Singing in the rain

Abel Tasman
Abel Tasman National Park is named after a Dutch dude, so there was a good chance I'd like it. I love how it became a national park. A local lady found out they were going to build a road through her property. In an effort to stop this and preserve the environment, she offered her property to the government on condition they created a national park. The government, a body put in place to make a decision, couldn't make a decision. They ummed, erred and generally prevaricated. The lady got tired of waiting, so wrote to the Queen of Holland, inviting her to NZ to open a National Park in honour of Abel Tasman. She replied to the NZ government saying she'd be delighted to come: 'Er, anyone send an invitation?', 'No', 'Well she's coming', 'Guess we'd better scrap the road and make it a national park'. Not that it's difficult, but its great to outsmart the government. It also preserved a wonderful area for me to walk and kayak around.

This looked like being two of my most active days, so I was pleased as punch to reach for the shower gel and end up with a wrecked shoulder. This looks like being the closest I'll get to doing a great walk: time, kit and the time of year have worked against me. There are 10 walks designated as great; I've been on bits of some, but at Abel I'll be walking one day of it, then kayaking a second day. I'll be camping overnight at a campsite with a toilet, drinking water and a fire-it's dark for 12 hours now, so I guess the lack of light will draw people to the fire. The arrangements I've made mean this is all very civilised: I leave my main bag behind, the water taxi drops me off at the start of my walk,



my excess gear (tent and stuff) is dropped at the campsite at Bark Bay, I walk the 12km or so to Bark Bay and the kayak trip meets me at Bark Bay in the morning for the paddle back to Kaiteriteri. Not wishing to take any risks with carrying my own food, I've enough to feed army.

As the tides had stopped me being dropped off further North for a longer walk (some stretches can only be passed on the beach at lowish tide), my original plan was to walk past Bark Bay and then doubling back. In the end I took a big chill on what looked a very active trip. The bay opposite Tonga Island is so lovely that I settled down to a long lunch with the count of Monte Cristo.



When I got to Bark Bay, only a couple of hours of daylight remained, so I put up my tent and caught up with Martin who was also a kayaking tomorrow, but had walked from the opposite direction. Sure enough the camp fire was a hit and the 7 of us in camp gathered round it. Later on I wandered to the beach to check out the stars. Looking around I noticed the wrench in my shoulder had spread to my neck-it must be the tension of my lifestyle. Kayaking may be tricky.

I slept wonderfully, lullabyed by the sound of the waves lapping the beach, which no more than a couple of trees separated from my tent. I got up for the beautiful dawn across the bay, with the sun rising from behind distant misty hills.




After a spot of breakfast Martin and I said farewell to our fellow campers and were joined by our 7 fellow paddlers and Eric the kayakmaster. Eric was Maori and had a conch for signals and attracting attention. We all had a go in a bay of awesome echoes, learnt some traditional chants, stuck our tongue out, had a bit of a dance and ate leaves while learning some bushcraft. It sounds really naff, but Eric's personality meant it was fun and informative rather than tourist schlock. I have to say I wasn't such a fan of 'Abel Tasman Idol', where each boat sang a song. Bit ITV for me. Eric has 6 kids, oldest 25, and one granddaughter-he's 7 years older than me, which makes me wonder what I've been up to.

In Maori culture, the uglier you are when doing the sticking out your tongue thing, the more you interest the women. The logic's something like 'Ooh, he's really ugly, he'll scare off any potential enemies and be able to keep me safe (and warm).' I guess you could say he who gurns, scores. Ladies of the North Island beware-Pollster the Minger is on his way.

In the kayak I was partnered up with John, who, in all honesty, was a bit below the standard required by his excellent name. Still, we didn't capsize, had close encounters with a rock or 2 and had a good time. We had some full on sea kayaks, which had a rudder controlled by pedals. The rudder didn't work like paddling, when you control direction back to front, paddle left to turn right; here the left pedal turns you left. Being in a kayak, this went against what I instinctively wanted to do and took a little getting used to. It doesn't seem to matter how much paddling I do, I can shift a boat, but it's stunning how drenched I get in the process.




Sounding like a very broken record-top way to spend a couple of days and after the kayaking, my entire upper body hurt, which was like a cure for the back and neck.

The weather has really been on my side here: it was a beautiful sunny day when I was walking, dry all night, mostly warm with a touch of rain when I kayaked, rained all night while I slept back in the hostel in Nelson and it's lashing it down this morning for the bus trip to Picton and ferry to Wellington.

I always prefer travelling South; somehow it feels like going downhill
I noticed as we got on the ferry that they'd given it a kiwi name and painted over 'Spirit of Cherbourg', but a retired cross channel ferry is still a retired cross channel ferry. Ironically, given the Cook straight's reputation, the boat's probably working harder now. Inevitably, the South Island didn't just fade away gently, but ended on an appropriately scenic note.



