Home on the range

View over the Wanaka © Me, Oct 2009

Hey there campers, it's that time of year where we in the southern hemisphere break out of winter hibernation and openly gloat to you in the northern half about longer days and lighter nights, the sun streaming into our bedrooms first thing in the morning, mister bluebird on my shoulder, all that springtime stuff. We just finished celebrating this fact (purely by accident) with a trip south to the barely-out-of -thermal-underwear Central Otago region. While it's been buds and blossoms for several weeks here in Canterbury, 6 hours south of here the seasons are only just turning over. It snowed as we arrived on the first night and half way through the first day, dressing up the low-lying hills in brilliant white coats but also clearing the air so much that you could just about reach across the lakes and make snowballs. Right on cue the clouds drifted away, still really cold but bringing out a powerful sun to melt the snow and make bike rides and beach barbies happen just like they do in summer, albeit with an extra layer of defiance.

We'll be back before winter returns, for sure, but the spring there was a magical, rarified experience. Anyone out there who was ever tempted to visit the greener grass, now's the time and south of here is definitely the place. It's astonishingly beautiful; no matter if you're primed to be impressed, it completely takes your breath away. Even the kids tore their eyes from the DVD player long enough to gaze out the car window aghast at the scenery. Of course nothing's more interesting than DVDs. Oscar drew a picture, after we finally arrived and everyone got ready for bed, of a lovely dramatic scene, all neatly framed in a big black rectangle...

On the way back, thanks in part to genuine interest and partly utter boredom with the same film over and over, they both got a bit of a kick out of looking out the window instead at the sheep and cows and deer, and even the awesome beauty of an unspoiled wilderness – although to be fair nothingness is something you have to really point out to your pre-tweenines. In my experience, on any given day, they only really fully absorb the essential reality of playgrounds, movies and fish 'n' chips, in that order. Which, when all's said and done, is a pretty enviable state of mind.

Two weeks later, I've finally got round to posting the pics up on the losnemo gallery and quaffed enough vino to sit down and recount the last few weeks for the blog. Despite not wanting to leave, it was surprisingly good to get home, and some stuff has come good since. Niki's volunteering a couple of afternoons at Ellie's school next door, which she's really enjoying apart from the desire to be there permanently tainting her appreciation of her real job in town. It really is an utterly brilliant school, relaxed and approachable, totally devoid of the airs and graces you often get with other schools. It's a special place even before you meet the staff and kids, quite apart from the stunning setting on the steep sides of an extinct volcano, without appreciating the unique ethos they seem to inspire in the kids. It's a small school with a big heart, the true center of the community; we feel privileged enough to have Ellie there, never mind Niki. Ok, it might not end up working out for teacher, but it'll always be a great asset.

While we were away Jessie rabbit moved in with Dianne for the duration (she's the lovely neighbour over the valley from us) and apart from having a lovely time, developed a strange condition: two large swellings between her hind legs. That's right, Jessie turned out to be a boy rabbit after all. Explains a lot, as he's extra feisty and looks at you with such a determined, fixed stare, you'd think he'd caught you looking at his pint. Maybe he objects to being called Jessie... anyway he's very bright; I've already trained him to go back in his hutch at night, more through necessity than a cute trick, as he was becoming impossible to catch. He's a lot calmer and more affectionate now too, hardly surprising when the sight of me approaching now means carrots and celery tops, rather than carrots, celery tops and persecution by a big blonde bloke with a torch in his mouth.

I'm struggling a bit in all departments, to tell the truth. Work is patchy at best and the new build is taking a lot more to get started than I thought. Aiming for a late-summer 2010 completion is looking more and more ambitious and less likely with every new discovery. According to Dave the Designer our best option at the moment is to aim to build in two stages, initially no more than we need to get a roof over our heads, then sit out the wet and cold seasons until a second phase can be realistically finished, sometime after this time next year. The only real consolation there is that I probably got all my sums right, I just failed to appreciate the way things get done here, and what you need to do to get things done fast.

