TravelSkite

Little and Large

2012-01-25T11:25:00.001+13:00

In a new move for me, I've written a guest post on another blog: Blogger At Large, which is a proper travel blog full of information and latest news, as well as being very chirpy and enthusiastic. It is, as they used to say in the 60s, a now and happening sort of place, unlike the more leisurely and reflective blog that this one is. The post is about Highclere Castle - yet again. I may be laid-back here, but even I can't ignore the opportunity to jump on such a big bandwagon as the Downton Abbey phenomenon. Why not pop over and read it, and have a look around there while you're at it?

I've done a couple of trips with Megan, who writes Blogger At Large, both at her very kind invitation and both brilliantly good fun. The first was via Tahiti to New York, my first trip to that exciting city, and the second to Disneyland for a mind-blowingly extravagant famil to mark the opening of what was then the new Finding Nemo ride in the old submarine pond.

I'd been to Tahiti years before, but on this trip we went to Fakarava - always fun to say - in the Tuamoto Islands. It's a huge coral atoll, the rectangular lagoon about 65km long, the land surrounding it so narrow that you can see from side to side. On one sparkling day we went on a boat like a flying fish to the far end of the lagoon, skimming along the turquoise water for an hour or so until we fetched up at a tiny motu, or island, with nothing on it bar a handful of palm trees, a bush or two, and tiny white shells scattered over the pink sand. The water was warm and clear, and we had a swim while Coco our guide laid out our picnic on a white cloth and made a fire from palm fronds to barbecue our steak. It was a feast, and the setting was idyllic: just us, the seabirds, the lapping of the waves on the sand, and nothing/nobody else for miles and miles and miles. The world has never felt bigger, and my place in it never smaller.

Costa packet, probably

2012-01-19T18:07:00.002+13:00

My goodness, that scurrilous Schettino, captain of the liner Costa Concordia, is such a cliché Italian coward that he's single-handedly revived all those old wartime jokes like the Italian flag being a white cross on a white background, and Italian tanks having four reverse gears and one forward in case of attack from behind. So thank goodness for the doughty coastguard captain Gregorio De Falco, ripping into him in such a robust fashion: the man's a hero, and more than cancels Schettino out.

From the details that are emerging of the organisation of the ship, and even its design, Italian cruisers are going to struggle to recover from such bad publicity - but the one I've travelled on, the Silversea ship Silver Whisper, was excellent. Small but perfectly-formed, it carried only 382 passengers, so it was nothing like the vast white bricks - like the Concordia and worse - that seem to be the trend these days, where you could spend a week without sighting the sea. We got on in Hong Kong, a splendid port to sail from, and were cosseted and pampered for the following week until we left the ship, reluctantly, in Shanghai - also an impressive port to sail into, which we could, being so svelte, right into the centre past all those extraordinary buildings.

The captain was Italian, not that we saw much of him, but the cruise director, whom we did, was too, and had such a comically thick accent that the Trivial Pursuit afternoons were especially challenging as we struggled not just to think of the answers, but to decipher the questions in the first place.To hear him mangle Don Quixote into 'donkey shoty' was to be totally flummoxed. But it was all good fun, and the ship was so friendly and luxurious, and the food so good, and the complimentary wine bottomless, and the bed so superbly comfortable, I would happily cruise nel modo italiano again - as long as it was with Silversea. So how pleasing that in a couple of weeks I'll be having lunch on board a sister ship, Silver Shadow, when it visits Auckland. And what a bummer, that directly afterwards I'll have to disembark again.

Catching up

2012-01-16T10:41:00.002+13:00

I've been MIA all week because of a new laptop and the unconscionable effort it's taken to get it set up and transfer all my files. Worst of all was migrating my old emails which took an entire weekend of Googling and wrestling with nerd-speak, getting familiar with esoteric things like .dbx files and trying over and over and over to shift files from Outlook Express via Windows Live to Outlook (for which I'm going to have to pay actual money to use). Thanks a lot, Microsoft. But it's done. Yay.

So what has passed me by in the meantime? Australian soldiers on leave getting drunk in the Middle East - sign of the times that that was a news story, but they were in Dubai, where the official relationship with alcohol is uneasy and it's a behind-closed-doors, consenting-adults sort of activity. Westerners who live there - and there are very many - have to get a licence to buy wine from a few special shops and then have to transport it straight home. You can only drink in hotel restaurants, and even then you're meant to behave yourself. (They frown on PDAs too, public displays of affection between the sexes, though it's all on for women and men to hold hands with their same-sex friends: it's rather sweet to see a couple of swarthy young Arab men in robes striding along with their pinkies linked.)

A dinner-table conversation about an upcoming fancy-schmancy family wedding at Hampton Court House (presumably near the actual HC) led to a mention of Blenheim Palace, which was followed, according to the law of coincidence, by a TV documentary that night about that amazing place, with some fantastic photography. It's a private home, always has been, but it's truly called a palace, and it's awesomely beautiful. And then there are the Churchill stars: handsome John, the first Duke of Marlborough, and Winston of course. Unmissable.

And yesterday a cruise liner inexplicably did a Titanic off the coast of Italy, with shameful losses of life. I wonder if it will give pause to those people who have booked for that trip in April to follow the course of the actual Titanic? The last place their ship will call at before crossing the Atlantic is Cobh, in southern Ireland, where we went last year and were happily absorbed by the excellent exhibition in the old railway station there. They've got a lot of artefacts (though not as many as in the travelling exhibition I saw in Copenhagen, which will be back in Barcelona by now) including a letter in a bottle that was thrown overboard as the Titanic sailed and was delivered to the writer's mother after his death in the sinking. And then I imagine the tourists will call in at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where many of the recovered bodies were taken and buried. I'd like to go there one day. I wonder if I will?

'Moby Dick' is, of course, catchier

2012-01-10T21:42:00.003+13:00

So the back half of the Rena finally slipped beneath the waves today, three months after it ran aground on a reef off Tauranga, spilling more cargo and oil into the Bay of Plenty; and in one of those coincidences that the TV newsreaders like so much because it means they don't have to strain over their segues, a ship in port at Christmas Island was damaged in a storm and is now releasing its phosphates cargo and oil into the Indian Ocean. The particular problem with this one is that the pollution it's causing is likely to endanger the whale sharks that will be arriving there soon to feed on crab spawn.

And that's awful, because whale sharks are such splendid creatures - beautiful, impressive, immense, mysterious, harmless - and it's a miserable thought that their numbers may be reduced through more human incompetence and carelessness. Swimming with them at Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia was far more exciting than the silly buzz of being tipped backwards off a platform into a 60 metre free-fall: seeing something that huge, that lives in another world entirely, glide into mine for even just a few minutes, was a total thrill and completely unforgettable, and as I said in the story I wrote about it, it left me feeling fiercely protective of whale sharks. Especially my one, A-708, which I registered afterwards with the Ecocean Whale Shark Photo ID Library, and check up on periodically, to see if anyone else has spotted it around the world.

That's one of the best things about travel: when you've been somewhere, seen something, done something, afterwards you always have an interest, a connection, that makes watching the news or reading the paper or just eavesdropping on conversations so much more real. It's a bit like leaving school and finally - eventually - putting to practical use some of the stuff you learned there. But so much more fun!

Number one

2012-01-07T22:43:00.001+13:00

Oh dear, shocking news today: the first disaster of the new year, only one week in. In the Wairarapa, a hot-air balloon hit power lines, caught fire and crashed, killing the pilot and the five couples who were his passengers. Apparently two of them leapt from the burning basket 100m up in the air - a hideous reminder of 9/11. It's our worst air accident since Erebus in 1979.

Having flown in a balloon three times now, in England and Australia, I can imagine only too well how it went: the nervous anticipation of the passengers getting up before dark, driving out to the launch spot with the trailer behind the van, the pilot making jokes as he got the balloon unpacked, laid out on the ground and held open by helpers. Then he starts the fan to fill the balloon and open it up, and afterwards the burners roar away to heat the air so that the balloon slowly stands.

It's an exciting moment, clambering into the wicker basket (always wicker, for lightness and strength) and holding tight, looking up at the orange glow from the burners brightening the colours of the nylon, feeling the heat - but always an anticlimax when the helpers let go of the ropes, because the balloon rises so smoothly and swiftly, there's no drama at all. It's a bit like that camera trick, where the background retreats behind the subject: the ground seems to pull away, rather than vice versa. And then, you realise you're way up in the air, and it's marvellous. It's cold, because it's still early, the sun's just risen while you were busy watching the balloon got ready, but there's warmth from the burners above; and when they're not being used, it's so beautifully quiet you can hear the dogs barking below on the ground; and there's no wind, because you're moving with it. And the views are fantastic.

The flights always seem to end too soon, within an hour, and then the pilot's busy using the burners to go up and letting air out to decrease altitude, concentrating on using the different air currents at different levels to go in the best direction for landing, watching out for hazards like power lines and trees, roads and rivers, fences and buildings. That's the most dangerous time, and that's when the balloon this morning got into trouble: instead of gently settling back on the earth, it hit power lines that set fire to the basket, burning through the ropes so that the balloon was released and the basket fell to the ground. It must have been horrific. I'm so sorry for those poor people, and their families. (The two who jumped had been given the flight voucher for Christmas by their children, who were on the ground watching; and the pilot's wedding invitations were posted yesterday. So sad.)

Cruising into 2012

2012-01-01T17:38:00.001+13:00

What better way to spend the first (uncharacteristically damp, grey and humid) day of the New Year than by indulging in some movie nonsense on the pretext of revisiting locations from the old one? Thus it was that I spent more than two hours twitching and wriggling nervously in my seat as I watched Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol work through its ridiculous story, told with every tool of movie trickery in the box. Steve Jobs (RIP) would have been thrilled to see the casual and ubiquitous use of iPads and iPhones to track and identify villains as well as a host of other useful spy-themed apps. The most thrilling part though appealed to a much more basic and age-old human instinct: fear of heights.

Which of course took Tom to Dubai, home of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, at 828m and 160 storeys, to do a Spidey up the outside with a dodgy gripper glove and then a Canyon Swing back down again and in through the window. As you do. The views down that extraordinary shiny silver building were dizzyingly spectacular, the surrounding buildings, the vast fountain complex and the ground itself so incredibly far away. I wish I had had the time to go up to the Observation Deck, but you have to book or pay some huge sum, and I was, as usual, on a tight schedule; but I did get to see it from the bottom, which was amazing enough - although very hard to fit into a viewfinder.

The movie started in Budapest, which I was interested to see as I'll be going there in May; then from Dubai went to Mumbai - where I haven't been, does Delhi count? - and finished up in Seattle, on the waterfront where we had a nose around, were most impressed by the Aquarium, and took a ferry from across to Bainbridge Island, which looked lovely but again we had no time to look around (aren't you glad you're not a travel writer, hogtied by the tyranny of the itinerary?). There was even a glimpse of San Francisco, where a chunk got taken off the top of the Transamerica Pyramid by an at-the-last-second aborted nuclear missile. So, pretty much been there - but done all that? Thankfully, not.

Plus and minus

2011-12-31T23:02:00.002+13:00

There will be a lot of people all around New Zealand and the world who couldn't be happier that 2011 is almost at an end. It's been rough, no doubt about that. Shocking natural disasters on an unprecedented scale, terrible things done to innocents by mad and/or bad people, environmental damage caused by stupidity or cupidity, financial suffering... We're all looking forward to putting it behind us (however illogical and arbitrary the idea of year divisions really is).

But it wasn't all bad. My skinny old cat made it through another year - in fact we all did, people, dog, cats, hens, fish and frog. I got to the Bay of Fires finally, after years of trying. The whole family went back to England for the first time ever. I saw Mt Taranaki clear and spectacular, swam with whale sharks and discovered river cruising. The house got a new coat of paint. I spoke French and German to strangers and was understood. NZ won the Rugby World Cup. Happy Feet the emperor penguin was repatriated from Kapiti to the Antarctic. I sold 64 stories, interviewed a Countess and survived two Canyon Swings and a Segway smash.

So, on balance, and from a purely selfish point of view, for me it was better than it was bad. I hope those of you who come here regularly (you know who you are and, thanks to Feedjit, I know where you live - but no more than that, don't be frightened away, come baaaaack!) reach the same conclusion. And if not, that next year's better for you. See you back here then.

Tick, tock, tut tut

2011-12-29T15:52:00.005+13:00

Travel tip for the day: don't be like Kipling's cat. Walking by your wild lone is all very well, out in the wild woods (as long as there are no bears) but when it comes to cities, grand houses and museums, it's far better to join the group and trail round behind the guide. There's nothing that makes a series of exhibitions come to life better than a good guide, enthusiastic and knowledgeable, keen to share the behind-the-scenes stories that won't fit onto the labels.

Case in point, at Clapham's Clocks here in Whangarei, where I'd been before on my own, and enjoyed a pleasant 40 minutes or so looking at all the clocks in this well-presented little museum, I never noticed till I went again and tagged on to a tour, that the number 4 on Roman numeral faces is never IV, always IIII, as above. Had you? More aesthetically pleasing, apparently, and a conspiracy amongst all clock-makers. And unless I'd been told to, I wouldn't have looked closely enough at the clock with founder Archie Clapham's photograph on it to see that his eyes were creepily flicking from side to side, à la Monty Python. Or noticed the Maori girl's pois twirling in perpetual-motion as she turned 360 degrees each minute. Or understood what ormulu really is and how the mercury-based process must have led to Mad Clockmakers just the same as in millinery it produced Mad Hatters.

The guide was appropriately Swiss, or perhaps German - she was enthusiastic about the 'kukuk clocks' - and went into a lot of fascinating historical detail about the coming of the railways and the necessity for standard time; and the maths behind longitude and mapping the new world that I'm sorry to say went over the heads of the old ducks whose tour I'd gatecrashed - literally, since she was quite tall and they were to a man (or mostly woman) amazingly short. But noisy, though, chattering away about their own clock history and other related personal details in that rude way that old people seem to think they can get away with once they've hit 70, tch. But at least I was listening not just politely but with interest. Go me!

Smelling fishy instead

2011-12-28T11:07:00.002+13:00

I know I'll get no sympathy for this very specific #firstworldproblem, but when you stay FOC in 5-star hotels all the time, it does lead to a lot of irritated tutting when you land up at a 3-star on a private trip. No gift on the bed! No Occitane toiletries in the bathroom! No fruit teas on the bar! NO AIR CON!!! Why, I might just as well be at home...

So here I am in Whangarei, oop north, where today the sky is unseasonably grey, the breeze a touch cool, but the people noticeably warmer than in the big city, the Town Basin is pretty even without sunshine and there are interesting yachts in the marina, like the Swiss one about to head off to Papua New Guinea, crewed by a lean brown couple who got their taste for the Deep Blue goodness knows how. Alongside are rusty fishing boats with a definite niff, their decks stacked with crates and floats, all very businesslike, but bearing names like Melodeon and L'Avenir in a pleasing touch of artistic whimsy.

So it's not hot and sunny, but the gulls are calling, the ropes are rapping on the masts, the pohutukawas are brilliantly red, and it's holiday time. I can manage without the Occitane, I guess.

Traditions old and new

2011-12-25T23:49:00.002+13:00

Still with the Christmas stockings, the healthy breakfast spurned in favour of chocolate, deliberately unlabelled gifts under the tree that no-one could identify; plus someone who shall be nameless who turned out to be too fat for a Santa suit: no comment. Pine needles and scented lilies.

Then acrimonious squabbling over the Secret Santa rules, a long cheerful dinner at cobbled-together tables with ham and salmon and baby carrots but no gravy (forgotten) and no herbs in the stuffing balls (forgotten); and pavlova with raspberries and strawberries, and pudding with sauce but no brandy butter (forgotten). And feeble cracker jokes (a locomotive made of toffee? A chew-chew train) but no solemn toast to Absent Friends (shamefully forgotten this year). But new friends at the table, Rosa from Honduras (where there are 7 million people and only one McDonald's) and Andrea from Seattle (really? We went there last year!) and Skyping to a prettily frigid Winnipeg and phoning a damp and dismal Lancashire.

Then home with a share of the left-overs for a nap in the sun, the Queen's Message, toffee and chocolates, Tim Minchin, Graham Norton, the Royal Variety Performance with two Kiwis - Hayley Westenra and the Boy with Tape on his Face - and no ads. It'll do.

Sigh

2011-12-24T09:23:00.004+13:00

The cake is made and decorated, the tree is up and there's a promising swag of pressies underneath it, the epic final assault on the supermarket has been made with success as regards the strawberries (TV news reporting a threatened shortage this year, sparking panic buying in this household at least), the pavlova-making is scheduled, the last-minute asap-deadline of 40 short Australian stories for a website has been met with the promise of a thrillingly generous reward, the weather's come right, delivering sunshine and heat - what could stop this Christmas from being another corker?

More earthquakes in Christchurch, that's what. Four yesterday between 5 and 6 points, shallow and sharp, more liquefaction throughout the eastern suburbs where I used to live, some building collapses, more damage to the already wrecked Cathedral, some minor injuries and, unsurprisingly, heart problems, closed airport, evacuated malls on one of the busiest shopping days of the year - and lots more people deciding that they've had it, they can't take any more. The timing is so cruel, after months of quietness, everyone beginning to hope that it was all over, putting it out of their minds, focusing on Christmas and summer holidays; and now all that's in ruins, shattered like the glass balls on the toppled Christmas trees in homes throughout the city.

It seems very unfair. Yes, other places round the world have suffered much, much worse this year in all sorts of ways, so 182 dead and a bunch of broken buildings is comparatively not much to complain about. But the way it's going in Christchurch is almost like torture: sudden pain, then it's over, but the possibility and fear of more remain, then more pain, then fear, then pain, then fear, then a long respite and the beginning of real hope, then pain again. It's ruinous to the spirit, and especially at a time of year when everyone looks forward to family and fun and being at ease mentally and physically. I do so feel for all those people outside - and inside - their houses right this minute, shovelling stinking silt yet again; and I understand if they feel they can't go on any more.

On the other hand, though, this isn't the Christchurch any more that was so shocked by the first quake in September last year: the city's got systems in place to sort power and water and roads without delay; pretty much everything that can fall down, has fallen down already; the people have water stores, gumboots ready, ornaments Blu-tacked in place. They'll come on through, and they will have a good Christmas. And, afterwards, only some of them will leave.

Ahhhh, pine!