From Picton it takes an hour to reach the open sea between the islands. The hour is spent in the wonderful Marlborough Sounds. It's a shame to be travelling in the direction I am-the South has been very special, moreover what an introduction it would be if this were your first glimpse of the south.



I can already see the North, so I'm curious as to how it takes another 2 hours to reach it.

Welly (Wellington)
Why do I always seem to be in a rush? At Picton I casually picked up a 'what's on in Wellington' booklet-I have become a magnet for all manner of helpful and bloody useless leaflets. Flicking through I noticed that Wellington were at home in the Super 14. Tonight. As this is likely to be my only chance to see a game, I decided to go.

I got to the hostel after 5; they didn't know when kick off was, but suggested I tried tickettek across town; I reached them to read their hastily printed 'We're NOT selling tickets for the Hurricanes v Highlanders' piece of A4-the length of their queue persuaded me to take my questions to the tourist information centre; which was shut. This was getting silly-I didn't know when the game started, where, if there were tickets, how the public transport worked and I was hungry. I tried a new approach and relied on my initiative and my map. 40 mins later, I was fed and stood in a queue for tickets at the Westpac stadium (AKA the Cake Tin). Top price tickets were $50, a touch under 20 quid. I went for a backpacker special-cheapest ticket you've got left. This turned out quite well-second row on the try line.

Rugby is serious stuff in NZ and I'd expected a no nonsense approach. I was a touch wrong. Outside the US, I have never seen so much crap at a sporting event. This was mixed with a provincial feel that I've felt in the kiwi cities. The cheerleaders were sponsored by Lanes bowling-the local 10 pin outfit. I have never understood cheerleaders. We had a guy dressed as captain hurricane; he was driven round in a plane;



there was kiss kam (go on, you can work it out); a no 1 fan contest; we thanked our sponsors-a lot; an up and under competition-fans try to catch; we showed ads on the big screen; the PA blasted Gary Glitter, been a while since I've heard one of his songs. Somewhere, just occasionally, I noticed there were 30 blokes playing Rugby. I tried to hide it, but I doubt I've ever laughing so much at a Rugby match. Oh and a bunch of blokes had come dressed as Santa. Who on earth goes to watch sport, with Xmas months away, dressed as Santa? I heard afterwards the attendance was poor, I guess this is an attempt to folk through the turnstiles.

The Hurricanes are Wellington's team (a reference I suppose to this being a windy city), the Highlanders Dunedin's. As Bill Hicks said 'If you work in marketing, please kill yourself'. I'm not sure how many current All Blacks were playing, but there wasn't anything to scare the other World Cup contenders in this game. There were a couple of nice breaks and maybe 3 top passes amongst a lot of errors. Still a game that ends 22-21, with the losing Highlanders missing a conversion with the final kick of the match obviously had its moments.



As a bonus we had a bizarre Tana Umaga cameo-he was sin binned after 10 mins and substituted (for a rest) 7 mins into the second half. In between he made some large tackles.

I'd planned to spend a couple of days in Welly and content that would be enough, I spent the first part of a very wet Saturday working out the first few days after Wellington. My preferred route was tricky and slow to get round, as well as being a little ambitious for the 3 weeks I've got in the North Island. For this reason I have binned Wanganui and Mt Taranaki, where my lack of mountaineering nous was likely to limit me anyway. Monday morning I head to Lake Taupo, from where the 5.45 Tuesday morning shuttle will take me to the Tongariro crossing, the best day walk in the country and home to 3 volcanoes-one of which played Mount Doom. Precious.

Mind made up, I decided to leave as much outdoor stuff as possible to the promised better weather of Sunday. So where to first in the deluge? The Wellington basin and NZ's cricket museum of course.



I had a long chat with the curator; when I arrived he'd been open for 2 hours and said 'hello, you're the first today and I wasn't expecting you!'. He shuffled round and turned on all the AV stuff for me. Later we chatted about cricket; we agreed the 1 day stuff is toilet (I understand the world cup made a very eloquent case for this). He'd visited Lords and seen a lot behind the scenes; I loved that he all but called them a bunch of blazers, then quoted Blowers picking the Wellington Basin and Trent Bridge as 2 of his favourite cricket grounds. I was the first to sign the visitors book for a week. This was a pity, as it was very good, despite the struggles of NZ cricket-70's sees first wins against England and Australia, 80's West Indies and England away, while Daniel Vettori and idiot C4 commentator Ian Smith make their all time best XI. Of course, they made it further than England in the world cup.

Despite the rain and the rugby players warming up, you could see what an attractive ground it would be on a nice day. Freddie made a ton and Thorpey a double on the last tour. AND they had a picture of Beefy-he played his 100th test here.

