Expeditions

We have made four excursions out of town since we arrived – 3 day trips and one longer trip. We just got back from two nights in Napier, so I will start with that.

Napier was a five and a half hour drive to the east coast. An odd thing I realized, comparing driving around Australia with New Zealand, is that we were mostly driving through forest, which I did not expect in Australia, and mostly driving through pasture land in New Zealand, which is sad because I believe it was pretty much all forest before the Europeans and their sheep got here.

Most of downtown Napier was destroyed in a 7.9 earthquake in February 1931, and particularly in the subsequent fire. I am most impressed with the rebuilding effort, compared with some modern day disasters. Within a few days a temporary town was built in the town square for the businesses to relocate to until a plan could be made for rebuilding. The earthquake actually helped the town in some ways because it raised the area a couple of meters. The town had been hemmed in by a large shallow lagoon which was drained by the uplift. It also had been subject to storm surges, so they pushed the rubble over to the beach, which was now higher and much wider. In the new town center, they widened the roads and put the utilities underground. Most of the town, about 20 blocks, was rebuilt within two years.

Napier is known as the Art Deco capital of the world, because most of the new buildings were built in this style. In the 80s, when a couple of buildings were torn down, the town realized it needed to preserve and restore its heritage, so it looks very good now and is a tourist attraction.
Besides just walking around on our own, we also took the 2 hour walking tour run by the Art Deco Trust, so we learned a lot about architectural styles of the time. Most Art Deco buildings use Egyptian or Mayan decorative motifs, but a few Napier buildings use Maori ones. We took lots of pictures, as you can see. A website is www.artdeconapier.com.

Napier is on Hawke Bay so it has a long ocean front. Only a few public buildings are built on the ocean side of the boulevard, which makes for very nice views. The beach is black pebbles, becoming almost sand size at the water’s edge. Of course, it was much too cool to think about swimming, but we always like fall beach walks.

Napier is also the home of the National Aquarium, which is the first place we went to on our first morning. There were fish from other parts of the world as well as native NZ species. They had a nice large crocodile, a large sea turtle, and 2 tanks with sea horses. Apparently NZ has the biggest sea horse in the world, although that still only means they’re about 6 inches long. They have one of those oceanariums where you are walking through a tunnel in the tank with the sharks and manta rays swimming around and over you. They had a diver feeding the fish at ten am, but the place was so packed with mothers and strollers and preschool groups that we did not stay very long. For awhile they had an octopus who put on quite a show for people, changing colors and playing games, and then about 6 months ago, it escaped! Good on him, as they say here.

We did not go to the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery, mostly for lack of time and because we chose to go to a movie there, The Topp Twins, instead. The Topp Twins are a unique NZ phenomena. They are lesbian twins who sing country music, including yodeling, interspersed with comic routines, one of which has them as 2 male farmers. They appear to be very popular. The movie is a retrospective of their career since they were kids in the eighties, busking on the streets. They were and are full of fun and energy, good singers with very funny routines. They also seem to have been involved with most of the political movements in NZ, from Maori land rights, to anti-apartheid protests, to nuclear free marches, and gay rights. They even had a TV show for a few years. The movie had been recommended to us, but is no longer showing in downtown Wellington, so it was great to see it in a small town. Website: www.topptwins.com.

Our expedition a week earlier had been to Masterton in the Wairarapa Valley. We forgot to take our camera. We went to the local Museum and Art Gallery, which had a very complete history of Maori and settler interaction. The Wairarapa was one of the few areas where this did not descend into warfare. Then we went to the Pukaha Mount Bruce Bird Sanctuary, NZ’s national wildlife centre for threatened species. They have been having a very successful program of breeding and reintroducing native birds. Their crowd pleaser is the kaka feeding. Kakas are large parrots who live in the wild now but do still come back for daily feedings for the public. While drinking tea we could also see a couple of takahe in an enclosure. They are a flightless bird about the size of a goose with long red legs. They had a darkened kiwi enclosure so you can see these nocturnal birds during the daytime. I still can’t figure out why they got chosen as the national bird, since no one ever sees them and although they are surprisingly big, all they do is walk around sticking their long beaks into the ground to find worms and bugs. The egg fills up almost all the body cavity of the female so laying it is quite a struggle. The male then tends the egg, since they female probably wants nothing to do with it after all that work. We also saw a stitchbird and a tuatara, a very primitive kind of reptile. We want to go back there sometime for a longer visit with a camera. Their website is www.mtbruce.org.nz.



Our first expedition had been to the Kapiti coast west of Wellington, with a nice coastal walk through Queen Elizabeth Park and lunch in Paraparaumu.



The second one was around the harbor, north then east then south to Baring Head, where we were surprised by a brilliant view of the South Island, including lots of snow covered peaks. We had then picnicked and took a short hike in the Rimutaka Forest Reserve.