dilanium
6th October 2008, 03:00 PM
Friday at about one in the afternoon we headed out to Shado-Lans and visited our kitty again. He was just as happy to see us this time as the last. He fell asleep on Liz's lap again, and we just hung out for awhile letting him chill.
We drove down to Waikanae, a tiny town on the Kapiti coast, and checked into our motel. The pool there was really nothing more than a glorified bathtub, and neither of us ever worked up the courage to find out what sorts of horrors might be lurking behind the door marked "Champagne Pool". We assumed it was a hot tub of some kind, but there our curiosity began and ended.
We headed out to Waikanae Beach. The weather was; gale-force winds were whipping all about, and a slight drizzle would later turn into a downpour. We caught sight of Kapiti Island, location of a wilderness reserve we'll be visiting in two weeks. Off to the south, we saw almost a dozen kites in the air. Liz thought they were kite surfers, but I didn't think so. In that weather, with the water temperature probably only a degree or two above freezing, you'd have to be barmy to surf in that. Examination of the photos I took showed her to be right. Crazy kiters.
Dinner at a beachside restaurant called Rock Salt was quite good, though the menu was pretentious as all hell. When your menu tells you your scallops are "gently nestled" on a bed of lettuce, or whatever the actual language they used, you know that you're in for a colourful, yet tiny appetiser. The bottle of Hawke's Bay red that we washed down helped lubricate the meal.
Waikanae itself doesn't have much to it. A few shops, a couple restaurants, and that's really about it. You can walk from one end of its "downtown" area to the other in about three minutes if you take your time.
Next morning we walked down to a small bakery, then headed off for Wellington. The weather continued to worsen, though the ominous grey of the sky and the blustering winds held more of a promise of severe weather than any tangible severity.
After parking at Te Papa, the national museum, we simply wandered through downtown Wellington for a few hours, taking in the sights of the thousands of shops arrayed everywhere. Though the density of shops was quite high, the commercialism here somehow managed to be much less crass and intrusive than what I'm used to from the U.S. It's hard to explain, but in the U.S. it almost seems like signs, billboards, et cetera are all screaming at you to buy, and buy now. Here, that impression doesn't quite come across.
We then wandered through Te Papa for several hours. The museum has six levels, each of them completely different from one another.
Level one was devoted to wildlife exhibits, including a pygmy blue whale skeleton the size of a DC-10 suspended from the ceiling and a model of a blue whale's heart with blood vessels and ventricles so enormous that small children were climbing through them like playground equipment.
The other levels varied from geological exhibits, the history of colonisation, a huge array of Maori artefacts including a full-scale marae that we walked through in an awed hush, and an art exhibit. We only made it through five of the six levels as it was getting late and Liz was running out of steam.
We attempted to check in at our hotel near the botanical gardens, but the desk agent, upon seeing our reservation slip, asked us to "wait over there, I'll get the manager." This is, in American hotel speak, "Bend over and grab your ankles."
In New Zealand, however, it means "We overbooked the hotel, so we'll book you at a better hotel closer to downtown, spot you the difference between their price and ours, let you eat dinner here for free, give you the bottle of wine that came free with the room package you bought from us, let you park here tomorrow while you visit the botanical gardens, and reimburse you the cost of your trip to the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary if you end up going there tomorrow."
Eh?!?
In America, here's how the same situation would have played out:
"Sorry, we overbooked the hotel. We'll refund you the cost of your room. Here's a list of other hotels in the area; one of them might have a room available, I really don't know. Wish there was something else I could do for you. Sorry. (Now go away.)"
But in Wellington, we got $120 reimbursed for a $99 room, a bottle of wine, free dinner, booking at a better hotel (and what manager in America, even a Motel 6, would ever admit out loud that another hotel was "better" than his?), and free parking for the next day. We ended up not going to Karori, but if we had, that'd have been free, too.
It boggles the mind.
So we stayed at the Kingsgate Hotel, which turned out to be about a five minute walk away from the capitol complex.
Walking past the "Beehive" as they call their central government building was a surreal experience. After being to Washington, D.C. in 1995 and witnessing what a hub of activity it was, seeing the centre of New Zealand's government was a study in contrasts. For one thing, the place was completely deserted at 7:30 at night. Not even any tourists, no late-night interns scrambling to deliver diplomatic packets, just nothing. And the gates were wide open. We could have walked right up to the building, heck, we probably could have walked inside if we wanted. And there was parking on the street right next to the fence. Compare this to modern Washington, with its concrete barricades and uniformed guards with semiautomatic rifles. And whereas a huge swath of D.C. is devoted to government buildings, the centre of New Zealand's government occupied a space no bigger than a private college of 1200 or so students. In fact, it looked like a university so much that if you didn't know what it was beforehand you could be forgiven for mistaking it for one.
