This week I have swapped places with my counterpart in the North Island, so that we can each see what the differences/similarities are between our respective jobs. This means that I have traded the raw power, explosive acceleration and pop-up headlights of DeathCar2000 for his diesel Nissan Avenir automatic (boo); but it also means that I get the opportunity to do a tiny bit of exploring on a whole other island (huzzah).
Before this could happen, I had to get here; and that meant finding out all about how standby tickets work, because that is what work booked for me. What happens is you get a ticket for the 1855 flight out of Christchurch; but it's totally sold out, so the only way you're getting on that plane is if you challenge one of the other passengers to MORTAL KOMBAT and totally Liu Kang them to pieces.
Or you could wait until the next flight... except that one's booked up too.
And so is the one after that.
But the 2130 flight is okay...
...except that it lands at 2300. And once you've crammed yourself and your luggage onto a bus and then bimbled aimlessly through the murky streets of an unfamiliar city to a hotel apartment block thing, it's closer to midnight; and you can't help but think that rather than spending two and half hours trapped in an airport departure lounge with no bar, it might have been nice to do something else. Like stay at home and have some dinner, for example.
Anyway, I'm here now. First impressions are that the North Island is like the root mean square of the South Island; whilst the latter consists of vast flat planes punctuated by unfathomable verticality, the former is generally lower but lumpier. The main thing the North Island has that the South doesn't is volcanoes and all sorts of other geothermal nonsense. Most of the really good stuff is just a bit too far south to make for a convenient weekend trip from Auckland, but I did manage to make it to Rotorua. Rotorua is home to Lake Rotorua, which translates as "the second lake" - so called because it was the second lake that the intrepid Maori explorer had seen that day. Apparently it used to be a big-ass volcano; now its just a big-ass lake.
Not much to look at, really. A little way down the road, however, is Te Whakarewarewa - a "living thermal village". It is home to what I guess could be referred to as modernised Maori. They drive cars, wear trousers and no longer eat interlopers (or so our tour guide assured us); but they still observe many traditional customs and practices. The village itself is situated on a thin crust of earth that struggles to contain the sheer geothermal power of science that bubbles away beneath. This gives rise to geysers, hot bubbling mud, clouds of sulphurous steam, holes in the ground that are slowly swallowing houses, and thermal pools that reach temperatures of up to 172 degrees (because of science).
The hot pools are used for bathing and cooking (though not generally in that order). The mud pools used to be used as final resting places for the deceased; the body would be wrapped up in flax and then forced beneath the surface, eventually slipping away to who knows where. Then whitey turned up and explained that the proper way to bury the dead was to put them in a casket and then put the casket in a hole six feet deep. They hadn't accounted for the fact that the ground they were digging into was a bit lively, and the caskets would gradually re-surface over a period of time... so they gave up on that idea, and nowadays the dead get entombed in concrete boxes on top of the ground. A few of them have wee chimneys to help relieve any steam pressure that might build up, thereby minimising the potential for any exploding steam corpse unpleasantness.
The following day the inevitability of me being a nerd in New Zealand was finally realised in full, and I went to Hobbiton.
Okay, so there are probably far nerdier things I could have done; but it still felt like an anorak-clad pilgrimage of sorts. When the first films were made, the hobbit-holes were all temporary constructions made out of polystyrene and bits of plywood painted up to look like the real thing. Once filming was complete, the set had to be completely destroyed for environmental and copyright reasons. The owners of the farm on which the set was built realised that they'd missed a trick, and when the set was rebuilt for filming of The Hobbit they made sure that it would be more of a permanent fixture.
Of course they're all still just façades, the largest hobbit-holes still only extending a few feet beyond the front door. The one notable exception being the Green Dragon pub, which is fully functional (and presumably available to hire for weddings and bar mitzvahs); and it was here that the tour concluded with a delicious mug of beer.
It didn't come in pints.
A trio of sinister foreign chocolate bars this week...
I remember when KitKats used to be the rubbish chocolate coated wafer biscuit you might get with your packed lunch if you were lucky. Then along came the KitKat Chunky, which had the same amount of wafer but about a million times more chocolate. And now we have the KitKat Chunky 3; basically a KitKat Chunky that has been split into three sections, and then had those three sections filled with stuff. Any traces of wafer you should happen to find probably got there by mistake.
When confronted by three flavours of KitKat Chunky 3, I was overcome with a mixture of indecision and joy at the mathematical symmetry of it all; and so I got one each of Chocolate, Caramel and Cookies & Cream. They all tasted of toothache.
DEATH TO FALSE KITKATS
No comments:
Post a Comment