It was still raining when I left and headed for Te Papa, which I can best describe as a fusion of NZ and Natural History presented in a very modern building and style. With good reason Wellington is inordinately proud of it, it's excellent. Exhibits are interesting, well displayed and thought provoking, while technology is used to get you closer and involved and make you think and smile. It was a million miles from Christchurch's dusty museum. I experienced an earthquake, captained an immigrants' ship to NZ from Liverpool, walked round a Maori meeting house, lifted rocks from the different layers of the earth's crust and core, learnt how NZ changed from a forest covered bird haven to today's position, saw the extinct Moa (kiwi ostrich) and a 20m adolescent pygmy blue whale skeleton. The immigrants section was very interesting in the way it contrasted to Australia: NZ appears to have been very humanitarian in who they took, including hundreds of Polish kids, orphaned in Siberia or on the march south after their 'release' in WWII. I ran out of time and had to return on Sunday for the Antarctica bit (still obsessed).




After the previous night's rugby, I had a change of scene and saw Chekhov's Uncle Vanya on opening night (my first choice, Tom Stoppard, was sold out). Wellington has a strong theatre tradition, which meant the theatres were full of plays not bloody musicals, apart from Fiddler on the Roof, which Topol had brought to town for a week. Vanya had plenty of unhappiness and wailing women (what I expected of Chekhov), but was funny too and had some strong environmental themes. It was perhaps a little overacted-I'd need to know more Chekhov to be sure.

On Sunday the weather transformed Wellington and I set out exploring. I took the San Francisco style cable car to the top of the botanic gardens and pottered my way down, only disturbed by the WWF visitor centre being closed (it's housed in a treehouse). The historic and parliament buildings are in the area below the botanic gardens and were a mixed bag. The beehive gets a lot of attention. It was constructed to complete the parliamentary complex. Had Norman Foster done it in the 90s with a load of steel and glass, it may well have been a triumph (if you like your office to have curved walls). Sadly it was a 60s build, in the time when commisioners of public buildings were convinced concrete was an attractive construction material.



More interesting than the beehive and the new government buildings were the old government buildings.



These are made of wood. Seriously. The new cathedral was unremarkable, even ugly. It was typical of recent cathedrals-do you go modern or traditional and pretend it's not really new. I've only seen one of each type succeed-Barcelona and St John's New York, most just get confused. This replacement for Old St Paul's was not a winner. While Old St Paul's may not have been exactly what is demanded of a capital city cathedral



It was made entirely of wood, and was quite gorgeous inside.



With my fill of architecture, I hit the library, the city/maritime museum and the (modern) art gallery. The gallery submitted to the 80/20 rule of modern art-20% interesting, quality work, 80% pretentious piss take for the gullible. I'm glad I went to the maritime museum after crossing the Cook straight from the South Island. It's a dangerous and changeable ship graveyard. I saw a long film on the Wahine, a big passenger ferry that sank in Wellington harbour in 1968. It wasn't even the only boat to sink in the harbour that year-the records only counted commercial ships, mug punter Sunday sailors are clearly expected to sink. The city part of the museum picked out an event from each year 1900-2000, which was an eye opener-a surprising amount of civil unrest occurred. It also had one of those displays where a number of tiny actors move round a 'set' that so fascinated Bryson in Down Under: it was on some Maori legends, but unfortunately the trickery was so compelling that the content became a bit lost.

To complete my set of differing nights out, I went to the cinema. Literally. The Curse of the Golden Flower was on, but I had come to see the Embassy. Only a Richard Gere movie would have dissuaded me-I saw in a paper he may be sentence d to Indian jail: more countries should have leglislation for crimes against cinema. Anyway, the Embassy is a wonderful old style cinema: it's grand, looks expensive, seats hundreds and has one screen.
Big and beautiful, it shows how the multiplex fast food approach to film, with its many small screens is another piece of progress that short changes the punter. The Embassy has magic and isn't that what films are all about? All cinemas should be like this-I really should have taken my camera.

I hope the Embassy can survive. The Sunday night crowd was sparse and I noticed at least 2 multiplexes in walking distance. I suspect it has fallen on hard times before; it had a major refurbishment just a few years ago so it could host the World premiere of the concluding Lord of the Rings episode-the Return of the King. If I ran the Embassy, I would make a lot more of this. I would screen one of the trilogy once a week: there's surely a market, judging by the number and cost of the LOTR tours. The cheapest I've seen is $150-for a day driving around location spotting. There's another asset they could maximise: every seat has a little brass plaque on it. Mine was Donal Lynch. This could have been mystifying, but the first one I spotted as I walked in said 'Billy Boyd. Peregrin Took.' It seems a safe assumption that the plaques record who sat where for the premiere. I bought a standard seat; I'd have definitely paid the extra for a platinum seat to sit in Ian McKellan's seat. They even did allocated seating, while missing this trick.

