Snells Beach

Hi again readers! I heard that some people (OK, maybe only one) were waiting expectantly to hear about the family lunch last Sunday. We drove up to Snells Beach (about 45 minutes north of Auckland) for (my cousin) Jenny and Stuart’s housewarming. Unfortunately I forgot to bring the camera, so these pics are off my phone.

As usual we arrived fashionably late, but it was a very casual afternoon and everything was still being set up. We last saw Jenny’s house when we visited NZ in November last year, and at that stage it was a bare frame. It’s almost completed now, just a couple of finishing touches to go. But it looks brilliant and I’m sure will be worth a fortune if they ever sell it – the view alone could do that, let alone the 3 bedrooms, huge living space, and full set of modern fittings.

Polished floors everywhere, so shoes off at the door. Claire was there with her clan, though Michael was down at Eden Park doing some rugby training. Gillian and Michael Harris were up from Wellington. Gillian prepared a huge feast in the kitchen while Michael Harris worked the barbeque. Jo took up the challenge of a game of Monopoly with the kids (which ended up disintegrating into sibling violence between Michael-Lydia and Moana), while Stuart and I retired to the home theatre (with huge projector) to watch the V8s from Puke.

Lunch was out on the deck. Very pleasant if you managed to get a spot in the sun, but a cold breeze kept threatening. Stuart cracked the top off a magnum of 1996 Manuwera(?) Antipodean, an awesome drop if you find it (and a wheelbarrow full of cash – it’s something like $300 for a (standard size) bottle). All in all a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

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I spent last night downloading several episodes of Supernatural for Jo on bittorrent, but it’s chewed through our internet ration pretty quickly (the torrent uploads count as part of the usage total)! Oh well, will just have to stay away from YouTube for the next few weeks…

It’s now ANZAC day, so I hope you’re all enjoying a pleasant day off. I did some gardening – gotta keep on top of the lawn! – while Jo took care of the inside. The hedgetrimmer took out the extension cord pretty easily, and blew a fuse in the process which took about half an hour to find. I tried to find a shop open to replace the cord (or at least the plug) and get some fuse wire, but they take public holidays pretty seriously around here. Guess I’ll have to wait til the weekend…

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For the tech geeks: NZ is just about to start free-to-air digital broadcasting next week, though initially only via satellite. Fortunately the previous tenants here had Sky TV so there’s a dish on the roof that we can plug straight in to. Just need to get a receiver box, and we’ll be good to go, finally justifying the widescreen TV! (for some shows anyway) Pity the signal won’t be in high definition for some time yet, damn backwards country this is!

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Melbourne
Advance notice to all: we’re back in Melbourne for a week at the start of June. We’re hoping a few people might like to come and see us on Saturday 2nd at Liz’s house up in South Morang. Probably just a casual afternoon drop-by-whenever afternoon, maybe lingering into dinner.

We might be around for the second weekend of June if Jo’s work organises some hospital/rehab centre attendances the following week, and we can rearrange the flights accordingly.

Well, that about brings you up to date (without boring you with too many mundane details). Send us your own stories if you’ve been doing anything interesting. (Frankly, any news from our friends is interesting!)

love all,

matt and jo.

Pets!

Everyone knows about the kitties, so here's a post about the rest of our animals.


Moths.
Little brown moths are everywhere, not sure of the breed, but they love gathering (in their hundreds) on the underside of palm leaves. Fortunately they seem to have stayed away from the wardrobe.


Bumblebees.
Jo got very excited to see a bumblebee for the first time. Unfortunately they're a bit elusive to photograph, but they love to buzz around the wild rosemary bush growing in the back yard.



Wetas.
I found a few of these guys when cleaning some dead leaves off one of the palm trees in the front garden.

Slugs.
They come into the kitchen on wet nights and lurk around the back door and rubbish bin. I've never seen such bloody huge slugs! Gotta be careful to watch where you step sometimes... (eww!)


Mozzie?
Not sure what this one is, but he's pretty damn big!

TV and family

We finally have a proper TV in the house, which means we're finally using some of our furniture (the TV unit) correctly. For the geeks out there: 40" wisescreen LCD, 720p high definition. Thank goodness for interest free loans! (which is amazing in this country where the interest rate is insane.) Don't worry, we'll have it paid off!

Part of the deal for the TV included an HD DVD recorder, but you have to send away for it so it's not here yet... and the salesman threw in some nice Monster cables and a little George Foreman grill (just what we needed!)

We had an experience getting the TV home - it doesn't look so big in the shop, but in all its carboard-boxed glory, there was no way this thing would fit into the back of the car! However at the same time we were at the back of the shop trying to figure out what we were going to do, someone else was there picking up a washing machine with a rented trailer. He immediately offered to transport it for us. It felt a bit weird loading our brand new TV onto a complete stranger's trailer and hoping he would follow us home without disappearing, but he was true to his word and we had the box home in minutes, followed by a bit more time unpacking, setting up, stashing all the packaging in the attic for when we need to move this thing again, and finally sitting down to dial in the colour from the usual overblown neon colours that make TVs lok so good in the shop next to 50 others.

