Auckland

We finished off New Zealand in Auckland.  Wellington is the capital but Auckland is larger and something of a cultural and media capital.  It also has the main international hub airport, so we spent a couple of nights there before moving on.

We wandered through Auckland Domain, one of the larger parks in the city, to the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which serves as both a memorial and as a national and natural history museum.   

In the natural section they had mock-ups of the extinct Giant Moa (standing at 3.5 metres) and the giant penguin (weighing in at 150kgs) - the moa being victims of being too damn slow, tasty and unafraid of humans with sticks for their own good, and the penguins being competed out of existence by its smaller cousins. 

In the obligatory war sections they had pristine example of a Supermarine Spitfire and a Mitsubishi Zero.  The Spitfire was produced post-war, but the zero was destined for a Kamikaze pilot but was laid up for repairs as the war ended.

A novel exhibition they had was one where local kids had modelled the battle of Gallipoli using Minecraft (in case you don't know, this is a computer game in which you can build 3D structures on various scales using simple blocks. It's quite popular with the kids).  They then made the model explorable using controls and wearing Oculus Rift (the newer, fancier generation of Virtual Reality) goggles, which was innovative.

There was a seismic exhibit here too, focussing this time on volcanos as Auckland is built on an active volcano field where an eruption is not unlikely.  They've put together this room, which is made up like a living room looking at a TV screen representing a french window onto the incoherent fury of an angry god.  That was a giggle.  There's a guy who walks out of the rubble at the end to tell you to take a flyer on the way out with information on how to die less from pyroclastic flow.

Air New Zealand also had an exhibition space, showing off their history, uniforms and whatnot, but they also had a mock-up cabin with more Oculus Rift goggles.  I think someone got a multibuy deal on those. Anyhow, you sat down, donned said Tomorrow's World glasses, and they showed you alternate ways of distracting us in-flight in future.  So, rather than staring at the screen on the seatback in front of you, you watch the floor disappear, to be replaced with a psychedelic fever dream.

This is them simulating the noise of an unconsolable crying child while you peer vertiginously through the seat in front of you,  into the yawning maw of an ill-tempered hippopotamus. 

 We finished off the Kiwi sojourn with cocktails, in a brave departure from habit.

So farewell then, NZ, you were the least foreign-feeling-but-categorically-foreign foreign place we are likely to encounter.  Next stop was Australia, which is still somewhat-British, but half the nouns there conspire to murder you.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben unsere Reise in Neuseeland beendet. Neuseeland ist das Ausland, aber wir haben nicht fremd fühlen. Jetzt sind wir nach Australien reisen, wo alles will dich töten!

Wrapping up South Island

Playing catch up again.

After Milford Sound, we drove up to Queenstown.  It’s the home of bungee jumping and other silliness.  We took a jet boat trip around Lake Wakatipu and Rees River, which was exciting. The six year-old in front of us described it as “the best day ever”, which was high praise.

While you can see Kiwis (the birds) in the wild, its not likely due to both their scarcity and nocturnal habits.  We were determined to see at least one, so we visited the Kiwi and Birdlife centre to have a look.   This blurry mess is the best I can do for a photo:

We were introduced to the brilliantly-named Devastation the Possum, who, while cute, represents the blight that his kind are on these islands.

"I am the night"

There are no native mammals in New Zealand, due to it being underwater at some point in its volcanic history, so everything they have now (ferrets, stoats, weasels, possums, foxes, rabbits) were introduced and cause merry hell with the local ecosystem.  Everywhere we went that was forested, we saw warnings about the vast amounts of poison they’d laid to kill off anything furry.  So Devastation was there primarily to remind us not to swerve if we see his cousins in the headlights.  An odd message from a wildlife park, but there you go.  They were selling possum fur souvenirs in the gift shop.  Apparently they don’t release any baby kiwis until they reach "stoat-proof" size, which is exactly what you imagine.   Here’s an adult kiwi beating the piss out of a possum that came looking in her burrow:

While we were in town we went for a Thai meal, which involved the weirdest dessert I’ve ever had.  It involved tapioca, sweet corn and green.

Nothing is safe

We made our way north to Greymouth, home of the Monteith brewery, with whose products I had become passingly familiar.  Grudgingly, and with much persuading, I popped in for a tasting.

They have also ‘Shanty Town’ – a recreation of the mining town that was set up here in the 19th century during the heyday of the west coast gold mining industry.  It’s made up of a somewhat accurate town built from original stores and buildings, and has an authentic narrow-gauge mining train which you could ride to an old sawmill - lumber being the other main industry in the area at the time.  The stories told are generally of hardship, drunkenness and disease - which made me a bit homesick.

To get across to Christchurch, one drives along Arthur’s Pass.  Evidently it was -rather familiarly- named for Sir Arthur Dudley Dobson, who led the first group of Europeans across the pass.  It makes for some more pretty pictures:

Our last stop on the south island was in Christchurch.  Christchurch is one of the larger cities in NZ, the largest on the south island, but I feel it would be mostly unremarkable were it not for the series of earthquakes that reduced a large part of it to rubble.  I'll wind in my normal flippancy as it wasn't very funny, but what it has led to is some novel ways of coping during the very protracted rebuilding efforts.  The city centre is almost entirely building sites, but artists were commissioned to tart it up a bit.

This isn't one of them -this is a strip joint.  It was like that before the quakes and was left entirely unscathed.
The churches were fucked though.  I'm saying nothing.

The Re:Start mall is the most interesting feature of the city centre.  Bereft of a standing shopping centre, they built one out of shipping containers.  It's rather cool.

They built a temporary anglican cathedral out of paper (and shipping containers, natch) while they argue about how or if to rebuild the original one.  They did a cool thing with the stained-glass, in that they took shards of the original cathedral's shattered window and blew them up to form a mosaic.

There's some odd touches floating about, too.   This is a dance floor in the middle of a carpark, complete with disco ball and a ipod dock and speaker system made out of a washing machine. Evidently, people just rock up, hook up their tunes, throw in their coin and make a complete spectacle of themselves:

I'm just jealous because I dance like Rick Astley being stun-gunned.

When we were done here, we dropped off the still-confused Japanese car and caught our flight to Auckland.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Ich brauche, um aufzuholen seitdem ich recht langsam bin. Wir reisten von Milford Sound nach Queenstown, in denen wir auf einem Jet-Bootsfahrt ging. Wir reisten dann durch Arthurs Passstrasse nach Christchurch. Christchurch war sehr schlecht durch Erdbeben beschädigt und sie sind innovative Wege, um wieder aufzubauen.