2011-12-18T22:47:00.001+13:00

The tree went up yesterday, possibly the latest ever in our personal history: delayed by the flit down south to walk the Hollyford. "It doesn't feel like Christmas," wailed the Baby when we got back, and then sat and Grinched while we decorated it, hanging up all the old friends that it's always a pleasure to unwrap from the tissue every year. The little red glass Austrian post-horn, the English red phone box, the heavy glass New York orb, the Australian kookaburra, the fat pig from Leavenworth, WA, the Mickey Mouse bell from Disneyland - all reminders of end-of-year trips, when everyone is building up to Christmas and wherever you go looks especially pretty.

I think it's a great time to travel, even if it means early winter in the northern hemisphere: no such thing as bad weather, remember, just the wrong clothes. There's a buzz in the air, the locals as pleased and eager as the tourists, a satisfying synchronicity that you don't get at non-festival times of the year; also, it's interesting to see, amongst so much that's the same, what is different about foreign Christmases. Like the candles lit on family graves in Salzburg, or the cute little huts set up along Nyhavn in Copenhagen where, had we been just a few days later, we could have bought mulled wine and cinnamon biscuits and lovely crafts and gifts. Or special (and especially fattening) flavoured coffees at Starbucks in Seattle, or the Rockefeller Centre ice rink in New York, or the sprigs of holly on the uniform overcoats worn by sweating cast members at Disneyland in sunny LA...

This year's new tree decoration is a Saint Nicholas from Copenhagen in fetching curly-toed boots, which makes a nice connection with the Arabian Nights slippers I saw in the souqs in Dubai, where I stopped off both going and returning from Denmark and where I would have found it rather harder, I'm guessing, to find much that was Christmassy at all.

Down to the sea in slips

2011-12-17T19:38:00.004+13:00

That was the title of a rather dull booklet, full of black and white photos and close-typed text, that passed across my desk in sixth form geography: all about erosion in NZ (but far more effective in teaching the power of the pun). I thought of it when I was over east earlier this year, driving to Wairoa to eat a pie and noticing all the streaks of bare soil on the cleared hills; and again last month when I was down in Taranaki in the back country going to Caniwi Lodge (no prizes for guessing the nationalities of the owners, sorry) where the green hills were scarred with white slips, and I regretted that they'd been cleared of bush for grazing, as even my townie eyes could tell that the grass was thin and the land not very suitable for pastoral use.

I stayed on my last night in Taranaki at Oakura Holiday Park, to the south of New Plymouth: a classic beach-side Kiwi campsite, brought into the 21st century by an internet cabin, but still pleasingly simple, running along the beach underneath a cliff. That's where my cabin was, the one with the poltergeist, where I slept peacefully with the sound of the sea in my ears - and that was the very cabin that last night was swept away by a landslide down the cliff, pushing three of them ahead of it and startling the people who were asleep inside. I was startled myself to see it on the news - and to think I'd been alarmed when the bedside lightbulb popped out!

Down in Fiordland where I was last week, though Davey Gunn did his best 100 years ago chucking lighted matches and grass seed left and right as he herded his cattle along the Hollyford Valley, the bush still stands virgin and ancient and beautiful. Yay.

The right kind of jet set

2011-12-15T13:50:00.002+13:00

Today in Auckland it's like Fiordland on a typical day, with grey skies, wind and torrential rain - what Mike our Hollyford Valley guide called 'inch-an-hour'. There's been a state of emergency declared in Tasman, at the top of the South Island, people flooded out, roads closed and two foolish tourists rescued from their precarious perch clinging to a poplar tree's spindly branches after getting too close to a raging river. Yet down in Fiordland where this sort of stuff is unremarkable (some parts like Milford Sound get up to 8m of rain a year) it was, and is, dry and calm, so that our jetboat driver, Rob, sat in amazement when we came off the river into the lake: "I've never seen Lake McKerrow look like this," he said as the ripples died away and the surface returned to mirror-smoothness.

The drought ("two weeks without a proper rain!" we kept hearing from the walk people, in tones of astonishment) meant that the river level was 2m lower than usual, so they'd had to cut a new path through the bush down to a deeper part of the channel than the one nearer the lodge where Rob normally moors the boat. Tucked under a tree fern, incidentally, were a couple of boxes labelled 'Fresh Free-Range Eggs' that he'd unloaded for the lodge. I had to commend them on their respect for animal rights in not using battery hen eggs to bait their stoat traps.

The trip along the river was consequently even more exciting than usual, as we skimmed over the shallows, sometimes less than a foot in depth, with rocks and logs to add to the challenge. Not normally a huge jet boat fan - and especially not of the Gold Coast incarnation, which does nothing but deliver nauseating 360 degree spins - I thoroughly approved of this trip, as it was exactly what the Hamilton jet was invented to do: navigate shallow braided rivers, enabling access to back-country, up-river areas that would otherwise require days of walking or riding to get to. Invented by a New Zealander, of course.

Flying like a fox

2011-12-13T22:00:00.005+13:00

Another beautiful day on Lake Wakatipu, with people enjoying themselves on, over and even, astonishingly, in the water (where the temperature is a permanently bracing 10 degrees). The lovely thing about Queenstown is that it's such a relaxed place, full of laid-back holiday makers all out to have a good time - but also buzzing with energy from all the adventure stuff going on, the streets full of kayak trailers, vans taking people off to activities, bikes, lean types with backpacks...

We did a bit of both today, starting with a massage at the Hilton's eforea:spa to smooth out any remaining muscle knots from the walk. It was very pleasant, but when I would really have appreciated it was at the end of that long first day, when my shoulders were aching from carrying my pack - or even on the last day after straining my calves walking 7km along the beach in soft sand against a strong wind. But we drifted away afterwards smelling sweetly of various essential oils, all loose and slippery.

Then we were back up Bob's Peak to take one of the more exciting routes down, along nearly a kilometre of ziplines with Ziptrek Ecotours, the last one 300m on a 45 degree angle producing speeds up to 70kmh. It was fun and very safe - though the young daughters of a terrible set of Australian tiger parents didn't think so, especially the younger one who was literally shaking and crying and set off wailing each time. But we had fun, zooming down through the trees with great views of the lake and mountains, hanging upside down (or trying to - I ended up doing the fabled Flying Dying Tortoise instead) and falling backwards in the Leap of Faith.

Then we had some interesting beers at Dux de Lux, and pizza at The Cow, award-winning sorbets on the lake steps surrounded by mutely begging ducks, and took the water-taxi back to the Hilton. Another good day - and unfortunately the last, here. For now.

Hollyford Valley Walk

2011-12-12T21:25:00.003+13:00

Hollyford Valley, done and dusted. Three days of walking, all different: 17km the first day, easy walking but SO MUCH OF IT along the valley bottom, following the beautifully clean, clear, turquoise Hollyford River with the snow bright on the peaks, finally getting to Pyke Lodge where we were met with drinks and nibbles and venison and pud. Then another day of walking through ancient forest and along the coast, 12km interpersed with jetboat rides past the hard and tedious Demon's Track to the end of the river and the rookery where we found not rooks but NZ fur seals, including cute fluffy babies; and another lodge with more drinks and nibbles and salmon and pud. And then today there were 7km along the Hollyford Bar, the long sandspit that back in 1860s claimed one ship in every three that tried to sail through the narrow gap (the Baby, who was with me, claimed Hollyford Bar should be a pub where you could buy, as well as drinks, tshirts reading 'I got wrecked on the Hollyford Bar').

In this rainforest area we struck a two-week drought, with the river dropped by 2m and the filmy ferns shrivelling up, but everything else green and lovely, and the track dry and easy. A wind got up on our last night and it rained, but it was gone by morning and we had a spectacular flight out in little planes that taxied over from the grass airstrip to pick us up right at the front door of the lodge. We flew along the rugged coast and took a sharp left at the entrance to Milford Sound, flying below the tops of those astonishingly high, bare peaks, streaked with waterfalls - though not as sharp a turn as the last one to line up on the strip at Milford, when we stood on one wing.

The star of the whole show was Mike, our young guide who was so knowledgeable and enthusiastic and thoughful and funny, and got us excited about a spindly moss - the world's first vascular plant! it's Jurassic! - and fascinated by early pioneer history - Big John Roberts lay face down on his living room floor for 10 days while his wife tried to organise the dressed wood for his coffin - and able to recognise rocks from the different ranges all around us. It was a brilliant three days, and the walk was a stunner.

Every which way but loose, fortunately

2011-12-09T12:58:00.007+13:00

Well, I threw myself off a cliff this morning, twice, and now after looking certain death in the face, Lake Wakatipu, the Remarkables, Queenstown look fabulously beautiful and perfect. Oh wait, they do all the time anyway.

The Canyon Swing - 60 metres straight down from a 109m cliff, into a 200m swing - was much more fun than it sounds at first. A literal rush, in fact. I didn't mean to do two, but I'm too biddable for my own good, so whereas first time I tipped backwards in a chair, the second time I went head first from an upside-down dangle. Cool!

And now I'm off for a gentle Segway around the lake, easy as but a tough workout for the grin muscles. Tch, what a job I've got...

UPDATE: Well, that was tempting fate. I fell, almost literally, at the last fence, a victim of over-confidence as I zoomed the last twenty metres back to the van, at 15kmh along an unsealed road, misjudging a rut - all my own fault. It's going to be a spectacular bruise, though.* And up till then we'd had a wonderful time, whining along the lakeside, through a building, along the lanes and pathways, up a hill and looping through the Gardens past beds of fragrant roses and cheerful groups of people playing frisbee golf in the sunshine, then back past the shingle beach and the ducks. Supercool fun.

Then we took the gondola up Bob's Peak for a couple of goes on the luge, a little gravity go-cart down a concrete track with corners and chicanes: simple but always a winner. And in between we watched the tandem paragliders running down the hill and launching themselves into the air with no drama at all, to spiral gently back down to the bottom - or, for the thrill-seekers, spin fast and sharply over the town.

And then it was time for our Hollyford briefing and then fish and chips on the beach with an eager audience of ducks and seagulls, not too fussy about whether it was a chip or a toe they were pecking at. Lots of people around, all having fun, some of them showing off (young man tight-rope walking across the water between jetties, I'm looking at you - which was exactly what you wanted, of course). Then back to the Hilton by water-taxi to nurse my grazes and pack for tomorrow's early departure into Fiordland. Busy day!

*UPDATE #2: Oh, yes!

Mountain high

2011-12-08T18:56:00.003+13:00

Even in a crappy iPhone photo, even through Perspex, even with reflections, this poser of a mountain delivers the goods. Taranaki again, from the air as I flew south, fingers crossed that I'd chosen the right (which is to say, left) side of the plane to sit on.

Lots of mountains today: first Ruapehu, of spectacular eruption and lahar fame, into whose crater I'm nevertheless hoping to peer later this summer; then Taranaki; then the Kaikouras, which I last saw a couple of years ago over the rim of a glass while toasting my toes by the fire in my own luxury treehouse; then Mt Cook, tallest of all, lording it over the rest of the Southern Alps; and now the Remarkables, so well named, bare and rocky, with Walter Peak across the lake.

Lake Wakatipu, that is, clean and clear and blue and sparkling today, just below our balcony here at the Hilton, where we've been treated to such a splendid afternoon tea that dinner's sadly now out of the question, despite having walked far along the lakeside this afternoon in the sunshine, smelling the sweet broom and leaping nimbly out of the way of intent cyclists.

And despite tomorrow looming with the horrors of the dreaded Canyon Swing.

Bottom gear

2011-12-05T15:28:00.001+13:00

Jeremy Clarkson has been in the news, running off at the mouth in his usual manner offending this time striking public sector workers in Britain, saying they should all be shot. He's made a career out of being provocative, like so many in the media all around the world including here, so why this particular remark should have incensed audiences more than usual I don't quite understand. Of course there have been rather too many mass shootings over the last year (even one is more than most of us would prefer) but it was, after all, a joke, albeit a clumsy one, made in his Grumpy Old Man persona. He's become such a star that he's very familiar to millions of viewers all around the world, not one of whom would have taken him seriously.

One of his Top Gear co-presenters, Richard Hammond, the short one who thankfully survived a horrendous crash a couple of years ago, is on the other hand seen as inoffensively cute and appealing - though there are a couple of drinkers in the Nag's Head at Longhope who say he's less nice than he appears: all very happy to sign autographs for pretty girls, but ignoring the adoring little boys who want the same thing, and not willing to participate in community events. Shame, that's the best thing about living in the countryside, especially in England, especially in Herefordshire, as I can say with authority having lived there, and not far from the Hamster's place either. That's it above, Bollitree Castle, between Bromsash and Weston-under-Penyard: an 18th century folly built to look like a much older castle. Behind the 'moat' and the wall is a rather nice country house with a big courtyard and gardens, the ideal place for a meet of hounds which is how, thanks to the Ross Harriers, I got to go there long ago, riding lovely black Reef (who was, strictly speaking, Wreath, as in funeral - stupid idea and even stupider name, as well as hard to say). Now I bet no-one gets to go there: it's all private and closed to view, and Richard apparently flits in and out by helicopter.

So he's missing all the fun of community events, like church fetes and open gardens and village barbecues. Silly man. If ever you're driving through the English countryside and happen across one of these events, stop at once and go in. They're great fun.

Fire and water

2011-12-02T09:59:00.003+13:00

So there I was yesterday, puzzling over how to find a home for a winter story about Northland that was pushed from pillar to post until it was no longer seasonal; at the very same time that a huge bush fire was consuming the peninsula where I stayed up there. Arsonist, the sod, not the first time he's struck - and this time, tragically, he took out a rescue helicopter that crashed into the sea in the smoke, killing the two men on board. (It's not a good time for helicopters right now.)

The Karikari Peninsula is a bit out of the way, so it's quiet and unspoiled: lots of bush, some farmland, a vineyard, scattered baches (holiday homes) and a very little town. And oodles of beautiful beaches, natch. We stayed at Carrington Resort, in a villa overlooking the golf course which was occupied only by pukeko on the damp day we were there, but the sunny morning we left (sigh) there were heaps of people queuing up to use it, including lots of family parties - which was nice to see, even though it blew my mind (we have a long, LONG, family history of endless games of minigolf all around the country that ended, every single one, with the Baby hurling her club to the ground and storming off. Perfect example of hope over experience).

She broke her arm on Monday - a mere crack below the left elbow, nowhere near as incapacitating, I felt obliged to point out, as a properly broken right wrist - which she's hoping isn't going to cramp her style next week in Queenstown where we'll be luge-ing, Segwaying, ziplining and, augh, canyon swinging - as well as walking the Hollyford Valley track. My main concern is that the weather will be kinder than it was when I was last down there walking the Milford Track. Which reminds me: remember to pack quick-drying knickers...

Emirates Business A380-800: review

2011-11-30T20:49:00.006+13:00

An A380 Airbus is nothing like a bumblebee. I had thought it was: after all, 580 tonnes, 500 passengers, two levels, it sounds physically incapable of flight; but, just like the bumblebee, it defies common sense and does exactly that. The bumblebee makes it look hard work, though, dipping and blundering along while, I was told, I wouldn’t even notice the Emirates A380-800 taking off. Generally speaking, I find it reassuring to note the moment that an aeroplane becomes airborne — it’s so much more preferable to continuing to trundle along the tarmac until it runs out — so this wasn’t as comforting a comment as it was intended to be. But it was true: the plane lifts off with very little fuss, too heavy to rattle and vibrate like the small fry, and lands the same way, more gently and undramatically than most smaller planes I've flown on.

And what's it like on board? I can't *cough* speak for Economy as I was flying Business, upstairs (not that I actually noticed I was upstairs, the first time, thanks to entering over a different airbridge. I realise that sort of lack of observation immediately discredits this review but, nevertheless, I'll proceed). My first impression was that Emirates has nobly sacrificed passenger numbers for comfort and space, because the individual seating areas are staggered so that at the side, for example, there's only one seat for each row (and two across the middle). The downside of that is that only every odd seat is next to the window, while the evens are on the aisle with the odd seat's legroom between it and the window. Also, because you're so high up and on the upper level, the curve of the fuselage means you can't see down that well. These things are important to people like me who enjoy looking out of the window.

So I was on the aisle and felt a bit exposed - though at least I had my own space. The alternate centre seats are placed so they're right next to each other, for couples travelling together who might want to talk to each other (I KNOW! Who are these people?) I liked that there was lots of space to put my stuff and even a little minibar (of juice and cute little cans of soft drinks). My feet fitted into a cubby hole with a locker for my shoes, and the headphone socket was accessible so I could use my own earphones (though they did supply noise-cancelling ones). I could also have charged up my phone or plugged in my laptop, though why would I want to with 1200 channels of entertainment available?

I found the controller less easy to use than on other airlines (and in fact, despite much wrestling, never in a total of 28 hours discovered how to remove the little control screen from its stand. Yes, too much in touch with my masculine side to ask for assistance there) but there was an excellent range of very recent, even current, movies and TV programmes, and though the screen was smaller than on Cathay Pacific, it was conveniently positioned (I had a back-of-seat screen once that was too far away for me to read the subtitles - shocking!). The table didn't slide back far enough - must be because I'm so very slim (!) but they did their best to fix that with some great meals, starting with hot nuts including macadamias, which won me over instantly.

There weren't that many loos, considering, but since they were positioned right next to the bar, it wasn't a penance waiting for one. Hmm, the bar. (Officially, the 'lounge' - the UAE has an uneasy relationship with alcohol - though there's plenty of it on the aeroplanes). It's a bit of a novelty and not really that useful: looks great in the photos with elegant people decorating it, but these days no-one feels obliged to dress up for business class and so, with only rumpled, comfortably-dressed passengers standing there, it had none of that class. They had nice snacks available, and the barman was very chatty and obliging, but the seating was narrow and slippery and who wants to pay all that money for a fancy seat and then not sit in it?

Come bedtime, the seat didn't go completely flat, no matter what they claim, so it was less comfortable than, again, Cathay - but the pillow was lovely, and it was all good enough. The staff were pleasant and helpful without being obsequious, and they were the smart ones: the Emirates uniform is one of the best.

As for punctuality, Emirates takes that so seriously that they're positively hard-line about check-in times: I've just read that they're now going to shut the check-in desk an hour before take-off, so that's something to look out for - especially at their shiny, spacious new airport in Dubai, where you have to hike for miles to some gates. They don't tell you that the special Business and First Class check-in terminal necessitates a route march to the shops and the gates.

