Quaking and Shaking
Oct. 3rd, 2007 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringWell, it’s official. I can sleep through an earthquake. Two earthquakes, in fact, one after the other late Saturday night.
My wife and daughter were jolted awake, but I snored on until roused. “Did the earth move for you, too?” I was asked, but I grunted, rolled over and learnt about it in the morning.
All a bit of a worry, really, because here we are in Napier, the city destroyed by an earthquake in 1931. The quake came through and turned the city centre into rubble, and a fire, fed by the broken gas mains, destroyed anything left standing.
New Zealand is not known as “The Shaky Isles” for nothing, you know. Building towers made of playing cards is an unknown art here, and Kiwis stare in puzzlement at grand confections, two or even three stories high, erected by smug Aussies. “How do they do that?” you can almost hear them say.
In some places, the earth’s crust is about as thick as a pizza, and you can wander amongst fuming steam vents, smelling the sulphur of the underworld. Geysers fizz and pools of boiling mud bubble like porridge. Ancient wooden signs half-heartedly warn of the dangers. “Stay on the path. Please do not swim in the lava.”
The danger of being swallowed alive into pools of hellfire notwithstanding, I love this place. It is beautiful. Scenic vistas open out everywhere, delightful towns sun themselves on the edges of wide blue lakes at the foot of green, snow-capped mountains. Roads wind through gorges or perch on the brink of sea cliffs, where whales wink at you far below and albatrosses lean in the car window to say hello.
The people stand sparse but foursquare amongst the views: herding sheep, tending broad acres of fruit, painting road signs and running for local government – a hundred votes makes you a councillor and twice that for lord mayor.
Anyone not actually employed in making the place into a rural paradise works in the tourist industry, pouring cappuccinos for jaded backpackers, serving up smoked troutburger and chips to motor-home drivers, tying a bungee cord around the ankles of young American heroes and tossing them off into a dizzy void.
I’m in heaven and smiling. I love New Zealand. It’s only a few days here before the Australian BookCrossing convention in Melbourne, but I’m making the most of it.
I didn’t drive a taxi shift on Friday. I had too many loose ends to tie up, too many books to pack up, too many clothes to fold up. I set the alarm for five AM and fell into bed, to wake every half hour, afraid I would miss the buzzer. I never sleep well before a trip. Finally, I got up, hours before I needed to, and browsed on the Internet, catching up with the lives of my friends, checking my reservations, getting the latest news on the BookCrossing convention.
Saturday dawn, we loaded our bags, and my son drove us to the airport. Always get the first flight of the day out of Canberra. The planes have flown in the night before and are ready to fly out. If there is fog on the runway, as there often is in Canberra, they can taxi through the fog and take off blind. The second and subsequent flights depend on other aircraft flying in, and if there is fog, they cannot land, so things back up and the terminal fills with angry travellers.
We got the first flight to Sydney and made our way to the international terminal. The transfer bus takes the back way, through the workshop hangars, and there are crowds of mechanics crawling over the jumbo jets. Sometimes there is something exotic, a rare bird flown in, and I keep my camera ready.
Not this time. We checked in for our flight to Auckland, and waited in the lounge, where Kerri relaxed and I took photographs of the great aircraft taking off and landing. There’s something majestic, something impossible, about a jumbo jet taking to the air.
Our flight was called in due course. LAN Chile instead of Qantas, a great graceful four engine Airbus, and I guess I was hoping for exotic South American cuisine for the inflight meal. Instead, we got a ham and cheese sandwich and a bowl of melon slices. Not even tea and coffee, let alone the spiced tomato juice that makes for a gloriously happy traveller.
Oh well. A flight to New Zealand can’t make me downhearted. We could fly on wooden seats with cheese and crackers to eat, and I’d still be happy.
We crossed the coast and there was a carpet of green velvet below. In Australia, we live on the margin of drought, but on the other side of the Tasman, there is rainfall for all. It looks so impossibly lush to our eyes attuned to Canberra’s rolling golden-brown hills.
Customs takes away my walking boots and returns them to me, freshly disinfected in a plastic bag. These people are serious about infection reaching their pristine land, and I don’t begrudge the delay.
We wheel our bags through the barrier, and here is our daughter to meet us. So good to see her after a month or so away. She’s driven up from Pukehina, a good four hours away. Kerri hands me the maps and I navigate her through Auckland’s southern suburbs as our daughter chatters away in the back, filling us in with the details of her life as a student teacher in a small rural school. So very different to Canberra.
We stop for dinner in Paeroa, the proud home of New Zealand’s national drink, Lemon and Paeroa. Unfortunately, it is not home to New Zealand’s best pizza, and I cannot recommend the Mykonos diner, even if the locals relish the culinary delights found there.
