Admiring Miramar

  With thanks to Visit Wellington for this famil

For once, leaving Wellington airport, I turned right instead of left, to spend some time exploring the peninsula suburb of Miramar (since I now have family there). It turned out to provide the perfect combination of exertion and reward, the latter mostly, I'm happy to say, edible. It's a hilly neck of land at one side of the entrance to the harbour, and there are some steep climbs up its slopes, through both bush and pretty suburbs of wooden villas. On a good day when, famously, Wellington can't be beaten, the views are excellent - unfortunately (but also predictably) this wasn't one of them, though the misty, moisty conditions produced a moodier picture which was still attractive.

Spreading the love, we collected a very good almond croissant from the Shelly Bay Bakery (which isn't actually in Shelly Bay) and then an excellent coffee from Swimsuit, and headed off on a walk that included enough steep bits to both cancel out the breakfast and earn the lunch we had at Scorch-o-Rama, in Scorching Bay (which wasn't scorching, but cool and silvery). I really liked the menu there, which was full of genuinely funny jokes, viz the vegan dish: "No animals were harmed in the making of this, unless Chef chopped another digit off. No? High three!" The food was yummy, too.

Then we carried on along the waterfront, past sandy beaches, pohutukawa, and a fringe of interesting houses, modern and traditional, with turrets and towers. Six, count them, in a row belong to Peter Jackson, so of course there be dragons. It was an interesting route, but long, with lots of steps, so after a rest back home I was ready for some indulgence.

First we went to Double Vision Brewery, in a mildly industrial area, where in the taproom with its big shiny silver tanks the bar serves a very appealing range of drinks. I really like that they're not grim purists, and was very taken by their offering such treats as Cocowbell - a coconut chocolate milk stout, as well as a strawberry and lime cider, and honey mead, plus all the usual ales and lagers. This month's cocktail was Chocolate Mud Slide - coconut stout with Baileys, vodka, chocolate syrup and cream. Sounds disgusting? Clearly, you haven't tried it.

Then we went to Oiko's restaurant for dinner, and had the nicest, friendliest waitress I've ever encountered. She also knew her stuff, and we did so enjoy our tasting plates, especially the chicken skewers and fish sliders. The sesame-crusted halloumi was a bit too delicious though for the family atmosphere, especially when it came to the last morsels - that's the downside of shared dishes.

Plus ça change...

                                      With thanks to Destination Wairarapa for this famil

Brrr! It was -2°C this morning, and the ice was so thick on my windscreen that I had to scrape it off with a redundant credit card - it's been a long time since I've had to do that. Beforehand, though, I had my last yummy breakfast at Parehua Resort - which has been a lovely, quiet, rural place to stay. Almost 30 villas and cottages scattered around a pretty and very neat garden, with a pond, bushwalk, and lots of trees. That means birds too, and it was a sheer delight to be woken by the echoing musical notes of a magpie this morning. I shall miss being fussed over in the restaurant by host Dean - I haven't experienced such friendly but perfectionist service since my last Silversea cruise. That's high praise, you know.

I whipped into Martinborough for a quick squizz, and found it to be a classic country colonial town - ie, neatly-mown town square focused on its war memorial, deliberately impressive stately buildings, and, er, a rather smelly trailer of sheep passing by. Some nice shops, though, and apparently also a sweet shop that I missed, tch.

Then it was off through the crisp, frosty morning back to Greytown, for a proper look around. I started at Cobblestones Museum, which is a town within a town, comprising a good collection of historic buildings, most of them moved onto site. One of the originals is a cute little Cobb & Co stable, which would have been a busy place, back in the day. I wasn't such a fan of the basic hospital, though, especially its bed with raised stirrups for you-know-what. I was taken, though, with the display inside the main building about wheelbarrow races, and the story of poor Samuel Oates, who in 1858 pushed one loaded with saplings from Wellington right over the Remutakas. When he called into the local pub for a well-deserved refreshment, some low-life nicked three of his trees. Painful.

Right next door, also in a pretty cottage, is Schoc Chocolates, where they make a huge range of tablet and fancy temptations from Belgian chocolate. They even make colourful, and edible, bowls and shoes there. It's just one of a whole townful of quirky little boutiques, proudly individually owned, and each one determined to be as appealing and surprising as possible. So, at Mango Interiors, you can buy a shiny wooden motorbike or Vespa 90 from Bali; or in Blackwell & Sons a fantastic, traditional English Pashley bike, when I was there for a whole $1000 off the usual $4 thou-plus price. Books, clothes, antiques, crafts, food... and all beautifully displayed in pretty wooden shops. No wonder it was busy.

It was lunchtime by now, so I had to head back to Featherston's Royal Hotel to eat with three of the driving forces behind the town's Book Festival. 'Driving forces' is right - they are totally dedicated and infectiously enthusiastic book devotees. The town has seven bookshops, which is going some for a population of less than 3,000. The festival draws writers, illustrators and publishers in ever-growing numbers for all sorts of events over a weekend in May. The hotel plays a big part - opened in 1868 it is, naturally, a feature on the Featherston streetscape, and is plushly Victorian inside, including the accommodation which I got to see.