But I would happily fly Emirates again. The plane is comfortable and has lots of little touches to keep me happy; and my complaints above are just quibbles. They have an extensive network of routes and deserve their reputation as one of the best and most popular airlines to fly with. And I'm not just saying that because they were hosting me, by the way.

Back to front

2011-11-29T21:49:00.004+13:00

This is Raj Ghat, the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi where an eternal flame burns above the simple black marble platform and an endless stream of school parties, pilgrims and tourists - as well as the odd world leader - come to pay homage, walk around the tomb three times, and visit the two nearby Gandhi museums. One of them is in the house where he was living when he was assassinated, and where his last footsteps have been replicated in concrete leading up some steps to the little gazebo where he was killed.

He is, of course, rightly and understandably venerated in India and all around the world, and his campaign of civil disobedience and passive resistance was one of the things for which he's remembered and seen as an inspiration. But he wasn't the first to think of this way of reacting to oppression by a stronger force. Fifty years earlier, at Parihaka in Taranaki two Maori chiefs, Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi, led their people in exactly that when Government surveyors came onto their land: they politely removed the pegs and fences and ploughed up the settlers' crops planted in Parihaka soil.

It all came to a head on 5 November 1881 when 1500 armed troops rode into the village where children welcomed them with songs and dances and offered them freshly-baked loaves, while the adults sat silently on the ground. The chiefs and hundreds of their followers were arrested and improsoned without trial, the village was pillaged, the women raped, the houses destroyed, and the land seized without compensation. Parihaka never recovered and the settlement dwindled to almost nothing, from a population of 2500 down to four.

Now it's being resurrected, and groups of tourists, like us last week, are being welcomed and fed just as the soldiers were (except with a very tasty 4-course meal), told the story and shown the grave of Te Whiti, which is almost as simple as Gandhi's. It's a good thing that Maata and her people are doing there, but shameful that it's the only way that New Zealanders can learn the detail of such an important event in our history and about two such influential men, who are commemorated nowhere else.

Gandhi has a statue in Wellington, though.

Cruising the Rhine: it's da bomb!

2011-11-25T14:27:00.003+13:00

There's a paragraph in the paper today about a drought in Germany which has dropped the level of the Rhine so far that unexploded bombs from WWII are now a threat to shipping on the river. It says that bomb disposal experts have had to blow up an incendiary bomb near Cologne and are working out what to do with a bigger bomb lying in just 40cm of water near Koblenz. As well, a grenade was spotted earlier this week on the river bank near Bonn. All highly disruptive, no doubt, to river traffic which as well as a number of cruising companies includes thousands of busy barges 24/7.

This is all of great interest to me, having cruised along the Rhine earlier this year past, yes, Cologne, Koblenz and Bonn, and heard the captain tell us that because of low river levels, we might not be able to complete the journey all the way to Amsterdam. We were all pleased to hear, the next day, that there had been heavy overnight rain in Switzerland that was expected to raise the river in time for us to stick to Plan A. Hooray, we all thought, no buses for us! We would have been even more joyful had we realised that a bit of Swiss sogginess was all that stood between us and Kingdom Come, courtesy of Bomber Command.

This man busily poking his metal detector into the water from a previously-unexposed shingle bank should have thought twice too, about exactly what sort of treasure he might be unearthing.

Chicks and choppers

2011-11-23T16:50:00.002+13:00

This morning, at the very moment that I was writing about the helicopter trip I took with Heliview in New Plymouth last week, another chopper being used to set up the seven-storey Christmas tree down at Viaduct Harbour in the city got tangled up with a pole and crashed in a muddle of metal. Fortunately the pilot wasn't seriously hurt - though as TV cameras were there filming the whole thing, his professional standing has taken a bodyblow and he's never going to live it down.

It was my fourth helicopter ride: the first was a mere hop across Lake Wakatipu after finishing the Greenstone Valley Trail, but the second was the real thing, swooping around in the Red Centre in Australia to get another perspective on Kings Canyon, which is spectacular enough seen from your own two feet, but even more amazing from the air. The third was great fun too, whale-spotting at Kaikoura one golden evening, hovering over a sperm whale as it came up to breathe and rest, and then buzzing back across the water to land on a bluff high over the bay. And then there was the Taranaki trip, when sadly we couldn't fly up to look into the crater of the mountain which was covered in cloud that day, though we did still get great views of that green-as countryside. I enjoyed all of the trips, thanks to expert and laid-back pilots who made it all seem super-safe. Ha!

And in other aerial news, I rescued a young thrush that I found this morning lying on its back on the road when I was out walking (after being hit by a car, I fancy, rather than just having chosen an inappropriate spot for a bit of a zizz). I brought it home and put it in the cat basket under a towel to see if a rest in the dark might do the trick - and happily it did. After an hour or so it was recovered enough to fly away as good as new. Yay, I thought, and wandered into the garden to pick flowers. Where I found the tiny corpses of two baby blackbirds lying on the grass, blown out of their nest perhaps or possibly preyed upon by other birds - magpies? - and dropped. Won one, lost two. Damn.

(Photo by Dean Mackenzie)

Snap!

2011-11-22T22:45:00.000+13:00

Look, I'm sorry to keep harping on about this mountain, but it's pretty spectacular - pretty and spectacular - you have to agree: certainly Ellen in St Louis does, envying our having to drive only 4 hours or so to get to it. She would have to drive for a day, she says, to reach a mountain, and even then it wouldn't be as pretty as Mt Taranaki.

But of course there are lots of stunning mountains in the US, although rather further away. I have to admit to a preference for the volcanoes: they're so much more satisfyingly shaped, there's something very aesthetically pleasing about that regular cone. I was thrilled to see Mt Barker so clearly when we were in Washington state last year, poking up unexpectedly on the horizon behind Seattle and becoming clearer and clearer as we drove north. And then when we came back across Puget Sound from the San Juan islands, there it was, looming up over the sea, white and sparkling and huge.

It's in the photo I chose for November when I was compiling my calendar for this year, so it's there on the kitchen wall right now, a white triangle peeping up behind a mass of brilliant orange pumpkins growing out at a pick-your-own farm where families were wheeling their toddlers round in barrows, scouting round for the best-looking ones for their Thanksgiving decorations. But it's the coastal one I'm going with today, because the shape shows up better. Remarkably similar to Taranaki, don't you think?

Poltergeists, poultry and a prediction

2011-11-21T16:24:00.002+13:00

There's nothing like the roar of the surf just twenty metres or so away from your bed to ensure a good night's sleep, despite the actions of the petulant poltergeist that hurled a glass light fitting to the bathroom floor just before I entered my cosy cabin at Oakura Holiday Park, and later poked a halogen light bulb out of its fitting to bounce on the bedside table, making me jump as I sat there blearily catching up on the day's notes.

But the friendly bantam who popped by in the morning to check up on me more than made up for those goings-on. I'd also have welcomed, but didn't see, the duck with the gammy leg who's another regular according to Al, who runs the park with his wife Jan. They both came with us to the Butlers Reef pub last night where the food was great and the company jolly. I'd've had more to drink, though, if I'd known how bumpy the flight back to Auckland was going to be, in that little plane. It didn't help that I kept remembering the montage of newspaper front pages on the wall of the airport cafe in New Plymouth reporting the miraculous landing there of an aeroplane on only one wheel. What on earth was the designer thinking?

So, Taranaki done and dusted. Well, hardly - far too much to see and do there in a scant three days: more of a Taranaki dip and degustation. I'd like to go back for a proper look, at leisure. And why not? It's only a four and a half hour drive away, along a very pretty route; and that way there'd be no airborne lurching. Next time I'll listen to Chaddy: he warned us there would be a storm today. "Chaddy knows," the locals in the pub said. They were right - and so was he.

A poser, puha and a pun

2011-11-20T20:07:00.003+13:00

Honestly, this mountain is such a poser. Lurks behind cloud cover much of the time, tantalisingly giving glimpses through holes in the cloud or veils of mist and then, and only when it feels like it, ta-rah! It's a fabulous sight from any angle, but I must say the foreground of all the blooming rhododendrons at Hollard Gardens framed it beautifully. It's ages since I've been to a big garden, and this one is so lovely: heaps of rhodies and azaleas, but also great trees, long sweeps of fine lawn and masterfully natural plantings of annuals and other bright flowers in the borders. And it's free - of the people, for the people.

Our main focus today was Parihaka, a Maori settlement to the south of New Plymouth where passive resistance was born in 1881, at great cost to the local tribes but inspiring Ghandi, apparently. We had a really delicious lunch there served by Maata's children and were entertained by them too. Then we had a superficial look around the village, which is struggling to come back to life after being abandoned and burnt down in the 1960s. It's a complicated tale that we weren't able to investigate very deeply, unfortunately, as nothing is rushed on a marae and greetings and meals must take their time. But we felt welcomed and even a short visit was better than none.

We ran out of time at the end, so our cruise with Happy Chaddy was cut short - perhaps as well, since the wind was up and with it the sea - but it was fun to slide down the ramp in a real English-built lifeboat the same age as me, and bob out on a circuit round one of the nearer islands to see fur seals, sea birds, a historical location that linked with Nigel's museum, and 'NZ's last real moa'. Actually, it was a reel mower - and the fact that Chaddy went to all the trouble of rowing out to this precipitous, rocky island and dragging an old hand mower up the cliff to fix in place, all for the sake of a pun, tells you everything you need to know about the entertainment value of his cruise. I'm a fan.

Sometimes you get the breaks...

2011-11-19T18:59:00.003+13:00

"Taranaki's so nice, it's as good as anywhere else. I don't know why people don't come here." So said Nigel Ogles, model-maker extraordinaire at Tawhiti Museum today.

He might be right about the people, but as for being as good enough - well, when the mountain comes out as it did this morning, could it get any better? It's a stunner, and we had a great couple of hours scrambling along its flanks with Dave, a local man and DOC manager, who knew everything about the history, vegetation and mythology of Taranaki. And he was enthusiastic and cheery and ready with a helping hand when the steps and rocks got a bit slippery.

And then we went to see the marvels that Nigel has been working on since throwing it in as an art teacher twenty-odd years ago. I love me a good diorama - and have the forehead bruises to prove it - but Nigel's work is up there with Weta Workshop. The great Richard Taylor himself has come and been staggered, and you can't say more than that. History with art, humour and passion: it's a winner.

High and low

2011-11-18T20:08:00.039+13:00

I could get used to being taken places by chopper. Just climb aboard, clap on the headphones and away you go, no fuss, no time wasted, and the views are terrific. Richard was at the controls, a veteran of 6 years in the British army - which is slightly unnerving in a pilot, you hope there won't be any sudden moves, but all was well. We swooped over New Plymouth and the port, clattered down the coast past the long black beaches with their long white lines of surf, and then inland over what must surely be the neatest and greenest farmland on the planet.

The mountain was hidden in cloud today, alas, so we couldn't get eye-to-eye with the summit, but we snooped over the tucked-away farms and houses to the north before setting down in a distant valley where Bob and Karen took us up some precipitously steep tracks and along knife-edge ridges in the ute before we walked through the bush to see what they were doing there in the name of conservation and specifically kiwi preservation.

Inconveniently nocturnal, the kiwi were naturally a no-show, but we did get to hear the clicks on the radio transmitter that showed Maru was where he should be, down in his burrow conscientiously incubating the eggs while the female that laid them was out recovering from the effort. (Kiwi eggs are about one-third of the bird's body size. Eye-watering.) It was a good walk, and even better to meet people with such drive to improve the environment for everyone's benefit.

Gee!

2011-11-15T19:06:00.002+13:00

When you go for a drive into the country, you expect to see sheep (this is New Zealand), cows, cattle and horses; and birds - a few hawks, pukeko maybe; always some dead possums. If you're very lucky, you stop to take a photo of a bridge and there, right above your head in a flame tree, is a tui feeding from the flowers, swinging about from the twigs like an acrobat. Not that the purists would accept this as a valid tui image, since it's not in a native tree. But it is better than my only other tui photo, of one having a bath in the guttering of our house. And the sound track of singing sky lark (another non-native, tch) was just icing on the cake.

I was doing a roadtrip story about SH16 which heads north-west from Auckland straight into the wine country around Kumeu, where serious tasters were solemnly spitting into - do they call them spittoons? Surely oenophiles have a fancier word (like oenophile). Anyway, not swallowing. There are more vineyards around Kumeu than you can shake a stick at, famous ones, too: Coopers Creek, Matua Valley, Nobilo, Soljans Estate... All very neat and flushed with new green, the roses at the ends of the rows just in bloom.

Then it was out into the real country, where the horses are knee-deep in buttercups, the fields are pricked out with curving lines of new crops just sprouting, and the hayfields are long and lovely and lush (thanks, GM Hopkins). I was looking for a private sculpture park owned by a millionaire (450 times over) who likes to think big. The little old ladies in the op shop at the pretty little Kaukapakapa Church told me "You can't miss it, it's just past the concrete bridge. There's giraffes and all sorts!" And you know what? They were right. Giraffes, eh. Not at all what you expect to see on a country drive in New Zealand.

Eleventy-leventy-leventy-leventy-leven

2011-11-11T14:05:00.001+13:00

I've just realised, from the information on the camera, that I was one second short of taking this photo at 11:11:11am. Bummer! I wonder how many other anal people around the world are, progressively, taking a photo like this - more than 11,111 I bet. But I must have been one of the first, so yah boo sucks to everyone else handicapped by the International Dateline.

See you back here next year, 12 December, lunchtime. It's a date.

Apples have been around forever

2011-11-10T23:13:00.002+13:00

Tonight's TV news report about the parlous state of the Italian economy included a shot of this sign, outside the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, a place I briefly visited in May. It was a strikingly modern sight in a city that's attractively historic - even if much of it is reconstructed history after the, ahem, last unpleasantness.

The city is grander than it should be because in 1949 Frankfurt expected to be made the new capital of Germany and was rather put out when the vote went to Bonn, especially since they'd already erected a bunch of fancy buildings and all. So instead it was made the financial centre, which has been a nice little earner for the city ever since.

The other big event for Frankfurt is its annual Book Fair, the biggest in the world, which it muscled in on claiming Gutenberg as their own, whereas he was actually a Mainz man. (New Zealand, incidentally, is going to be the guest of honour at next year's Fair, which means that there's going to be a lot of German attention focused on not just NZ literature, but the country as a whole.) It is true that he sold his first printed Bible there in the fifteenth century. There's a big statue of him and various city fathers in the main square, featuring bits of printing press, and I was most impressed by the sculptor's inspired vision of the future of books demonstrated by this woman holding an iPad.

Before the event

2011-11-09T16:42:00.003+13:00

Another of my Downton Abbey stories is out today in the Christmas issue of Next magazine; and in the travel section is a story by another writer about Copenhagen, with the photos showing all of the things I saw, except in a rather better light. The weather was the main disappointment of our visit there - that, and the timing, just a week too early for the Christmas markets, sob - and it would have been lovely to have had some blue sky and sunshine to bring out all the colours. It was lucky, at least, that our first afternoon had a decent gleam of sunlight; and the last morning was getting better again.

Photographing the Little Mermaid against even a watery sun wasn't as easy as I would have liked, though. She's been decapitated twice, poor thing, and has a noticeable scar around her neck. She's got about a bit though: she was in Shanghai last year for the Expo, and I was there too, just before it began, when the city reeked of wet concrete and there were traffic barriers, cranes and big machinery all over the place as they rushed to get ready. It was the same in Delhi when I visited just before the Commonwealth Games - and no doubt it's how London is going to be next year when we go there a few months before the Olympics. It's getting to be a theme.

Back to Copenhagen: despite the whingeing, above, there is still something to be said for misty, moody days, and the view from the hotel across the harbour was positively Turner-esque when the sun rose:

One hump or two?

2011-11-07T22:40:00.002+13:00

Tomorrow is the big day at the races in Christchurch - or one of them, at least: Cup Day at the Addington trots, and a welcome chance to dress up and have some fun for Christchurch people. I was a bit disappointed in Dubai not to see any horses, other than in statues and sculptures, since Arabs are such a beautiful breed. If I'd had more time, I would have tried to go for a ride. Arab horses have rounder, flatter hooves, you know, to help with not sinking into the sand.

But I did see racing camels. I'd heard about camel racing last year while lurching through the Outback near Pichi Richi in South Australia with Graham, a 4th-generation cameleer who has worked as a trainer in the Middle East with racing camels worth up to $8million, which is pretty rich going for a place (in Dubai at least) where gambling is forbidden. The prizes tend to be luxury cars, in compensation. The camels can go surprisingly fast: I was told 50kmh for the females, half that for the males.

We saw a training session in progress outside the city, dozens of camels loping along, some with jockeys and the rest with the new robot jockeys, that have taken over from the young boys who used to be used, often in less than desirable conditions. Now the camels have little machines strapped to their backs with whips attached that whirl round in circles, radio-controlled from the 4WDs that drive alongside. Modern technology, eh?

Lounging around

2011-11-06T17:41:00.000+13:00

I'm back in Dubai's shiny new airport, all marble and stainless steel and reflective surfaces over vast areas of space. There's a separate entrance for First and Business class passengers that's most spacious of all, but they don't tell you that after you've been wafted through check-in, you have an enormously long hike to get where the action, and all the plebs, are.

I had a small stoush with a bolshy young Arab lady who tried to push in the queue at the shop where I was offloading the last of my local currency: boy, did she argue! But I stood my ground and she, in a hurry, eventually stormed off with a lot of huffing. The Brits may have moved out of Dubai sixty years ago, but that's no reason to abandon one of their most useful gifts to civilisation.

And now I'm in the lounge, disappointed that I can't get my iPhone to connect wirelessly (hence no photos), struggling with a public keyboard with most of the letters worn off, and rather tempted to have my shoes shined, for the novelty of it - the last time was in New York, years ago - but anxious that it may involve tipping, and I have no more cash (see above). I do have some Samoan currency that I forgot to put into the big glass charity jars back in Auckland, but pretty though the notes are, I doubt they would be welcomed. Certainly the man at the Dubai Mall money exchange yesterday laughed with genuine amusement at the very idea.

This is a very big lounge, and somewhere in it is a rack of newspapers that evidently includes the Sunday Times, so that's my next mission. I do keep busy, on these trips.