Pukehina, and here are Kerri’s aunt and uncle, perpetual gypsies temporarily resident in this small coastal village. Twenty odd years ago, we got married in their Brisbane backyard, and it is a pleasure to see them again. They fill us full of coffee and sauvignon blanc, but after a long day, we’re tired, and we climb into our beds, a momentary transition into deep sleep.
The earthquakes cannot rouse me, but in the morning I’m up and about, cheerful to be in this pleasant green land. We see the tiny school, a tiny white-painted cluster of buildings amongst hills, a small island of humans in a landscape full of dairy cows. It is utterly charming, and I envy the children their schooldays, though perhaps it will take them several decades to appreciate how lucky they are.
Lunch and dinner are champagne meals, full of good food, good conversation and easy laughter. Kerri’s uncle spent a couple of years as a taxi driver, and he understands some of the pleasure I take in the job. And some of the frustrations.
Another night, rain and wind and the sound of surf on the nearby beach. But no earthquakes. I get up early to take a walk on the strand, and apart from a lonely fisherman and some gulls, I have the world to myself. Just me and a watery sun, grey waves rolling in, a lonely volcano on the horizon, and driftwood logs on the coarse sand.Heaven.
After breakfast I take the wheel of our temporary car, and head out through a lush landscape to Rotorua, past the thermal parks, through the hills and down to Taupo, where we have lunch in the bustling main street of this tourist town on, as the brochures declare, the shore of Australasia’s largest freshwater lake. A lake the size of Singapore, full of trout, fringing forests stocked with wild pigs and deer. People come here from all over the world for the hunting and fishing.
A short detour along a thermal walk, steam and sulphur fuming out, and then two hours of one of the best driving roads I have ever experienced, swooping and curving through hills, farmland and forest down to the delicious Art Deco city of Napier, rebuilt after the great fire in what was the style of the modern age.
I love it here. The architecture is a treat for the eyes – a whole city centre in Art Deco. Our hotel sits on Marine Parade, our balcontg a pleasant place to sip coffe and contemplate the Pacific through a screen of Norfolk Island pines.
Happy? I could hardly be happier, spending a holiday here in paradise with my family. After you add a few dozen of my BookCrossing friends next weekend in Melbourne, you may never be able to scrape the smile from my face.
My wife and daughter were jolted awake, but I snored on until roused. “Did the earth move for you, too?” I was asked, but I grunted, rolled over and learnt about it in the morning.
All a bit of a worry, really, because here we are in Napier, the city destroyed by an earthquake in 1931. The quake came through and turned the city centre into rubble, and a fire, fed by the broken gas mains, destroyed anything left standing.
New Zealand is not known as “The Shaky Isles” for nothing, you know. Building towers made of playing cards is an unknown art here, and Kiwis stare in puzzlement at grand confections, two or even three stories high, erected by smug Aussies. “How do they do that?” you can almost hear them say.
In some places, the earth’s crust is about as thick as a pizza, and you can wander amongst fuming steam vents, smelling the sulphur of the underworld. Geysers fizz and pools of boiling mud bubble like porridge. Ancient wooden signs half-heartedly warn of the dangers. “Stay on the path. Please do not swim in the lava.”
The danger of being swallowed alive into pools of hellfire notwithstanding, I love this place. It is beautiful. Scenic vistas open out everywhere, delightful towns sun themselves on the edges of wide blue lakes at the foot of green, snow-capped mountains. Roads wind through gorges or perch on the brink of sea cliffs, where whales wink at you far below and albatrosses lean in the car window to say hello.
The people stand sparse but foursquare amongst the views: herding sheep, tending broad acres of fruit, painting road signs and running for local government – a hundred votes makes you a councillor and twice that for lord mayor.
Anyone not actually employed in making the place into a rural paradise works in the tourist industry, pouring cappuccinos for jaded backpackers, serving up smoked troutburger and chips to motor-home drivers, tying a bungee cord around the ankles of young American heroes and tossing them off into a dizzy void.
I’m in heaven and smiling. I love New Zealand. It’s only a few days here before the Australian BookCrossing convention in Melbourne, but I’m making the most of it.
I didn’t drive a taxi shift on Friday. I had too many loose ends to tie up, too many books to pack up, too many clothes to fold up. I set the alarm for five AM and fell into bed, to wake every half hour, afraid I would miss the buzzer. I never sleep well before a trip. Finally, I got up, hours before I needed to, and browsed on the Internet, catching up with the lives of my friends, checking my reservations, getting the latest news on the BookCrossing convention.
