New Zealand: day 8 - Wellington to Christchurch

Alarms went off at 5.30 this morning in Wellington for us to get up and out of our AirBNB and off to the Wellington Airport.  We gassed up and returned the rental car before the Hertz office was open.  Inside the airport the check-in clerks were strict with luggage weight, so we had to do a little repacking to make our weight limits.  Once our bags were checked, we headed into the airport to get some breakfast.  While we were eating, we learned that H's soccer team won their game today (go Leapin' Leopards).  As the clock got closer to the departure time, I started getting nervous about getting to the gate.  We hadn't gone through security, and we had no idea how long that would take.  

It turns out that there is no passenger screening at the Wellington airport for domestic flights.  No xrays, no conveyor belts, no US-style security theatre. We just got on our plane!

The skies were blustery all morning, and after a short delay waiting for wind shear to abate, we took off into some hella turbulence.  It was like a roller coaster for a few minutes.  But, once we climbed out of that mess, we had smooth sailing for the 70 minute flight to Christchurch. 

On the ground in Christchurch, the rain was pouring.  We got in our rental car to escape the rain, and since the airbnb wasn't ready for us yet, we found a board game cafe with crappy pizza to occupy us for a few hours.  

Our airbnb is loft-style, so while there are two beds in different parts of the apartment, there are no enclosed rooms.  It's hip and well-appointed.  We all got settled and I made a grocery run. When I got back, S was zonked out and H was playing video games with her buds, so I took a walkabout in town. 

The CBD (central business district!) of Christchurch is huge, with tons of shops, bars, restaurants, etc.  The Avon river snakes through town under bridges and through small tunnels.  

The city is filled with street art.  It seems like on every block there's at least one big mural!

Since so much of the city was leveled after the big earthquake, the architecture is fairly modern.  Think container-unit chic - lots of right angles and grey and boxiness.

After an hour of wandering, I needed a warm-up, so I found my way to an old church that had been converted into a bar and sipped a whiskey while a woman played guitar and sang a setlist that included Country Roads, and What's Goin' On.  

S woke from her nap and pried H off her ipad to meet me for dinner at Kokomo, a lovely restaurant right across the street from our airbnb.  The food was delicious, and our two servers (one from New Jersey and one from Uruguay) were both great to talk to!  We returned home to a chill evening to get S warm and think about how to spend our two days here before we head off for our next adventure!

 

New Zealand: day 7 - Te Papa & Botanical Gardens

We all crashed early and hard last night, but were up and at 'em this morning.  We grabbed a quick breakfast at a cafe on the way to the waterfront, where we passed some lovely civic art along the wharf.  It was a beautiful sunny and breezy Saturday, so the whole city was out and about!

 

H provided the I.

A sculpture about solace? A chance to fake pushing someone in?  Also yes.

We made our way to Te Papa, the national museum, which had a bunch of wonderful exhibits.  One was on Maori carving:

One was on nature and climate change.  It explored the intersection of reducing harm and adapting to the impacts.  I never knew about this innovation!

The nature exhibit also had a section called Nest, which had photos of scores of birds, each with an egg-shaped button.  If you pressed the egg, you got to read a little about the bird and also hear its call.  The kicker was that some of the birds had gone extinct, and so when you pressed the button, you heard nothing.  Quietly powerful.

There were other interesting exhibits as well, including a modern art wing (H & S watched an entire 40-minute video art piece), a section on white migratory stories, and a section on the treaties between the British and the Maori that led to New Zealand's independence. 

But the most interesting exhibit by far was called Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War, which took a deep dive into the 8-month siege of Gallipoli during WWI, in which the NZ army played a major role (the Americans weren't really involved, so it's not something that S or I were really familiar with).  The campaign was tragic, and the exhibit told its story from multiple perspectives and more or less in chronologic order.  Each chapter of the exhibit started with a huge sculpture of one or more people involved in the campaign, from soldiers to officers to nurses.  The sculptures were lifelike but huge, and they helped to convey the scale of the experience and the greatness of the participants without removing the complexities of the individuals like a marble statue would.  