Cosmo diary, with dates

2011-11-06T05:45:00.000+13:00

It's been a very cosmopolitan sort of day, literally: Dubai is that sort of place. Only 20% of the population is made up of local Emiratis, and everyone else comes from the rest of the world. My guide Tareq said (but then he would, wouldn't he?) that they all get on famously, and no-one resents the fact that the Government looks after the locals so well, giving them houses, wedding money and children money, free health care and schooling and so on - and, since no-one has to pay taxes here, perhaps they really do.

So this morning's tour took in mosques both Arab and Turkish, and this afternoon I was left to wander in that western place of pilgrimage and worship, the shopping mall. Specifically, the Dubai Mall, with 1200 shops, in which no big retail name was absent - Bloomingdales, Galeries Lafayette and, from England, Debenhams ha ha but also Marks and Spencer - and where the people-watching was epic. Every permutation of the burqa was there, and traditional clothing for the men, as well as the full gamut of western dress. There was a huge ice rink where little boys in what looked like white nightgowns pushed plastic penguins across the ice; an equally huge aquarium with sharks, rays and Kelly-Tarlton tunnels; a three-storey waterfall with diving men frozen in mid-plunge; and outside a vast artificial lake where a fountain show took place at 1pm against the backdrop of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa at 828 metres or 160+ storeys (which no, I didn't go up because you have to book). It was actually so tall that I didn't see it straight away, through not looking high enough.

There were also markets today, fish and fruit and veg (including, shockingly, kiwifruit from Iran), lots of dates - there are 300-odd varieties, all different in taste and appearance, and I also tried the fresh ones, yellow and crunchy. I saw men crouched over big copper vats stirring syrup with a wooden paddle to make a honey and date sweetmeat for the holiday of Eid tomorrow - the same one I was in India for a couple of years ago, that involved very many decorated goats there. Here there were also sheep and cows on the backs of utes being transported through the city centre, looking docile, not knowing that for them, it wasn't going to end well. I feared the doleful-looking fish in the tank beside which I ate my Chinese dinner tonight have a similar fate ahead of them, alas.

Happy socket...

2011-11-05T01:12:00.004+13:00

... is happy. Though I'm a bit sorry to leave Copenhagen today, now that the sun is gleaming through the clouds again, and I had such excellent fun this morning cycling along beside the harbour to the Little Mermaid. The cobbles rattled every tooth in my head, but I really enjoyed it, even feeling a little Danish - though they whip along MUCH faster than I did.

And now I'm waiting to board the plane taking me back to Dubai and its 35 degree heat. It's never dull, eh?

Riches

2011-11-04T06:34:00.002+13:00

Hmm, I see on the way to coming here that this blog has had a visitor from Hanover - which is a coincidence because Copenhagen is full of rampaging Hanover football fans decked out in green and white scarves. They were marching about in groups, carrying crates of beer and singing randomly, though cheerfully. Something happened while I was in a museum however, nosing happily through an excellent, if unexpected Titanic exhibition - I could hear lots of sirens despite the headphones of my audio guide - and when I walked back to my hotel, the big square at the end of Nyhavn, though empty of fans, was awash with an appalling tide of litter, crushed beer cans and broken bottles. I hope the Danish police, many of whom get about on bikes wearing endearingly unflattering black and reflector-strip shorts, were able to cope with the Germans.

Today was grey and cold again, alas, so the autumn colours went to waste, and when I explored the Rosenborg Castle it was hard to appreciate the treasures within because the lighting was so dim in all the rooms. That was a shame because there was no surface not covered with fine glass or china, old tapestries, portraits big and small, or carved wooden panelling - however, it did speed up the inspection process. I lingered in the basement treasury, though, where the crown jewels (Denmark has the oldest monarchy in the world) were gleaming in their cases and I felt sorry - well, not really - for the woman who had to bear up bravely with a monster ruby the size of a goose egg hanging from her neck.

At lunch I sat in the rooftop restaurant of the old Post Office and had a little feast of Danish specialties, including a crispy fried plaice fillet, smoked salmon with cream cheese and a small beef steak with mushrooms. It was all very tasty and I enjoyed it, but it was filling and I'm still not feeling empty enough to be looking forward to dinner tonight, which is in a restaurant that's impressed the apologetic young man at reception here (he's called, inappropriately, Raphael). And it's just tragic that I haven't had room at any time during my stay to indulge in any street food: not the hot roasted and/or candied nuts, not the crepes with nutella and banana, not the organic hot dogs, and not - sob - the sweet breads and pastries that make such gloriously-smelling use of sugar and cinnamon.

Better by design

2011-11-03T06:51:00.002+13:00

Sadly we had a leaden sky all day with not even a glimmer of sun, so my toiling up the Round Tower was a bit of a wasted effort as far as the view over the rooftops was concerned; though the tower itself is worth the visit. It was completed in 1642 and is remarkable for the spiral road to the top inside it. Peter the Great rode up there on a horse, a car has made the journey, and there have been lots of bike races in it; but what surprised me most today was that no-one seems to have been tempted to set loose one of the big round pumpkins sitting in the window recesses as Halloween decorations. Such a well-behaved people.

There's an observatory at the top, but it was closed - and there wasn't much to observe either, as fog came down and rubbed out the tops of all the towers, unfortunately. So today was about interiors: of warm and inviting Baroque churches where music was being played; the Lego shop with its lolly-bins of brightly-coloured bits; the Royal Cafe where we had Smushi for lunch - beautifully-presented open-faced little sandwiches, a cross between traditional smorrebrod and suchi; the Design Centre, which took its form follows function philosophy seriously and was not just hands-on but bums-on in its display of stylish Danish inventions, from egg-cups to chairs. They're nothing if not practical, the Danes: proudly included were also colostomy bags and hernia knickers.

It's a good city for walking around, though the cobbles are punishing; but it was a shame there was no sunshine to bring out the colours of the autumn trees and the painted buildings. Perhaps tomorrow.

Onsdag morgen

2011-11-02T19:34:00.001+13:00

Creamy pumpkin soup and delicate brill for dinner last night at cosy organic restaurant Cap Horn along the quay, where hardy souls - not all of them smokers - sat outside in the chill, wrapped in the rugs that were draped over the backs of the chairs. Along the edge of the water is a row of little kit-set huts being assembled for the Christmas market that begins next week, so we'll miss it unfortunately. They were busy yesterday slotting the huts together and stringing spruce garlands across the cobbles and around the windows, and fixing up the lights. It's going to be very pretty.

The waitress last night started speaking to us in Danish and then apologised sincerely when we looked nonplussed - as if it was unreasonable of her to have done that, here in Denmark and all. Of course, like everyone else we've spoken to, her English was perfect, even down to the regional accent, which was appealing. When I encounter a Dane speaking Brummy, I'll be enchanted.

This morning is dull and overcast, so I'm glad we did the canal tour yesterday even though we were rumpled and tired after our travel. For a moment there, we were thinking - madness! - that this was a holiday.

Wonderful!

2011-11-02T05:29:00.003+13:00

It's lovely to be back in Copenhagen after, cough, 30 years, and this bit doesn't seem to have changed at all. Nyhavn is still a short canal lined by 4 and 5-storey houses painted strong colours - one of them, number 67, once lived in by Hans Christian Andersen, rather sweetly known here as HC Andersen - between narrow cobblestone roads, with lots of old wooden sailing ships moored along the wharf. Our hotel is right at the end, where the canal meets the harbour, and I have a lovely view of the Best Restaurant in the World, straight across the water: Noma, in a tall brick warehouse. We're not to eat there, unfortunately, though I'm sure we'll do just fine at the places Wonderful Copenhagen has picked out for us.

We took a canal cruise this afternoon, in bright sunshine and a sharpish breeze, scraping under low bridges and delighted by the towers and spires, bikes and boats, brick and stucco in the low sunshine. Back at the hotel, the nice young man at reception was amazed that we should have come all the way from New Zealand to see Copenhagen. "It's not Paris, you know," he said apologetically. But it's lovely, and I know we're going to enjoy exploring it over the next few days - and staying in this cosy old hotel, 71 Nyhavn, with its beams and odd corners and shapes.

It took six hours to get here from Dubai, by the way - a daylight flight this time, and I looked out at just the right time to see a gigantic snow-clad mountain spread out below, surrounded by brown arid land. According to the airshow, it was halfway between Van and Tblisi, and Google suggests tonight that it was Mount Ararat, in Turkey. I do wish they'd put proper maps in airline magazines the way they used to

A day in Dubai

2011-11-01T06:40:00.001+13:00

What a long day! Despite sleeping well on the plane, I was awake at the equivalent of 3am here, landed at 5.30am, got to the hotel and had second breakfast like a good hobbit, and was out again at 9am on a city tour. Then lunch at 1pm, a short break, and out again at 3pm for the Desert Safari which returned us to the hotel at 9pm. And tomorrow we're due down in the foyer at 6.30am for the next leg of the trip to Copenhagen.

Where it will be considerably cooler than the 38 degrees it was today as we skimmed along wide, neat, clean and modern highways past those amazing skyscrapers and miles of fancy villas and apartment blocks, the bright blue Creek and sea, ranks of date palms and dozens of mosques with graceful minarets. We popped into souqs specialising in spices, gold, clothing; went on a river ferry; to the underground museum; and did a circuit of Palm Island, that literally fantastic creation in the sea built in the shape of a palm tree.

Then tonight we bucketed over sand dunes in a 4WD Chrysler, slithering and swerving; watched racing camels being trained with robot jockeys; saw a falconry demonstration - peregrines can reach 369kmh, you know; glimpsed wild oryx with 90cm horns; watched the sun set over the desert dunes; had a camel ride; drank Arab coffee; had a local meal that was served just like in a school canteen; and watched agog as a scarily manic Russian belly-dancer whirled and gyrated like nobody's business. And now, hooray, it's bed time.

Starting well

2011-10-30T17:52:00.002+13:00

This is the new Emirates business lounge at Auckland airport: very big and spacious, just like the A380 we'll be getting on board shortly. "So big you can't feel it take off," I was just told. Don't know if that's what I want to hear, it being such an unfeasably large aircraft that getting off the ground seems problematic anyway.
But the lounge is the nicest one here, smelling of leather from the cream armchairs, except down here by the food which is so delicious it's only the knowledge that I'm going to be offered still more once on the way that's stopping me from making a real pig of myself (the only pig in the whole restaurant, that would be, of course).
We have a ninety-minute stopover in Sydney that I wasn't expecting - bit of a shame on top of what I'm told is a 22-hour flight to Dubai. Just as well there's 2,000 hours of viewing in the entertainment system...

Happy birthday to me

2011-10-28T17:44:00.000+13:00

And what better way to spend it than poking a cannula into my skinny old cat and pouring electrolytes into him? "Oh dear, I think he's only got one more visit here in him," said the vet yesterday, showing me how to put the needle into a flap of some of the loose skin he now has so much of. Yet he's still cheerful enough, if tired, and though he doesn't do much more than lick at his food, he enjoys a wander round the garden and a roll on the path in the sun, and always seeks me out to lie against me at least, if his auld enemy the laptop has stolen yet again the prime position.

So it's a bit of a worry that I'm going away on Sunday for a week. That's a long time for him, especially now, and I'll be anxious that he won't be here when I come home. I'm doing another crazy flit up to the northern hemisphere, via a day in Dubai each way, for just three nights in Copenhagen. I was last there in 1980, so I'll see some changes - and also lots of things the same, since the city has such a lot of historic buildings. I do remember that my overwhelming impression last time was that I'd never before seen so many beautiful things I couldn't afford (same for Stockholm and Oslo - they know a few things about style, do those Scandinavians).

It's autumn there of course, and about 9 degrees, which considering it's 20 here and 33 in Dubai, is going to be something of a shock to the system, especially considering the fierce air-conditioning I'm going to encounter. Although not on the desert sunset safari - that'll be the one with the camels...

Under the volcano

2011-10-25T16:27:00.005+13:00

Another amazing coincidence! And a mystery...

Beleaguered Boeing is finally bringing their troublesome Dreamliner to New Zealand next month, Air New Zealand having ordered several and having had to be very patient as deliveries are currently 3 years behind schedule. Clearly, then, it's the ideal time to write up our visit last year to their assembly plant at Everton not far from Seattle (my Seattle story was published in the Herald on Sunday just a couple of days ago, but that's a piffling coincidence, I'm picky now). They told us on the tour there over that astonishingly huge building ("big enough to enclose the whole of Disneyland - and the carpark!" they boasted) that William Boeing's first two planes, built in 1916 by the man himself and his partner Conrad Westervelt, little biplanes with floats, were sold a couple of years later to New Zealand, which was mildly exciting to us at the time.

Doing a bit more research today, though, I've discovered that they were used by a flying school here in Auckland to train pilots, and on inaugural air mail deliveries within NZ. When the flying school closed down in 1924 the planes were put into storage - inside a tunnel in North Head, where I went last Friday to watch a yacht race. And there, apparently, they remain to this day, despite a number of attempts to locate them by both private people and Motat, the technology museum where the Baby works part-time, and where their new aviation hangar has just been opened, which the OH visited on Sunday, and where the planes would no doubt be displayed if they had been found.

As it is, however, their exact whereabouts are unknown, walled-up and concreted into an unidentifiable disused tunnel under this extinct volcano-turned-fort, the men who did the work having pretty much passed on by now, and the authorities being curiously unhelpful to those trying to solve the mystery. What a ripping yarn!

Enfin!

2011-10-23T23:16:00.000+13:00

Oooh, see how the gold is gleaming on this triumphal statue by the Alexandre III bridge over the Seine in Paris. How beautiful it is! But really, you know, tonight it should be silver. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Fish and Chopin

2011-10-22T21:18:00.002+13:00

Met up with an old friend today and a new one: a fellow Inca Trail climber from three years ago (the one who channelled his inner mountain goat and stayed in front all the way, despite being rather more stricken in years than all of the rest of us) and his wife here from England for the rugby. So what do you do on a free day in Auckland?

You go to Waiheke, of course - even if the weather wasn't the golden day we were promised, it was still worth taking the ferry over, mooching around Oneroa, eating lunch on a deck looking over the bay, polishing off a bottle of Kennedy Point, and then popping up the hill for what was, cheerfully, our third helping of an island institution. Lloyd and Joan Whittaker have been putting on their ninety-minute show for I don't know how long, introducing and demonstrating their wonderful collection of musical instruments from a dulcimer to Paderewski's concert grand, with in between harmonicas, accordians, pianolas, glockenspiels, organs and more. They play everything from Old Macdonald to Chopin, by way of Lloyd Webber, and at the end the audience is welcome to have a go. It was a great success with our visitors, and entirely a delight, even third time around.

Back in the city, it must have been about our fifth or sixth time to Kelly Tarlton's underwater world and Antarctic experience, with two sorts of penguins happily sitting on eggs in their snowy underground enclosure, and more varieties of sharks gliding over our heads than we could shake a stick at. There's always something new to enjoy, and lots of old stuff to enjoy again, and more things to learn. Did you know an adult octopus can squeeze through a hole the size of an old English penny?

Ahoy and other nautica

2011-10-21T22:37:00.001+13:00

This morning a couple of hundred yachts left Auckland in perfect conditions on the Coastal Classic race to Russell in the Bay of Islands, and I - and a hillful of people - watched them go from North Head. They were a grand sight on the sparkling water with the wind filling their spinnakers (possibly gennakers - I'm no mariner) as they jostled for position rounding the point and skimmed past Rangitoto heading north. I was thinking they would be arriving tomorrow, and some of the smaller ones may, but astonishingly the race was over for the front-runners in less than six hours: pretty good for 119 nautical miles.

Auckland is known as the City of Sails, and a harbour full of yachts is a fairly regular sight, but it was a particularly lovely one today after a week of rain, especially with a holiday weekend ahead. Before I lived here, the only time I saw a yacht race was years ago from the Isle of Wight, when the Whitbread Round the World boats set off along the Solent. They were big, big yachts, and what astonished me was how the water, which had been relatively calm, was churned up like a washing machine by their wake as they swept past - and that there were spectators out there amongst it in spindly little kayaks and even someone on a windsurfer.

Speaking of which, I had a go on one of those in Fiji and had lots of fun right up until the point that I had to be rescued by the resort staff when I couldn't work out how to sail back up the lagoon against the wind. As I said, not a mariner.

Taste of, ah, Tasmania, actually

2011-10-20T08:51:00.000+13:00

Last night I was at the opening of the Taste of New Zealand expo in Victoria Park, where a bunch of restaurants are serving up taster menus, chefs like Rick Stein and Annabel Langbein are doing demos and there are lots of foodie stalls. Discover Tasmania invited me, having cleverly snuck in somehow to promote their wines, beer and - who knew? - whisky.

The weather was appalling yesterday, absolutely torrential cold showers with in between cruelly warm and sunny spells that continuously fooled everyone into thinking that all would now be well - not the best conditions for wandering around a grassy arena in heeled boots, with fat raindrops falling off awnings and diluting my wine. But it was pleasant nonetheless, and a great way to showcase over the next few days the excellent food that's available here.

Having said which, by another of those coincidences that I love so much, the tent where we ended up eating was District Dining, a restaurant newly opened in Auckland by someone from Launceston, at whose restaurant, the Black Cow Bistro, I ate in February with the Tourism Tasmania man who had just poured the wine I was drinking - neither of them knowing the other was there. The wine was so good that I can't now remember whether the lamb I ate was roasted for 6 or 12 hours - it was some immensely long time, anyway, which made it superbly tender and succulent, and the cauliflower puree was perfectly matched.

Launceston is a very fattening place: it's in the Tamar Valley in the north of Tasmania, where there are excellent vineyards (Ninth Island a favourite) and lots of specific and enthusiastic producers like the raspberry farm, the cheese factory (wasabi cheddar, anyone?), and the chocolate factory that together made such a wonderful day out that my daughter still drools about it five years later.

Last time I was there I tragically had to forgo the tasting menu at Josef Chromy because I had a long drive ahead of me, but the lunch I did have was just lovely, fresh and tasty, and I really enjoyed sitting outside with a view over the lake and vineyards beyond, with several merry hen-parties going on in the garden below me. If wine and food is your thing (and actually, even if it isn't, particularly) then go and explore the Tamar Valley: you'll be glad you did. Until you stand on the bathroom scales back home, that is.

Eureka, and other water

2011-10-17T16:24:00.000+13:00

Now that the All Blacks have trounced the Wallabies, who've succumbed to the Eden Park hoo-doo once again - the choke's on them! - the focus has turned back to real news and proper English words.

