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My New Zealand trip inspired 28 pages of journal and hundreds of photos. I had to select among the photos. The last shall be first on this blogsite, so to follow my progress day by day go to number 1 in the New Zealand theme.. Each text page is followed by a photo page.

Day nine

(continued) After wandering the main street and the waterfront again I arrived at the entrance to the Bob’s Bay walking track, which has a higher and a lower path. It seemed a reasonable test. I started with the upper track and found it challenging and slow going. I’m not good uphill, especially with a camera and two lenses that are not light. There were very nice native plants on the route as well as introduced plants I had known as a child; gorse, bramble and wild roses bearing hips. (No! Not child bearing hips; their glossy red berries.) The day was warm and it was heavyish going for me so when the upper track joined the lower track I turned back. To my relief the lower track was fairly flat but when I reached the end of it I was tired. My lack of fitness for walking in the way I have enjoyed all my life made me a little despondent but I made myself think of the walk as good exercise to strengthen my heart and body. I went back to the hostel and slept a while.

A ferry arriving at Picton, from the Bob’s Bay track

When I awoke I chose to have a roll from Subway as my dinner. It’s healthy enough for fast food. When I went for my snack dinner I didn’t take my camera. After eating my sub I strolled down to the water again and the light was thrilling and the distant hills along Queen Charlotte Sound were beautiful, a bad time to leave my camera behind again. Soon a group of Morris dancers cheered me up. They had everything but the maypole, bright costumes, scarves and sticks to clap together and one had tap shoes. The musicians were unobtrusive but played a very competent accompaniment of traditional tunes including my old favourite, the Lord of the Dance. It’s one of the very few tunes I can sing and about the only one I have ever been game to sing publicly, to my students and friends in China.

I talked with my roommates later, a young Aussie training as a vintner and an Israeli who said that the main hassle of living in Israel is not the warfare and possibility of random bombs but the high taxes and cost of education and other essential services. I guess a lot of the taxes go to military uses.

Tree silhouette against the turquoise water of Queen Charlotte Sound

Day ten

My phone switched off in the middle of the night so I slept past the time I wanted to get up. The ferry to Wellington didn’t leave until after 1.00p.m. so it wasn’t a problem. Learning from several glitches I had experienced I went straight to the terminal to book my seat anyway. Well! They told me they could not give me a booking but that I would have to go to the railway station, book, and return for seat allocation. Part of my two week Transcenic railway ticket is a one way passage on the ferry so I doubted their correctness.

Off I went with my trundly suitcase, backpack and day bag. The ladies at the station, the Soundsair office, were wonderful. They were most perturbed that I had been sent back lugging all my gear and went in to bat for me immediately. They told me all the ferry terminal person had to do was make a phone call to Transcenic and that is what she should have done. First they checked with head office to confirm what they were saying and then made an irate phone call to the terminal. Listening to the call brightened up my day, but my new friend told me her complaint was met by laughter.

Someone will have to retrain the terminal staff in the right procedure. When I returned to the counter the same politely smiling but unyielding blonde young woman gave me no sign that she had made an error. Should I have described my health problems and the danger of causing sick travellers to over-exert themselves. It could have been a kind of grim fun but I’ll just send a copy of this story to the head office. I was definitely experiencing some discomfort by the time I got back to the terminal, a short journey for most people.  From the Hostel to the terminal one way was not difficult.

Update: The manager of the Terminal, Mr. Tony Bascand, has now been in touch with me and informs me that he has spoken to the staff and has put in place measures to avoid anyone being referred to the station for a booking again. His correspondence with me was very courteous, indeed pleasant, and he offered his apology for the inconvenience.

The day was overcast again and photography on the voyage was not promising. I hoped for some reasonable moody land and seascapes. The boat is quite large and carries several hundred people as well as cars and even large trucks. It has a bar, a sizeable dining room and coffee shop, a games arcade and numerous sitting rooms. The open deck area is on level ten and on the day I sailed it was very windy and pretty cold.

