North Island Trip: Days 14-15, The Journey Home
Originally, our plan for the North Island trip was going to take us out around the Bay of Plenty and the East Cape, but things were getting weary and everyone was ready to be home, and Sara suggested we give up the extra-scenic tour for a quicker journey home. (I quickly agreed. Thank you, sweetie.) This had the added advantage of allowing us to see Taupo again, but this time in the daylight. So we chose a few way-points, such as the straightforwardly-named hot water beach just south of Coromandel Town (B), and Taupo (C), where we stayed the night. We got there in time to see the lake, but only just barely: it was almost dark and after dinner we fell right asleep. The next morning we woke up early and headed home for Wellington (E), stopping on the way in Napier/Hastings (D), which is like Minneapolis/St. Paul, except much, much smaller and located in New Zealand.
Here’s how it looked on the journey home:
Hot Water Beach
I’m sorry to admit that I took a pass on Hot Water Beach and went for the nap-in-the-car option instead. In my defense, I drove for literally the entire trip, with the one exception being once during our stay in Coromandel Town when Sara drove to the nearest take-out place only to find it was three blocks away. So I had a little car-nap coming to me. But by all reports, Hot Water Beach lived up to its name: it’s a beach where you can dig a little in the sand and it’ll start filling with hot water. Meanwhile, a few meters away is the Pacific Ocean, which is decidedly not hot water. This particular geological oddity is a big tourist attraction though, so the beach itself was pretty crowded. Here, take a look:
Kiwis enjoying their Hot Water Beach as if it were beach weather…
… and what the weather was really like
We did have some breaks along the way to Taupo, and I got in a few shots. As did Sara, obviously.
I don’t look that bad in a beard in this shot
Pacific Coastline
Napier / Hastings
We only stayed for a couple of hours in Napier because we wanted to get home to Wellington before I was sleeping at the wheel. I even managed to convince Sara to forgo Hastings, which is so close to Napier that they almost have the same name. (Thank you again, sweetie.) But we did enjoy the park that we found in Napier, we had a good lunch, and as we drove further south we really started to see the fall colors. Which was a little odd for us, seeing as how this was the end of April.
Excited to be out of the car
Standing over the Port of Napier
You’ve got to stop and hear the flowers
Starting to see those Fall Colors
Yep, definitely fall
As usual, you can see more pictures of our last few days heading back on our Picasa website. But this marks the end of our North Island trip. I have plenty of other great pics from just the regular days in between trips (and a few smaller trips around the area) here in Wellington, but we’re moving out on Sunday, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get to them all. But I owe it to my mom, so I’ll try, dear reader, I’ll try.
Labels: North Island trip
North Island Trip: Days 11-13, Coromandel
Having gotten to the top of the island (some of us, at least), it was time to head back down. The problem with any kind of journey north of Auckland is that you really can’t come up with a looping itinerary: there’s really only one way up and one way down. You might look at the map on the right and say, “Wait, you could go down the west coast using 12 and take 14 after Dargaville!” But then I would say, “Thanks, Princess Mapquest, but that route would be less fun than a street full of sheep poop.” And I can pretty much guarantee it would be, because 1 is the main national highway and it is one lane from Auckland on. It’s got stop lights and go-slow zones in almost every town it passes, and if you’re really lucky then driving from the top of New Zealand down to the Coromandel peninsula (where we were heading) won’t take too much longer than a full day of driving. Which it did.
This is not to say it wasn’t gorgeous, because it was. But it was also what we’d seen already, so I didn’t take any pictures.
Waiau Waterworks
The next day we lazed around for a bit in the morning, and then headed out for the Waiau Waterworks which Fodor’s calls a “quirky playground.” This, I’m guessing, was edited down from “the playground you’d get if Rube Goldberg collaborated with the guy in your office who emails everyone stupid Internet jokes.” There are quite a few moving sculptures, mostly operated by water, and a lot of odd playground equipment, much of it we’d never seen elsewhere, interspersed along a long woodsy trail. As you follow this trail, from sculpture garden to playground, you find random bulletin boards and posted signs with information that could only have come from stupidjokesandamazingfacts.com.