Unfortunately having a big TV doesn't make the local programming any better. Local free-to-air isn't in high definition until next year, Sky have only just started digital transmission this month, so we'll consider if that's worth paying up for, but most of the channels are more of the same (ie crap), and it's extra for sports or movies or any of the good stuff. I'm sure there's more interesting stuff we coud do with that money each month.

(However, I'm sure there's some motorsport on there that I'm mising out on, such as the V8s from Pukekohe this weekend... I'd get down there, but we're going to see Jenny and Stuart's new house on Sunday. About the only motorsport that does get shown is the A1, not surprisingly Team NZ is doing very well!)

You can also see our new rug in the photo, which was cheap but very nice and fuzzy, feels great underfoot (if you're brave enough to take shoes off and risk the icy cold floorboards, the weather is turning very cold here in the mornings)

On Thursday night I went out to dinner with auntie Gilly and Michael at the home of Tim and Diana Shaw (Tim is Berry's cousin). Very nice people and a great house in Remuera, and Diana put on some great Moroccan food. We dug through some archival photos that Tim's sister had collated in a scrap book, got to catch up on some family history that I'm not too familiar with.

I'll have more family stories after tomorrow.

cheers all!

Roto-Vegas! - Part 2

On Saturday we took a morning walk in the Redwood forest, which despite being an introduced species seems to fit in fairly well. Certainly a good place to unwind and get away from the noise of the town, though it does get rather cold down in the shade.
We drove further south to check out a few of the local lakes - mostly volcanic calderra (extinct craters), each with a unique colour or attribute. This is Lake Tarawera, which until an eruption some 120 years ago used to come much closer to the viewing site.
We made it back to the other side of town for the Kiwi Encounter tour, which takes you through a kiwi egg hatchery. Very interesting little birds these, you can appreciate the need for a hatchery when you see an egg next to one of them - the analogy is like giving birth to a fully grown three-year-old...
More fun than the tour itself though was the outrageously camp guide Dion, who I'm sure could only have gotten more excited if he suddenly discovered a that kiwis came in hot pink velour rather than feathers.
We also stopped off for a look around some recent thermal activity in the middle of town at Kuirai Park. Feels somewhere between a movie set and a fantasy land.
We thought we'd be smart and hit the Polynesian Spa at dinner time, on the basis that everyone else would be at dinner. Unfortunately everyone else had the same brilliant idea, so it was pretty busy. Still, there was enough room to find your own personal space, and once we'd figured out which pool wasn't scaldingly hot we settled in for a good soak. Thanks to James and Jacq for the lovely gift, would love to go back again. Eventually the sulphur fumes got overpowering, so we retired for a home cooked meal. Could have passed on watching Vanilla Sky though, should have figured it would be dismal (exhibit A: Tom Cruise, your honour) but it kind of sucks you in at the start.
Apart from hiding all the chocolate eggs on Sunday and making Jo find them, Sunday was a return to normal - drove back early to Auckland to beat the traffic and take care of things around the house like more gardening. Oh - here's a fun one for you: the local councils don't collect garden waste. You have to pay for a private collection service to take away the contents of your garden bin, trouble being that they only do it every 4 weeks, and our bin is already full again after one week. So I'll have to slow down with those hedge clippers...
Love to all, please keep in touch and let us know what you're up to.
Matt and Jo.

Zorbing

It's not hard to picture the scene: a handful of local adventure tourism operators kicking back at the end of a hard day of scaring tourists, downing a few Steinlagers and trying to think up new ways of parting gullible, adventure loving backpackers from their parent's hard-earned Euro (or Yen, or dollars, you get the idea). Then one pipes up with:
"How about this: We get a giant inflatable ball, right, and we stick a punter inside. Then we push them down a bloody big hill!"
And to a chorus of "Choice!", "Sweet-as!" and other stereotypical New Zealander epithets, the group set off to establish the activity of Zorbing.
In theory it sounds brilliant, and Kiwis have an enviable reputation for adventure tourism - jet boating, bungy jumping, bungy slingshots, and various other bungy-related activites. The trouble is, with Zorbing, somewhere between that alcohol-fuelled concept meeting and the execution, things went pear-shaped.
For starters, the Zorb is so bloody big that it has the aerodynamics of a small barn, but inflatable, so it has the weight of a kite. Imagine skiing with a parachute attached. So even on a decent slope, it's just too damn slow. It takes about 40 seconds to get down a 200 metre hill. People can run that fast. (Other people, admittedly.)
Secondly, the balls are made of clear plastic, which is great for the first 10 minutes of use, but then they get scratched and hazy and you can't see in. Or out.
And finally most people take up the option to have a bucket of water thrown in with them, making the whole thing slippery. Personally I'd take the dry option so that you have at least half a chance to stand up, run, trip, fall over, and generally tumble your brains out in relative safety. I guess the aim is to experience what it's like inside a washing machine, if the washing machine were giant and padded and rolling down a hill. But they're not. So it ends up being like sitting in a cold bathtub, whilst going down an escalator. With your eyes closed. To very badly paraphrase Groucho Marx (apologies), a real washing machine would be much more fun.
So, in its current execution, Zorbing is a failure as a proper adventure activity. I was excited to try something unique, but after 2 minutes of watching I was ready to leave. We only stayed to take some photos.
Not to be entirely negative, I can see the potential of the Zorb. But it requires a few enhancements: One, make the hill steeper. Much steeper. You could probably drop these things off a cliff and they'd float down gently without hurting the occupants. Two, add some obstacles to the hill, so you have a more exciting trajectory than straight down, or down the lame "luge" course. A few bumps, jumps, bounces, and trees to hit would make it far more satisfying.
As an endpoint to this rant, the show "MXC" (which is an amusing US redubbing of the Japanese gameshow Takeshi's Castle if you've missed it) had a far more hardcore version of this activity, involving a small hard plastic ball (barely big enough to fit someone in) and a real obstacle course. No doubt painful, but genuinely funny and surely more adrenaline inducing.

