Sunday, January 8
We are about to go out to dinner in the art deco hotel where we’re staying on the Pacific in Napier. Napier is about as art deco as you can get. In fact, it’s a heritage site (if not UNESCO, certainly with the NZ government.) The architecture here is a perfection of art deco almost unknown in the whole world.
The place had an earthquake in February, 1931, decided to rebuild in reinforced concrete and the city fathers realized that the best style, and cheapest style for the day, was deco. Hence street after street after street of beautiful art deco architecture. Come the 1980s, the city fathers thought about redoing the whole place, but an arts advisor from London convinced them that deco was beautiful and they had the best example of it, en masse. Hence, restoration and rehabilitation began, and after 25 years, the place is just lovely. In fact, they are still discovering some of the art deco pieces when some of the buildings which were redone in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Some of the deco had been covered over so now the restoration does some fixing. Walking down the streets is like transportation back to the 1930s. Buildings in California mission style abut ziggurats and speed lines to create an entire downtown, still in use, like our hotel, the Masonic Hotel, rebuilt from ruins in 1933.
This is what an old hotel should be like. Charming reception, charming bits and pieces, lovely rooms, if old, but not worn out. Just great. We’re off to the hotel restaurant for dinner because it’s Sunday in a small NZ town.
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Tuesday, January 10
Yesterday, we didn’t get much chance to write since we spent most of the day on a bus.
The restaurant, Med, in the Masonic Hotel was lovely. The receptionist was half-Maori, half-European and very very cute. A wry gay wit, so to speak. He stronjgly recommended trying a group of Hawke’s Bay wines, the vini locale, so to speak. We started with two: A Trinity Hill, Hawke’s Bay Range SV and a Squawking Magpie ‘The Chatterer’ chardonnay. Ben liked them both, I found the chardonnay to be a bit on the heavy side, though I enjoyed the SV very much. We chose three reds by the glass, a syrah Sacred Hill ‘Halo’, a mix of Malbec and Merlot, Clearview ‘Two Pinnacles’, and a Brookfield ‘Ohiti Estate’ Cabernet Sauvignon. We enjoyed all three, though john was particularly taken with the syrah and Ben loved the Malbec/Merlot.
The chef comes from Goa and uses an Indian style to the food coupled with a few years in the Eastern Mediterranean and then Melbourne, so he also has a Mediterranean style. Ben ordered three appetizers as the meal: oyster shooters, scallops and a dish described as duck cigars, which were like small duck dim sum. John had a green salad with kaimai blue cheese from Matamata (see Hobbiton above) and a rack of lamb done with adobo. We enjoyed it a lot.
In the morning, we decided, since the weather had changed, to put our hands in the Pacific and walked to the Front. Along the way we stopped to look over a 1936 Austin Seven, very tiny, 750 cc engine. The British equivalent of a cheap Ford. They do up the 1930s here big for the deco buildings. A cute young couple, Felicity Dorrington-Smythe and Andrew C. Montgomerery III dressed in period were posing as part of the tableaux of the car.
We had taken the art deco tour the day before so we went back to see some interiors and streets we hadn’t truly explored before. The interiors of what was the newspaper is done very much in a Frank Lloyd Wright style and there are several others that are worth a glance.
We breakfasted at a Ujazi, a coffee shop/lunch/breakfast place, eating outside. Ben had yoghurt and fresh fruit salad, with lovely pineapple and apples. The apples have a milder flavor here, but the pineapples are very full. John tried the local sausages, which are typically British, being mostly bread and fat in a casing. The local bread was good.
After a lingering cappuccino on the mall amidst the deco we boarded the bus about 1 PM for the six hour trip to Wellington. Had the air conditioning been working well this would have been a grand trip. As it was it was a fine tip though a bit warmer than we would have liked. New Zealand’s long distance Inter-city busses are very good, very comfortable and move as fast as they can on the two lane roads. There are very few freeways. We have only seen them in Wellington and Auckland.
The run took us through several lovely mountain ranges, which we could see because it had stopped raining. Stopping in several small towns to pick and discharge we got to see a slice of the rural life of the country. The towns are tidy, but reminiscent of the California central valley with the fields stretching for miles off to the mountains.
A true high point was a detour we had to take because the main road slid down the side of a mountain and was being repaired. It took us through a wind-farm with the aeoliens (windmills) turning in the wind. NZ gets about 60 percent of its power from hydro, 10 percent from geothermal and is expanding its wind capabilities. There is no nuclear.
We arrived in Wellington about 7:15, took a shuttle to At Home in Wellington, our apartment hotel, started laundry--we are still working on figuring out all the heiroglyphs that take the place of words on the machine--and decided on a down home dinner.
We ended up on Cuba Street mall at John J. Murphy’s Pub, complete with Irish music, a Scots chef, Irish and Scots bartenders and big screen cricket. John had very acceptable fish and chips with a Tui ale and Ben enjoyed a seafood gumbo, fresh bread and very nice salad. No ale.
Got back to find the laundry not dry, but we think we have mastered the machine now. Second load goes into the dryer shortly. Now to breakfast and explore Wellington.
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