The beds here at the Oaks Hotel are quite remarkably comfortable, the sheets silky smooth, and the pillows just right - so it was with some reluctance that I left mine this morning for our last day in Wellington.
The sun was shining as we popped up the hill to fashionably grungy Havana Coffee Works for one of Wellington's better flat whites (and that's a hard call) and then walked down to Te Papa for a private tour. I've been to the National Museum many times, but never on a tour and when we first met Roger I wondered if that was maybe a good thing.
He was full-on, was Roger. He's an OWM, and I started by bristling at his clichê jokes about Yes, dear and other comments verging on misogyny; but after a bit he either wore me down or won me over and I began to enjoy his enthusiasm, his energy, his professionally practised spiel and colourful turn of phrase. The Maori-European wars were all about "testosterone, adrenaline, feathers and dust"; Zealandia broke off from Australia "because you would, wouldn't you?"; and Maori soon saw off the moa because "look at the drumsticks on that chook!"
His favourite word is "Amazing!" and it's always good to spend time with someone who loves their job, so I was pleased in the end to have him skim us over the surface of Te Papa in 90 minutes. Because that's all you can do, in an hour and a half: you could easily spend that just in the Gallipoli exhibition (which is so popular its run has been extended till 2021, but don't hang about).
I went back, myself, to have a closer look at the new Te Taiao Nature exhibition for a story, and enjoyed the jolly earthquake simulation, though it was sobering to absorb the general theme of Look what we're losing! Look after nature, please!
And then, after a solitary lunch, that was pretty much it, for Wellington, for this visit. I always like coming here, it's a great little city and there's always something new - or old, see Gallipoli, above - to enjoy. Why not come, yourself? Stay at the Oaks, and see how right I am about their beds...
The morning got off to a messy start, organisation-wise - this famil is a first for the PR person, and there have been some hiccups - but once we were eventually settled in the little pink bus of Hammonds Sightsee Wellington and driver Lorraine was back in her groove, everything went splendidly. The weather was messy too, but this is Wellington, it could have been much, much worse, so we were grateful for that, at least.
The tour took us through the city to the cable car, which I skipped, having done it so recently, instead being driven in solitary splendour up through the pretty suburb of Kelburn with its cute little century-old wooden bungalows to the top of the hill to meet the others, and take the obligatory city-lookout-with-cable-car-foreground photo.
Then we wound back down to the bottom entrance of the Botanic Gardens and stopped to have a look at the Lady Norwood Rose Gardens, which were in glorious, and sweetly-scented, full bloom; and at the Begonia House which was warm and steamy and full of ferns and orchids and water lilies. Oh, and begonias, too. Lovely.
We gave a salute to Parliament, St Paul's old and new, The Fortress (aka US Embassy) and then stopped at the Wellington Museum for a shamefully quick once-over. The tour idea was to show what people could do by themselves, but it seemed unlikely that the others on the bus, debarked from the gigantic Ovation of the Seas, would return for a proper dose of culture. Their loss.
We drove along the waterfront past all the landmarks - so many! Not London, but nothing to be ashamed of... - and the Ovation people were excited by all the private (and astonishingly steep) cable cars as we headed out towards Miramar. Quirky Seatoun came next, and the dramatic story of the Wahine sinking back in 1968. The next bit of the south coast was new to me: spiky rocks leading out to Barrett's Reef, wild and hostile even in a northerly with no waves breaking. It was easy to imagine how violent and scary it must be there in a roaring southerly like the one that sank the ferry.
Back past Moa Point (complete with moa), under the airport runway, around Lyall Bay and through Kilbirnie, along the green Town Belt, up to the Mt Victoria lookout (again), and finally we wound back down into the city, past houses teetering on the precipitous rock, and Mackenzie Avenue which is just a flight of very steep steps disappearing uphill.
That evening we went to Atlas, a new restaurant on Customhouse Quay which is done out in pale woods, gold and teal, and staffed by intimidatingly serious and dedicated people. The head waiter had us feeling as though we were failing an exam with his interrogation as to what sort of wine we wanted from the 300 on offer.
We got through that, knowing that we hadn't acquitted ourselves well, and then struggled with the menu, full of new and unusual combinations of foods, and finally got that too sorted. But the drama was not over! One of us had ordered the lamb saddle, which turned out to be a couple of thick slices of quite rare meat - too rare for this diner. She asked the (American) waitress if it could be cooked a bit more. Well!
