Moving to Wellington

Ash is taking a photography course at the moment, for which the students have to complete an assignment each week (such as landscape or architecture photos). This has been a good way to get out and see places that we might not otherwise. For one of her landscape assignments, we went to McLaren Falls Park, in the hills outside Tauranga.

We also checked out the beach by Mount Maunganui.

We went to see Ash’s brother play football one weekend, in slightly nicer conditions than you would get for a winter-time football match in the UK.

As my I start work in Wellington on the 27^th, we drove down on the 19^th to give ourselves a bit of time to look for apartments. We are staying with Ash’s friend who has a house in Khandallah, a very hilly area of town. Here’s Pearl, the resident cat, looking unimpressed.

We went for a little wander on the waterfront to get some shots for Ash's course. There are some nice bits of public art in Wellington, including this series of installations with excerpts of writing about the city.

I also thought these beach huts were quite picturesque.

And ash got this cool view of the city at night from the same area.

In fact, because Wellington is so hilly, pretty much wherever you go you’ll get a good view.

Finally, we went over to the other side of the bay from the city for lunch. We saw these mosaics of New Zealand birds in a town called Eastbourne - I don’t think we do enough of this kind of street art in the UK.

Fieldays

In the spirit of truly immersing myself in New Zealand culture, we visited Fieldays, which is apparently the biggest agricultural trade show in the southern hemisphere. While that sounds really dull, it was actually a pretty fun day out! As well as all the farm machinery on sale, it was a kind of microcosm of the New Zealand way of life. One of the first things we saw was the tractor pulling drag race –

The police and the fire department also got involved:

We then checked out the “Timbersports” competition. This was a time trial that consisted of four tasks – cutting through a log with a chainsaw, standing on top of a log and chopping it in half with an axe, cutting a log with a traditional bow saw and chopping a log while standing on top of it!

The next stop was the performing sheep dogs – one of them had learned how to wrap himself in a blanket. We couldn't get a good shot of that unfortunately, so here he is standing on his trainer's back.

Toward the end of the day, the British Commission provided us with much needed free cups of tea (Twining’s no less!). As most of you will know, getting anything for free warms my heart, and all I had to do to claim it was pretend to be interested in investing in Cornwall. We also got plenty of food and booze samples, and ended up coming away with some cheese, beer and tea made in New Zealand.

There was a lot of charmingly agricultural prize draws to take part in, among which was “guess how many artificial cow teats are in the jar”. This is my personal favourite though – win one tonne of Magnesium Oxide!

We rounded off the day with a trip to the petting zoo, where we met a Kunekune pig (meaning “fat and round” in the Maori language, Te Reo).

Karangahake Gorge and Wellington

We started the week with a trip to Karangahake gorge, which was a mining area during the New Zealand gold rush. The path crosses over a couple of rivers and goes through an old train tunnel, which was about a kilometer long.

On the way home from Karangahake, we stopped at Owharoa falls. They seem to have more waterfalls than they know what to do with in this country.

The next trip was down to Wellington, where I had a job interview on Thursday. Tauranga to Wellington is a 7 hour drive; there aren’t any motorways in New Zealand, and the roads follow the terrain a lot more so they can get quite windy. However, this also means that road trips are a lot more scenic than they would be in the UK – all of the photos below were taken from the road. This is a lake we stopped at on the way:

The day after my interview, we climbed up Mount Kaukau, which at 445m is the tallest point in Wellington. On a nice day the view looks like this:

However, on the day we climbed it the mist closed in so we saw precisely nothing. 

It was still a nice walk though! We finished off the day with a boardgame night at Ash’s friend’s house.

On the way home, we drove past Mount Ruapehu in the central plateau. This is a sort of half desert, half heath area and probably one of my favourite in New Zealand so far. It’s also the New Zealand army’s firing range, so you’re not allowed off the road!

Right next to Ruapehu is Mount Nguaruhoe, which was used as the filming location for Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings movies.

Hamilton Gardens and Tauranga art gallery

We went to visit a friend of Ash’s in a town called Cambridge last weekend (they have one here too). Before lunch, we went over to the public gardens in Hamilton, which were well worth a visit and free to enter, which obviously gets a thumbs-up from me.

The first garden had some interesting inscriptions of Maori proverbs; there was one written on a large steel pipe which means “as man disappears from sight, the land remains”. Apparently the pipe will eventually rust away to nothing, which I thought was kind of cool.

There was also a traditional maori garden, which included this store house for keeping crops off the ground (I know that there weren’t any rodents in New Zealand before Europeans arrived, so I guess this was either introduced after that or was a way of stopping food getting damp?) All the little mounds you can see in the background are for sweet potatoes, which apparently need to be very well drained.

We had chosen a good time of year to visit the japanese garden, which had some nice autumn colours.

The next stop was Tauranga art gallery (also free!). It was pretty small, but they had an interesting exhibit of interactive art – some of it was a bit perfunctory, but the highlight was this three-dimensional light installation that you could walk through.

Kaiate Falls and Mount Maunganui

After getting into a normal sleep pattern and getting some of the boring stuff out of the way (like organising a bank account and a SIM card), we took a bit of time to go and enjoy the outdoors.

Our first stop was Kaiate falls, which is a little way out in the country from Tauranga. It's a short walk, about half an hour down the hill and half an hour back up. Very soon after we set off on the path, we got this view of town (that's Mount Maunganui in the distance, more on that later) -

And then right after that you get your first waterfall -

And then at the bottom you get the main event -

The next day, we took advantage of a gap in the weather to climb Mount Maunganui. At 761 feet, it's just about the right length for a casual walk and you get some pretty nice views from the top. We had climbed this the last time I was in New Zealand, but we forgot just how steep it is!

We made it to New Zealand

As some of you know, it's been a hectic couple of months while we got everything sorted out for our move. Now that we're here, we're taking the chance to have a week or two of down time before we move down to Wellington to look for jobs and a flat. In the meantime, we're staying with Ash's parents in Tauranga. (Resident cat pictured below).

The flight went smoothly; we had a one hour changeover in Hong Kong, which was a bit hectic because the airport is massive, so we had to rush around to find our second plane. However, taking two 12 hour flights was definitely preferable to how I got to NZ last time, with a 6 hour flight and an 18 hour one - avoid that if you can!

Although the flight was good, we have had some hardcore jetlag since we got here, with today being the first time we have woken up after 2:30 am.

Because it is coming up to winter, I was expecting to arrive in the cold, but it has been 20 degrees and sunny so far, so hopefully we should still get a few weeks of nice weather. Here's a photo from our very sleepy trip to the waterfront yesterday:

                                  

I'll be posting an update when we get up to something a bit more interesting, but I guess that's it for now!