My timings have been based on one stage moving seamlessly on to the next, with contractors and materials turning up right on cue, and you only really get that sort of assurance if you're an established builder with plenty of clout. As Dave pointed out, if my electrician is booked in for Monday morning and a big builder client of his wants him in Timaru instead, who's he going to let down? Right. So instead of being ready for the concrete pour on Friday that's been booked for weeks, I have to rebook them, costing me another load of weeks. Better to work it all out, add a month, tag on 20% for the weather, then double it. It's not the end of the world, just a bit of a cloud over a big project that's got the silver lining of freeing me up to get some paying work in.

The kids are splendid. Ellie seems to grow an inch a day, reads everything in sight, wants her ears pierced and doesn't care if it hurts, bites her toast with her back teeth and likes to stick her tongue out at you through the gap in her front ones. Did I mention she decided to change the spelling? I never liked "Elly" that much anyway and when we named her Elizabeth it was largely to give her the option of changing to another variation in later life. I wasn't expecting it to happen on a monthly basis but at least it seems to be working...

Oskie's just brilliant, getting on very well at kindie but wants to go to the big school. We've been to see Andrew, the principal, more than once and each time had to convince him that he needs to grow as high as the school gatepost before he's allowed in. He started a Saturday morning music class this weekend which he loves, basically because Brooklyn, his bessie mate from kindie, is there as well. They're amazing together, run riot all day long and have to be separated for meals as they're fond of swapping lunch boxes, and Brooklyn's a vegetarian...

It's an another amazing place, that nursery. Tagged on the side of Ellie's school, owned by a lovely local couple and run by the nicest bunch of people you could ever want to meet. Like the school, it's refreshingly devoid of any dogma or obvious, in-your-face regime, just dead open, relaxed and loads of fun. Did someone mention dogs..? Oh yes, the owners also have a Spoodle, a Cocker Spaniel / Poodle cross so-named (I'd imagine) to provide a better alternative to the ever-tasteful American breeders calling them Cockapoos, for crying out loud. "Spoodle" isn't that much better, I'll grant you, but at least it doesn't put you in mind of the erm, Greek olympics. She's a lovely dog too, and so are her puppies... one in particular, the Big Black Boy we're calling – as a working title – ThreeBee (geddit?) is coming to live with us next weekend.

We're very excited, if a little unprepared. Our back garden might be the perfect run for him except that a couple of weeks ago, a Very Big Black dog that we called VeeBee (only kidding) suddenly appeared there while we were having a barbee... I realise the wafting smell of sausages is the reason why, but exactly how has us slightly worried. I cant see a single gap in the undergrowth around the border (I'm not sure if there's a fence there or not...) but if Veebee could get in, Threebee will definitely get out, probably the first time next door have a fry up. So I'm off now to have a good rummage about up where the bamboo grows thickest, and no, that's not another euphemism for alternative bedtime practices, it's high time we got ready for whatever the Threebee might throw at us.

Look out for a special bulletin dog blog next week!


Once again, two new albums of photos are up on the losnemo gallery. Enjoy :-)

An eventful fortnight

This'll be a quick one cos it's Oskie's birthday tomorrow.

I've done the balloons and Niki's iced the cake but there's still presents to wrap and streamers to put up and it's getting on for midnight. It's a particularly big occasion for him not just because he's three, or because he's finally getting a skateboard (and talked about nothing else for the last three months) – these things are big enough, but today was the day he gave up his dummies. You know, those pacifier things; all 5 of his beloved dodies were traded in this afternoon at CheapSkates for an outrageously oversize lime green skateboard. Bless him, he can't even look at it without falling over but he gave the man his precious rubber teats without so much as a grimace and went almost straight off to sleep tonight without them. And he wasn't well; he's had a nasty cough for a few days and went to bed with a bit of a temperature. His last words before drifting off were, predictably enough, "but I want them!"

Nice one, Calpol...

It's all big events round here at the moment. The Festival of Lights was a sight bigger than we expected, the town completely choc full of people on the final night, kind of like a sedated Spanish Fiesta Major complete with stage entertainment and even a churrerira stand. The churros were ok, considering the distance the recipe had to travel and the Brazillian-French team that were running the stand. Typical Kiwi catering. Wacky food was everywhere, involving fundraisers for local schools and a mulled white wine which completely erased my memory of everything else on offer. All in all it was a pretty spectacular event for a little harbour town. I've put some pics up on the LosNemo gallery site.