The bicycling guy powered by water reminded us of Ben
As did this sign:
Alison LOVED this spinning wheel (though she didn’t really spin)
Katie reads a bulletin board with Internet jokes
Ride ‘em, Cowgirls
To get a real sense of these things, though, you’ve gotta see the videos…
The bedpan water sculpture:
The water-powered clock
If only we’d gotten the video of Sara falling on her butt trying to do this…
Katie on the super-long zip line
And my personal favorite: the ET-like bike ride
Driving Creek Railways & Pottery
On our next day in Coromandel we found another (slightly less odd) hybrid attraction: Driving Creek, the railway / pottery store. As it turns out, the fellow who bought up the land, and then set up a pottery collective, needed some way to get the mud from one part of his land to the other. So he built himself a railway. Now, when the railway isn’t hauling mud (which it still does), it’s giving rides to tourists.
The train’s destination is the “Eyefull [sic] Tower.” (Anyone who makes puns that bad probably hangs out with the Waterworks Internet Joke guy.) But it’s an unsurprisingly beautiful vista at the top, and the engineer / artist / owner who bought all the land is making a concerted effort to restore the forest to its original state by replanting kauri trees, so I can’t complain too much. I think we were all a bit tired at this point, but we enjoyed the train ride. And then we really enjoyed going back to our room and watching movies rented from the front desk.
Riding that train…
When your train is built by artists, you’ve got to expect a little sculpture along the trip
Our destination, up above the trees
The View
Heading home to watch Shrek**
These are just a few of the photos from our Coromandel days, go to the Picasa website to see more.
** I would be remiss not to mention that this is where Alison first saw the Shrek movies, starting with Shrek III, and fell in love. She now regularly wants to play “Shek,” and always chooses the character of Shrek for herself. Katie is allowed to be Fiona, and Megan is usually cast as the donkey. If I’m lucky, I get to be “baby cookie” (i.e. the gingerbread man). All of this is set up so that Megan can start singing “On the Road Again,” and Alison can yell, “Stop singing, Donkey!” This, she believes, is the single most hilarious part of all three Shrek movies.
Labels: North Island trip
North Island Trip: Days 9-10, Kaitaia & Cape Reinga
After a wonderful full day touring the Bay of Islands out of Russell we drove north to Kaitaia. The trip was fine for all of us except Megan, who got sick half-way through. She persevered, though, and after a lunch stop along the northwest coast of the “northland” (as the Kiwi call it), we made it to our bed and breakfast just south of Kaitaia.
On both of our trips (South, then North Island), we’ve stayed at plenty of very nice places, with very nice people. Probably our favorite hosts, though, were Jenna & Polly. Mike & Rosemary, actually… Jenna & Polly are the golden retrievers who live with them. Alison was, by turns, enraptured and horrified by these two lovable, but quite active, doggies. “Do you remember Jenna and Polly?” was a common out-of-the-blue question from Ali for the rest of the trip (and well into the weeks following).
Sara had originally planned (through Mike) an all-day bus trip for all of us from Kaitaia up to the very tip-top northernmost point of the North Island, Cape Reinga. With Megan feeling sick, though, we decided to limit that excursion to just Katie & Sara, and thus spared ourselves the horror of a day-long bus ride with a two-year-old. Megan, Alison & I stayed home, which means I can’t give a very good description of what happened. (Though I well remember the fact that with Megan reading in the back room, and Alison down for her nap, I was able to listen to my own music! It was a momentous occasion.)
Therefore, after a few pictures of the trip to Kaitaia and our gracious hosts, I’ll leave it to Sara & Katie to fill in the details…
One things about NZ trips: when you have to pull to the side of the road because one of your children just barfed, at least the scenery is usually quite nice.
