southerlies rattling the house November 23, 2005  

We arrived back in Wellington a week ago, via a fairly calm trip down. We stayed overnight in Tokaanu - it's a smallish township on the southern end of Lake Taupo, about 3k out of Turangi. Nice wee place. Tokaanu's main claim to fame is that it's a small thermal area: there's a lot of natural hot pools. There's a publically accessible walkway that takes you around the main pools; they're very nice, and it's a good wee walk. Next to the walkway is the hot pools complex, where you can spend $9 a head to be able to sit in the soothing/healing/invigorating/insert your own marketing phrase here waters. For a maximum of 20 minutes. Presumably lest your skin slough off dramatically from an overdose of natural minerals, or your isotonic balance be put out of whack, or you get in the way of the owners making another $9 per head from a bunch of Japanese tourists. Or something. We avoided this by staying at the Rainbow Motel; $75 per night for a motel unit (a double bed, two singles, a camp bed and a lot of floor space - you could get an entire softball team in one!), and completely free access to the motel's own hot pools. Heather and I put Rebecca to bed, grabbed a couple of towels, and headed off to soak a bit. Lovely. Absolutely lovely. A great way to end a day's driving.

Of course, it wasn't a terribly hard day's driving. Auckland (well, Waitakere City, but you get the idea) to Tokaanu is four hours in the saddle. Handily, it's further along SH1 than Taupo, so it works better to divide the driving into two days (the halfway line between Auckland/Wellington actually passes through Tokaanu township). We stopped off in Tirau for lunch on the first day (primarily to see the corrugated iron animals), Taupo for a cuppa and for Rebecca to suffer a high-speed 4-ft fall from a piece of badly designed play equipment (onto 6 inches of bark chips, mind - no injuries at all), and then around the lakeshore to Turangi and Tokaanu.

Second day's driving was broken up at Waiouru (lunch at the Army museum - anything to calm the nerves after driving the bloody Desert Road), then at Bulls (traditional!) and Paraparaumu (pick up some cheese at Lindale). Arrived at Mum's place in Wellington at about 5pm. Nice it.

Rebecca has spent the time since in running about the place, making friends left right and centre, and occasionally stropping up whenever forcibly removed from ride-on horseys outside supermarkets. She's having fun. Her meteoric acquisition of language continues apace.

It's odd when people think I'm English. I mean, I had someone try to explain who TelstraClear were the other day - I had to say, "Look, I'm actually from Wellington originally, I know who Telstra are." The conversation then went as follows:

Other person: Oh, you've picked up quite an English accent.
Me: Yeah - I was over there for seven years.
Other person: Did you spend much time with English people, then?
Me: Er... yes. I mean, I was living and working there.

This turned out to be from someone who'd spent two years in London, but hadn't really talked to English people that much. C'mon, guys - Shepherd's Bush is only a mile or so across! You must venture out occasionally!

So we're back on the ground in Wellington. I'm looking for work, with a reasonable degree of success - a couple of good-looking prospects. Fingers crossed. We're also spending time looking at various suburbs with a view to the possible acquisition of property. The consensus seems to be that our plan to rent for a few months while scoping out the market is a good one. It's interesting seeing how our perceptions of various suburbs have changed. Previously, as a student with no car access, I'd considered Seatoun to be a blasted waste on the other side of civilisation (well, past Strathmore anyway). Having spent most of yesterday arvo at it, I now consider it to be a rather nice wee suburb, reasonable access by road, but possibly a little small and lacking in required amenities (no public library, for instance). Our previous criteria when looking for accomodation (lack of actual water coursing down internal walls combined with proximity to the university, liquor stores, and good cafes) have changed slightly (dry, good sun, decent parking, proximity to good schools/public transport links). We'll see what happens.

Mind you, staying out in Newlands, Johnsonville is looking OK. There's a very good looking cyclepath heading from central Wellington down Thorndon Quay, along the bottom of the hill, and up the Ngauranga Gorge - you can watch everyone drop into their granny rings at the foot of the hill. And J'ville does have a heck of a lot of amenities (excellent swimming pool, for one). But then there's Brooklyn (nice views, proximity to good MTB tracks around the wind turbine), or Northland (nice views, affordable, actually quite a nice place to live), or Karori (good schools, proximity to excellent mountainbiking). Ah, choices.

In any case - we're back in Wellington. If anyone fancies a cuppa, drop us a line. Please note that due to equipment failure, we've lost most people's email addresses - so if you've not heard from us (as, indeed, most people haven't), it's probably because we've lost your contact details. So hop to and give us a yell, so we know where you are when we need to send out the housewarming invites.

Speaking of the Taupo lakeshore - good luck to everyone on the Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge on Saturday. I'll be doing it next year, once I've healed this bloody calf, trained myself into some hill legs, and the shipment with our bikes in it has arrived. Roll on!

I was particularly interested to note the police's description of how much dope was found during the bust of a large-scale hydroponics operation. "It's enough to last a township like Ohakune through an entire ski season." I've been to Ohakune - my sister was married there - and I must say, it's a side of the township that I wouldn't have suspected. Is Ohakune now the NZ standard for amounts of dope consumed? Might a smaller bust have been, say, 1/28 an Ohakune ski-season - call it a wet weekend in Invercargill?

turns out to be the waitemata November 09, 2005  

I turn out to have strained the main tendon in my left calf. This explains the agonising pain that I've had for the last two weeks, then. Since the first time I had the pain was in midair on the way to Malaysia, I had been vaguely worried that it was some tabloid-nightmare blood clot. Rather unfortunately, I just assumed it was some kind of muscle cramp, so I tried to work it out. 100 calf raises would have been a good idea if it was in fact a cramp; however, since it's a strain, that was actually one of the worst things I could do. Things you find out, eh? I must have strained it in Heathrow, lifting our incredible pile of luggage (did I mention that we've bought a station wagon just to cart it all down to Wellington?). Bloody painful, mind.

We've been doing a few walks around the local bush. I keep having moments where I have the following train of thought, upon turning a corner and seeing a new vista:

Look! It's a pukeko! Shh, in case we disturb it!
And look! Another pukeko!
And another!
And another!
And another twenty behind them!
I think one of them may even have a hamburger!
Maybe pukekos aren't that uncommon.

It's all a bit like that. I'm taking a while to get back into how common, or not, some of our native (and indeed non-native - saw a Rainbow Lorikeet in the bush today) fauna is.

I'm also in full-on food nostalgia mode. You know, the one where you're in a corner shop and see, say, a K Bar, and think "Crikey! A K Bar! I haven't had one of those since childhood! I must buy one immediately and relive my carefree childhood days!" Except that it's all happening in one big burst, since I haven't seen a heck of a lot of this stuff for years. Ironically, when I had an attack in the bakery the other day and bought a brace of lamingtons for afternoon tea, the mates that we were having afternoon tea with hadn't actually eaten lamingtons for a couple of years. I mean, you don't when you live in a place, right? But we've been having a few hits like that - like, with lamingtons, Macs Gold, Whittaker's chocolate, afghan biscuits, custard squares... averaging one attack a day at the mo, to be honest.

Leaving Auckland on the 15th; back in Wellington late on the 16th. Rock steady.

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