There's news on the job front too. Niki's been making progress with local schools and, as predicted, the best leads have come from personal contacts. She had a few days relieving work (that's Kiwi for "supply teaching") at a big city-centre school, full of brutal pre-teens but still miles better than the one she was at up north... and an interview at a Catholic school in New Brighton that turned up some interesting part-time possibilites. It's looking like a combination of part-time and relieving will work out best (and probably best-paid) if only because the real prize – promised sessions of Spanish teaching at the local Steiner school – then remains a viable proposition. Fingers are crossed. Me, I'm still not absolutely sure what's going to come my way but it's currently looking like construction work might be looming on the horizon again. And not just any old construction work: I might have an entire house to build before too long.

I've been saving the biggest event til last, even though it actually appeared first. See that view over the harbour in the photo? Nice picnic spot, no? Just above where we're living at the moment, too. Well, we might have just accidentally kind of bought it, sorta thing. We were chatting with a neighbour who mentioned the land was up for sale, said she'd had her eye on it for some time, dropped a very big hint that the owner was extremely keen to offload it, so we put a daft offer in. Which he turned down of course but we still ended up getting it for a really good price. The rest of the month has been a meetings and drawings and plannings and overall, a slowly-kindling hope is evemrging that we might be able to get the whole thing off the ground by the time we come to move out of the place we're in now.

People we're talking to are speaking of a council planning department suddenly free of backlogs, presumably (like everywhere) due to the lack of building going on in the region, able to turn what used to be an 18-month approval process into something much more immediate, for the right kind of application. If we can keep it simple, within known limits, the fact that our land already has outline planning permission means we might even get it down to so many weeks. Naturally, this has me thinking we can possibly afford to push our luck... we'd love to build something out of the earth, rather than just pour concrete all over it. Wattle and daub? Almost... there's a long, fairly strong tradition here of rammed earth construction, just like poured concrete but using compacted clay-based soil instead: exactly the sort of soil we have here, in fact. As our place will be quite conspicuous, we're keen to make it blend in as much as possible and you can't get much more incognito than a mud hut on a hillside.

Will the town planners like the idea? Well, the nice thing about this place is, you can just walk into their office and ask them. It's way more open and informal than anywhere else we've ever lived. You meet these people and they're just incredibly personable and helpful, plus it's such a small town; you get to know a proper local and they just seem to know everyone and go out of their way to introduce you to the right people. It makes the idea of building here much less intimidating and living here a genuinely positive, exciting prospect.

We'll see. We haven't even paid for the land yet...

I did mention the new album in the LosNemo gallery earlier but it's becoming customary to include a link at the end so here it is: Link. You'll want the "Late June"album for the most recent pics. Finally, a solemn promise to post up the birthday party pics there. Like, as soon as possible. Hey, c'mon, I've got a lot on my plate these days...

No small change

The lava flow valley overlooking Pigeon Bay, Banks Peninsula

So here we are, mid-June and we're all done and dusted, pretty much all the basics sorted, more or less as planned. We moved in, we unpacked, we settled ourselves and the kids (not in that order) housed the rabbit and ignored the garden. The winter logs were delivered and stacked, I gave my little purple studio (one of the two rooms upstairs) several thick coats of white, Nik scrubbed the bejeezus out of the rest of the place, shelved books, warded robes, washed a mountain of long-boxed clothes... it might sound like chaos but it wasn't, in fact it was quite relaxed in some respects. Although we did have our moments.

Moment one was the acceptance that a nice, casual week of demolishing our box mountain (the contents of which, in some cases, hadn't seen daylight in almost 10 years) was in deep jeopardy. The first job on day one was to get the kids' bunk beds up and we were about two hours, 25 boxes and some premature baldness into day one when we started wondering whether the bolts that hold the beds together were going to be at the bottom of the last box we would unpack. This turned out to be a pretty accurate prediction. It also meant that we were completely unpacked by the end of day one, even if we were neck-high in cardboard for the best part of the week.

I think moment two, even if it wasn't the second one chronologically speaking, has to be the realisation that we'd probably been going about heating the place the wrong way, round about the time we had a week's worth of wood left, just three weeks into our stay. It was supposed to last three months. Other realisations, like exactly how steep is our street?? and oh no, it seems we've shipped 16 cubic metres of worthless crap halfway round the world were more gradual appreciations than sudden shocks.