The waitress gasped, staggered backwards with her hand to her heart, and stuttered breathlessly for a minute before, after hesitating, taking the plate away to "see what I can do". The drama was hilarious, and we had no idea what occasioned it - scary chef, the novelty of such a bourgeois request - and it was quite the highlight of the evening.
The food, incidentally (and by now it did seem incidental) was excellent and interesting, and we all enjoyed it, from the malt butter with the bread at the start, to the black garlic with the bitter chocolate at the end. But the incidental floor show was the best part, by far.
UPDATE: And in today's coincidence, which I am glad to have had no part in, the cruise ship passengers on today's city tour heard all about the Wahine disaster, when the interislander ferry got pushed around by a storm and ended up on a reef with one propeller knocked off, one engine conked out, and 51 people getting drowned. So what happened this evening? As the Ovation left the harbour with its 4000+ passengers, it got as far as Seatoun where its engines mysteriously stopped and it sat there near the reef, held in place by tugs, for an hour and a half before the problem was fixed.
Let me - as a (reluctant) newbie to the airline - draw a veil over the unaccustomed penny-pinching ways of Jetstar and its uncompromising attitude to gouging money out of its passengers (which was, to be fair, slightly eased by the sympathy and helpfulness of the check-in girl, who seemed embarrassed to be charging me extra for my carry-on bag), so that I can bring to an end this already unconscionably run-on sentence. I travelled this morning to Wellington to join a small famil focused on reviewing the newly-opened Oaks Hotel there.
It's a perfectly nice hotel. Will that do? I'll have to be a bit more wordy in the newspaper, but basically, that's it. It's new, fresh, businesslike, comfortable. Some elements, like the coffee machine and - hopefully (she wrote with narrowed eyes) - the bulk dispensers of toiletries instead of the current eco-unfriendly tiny plastic containers, are still to be sorted, but it's been up and running for six weeks already and they know what they're doing. The GM is particularly enthusiastic and focused.
The best thing about it, even more important than its excellent chef, is its position in Courtenay Place. In what is already a small and accessible CBD, the hotel is perfectly placed for whatever you want from Wellington, whether it's business or pleasure.
My business is, of course, pleasure; so after checking in I set out to seek some. That, almost inevitably, meant heading down to the waterfront, just a couple of blocks away where, it being Sunday afternoon, things were gently buzzing. People were everywhere: on feet, skateboards, scooters, bikes, with kids, other people or dogs, gazing out over the harbour, sitting chilling, wandering, or - a bit unexpected this, but really, it's quirky Wellington, I shouldn't have been surprised - teetering along on a tightrope above the water, with the inevitable result that all of us watching, à la Janet Frame's The Linesman, were hoping for. Not that he seemed to mind (he was prudently wearing a wetsuit, after all).
Feeling I should be showing a bit more initiative, I looked at the peak of Mt Victoria behind him and decided I would go up there. So I reversed direction and marched along the waterfront, past the lagoon, past Te Papa, past the Solace in the Wind statue, past a remarkably tempting assembly of food trucks by the Sunday produce market, past the skateboard park and playground, past the pretty boatsheds and the busker amusing himself with his guitar, and on to Oriental Bay.
As ever, I had an inadequate map, and my trusting to instinct had its usual result, when I ended up on the wrong side of a fence at a dead end. On the other side, though, was a couple in the same predicament so, encouraging each other, we climbed over it and carried on with our walks. Even though Mt Victoria - an extinct volcano, natch - is only 190m high, it was still a steepish climb up winding tracks through bush and pine trees and I was grateful for the gusty wind to cool me down. There were other walkers, more dogs, more bikers (lots of astonishingly steep tracks for them - more like chutes) and, near the summit, a disappointing car park meaning a bunch of people at the lookout who hadn't earned it.
There was an Admiral Byrd memorial pointing straight at Antarctica, 4,000km south; information about the wind (world's windiest city - shut up, Chicago); a cannon that used to announce noon, up until 1900; and also some tui feeding on the flax that fringed what could have been a more colourful view of the city, harbour and airport, but at least it wasn't raining. And then I headed back down again, along steep, crumbly tracks that my shoes weren't designed for, to quiet streets and past lovely wooden villas, back into the city. Feeling insufferably virtuous, I must say.