I was starting to fade a little now, but I got another injection of enthusiasm from Garrick, who drove me back out of town to the racecourse he runs, to see the campsite there. On the way, we passed the huge site where, in WWI, there were rows and rows of 90 huge wooden barracks at the military camp. It was resurrected in WW2 as a Japanese POW camp, where there was a riot in 1943 and almost 50 prisoners were killed. All rather grim, but the racecourse was a classic country set-up and had some interesting buildings too, including an octagonal hospital used during the 1918 flu pandemic, which originally had a hole in the roof for ventilation. In less than two months, flu killed 9,000 people in NZ - that's half of the 18,000 soldiers who died over the whole of WWI. Sounds familiar...

And then it was time to leave Wairarapa and drive back over the Remutaka Hill to Wellington, happily against the surge of traffic heading out of town for the weekend. I had lots more treats to look forward to - in Miramar.

Bad start, good finish

With thanks to Destination Wairarapa for this famil

Phew, busy day today. Lots of miles covered, people met, things seen and learned (and promptly forgotten) - but definitely enjoyed. Chilly start, though. Thanks, by the way, to the OWM who, when I said as much as I passed him on my way to Parehua's restaurant for breakfast, sternly corrected my comment to praise the sparkling morning. Hadn't noticed that.

Lovely Luke at Longbush Cottage restored my good temper with his contagious enthusiasm for the tulip. He plants about 6,000 of them every winter, in pots and beds around his pretty little cottage, to bloom during his Tulip Festival in early October. It tells you everything about his eagerness, that I got caught up in it all despite, right now, there being nothing to see but the odd tiny green tip poking through all the mulch. It'll be splendid, for sure.

Next I headed, through lovely winter scenery, to Masterton, for a bit of art at Aratoi, the big gallery there. There was some good stuff to look at but I was most impressed by the current exhibition of a huge model moon, constantly rotating to show off its hidden side. It was a bit alarming, to see that it's much more pitted on the far side than the smoother surface we can see - because of all those meteors it cops, which would presumably otherwise hit Earth. Thanks, moon.

Masterton is home to the Golden Shears competition and of course has a detailed museum covering every aspect of shearing sheep; also plenty of art and a very popular park with a miniature train and an excellent minigolf course I would love to have taunted the Baby with - but I had an appointment to keep up the road.

Pukaha is a wildlife sanctuary I've been to before, but this time I was shown around by the inimitable Everlyne, who was irrepressibly full of information and - yes - enthusiasm. She told me lots of interesting things, and took me to see a kokako who only likes men, so Everlyne collared a passing one to take to the enclosure so the bird would come and talk to us. As it/she did - though, disappointingly, she didn't drop the f-bomb as she has been known to.

The eels were pretty impressive, too, big and so eager for a feed that they nearly wrenched the spoon away. The whole place was well done if, today, a little light on actual bird life, despite Everlyne's best efforts. Didn't matter, though - she was the real star.

Masterton is a perfectly pleasant town, with some impressive buildings, but it suffers from being so close to Greytown, which is outrageously pretty and full of character, as well as a whole range of quirky boutiques and other attractions. One of them is the White Swan Hotel, which was moved here from Wellington in six bits, one of them dramatically falling off its truck on the way over the Remutakas. 

I had a very tasty dinner there before going out to admire the town's current Festival of Christmas, with lots of decorations, lights and big slides. I'll be back again for a proper look around tomorrow.

Welcome to Wairarapa

With thanks to Destination Wairarapa for this famil.

Back in the air again, heading this time to Wellington, for - gasp - actual work. (Er, "work".) The Kaikouras looked splendid, as did the capital as we came in to land. Not that I was having anything to do with the city, to begin with, anyway. I had Wairarapa to explore - which means driving over the Remutaka Hill, even today something not to be sniffed at.

Of course, it was worse in the old days, specifically during WWI when young soldiers who'd completed their training in Featherston were marched over this range of hills, taking three days to make the journey. Naturally they would have welcomed the cups of tea offered to them at the summit by grateful civilians - can't help thinking though that a beer would have gone down better. Especially since they had Gallipoli ahead of them.

My first call in the pretty little town of Featherston ("NZ's only Booktown!") was at the Fell Locomotive Museum, a typically detailed, well-presented and thorough effort by rabid enthusiasts, here celebrating the engine that pulled the train over the steepest bit of the hills. It's the only one left in the world, they proudly proclaim - and it is impressive. It has separate gripping wheels that latch onto a central track to grind up the incline, and the brake blocks wore out so fast that they had to be replaced every trip. There was only ever one accident, due to a gale, not slippage, and a newspaper report from the day is educational in several respects:

Can you imagine reading that sort of detail today? There were two crime reports in my paper this morning that had warnings above the text.

Next I met a cheesemaker, also an enthusiast and justifiably proud that his organic cheeses are made from milk that takes just half an hour to get from the cows up the road into his churn. He was disappointingly stingy with his sample sizes, though - so I was very happy to be met with a generous platter of savoury nibbles at my accommodation, Parehua Resort just outside Martinborough, next door to a vineyard. Only trouble was, it spoiled my appetite for what turned out to be a delicious dinner, and I couldn't manage dessert. Tragic. But the lovely kereru artwork over my bed was a consolation.