Honestly, our street has to be one of the steepest in all Canterbury, although possibly not as steep as the famous Bridle Path along the way a bit, which I discovered to my cost when I tried to cycle up it. Some people even try to run up it. Even when you attempt to walk up it you quickly understand why the early settlers found it easier to dig a tunnel through two-an-a-half kilometres of solid granite than haul their belongings over the top to Christchurch. Maybe if we'd been forced to do the same we might have been a little more discriminating about was actually valuable enough.

It's taken a month to realise a few other things.

1. Work might be there for the taking, but the job you want isn't. We've both been knocked back on the job application front, mostly (we think) because a Kiwi CV is expected to be more of a sales pitch than our starchy European ones. Even having fixed that, another big reason is the who-you-know factor, which seems to be huge here. It's going to pay us to take whatever work we can for now and hopefully find an "in" to the work we really want. We're giving it until the end of school term and then it's anything goes. Nik's already sourcing supply work. I'm knocking up websites like crazy (see below) after which I'll be seeing what work there is down the docks. Labouring I mean, not what you're thinking...

2. Kids are incredibly resilient. It's as if they've lived here all their lives. The little un's very happy in his new "school" (we're not allowed to call it "kindie" due to bad memories of Little Angels in Auckland) just as much as Elly is in hers. They're both like seedlings dropped into sh... er, fertile soil, shooting away in every direction; she can read and write really fluently, ride a bike, has bags of confidence and loads of friends; he can also ride a bike (just about) and could talk the wheels off it if it had ears, is Mister Popular at school and is suddenly about six-foot-two. Seems like every time we take the bikes out I need to take a spanner along to raise the seats.

3. We love this place. It's just brilliant. The streets might be vertiginous and our house full of cluster flies, it's much colder than we thought and the super-warm & friendly people are proving difficult to really "connect" with, but we love it all with a passion that more than sees us through. The port is a magnetic focal point for everything, the town buzzes with ideas and activities, the city is really easy to access but feels miles away and the world this side of the tunnel is just stunningly beautiful. Yesterday we took a day trip to Akaroa on the other side of the Banks Peninsula and discovered a lifetime-worth of walks, picnic spots, bike rides and boat trips, all in the most jaw-dropping landscape. I might even take some pictures there one day...

4. Blogs don't write themselves. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just the words but for me at least it's important to have some pictures to make the story more complete. I've finally finished a new website to accompany the blog, which will (at last) save everyone from the dull-as-dirt Picasa and give me an incentive to keep things up to date. We now have a shiny new domain at losnemo.net that's our very own blog gallery. It's (hopefully) very easy and intuitive for visitors: when you first get there (and when you reach the end of a slideshow) you should see a gallery page with lots of albums on it. All you do is choose an album (they're vaguely date-based) and then look for on-screen clues to find your way around. I'm not being deliberately obtuse, designing it this way: little buttons mean bigger pics! I'm hoping to move the blog there soon too, but I'd like to link it all up with my other sites first. The idea is to get all that done in the next couple of weeks (term ends 3rd July) so that I can blog little and often, rather than this tediously long essay format that I frankly won't have time for anyway, should plans come to fruition. There's a feast of around 150 shots over five albums there at the moment, but updates will just be around 30 images long, hopefully once a week. Or so.

I'd value your feedback on the new gallery. It links up almost seamlessly with the software I use to edit and organise my photographs (I'm using a tweaked version of SildeshowPro in the Web module of Adobe Lightroom, should anyone be interested) which I'm hoping will drive everything through the same portal, rather than off in different, impossible-to-manage directions. A selection of the images will be transferred to an e-commerce site over at Photoshelter, making it easy for anyone wanting prints to order them online. Then a "best of" selection of that site gets ported to my portfolio site. Sounds good in theory :) but at least I've got phase one up & running. Anyway leave a comment here or drop me an email & tell me what you think.

There's loads more I should have mentioned but I'll leave it at that for now. That way, half the next one's already written :)

Postscript for grandparents: there's a new link to the photographs hidden in the text above. You can also click here or use the link at the top of the page marked losNemo.net Photo Gallery

(patronising, sarcastic old git... I don't know where I get it from...)

