Huka Falls

These holiday posts aren't going to be in any sort of order; sorry about that. If I'd done them at the time it would have been different, but not having my laptop with me (by choice) I'm forced to pick up on them later, and that's usually not very successful.

Anyway, the Huka Falls. As I mentioned in another post I went up in a float plane last Monday while in Taupo. While I was flying, I saw the Huka Falls below, and later in the afternoon, my wife and I decided to go and see them close up.

We got to the starting place, walked over the bridge from the parking lot, saw a lot of rushing water beneath us, looked at the sign ahead of us, and, for some reason known only to the Universe, we ignored the sign that said '1 minute' to the left, and took the sign that said '1 hour' to the right.

The one hour walk proved to be at least three-quarters of an hour, and it was up hill and down dale, and across a couple of little bridges and so forth. Very pleasant, and it would have been well worthwhile if it had actually led to the Huka Falls. Instead it came out at a bridge where some teenage boys were jumping off the railings into the water below. Other people were lying around in the water, which turned out to be warm from the steam given off further up the hill. None of these people had come there to see the Huka Falls.

Finally we asked a couple where the Falls were. They pointed back along the path - about an hour that way....

After a short rest, back we trudged. How we'd mistaken the sign I have no idea, but sometimes it just happens. We were somewhat footsore by the time we got back to the original bridge, and went on for the hundred metres of so to see the famous Falls we'd been chasing for the last couple of hours.

They were certainly worth seeing, but not quite as remarkable as I'd thought from the air. The drop is about seven metres, but you view that from above, and so you don't get that sense of the water falling down towards you. Never mind, we have a memorable walk to record in the holiday diary instead...!

My daughter has just informed me that a float plane engine 'exploded' (as most of the news reports put it) over Lake Taupo this afternoon. Since there are only two float planes operating on Lake Taupo it could well have been the one I went on. Here's the report - which is pretty identical everywhere you look, making it rather seem as though the whole thing was a bit overblown...
A scary experience for the pilot of a float plane while in the skies over Taupo this afternoon: a full emergency response was initiated when the plane's engine blew up.

Police say members of the public who were doing a spot of weekend fishing on Lake Taupo telephoned police after seeing a smoke trail coming from the back of the plane.

The float plane managed to land safely on the water at Tokaanu Bay. No-one was injured. The Civil Aviation Authority is investigating.

The photo of Huka Falls was taken by someone who goes by the nom de plume of 'weir thru a lens' on Flickr.com

October 09 holiday - first post

I've just introduced this latest holiday on my main blog- it gives a bit of background as to why we were on holiday in the first place.

We both flew to Wellington on Wednesday the 21st - on separate planes. This had come about because when we were booking online a few months ago, we had to book separately, because my wife was doing a multi-stop and I was only doing a return trip. Consequently, Air NZ's online system couldn't somehow see the point of putting us both on the same outward flight - or perhaps it was trying to give us the cheapest options - and we took 'em!

We actually asked the guy at the desk if we could be put on the same flight, but he'd had something unpleasant for breakfast, apparently, and didn't even give the idea the time of day. (My wife later told me her flight was half empty.) I put my suitcase through, and my wife put her rucksack through (one of those we carted around Europe in 2007) and we assumed we'd meet up with them later. The rucksack had the items of food we'd brought (we were going to be staying in Youth Hostels) along with the toiletries and some clothing, and a few other odds and ends.

She duly got on her plane - the one which would stop in Christchurch, and then arrive almost at the same time as mine, which left an hour later (!) - and I sat down and waited until my own flight left. Officially it took off late - by about ten minutes - but I still managed to arrive only minutes later than my wife, who was standing by the baggage carrel when I got there - waiting for her knapsack to arrive.

And then we both waited. My suitcase came through, but no knapsack. Finally a young man from the baggage section came over to see if everything was all right. No knapsack. Did lots of tapping on his keyboard, couldn't find why it had gone awol. Assured us that it would probably be on the next flight out of Christchurch, and if so, he'd have it sent round to the Youth Hostel.

We went to get the hire car; they came and picked us up and took us to their base, and then it was off into the Wellington traffic, using my wife's recently acquired iPhone with its GPS application.

This one got the name Frankie (his predecessor in England had been Malvina), and in general he was pretty good at guiding us around the country. I'll talk about the Hostel in another post, and finish off what happened about the knapsack.

I rang the baggage people back later in the afternoon as there'd still been no sign of the pack - and no word from them. Of course, I got someone else and we had to start all over again. Still no sign. Finally, about 10 pm that night they rang: still no sign.

We had had to get some more food in (fortunately the Hostel is across the road from a New World supermarket), and we had to get some more toiletries as well. Next day still no news, and finally, late on the second night in Wellington, we got a call: the bag had gone to Auckland and then onto Napier!

They were merrily chirping on about getting it sent back to Wellington when I informed them that we were leaving for Napier in the morning, and would appreciate that they didn't start sending it around the country again. So finally we met up with our food and toiletries and odds and ends in Napier when we arrived - at the youth hostel there. The boiled eggs weren't too healthy, but the cheese survived, as did the margarine and the rest of the items.