We got to watch some avian fighting while stopped for lunch
Our very wonderful hosts from the Plane Tree Lodge
Katie & Sara’s Excellent Adventure to the End of the Island
The bus trip starts by driving up the so-called Ninety Mile Beach (it’s actually only 60 miles long). It’s massive—this wide stretch of beautiful beach that goes forever. There are several tour buses that do the route, and some brave(read: stupid) travelers take their own cars. Standard road rules apparently apply. Our tour bus guy was a fairly typical tour bus guy—he thought he was funny, a lot of the older people on the bus thought he was funny, but from a purely factual point of view (ours), he was not. We are going to do OUR blog post differently, interspersing our narrative with photos, so let the eye feast begin.
Our trip begins!
Looking out from where Katie is standing, there is this amazing rock formation. I’m sure it has an official name, but we simply call it…
Holy rock
Looking the other direction from Katie, you get a sense of the terrain up here. Sand, sand everywhere. These absolutely gorgeous dunes with grass, trees, and other vegetation growing on them. Scenery made for screensavers.
We love our family, we really do, but it was SO nice to have this day to ourselves. This is us in front of our Sand Safaris bus. We were troublemakers, always the last ones back on the bus because we were busy taking silly pictures, getting hot chocolate, buying ice cream. Here we are…
Intrepid explorers
One of the highlights of the trip was the stop at the sand dunes, where anyone who wanted to could borrow a sled, haul their butts to the top of this massive dune, and go slip slidin’ away. Katie got extra lucky and found a new/old boyfriend up top (if you look closely, you can see the delight on her face). She made it to the bottom, and we managed to give the old guy the slip. We both went down three times; the climb up was really rough, and we were seriously tired out afterwards.
Sand sledding
This is my artsy-fartsy shot. Pretty nice, eh? We were really quite stunned by the beauty of the sand dunes. It inspired me to get my family down to the Sand Dunes National Monument when we get back to Colorado. Nothing like going half-way around the world to get your priorities straight.
We got back on the bus for another hour or so before winding our way down to this lovely bay where we had lunch. It was a cold and fairly windy day, so we just huddled up and enjoyed the scenery. The feet shot is yet another example of my budding photographic talent. Four feet is a heck of a lot less (and more manageable) than the usual ten.
After lunch, we headed for the top! The walk down to the lighthouse has apparently been really built up in the last ten years or so; there were lots of signs on the way down, and the path was lovely. But it was really windy and cold and started raining. If it weren’t the amazing view, we would have been miserable. The lighthouse itself was fairly standard, but the fact that we were standing at the top of the country and looking out across the Tasman Sea to the west and the Pacific Ocean was pretty breathtaking. I love the idea of being able to look out over the meeting of two massive bodies of water.
Cape Reinga Lighthouse
Looking to the east, we could see the actual tip of New Zealand. It’s obviously inaccessible, but it was nice to be able to look at it.
Then there’s The Tree. This is so amazing. From the New Zealand Encyclopedia: “It is a pohutukawa tree and, according to ancient lore it was the final departure point for the spirit of the Maori. It was said that the spirit, after travelling up the west coast to a spot a few miles south of Cape Maria van Diemen, continued overland to the western end of Spirits Bay and eventually reached the pohutukawa tree. There it descended the roots and entered the sea. (This tree is reputed to have been in position for about 800 years and is said never to have blossomed.) The spirit surfaced at Manawatawi (the Great King Island) and, after a farewell look at the land of the living, descended again to the depths and continued its journey to the other world.” And it’s so photogenic to boot! Yea for The Tree! Go Pohutukawa!
And this is us. We are not dead, so we will not go the route of the Pohutukawa. Instead, we will go get ice cream (oooh, foreshadowing…)!
This is the most important photo of the entire North Island trip. This ice cream symbolizes our love of ice cream. It was The Epitome of Love and Ice Cream (flavors: Lime and Boysenberry). Just typing it gives us shivers. I was skeptical of the combination, but man oh man. (Note: we stopped in a tiny town at a tiny dairy and most of the people on the bus went in to get ice cream. We were not going to get ice cream, but then it looked so good, so we snuck off the bus and got in line. We were the naughty naughty people who made the rest of the bus wait, and we will NEVER regret it.)