Waiting room only

I think it must be normal for the first part of a long wait to pretty much fly by, after which the middle bit drags a little and the last few days never actually end; they kind of stay with you forever, like a scar. Or a tattoo, depending how fond your memory of it turns out to be. Our recollection of the last three weeks will probably be of the inky, needly variety, cos apart from the cold and abiding feeling of being in limbo, it's been brill.

It could have been so much worse. Our reckless faith in providence saw us take the first offer of temporary accommodation that came along, despite the fact that Bed & Breakfast clearly isn't the regular self-contained accommodation most sane people in our situation would opt for. Most B&B's are fine for a couple of nights and bearable for a week, plus their typical set-up means you're basically there at night and out during the day so it's no problem. But for three weeks... the thing you often overlook is that a B&B is also someone's home.

I've already mentioned how accommodating Nicky and Joseph have been of our invasion of their home and Elly embracing them as "our new family" kind of sums up how we've all been dealing with it. Apart from mealtimes (this is self-catering, after all... the only precondition they had was that we make our own breakfast!) it's been a case of mucking in with the day-to-day stuff – feeding cats & chickens, chopping firewood, etc – and preparing the ground for moving into our new place.

We've got Elly into a fantastic school right next door, Oscar happily settled into a nursery (yay! at last!) right next door to that, got sorted with doctors, registered at the library, signed up for... well, you name it, we joined it. Having housemates who know the ropes is a massive plus, saved us hours of messing about and pointed us directly to the best walks, bike rides, shortcuts and daytrips, shops and bus routes, even got us an official welcome on the local radio station. Which was nice.

Yet when push comes to shove this is just another waiting room, one more departure lounge, hopefully the last in a long time but still a pain to have to endure. Despite being a great house with pretty much everything going for it – lovely views across the harbour, wild gardens, great neighbours, just a short walk into town – our growing familiarity with it has inevitably turned to contempt... slowly but surely, daft things like a lack of power points, lack of decent heating (we're still not toughened up to the cold yet) and the er, microwave being in the wrong place – lots of petty niggles begin to gang up and drive you nuts. You know it's time to move on when you find yourself sitting there, mentally pricing up double glazing and loft insulation...

It really is very cold here at times, which is fine, as long as you have a reasonably warm house and you're not soft as shite. Summing it up quite nicely right this moment is the incredibly loud hammering of a passing hailstorm on the corrugated tin roof above my head. Nothing unusual about that, pretty much every house here is a pretty, timber-framed shack with roofing my old shed would put to shame. Nor is it unheard-of that it's gone from balmy autumn to barmy winter in 24 hours (it can't be 2 degrees out there and it's not even dark yet) – nope, I'm beginning to realise it's definitely just us being soft. That's what you get for spending a whole year chasing summers.

The best thing about being here really is the never-ending list of distractions. The harbour is a beautiful, dramatic landscape, a chameleon that morphs into something different every time so much as a cloud passes. Lyttelton port never sleeps, or so you'd think, as container ships the size of a small town roll in at all hours, stacked so high with those huge metal crates you can't comprehend the dynamics of it, how they don't just topple over, how the hell they manage to float at all... meanwhile the town center buzzes gently to itself, terraced up the mountainside like an amphitheatre built to applaud it all.

Just like this blog entry, it never ends... until you look up and realise, through all your interminable daydreaming, that it's time to get a move on. Tomorrow we break camp and climb the volcano... at last, we can move in, get our heads down and get on with our lives. We're all incredibly excited. There's still loads to tell – about the town, the amazing people we've met, our work prospects and all the weird synchronicity that seems to spring up in everything we do here – but it'll have to wait til next time.

I'll try to make that soon (like next week) keep it short and (as I also keep promising) get some pics together as well.

Lyttelton at last

Wow, it feels great to finally be here! A bit weird not being in our new house yet, and we completely buggered up the packing logistics, and Sally's still cooped up in her cage, and it's absolutely bloody freezing... but we're all high as kites.

The remainder of our journey down was pretty easy. A very pleasant drive down to Wellington left us time enough to visit the Te Papa museum, if not enough to see everything in it. It's a superb, ultra-modern, multi-storey space stuffed with far too many amazing things for one visit, the current Monet exhibition included :( Still, we did manage to sneak the rabbit in past the motel concierge and the takeway from Masala was almost as brilliant as last time.