Roto-Vegas! - Part 1

Happy Easter all, hope your holiday is as solemn and/or as chocolatey as you desire.

We've just returned from a few days in Rotorua, aka Roto-vegas, aka stinky town, aka... well I'll just let this ute sum up the place:

Actually, the smell wasn't as bad as my corrupted childhood memories had led me to believe, it's only in the really active (volcanically speaking) parts of town that you notice it.

First off, a big thank you to Jacqui and James for the gift of the entry pass to the Polynesian Spa. We'll get to that part later though.

Obviously the first part of the trip was getting there, and it wasn't long out of home that the smells began. Koba got a case of the nervous shits on the way to the cattery, thus adding to the fragrance of "ex-smoker's car" and vanilla car freshener. Fortunately the mess was contained within his cage, which was left with the cattery staff to take care of, hehe. Having cleared the mad Auckland holiday traffic, we stopped at Huntly for dinner and added Maccas takeaway to the olfactory composition. mmmmm.

@94 on Springfield is a fantastic B&B, and Jo once again proved her capable online research skills to pick a winner.

On Saturday we cruised around a bit seeing what was on offer. The Whakarawera village is a really odd site - basically a Maori village (not very traditional, but the residents do live right in the middle of a tourist park) set amongst a highly geothermally active site - boiling water and mud pools and geysers, etc. I think we were both most taken with a two year old playing on a porch about 10 metres from a deep boiling hole in her own front yard.
Side note - I want a grave with a steaming chimney:

We bypassed some of the other touristy stuff and took the car up Mountain Rd for a scenic look. Part way up this twisty climbing road I felt like John Batman, pondering "this looks like the place for a hill climb" (assuming he had fallen through a space-time warp and parked his ship halfway up a hill in the middle of an island, and suddenly knew what a hill climb was, let alone a car...). Half way up the road is closed off to traffic, so we set off on foot to see more.

Just beyond the gates it's obvious (from the burnout patch) that the upper section of road DOES get used as a hillclimb track! Known as the Ngongotaha hillclimb, it's run a few times a year according to some quick googling.

Beautiful views over Lake Rotorua, but not while competing I guess... also saw some farmed deer and this cute litte hedgehog.
Dinner was at Bistro 1284 in the middle of town - bloody expensive but very nice, it was recommended by the psychiatrist Jo works with. Top choice again.

did someone ask for rain?

...because it landed here on Thursday. I'm not talking about your usual Melbournian shower for a couple of hours, it rained Hard.

All. Day.

Which, despite the best efforts of a plastic bag inside my backpack, still left me with a wet shirt after the ride to work. Could have been worse I guess, still, I don't like having to pull on wet clothes for the ride home. Not that that makes much differerence when it's still raining...

On Tuesday we caught up with my cousin Dave (brother of Juliet whom I saw last week) and his partner, on their way back to China via Brisbane (what is it that seems to make all Kiwis end up in Brisbane at some point in their life?). We only had enough time for them to come over after dinner and sit around for a chat, but it was good to hear all the stories about their life in China.

We got some more furniture on TradeMe this week, so now we have an entertainment unit to add to the random collection. Highly functional as we have no TV to put on it yet, but I guess that's in keeping with the minimalist ethos that has so far provided a dining table with no chairs (booked in for May purchase), and a couch but no coffee table...

A few hours of the usual IKEA-type assembly (lucky I packed the screwdrivers, but I would have loved to have my cordless drill on hand...), and a few profanities later and everything was together.

We picked up the unit from the North Shore (ie, across the harbour bridge) and stopped off for a look around at the local beaches, shopping and markets. Not a very good day for it though, a bit drab. The tide comes right in to completely cover the sand, leaving seaweed everywhere, so the beaches aren't that picturesque.

Jo was particularly taken by a party pill shop. Never seen a dedicated one before, but there are quite a few cafes etc with petition forms rallying to keep BZP based party pills legal in NZ. I'm sure the neuropsych readers out there will be thrilled by that one...

We'll show you some pictures of the miscellaneous "pets" soon, and the veggie garden's progress (the spinach, basil and lettuce are going well, but something is eating little holes in the oregano).

love,

matt and jo