Progress has been made on the Rena, with salvors (another new word we've been introduced to) on board the nerve-wrackingly, and noisily, shuddering wreck, and the fuel oil is being removed using an Archimedes screw - because it's of the consistency of Marmite, and can't be pumped without being heated, which is impossible in these circumstances. It's a long, slow process and there's more weather on the way to interrupt it, and we've been told there will still be a spill when the ship, as it must, works free of the reef.

Hard work by many hands has cleared some of the sandy beaches, but there's still a lot of oil amongst the rocks, and fears of what will happen to the wetlands have led to a pre-emptive strike, trying to capture as many dear little NZ dotterels as possible. There are only 1700 of them in the world. That means abandoning their eggs, and having to wrestle with the new problem of looking after them till it's safe to return them to their territory - whenever that might be. And soon the godwits, and the lower-profile but equally doughty red knots, will be arriving from the Yukon and other incredibly distant places. Sigh.

Meantime, Thailand is disappearing under flood water making its way downstream to Bangkok, lying either side of the Chao Phraya River, which is both immensely wide and amazingly busy with boats and ferries constantly buzzing along it. One thing all tourists do when they visit is to take a long-tailed boat cruise through the khlongs, or canals, that wind like back streets through areas where people live in often fairly rickety wooden houses on stilts. They wash, fish and get about, in the water: it's part of daily life there, but they're very vulnerable to it, and any rise in height or increase in the current is going to make things extremely difficult, as well as threatening many fabulous and ancient temples. Tch, haven't we already had enough floods this year?

Nasty, brutish and long

2011-10-16T11:33:00.002+13:00

Eighty minutes watching rugby is too big an ask for me - even ten is a trial. So I certainly won't be glued to a screen tonight at any point of the game; though I will be keen to find out the final score. NZ v Australia: it's going to be a needle match, the biggest one of the whole tournament, quite possibly even more keenly followed than the actual final. (Either us or them against France, alas: shame the Welsh got knocked out last night.)

We have this thing about the Aussies and, to a lesser extent, them about us. They're loud, cocky, brash and, what's worse, have good reason to be confident: they do tend to succeed. We always feel smaller, on the hind foot, having to try harder, and get touchy about being teased. I don't think I've ever been on a mixed-nationality group tour where the Kiwis haven't been singled out for some special put-downs. For some reason, the jokes are mainly to do with unsavoury relationships with sheep - as if the Aussies don't have a bigger flock than we do. A former Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, once said that the stream of New Zealanders emigrating across the Tasman raised the average national IQ of both countries, which was the only positive thing I remember him for.

And I really like Australia, as a destination: it has fabulous scenery quite unlike anything we have, the distances are mind-blowing, the wildlife is endlessly bizarre and appealing, the crocs and sharks and jellyfish and snakes and spiders definitely add some excitement to being outdoors, there's great food and wine and history, the shopping, even for a -phobe like me, is enticing, there's all sorts of fun to be had there, and the people are, jibes apart, friendly and welcoming. I really can't take too much of the accent, though - after about a week of it, my ears get tired. And they make fun of our accent! "Fush and chups" they reckon - they, who say "feesh and cheeps".

I read about some graffiti near Sydney airport written by a disgruntled Aussie: 'New Zealand sucks'. Shortly afterwards, an inspired Kiwi added: 'Australia nil'. That will do nicely, tonight.

Virus v cancer

2011-10-14T17:06:00.001+13:00

Niven Rae is a local historian and long-time resident of Maketu, who told me about sleeping in a tent in the garden as a boy and waking to find a great dam of logs built up against the fence, deposited by a tsunami after the 1960 earthquake in Chile, that travelled all the way across the Pacific only to stop just metres from where he lay asleep.

He's been on the TV news not only describing what it's like to see his home environment wrecked by what the sea is washing up now, the filthy, stinking black heavy fuel oil escaping from the Rena, but also shouting and swearing at local officials who have been trying to stop the people of the Bay from getting stuck into cleaning up the sand. In the mural behind him you can see the monument marking where the canoe Te Arawa, one of the seven waka of the 1340 Great Migration came ashore, at the start of the swirl of sandy beach; and the island, currently a spit, that protects the estuary; and a diver in the water enjoying the marine environment; and the Bay continuing all the way around to Mt Maunganui and beyond. And all of this is now coated in sticky black, every single wave bringing more ashore, the blue sea brown and murky, hundreds of shorebirds mired and dead, unrecognisable.

Containers are now falling off the ship, which has cracked all the way through and is only just hanging together; 80-odd of them so far floating in the sea and being washed ashore all over the place, battered and broken, their contents spilling out and adding to the mess: a bizarre mixture of timber, milk powder, frozen beefburgers and animal hides. The authorities have been huffing and puffing about how they couldn't have started the clean-up any earlier, and how only trained people should be scraping the sand, and that everything possible is being done by experts - but no-one's convinced. Meantime the Greek company that chartered the Rena is passing the buck to the Swiss-based company that owns the ship, registered in Liberia, and they're no doubt going to blame the Filipino crew. And all the while, down here in New Zealand's now ironically named Bay of Plenty, our ecology and our environment are in ruins.

Back in '06 I stood with Niven on a hilltop pa site looking down on the village, the river and the beach towards the creeping holiday-home sprawl of Papamoa beyond. "It's a virus," he said. He's got something far worse to worry about now, poor man.

Godwit-damn it

2011-10-11T17:40:00.002+13:00

This is the estuary at Maketu, at the southern end of the Bay of Plenty, where the Kaituna River dawdles through the Ongatoru estuary inside the long sandspit and provides the perfect sanctuary for birds in the wetlands. (Except, I have to say, in the duck shooting season when, the landlady of the Blue Tides B&B where I took this photo from said, "It's like the Somme out there".) But mostly the sanctuary is exactly that, and in the spring thousands of godwits arrive, having flown all the way from Alaska.

This year, though, they may wish they'd stayed up north, winter notwithstanding, because this estuary is under threat from fuel oil escaping from the container ship MV Rena, still jammed tight on a reef near Tauranga. It's shaping up to be a full-blown environmental disaster, with huge black, sticky gobs of oil already washing up on the long, lovely and well-used sandy coastline of this huge bay. There's a boom in place across the estuary at Maketu to protect the wetlands, but no-one is holding out much hope of its beating the tidal current, especially with the storm currently passing over whipping up a 3-metre swell.

We're all thoroughly disgusted and appalled at the initial lack of action and the apparent failure of any contingency plan for this sort of event. It's a disgraceful cock-up, and the environment, and the people and birds and sea-creatures living in it, are going to suffer for it. I'm angry.

Spreading the joy

2011-10-10T17:54:00.002+13:00

As I waited, yet again, for my old dog to catch me up on our walk back from the dairy, I stood and watched a couple of council workers in hi-vis vests trimming the grass verge along the footpath past the park, one of them buzzing along the edge with a weedeater while the other used a long-handled gripper to pick up bits of rubbish out of the gutter. What a dispiriting job, I thought, cleaning up cigarette butts and other unpleasantness thrown down by ratbags. The wind was blowing the grass clippings about, the sky was grey and it was cool enough for me to have put on a jacket; so when the dog finally dawdled up to me and we wandered past the men, I was surprised when the rubbish-picker turned to me with a broad grin and said, "What a great day!"

And then he continued, "Go the All Blacks!" and turned back to his work, clearly light of heart and convinced that all was right with the world, leaving me to walk home with a smile on my face. I'd already heard the men building a new deck next door having a long and detailed discussion about last night's game against Argentina as they hammered and sawed, thoroughly enjoying their serious analysis. So that's why I've decided to come off the fence and say that I want the All Blacks to win the Rugby World Cup: personally, I don't give a fig, but if it means so much to other people, and makes them so cheerful that it improves my daily life, then I'm prepared to put up with the inevitable after-party rabbiting on in the media. That's going to happen anyway: better it's positive than the negative wrist-slitting mourning and recrimination that would occupy exactly the same number of column-inches.

So, France: I love your little villages, your boules players, the pavement tables, your grand buildings, the narrow tree-lined roads, your hyper-markets, your stylishly squiggly Metro signs, crazy traffic, silly little cars, fondness for mongrels, shocking handwriting and hopeless attempts to cram too many words into your song lyrics;

Wales: you have so many great castles, beetling bare rocky hills with ancient history, ridiculously long and unpronounceable place-names, leeks and daffodils, such a lovely accent, stern stone no-nonsense towns, beautiful hills and woods and moors, and your choirs are second to none;

Australia: I've had so much fun every time I've come, you have fabulous native wildlife and pandas too, the Outback is truly glorious and one of my favourite places on the planet, the Reef is amazing, there's so much dramatic history to learn about, the little stone towns are so pretty, I'm very fond of your gum trees, the Opera House is a wonderful sight and Uluru is mind-blowing:

but I'm sorry, I want you all to lose.

NIMBY

2011-10-06T19:39:00.002+13:00

Almost a week ago, I was flying back from Gisborne to Auckland on a sunny afternoon, gazing out of the window down at the astonishingly long cloud of steam from White Island's volcano, which was trailing all the way northwards towards Coromandel. There was a nice little island down there, off the coast from Tauranga, and I looked at the scattering of houses on it and wondered what its name was.

Now I know. It's Motiti Island, and it's in the path of a much more sinister trail, of oil from a container ship aground on Astrolabe Reef. The MV Rena has been sitting there, listing ten degrees, for three days now, a 47,000-tonne ship with 1700 tonnes of fuel on board. It's a powder keg that's started smoking: some birds have been killed by the oil slick already. An old Maori man whose family has lived on the island for generations is wanting to see some action - and so am I. Nothing much seems to have happened so far except for some babble and hand-flapping. The weather's perfect for operations at the moment: I want to see them out there, pumping out the fuel, shifting the containers, dragging the ship off the reef.

The sea and the coast are so beautiful there, and so unspoiled: we really don't want another Gulf of Mexico disaster in our backyard.

Accidental protein

2011-10-04T19:43:00.001+13:00

I discovered today that there's a straight line from rats in the roof to maggot pupae under the bed, but that's as far as I'm going with that particular story, other than hoping that the line bypassed my wide and snoring mouth. Although really, there's no logic to that, seeing as how I've cheerfully bitten an ant's bum and chowed down, a little less cheerfully, on a huhu grub, which is a maggot on steroids. Seriously, it's a Michelin-Man maggot.

It wasn't nice at all, and I won't be having another, thank you; but the ant was very refreshing. It was a green ant, and I was encouraged to try it on an Aboriginal bush-tucker walk in the Tiwi Islands, just off the northern coast near Darwin. It was a tiny shot of citrus, full of vitamin C, and an invaluable part of a healthy diet for the Aboriginals. (I also tried dog's balls another time in the Territory, but you'll be relieved to hear they were twin berries rather than the real thing - very authentic-looking, though.)

I marvel at the things the Aborigines ate out in the bush - not so much at the insects and such because needs must etc, but because so many of those foods are extremely toxic in their original form and require, some of them, immensely complicated processing to make them safe to eat. You have to wonder how many people died discovering the recipes. And it's a pretty serious thought too that even when someone died a no doubt horrible, writhing death after eating a particular plant, they persisted with trying different methods of making it safe, because they had to, because there was precious little else to eat.

I was researching a South Australia story yesterday and read about Burke and Wills (not to be confused with Burke and Hare, who are entirely different). They were spectacularly unsuccessful explorers in Australia in the 1850s who eventually died in the Outback of beriberi, because they hadn't paid proper attention when the Aboriginals showed them how to prepare nardoo seeds: they collected, ground up and ate them without first roasting the seeds, which was the crucial step to remove a chemical that destroys vitamin B. So though they had full stomachs and weren't hungry, they had no energy and just faded away.

And so, that heart-breaking scene I saw in a painting in Castlemaine, Victoria, last year showing the last moments on earth of poor old Billy, Burke's horse, which Wills shot for them to eat, need never have happened.

Learning from history

2011-10-01T18:13:00.002+13:00

The wrangling over the future of Christchurch continues, with still no clear idea of how to proceed, plus further complications caused by the real possibility that there will be no insurance available for new buildings - bit of a set-back for putative developers, natch. There hasn't been a decent shake there for a few days, but no-one's jumping to any conclusions: everyone's learnt the hard way that the next earthquake is usually not far away.

After the February quake that wrecked the city, there was some talk about Napier, which was flattened in 1931 yet rebuilt, Art Deco style, just two years later. Nobody mentioned aftershocks there, and I assumed they were 'lucky' to have just the one cataclysm, after which they could set about putting things right again. At the Wairoa Museum though (the town is 100km from Napier) in a display of the local paper's front pages, there was one from September 1932, reporting a quake that was more intense there (and in Gisborne), and more destructive, than the February '31 one (kind of a coincidence, that the shakes were in September and February, same as in ChCh). So rebuilding was more an act of faith than I was thinking.

I was rather taken with the report about the first quake, which said that people found the immediate aftershocks frightening: "...everyone being in a terrible state of nervousness but bearing up wonderfully well. In fact, everyone showed the spirit of true Britishers." So that was all right, then.

"Always blow on the pie."*

2011-09-29T18:29:00.002+13:00

98 kilometres is a long way to drive for a pie, but Osler's Bakery in Wairoa is famously good. I hovered in front of the warmer, dithering over the lamb and mint, pepper steak and kumara, chilli beef 'n bean, wondering if I was brave enough to risk the 'boil up', but finally plumped for the classic steak and cheese. And it was good: light pastry, tender meat, real cheddar and great flavour. Excellent eating, especially in the sun on the riverbank, even if the seagulls were noisily disgusted that there was nothing left for them. Tragically - but probably just as well - I was too late for the award-winning port, plum and apple pie that I might have had for pudding: all sold out.

Wairoa isn't the prettiest town in the country, surrounded by green hills poxy with erosion, but the little museum showed real pride in their most famous son, George Nepia, member of The Invincibles, the All Blacks team of 1924-5 that won every one of their games on overseas tour. I was more taken by the story of Scottish settler Neil Walker, who sent his brother to fetch back to the farm the lady he arranged to come out from home to be his wife - but Peter was the one who married Miss Frew. And then they both died young and Neil brought up their children. Awww.

The best bit of Wairoa is the Bar, down at the river mouth where the turquoise sea breaks over the shingle bank and the black sand is littered with silver driftwood. There was a skylark singing, the sun was warm and it was almost as beautiful as the Mahia Peninsula, which has all that plus white cliffs and enough remoteness to make it feel like an achievement to have got there.

*Link here.

Go East

2011-09-28T14:02:00.001+13:00

Here's another of Prof Catton's coincidences*: the DomPost is running my East Cape story on the very day that I return to Gisborne. Because I can't keep away? No, pleasant place though it is, it's more about (shhh) earning airpoints to enable another upgrade on a proper trip sometime in the future.

The editor didn't choose my favourite picture, above, of ghostly winter-white um, poplars I think, in the low sun shafting across the hills as the snow-clouds swept up from the south. Nor did he choose the interior of the amazing St Mary's church at Tikitiki, where everything was carved inside. I mean, everything: pew ends, rafters, candlesticks, font, pulpit... if ever the vicar delivered a wooden sermon, that would end up carved too, I reckon. And the walls and ceilings were decorated too, with woven tukutuku, giving the place not only a very Maori feel, but making it cosier and more lived-in.

In the little wooden church at Te Aroroa, where the road forks off to the actual Cape, there were guitars lying about in front of the altar, gas heaters, even rugs - it was as though the congregation had just popped out for a moment. Untidy but well-used and clearly part of local life. Nice.

But I think I've done the Cape, for the moment: tomorrow I'll try heading south. There will be pie.

*And here's another: the post linked to there is about Seattle, which I was writing about just yesterday.

Clock, toe, balloon

2011-09-25T15:15:00.000+13:00

The start of daylight saving always makes me think of Alice Springs: it was because a dozy railway booking clerk in Sydney didn't allow for the fact that there is no daylight saving in the Northern Territory that I turned up in Alice to catch the Ghan back to Adelaide only to find that it had been gone for an hour. And the next one wasn't for another three days. I found that out by climbing over the padlocked station gate to check the timetable - and it was when I was climbing back out again that I tripped and fell, gouging a chunk out of my big toe so bloodily that a passing police car took me to the hospital for a dressing.

The second time I was in Alice I scraped a hotel door over my toes and had to swathe them in plasters too - but last time I escaped all injury, which was particularly fortunate, considering a hot-air balloon ride was on the itinerary. The worst thing about balloon rides in Australia is having to get up so early: pre-dawn, for some aeronautical reason. The one time I went up in England it was in the evening and very civilised, and the standard glass of champagne afterwards went down very well - at about 8 o'clock in the morning, it's not normally so welcome, unfortunately.

On the other hand, seeing the sun rise as you float along is pretty magical, and seeing the colour flood into the landscape is just lovely. That last trip was the most exciting, though, and not in an entirely good way, as we missed our first choice of landing spot, came a little too close to a power line for my personal peace of mind, and then had to hang on to the basket as we were dragged along sideways before stopping. The champagne was more medicinal that day.

Les Bleus et les Noirs

2011-09-24T16:44:00.002+12:00

Even I am aware that it's a Big Game tonight, between NZ and France. I don't follow this stuff at all, but I know that the French knocked the Kiwis out of the RWC in 1999 and again in 2007, that we've (we've! how sucked in am I?) beaten them since in France, and they've beaten, er, us here since then. I'm sure there's much more to it than that, but this week's scandal has been that they've picked a B team to face the All Blacks because a loss would put them into a better draw for round 2. How dare they think strategically! "The filthy French," is what we're thinking.

Or people who care, at least. I'm happy just to be reminded of a couple of summer days in Paris earlier this year, of sitting upstairs in an open-top bus cruising round the city looking at all the glorious buildings, the gold on the statues gleaming in the sunshine, people strolling beside the Seine and smooching on the riverside benches, the grass so green and the hedges so neat. And the soldiers with guns, and the horrendous snarl of traffic, and the ubiquitous piles of dog poo as traps for unwary rubber-neckers, and the tacky souvenir-sellers and bracelet-plaiters, and over-it artists in Montmartre - no, really, it's all Paris, and it was all great.

Except, unexpectedly, for the food, which was disappointingly ordinary, even when we tried to get away from the main tourist drags: I hope the French players and supporters find the opposite here.