Although we had a pretty smooth crossing, Elly hadn't been too bright on the Wellington leg of the journey, had a bit of a temperature that night and looked decidedly peaky on the ferry. She waited until we hit the windy road up into the hills beyond Blenheim before regurgitating her breakfast of doughnut and chips. Oscar slept, watched vids, did colouring-in, got very annoyed when we didn't stop every 10 minutes for a wee, and was generally very funny and entertaining. Sally and Elly slept and looked sick as chips, but all in all we had a nice, relaxed, fun-filled journey south.

We've been here four days and it already feels like home. It's actually Nicky & Joseph's home that they run as a B&B, just down the street from our new place. Apart from their beautiful house they have two top tomcats, Angus and Gordon, two cute girly chickens who answer to Vivien and Sally and I guess one more lop-eared bunny is neither here nor there. N & J are lovely people, very tolerant of our boistrous troupe and very generously offering to put us up for the same rent that we'll be paying when we finally move up the street. E & O have really taken to them, especially Elly, who refers to them as "our family".. bless 'er :)

It was just getting to be a problem, having stuff strewn about several corners of New Zealand, when the phone rang this afternoon to say our lorry-load was to be delivered tomorrow at eight. Pete and Lois (our new landlords) own Lyttelton's longest-running bar/restaurant, the Volcano Cafe and Lava Bar on London Street, and were delighted to be informed they'd be dragged from their beds at the crack of dawn to receive us, our two jacks-in-the-box, one large removals van and several burly mister shiftas. Thank god they have a sense of humour. They're doing a kind of business swap with a French pal of theirs who has a B&B just north of Provence near the famous Alpe D'Huez, for the coming year-to-eighteen months, and are in the process of packing all their worldly goods in readiness, so it should be a right laugh...

At least I'll get my missing camera gear, the plug adaptors and whatnot that we forgot to pack, along with the wooly jumpers and long pants we were quite certain we'd easily manage without til the lorry-load arrived. One pair of long pants between us and it's been utterly brass monkeys since we landed; thick cloud and leaden skies at first, followed by a stiff sou'westerly for the last 48 hours blowing so hard out of Antarctica you could actually smell the penguin farts, as if preserved in little frozen gas bubbles. The truth is, of course, we're all soft as shite due to 12 months of non-stop summer, so anything remotely close to single figures Celsius has us back under the duvet faster than you can say "thermal underpants".

The pic at the top gives you some idea of the lie of the land. It's a bit hilly. We're going to be living halfway up the crater edge (did I mention the whole harbour is an extinct volcano? Well it is..) a leisurely 30 minute stroll from the top. You can just see our place between the legs of the second pylon. That township out on the other side of the harbour, beyond the reclaimed flatlands of white storage tanks, is Diamond Harbour; beyond that, the Banks Peninsula. We've yet to see either of them but they're supposed to be stunning. It certianly looks very pretty from up here. It's like a whole new world laid out in front of you, something we've been hoping to feel since we left Spain and something that finally, hopefully, feels like it's happening.

There's a load of new pics on the accursed Picassa. If it's as jerky for you as it is for me, try the slideshow but pause it and use the arrows to manually move from pic to pic. I promise to get a better viewer sorted for next time.

Hasta la proxima!

The stuff of life

I did remember to post up those pics. I just forgot to mention it on the blog :) As there are (I'm told) some issues with finding the link among those relatively new to following blogs (Hi Dad!) you need to click here to see the gallery or click here to go stright to the slideshow.

I don't know about you, but the Picasa server seems to be getting slower and slower, making the images change before they've properly loaded. I'm moving the show to something more slick, I think, it would be a sham eto make them smaller files just to suit Mr Google. These days, I have to admit, things like that just have to be Flash-based, such that the whole show loads up before you view it, and your viewer isn't left wondering whether the strange and tediously developing image is supposed to be part of the presentation. Bro' Mark has finally launched himself webward with a fun showcase of his lovely work, nice and clean, simple and Flash. His other page is my favourite, so it's going on the favourite links sidebar :)

Scorching hot again here today, mercifully only 91% humidity so it was only really bad when you went out into the sun. The atmosphere's ultra-clear so you get full-on UV rays, not filtered the way they are back in Spain, and I swear you can actually feel it penetrating right though your hat. In other news, we finally got the growth charts up again and while Elly has achieved a very respectable three centimeters since September, Oscar has managed almost six. Saved us a fortune in summer clothes, as his previously long pants are now cool-looking three-quarter cutoffs.