I went out several times when the scenery was especially good. A woman sitting smoking caught my eye. Something about her reminded me of WXY and I warned myself to ignore her. Despite that I found myself trying to make a connection. First there was eye and smile contact and then a joke followed by ‘Where are you from.’ Montreal. Brisbane. I couldn’t stop myself from quipping that the sea air was a good antidote to the effects of the smoking.  (to be continued)

My New Zealand trip inspired 28 pages of journal and hundreds of photos. I had to select among the photos. The last shall be first on this blogsite, so to follow my progress day by day go to number 1 in the New Zealand theme.. Each text page is followed by a photo page.

(continued)  Tea, water and snacks high in protein but low in carbohydrate and sugars kept me going until tea time when I found a Korean restaurant in an arcade. In my first year in China, in Xiangfan, I had a great Korean friend, Kim In Ho, who managed a restaurant and other interests there for his company. One dish I particularly liked is made in a ceramic pot. It has a bed of rice with vegetables arranged on top. Laid on that is a partly cooked egg. The diner takes chopsticks and mixes it all together, completing the cooking of the egg. It’s delicious and comes accompanied by side dishes of pancake, spicy pickled cabbage and soup. Reliving the experience of this healthy Korean meal gave me a lot of pleasure and the beautiful Korean waitresses were delighted to hear how I first had knowledge of it from China.

When I returned to the Hostel there was no trace of the dizziness of the day before and my roommates and I had another long discussion before turning in for the night. I set my alarm for 5.30 to catch the shuttle bus to the station.

Day eight

A scarf of cloud, Queen Charlotte Sound

In this cool climate I have been saving power and water as well as preventing some pollution by detergents. A bath every two days is enough and instead of the two t-shirts a day I was wearing in the heat of a Brisbane summer I used one in two days without seeing anyone wrinkle their nose.  I left Charlie B’s wearing a new black t-shirt with a Maori fish hook design.

Around the corner from Charlie’s is another hostel, Latimer House, and that’s where I was to meet the shuttle. When I got there I saw a woman who I soon discovered is a retired librarian from New York State who just finished four months in Antarctica as a weather observer. She applied to the company that supplies the personnel and was paid well for the experience, plus transport to and from New Zealand. Soon we were joined by Dawn and Donna from Victoria, British Columbia.

On the train I sat in silence for a while. The day was coldish but the carriage was warm. After a breakfast of roast potato and a cup of tea from the dining car I began to make conversation with the young man beside me. He is a boy off farms in the isolated hilly areas and is now training as a chef. He got off at Kaikoura and I joined Dawn and Donna for the rest of the trip. One is a computer person who has been in the field for many years and the other is an academic, a Sociologist specializing in Feminist and Anti-racist areas of study. I have the impression they were keen on walking in natural areas and at Picton they were catching a water taxi to an island. Do I need to say the conversation was good once more?

When we got to Picton I checked in at Picton Lodge, a hostel two doors from the station, and asked for two nights. With the afternoon free I spent it sleeping off the effects of my early rise and walking around the waterfront and the main street. There were plenty of cafes, art galleries and souvenir shops. Lunch and dinner were contrasting experiences. At the Dog and Frog I had a roast dinner with so much roast beef I could hardly finish it, cheap too! It’s typical of what I think of as the classic country café in Australia with good tucker, working man’s helpings, and dead cheap. A lot later I bought my evening meal at the Slip Inn. There I paid a lot more than at the Dog and Frog and had a piece of salmon of a reasonable size, but it was tasteless. There were a few tiny pieces of roast potato, a dessert spoonful of less than gourmet mayonnaise and several small leaves as a garnish.

A place to view beauty, Picton

You can guess which one had the shiny furniture, the prize location and attracted the most customers. I often wonder about people’s sense of value these days in choosing an eating place. Some chefs exaggerate their own worth too. The appearance took me in.