In one early section, I noticed a reproduction of a British enlistment campaign image, and got to have a talk with H (who is currently playing Mufasa in The Lion King) about how images are passed down and reappropriated through generations:

We had been thinking of skipping Te Papa for time, but Richard Taylor of Weta suggested yesterday that we not miss it.  S and I are both glad that we took the time.  I think H is too, but she'd never admit it.

After seeing the museum, we grabbed a mediocre lunch at the museum cafe and then walked our way over to the lower end of the cable car.  We rode it up the hill, and there was a lightshow in the tunnels!

At the top of the cable car is a stunning view of Wellington, a space museum/planetarium/observatory, and a botanic garden.  We walked our way down the hill, ending up at The Beehive (NZ's capitol)

After that, we went into mellow mode.  We found some yarn for H to finger knit with, headed back to the airbnb, and ordered Thai food delivery.  The sun was low and the clouds were out, so I walked to the beach for a few photos.

This is our last night in the North Island.  Tomorrow we get up early to get to the airport to fly to Christchurch!

New Zealand: day 6 - Weta & Cuba Street

We all got a decent night's sleep last night and woke to find that our windows opened up onto beautiful Oriental Bay here in Wellington. The sun was shining, people were walking their dogs, swimming in the bay, and generally enjoying a lovely spring morning.  

Our first stop of the day was visiting the Weta Workshops.  S has a colleague who used to be on staff, so instead of the normal tourist tour, we got a real behind-the-scenes tour of the workshops.  We saw animatronics, props, sculpting, metalworking, leatherworking, digital modeling, design, business relations, and so many more areas.   We got to talk to a lot of the artisans and craftspeople, and we even got to meet founder Richard Taylor, who paused from working on a project to talk with us about his work and Weta.  S was treated like royalty, mostly due to her proximity to certain green puppet NOT named Kermit, and I had a great chat with the design leads about how they sculpt their business and what they look for in new hires.  It really was a stunning experience, and we're all grateful to A for taking a few hours to lead us around.  We signed NDAs, so I don't have many photos from the tour.  

H holding a filmed prop.  S holding a fake Sting.

Another troll, another attack on H.

After the extra special tour, we had a quick lunch and returned for a crafting class run by a Weta staffer.  We worked with two kinds of clay.  With the first one, we each made a creature head, and our leader T taught us how to build the heads in a methodical way that still left a lot of room for creativity.

The Cabbage King.

The second clay got hard quick, and we used it to practice making textures - we made reptile skin, hair, and mammal skin texture.

H working on hair texture.

After the crafts class, we decided to bail on our tourist-level tour (we had a better one anyway!) and instead headed back to the Central Business District of Wellington, to Cuba Street.  Cuba Street is full of shops and restaurants.  At least five bookstores, 3 musical instrument stores, four record shops, ten shoe stores, and countless restaurants.  It was a lovely way to spend an afternoon.  I wandered into Alistair's Music and spent 45 minutes talking with Alistair and his wife Katrina.  They had about ten banjos on display and about ten lifetimes of experience that they had lived.  They regaled me with stories of Rhiannon Giddens spending hours in the shop falling in love with an Irish banjo.  They showed me a Moroccan banjo ancestor that smells like camel piss once it's warmed up.  They showed me an Afghani rubab that is super rare now that the Taliban has banned them.  What a great way to spend an hour. 

Dinner was at a Turkish place called Kisa (yum!), and then home to chill out and plan tomorrow's adventure!

New Zealand: day 5 - Taupo to Wellington

We woke in our lovely moderately-priced hotel on the shores of Lake Taupo, rejoiced that we didn't have to get out the door at the butt crack of dawn, and hit the road at 10am.  Our lovely hotel clerk sent us on our merry way with a boatload of well-wishes and enthusiasm for this terrific bluebird crisp day.  

Our first stop was just north of Taupo at a place called Huka Falls.  These falls aren't particularly high, but they are LONG.  The runoff from the whole of Lake Taupo gets funneled down a slot canyon that's barely 40' wide, so the water moves through fast.  when it gets to the other end of the slot, it shoots out at a huge velocity, shooting much further out than its descent.  The city built a bridge over the middle of the falls, so visitors can stand directly over the rushing channel.  We all three talked about how cool (and scary) it would be to raft it.