The final stop of the day was at the Gumdigger Village/Kauri Forest. One of the early industries in this part of the island was gumdigging—extracting gum from ancient Kauri trees. Kauri trees are massive. They’re just huge. Dug at this point would go to the internet and find some factual information to share, maybe add a little “hyperlink”, but we prefer not to do that. So, instead, we present… Boots! And a little hut! Yay!
It’s a jungle out there…
Before we left the Gumdiggers village, we spotted these cute little ponies. They were just irresistible, so we went over to have a look. “Oh, look, mom, the cute little pony! AAAA!” It was an electric fence. We decided the day just wasn’t complete until someone got electrocuted, and this is photographic evidence (I took the picture just as her butt decided to touch the fence). Apparently it really hurt, but it was so dang funny I had a hard time conjuring up any sympathy.
Fortunately, the Fence Incident of 2009 didn’t do any permanent damage, and the day ended with Katie just as beautiful as when it started.
Thank you for your time and patience. We hope you have enjoyed the guest bloggership provided by Katie and Sara. And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming (Dug).
And as always, if you’re interested, we put more pictures from these couple of days up on our Picasa website.
North Island Trip: Days 7-8, Russell
I’m pretty good with driving on the wrong side of the road now, but there are a few things that still throw me. One of those is: as you move north, the weather gets warmer. Thus, it’s in the northern parts of the North Island that you’ll find your Kiwi beach towns, my favorite of which – by far – was Russell.
We journeyed north from Auckland towards Russell using the same map that Google provided on the right here. But that, it turns out, was the wrong map. Luckily, Sara had learned from the guide books that the last bit of the drive, though the only over-land route, was long and boring and to be avoided at all costs. Instead, we took the ten-minute ferry from Opua to Okaito and had a lovely ride (see map below). I’m fairly certain that this is the first time Google has been wrong ever.
Russell is one of the main tourist towns in what’s known as the “Bay of Islands.” According to Wikipedia, it used to be a rough-and-tumble place whose reputation was so bad that they couldn’t put the colonial capital there, even though it was the obvious choice. There’s precious little sign of that now, though. More than anything, it reminded me of a small seaside town in Massachusetts, maybe, but with fewer Kennedys.
We stayed at a pleasant motel for two nights; Sara had booked us on a boat tour of the Bay of Islands during the intervening day. Originally, she’d planned to have us stay longer, but the nicer hotels or B&Bs were booked, which all turned out for the best because, as much as I liked the town of Russell, the B&B we stayed at next was certainly our favorite of the trip.
Our first evening in Russell provided a beautiful, if cloudy, sunset which we watched from one of the many restaurants along the beach. Katie read Harry Potter VII to Megan while Sara played with Ali by the water and I drank a pint of northland brew and marveled at the awesomeness of my life.
The next day was our full-day boat trip around the Bay of Islands called the “Cream Trip.” The name sounds odd until yo learn that the trip follows the same route that the milk run once did, and in fact still delivers packages to summer residents. One highlight of the Cream Trip is visiting “The Hole in the Rock,” which certainly lives up to its name. The water was too rough for us to be able to actually ride through the hole in the rock, but we did get to stop at a quiet beach for a picnic, a glass-bottomed boat fish-feeding tour (for Katie & I) and a tramp up along the ridges overlooking the ocean (for Megan & Sara). They brought us back before dark and then we headed across the small main street to enjoy probably the best homemade pasta meal I’ve had most anywhere (Gannets, by the way, if you’re planning a trip).
There is no doubt that if we lived year-round in New Zealand, we’d be planning a week-long family holiday in Russell. I can’t think of a better place in the northland to spend one.
Close-up of the Bay of Islands
Flowers outside of our motel, town hall in the background
Russell Pier Panorama
A building is Russell’s “downtown”
The sun goes down in Russell
Heading out for the Bay of Islands “Cream Trip”
Classic Bay of Islands Shoreline
The aptly named “Hole in the Rock”
Our picnic beach
Rare shot of Sara & Dug together… alone!