The evening finished with a conversation with Tim, a Bowen therapist from Nottingham in the over thirties age group. We talked about massage and health and many other things. Another good soul.  (To be continued)

My New Zealand trip inspired 28 pages of journal and hundreds of photos. I had to select among the photos. The last shall be first on this blogsite, so to follow my progress day by day go to number 1 in the New Zealand theme.. Each text page is followed by a photo page.

( continued)   The Museum also had many exhibits of creatures that once thrived in this unique land, most exclusive to the country. New Zealand’s isolation produced species to be found nowhere else and despite predation by humans and introduced species a lot still survive. The best known of the extinct species, the Moa group, were killed off by Maori and only the Kiwi remains. Also, a large eagle big enough to kill Moa perished.

At the backpacker’s my companions were these: Daniel, a German touring before starting his teaching career; Theo, a retired Australian Greek touring New Zealand on a motorbike he had shipped from Melbourne; and Joeren, a German touring before beginning his career in biophysics. We had two nights of wonderful conversation, finding common ground in our mutual love of humanity and caring for the suffering of our fellow human beings.

Day six

A Mall of Deco buildings where I usually had my breakfast.

Breakfast on day six was omelette again but from a different café owned by people from Shenyang in Liaoning Province of China. The big task I had set for myself that day was to find a battery for my mobile phone, which had been giving trouble. It took me a lot of walking as there was nothing to be found in the central city area, so I asked in various shops and kept going from one shop to the next until I had gone a long way and crossed the railway overpass into the suburb of Sydenham. When I finally got to the right shop the owner was friendly and charged up the new battery for a time while I went for a snack.

I did little else on day six but walked in the Cathedral Square area a while. There was a problem developing with my health, I knew, because every time I woke up I felt dizzy and one of my eyes was bloodshot. On the street leading to Charlie’s from the Square there was a medical clinic so I went to see a doctor. He was a new immigrant from Glasgow, Doctor Allan Sinclair, and just the kind of doctor I like best. He dismissed the eye problem as a common thing that would quickly heal by itself. I last had that happen to me as a child but he was right, it soon passed. But my sugar level was astronomical and he told me he could put me in hospital. We discussed it and he gave me very clear information on the maximum doses of my medicines and told me to take those doses. He also told me to drink more than two litres of water a day and that if I got any worse I was to come straight back to him and he would hospitalise me. However, my heart, lungs and blood pressure were good so I knew all the walking was doing its job and helping my medicine work well.

That evening I had no dinner, took more pills than usual and drank lots of water. Theo was very concerned for me and gave me lots of wise exhortations about looking after my health. He is a man whose life began in poverty in Greece but has learned the best lessons possible from it all and carries no bitterness. If we had lived in the same city I would have wanted him to become one of my best friends.

Day seven

Of course it was not right for me to leave Christchurch with my health at risk but I was not willing to sit in the hostel thinking mournfully about my fate. Once again I walked to the Square and caught the tram to the Art Centre. My real goal was to visit the Art Gallery itself, but I had not noted down Su Mu Chen’s name and wanted to get it. He and his father were pleased to see me again and we exchanged e-mail addresses. That was when I discovered that their surname was Su, the same as my Chinese family name, though they wrote it in the much more complex Traditional script used in Taiwan.

After visiting them I walked across to the beautiful modern Art Gallery building and was told I could photograph the structure but not the exhibits but there was an installation in place that could be photographed. It is a wonderful building and I really enjoyed using my super-wide lens to try to capture it. I enjoyed all the exhibitions but the early colonial work had the same affect on me as similar stuff in Australia. They seem deadly dull to me and I am repelled by the Europeanized landscapes and natives barely distinguishable from Europeans with shoe polish on themselves or resembling monkeys. The opulence of the clothing on the daughters and wives doesn’t impress me either. (To be continued)