Going not home

Really? Ten months since I was last on a plane? That’s so gloomifying, sigh. And it was to Christchurch last time too - which is perfectly fine, no complaints there. I was pleased to swoop down over the plains and braided rivers on a sunny winter afternoon, even if it was to drive with my sisters to my father’s house, to draw lines, close doors, place full stops, all that. There was a bellbird singing in the garden and the distant mountains were shining in the sun beyond the trees of the city, which was green and neat and pretty.

I went back to the same hotel, the Mayfair, which is better now than it was then, at its beginning, and I liked my room and was proud to work out all its fancy electronics. Despite all that tech though, it was quaint to note, in the lift, that superstitions still rule - apparently, East Asian cultures view 4 the same way we do 13 (the owner’s wife is Japanese):

That’s because, in Japanese, the word ‘four’ sounds like ‘death’. That’ll do for today’s connection.

Ship of nightmares

So, five very rich men have now joined the 1500 mostly very far from rich people who died when the Titanic sank 111 years ago. The extensive - and expensive - search for their submersible has generated a mass of headlines and lots of screen time and, while it’s been moderately interesting to follow, it’s hard not to miss the sharp contrast with that other recent sinking, in the Mediterranean. Viz this very pointed cartoon in The Times yesterday. 

Recap: last week a fishing boat hideously crammed with migrants from Libya trying to escape to Italy sank off Greece. Some men on the top deck were rescued, while around 500 mostly women and children trapped down below drowned, their bodies so far unrecovered. It was initially in the news, but soon dropped out of sight, especially once the Titan submersible got into trouble. 

Amongst all the dreary conclusions to be drawn here (as well, of course, as acknowledging that any life accidentally lost, even of self-indulgent billionaires, is tough), the one I'm focusing on is our apparently never-ending fascination with the Titanic. It's inescapable, in our culture. I mean, like me, you've seen the movie, right? At least once, I bet, and quite possibly several times - you're certainly super-familiar with the quotes and iconic scenes. And, if you've gone overseas much, you'll have come across Titanic displays in various museums and possibly even one of the travelling exhibitions. The big one that's in New York right now I saw in Copenhagen - in 2011. It's still going!

I've certainly seen my share of Titanic stuff, from Jack Dawson's grave in Halifax to a note in a bottle thrown overboard by a passenger in Cobh, Ireland. And of course it's impossible to visit Belfast without going to their striking Titanic museum near the shipyard where it was built. That it was opened a century after the sinking tells you all you need to know about people's morbid fascination with mass deaths. See also my last post (er, also the Last Post) - but especially if there's something glamorous about it. 

Not that the bulk of Titanic's drowned passengers were, nor those on the fishing boat: just poor people trying to start new and hopefully more successful lives than those they were escaping. Nothing glamorous there, at all.

And for today’s tenuous connection, I’m currently sorting out a trip to Wairarapa, which is where James Cameron lives on his huge farm. 

Oestrogen rules!

I was going to revisit here a train trip I took from New Delhi to Agra, way back in 1980, prompted by the appallingly tragic triple train crash that's just happened in India. But of course that would be somewhat appalling too - insensitively trivialising and tone-deaf. So instead I'm going to write about war as a tourist attraction.

Today is the anniversary of D-Day, after all. And who hasn't done a tour of northern France and not been to the beaches, visited Dunkirk, been awed by the white crosses stretching away into the distance at the cemeteries, marvelled at still being able to see the remains of the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches? It's hugely sobering to see it all, stand on the edge of a bomb crater, read the info boards, and imagine the horror of it all - but it's also, be honest, fascinatingly interesting, dramatic and thus, yes, entertaining.

Wherever you (ie I) go in the world, there are wartime (and worse) 'attractions' - I honestly couldn't count the battlefields and war cemeteries I've visited, from Gallipoli to Gettysburg, Adelaide River to Bourail in New Caledonia. Plus Stalag Luft III and, even worse, Auschwitz and the Hanoi Hilton. These places have an irresistible appeal that's a weird combination of honest reverence and regret for all those lives lost and pain inflicted, and a creepy fascination for viewing the utter depths of cruelty that men (it's always men) are driven to by their overwhelming desire for power and territory.

And, though I suppose it's possible to travel the world and have holidays that don't include stuff like this, it's always there, pretty much wherever you go. The tourist industry isn't backward in pointing that out and, yes, exploiting it openly with focussed tours and suchlike. Their main customers are, of course, Baby Boomers, whose parents lived through WW2 - I wonder, once we've all shuffled off , whether younger generations will be quite so interested?

I'm guessing yes. After all, war has been a constant throughout human history, and is certainly front-and-centre right now, with the distinct possibility of others looming, despite the deservedly quite distracting threats of climate change. Do you ever wonder how different things might have been/might be if there were a bit less testosterone swirling through the people in charge around the world?