I can’t get enough of these Bay of Island shoreline shots
You can find plenty more Russell / Bay of Island shots up on our Picasa website.
Labels: North Island trip
North Island Trip: Days 4-6, Hamilton & Auckland
We spent our third night of the trip in Hamilton, a small but pleasant college town just about in the middle of the North Island, north-to-south, though it feels more northern. One of Katie’s best Boulder friends had lived in Hamilton not too many years ago, so Katie was on a quest to get a picture of herself in front of her friend’s old house. So before we headed out to Auckland, we wandered the neighborhoods of Hamilton for a bit until our objective was achieved. Success!
Hamilton Gardens
Before we left we also visited the Hamilton Gardens. This would seem an excellent place to point out how fantastic it is to have someone who actually researches trips, reads guide books, plans itineraries, etc as part of your family vacation. I’m not completely deficient in this area (the trip to Sydney that Katie & I took wasn’t completely without planning), but Sara is certainly the master. Had it not been for Sara, I’m pretty sure there’s no way we’d have ended up going to the Hamilton Gardens. And as much as I’m pleased with our gardens here in Wellington, I must admit that the Hamilton Gardens are superior.
The part of the gardens we visited is called the “Paradise Garden Collection” and it reminded me most of the World Showcase at EPCOT Center. There are six separate and completely different gardens in the Paradise Collection, each representing a particular garden style in a particular place at a particular time. We first visited the Japanese Garden of Contemplation, then the Chinese Scholars Garden, followed by the Italian Renaissance Garden, the English Flower Garden, and finally the American Modernist Garden. (The Indian Char Garden was closed, unfortunately, due to vandalism.)
I was completely wowed by the first three gardens (I was on grumpy baby duty for the English Flower Garden, and all of us were underwhelmed by the American Modernist Garden—blech), and particularly interested in the different between the Japanese and Chinese gardens, something I’d never have been able to describe before visiting, but which became self-evident simply by walking through them and appreciating the flowers, the layout, the design. There were a few helpful signs with background information, etc, but it’s really best just to be in them, walk through them, experience them to understand, and that’s what the Hamilton Gardens provide. Kudos to Hamilton.
NOTE: My insistence that the only way to really understand these gardens is to actually experience them won’t keep me from showing you pictures of each. Sorry.
Japanese Garden of Contemplation
Contemplation Happening (mostly)
Chinese Scholars’ Garden
Italian Renaissance Garden
English Garden
We spent the next two days in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and on those two days we visited two major attractions: the Auckland Sky Tower and Kelly Tarlton’s Antarctic Encounter & Underwater World. Both were interesting and fun, but only the Sky Tower will live in family legend forever. And that’s just because of…
The Sky Tower Man!!!
I’ve been in my share of iconic man-made viewing structures (the Empire State Building, Seattle’s Space Needle, etc), so I didn’t have high hopes of this being much different. Like the Space Needle, Auckland’s Sky Tower was built as a restaurant and an observation deck. Unlike the Space Needle, the Sky Tower is all about scaring the beejebus out of acrophobics. That’s not me, luckily, so I was more than happy to go stamping around on the clear plexiglass 1,000 feet above the ground. Others in the family did not find this as amusing as I did. But eventually we all got into the game of leaning out against the clear panels and looking straight down. For my money, all big towers should have this feature. (You can also pay to walk around the top of the tower and then bungy jump off the side, but Sara put the kibosh on that idea. Oh, well.)
The important part of the visit, though, was what happened to Alison. She was cheerfully running around, acting like the two-year-old she is and generally ignoring everybody who didn’t come directly into her path (and a few who did), when Scotty, the Sky Tower mascot, came off the elevator. Scotty spotted Alison, went to her, bent down in a completely friendly, non-threatening manner, and said “hello.” Alison turned around and … completely flipped out. I wasn’t there, but I’m told it was a scream to end all screams, something never before witnessed from any of our daughters at any age. Scotty (or “the Sky Tower Man,” as Alison now calls him) was of course apologetic and immediately plied her with chocolate treats, which seemed to defuse the situation. But to this day (and I’m writing this two months later), the Sky Tower Man tops the list of scary things in Ali’s imagination, and she’ll regularly mention him out of the blue. I’ve included a picture of him below and you’re welcome to look… if you dare!