Our first group activity was a visit to Zealandia, a large eco-sanctuary within the city, where I'd been before but not to do the Twilight Walk. Our guide, Keri, gave us a depressingly resigned overview of the destruction people have wrought on NZ's wildlife and vegetation, and then took us out to see the start that's been made on fixing it here. It was good, to see so many birds - including a doughty Paradise shelduck mother who attacked someone's ankle for getting too close to her chicks - and the Aussies especially were much taken with them all. Being a Waihekean, most of them were everyday sights for me, but it was good to see, and hear, saddlebacks and stitchbirds too.
Best of all though, were the tuatara - half a dozen of various sizes, including one quite big (probably 30 years old) who ignored us from his burrow. Only living dinosaurs, people, and NOT LIZARDS!
We were all hoping for kiwi, of course, because they have about 150 within the reserve's serious anti-pest fences, but we were a bit too early for them to be out. Night-time tours have more luck that way, but don't see as many other birds as we did.
Then it was time to head back, at nearly 9pm, to the hotel's Oaks & Vine restaurant. Non-Spaniard that I am, my digestive processes are geared for 7pm dinner at the latest, so being served my main course at 10pm was a shock to my system that - spoiler alert - had me lying awake from 2am till 5am. But never mind, eh, it was delicious, and my greatest regrets were that I didn't order the meltingly tender and flavoursome twelve-hour lamb, or have enough room to do justice to the tarte Tatin with butterscotch sauce and coconut icecream. And at least there was Cable Bay Syrah, from Waiheke.
Never mind the nasty murder trials currently being conducted at each end of the country, or the lurid sunsets in the South Island caused by the smoke from the terrifying NSW fires, or even the ever deeper depths to which overseas politics is sinking - the big news this week is that the hoiho has been voted Bird of the Year!
BOTY has become a big event in the NZ news cycle since it was first begun 14 years ago. There have been scams and scandals, memes and hacks, poster campaigns and celebrity endorsements (Stephen Fry, Bill Bailey), plus a lot of fun; and each year it has become bigger and bigger, so that this year there were 43,460 votes. There is some suspicion about the 300+ votes received from Russia, with dark mutterings that perhaps they were trying to swing the vote towards the bar-tailed godwit, which migrates between here and there. Australia (684), the UK (682) and the US (563) were even more prolific voters, but no-one is accusing them - yet - of an attempted hack.
The hoiho, or yellow-eyed penguin, by just pipping the kakapo, has broken the run of k-birds (kokako, kea, kereru) which I had rather hoped myself to continue by voting for the kaka, since one of the flock that lives in our valley has become a regular visitor to our deck, muscling in on the nectar feeder I keep topped up for the tui.
Sadly the votes for the hoiho hugely outnumber the total population of the bird itself which, at 225 pairs, is in serious trouble - usual story, warming oceans, commercial fishing, human disturbance. So it was no wonder that the pilot of the boat that was taking me from Oban to the Ulva Island bird sanctuary was astonished and delighted to spot one swimming nearby, and circled back for a closer look. I saw some others on that Southland trip too, at Curio Bay in the Catlins, coming ashore to hop along over a fossilised forest back to their nests.
It's always cute and special to see a penguin, even when you've been to Antarctica and seen 15 different species in colonies pushing 100,000 (that's a lot of noise and smell). I hope the hoiho manages to cling on. It would be so sad if, in the end, the only place to see it was on our $5 note.
Have you heard of OneCoin? It's an online currency like Bitcoin except (except?) that it's a scam - possibly the biggest cryptocurrency fraud in the world so far. Launched in 2014 and still up and running, it has attracted hopeful investors from all around the world who are, to put it mildly, dismayed to be just learning now that their hard-earned money has disappeared into the ether.
Well, not disappeared - it's actually been banked (presumably, and ironically, in a conventional off-shore account) by the scheme's founder: glamorous, red-lipsticked, Bavarian-born intellectual Dr Ruja Ignatova. Dr Ruja is the one who's disappeared and, as I've been squatting on a steep bank in my garden here on Waiheke, cutting steps out of the clay and sweating profusely in the spring sunshine, I've been listening to a gripping 8-episode podcast all about it: The Missing Cryptoqueen by technology journalist Jamie Bartlett and his BBC producer Georgia Catt.