UPDATE: Both Sunday papers went for the same headline - 'French Toast' - so instead I'll plump for 'Pas de Problème'.

Giant inflated - head?

2011-09-19T22:38:00.002+12:00

When I say that my head's all over the place, I mean that literally (almost). Busily catching up with writing after - what? eight trips away so far this year? - I've been working on stories about England, Ireland, Macau, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Mauritius, and lining up Seattle and more Australian stories to do next. The NZ stories were Waiheke Island and Lake Wakatipu, which is rather perverse of me since most of the action at the moment is right here in Auckland.

That blimp-like affair is the inflatable rugby ball containing a full-on Tourism NZ blitz to convince potential tourists to get themselves out here: it's usually positioned somewhere significant overseas. Right now it's on Queen's Wharf on the waterfront ('Party Central' they insist on calling it) and I had a look at it the other day, though even soon after it opened on a Friday lunchtime the queue was too long for me to bother with. Another day - there are enough of them still. Weeks to go yet till it's all over. Sigh.

I did go in The Cloud (aka The Slug) though, which was much nicer than it had promised to be when first proposed, and had a couple of huge screens showing an imaginative presentation of uniquely Kiwi features, from Weta Workshop to computerised cow eartags, all mixed in with Scenery, that made me a little pink with pride - even though the actual displays were somewhat mystifying. It probably was clever, inventing a way of making plastic chain mail with no joins - but what is it for? There was a lot of interest in the jetpack, but it looked a cumbersome beast and nothing like in the comics. The wood-veneer Vespa was, er, novel.

Most diverting, though not Kiwi at all of course, were the Segways being used outside by staff pretending to be serious, swooping up and down the wharf transporting sections of temporary fencing. Ubercool, as ever.

12/09

2011-09-11T18:18:00.000+12:00

For us New Zealanders, that's when 9/11 occurred: we're 16 hours ahead of New York, and it was September 12th when we woke, an astonishing 10 years ago tomorrow, to the news of what had happened soon after midnight our time. Or not, in my case - busy with getting children off to school, and myself to my undemanding little job in the office at the younger one's school across the road, it wasn't till I got to my desk that I realised something was up, and a wide-eyed teacher there told me the incredible story. I rushed to the assembly room where the television was on, showing over and over those images for which the word 'shocking' just doesn't measure up, and listened to the stunned commentary from presenters and journalists who were having equal difficulty in believing what they were describing.

I've never known that feeling before: I've heard unexpected, terrible news before, but the scale of the attacks, the recognition of the coldly inspired leap of imagination that led to them, and the irrevocable loss of innocence that they brought about, plus the simultaneous annihilation of thousands of ordinary peoples' lives, was unique. It's no exaggeration to say that we all, all around the world, took a step together when we heard the news, into a future that was instantly very much less safe. It's affecting us still, in so many ways, and there's no going back.

One thing that I hadn't expected, on our family trip to England and France in July, was how astonished the girls would be to experience the level of security that's standard there: the bag checks, the x-ray machines, the CCTVs everywhere - just to go up the Eiffel Tower, or into the Tower of London. Shuffle, queue, wait... so tedious, in probability so unnecessary, yet absolutely inescapable.

Though not here, which is why the girls hadn't expected it. In most people's daily life here, apart from at the airport, there are no obvious security checks, no searches, no constraints on our freedom. It's something we take for granted most of the time - but it's good to be reminded of how lucky we are in New Zealand. There are advantages in being so far below the rest of the world's radar.

So it begins...

2011-09-09T17:14:00.002+12:00

The Rugby World Cup 2011. For six years now, this event has been looming ever bigger over the country, a slow and steady build not just in the media, which will seize on anything to fill column inches, but also amongst most Kiwis, even those of us who can't stand rugby at any price.

Having been brought up in a non-sporting household, and raised my children ditto, I've been conscious all my life of not quite fitting in, of not being an absolutely true-blue (or black) Kiwi - but, ironically, it's this imminent seven-week total immersion in the game that's shown me that in fact I'm far from being alone, most of the people I've spoken to saying, "I"m not actually a rugby fan..."

It's enormously heartening, I must say, after years of feeling like an outsider with a guilty secret. But their next word is just that: "but" - "but I'm looking forward to the fireworks/party/buzz..." And so am I. Especially here in Auckland, where we've been putting up for months and months with tiresome roadworks and construction as the place has been readied - and that after years of even more tedious argument about how things should be done. Now, though, it's payback time, and right this minute it's started brilliantly, on a fabulous clear sunny day with thousands and thousands of people, locals and visitors, crowding the waterfront, 600 Maori rowing 23 waka into Viaduct Harbour, bands playing, a flash-mob haka in Queen Street - and later tonight the biggest firework display ever held in the country. Can't wait.

Sit. Vac. - Rattenfänger

2011-09-07T15:17:00.001+12:00

It's very hard to concentrate on writing about having coffee with a countess in an English stately home upstairs from a library of 6000 leather-bound books, Napoleon's desk and chair from St Helena and an array of framed family photos on the grand piano that include the Queen and Diana - very hard, I say, to concentrate on all that while there are rats rampaging around in the ceiling insulation above my head.

Although, given that Highclere Castle was neglected for years so that the upper storey of 50 bedrooms is pretty much uninhabitable because of the leaky roof, I'm sure rats are not unknown to Lord and Lady Carnarvon. Perhaps we could have bonded over that. Too late now.

Here I am, back home half a world away, with rats in my roof - probably the very ones I've been inadvertently feeding down in my sieve of a henhouse. This very cold winter they must have moved from their damp tunnels in the dirt up into our roof to snuggle cosily under the pink fibreglass duvet there. The Man has been through with his nasty baits, and in a week or so all should be quiet - although that won't describe my state of mind, envisaging decaying corpses scattered all over the ceiling. Poisoned rats don't go outside to die, apparently - and unfortunately. Urban legend.

I have no photos of the rats in my roof, but it's only a short leap from them to bats in the belfry, and thence to the wonderful sight of vast clouds of fruitbats flying out over the northern Queensland town of Cairns to feast on mangoes: their nightly outing from where they roost in trees on the other side. It was a staggering sight, but I haven't got any photos of them either; though there is this one of the stainless steel fish in the swimming pool on the Esplanade where I was sitting when I saw them. It's where everyone swims because there are crocodiles and stinging jellyfish in the sea. Oh and sharks - nobody mentions them because they're pussycats compared to the danger presented by the others. Rats, bats, crocs, stingers and sharks: is that enough animals for you today?

Daaa, da da, da-da dah...

2011-09-04T14:49:00.003+12:00

Wow. One whole year since the first Canterbury earthquake and the end of normal life for everybody living there. Though it was a shock (sorry) at the time, to discover that there were fault lines where no-one had ever suspected them before, what's been more dismaying for all of us since last September 4th is to find that a big earthquake like that 7.1 isn't always a one-off spectacular - it can also be the pilot of a series. A long, long series that, fingers crossed, won't end up taking on the longevity of something like Coronation Street.

A new video of the Christchurch Red Zone shows a city that's almost unrecognisable: full of empty spaces, fenced-off pavements in front of crumbling terraces full of cracks and holes, rough unsealed roads, crooked buildings, heart-breakingly familiar Christchurch icons like the Cathedral all in pieces, surrounded by piles of rubble and propped up with girders - and every so often something apparently completely unscathed, like the tall glass BNZ building, or the Millennium Chalice that looks so delicate. And not one person anywhere.

The only good news from that first quake was that no-one died. I've read that hundreds of times - but in fact someone did that day, of a heart attack undoubtedly caused by the stress. Now that the aftershock count - including the biggies on 22 February and 13 June - is up to 8529, including a 5.1 on Friday and a 3.3 today, it wouldn't be in the least surprising to learn that Christchurch's collective heart is failing. But it's not, it can't, and it won't. Kia kaha, Christchurch.

Hip, hip hooray...

2011-09-01T14:17:00.001+12:00

Spring starts today, so Sod's Law means a cold snap this weekend and more snow down south. We also have drifts of leaves everywhere - very confusing, but it's because the evergreens, which most of the native trees are, are dropping the old ones as the new ones push through. Even though I grew up here, I lived in England long enough to find it highly disorientating to be sweeping leaves in spring.

But Bruce is back! It will be his fourth summer in our pond and it's wonderful to see him again, reappeared from wherever it is he goes when the weather cools. He's like the cuckoo for us. He's called Bruce because he's an Australian green and golden bell frog. They've somehow got a toe-hold in this part of the country but are officially not welcome, so when I made enquiries about finding him a wife last year I was sternly told that if I were to enable breeding (I'm a frog pimp!) the frogs would have to be contained. (It's all academic anyway, as the goldfish would eat the eggs before they got anywhere near the tadpole stage, but it will be sad to hear him calling again - night and day - and never seeing another green face.)

In southern Western Australia last year, we spent a pleasant day with Dr Dave of Out of Sight Tours. He's a naturalist who drives people out for walks along the coast, which is pretty spectacular with cliffs and surf and excellent rocks. He has a related frog on his blogpage, which he says sounds like a motorbike when it calls, so we're lucky that ours just goes "crrrr-ack". Dave was full of interest - in both senses. He told us lots of fascinating stuff, but he was also enjoying himself being out and about in one of his favourite bits of Australia, and though he must have seen thousands, was as delighted as me to see kangaroos in the scrub and was snapping away at them as eagerly as I was. Enthusiastic people: they're my very favourite sort.

Feedback!!!

2011-09-01T10:13:00.002+12:00

Well here's something interesting, for a couple of reasons: a first-person account from a reader in Vermont of the floods there, with personal drama and a heartfelt plea that I'm happy to pass on -

<< What a coincidence! I am a reader of yours FROM Vermont! Yes, it is devastating and sad here. There were at least 3 of the 7 historical covered bridges torn down - monuments to Vermont's history and pride. It is so sad to see them go. I hope they will be re-built. I spent the entire day Sunday fending off a brook that turned into a raging river from my parents' home in Wells, VT. The brook, which is normally about 6 feet wide and knee high ended up being about 75 feet across, and 9ft deep. The water was so powerful, it moved a 3ton boulder 10ft downriver. That could have been our home. Luckily, due to the quick actions of helpful townspeople, we were able to save the house, with only several inches of water in the basement. We did lose our entire yard and our water well, but the house is still intact. We were one of the isolated towns for two days. We were able to leave and return to our home in Burlington, VT late Tuesday night. That was my experience, and we were SO lucky. There are still many people without electricity, shelter, and food is dwindling in the isolated towns, with no ETA on supplies. Check out the Vermont Red Cross site and donate if you are able: www.redcrossvtnhuv.org/index.asp?IDCapitulo=44W8UXGL8L >>

I do hope life becomes much easier very soon for everyone in Vermont. Thank you for getting in touch.

And the other interesting thing about this comment is that it shows there are actually people reading this blog who aren't my husband or random Googlers who've landed on the site when looking for 'French flag' or 'medieval serving wenches' or, most mysteriously, 'surf board hair loss'. It's very heartening.

Goodbye Irene

2011-08-30T23:24:00.001+12:00

Hurricane Irene has gone to Canada - well, not a hurricane any more - but she's left a lot of damage in her wake. Not in Manhattan as was feared, but elsewhere, including Vermont, and on the news tonight there was sad footage of a covered bridge being swept away. It looked a lot like this one, and it may actually have been the very one - whatever, it's a shame. Those bridges are so pretty, and such a significant part of the scenery there, I can understand why on the soundtrack people were wailing.

We only had a day in Vermont, sneaking over the border from a trip sponsored by Tourism Massachusetts, because we wanted to see the bridges, and buy some maple syrup. I've still got the leaf-shaped bottle, refilled many times over; and remember clearly how neat and lovely the countryside was that autumn, all the leaves so colourful and pumpkins everywhere.

On the news it looks dreadful, brown water rampaging over roads and through towns, breaking bridges, houses, fences and barns; it's going to leave an awful mess. Oh, nature is giving people such a run-around this year, all over the world.

Anyone here read Chinese?

2011-08-26T17:18:00.000+12:00

I'd love to know what it says on this billboard, seen on the approach to Macau's A-Ma Temple, which is an attraction both for tourists and for local people, who go to make wishes, pray and light joss-sticks. Why are all the children in love with the sparkling pink toilet? Are they being encouraged to keep it clean? Get one? Pray to it instead of the temple? It's a mystery. They're an inscrutable lot, those Orientals - particularly if you've never bothered to learn their language.

Bathrooms featured remarkably prominently during our five days in Macau. Drawing a discreet veil over the evening I spent unhappily defiling the marble in my own hotel bathroom, let's consider instead the astonishing rooms we trailed through as a group on our otherwise fairly tedious programme of site inspections. Because they were wanting to impress us, they showed us their fanciest suites, and all the bathrooms featured acres of shiny marble, dinky bottles of expensive toiletries, twin basins, televisions, gold taps, and space, vast expanses of space. They had shower rooms, not just showers - some with a glass wall into the bedroom, which seemed odd, some set up almost like a stage. One was big enough for an entire rugby team to wash in at the same time with no unmanly touching. Another had a raised infinity spa bath with a projector and screen overhead. Several had killer views over the city about 40 floors below. They all had adjoining his-and-hers dressing rooms.

But mostly they had mirrors. Mirrors everywhere: floor to ceiling, on every wall, in the shower, even on the ceiling. And that's where they made their mistake, I reckon - because if I'm going to fork out a thousand dollars or so a night for all that luxury, I want to spend my time in there feeling good. And catching sight of my naked self bent over scrubbing my feet in the shower just ain't going to do that.

All shook up

2011-08-25T17:25:00.001+12:00

So they had an earthquake in Virginia yesterday, a 5.8 which caused alarm and despondency in New York and Washington, broke the tips off some spires on the National Cathedral and sent the mergansers at the Zoo flocking into the water in the clear expectation that there would be no tsunami. Pft. Well, 5.8 is a decent size, I suppose, and it's certainly a rare event on the US east coast - so rare that it seems no-one knew the drill about desks and doorways - but still, pft.

Canterbury's up to 8457 aftershocks now since 4 September - almost a whole year ago, amazingly - 28 of them over magnitude 5, two of them bigger than 6. And many of them have been very shallow, so they didn't slip by unnoticed. There've been three 4+ shakes in as many days since Saturday. People's hair is falling out with the stress, there are still 1600 households unable to use their own toilets, and the announcements have begun about whose homes and suburbs are unsuitable for future habitation. Demolition in the city centre is continuing apace and every few days there's an announcement of another notable building having been condemned.

But although it's tempting just to smile and shrug, and to think along the lines of 'we should be so lucky', I do understand all the excitement and anxiety about the Virginian quake, especially amongst New Yorkers. After all, they have a big anniversary of their own looming up.

Hi ho, eh bro'

2011-08-23T22:05:00.000+12:00

This is the kind of thing you see along the road on the East Cape, even today. I also went past a house where there was a shaggy horse in a little paddock in front and a saddle slung over the gate, where I assumed someone had come for a visit and parked the conveyance outside. It's good to see horses used for everyday errands and not just for having fun; and if it had been the summer holidays, I'm sure there would have been kids riding bareback down to the dairy - one school I drove past had a paddock full of assorted ponies across the road that I'm sure were only there till 3pm and hometime.

But I did also see a remarkable number of quad bikes buzzing about, loaded up with all sorts of things but especially, given the chilly weather and the storm on its way last week, lengths of bleached driftwood off the beaches, being taken home for firewood where I imagine they would make the room smell of the sea. I guess the bikes will become the new horse for the future - though there were so very many horses everywhere, that'll be some way off, I'm happy to say.

(Note the white gumboots, by the way: from the freezing works. And the checked bush shirt, thick and scratchy - standard back country uniform.)

Only the horses were missing from Taika Waititi's movie Boy, which I watched again last night and loved again, though I still find it more sad than funny. It's about to be released in the US. I really hope it does well.

Signs

2011-08-22T22:36:00.000+12:00

Writing about the East Cape circuit today, where even though the scenery was stunning, my attention was still caught by the odd quirky sign like this one, which to me indicates a true Athenian at the end of the arrow.

And next I have to do a Macau story which alas has to be mostly about the hotels, since someone else has snaffled all the interesting Portuguese-angled material for the same magazine. It wasn't all stylish suites and scented spas: walking down the busy lanes from the ruins of St Paul's to Senado Square, I was diverted by the assumption by some Chinese company that this would be a good fashion label:

Maybe there's something about those simple letters that looks elegant and classy to a Chinese eye - who knows? And probably they could be forgiven for not being familiar with the word. But really? They didn't see anything wrong with this one? Really???

Caveat venditor

2011-08-20T22:22:00.002+12:00

Today I bought a new (to me) car, a Mazda 3 like the one I drove this week all round the East Cape's many, many corners - and also almost like the one I went down to Christchurch two years ago to drive to Kaikoura to review for the Mazda in-house Zoom-Zoom magazines for here and Australia. As you do - or as I wish I did more of, since it was lots of fun, came with an expense allowance and paid extremely well. And I even got another story out of it, later.

It was a cool little car with a cheerful grin/grille and I loved driving it through the bright winter landscape of North Canterbury up to Kaikoura where the photographer and his wife and I stayed in a fancy tree-house, ate excellent meals, rode Segways, went whale-spotting in a cute little bubble of a helicopter, bought a crayfish from a roadside caravan and saw dozens of baby seals playing in a pool underneath a waterfall. There was quite a lot of driving back and forth past the snapper on top of his stepladder, and some personal posing that was less fun; but altogether it was a jolly couple of days and left me with positive feelings about the car.

So now I have one of my own, sucked in by my own sales pitch to believe that it's the car for me; and though it's not the same vibrant blue of the one in the story, I'm trusting that its paler colour doesn't mean that my future driving experience will be similarly subdued.

Pining for the open sea

2011-08-18T16:05:00.000+12:00

This is why the air smells so tangy outside on the river bank - and why I had to grip the steering wheel hard with both hands over and over again on my trips up the Cape. I must have met dozens of these logging trucks thundering along pulling trailers, loaded up with logs from the forests out east. Yesterday they were like some mythical beast, bearing down on me in a great cloud of spray and passing with a whump! And the returning empties were no better, their trailers on top and whizzing along well over the speed limit (them and me apart, there was precious little traffic on the road, which did allow all of us some personal interpretation of speed advisories and white lines).

