New Zealand 2010: Wellington (Saturday, February 20)

Written on the ferry to Picton (on the South Island), 11:00 am on Sunday, February 21; and in the Sydney airport at 7:52 pm (Sydney time)

We started the day with a drive up by where the Interislander Ferry would leave in the morning, to be sure of our route and time to get there (about 10 minutes).  Then we went to the New Zealand Parliament buildings, including the one oddly architected one referred to as the Beehive.

We then drove by the botanic garden, but apparently it was walk-through only, so we couldn’t drive through.  So we went to Zealandia, the visitable part of the Karori Sanctuary, a valley once used as the water source for Wellington (when they dammed it), which a group is today attempting to restore to close to natural habitat.  This has included removing invasive non-native species, constructing a fence around the entire reserve intended to prevent rabbits, cats, stoats, hedgehogs, and rats from getting in, and re-introducing wildlife long gone from the mainland, including giant wetas (New Zealand crickets the size of a child’s hand) and tuatara (a lizard-like reptile largely unchanged in the fossil record from 60 million years ago).  We got to see a couple tuataras (tuatara? tuatarae?), but they were shy, so pictures came out lousy.

One attraction in the reserve was the remnant of a small gold mine (there had once been several, but this was the only one in the valley still safe to enter).  It went about 50 feet into the hill and then connected to a vertical shaft about 50 feet high.  The cave was usually just over 6 foot high, and we got to see a number of cave wetas and when the faint red torch (flashlight) was turned out, a handful of bioluminescent glowworms.

Pretty much every time we were out in a forested area such as the Karori Sanctuary, the bugs were out, too.  Not hopping around, landing on you, biting you bugs, just in the trees, making noise.  Lots of noise.  Loudest bugs I’ve ever heard.  We kept looking to see if we could see them (since it sounded like there must be hundreds of huge bugs in each tree to make that much racket), but we never saw the noisemakers.  I have this suspicion that they were really little ones which are able to make massively disproportionate noise.

Coming back to the hotel, Mom laid down for a nap while I went shopping.  I picked up albums from Barry Saunders (of The Warratahs) and a Noel Parlane (another New Zealand country singer) at Slow Boat Records.  Then I went looking for a scarf for Kent, as he had asked me to bring one back for him.  I finally got smart and started checking out the hiking and skiing stores and found one (part Merino wool, part possum fur), a short black one with a loop for tucking the end through.  I apparently snuck in just moments before closing, and by the time I had made a selection, they had closed the registers.  They called for approval to reopen one of them, and only did it because I was paying cash.

Heading back to the hotel, I picked up a small plastic replica of the famous New Zealand tiki for my boyfriend.  This weird design — the “pitau” version of “hei-tiki” (according to Wikipedia), it looks like a frog-man, with its head akilter and its tongue out — is one of the iconic images of New Zealand, seen on greenstone jewelry and t-shirts and so on all over the country.  Hei-tiki is technically a neck pendant, not quite connected to what Americans think of as “tiki (bar) culture”.

Mom and I then went on a drive up Mt. Victoria, the urban mountain in the middle of Wellington.  If you’ve ever had the chance to drive up Twin Peaks in San Francisco, you know very much what we got: very curvy urban drive, and a 360-dgree mountain view of all the surrounding cityscapes.  Mt. Victoria also has a Robert Byrd memorial, looking due south toward Antarctica (although you can’t see it from there; it’s hundreds of miles away).

They were gearing up for a rugby match in the big stadium we could see, but whether it was the wind or the geography, the sound all seemed to come from downtown Wellington instead.

Dinner was at Rasa, a Malaysian/South Indian restaurant across the street from the hotel.  I ended up having goat curry, and Mom had a dosa, sort of a south Indian burrito, usually done with potatoes as a breakfast food.  According to a restaurant review posted there, this dish is difficult to do right and only two restaurants in Wellington have it on the menu.

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Updated on March 9, 2010

Added links.
Added travel map.
Added section on insects.

Updated on May 17, 2010

Added better travel map.