Saturday dawn, we loaded our bags, and my son drove us to the airport. Always get the first flight of the day out of Canberra. The planes have flown in the night before and are ready to fly out. If there is fog on the runway, as there often is in Canberra, they can taxi through the fog and take off blind. The second and subsequent flights depend on other aircraft flying in, and if there is fog, they cannot land, so things back up and the terminal fills with angry travellers.
We got the first flight to Sydney and made our way to the international terminal. The transfer bus takes the back way, through the workshop hangars, and there are crowds of mechanics crawling over the jumbo jets. Sometimes there is something exotic, a rare bird flown in, and I keep my camera ready.
Not this time. We checked in for our flight to Auckland, and waited in the lounge, where Kerri relaxed and I took photographs of the great aircraft taking off and landing. There’s something majestic, something impossible, about a jumbo jet taking to the air.
Our flight was called in due course. LAN Chile instead of Qantas, a great graceful four engine Airbus, and I guess I was hoping for exotic South American cuisine for the inflight meal. Instead, we got a ham and cheese sandwich and a bowl of melon slices. Not even tea and coffee, let alone the spiced tomato juice that makes for a gloriously happy traveller.
Oh well. A flight to New Zealand can’t make me downhearted. We could fly on wooden seats with cheese and crackers to eat, and I’d still be happy.
We crossed the coast and there was a carpet of green velvet below. In Australia, we live on the margin of drought, but on the other side of the Tasman, there is rainfall for all. It looks so impossibly lush to our eyes attuned to Canberra’s rolling golden-brown hills.
Customs takes away my walking boots and returns them to me, freshly disinfected in a plastic bag. These people are serious about infection reaching their pristine land, and I don’t begrudge the delay.
We wheel our bags through the barrier, and here is our daughter to meet us. So good to see her after a month or so away. She’s driven up from Pukehina, a good four hours away. Kerri hands me the maps and I navigate her through Auckland’s southern suburbs as our daughter chatters away in the back, filling us in with the details of her life as a student teacher in a small rural school. So very different to Canberra.
We stop for dinner in Paeroa, the proud home of New Zealand’s national drink, Lemon and Paeroa. Unfortunately, it is not home to New Zealand’s best pizza, and I cannot recommend the Mykonos diner, even if the locals relish the culinary delights found there.
Pukehina, and here are Kerri’s aunt and uncle, perpetual gypsies temporarily resident in this small coastal village. Twenty odd years ago, we got married in their Brisbane backyard, and it is a pleasure to see them again. They fill us full of coffee and sauvignon blanc, but after a long day, we’re tired, and we climb into our beds, a momentary transition into deep sleep.
The earthquakes cannot rouse me, but in the morning I’m up and about, cheerful to be in this pleasant green land. We see the tiny school, a tiny white-painted cluster of buildings amongst hills, a small island of humans in a landscape full of dairy cows. It is utterly charming, and I envy the children their schooldays, though perhaps it will take them several decades to appreciate how lucky they are.
Lunch and dinner are champagne meals, full of good food, good conversation and easy laughter. Kerri’s uncle spent a couple of years as a taxi driver, and he understands some of the pleasure I take in the job. And some of the frustrations.
Another night, rain and wind and the sound of surf on the nearby beach. But no earthquakes. I get up early to take a walk on the strand, and apart from a lonely fisherman and some gulls, I have the world to myself. Just me and a watery sun, grey waves rolling in, a lonely volcano on the horizon, and driftwood logs on the coarse sand.Heaven.
After breakfast I take the wheel of our temporary car, and head out through a lush landscape to Rotorua, past the thermal parks, through the hills and down to Taupo, where we have lunch in the bustling main street of this tourist town on, as the brochures declare, the shore of Australasia’s largest freshwater lake. A lake the size of Singapore, full of trout, fringing forests stocked with wild pigs and deer. People come here from all over the world for the hunting and fishing.
A short detour along a thermal walk, steam and sulphur fuming out, and then two hours of one of the best driving roads I have ever experienced, swooping and curving through hills, farmland and forest down to the delicious Art Deco city of Napier, rebuilt after the great fire in what was the style of the modern age.
I love it here. The architecture is a treat for the eyes – a whole city centre in Art Deco. Our hotel sits on Marine Parade, our balcontg a pleasant place to sip coffe and contemplate the Pacific through a screen of Norfolk Island pines.
Happy? I could hardly be happier, spending a holiday here in paradise with my family. After you add a few dozen of my BookCrossing friends next weekend in Melbourne, you may never be able to scrape the smile from my face.
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 03:58 am (UTC)This is what I love about NZ, you can always find somewhere to be by yourself, but you can find places to be surrounded by people as well.
I'm glad you are having a good time.
See you in 1 and a bit days!!
no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 04:14 am (UTC)I would never want to, it's so charming a one. :)
no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 06:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 10:33 pm (UTC)