Gisborne is a busy little port and concerns itself with fishing, forestry and frozen food. At the moment the logs are stacking up so high, there must be a ship due in soon to take them all away: in the few days we've been here, the wharf has filled up with them, of surprisingly assorted thicknesses. Possibly the weather is delaying the ship's arrival, with blustery squalls sweeping past, big breakers rolling in on Waikanae Beach, and people in town being blown along the streets like autumn leaves.

It's a nice little town, with some fine old Art Deco buildings, wide streets, a musical clock, Phoenix palms lining Gladstone Street, and all the shops anyone needs. And even though 'Perfect Roast' serves meats rather than coffee, you can also get a decent cup; and we've had a good meal out each night. Tonight though, the sights are set lower for a pizza and beanbag at The Dome cinema: could be fun. Could also do my back in.

Two legs good

2011-08-17T22:18:00.000+12:00

Cold and grey and squally in Gisborne this morning so, acting on a hunch, I drove back towards the Cape, and the further I got from the city, the better the weather became. Hikurangi, its flanks streaked with snow, had its head in the clouds, sulking that there was no sun to see first in the world today; but though the wind was strong and icy, there was brightness and no rain, and that was good enough for me.

It was a long drive, 170km, up to little Te Araroa, where the country's biggest pohutukawa sprawls on its 19 trunks just across the road from the long, wild beach where the breakers were roaring in like express trains - really, it was very odd to hear what sounded like motorway traffic in such a remote setting. The dairy lady with the chin moko told me that the road to the lighthouse was fine so I set off past the playground with its sign 'No Horses' and along the edge of the land towards NZ's easternmost point.

Only about half of the 20kms were sealed, and the unsealed bits beneath the high bluffs were alarming because - quite apart from the tsunami warning sign - they included a number of slips with insubstantial temporary barriers marking where the road had disappeared into the sea, and reducing the width to just one lane - which was where, of course, I met the only traffic coming the other way. But once back on the tarseal and skimming along past isolated houses, wind-bent manuka and cattle grazing along the beach, it was a lovely drive; and the lighthouse appeared sooner than I expected.

It was on top of a separate hill right on the edge of the land, poking up out of thick bush. I drove to the end of the road and thought about climbing up to it - 700 steps, I had been told - and sighed. I got my coat and went to open my door; and I couldn't. The wind was pushing against it so hard that I struggled to get it open even a few inches and I was afraid that if I tried to step out, it would slam shut and snap my leg off. I can read a sign as well as anyone: I didn't climb up to the lighthouse. So sue me.

A partridge in a pear tree...

2011-08-16T18:11:00.002+12:00

…was one creature I didn’t see today, on my 500km circuit of the East Cape. This is a remote and laid-back area, where animal husbandry is a fluid affair: viz the frequent roadside notices warning ‘Stock wandering’ and a helpline number to ring (if you were actually able to get a signal – remote area, remember). So on my long, long drive today, I saw on or by the road, loose, not a partridge but a pheasant, three turkeys, some ducks, a rooster, five peacocks, some sheep, some cattle, a bull, three horses, four pigs, a dog, a cat and a dead seal.

There was also a lot of frost and some black ice under a brilliantly clear and sunny sky as I wove through the Waioeke Gorge past geometrical winter-pruned vineyards and lumpy green paddocks and bush and kiwifruit orchards to Opotiki on the other side. Then I followed the coast along black basalt rocky reefs and sweeps of coffee-coloured sand, past little blips of settlements, each with a marae and a wharenui with impressive carvings on the frontage. There was the pretty little church at Raukokore, all by itself on the black rocks with turquoise sea all around, where penguins nest under the baptismal font; and distant White Island, its volcano steaming in a sinister manner, away on the horizon. Hicks Bay is a hick town with a beach second to none; Tolaga Bay has the longest jetty in the southern hemisphere. It took so long to get around, with photo stops and vain attempts to locate the locations of Whale Rider and the wonderful Boy, that by the time I got to the tip I had to power back down to Gisborne; so I didn’t get to the lighthouse at NZ’s easternmost point, or have a chance to linger along the beaches.

Perhaps tomorrow, weather willing: though it may be our turn for the Polar Blast that’s dominating the news. Poor old Dunedin is used to snow, and Queenstown thrives on it; but in Christchurch people are still living in cracked houses with outside loos (some even in caravans and tents) – and now literally on top of all that they’ve got snow too; and Wellington’s steep streets are slick with ice, plus they’ve had thunder and lightning; and they’ve all had power outages. Seems like it would be only fair if it were Gisborne’s turn tomorrow.

Will the real James Cook...

2011-08-15T21:28:00.005+12:00

…please stand up? Gisborne is where, in 1769, James Cook first landed in New Zealand (not the first European to come here, or even to set foot if you believe that thing about the Portuguese, but the first to plant a flag, and that’s what counts - so the moon is American, of course. Unless it’s not!) So naturally there is a monument at the spot: an ugly obelisk that when erected at least had a backdrop of shore and sea, but now is the focal point of an area of concrete, warehouses and passing logging trucks.

But up on the hill, with a fabulous view over Poverty Bay (so called because stroppy Maori prevented Cook from getting the water and provisions he wanted - and not, as all the tourist literature obligatorily insists, because the area is infertile: quite the opposite) is a bronze statue of a man in 18th century uniform with the tricorn hat and britches, who’s stood in place since the Bi-Centenary. Except - and this was pointed out some time after the, er, erection - he’s not James Cook. Quite who he is, no-one knows; and as the statue was a gift from a brewery, all bets are open. The attached plaque is cheerfully upfront about the confusion, which is rather charming, and preferable to a Gaddafi-style toppling of the statue.

Down by the river is the real thing, put up at the Millennium (a big deal here, as thanks to the Date Line and its position further east than anywhere in NZ, Gisborne is the first city in the world to welcome in the new day). And further along the river bank is another statue, of young Nick, the surgeon’s assistant on the Endeavour, who was the first to spot land and thereby earned himself a gallon of rum — after which he would have needed some medical intervention himself, I’m guessing. Cook named the promontory south of the bay after him: Young Nick’s Head. Which, when I was learning NZ history at school, was amusing enough; but somehow I wasn’t listening when/if we were told that the boy’s real name was actually Nicholas Young. Oh, how they must have laughed at the joke, Cook and Joseph Banks and co, tucked into their cramped cabins rubbing their forehead bruises from the low cross-beams.

But the real news today is that sprinkle of snow on the far hills beyond the imposter's feet: rare enough here, the dusting that fell in Auckland was, if the pro-snow people have their way over the hail-deniers, the first snow to fall there since 1939.

Where's Michael Fish when you need him?

2011-08-14T17:56:00.001+12:00

Three weeks ago I returned to NZ from summery UK via Hong Kong where it was 34 degrees and even though I didn't leave the airport's air-conditioning, I felt uncomfortably oppressed by all that heat and humidity bearing down on the vast curving roof; and then I got back to Auckland for the coldest day of the year. It was raw and chill and miserable.

Yesterday I returned to NZ from Macau and Hong Kong where it was again - still - 34 degrees and drippingly humid. I had spent a week going from melting heat to goosebumpy air-conditioning, setting off a similar fever-chill series on a personal level that had me prostrate in bed for 16 hours. But then I got home to a bright and surprisingly warm day, all set to head off to Gisborne this afternoon, seduced by reports of what last week was brilliant clear sunny weather. Except that now there's a massive cold front passing up the country bringing snow even to such unlikely recipients as Rotorua and Napier, and the phone is promising single-digit figures for Gisborne itself and freezing night temperatures.

It is winter, after all, but Gizzy and the East Cape usually skim through with lots of sunshine and warmer temperatures than elsewhere, and I was looking forward to exploring Whale Rider country. Bother. If only the forecast had come courtesy of Michael Fish, I could be feeling optimistic.

Beating the heat

2011-08-12T20:07:00.002+12:00

At the Peninsula (where I stayed last time I was in Hong Kong, in a 6-room suite with a hallway and brass telescope) the string quartet was playing 'Roll Out the Barrel' as I sipped my Earl Grey at high tea. Were they being ironic? Because the Pen's afternoon tea is as far from a knees-up as you can get.

It's in the lobby, with high moulded ceiling, acres of shiny marble, potted palms and white-suited bellboys opening and closing the doors for everyone, even those who arrive, sweating, on their own feet instead of gliding up in one of the hotel's fleet of Rolls Royces.

The tea was well done, beautifully presented and very tasty: hot little pastries, cucumber and salmon sarnies, pretty petits fours (especially loved the almond friande with the maraschino cherry) and bottomless tea made from leaves. Lots to look at as people came in and out; and no hurry at all to vacate the table, despite the long queue of people waiting.

It was all very classy and elegant, and cool in every sense: unlike outside where it was stiflingly hot and muggy, people were huddled under their umbrellas, and others had given up entirely and composed themselves for sleep on shady benches and elsewhere, shoes off, folded cardboard under their heads and dead to the world.

Everything is illuminated

2011-08-12T01:53:00.000+12:00

Macau is a very compact place: a peninsula and a couple of islands linked by bridges, only 30 square kilometres altogether, so we’ve been travelling the same roads back and forth as we’ve been taken to various sights over the last four days. This quickly became a favourite view, across a man-made lake to the man-made cityscape of tall and extravagantly-shaped buildings. The Grand Lisboa is the oddest of them all, and at night is spectacular.

We were on our way to yet another Portuguese restaurant, Antonio’s, and were served by Antonio himself who indulged us (and himself) with his party piece after the excellent meal and the flaming crepes Suzette: he wiped off his sabre – what, you didn’t know that chefs had sabres? – and showed one of our group how to take the top off a champagne bottle with one swipe. That’s the glass and all, cleanly, with no splinters, or lost wine. Pretty cool, we all had to admit.

There was nothing cool about today. I’ve no idea of the temperature or humidity, but walking around the narrow streets I nearly melted, and reduced a substantial paper serviette to a limp rag simply by wiping my brow with it. My sense of direction was discombobulated and I went in frustrating circles trying to find my way back from a little park where I was sorely tempted to commit a sort of theft by releasing the birds left there by their owners in tiny little bamboo cages.

Despite the heat, there were people there working on the machines that are dotted about in parks throughout the city, doing unselfconscious tai chi under the trees and even walking backwards down the path; as well as playing cards and mah jong in stone pergolas. And everywhere there were people sweeping and tidying, keeping it all neat and tidy.

Then it was off to the ferry for the hour-long trip to Hong Kong, for which it would have been lovely to stand on deck to enjoy the islands and the interesting shipping, but we had to stay shut inside by foggy windows, alas. This city is as busy and energetic as ever. It’s odd to see other white faces here, after Macau, and the waterfront is very cosmopolitan – as well as spectacularly illuminated too, on this hot and muggy night.

A glass act

2011-08-10T23:47:00.006+12:00

Two connections today: at the MGM hotel (yes, another site inspection) they have a Dale Chihuly hallway lined with big pieces of his work, which also features in the lobby. I first came across him in Washington state and especially in Tacoma - and thought I had already seen some of his distinctive twirly tubes at the Galaxy earlier today (why yes, since you ask, that was a hotel inspection too). Lovely stuff, and classy, which was the aim - where all the other hotels have had us walking on (spit) marble, at the MGM the floors were jade and lapis lazuli. It's the kind of place where they employ leaf-dusters.

At the two hotels we drifted through scented corridors where it was all about hush and Zen, every detail considered - at Galaxy's associated Banyan Tree, the swirls of little bubbles in the coloured concrete panels of the walls were each applied by hand - and in the suite that was bigger than many houses, if it was Tuesday it was Ylang Ylang. Galaxy had a wave pool with a white sand beach on its second floor. MGM had a Portuguese square recreated indoors, with bored little budgies in tiny cages hanging from pergolas.

But then we got to see some proper sights: wine museum where we tasted white port, an aperitif; a Grand Prix museum where we got to sit in a real Formula 3 car (those things are like coffins - and hopelessly insubstantial); and a science museum where they had a display of da Vinci machines which included the cryptex that Dan Brown claimed he had invented, wrongly - but the da Vinci people were forced to include it by popular demand, and it's the most popular item. How sad, when there's all that other amazing stuff there that he actually invented.

And then we went to see the pandas, so I could be all "Oh, I've touched a panda before, in Adelaide, look at the close-up photo on my phone here, I can tell you all about them, what do you want to know?" I make a lot of friends that way. The two here were in the same enclosure, and moving around, which was lovely and a treat - "They do spend most of the day asleep in a ball," I informed everyone beforehand - but we were whisked away after a scant 10 minutes, which was mean.

Finally we had some free time and, having been shown the hotel's Six Senses Spa where it was all trickling water, perfume, open spaces, orchids and bamboo, I went to a dark little dive off the street where armchairs draped in towels were jammed in and Chinese men with no trousers were lolling back having their feet rubbed while they smoked and watched Brazil beat Panama in the football. I had a rather painful foot massage from a fat woman who tutted over the hard skin on my toes and simpered "Tip? Tip?" when I paid her.

Not even one Cornetto, though

2011-08-09T23:54:00.000+12:00

"Call that a bathroom? Why, it's only three times bigger than mine at home - pah!" That's what happens when you've been paraded through the swankiest suites of five flash hotels in the space of two days. Luxury fatigue: it's a sad condition.

All that said, there's no not being blown away, stunned, astonished and simply gob-smacked by The Venetian. It's the size - 3,000 suites, 10,000 employees - and the success - takes more in a year than the entire Las Vegas strip combined - but mostly the concept: recreate Venice, canals and all, indoors. It's bizarre, but so well done that it's fascinating, and easy to see how people spend all day there indoors under its permanently blue sky, wandering the shops, taking a gondola ride, watching the street entertainment, eating in one of the 30 restaurants - and then, of course, popping downstairs for a flutter in the vast casino.

Of all that, I took the gondola ride with Luciano, a real Italian opera singer in a blue-striped tshirt and red sash who had to learn how to row when he came here but belted out a mean cliche - Volare, Santa Lucia - and when asked how this Venice differed from the real one said simply, "It's cleaner."

We also visited Ice World there: an exhibition of ice sculptures - Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Taj Mahal plus animals from dinosaurs to pandas and penguins - where I went down an ice slide (fast!) and was glad after half an hour to emerge from the -15 degrees, despite my big padded coat.

And then last night we were in the packed 15,000-seat theatre for a Cirque de Soleil show, Zaia, which was as spectacular as ever and left me feeling astonished and physically feeble.

There were other things today - cemetery with PO Box tombs as well as mini-mansions; old colonial houses; lotuses and white herons; and lots of delicious Portuguese food - but mainly it was all about the Venetian. Just as well really, as there was a tremendous thunderstorm this morning which dropped the temperature to a mere 25 degrees, but hoisted the humidity to 95%.

Sick of it

2011-08-08T23:21:00.001+12:00

I've seen more shiny marble, thick rugs and gold taps today than you could shake a stick at. This famil has a tedious number of site inspections included in the itinerary: two or three every day, which is a shocking waste of time when we could have been out and about in Macau seeing the sights and getting material to write about. If I'd known how it was to be, I wouldn't have come - but I didn't get the itinerary till a couple of days before we left. This is travel agent stuff, not travel writer treatment.

It's because there's no such thing as a free lunch, of course, and though I would have been fine with street food, taking us to fancy hotels for slap-up buffets and shows means we have to trail around behind the marketing people making polite noises about their executive suites. They were pretty good, though, if you like acres of floor space, showers like small rooms, your own karaoke room, giant flat-screen TVs everywhere including over the infinity bath, and floor-to-ceiling views over Macau's skyscrapers and huddled apartment blocks to the hills of China just across the harbour.

We did get to do some touristy things: a visit to the A-Ma Temple, which climbs up a hill and was very busy with worshippers lighting bundles of joss-sticks and bowing before shrines; as well as buying wishes which were written on red paper, hung inside a big incense spiral and hung from the ceiling to smoke away for a couple of weeks. Then the ruins of St Paul's - literally just the facade at the top of a flight of steps, the rest having been destroyed in a fire. And we went up the Macau Tower, designed by the same company as Auckland's Skytower (evidently short of ideas, as it looks almost exactly the same) and found a Taupo guy called Anthony running the AJ Hackett bungy from the top: in the job 20 years, and still amused by how jumpers try to fly by waving their arms as they fall, "screaming like a stuck pig".

And then I got sick, and was sick, and had to opt out of the last visit which included a casino. It was incredibly hot and humid today and very uncomfortable walking the streets (even the locals hiding under umbrellas when they had to venture out of the air-conditioning); but I think it was actually something I ate that did for me. Such a tragedy, because the rest of the group couldn't stop raving about the lunchtime buffet...

Saúde!

2011-08-08T12:00:00.001+12:00

Even I found yesterday unconscionably long, despite having slept in later than everyone else on the morning of departure thanks to having spent the night at the new Novotel Auckland Airport, which was very comfortable, amazingly quiet despite overlooking the runways, considerately provided breakfast from 5am, and was a brilliantly satisfying five-minute walk to check-in from literally across the road.

There was a lot of waiting around, as there always is with travel, plus a hiccup with a group member who broke a tooth on his flight to meet us from Sydney and had to be taken to hospital; so we didn't get out to dinner until well after 8pm local time (midnight according to our bodies). The drive to the restaurant was pretty spectacular - Macau advertises itself as "where Asia comes to play" and there are many casinos here, a couple of them built almost on Las Vegas scale: enormously tall, with fountains, mirrors and millions of coloured lights flashing and swirling and changing. That lovely bridge was spectacular too, in a much classier manner, lit up with white lights and reflected in the water.

We had an excellent dinner at O Porto Interior, a Portuguese restaurant that specialises in seafood, and the giant stuffed prawns and the seabass were really delicious; and the wines excellent too. It was nice to see big family parties there with three or four generations all eating together - and they're good-looking people too, the Macanese. We were sorry not to be up to reaching the port stage, but everyone was drooping by then and looking forward to our big soft beds. It took some vigilance on the part of our guide to herd us safely across the road - the zebra crossing under our feet meaning nothing whatsoever to the relentless drivers zooming along the street even late on a Sunday night.

Welcome

2011-08-07T23:55:00.000+12:00

By hydrofoil across the Fragrant Harbour to Macau, a 45-minute trip with views of fishing boats like spiders, volcanic jungly islands ringed with ranks of uniform apartment blocks, and finally Macau itself, disconcerting with its oddly familiar Skytower-clone silhouette looming over an unfamiliar skyline. And a very splendid bridge soaring across the water, white and modern and graceful.