Updated on June 8, 2010

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-zealand-2010-wellington-saturday.html

New Zealand: Kayaking Lake Taupo, Taupo, and Rotorua (Thursday, February 18)

Written in the car headed to Taupo, about 12:50 pm on Friday, February 18, and finished in the room in Wellington at 10:00 pm

We drove back down to Taupo today for my kayaking outing, arriving at the i-SITE Visitor Centre about 10 minutes before departure time (just right).  I forgot my water bottle and towel in the car, and Mom left a couple minutes after we got there, so I had to do without.  (Didn’t need them in the end.  I’m not one of those who guzzles water from a bottle all day, anyway, and I just settled for being wet after swimming.)

Run by Kayaking Kiwi, our party included 10 of us and two guides.  I was paired with Daniel, a backpacker on vacation from Cork, Ireland.  We were one of the strongest pairs — my father used to do a couple river canoeing trips a year when I was a teenager, and you never forget those skills.

We drove out through Acacia Bay, where we were told that the housing market has spiked quite a lot, to where houses with a lake view are now in the NZ$500,000 range.  (Which to my eye is a steal; that’s about US $350,000, and Seattle houses with these sorts of views would be over $1,000,000.  Maybe I should emigrate?  And indeed, a real estate search for Acacia Bay does show lake-view houses in the $400–600K range.)  We unloaded kayaks on a beach and donned safety gear, including a funky tunic which stretches over the mouth of the kayak to help keep the water out.  The group spent about an hour kayaking to the carvings, 20-30 minutes there, 20 minutes back to a spot where we had some snacks and swam a bit, then back to the starting point.  Only one of the kayaks was lagging much of the way; I think we may have been a faster group than average, over all.

(While I could do all the paddling fine, there’s no question that I will feel this upper-body workout for the next couple days.)

I had initially thought the carvings were ancient but well preserved, but that’s silly when you think of it: there was no metallurgy in the South Seas 300-600 years ago, so there was little way for the Māori to develop the tools needed to carve volcanic rock.  Rather, they were done in the late 1970s by a trained native carver using metal tools but traditional methods.  The largest is about 30 feet high, a solid wall carving representing Ngātoro-i-rangi, the navigator of the canoes which brought the Māori to Aotearoa (New Zealand).  There were several other smaller carvings, including one of the lizard-like guardian of Lake Taupo (in Māori legend, all bodies of water have one, called a kaitiaki).  (Here is a Google images search for the carvings.)

(The Easter Island moai were apparently done with stone tools, and except for a handful, are made from tuff [compressed volcanic ash], which may be easier to carve. These carvings are very fine in comparison.)

We were back to the i-SITE drop-off spot just after 5 pm, an hour before Mom was supposed to pick me up. I wandered around, but most of the shops closed at 5 pm on Thursday (but some had been open later on Wednesday, which seemed odd).  I had a cone of Tip Top ice cream, pineapple with chocolate chunks — yummy — and wandered through a kitchen store on Tamamutu Street, then visited the Taupo Library and headed to the parking lot where Mom had dropped me off and dozed in the sun.  (Yes, the sun eventually came out a bit while we were on the lake, and then later as well. I used good sunscreen today.)

(The pineapple ice cream echoed a brand of New Zealand candy, pineapple-flavored taffy covered in chocolate called Pineapple Lumps.  What a name, eh?  Then what do you make of Peanut Slab?)

Mom had gone to a bookstore, and then to the Orakei Korako Cave and Thermal Park, where she walked the entire park except for the cave.  Good for her!  After she got back, we ate dinner at Portofino Italian Restaurant in Taupo, then headed back to Rotorua.

Each place we’ve stayed at has been outfitted with an electric tea kettle.  These have proven to be superb paired with a French press to make coffee, able to bring 1.5 liters of water to a boil in just a minute or two.  That seems vastly more efficient than using a stove to heat a metal tea kettle.  I don’t recall having seen electric tea kettles for sale in the States at the likes of Bed Bath & Beyond, but now I’m going to look for one.

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Updated on March 1, 2010

Updated on March 17, 2010

Added links.
Added travel map.