Downtown Wellington was nearly deserted, too, at that late hour of 7:30. We headed for a bar called Molly Malone's to meet up with some of Liz's friends from the Emigrate NZ forums. There, I drank Guinness, Liz drank water and I had a breakthrough in my understanding of rugby while watching Otago hand Wellington. Rugby, it turns out, is basically American football without pads, forward passes, or downs. When someone gets tackled or the ball comes loose in American football, everything stops; not so in rugby, where instead people pile on top of one another.
The band for the night started setting up their instruments, and I noted with dismay that the drummer had an electronic kit, which immediately led me to believe that the band was going to be horrible. That turned out to be unfounded; they were actually quite good, for a cover band. Once the band took off and the radio took over, the volume of the music went from "loud enough to squelch casual conversations" to "OW HOLY JESUS MY EARS", so Liz and I headed back to the hotel. On our way, we saw the "seedy underbelly" of Wellington, which is another way of saying we saw a bunch of drunken Kiwis staggering from one bar to another and not much else.
Next morning we headed up to the botanical gardens, which turned out to be a huge and varied array of plants arranged on a massive hill on the edge of the city. At the top we found Wellington's cable car, which we took down to downtown for some more shop browsing before heading back up and exploring the gardens some more. On our way down the hill to the Rose Garden, I heard Dixieland music playing off in the distance, which set off all kinds of cognitive dissonance; the last time I'd heard a live band playing Dixieland was back in St. Louis, quite literally on the other side of the planet. But sure enough, there they sat in the clamshell auditorium, even in era-appropriate costuming, belting out "Camptown Races" with their Kiwi accents. Dude, I thought to myself.
After checking out the as-yet-unbloomed rose gardens and the greenhouse next to them, we decided it was time to put the vacation to an end and head back to Palmy.
On a whim, we decided to take SH 2 back to Palmy instead of SH 1. This turned out to be a harrowing experience.
For the past three and a half years, I've been having this recurring nightmare where Liz and I are driving along, minding our own business, when all of a sudden the car goes off the road, over a cliff, and sends us plunging nearly a mile through the air to our deaths.
So, back in the real world, here we were, going over these mountains with blind twists and turns, in the rain, with lanes barely wider than the car itself, with nothing more than a barbed wire fence between us and a 500 meter sheer-walled plunge to the bottom of a gorge. I was unable to persuade myself to drive any faster than 20 kph, and if the steering wheel were a neck, it'd have ligature marks to set a coroner's heart aflutter.
We obviously survived, and we returned home exhausted, but in a good way. This was our first real vacation together in all the years we've known each other, where we had no ulterior motives for leaving home like visiting family or moving from one state to another. In all, it was a hell of a lot of fun. We packed a lot of experiences into two days, but not so much that there's nothing left for us to do anytime soon.
-Liz's OH
We drove down to Waikanae, a tiny town on the Kapiti coast, and checked into our motel. The pool there was really nothing more than a glorified bathtub, and neither of us ever worked up the courage to find out what sorts of horrors might be lurking behind the door marked "Champagne Pool". We assumed it was a hot tub of some kind, but there our curiosity began and ended.
We headed out to Waikanae Beach. The weather was; gale-force winds were whipping all about, and a slight drizzle would later turn into a downpour. We caught sight of Kapiti Island, location of a wilderness reserve we'll be visiting in two weeks. Off to the south, we saw almost a dozen kites in the air. Liz thought they were kite surfers, but I didn't think so. In that weather, with the water temperature probably only a degree or two above freezing, you'd have to be barmy to surf in that. Examination of the photos I took showed her to be right. Crazy kiters.
Dinner at a beachside restaurant called Rock Salt was quite good, though the menu was pretentious as all hell. When your menu tells you your scallops are "gently nestled" on a bed of lettuce, or whatever the actual language they used, you know that you're in for a colourful, yet tiny appetiser. The bottle of Hawke's Bay red that we washed down helped lubricate the meal.
Waikanae itself doesn't have much to it. A few shops, a couple restaurants, and that's really about it. You can walk from one end of its "downtown" area to the other in about three minutes if you take your time.
Next morning we walked down to a small bakery, then headed off for Wellington. The weather continued to worsen, though the ominous grey of the sky and the blustering winds held more of a promise of severe weather than any tangible severity.
After parking at Te Papa, the national museum, we simply wandered through downtown Wellington for a few hours, taking in the sights of the thousands of shops arrayed everywhere. Though the density of shops was quite high, the commercialism here somehow managed to be much less crass and intrusive than what I'm used to from the U.S. It's hard to explain, but in the U.S. it almost seems like signs, billboards, et cetera are all screaming at you to buy, and buy now. Here, that impression doesn't quite come across.
We then wandered through Te Papa for several hours. The museum has six levels, each of them completely different from one another.
Level one was devoted to wildlife exhibits, including a pygmy blue whale skeleton the size of a DC-10 suspended from the ceiling and a model of a blue whale's heart with blood vessels and ventricles so enormous that small children were climbing through them like playground equipment.
The other levels varied from geological exhibits, the history of colonisation, a huge array of Maori artefacts including a full-scale marae that we walked through in an awed hush, and an art exhibit. We only made it through five of the six levels as it was getting late and Liz was running out of steam.