Even at 6pm it's hot, and humid, and we were thankful for airconditioning on the short drive to our hotel, the Landmark, which is also rather splendid and spacious and has a most opulent marble bathroom to disport myself in. There was much excitement in the group when we checked in and were told that the minibar was free. "Surely she said 'fee'?" we speculated, thrilled at the prospect but anxious too.

There was no cause for concern. Even if our credit cards are charged for the entire contents, it's not going to break the bank:

Ni hao

2011-08-07T20:07:00.002+12:00

Back in Hong Kong, just two weeks after passing through here on the way home from the UK - waiting now for the ferry across to Macau (straight from the airport, via train and a series of escalators, all very automated, clean and efficient).

We were wafted here in Cathay Pacific's Business class. I love those pods: unlike Air NZ's Business which scrimps on comfort, these are the real deal, with big TV screens, seats that recline fully flat WITH ALL THEIR PADDING, tables that are easy to eat off, feathery duvets and good-sized pillows. And excellent food and wine and chocolates and hot flannels...

So feeling pretty chilled - which is a laugh, seeing as how it's 34 degrees here.

Over it

2011-08-03T15:37:00.003+12:00

It's been not quite the Black Dog of Depression on my shoulder, more the Grey Cat of Jet Lag sleeping on my face, but the effects have felt the same, especially when it's dragged (oh, how it's dragged) on for nine days, sucking the colour out of the day and making the endless night feel stuck at the 3am pits when the past is one long mistake, the future a downward spiral and all hope dead. But last night I finally slept through like a baby (actually not at all like the babies of my acquaintance) and woke at a sensible hour feeling refreshed and interested and light, so normal service can now be resumed.

Stephen Fry has just arrived in the country to film on The Hobbit, and is tweeting tetchily about feeling "weirdly high and spaced-out" after flying in from South Africa, so he has my sympathies (also, it must be rather irritating to be constantly mistaken on the street for James May - what are you thinking, Wellingtonians?) Coincidentally, Hugh Laurie is in Auckland this week filming Mr Pip. The Americans think he's theirs, and cool, thanks to House, but we've known him since A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Blackadder so we're not fooled by the jeans and stubble, and know what a cheerful (and thoroughly English) clown he really is.

The Baby was er, babysitting Motat yesterday while a set was being constructed in the blacksmith's forge for Mr Pip filming to take place there on Friday - it'll be exciting for them to have a bit of glamour in their midst. Motat (Auckland Museum of Transport and Technology) is a worthy place, but old-fashioned in a way that doesn't quite pull off charming, unfortunately. They have good stuff there, but it's not well displayed, and most of the hands-on stuff seems to be broken. It really needs an injection of cash and some pizazz in its management - if it could aim to be like the Yakima Valley Museum in the otherwise fairly undistinguished town of Yakima in Washington state, it would be beating the visitors off with sticks, rather than desperately enticing them in with free entry.

Their stuff was just as eclectic - from a skunk pelt to a butter churn operated by a sheep to a piece of hardtack from the Civil War - but the display was bright and open and inviting, with lots of colour (especially the collection of neon signs) and entertaining storyboards. It probably helped that we were welcomed by the director, David, who was bubbling over with enthusiasm. I love enthusiastic people; and I hate that jet lag makes enthusiasm impossible. I'm glad to be over it.

(What a shame, then, that I'm going to Macau on Sunday, starting the whole sorry business all over again.)

Fishy tales

2011-07-29T17:53:00.000+12:00

With the aftershock total now 8175, any small bit of cheer is welcome from Christchurch, so it was heartening yesterday to hear a good news story for once, about the two goldfish Shaggy and Daphne discovered still alive in their tank in an office in the Red Zone, 134 days after the building was evacuated following the February quake. There was some dark muttering about their having lived off the corpses of their disappeared companions, but informed opinion has it that they have simply been in shut-down mode because of low temperatures (and snow is just the latest environmental insult that Cantabrians have had to cope with), the missing fish probably having been swept over the top in a post-quake mini tsunami.

From one extreme to another, my Ningaloo Reef whale shark story is recently out too, on the cover of the Herald's travel section, which was rather exciting - especially as my Leavenworth one was inside too. And then this week it was Reunion Island's turn. As ever, feast or famine - which is how it must be feeling for Shaggy and Daphne now.

Till next time

2011-07-24T21:02:00.004+12:00

It was a perfect day to leave England: fixed in the memory on a warm summer's day, driving across the Cotswolds where the rolling fields of corn are golden and ready for harvesting, the trees are green and stately, and the butter-yellow stone of the houses in the villages was set off by the sweet peas, hollyhocks and lavender growing in the borders and flower-boxes.

We've been away for about four weeks. It seems ages, looking back over where we've been, the things we've done and seen, the people we've caught up with. Paris, London, rural England, Oxford, Stratford, Wales, Ireland... Punting, a West End show, a jaunting car, a progressive supper, a game fair, palaces and cathedrals, pubs and restaurants, gardens and galleries. Horses, dogs, goats, cattle, camels, donkeys and ducks. Pork pies, cider, Eccles cakes and cream teas. Boats, buses, cars, carts, trains and planes.

It's been fun. But it will be good to get home. (Especially on Air NZ business, thanks to airpoints and an upgrade, yay.)

UPDATE: Air NZ Business? Bit of a disappointment: looked good with the pods and all, and the service as always was excellent, but when it came to bedtime, instead of the seats reclining all the way back, what happens is that you stand up to allow the back-rest to fold forward to join up with the foot-stool. The resultant bed is perfectly flat, but the padding is minimal and it's like sleeping on an ironing board. It's a clever idea that doesn't work.

Slainte!

2011-07-21T09:41:00.001+12:00

Couldn't leave Bunratty this morning without a too-quick look at the Folk Park: one of those outdoor museums where buildings have been relocated or reconstructed to make an old-time village. This one works particularly well, the trees and gardens looking really well-established and natural, and the buildings so pretty. And then of course there are people around like Mike here, in the school room, cane at the ready and full of chat about how back in 1847 ("Black '47") the children were so weak and tired from lack of food that it was no problem for a single teacher to be in charge of 130 of them. There were six books to teach from and "only one answer to a question" which were all learned by rote. Mike remembered having to kneel on prickly sticks for being late to school and threatened with expulsion if he looked at a girl, even his own sister - and he was born in 1952! (I speak as a Coronation baby myself.)

The main focus today was the Ring of Kerry, a 100-mile drive around the Iveagh Peninsula which promised great scenic spectacles that didn't initially deliver - I have a high standard for coastal drives, I am a New Zealander after all - but in the end all was well. Beetling great bare mountains, rocky coast, clear blue water, distant clusters of white-painted crofts, trails of stone walls down the slopes... No complaints.

And finally dinner in a pub in central Kilkenny, with a glass of cider beside me, a beef and Guinness pie inside me, a duo belting out 'Black Velvet Band' and other old favourites right in front of me, and my last day in Ireland ahead of me.

Horses - four courses

2011-07-20T08:59:00.002+12:00

Busy, busy day - proof again that there's more to see and do in even a small corner of Ireland than you can ever hope to squeeze into a laughable 5 days. First there was Waterford's Treasures: rooms full of silver and gold and crystal chandeliers with more than 200 prisms sparkling - and also more pleasingly ordinary stuff, like a tin clockwork toy Miss Busy-Bee the Typist and posters of Ireland's first pop superstars The Royal performing their smash hit The Huckleback in 1964.

Then a quick look at Waterford Crystal over the road where a grizzly bear 50cm high would set you back 30,000 euros, or an American football helmet - should you have a use for a glass one - a mere 17,500; and where Noel the duster claimed to have "nerves of steel" but that when accidents happen "it pays to run fast."

At Cashel Rock, that scourge of the tourist - scaffolding - was all over one side of the castle/cathedral like a rash, but down at Bru Boru, a cultural project, we were delighted by a mini-show of singing, dancing and music of such a high standard, we wished could see the proper evening show. Mind, it's hard work tapping along to that infectious music, so my ankles would be weak after that.

The horses came at Coolmore Stud, where a dozen or so stallions live in enviable elegance: lawns, gardens, trees, their loose boxes like pretty little houses, and endlessly pampered - though having five men watching narrowly when you have your end away, filming every moment, must take the edge off the luxury.

And tonight a four-course medieval banquet at Bunratty Castle, a tall and imposing 15th century castle, where Tom the Butler, some pink-cheeked wenches, an accomplished harpist and a lugubrious fiddler thoroughly entertained us while we ate a surprisingly tasty dinner. A long day, happily ended in the comfort of the Bunratty Castle Hotel's big, soft bed.

Street life

2011-07-19T08:56:00.000+12:00

"Yur fookin' hoortin' may! Yur fookin' hoortin' may!" Moment of drama on the streets of Kilkenny as a man who stole a big bottle of vodka was forcibly detained by a couple of burly store detectives while the Garda came screeching to the rescue, siren and lights going.

It was pretty much all about the streets today: wandering Waterford's maze of lanes before being escorted on a guided tour by the famous Jack Burtchaell, who's been doing it up to six times a day for 21 years and so can be forgiven a certain lack of energy in his performance. Still interesting, though, covering 1000 years of history in an hour and a mile, with plenty of digs at the British, plus sex, violence and the drink. Waterford, a Viking city, is older than all the Scandinavian cities and is third in age only to London and Paris, so there's a lot to talk about; although some things can't be seen any more - the Waterford Crystal factory closed in 2009, alas, though there's still glass being blown here.

Then to Kilkenny through the green as countryside, where the sturdy castle - invaded today by hordes of Germans - is surrounded by a knot of little cobbled lanes lined mostly, it seemed, by pubs. It looked a lively place, colourful and pretty, and it was a shame we had so little time there.

Back in Waterford, we ate in the completely empty Munster bar before following our ears down to the riverside quay to watch a troupe of scout bagpipe band members practising: they were good, though it was odd to hear Scotland the Brave. It was windy and cold, so we had to go afterwards to the magnificent Granville Hotel for a warm-up: all shiny brass, stained glass, comfortable chairs and original caricatures of golfers and jockeys; and birthplace of Thomas Francis Meaguer, who did many things including designing the Irish flag, but for me was special because at one point he was sent to Van Diemen's Land - otherwise known as Tasmania, where I went in February. So that's today's connection.

Good Knight

2011-07-18T09:42:00.001+12:00

How I do hate the word 'uncomfortable'. Mostly when it's used by a gynaecologist bearing down on me with a plastic speculum; but also when it's uttered by the captain of a ferry I'm trapped on for the next two hours. Crossing from the Welsh port of Fishguard to Rosslare in south-east Ireland, we were shunted about by 2-metre swells and it was no fun at all, even with a Scopaderm patch behind my ear: it's a long time to stare at the horizon and concentrate on not hearing all the honking up going on elsewhere in the cabin.

But eventually we got back onto terra firma and wound up at the world's "oldest intact still-working lighthouse," said William, choosing his description carefully to avoid any possibility of challenge. Hook Head in County Wexford has had a light since the 5th century, and an actual lighthouse for 800-odd years, so I reckon he's pretty safe. It was a fine and stirring place to be on a blustery day with dark cloud and bright sun and, ever a sucker for lighthouses, I would have been pleased to be there on those grounds alone - but one-third of the way up its 150 steps, we came across an amazing coincidence.

Regular readers (hollow laughter) will recall that earlier in this trip, we stayed at the Inner Temple in London - a privilege accorded to members only. Just metres from the door of Dr Johnson's Building was the Temple Church, built in the 12th century by the Knights Templar, they of the Crusades. We went in and looked at, amongst others, the effigy of William Marshal who made King John sign the Magna Carta in 1215 and thereby also made his own name, amongst the legal fraternity at least.

But something else he did was to found the town of New Ross in Wexford and, to encourage trade there, also built at the entrance to the river, Hook Head lighthouse, where there's a picture of his supine statue back in London. Connections, eh? Love 'em.

Horses and goats and dogs, oh yes!

2011-07-16T20:42:00.003+12:00

And people, lots and lots of lovely, friendly, welcoming people, here in Herefordshire where we used to live. It's been such fun and a great pleasure to have conversations again about hunting and farming and horses, to hear so many names we'd almost forgotten and catch up on the news, almost all of it still completely local as so few of them have moved away (though some, inevitably, have now er, moved on).

Why would they want to go elsewhere? It's such a pretty part of the country, and there's always so much going on. Last night it was the Progressive Supper to raise funds for Lea Church, and about 40 of us moved from house to house - starter, main, pudding and coffee - eating really delicious food (summer pudding! heavenly) and mixing and mingling with a great assortment of people including the highly popular young vicar who has six churches on his patch but still has time to keep a horse for hunting.

Things don't stand still here, depite the traditions: yesterday we visited a goat farm to watch the milking of about 800 in a huge shed where 1200 of them live permanently indoors, entirely content on yellow straw with plenty of room and sun and air, and plastic barrels to play with. I thought I was against factory farming, but what I saw there was entirely unobjectionable. Travel: it does so broaden the mind.

Periodic visits

2011-07-11T09:38:00.000+12:00

It's very nice to be back in Oxford again: last time was two years ago on an Alice-themed visit. This trip is student-focused, and we're staying in Keble College - one of several that rent out their rooms during vacation time. It's the real deal: three-storey buildings forming quadrangles around squares of fine, neatly-mown striped lawns, and a high-ceilinged dining hall where we'll be having breakfast tomorrow.

There was also a brief dodo-detour at the Museum of Natural History across the road, to see the complete skeleton there and the feathery reconstruction: rather more impressive than the sad display of remains that's all they have to show off in Mauritius.

It seemed only fair to try out the Oxford version of punting, having done it in Cambridge last time. To be brutally frank, it's prettier in Cambridge, as there's more to see of the colleges, and more bridges to pass under, but Emilio, our very English punter, was charming and so was the enterprising pair who sat in the middle of the river in a punt full of Pimm's ingredients, even down to pots of mint, so we were able to pause for them to make us all a large glassful each, and then glide on our way, fully content. What better way to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon?

Home county

2011-07-09T09:36:00.000+12:00

Back to Farnham, Surrey today: the first place I lived when I arrived in England 34 years ago, to spend the day with family I first met then, still as funny, and such good company that the daughter who was initially miffed that we couldn't go instead to Legoland, was entirely won over.

Farnham is such a pretty town, different from the Cotswold classics but in its own way just as appealing, with its historic old brick buildings, some of them in herringbone patterns, its half-timbered houses, and flint ones too. As well, it takes the Britain in Bloom competition very seriously, and is a prize-winner with hanging baskets and window boxes bright with flowers everywhere. The country all around is lovely too, with lots of woods, the Common, bridle paths and footpaths - we took a walk to look at the mock-castle set currently being used for Johnny Depp's new movie Dark Shadow (unfortunately no filming in progress today).

A sainted aunt, cousins, children, cats, a dog and some horses, plus a cosy pub, good stories and cider: another good day.

End of the octology

2011-07-08T09:26:00.001+12:00

What a big day: the last event in the Harry Potter section of our lives, that's given us so much shared fun and excitement over the last 14 years. It was the premiere of the final movie, held in Trafalgar Square because the usual Leicester Square wasn't going to be big enough. Trouble is, Trafalgar wasn't big enough either, with so many eager fans camping out for days that the 8,000 coveted red wristbands for admittance to the central area soon ran out, and thousands of people were shut out into the wasteland of the footpaths around the outside, to be barked at by stressed policemen.

Rather unkindly, the barriers were solid and high, leaving us wishing we had drills - "Or a wand!" one girl said longingly - and reduced to poking our cameras over the top, hoping to catch a snap of the stars or JK herself on the stage in front of the big screen. We were all herded and bossed by the police, and most of us saw very little, our only excitement coming from the roars and screams of the crowds squeezed on the steps of St Martin's as they caught sight of a new star coming forward for an interview. But it was still fun and exciting, and it was such a good-natured crowd, from little kids in cloaks and round glasses, through the 20 year-old Harry generation with their risque posters ("I'd get sleazy for Ron Weasley"), all the way up to people like me who ought to be beyond it, but were loving every moment.

It was a major production, getting there from Gloucestershire, and battling through the traffic and crush of people, and we saw practically nothing of the celebrities - but it was an event that meant a lot to us, and we were glad to be there.

Summertime in England

2011-07-07T03:38:00.002+12:00

Synonymous with Glastonbury, Wimbledon, Royal Ascot - and rain. Well, showers, so at least we did get to enjoy, in between, the rolling fields of wheat and barley in the Cotswolds, the poppies along the verges, and the lovely honey stone villages that are looking so neat and pretty with flowers in tubs and baskets and the grass so fine and tidy.

Lots of names from the past - Cold Slad, Pamington, The Slaughters, Bourton-on-the-Water, Broadway - and a long detour so the Firstborn could take a photo of the Wyre Piddle sign. Then a bit of rain, and we took shelter in the classy shops of Cheltenham Spa, where the assistants are effortlessly polite and the customers ditto. I'm feeling a bit scruffy here, to be honest - I always used to dress up to come to Cheltenham, whereas Gloucester was all jeans and muddy gumboots.

Non-appearance by the daughters at the rendezvous under the Regent Arcade fish-clock - instead an urgent text: "NEED MORE TIME!" - I'm glad Chelters is fulfilling our promise.

As I was saying to Lady Carnarvon...

2011-07-06T19:41:00.001+12:00

Highclere Castle is a beautiful building and a fun place for her young son to grow up in. We were there to get material for a story about "Downton Abbey", the irresistible upstairs/downstairs soap opera that's just finished its first season in NZ, and which is filmed at Highclere. We chatted with Lady Carnarvon for an hour. She was very nice, but wouldn't let me take a photo "because I'm a mess and haven't got any makeup on" - I should be so lucky, to look like that when I'm at my worst, all tousled blonde hair and blue eyes and perfect teeth, and casually elegant.

The house was very appealing on a hot July day - though evidently a chilly place in cold weather, and all the fireplaces were set ready to go - and I especially liked all the evidence of occupation, like the tubes of cream on the bedside tables, the books left open face down, in amongst the Van Dyck portraits and the soaring ceilings. Oh, and seeing the Queen and Di in family photos scattered about on the grand piano and side tables. And there was a Tutenkamen exhibition in the servants' cellars that was mostly convincing replicas except for Lord Carnarvon's actual folding razor that gave him the fateful knick, leading to septicaemia and death, and the Curse of the Mummy story. Great stuff.