The Auckland Sky Tower doing its sky-towering thing
Is that a target for jumpers?
Auckland’s a pretty big city
Goofing around in the Sky Tower
Megan! Watch out! The Sky Tower Man’s behind you!
There are no small number of penguin-themed attractions around New Zealand, and if Kelly Tarlton’s Antarctic Encounter & Underwater World isn’t the best, well, at least it probably has the longest name. It also has penguin tetherball, penguin suits, and a special penguin race-track. Which was pretty much all we needed.
Penguin Tetherball
Mommy Penguin and her three Little Penguins
Sisters Race
And because you really need to see it to believe it…
Sara reminds me that these two attractions weren’t the only things we did in Auckland, but admittedly the rest of our days there were less exciting than what you see above: we shopped at Victoria Markets, walked in some nearby parks, read, did laundry, and so on. The one event that I’m sorry I didn’t get photographic evidence of was Meg’s dip in our hotel pool which, seeing as how it was an outdoors pool, was freeeeeeeezing. Even the hotel owners came out to watch when that happened.
As always, you can find more pictures than the ones I singled out above up on our North Island – Hamilton, Auckland web album.
Labels: North Island trip
North Island Trip: Day 3, Easter in Middle Earth
[Back again to the details of our North Island Trip, which we took mid-April during the girls’ mid-term break.]
There’s a hilarious scene in one of the episodes from the first season of The Flight of the Conchords where a stranger says he loves Bret & Jemaine’s act because pretending you’re from “some nowhere place nobody knows anything about, like New Zealand” is pure comic genius.
Jemaine: But we are from New Zealand.
Stranger: Oh, right. No, really, I love New Zealand. I mean, Lord of the Rings, am I right!? And uh, … hobbits and stuff. And … Lord of the Rings. [pause] But hey, don’t let me bore you with all my knowledge of New Zealand!
We got a similar reaction from folks when we told them we’d be living in NZ for several months. Heck, I think that was pretty much my reaction when Sara suggested the sabbatical in the first place. But for a country whose current most widely-known claim to fame is being the backdrop for Lord of the Rings, there are surprisingly few vestiges of Middle Earth left here. You can take any number of LoTR tours, but all the guides can do is point out a meadow or a mountain or a river and say, “now try to imagine that Frodo and Gandalf…”
This was actually intentional. The agreement that Peter Jackson reached with the New Zealand government was that they’d leave no trace of the filming behind. Everything that was built was torn down; everything dug up or taken away was put back. In one case, though, the plan wasn’t completely carried out. The Alexander family farm outside of Matamata, which stood in for Hobbiton, Frodo & Bilbo’s home village, was hit by a fierce winter storm before the sets could be completely dismantled. The movie company pledged to return to finish the job in the spring, but in the meantime friends and neighbors asked to see the remaining set, and the Alexanders decided it might be worth keeping. Several years of legal wrangling later the Hobbiton Tour and Sheep Farm Experience was born.
As you can see from the map, Matamata (B) wasn’t too far out of the way on the drive we were taking from Rotorua (A) to Hamilton (C), so on Easter Sunday morning, we woke up, spent some time hunting for jellybeans the Easter Bunny had kindly left in our hotel room, and headed out for our Hobbit (and Sheep Farm) Experience!