Updated on June 7, 2010

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-zealand-kayaking-lake-taupo-taupo.html

Stupid, Stupid Ads! — Non-Olympic Sponsors

“Stupid, Stupid Ads!” dissects ads that try to do something underhanded or just plain stupid.

This ad is a window sticker about three feet high from a local Subway shop.

Look, it’s the official sandwich of the 2010 Winter Olympics!  Er, well, maybe not.  "Winter Sports".  "Coverage from Vancouver".  A logo with a bowl of mountains and a stretched banner (the NBC coverage logo).  No linked rings.  Sure as heck meant to evoke the 2010 Winter Olympics, but without paying the hefty license fees attached to that.  Just the fees needed to have the NBC Sports logo and presumably logo design.

Maybe this is just a case of “Olympics?  What Olympics?  There are Olympics going on?  Really?  We’re just promoting hot food for people who, you know, like to snowboard and stuff.”

I’ve heard that the Olympics licensing fees are stupid high.  This looks to be a bit of backlash about that to me.

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Updated on March 3, 2010

I turns out that there’s a term for these fake tie-ins: “Ambush Marketing”.  And for this years Winter Olympics, the top ambush marketers were Verizon, Subway, and Pepsi.

Here’s an article from The Global Language Monitor.  I found it from Schott’s Vocab blog.

What Were They Thinking? — They’ve Suffered Enough, Just Give It to Them

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This video on CNN.com covers some controversy over merchandise using the New Orleans Saints fan phrase “Who Dat?”

The story itself is utter junk, playing things as the Big Bad NFL picking on small businesses, since the end of the video reveals that the NFL complaint is narrowly targeted to items which use the Saints’ name/logo/colors, and thus imply an approved connection to the team.

The real junk, though, is the commentator, who repeatedly implies that because New Orleans had to deal with Hurricane Katrina — and perhaps just as bizarrely, because the Saints have had many losing seasons in the past — the NFL should just let this slide.

What’s up wit’ dat?

Sorry, but that’s not how trademarks work.  You either defend them or you abandon them.  Maybe you license them for a smaller fee than usual, but you don’t say “Awww, how cute!  The team has finally had a good season, so give up the trademark so that carpetbaggers trying to make a quick buck can really profit!”

(How long does New Orleans get a free pass due to Katrina, anyway?  Do New Yorker’s get to hawk trashy logo merchandise for the Giants and the Jets in perpetuity due to September 11?  What about the Dodgers after the Northridge quake, or has their freebie expired?)
 

Ireland: Dublin, Dublin to Killarney, and Killarney (Saturday, February 23)

Written Saturday, February 23 at 7:44 pm, Killarney (upstairs in a cottage at Old Killarney Village)

We took the City Tour in the late morning, on one of a fleet of “hop on, hop off” double-decker busses.   We got on at Parliament House/Trinity College, then off at Merrion Square, St. Stephen’s Green (big park), and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but then rode the rest of the way back to O’Connell Street.   I’ll probably come back to the Guinness Storehouse tour next weekend.   Had luck at the Cafe Royale at a Best Western on O’Connell Street, sitting under the TV showing the Birmingham v. Arsenal soccer match.   Every pub around was getting packed full for the Six Nations rugby match of Ireland v. Scotland, held there in Dublin that afternoon.   So many Scots boys in kilts, everywhere!   (Looking forward to Utilikilt weather in Seattle again!)

We bussed back to the B&B to pick up the car, then drove from Dublin, through Limerick (rather, just to the south of Limerick), and then to Killarney.   Nothing special about the drive itself, although large portions were just one lane in each direction.   Mom’s driving was better, probably because she got used to the car.

It got dark about 20 minutes before we got to Killarney.   The place we’re staying at — Old Killarney Village, a small development of time-share cottages — is outside Killarney, so we missed the turn off and went all the way to the town center, then backtracked and asked directions.   Then almost missed the turnoff going the other way, then just missed the side road from there, and then missed the check-in office.   No big deal on any of that, just one little whoops after another.

We’re heading into town in a few minutes to get dinner and visit the grocery to get all the necessities for the next week.  Maybe find an Internet café, too.