie sandwich & chicken roll-up.

The ferry ride on the high speed Lynx is two hours. It takes five hours by regular ferry. It seems odd to me that two states of a country would be separated by five hours of water. But then there’s Hawaii. I guess it takes us seven hours to get to Chicago, but that means we’re driving over land not water for three hours of Ohio, three hours of Indians, & one hour of Illinois.

Toby