Easter Morning, Rotorua
Counting jellybeans
Joking aside, the Hobbiton tour was worth every penny. Not so much for the LoTR tie-in (though seeing the remaining set and hearing stories about interns cutting the grass with scissors was fun), but because it gave us a real sense of a central-NZ sheep farm. As I may have mentioned elsewhere on this site, there are ten times as many sheep as people in New Zealand, and as far as I can tell they mostly live on farms like the one we visited. The weather was gorgeous, and I think the fact that we were on a tour with a bunch of people who also paid good money to look at fantasy story left-overs meant that nobody was too self-conscious about taking silly pictures or posing like a hobbit.
(At one point the guide suggested that we do our best hobbit-dance across the field to the “party tree”, and our family quickly complied, followed by the remainder of the tour group. Later, I heard the guide say that it was the first time she’d ever actually gotten everyone to dance. We’re trend-setters, I suppose. Or goofy enough to make everyone else feel comfortable.)
Welcome to Hobbiton. Population: Us!
Is this how hobbits dance?
Our family visits Bag’s End.
Even without the sets, it looks like The Shire
The second part of our visit (after the “Hobbiton Tour”) was the “Sheep Farm Experience”, and I liked it just as much. Alison, for her part, talks about “the man cutting the sheep” almost as much as she does “the Sky Tower Man” (who’ll be featured in a later post). Katie got to feed one of the lambs and we all got a taste of a working sheep farm. By “taste”, of course, I mean very little, since we didn’t get dirty, we weren’t hot and sweaty when it was done, and we didn’t have to get up at dawn. Best of all worlds!
“I surrender!”
Mid-shear
Katie had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb
Like these? Many more pictures available on our Picasa website. Enjoy!
Labels: North Island trip
Dug & Katie Visit Sydney
[NOTE: Sorry to interrupt our North Island Trip, but I wanted to get this in before I forgot the details. I’ll get back to the North Island soon.]
Not too long ago, I sent out a plea to everyone whose email address I could dig up in regards to a contest I’d entered. I didn’t win, but the whole effort was worthwhile if only because it gave me an excuse to get back in touch with people I’d not been in touch with for years, if not decades. One of those people was my old college roomie, and life-long pal, Scott Shepherd.
Scott is a professional actor in New York – one who actually makes a living at it. This is no mean feat, as you can imagine, and I’ve always been impressed. I’ve also been jealous, seeing as how Scott gets to go to hip places around the world (L.A., Ireland, Moscow, and um, Brooklyn) to visit, perform, and be paid for it. So I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised when he wrote me in response to my blast email to tell me he was touring Australia. But to discover he’d be in Sydney (which is just a short hop across the Tasman from Wellington) and performing the critically acclaimed Gatz at the world-famous Sydney Opera House… well, that was something I simply couldn’t miss. And it seemed like the kind of theater experience I couldn’t let Katie miss either. And so, against the better judgment of my financial advisor (hi, Sara!), but with the blessing of my understanding spouse (hello again, Sara!), Katie and I flew to Sydney last weekend to see Gatz and discover the city. I am so glad we did.
Hyde Park from our hotel
After a very comfortable Saturday afternoon flight on Qantas (free wine! chocolate ice cream bar for dessert!), and an inordinately long time waiting for our ride to the hotel, we checked into our centrally-located, but extremely small, hotel room and watched an episode or two of Firefly. The next morning we strolled down to Darling Harbour and happened upon a pancake restaurant, which is never a bad thing. We had until the mid-afternoon for the play, so we also managed to take the monorail, check out a little of the central city, and even head up to The Rocks for the weekend-only outdoor market there.
Sydney’s Darling Harbour
Queen Victoria Building: a high-end shopping mall
Glass blowing at The Rocks outdoor market
The most memorable part of the morning, however, was when we stopped to watch Bendy Em, a Sydney street performer and contortionist. For reasons unknown, I was selected from the gathered crowd as her assistant. She was an amusing performer (and yes, very flexible) and I’m game for anything, so we had a good time. Not quite as good as Katie, though, who I don’t think stopped laughing once during the entire performance.
Dug picks up a Sydney woman
Bendy Em crawls into her 17” box
For any normal tourist, this could easily have been the highlight of the trip, or at least the day. But we had tickets waiting for us at the Opera House, not to mention several hours of theater to look forward to!