The last episode has just been uploaded - being real life, there's no neat tying-up of the loose ends, or even a well-deserved comeuppance for Dr Ruja. Instead, there are more false trails and heart-breaking interviews with people who thought their financial problems were all over, sucked into the hype of getting in on the ground floor with this new money-making scheme. Jamie talked to people who had persuaded their family members to invest huge sums of money - tens of thousands of pounds - and who now were faced with having to tell them that their life savings were gone. Or not tell them - one sad young man simply couldn't bring himself to confess to his mother that he had lost her money, and was desperately stringing her along in the hope that - somehow - the worst might not actually have happened.
And it was at this stage that this blog post's hook revealed itself: Jamie and Georgia had followed the trail of investors to Uganda, and had gone to a small town there to speak to this young man in front of his mother who, fortunately for her peace of mind, didn't understand English and had no idea that her life's savings were lost. And this random town, in the middle of Africa, where this particular victim, out of 50,000 investors in the country, was chosen by chance by Jamie and Georgia? Mbarara, which I passed through twice on my Intrepid Basix journey to visit Rwanda's mountain gorillas in 2017 - just about the time that Dr Ruja dropped out of sight.
I remembered the newspapers stapled shut on the newsstand in the shop where we bought drinks, the motorbike traffic with its sunshades and huge loads of goods and/or people (up to 4 men), a teeming market; and, on our return journey, camping in the bird-busy grounds of what by then seemed to us a fancy hotel, where I drank Nile beer in the garden bar and was quietly thrilled to hear Toto's 'Africa' being played. That was Day 12 of our dawn-to-dusk camping tour in a rattly bus with inadequate upholstery, passing through a never-ending roadside parade of lives lived on the margins. We were all looking forward to getting to journey's end in the sophistication of Nairobi and the subsequent return to our soft and comfortable lives. It had been an education, to see how hard these people's lives were - and, now, it's an outrage and a tragedy to know how much harder it is for some of them, all thanks to a clever woman with no conscience.
I don't know. I've been all over the place, going up in hot air balloons and small planes, riding horses, swimming with whale sharks, getting close to bears and rhino and lions, climbing peaks and going down into caves, scuba diving and kayaking, and the most proper drama I've witnessed was heading across to lunch in the city today on the Waiheke ferry.
Well, actually, there was that time I was mugged in Santiago - oh, and dislocated my shoulder in Norfolk, and, um, got tipped out of a white-water raft near Taupo, and, that's right, ran aground in a ship off Stewart Island... but I'm sticking to my premise, that this afternoon it could have got really nasty on board Fullers' Quick Cat.
Not that it did, of course, I'm here typing this and besides, this is New Zealand, even a fire on board a ferry is a laid-back experience. Because that's what happened: I was sitting reading the local rag in the main cabin when there was a flurry behind me and a serious-looking life-jacket-clad staff member was opening a hatch I'd always wondered about below the window, and dragged a fire hose out of it, and across to the door. An announcement told us that there was a problem with one of the engines and we might like to go outside to avoid any fumes. Not many did.
Then we were told that, actually, we all had to go up to the top deck because the starboard engine had caught fire and we needed to be in the open. So we trooped up there, a bit bemused, no-one particularly worried, tourists laughing, and got whipped about by the chilly wind for a while until we were allowed down into the upper cabin. "The fire is contained," we kept being told and, apart from a faint smell, that seemed to be it.
Except that obviously the engine was out of commission, so we had to limp across the harbour on one engine at just 8 knots, so our journey ended up being about three times longer than usual. Never mind, we had entertainment: the Coastguard gave us an escort, and the police launch Deodar III came alongside so three firemen in all their clobber could leap on board.
Eventually we chugged up to the pier where, kudos to the skipper, we eased into the mooring with no hiccups. There was a fire engine waiting by the Ferry Building, and more firemen on the pier, a couple pushing a stretcher for a crew member who, we learned on the TV news that night, had been overcome by fumes. And that was it. Apologies from the skipper, and thanks for our understanding, and everyone trooped ashore as usual, faintly relieved at not having had to get wet.