Niki's term started off really hard, having lost her bessie mate teacher to the posh school Elly goes to, losing our kids after such lovely long holidays and gaining only another classful of incredibly rude and insubordinate ones. It's a real uphill struggle but she seems to be making headway against all the odds and is even starting to push through some changes to the hapless school regime. They don't deserve her, basically, and I've no doubt they'll miss her when we bog off and find somewhere that does. Doing really well on the bike though, being one of those nutters you see out on training rides before it gets light most mornings a week. We'll have her doing that Taupo Ironman yet :))

Me, I'm another uphill struggle. Motivation isn't a problem but direction definitely is. I feel I could do just about anything here at least as well as the best of them, but there's precious little calling or obvious demand for any of it. I see "gaps" everwhere, from reportage wedding photography to wacky patio installations, and whereas the Kiwis seem (on the face of it) to be progessive, up-for-anything types, they're colllectively very conservative, happy with the way they do things and not really up for anything new. Maybe it's just Auckland, in fact we're both convinced it is just Auckland. Our next trip south will be with bags full of very loaded questions and unreasonably high expectations.

I drove out to North Shore tonight to pick up some speakers I won on TradeMe (eBay here is a joke, try it!) They're great, apart from the huge big dent I put in one of them when I dropped it on it's way into the house :-/ It was one of those journeys that typifies living here in a very literal sense: I stopped off for some speaker cable at Dick Smiths (a kind of NZ version of Tandy) over in Sylvia Park, which for me is the worst kind of shopping mall. Not your big out of town mall – nothing in Auckland is out of town – just an ugly, sprawling, concrete carbuncle flanked by motorway flyovers. If it didn't sound like a cross between open greenbelt and a Swedish porn star I'd probably be more forgiving. The traffic was shocking into the city and I crawled along under leaden skies in the sticky heat for what seemed like hours.

Then suddenly I was cruising over the harbour bridge, five lanes of open sea views, volcanic islands to the right, rolling hills to the left. The sun comes out. My seller is a typical Kiwi; affable, honest, vague, a bit odd... but all is in order, the drive back is smooth and clear, and I inevitably think, "why isn't it like this all the time?"

That's just it though, you can't ever pin it down. It changes like the weather and leaves you none the wiser. One thing's for sure: tomorrow, it'll be exactly the same.

Comparative nonsense

Notice anything different about this No Entry sign?

Before we came, we'd chatted with a fair few people who'd already been and there were a fair few more who, despite being very impressed, thought it eerily reminiscent of the UK, especially in & around Wellington and Christchurch. Some even use "Little England" as a synonym for Christchurch. We've not been there yet (not for that reason, but it's probably reason enough..) but I'd kind of expected to find the suburbs here in Auckland's to be a lot more familiar than they are. They're actually more reminiscent of Barcelona's urbanizaciones if anywhere, just definitively down-under, with a lot of things distinctly Kiwi rather than Ozzie in character.

For example, one thing we've done a lot of is grocery shopping. Supermarkets are pretty much the same the world over, although their trundlers are front-wheel-steer only and there are a lot more dairies to compete with. They're everywhere, super-convenient for shoppers and robbers alike, although convenience shopping doesn't stop with them: like Australia, you can get most basics at the servo and there's usually a "superette" (love it) on the main roads in & out of town. It's all about as English as Watties tomato ketchup.

Ignoring some inconvenient facts for a moment, New Zealand is also way bigger than the UK. It took a little over 3 hours driving to get from our old place in Durham to Heathrow airport, a journey which, on the map, seems to traverse a good chunk of the country. Drive from Auckland to the south coast and it will take you nine hours, and that's just the reasonably flat north island... add another nine and you might get somewhere near the southern highlands. For the averagely laid-back traveller, that's at least a three-day journey, and doesn't even account for the ferry between the two landmasses. It's no wonder it took those poor Hobbits so long to get to Mordor.