The joys of travelling. [Photos of this trip are on a smart card in Auckland at the moment; my wife took them with her when we split after our return trip to Wellington, so they may get added in later. The photo here was taken by Stephanie Anne (flickr.com) and shows a bed/room similar to the ones we had in the Wellington YHA.]

Returning Home

The Internet at the holiday place in Cromwell was a bit expensive considering that it’s not particularly fast, so I didn't upload any more of the notes I made. Now back at home, and catching up.

It was very difficult to sleep at night in Cromwell: the bed was okay, but it was so hot and stuffy during the night, that you couldn’t decide whether you wanted to be covered or not. It was very hot and blowy on Friday, but Saturday was just plain hot, with that kind of blazingly blue sky Central is famous for. We went to Wanaka, because my daughter, who'd come to stay with us, wanted to take her five-year-old to Puzzle World. Quite a successful trip overall, and we spent a fair amount of time there. Even went through the maze, something none of us had done before. Didn’t quite make it round all four towers - the last one eluded us somehow - but did pretty well in general, and mostly only gave up because of the heat.
We were going to stay down by the lake for a while, but it was very crowded and finally we decided to come back to Cromwell so the others could go for a swim at the pool.

We considered coming back via the Lindis Pass today; it’s a different route from the one we come home normally on, pleasant enough to drive and there’s a lot less twisting and turning than there is on the usual route through Alex and Lawrence and Roxburgh. Don’t think it takes a great deal longer - if it’s longer at all.
However, in the end we did the usual route, partly because we knew that an old friend of ours had bought a cafe in Clyde, and we thought we'd look her up. Surprisingly, since we had no idea where her cafe was, we found her by asking at the first place we went into: the cafe was two doors further down! As always she was greatly pleased to see us, and we had cappuccinos on the house. Unfortunately she was so busy that she didn't have much time to stop and chat - the place wasn't rushed off its feet, but was certainly too busy to take time out.
Anyway, it was good to talk to her albeit briefly: her husband had prostate cancer a few years back, and so she sympathised greatly with my current situation!

Picture of the Clyde Bridge courtesy of the Promote Dunstan site.

Moving on

On Thursday last week, Celia and I did a meandering sort of trip over from Otematata to Cromwell; it’s quite a pleasant ride through the Lindis Pass (which isn’t one of those high up over the mountains kind of Passes) and the time went quickly enough.

Cromwell was very hot the following day, although it was pleasant enough later on to sit outside and type this. A bit of a breeze came up and the sun went down enough to take the edge of it.

Our self-contained unit had two good-sized bedrooms, a reasonable lounge area and a good toilet/bathroom. But the kitchen was ridiculous: pokey and cramped, with only one cupboard - and that was below the sink. There was a kind of bench, but it was very loosely fixed to the wall, and wouldn’t hold any great weight. The sink was all of a piece with two gas hobs that didn’t work, and then there was a plug-in unit with a couple of hot plates. No oven, but there was a fridge and a microwave. The air conditioner didn't appear to work either.

Unfortunately the kitchen rather undercuts the value of the rest of the unit, and appears to have been an add-on to the rest of the place at some point. It's plainly not geared for people who actually want to cook, but for those who might like to heat up some package meals or somesuch.

Celia went for a swim in the afternoon, but I wasn't really fussed about trying to wrap up the catheter and all underneath my swimming togs (!) It might be manageable, but the disadvantages seemed to far outweigh the advantages...

Second day

Neither of us has been laid low by drinking untreated water, so obviously our stomachs are tougher than the Waitaki District Council believes. Which is a good thing. However, today we got a call from my doctor saying that they’d written out a script for yet another antibiotic! I’ve already got enough tablets of a different kind to last me till next week, but it seems that on the basis of the lab results that came back after my last urine sample, (taken when I visited the After Hours doctor on Friday night) they think I need to be on this different antibiotic rather than the other. Will I be resistant to anything at the end of all this? LOL
Anyway, to get this script filled we had to go to the nearest chemist, who just happens to have a pharmacy in Twizel, which is a good half hour up the road from Otematata. Celia found this out from a woman who lives near where we’re staying and she said there was a bit of a shortcut to Twizel on the Omarama Rd at Prohibition Rd. (Interesting name for a road.) We found it, and headed off to Twizel.
This is an up and coming burgh, with a great big market area surrounded by shops, and its own radio station. Twizel came after Otematata in the dam-building towns. Once everyone had finished dam-building at Roxburgh, they moved half the houses to Otematata, built the Benmore dam, and then did the same thing a decade or more later when Twizel was the new place for dam-builders to be.
All these little towns have also been long-standing places for people to go for holidays. We met one man today who’s had a place in Omarama for thirty years. To me the area is a bit dry and hot at its best to be really enjoyable, but the lakes are great for fishing and boating (if you fish and boat) and everyone comes up in the Christmas holidays and meets all the people from Dunedin who they normally see at home.
Anyway, Twizel, Omarama and even Otematata are all building shopping areas: who shops there when all the visitors go home I don’t know, but obviously they think it’s worth their while. Otematata is just in the process of completing a long building that has a grocery at one end, a café in the middle and an as yet unfinished community hall at the other. Twizel, as I said, has this very new market/shopping mall. Omarama has what appears to be an all new shopping area too. Including an antiques and collectables shop. Compared to the one in Kurow it’s like going from a child‘s bedroom after he‘s thrown all his toys around in a huff to a museum display. Here everything is labelled, in groups, tidy, walkaboutable - and there’s even a display of costumes from Hercules, Xena and some other fantasy show that was made in NZ in the early 2000s which I’ve never heard of: Cleopatra in the year 2525 or some such, if I recall.
We had lunch by another one of the man-made lakes (something with Taniwha on the end of the name), headed along the road to look at the salmon farm where the salmon were threshing about as though they hadn’t seen anything to eat for a year, whenever any food was thrown into their water. And then, after our trip to the shopping metropolis of Omarama, we stopped off at a Fish and Game reserve (it’s just before you get to the Lake Benmore Camping Ground going south). Tranquillity.
Although we’d struck rain a couple of times during the day, it was warm and sunny at this stage, and the lake was a beautiful deep blue, the flowers along the banks were a kind of lilac/purple, the hills were their usual washed-out grey/blue, and the grass was actually green in some parts. After we’d sat for a while half drowsing, we went for a walk down to the lakeside. (Yes, I walked quite some distance and managed it without much discomfort at all.) There we met the man who has had the house in Omarama for thirty years, and his wife - who turned out to be a patient at the Health Centre where my wife works. Of course. My wife said, what are the odds of meeting one of my patients in a place like this? I thought, on the basis of past experience, the odds of not meeting a patient were much greater!