All in all, it was a lot more traumatic way back in 2006 when I fell off the side of a staircase in a holiday house we were renting on Waiheke, knocking myself out on the washing machine below, and breaking my wrist. The local ambulance people took me to the jetty - somehow, can't remember - and I rode in the original Deodar across the harbour to a waiting ambulance that took me to hospital. I missed out on being delivered there from Waiheke by the Eagle helicopter because it was attending a big crash up north, which also meant that I was left waiting for hours on a stretcher under a bright light while the casualties from that accident were seen to. Not that I'm bitter, at all... Oh, and they sent me home next day in a taxi, bare-footed and wearing somebody else's ghastly too-big top because they'd cut mine off. Tch.
Depressed and cynical and jaded as we all are these days, with 2016 having been such an awful year in so many ways that we couldn't wait to get to 2017, which turned out to be worse, ditto 2018, ditto 2019 and so, presumably, on... Progressively, dramatically dreadful as these years have been, there were - surprise! - others further back that were pretty eventful too. I was reminded of that today, over a long, sociable, delicious and sunny lunch at Baduzzi (venison meatballs!), hosted by Silversea. It was their annual catch-up with media here, most of them editors, plus me, to tell us about their new ships and new destinations and new themes.
The MD began by reminding us that it is Silversea's 25th anniversary this year, and asked us what we remembered of 1994. Well, personally, it was my first year back in NZ with my English-born family, but beyond that, I was stuck. Turns out quite a lot of big things happened, from the Rwanda genocide to the beginnings of 'Friends' and 'ER'. OJ Simpson did his slo-mo car chase, Kurt Cobain committed suicide, there was warfare in Sarajevo, Chechnya and the Persian Gulf, Fred and Rosemary West were charged with 12 murders at Gloucester's House of Horrors (including that of their poor daughter Heather, who I'd taught at Hucclecote Secondary Modern School a few years previously, along with her siblings Mae and Stephen).
Better things happened too. I really should have remembered, having so recently been there, about the ceasefire in Northern Ireland. Mandela was elected president of South Africa, the Channel Tunnel opened and Eurostar started up, Amazon was launched. We lost John Candy and Fanny Craddock, but gained Justin Bieber (maybe not really a gain). It was a big year for movies: Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Lion King, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Once Were Warriors, Speed. Playstation arrived.
And here in Auckland, we had a water shortage and I stopped, forever after, leaving the tap running while I brushed my teeth. (Plus, less positively, I will never forget 'If it's yellow, let it mellow - if it's brown, flush it down'.)
Meanwhile, back in Italy, Antonio Lefebre d'Ovidio founded Silversea, aiming to set a new standard in luxury small-ship cruising with two purpose-built ships, Silver Cloud and Silver Wind. The latter took me around Ireland and through Tower Bridge a couple of months ago, and is about to be converted to another exploration ship for them, since that's a field that's seeing a lot of growth lately (Antarctica, the Arctic, and Galapagos). Silversea will soon have a total of eleven ships in operation, thanks to the boost the company got from what it likes to call its 2018 'partnership' with Royal Caribbean - though the rest of us are more likely to term it a takeover, since RC now owns 2/3 of the company.
They boast about visiting 900 ports, more than any other cruise line, and on top of their excellent facilities, food and service, that keeps people loyal. Their regular guests sign up and pay in full as soon as new cruises are announced - unfortunately, since I have my eye on their new Northeast and Northwest Passage routes, between Norway and Nome, Alaska via Greenland, which I would love to do if ever (clearly unlikely) a suite was left empty.
My association with Silversea goes back 10 years, to my first cruise - to China! - in 2009. Since then, I've done six more, and despite the occasional disloyal curiosity about their main rival, Seabourn, would be perfectly happy, delighted in fact, to set sail with them again in order to reach my own personal 25 goal - of Silversea stories published, that is (I'm up to 24...)
BOTY has become a big event in the NZ news cycle since it was first begun 14 years ago. There have been scams and scandals, memes and hacks, poster campaigns and celebrity endorsements (Stephen Fry, Bill Bailey), plus a lot of fun; and each year it has become bigger and bigger, so that this year there were 43,460 votes. There is some suspicion about the 300+ votes received from Russia, with dark mutterings that perhaps they were trying to swing the vote towards the bar-tailed godwit, which migrates between here and there. Australia (684), the UK (682) and the US (563) were even more prolific voters, but no-one is accusing them - yet - of an attempted hack.