The thing is, it's so goddam hilly, the roads you see on the map are no indication of distance at all. If you flattened the buggers out they'd be twice as long. Seriously! It's big in a quiet way, like mountains or oceans which seem relatively small from a distance and vast when you get right up to them. We went tramping on Sunday, drove up into the Hunua mountains beyond the Napa Valley vineyards to a locked gate, at which point you have to get out and er, tramp. Looking for a picnic site and sporting totally inappropriate footwear, we followed a mud-laden trail through dense forest, overgrown with monster ferns and sinister creepers, which according to a large-scale map we found would be a kilometer maximum before we reached a viewpoint with fabulous views. It took about an hour. I swear it was nearer 5km... the view was indeed fabuolous (see pics) and the kids were amazing, but we had a classic bus-load of tourists at the top of the mountain moment when we turned to leave and found a perfectly good road round the corner providing an easy 10 minute stroll back to the car...

Anyway, about those inconvenient facts: the Kiwi landmass covers roughly the same area as the UK, give or take a receding shoreline or two (if one of the 48 volcanoes here decided to erupt, that could change quite radically of course) and there are famously more sheep here than people. Like about five times as many, and roughly 15 times fewer people than the UK, but it's really not that obvious until you go to the beach on a perfect sunny day & find there's almost no one there. That same Sunday we drove through Maretai, a really stunning seaside town with beautiful, turquoise crystal seas and spotless beaches fringed with shaded, grassy picnic areas; it was 12 noon and there were maybe 30 people there. The beach, which must be all of 3km long, was practically deserted. Out of the city, you do get this odd feeling of being vastly outnumbered by livestock. Across the road from the beach, a flock of wooly ruminants keep their heads down, hoping no-one will notice.

This is the reason NZ is so high up the chart of "per-capita" statistics; less than a quarter of the population of 4.2 million people live outside of the cities and burbs. The result is that the country has – per capita – more crime, more McDonalds restaurants, more Olympic medals and more dope smokers than almost any other country in the world. Everything you'd expect to find downtown New York is present in Downtown, Auckland City, but it's magnified statistically by the sheer dearth of people living anywhere else in NZ. Having the second-lowest population density in the world really does distort the stats as much as it scares the sheep: the fact is, this is one of the safest countries in the world to visit, it does crap at the Olympics and for the most part you can't find a Big Mac or score a bag of grass to save your life.

Not that we'd want to do either of those things, of course...

In transit

This was the hilarious state of play on arrival at Heathrow. We hired a nice car and bombed it down the M1 (actually M1 / M42 / M40, should there be any route nerds reading..) arrived bang on time and E & O were just fab the whole way. A good cry seemed to be therapeutic, cos they were just wonderful all through the enormous check-in queue too. We're in Changi airport now, overnighting airside at the Amabassador Transit Hotel. It's... well, it's got two beds, so it's a bloomin' godsend. The flight was no bother, although we're not going to see the best of the place from here.

From my centre aisle seat, straining an envious eye through the window seat headrests, following a 12-hour flight and probably due to having precisely one hours' sleep in the last 24, urban Singapore looks like one of those magic domino exhibitions. Hundreds of apartment blocks become white tiles, a certain distance apart, their dark windows spoiling it slightly by making up too many spots. As we're not going to get out of the airport this time round, that's the way it'll be remembered; a big climate-controlled, bizarrely-carpeted shopping mall surrounded by jumbo jets, with nearby suburbs ready to fall at the flick of a finger. Really must make more of an effort to get out next time ;)

We're all completely fried and need to get some kip, so I'll keep this short. Actually the kids slept quite well – flight took in their normal bedtime hours – and since they've had a bath and spoken to the grandparents on the Skype they're bouncing round the room like newborn lambs. It's one of those places, Changi airport, where a passing glance into the hollow eyes of fellow travellers sparks a vague recognition of yourself: everyone's six timezones the wrong side of zomboid. It's nine at night now, we've got this hotel room til 6am then an 8.30am, second-leg, 10 hour flight to Auckland. Excited beyond belief of course, but it won't be that keeping us awake, it'll be the kiddy bodyclock refusing to budge from UK time...

Next post from New Zealand!