From the falls, we drove just a few minutes further to Craters of the Moon Geothermal Park.  The park was little more than a 2k walk through a geothermal field.  There were some informative signs to share some interesting aspects about the ecosystem.  

Then, it was time to say goodbye to Taupo.  We drove back through town, down along the eastern edge of the Lake, stopping for lunch and gas in Turangi.  From there, we drove into Tongariro National Park.  The park encompasses a few ecosystems, including dense forest and arid planes.  It also hosts the mountain that played Mount Doom in the LoTR films.  We stopped to do the short walk to Tawhai Falls, which was the location of Gollum's Pool, also in the LoTR films.

my preciouses

We headed further into the park and the visitor center, only to be stymied by the lack of good magnet selection.  S had eyed a longer hike, but it was getting late in the day and we still had four hours of driving ahead of us.  So, we skipped the hike and opted for a handful of fun stops along the way.  

The first stop was at a playground in Ohakune, which boasts NZ's largest carrot.  The playground was built for kids in honor of the deep agricultural roots from that area.  Bunny was in heaven.

We continued SE to the Tangiwai Memorial site, commemorating a Christmas Eve train crash in the 1950s that killed over 150 people.  There were memorials to the dead, informational displays about the crash and the recovery, and a short walk to the crash site.  It was pretty moving.

We hopped back in the car and kept driving.  We decided to stop for dinner in Bulls, a town known for embracing their big pun (who do you call when someone breaks the law?  The consta-BULLS), but the restaurant options looked for crap, so we continued on to Palmerston North, where we found a terrific brewery that made some delicious pizzas. 

Kiwis love their puns.

I had a half-pint of an IPA that was lovely.  

Fortified for the last leg of the drive, we hopped back in the car.  We had just over two hours to go, and the sun had set.  As soon as we left Palmerston North, the rain started.  So, we're on narrow winding two-lane highways, driving at 90 kph, without streetlights, in the rain, driving on the left.  The rain lasted for about 45 minutes, and when it finally gave way to clear skies, my fingers were sore from the white-knuckling.  But, we made it safe and sound. 

We got to Wellington at around 9pm, unloaded everything, and H was knocked off by around 10.  S followed soon after.   I stayed up to blog and do some laundry.  Big day tomorrow!

New Zealand: day 4 - Hobbiton, birds, worms, and Taupo

We got up early this morning and said so long to Jo, Zeb, and Treetops as we headed down the mountain and into the Shire!  S is a bit LOTR fan, so we spent this morning at Hobbiton. The film set was entirely destroyed after the LOTR films were made, but when the company came back to film The Hobbit, the set was rebuilt with the intent of making it permanent, so that visitors like us could come to see it!  Most of Shire was Hobbiton, and we got to look at the exteriors of so many Hobbit holes, including Bag End!  The weather was perfect - sunny and cool, with occasional rain showers sprinkled throughout.

S is 'Wizard-sized.'

On the grounds, they had also crafted three stone trolls!

And, two of the hobbit holes had been dressed inside so that guests could wander through and feel like they were hobbits!  None of the interiors were shot in the shire, but it was still a cool experience.

After the shire, we leaded west and stopped off at an aviary, where we saw lots of birds, including some kiwis!

From the aviary, we headed further west to the Waitomo Glowworm Caves.  The caves were Maori burial grounds, but now they're open to respectful visitors.  We were guided through the caves and saw the glowworms up close.  Our guide invited someone to sing in the caves to hear the acoustics, and H regaled the tour with the first verse of Rainbow Connection.  We ended the tour on an underground boat cruise, with glowworms high over head.  Magical.  We were all silent and in awe.

From there, we headed to Taupo and our hotel for the evening.  S and I had booked a dinner at fancypants Embra, and it did not disappoint.  This is my starter - a crab tart with apple and macadamia foam.  Stunning!

We're back at our hotel for the evening, trying to get warm and settle in.  Tomorrow is a waterfall day!