I waited for the lights to go up at the end and had a look on Billy Boyd's row-wormtongue and all the hobbits were there, Sam and Frodo sat together. I'm not sure where the big boys were.

So what to make of Wellington: it seems to be trying very hard to establish an identity for itself, particularly on the artistic side. Much of this is good stuff (the musea are very well done), sometimes it seemed rather forced-the council wrote a large cheque so someone would dump a bit of art on the corner. I assume this is due to continual references to Auckland as the de facto capital, it has over a quarter of the country's population and may well be less popular here than London is in the UK. Wellington is the capital because it is in the middle of the country rather than it being a natural capital. While it's no Canberra, like a younger brother it is out to prove something. Although, it's equally possible that it's just the fact NZ doesn't really do cities-the cause of my disappointment on tour 15 years ago. Like Oz when you're in the country, you can't understand why so many people leave for Europe; in the cities, it's more understandable. Still, a good couple of days, with some varied nights out.

Mount Doom
The journey to Lake Taupo from Welly was lengthy and rainy. I wrote, read, listened to the BBC radio version of the LOTR on my iPod and had eggs and chips to eat (stroke of genius there, I can tell you). It kept raining all afternoon and by the sounds of it lashed it down all night. Mindful of the weather and my 5.45 a.m. bus to the Tongariro crossing, I took it easy and went to the post office, tourist info and supermarket before watching There's Something About Mary with an English girl, who laughed at all the same bits as me. 10 mins after saying goodnight, I realised she was probably interested. I need a kind of radar to help me.

The Tongariro crossing is 17km long, rises just under 1,000m (often steeply) before falling back slightly more. The crossing goes between the volcanoes Mounts Tongariro and Ngauruhoe. The latter was Mount Doom (with the help of another volcano). The Tongariro crossing is the greatest day walk in a country with many of the world's greatest walks. It affords great views of all sorts.

Apparently.

For the first two hours or so I saw bugger all. When I set off last from the car park there was a thick cloud cover. It started to clear, but then I started to climb. Into the clouds. I got a glimpse of what must have been a big busload of folk 15 mins or so behind and then they disappeared-along with everything else. For a while I was struggling to see the next pole: posts, stakes, reflective markers, splashes of paint and poles are all used to show the way when the path is unclear. I'm not sure if this is common in walking circles or an Anzac thing-it was new to me in Oz, but then so was walking. There was a lot of this



I'd started to descend by the time I saw the Emerald lakes



So I didn't see any volcanoes, though I may have been on the summit of Mount Tongariro-I was just following the poles and it was hard to tell. Do I sound narked? I don't mean to sound narked. I missed some great views, but I have seen lots of great views, so can't and shan't complain. Yesterday and tomorrow one of the bus companies cancelled, so I was quite lucky to go at all. I never felt in danger, but the power of the mountain was clearly demonstrated as the visibility plummetted and the wind ripped across me (I moved a little further away from the edge in the gale). I didn't realise how cold it was till I drank from my water bottle at blue lake and it was ice cold-on the first big climb I was only in a short sleeve t-shirt while the sweat stung my eyes. I was in shorts all day and I'm convinced this was the first time I've worn shorts and gloves at the same time-cold hands, warm heart ladies. (Speaking of which I'm sat in the hostel's lounge/kitchen and they've just put Fairytale of New York on-this place is great, I think they may have stolen my iPod).

I enjoyed the high descent as for about 15 mins I was walking on volcanic ash: this was very like going down a sand dune-your feet slide each time you touch down, giving you extra value for each stride. I didn't go as fast as I did in Namibia since there were a lot of rocks to fall on and a precipice into god know's what-it was misty.

The frequent stench of sulphur meant you knew it was a volcanic region, even if you couldn't see the volcanoes.



It was also a future echo of the eggy fart that is Rotorua-my next stop. The smell of Rotorua is one of my more vivid memories from 15 years ago.

With Tongariro crossed, I was back at the pickup point an hour early-I hadn't hung around in the mist, clouds and wind at just under 2,000m. So I found a piece of paper and spent an hour writing the opening and structure for a book that came to me on the walk. I've also had a new idea for a film/TV thing that's been bubbling around for the past few weeks. One of my regrets is that I haven't spent 2/3 weeks somewhere quiet and beautiful and tried writing properly. I've not developped any of the half dozen or so outlines I brought with me in my notebook (well it's actually a Word file, but where's the romance in that?). Part of me is hoping that when my house is relet it has to be a year, not 6 months. Then I can get back in Oct, do Istanbul to the pyramids, then buy a laptop and rent somewhere cheap and remote and spend 6 months seeing if I can write.