Wellington and northwards

March 3 - We moved to a much nicer campground a few miles north of Wellington today. There is a bus which runs very close to the gate, so we hopped on that and went to the city to see the Te Papa Museum (rough translation = Our Place) which we had been told not to miss. It’s basically THE museum for New Zealand and we were pretty impressed. It’s on 5 floors, each floor having a theme. They had a special exhibit on Pompeii while we were here, so we took that in as well as all the more local stuff - geology, anthropology, natural history, sociology, art etc. etc. etc. I was particularly taken with all the information about Maori history and art - they have some beautiful examples of carving and jade work. The photograph is of a tiny part of a huge canoe. We spent about 6 hours there today and, starting at the top, had only worked our way down to Level 4 by the time we had had enough! We walked back to the bus stop along the sea front, but it was not very inspiring. We met a lovely English lady from our camp site on the bus home and invited her back for a cider with us - and it turned out that our next door neighbours for the night were a very pleasant couple from Glasgow, so we had a bit of a party!
March 4 - Back to Te Papa again today to meet our friends from Adelaide, Reg and Ruby, who are doing our NZ trip in reverse! We had lunch with them and then split up to go round different parts of the museum and then met up again for coffee. It was lovely to see them again - too bad it was for such a short time.
We’re not staying any longer in Wellington - we have the campervan for another 3 weeks and we want to head north and not be in too much of a rush. There isn’t anything here that particularly caught our fancy, so we’ll be off in the morning for pastures new!
March 5 - The pastures new involved driving through Masterton where I had read that the Golden Shears (sheep shearing) event was happening and we thought we couldn’t pass that up. Masterton turned out to be a quaint little place with the main event happening in the Recreation Centre. We arrived just in time for the quarter finals of the wool handlers event (lucky thing we didn‘t miss it, eh?!) . I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a wool handler, so it was something of an education besides being very entertaining (people-watching at this kind of event is half the fun for me!) A wool handler is someone (usually female) who picks up the fleece as the shearer takes it off the poor unsuspecting sheep and then sorts it. There are lots of different grades of wool - the belly fleece goes one way, the main fleece gets thrown on a table (we figured out pretty quickly that you get maximum points if you throw your fleece so that it doesn’t hang over the edge of the table) and the “locks and socks” go in a different pile. (In the photo, note the guy in the bottom right corner and his facial hair - we used to call those tufts “mutton chops” which I thought was rather apropos!!) The handlers have to work incredibly quickly to keep up with the shearers. Once it’s sorted, they have to roll the main fleece up and put it in a basket. There were a couple of men doing running commentary - it sounded like a horse race as they spoke faster and faster as the time ran out (each handler had to sort 4 fleeces each). And of course the pitch of their voice goes up with the excitement and we found ourselves on the edge of our seats, watching to see who would pick up the last piece of fluff first!!! Excellent entertainment. The afternoon was to be the quarter finals of the next stage of the game which is baling the fleeces into huge blocks measuring about 4’ x 4’ (we can’t remember the technical term!) but we decided to pass that up. Then we drove north to Napier where there are apparently lots of Art Deco buildings. There was a huge earthquake here in the 1930s and when the city was rebuilt, the new buildings were all in that style. Barring further earthquakes, tomorrow we’ll do a walk around the central area where most of the buildings are and then head west to Lake Taupo for a day or so.
March 6 - Walked round Napier on a very blustery day and John took many pictures of the lovely Art Deco buildings. Guy - if you’re reading this, you would love it here! So many different colours and shapes, with all kinds of decoration, stained glass and tiling. It turned out that the local Chinese Society was putting on a dragon dance so we got bit caught up in that on our way! We then drove to Lake Taupo and as we got closer to town, there were more and more “delay” signs. It turns out that New Zealand’s biggest international event was going on today - an Ironman competition, so of course I was thinking about Andy and my nephew, Mark who are both triathletes (it was windy as hell, guys!) The town is completely taken over by people in spandex and you can’t move in inch without getting run over by a bicycle. So we retreated to our campground and will drive on tomorrow to Rotorua where we hope we can sit for a few days.
Just to fill in the few gaps that you may have noticed in the dates as we’ve been going along, if nothing is written for a particular day, it’s probably because it’s been one of our “down” days. Being a tourist is lovely, but tiring! So quite often we take a day off and just do nothing or catch up on boring stuff like laundry, grocery shopping, hair cuts, etc. If we’re by a beach, we’ll go for a walk, read and relax and/or John beats me at cards. We’ve got into a pretty good rhythm for our days which usually involves getting up when we wake up, (which is often not until 7:30 or 8 a.m. - how will I manage to get up at 6 when I have to go back to work?!), having a shower, breakfast and then either getting on the road, doing something touristy or having a nothing day. We usually have supper around 7 and by the time it’s cooked and cleared away, it’s getting dark and we play that dreadful card game that Zoe taught me (Pigs in a Blanket or some such name). It’s a game which demands a certain amount of skill and a large amount of luck and John has the most uncanny knack of turning up exactly the cards he wants at the right moment which is incredibly annoying! Every day I think my luck must change, but I’ve been on a bad losing streak lately and have practically given up playing altogether! And of course we read - probably more than either of us have for a long time. I’m having trouble persuading John that we have to leave most of the books behind - he keeps finding stuff that he absolutely positively can’t live without! We keep going to second hand book stores and swapping our treasures and we’ve read some pretty odd things, but it’s been fun!