This would probably be a good time to explain Gatz. Unfortunately, that’s not easy to do. If I tell you that it’s a verbatim reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in its entirety, you’d probably think it was exhausting, which it’s not. If I tell you that the cast is just a handful of actors and it takes place in a dingy modern-day office, you might think it’s one of those “modern retellings” of a classic, which it’s also not. I think the best way to describe it is to tell you that I spent six-plus hours listening to Scott read the Great Gatsby, and in the end, I wanted to go out and buy the book so that I could read it again. Truly something I won’t forget.
Katie & Dug in front of the Sydney Opera House
Katie presents… Gatz!
The Opera House at night
The play was Sunday, and we weren’t leaving until Tuesday afternoon (that’s how the flights worked out most cheaply), so we got to hang with Scott on Monday and then do a little exploring on Tuesday. Considering the late night Sunday and time difference (it felt like two hours later than it was), Katie & I were surprisingly hardy for our day with Scott. We took the ferry out to Manly Beach and spent the afternoon figuring out how many “Manly” puns could be made before the joke became tired (more than you’d think). After we got back, Scott led us through the Botanic Gardens where we saw wild parrots and cockatoos flying around, as well as hundreds, very possibly thousands, of bats. Yes, bats. Just hanging out in the trees. Hard to be scared of them, really, it was so overwhelming odd.
After the gardens we wandered through a few of the more (ahem) interesting parts of the city. (Bringing Katie concerned me until I realized that it was only a few years before she’d probably be wandering with friends and a backpack through similar sections of Amsterdam or Berlin or somewhere. Oh, well.) Our destination was a famous boomerang shop Scott had heard of, and it was worth the trip. The proprietor told all about how he started the International Boomerang Championships after getting some Yank from NYC interested in the 70s. “Oi, those Yanks beat us that year, and I told my mates of course they did! They started drinking after the championship!”
Scott & I both bought a boomerang, and then we went to Hyde Park to try them out. It occurred to me, though, that throwing a hard stick that’s intended to come spinning fast back at you in the near-total darkness wasn’t the brightest of ideas. We’d probably either lose the boomerang or end up winning a Darwin award. So we only did it twice. (Scott & I have obviously made a lot of progress since college.)
Scott & Katie, with the Harbour Bridge behind them
Manly Beach
Exotic birds are the norm in the Sydney Botanic Gardens
Those are bats, people. Bats.
St. James Cathedral that evening
Our lack of sleep caught up with us on Tuesday. We spent the morning at the Sydney Aquarium, seeing sharks, colorful fish, and two of the only captive dugongs in the world. These are the manatee relatives who were supposed to look like mermaids to sailors of yore. All I can say is, if they were fantasizing about these creatures, then they’d been at sea for a very long time.
The aquarium was an excellent one, and I particularly enjoyed the underwater viewing tunnels, which they had in both the shark pool and the dugong pool. The tunnels were clear and the pools not overly large, so you really felt like you were in the water with the various sea creatures. At one point both Katie and I were watching one of the dugongs pass overhead, when we got to see something I honestly never thought I’d see: we saw a dugong poop. No, I didn’t get a picture. Let’s just say it’s not anything you need to put on your bucket list and leave it at that.
We also visited the National Maritime Museum and learned a little about immigrants to Australia from the 40s and 50s, and we visited the Australian National Museum to see a whole bunch of skeletons and the largest known extinct marsupial. But like I said, we were pretty tired, so we spent a good portion of the day just enjoying the sunshine (that was supposed to be rain) and our books. Later in the afternoon we headed back to the airport and then to Wellington, which was much, much colder. But we’d missed Sara & Megan & Alison and were very glad to be back.
Katie and a mermaid dugong at the Sydney Aquarium
Manta ray with one of the viewing tunnels behind it
Classic example of Australian humor
Enjoying the sun before heading home to cold, cold Wellington
Finally, as I always say, you can find many more pictures up on our Picasa website. Enjoy!
Labels: Australia