We attempted to check in at our hotel near the botanical gardens, but the desk agent, upon seeing our reservation slip, asked us to "wait over there, I'll get the manager." This is, in American hotel speak, "Bend over and grab your ankles."
In New Zealand, however, it means "We overbooked the hotel, so we'll book you at a better hotel closer to downtown, spot you the difference between their price and ours, let you eat dinner here for free, give you the bottle of wine that came free with the room package you bought from us, let you park here tomorrow while you visit the botanical gardens, and reimburse you the cost of your trip to the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary if you end up going there tomorrow."
Eh?!?
In America, here's how the same situation would have played out:
"Sorry, we overbooked the hotel. We'll refund you the cost of your room. Here's a list of other hotels in the area; one of them might have a room available, I really don't know. Wish there was something else I could do for you. Sorry. (Now go away.)"
But in Wellington, we got $120 reimbursed for a $99 room, a bottle of wine, free dinner, booking at a better hotel (and what manager in America, even a Motel 6, would ever admit out loud that another hotel was "better" than his?), and free parking for the next day. We ended up not going to Karori, but if we had, that'd have been free, too.
It boggles the mind.
So we stayed at the Kingsgate Hotel, which turned out to be about a five minute walk away from the capitol complex.
Walking past the "Beehive" as they call their central government building was a surreal experience. After being to Washington, D.C. in 1995 and witnessing what a hub of activity it was, seeing the centre of New Zealand's government was a study in contrasts. For one thing, the place was completely deserted at 7:30 at night. Not even any tourists, no late-night interns scrambling to deliver diplomatic packets, just nothing. And the gates were wide open. We could have walked right up to the building, heck, we probably could have walked inside if we wanted. And there was parking on the street right next to the fence. Compare this to modern Washington, with its concrete barricades and uniformed guards with semiautomatic rifles. And whereas a huge swath of D.C. is devoted to government buildings, the centre of New Zealand's government occupied a space no bigger than a private college of 1200 or so students. In fact, it looked like a university so much that if you didn't know what it was beforehand you could be forgiven for mistaking it for one.
Downtown Wellington was nearly deserted, too, at that late hour of 7:30. We headed for a bar called Molly Malone's to meet up with some of Liz's friends from the Emigrate NZ forums. There, I drank Guinness, Liz drank water and I had a breakthrough in my understanding of rugby while watching Otago hand Wellington. Rugby, it turns out, is basically American football without pads, forward passes, or downs. When someone gets tackled or the ball comes loose in American football, everything stops; not so in rugby, where instead people pile on top of one another.
The band for the night started setting up their instruments, and I noted with dismay that the drummer had an electronic kit, which immediately led me to believe that the band was going to be horrible. That turned out to be unfounded; they were actually quite good, for a cover band. Once the band took off and the radio took over, the volume of the music went from "loud enough to squelch casual conversations" to "OW HOLY JESUS MY EARS", so Liz and I headed back to the hotel. On our way, we saw the "seedy underbelly" of Wellington, which is another way of saying we saw a bunch of drunken Kiwis staggering from one bar to another and not much else.
Next morning we headed up to the botanical gardens, which turned out to be a huge and varied array of plants arranged on a massive hill on the edge of the city. At the top we found Wellington's cable car, which we took down to downtown for some more shop browsing before heading back up and exploring the gardens some more. On our way down the hill to the Rose Garden, I heard Dixieland music playing off in the distance, which set off all kinds of cognitive dissonance; the last time I'd heard a live band playing Dixieland was back in St. Louis, quite literally on the other side of the planet. But sure enough, there they sat in the clamshell auditorium, even in era-appropriate costuming, belting out "Camptown Races" with their Kiwi accents. Dude, I thought to myself.
After checking out the as-yet-unbloomed rose gardens and the greenhouse next to them, we decided it was time to put the vacation to an end and head back to Palmy.
On a whim, we decided to take SH 2 back to Palmy instead of SH 1. This turned out to be a harrowing experience.
For the past three and a half years, I've been having this recurring nightmare where Liz and I are driving along, minding our own business, when all of a sudden the car goes off the road, over a cliff, and sends us plunging nearly a mile through the air to our deaths.
So, back in the real world, here we were, going over these mountains with blind twists and turns, in the rain, with lanes barely wider than the car itself, with nothing more than a barbed wire fence between us and a 500 meter sheer-walled plunge to the bottom of a gorge. I was unable to persuade myself to drive any faster than 20 kph, and if the steering wheel were a neck, it'd have ligature marks to set a coroner's heart aflutter.
We obviously survived, and we returned home exhausted, but in a good way. This was our first real vacation together in all the years we've known each other, where we had no ulterior motives for leaving home like visiting family or moving from one state to another. In all, it was a hell of a lot of fun. We packed a lot of experiences into two days, but not so much that there's nothing left for us to do anytime soon.
-Liz's OH