First day in Otematata

We discovered last night that we weren’t supposed to be drinking the water straight out of the tap, after I’d already had a least two glasses of it with my various tablets. Found it hard to get to sleep: probably feeling neurotic about the possibility of adding yet another thing to my current state of health (although I seem to be all right) alongside concerns about something going wrong with the catheter bags during the night in someone else’s bed (!) I’m finding I’m having occasional really blue days - today started off that way (not helped by sleeping very badly) but I’ll just have to keep moving forward. How people who have much worse operations to look forward to cope I’m really not sure. I’m having enough trouble with this relatively minor one.
The day started out cloudy again, and not particularly warm, but it became been sunny later and very pleasant. We went out to Benmore Dam, which is just a hop and a skip across from where we're staying, pretty much. Very spectacular, because for the first time in about ten years, they're having to let loose a lot of water - for once there's far too much in the dam.

Back on holiday

Haven't used this blog for over a year, but since we're back on holiday (albeit a rather less involved one than the last) I thought I'd use it again.

Travelled to Otematata yesterday - first day of our away-from-home holiday. We’ve been given the use of a house for four days, a house, I might add, that can hardly be classed as a crib or bach. It’s got three bedrooms, is fully furnished (and not with all the cast-offs from the real house), and all the mod cons it needs.
Otematata is near three or four of the big lakes up this way: Benmore, Aviemore, Waitaki. They’re all pretty much within spitting distance of the town.
On the way up we stopped in Oamaru and had a look at the public gardens - first time we’ve ever done that in all our times of stopping in the town. And later we stopped in Kurow, a place similar in size to Otematata, I think. It has the distinction (in our eyes, anyway) of possessing a curios/antiques/junk store which is not only itself absolutely cluttered, but has spread to a shop (maybe two) across the road, and into the two cars parked permanently outside.
It’s almost impossible to move in the main shop without feeling you’re going to knock something over, and whatever the organisational pattern is, I didn’t discover it. Books were absolutely everywhere, stacked high, low and in piles that threatened to come down when a heavy truck went through the town. Hundreds of collectors’ items stood on shelves in every direction. Outside, shelves hosted dozens of teapots, mostly metal ones.
The owner claims to able to find any book you want to ask about; just as well, as no one else has a hope of finding it. If you don’t happen across something that catches your fancy, forget about looking for something that you really want. Ninety percent of the books are shrink-wrapped. There’s a sign - amongst a number of signs - saying that all shrink-wrapped books have been inspected for marks or torn pages or any other wear. Shrink-wrapped means they’re in good condition. But it also means you can’t read a few pages to see what sort of book it is. On the other hand, there’s a sign telling people that the books are for buying, not reading in the store. And another sign demanding that parents make sure their children put all the books back in order. And another sign saying that all the hardcover books are in the store out the back; just ask, and the owner will get whatever it is you want. How you’re supposed to know what he has is another issue.
There’s also a sign saying that few stores offer the sort of service this store does!
If you follow the available space between the books you eventually come up to a dead end - and another sign on the way that says something like No thoroughfare through here. Not that there’s much chance of a customer going into that particular ‘area’ as it’s well and truly barred by the usual stacks of books.
I suspect that this shopkeeper has some really valuable stuff in the store. But he doesn’t seem to know that people like to browse, and in order to browse they have to be able to get their hands on things. Little chance of doing that here - the book you’re most likely to want to see will either be shrink-wrapped or at the bottom of a stack. Trying to pull it out will cause a major collapse.

The weather was great when we left Dunedin yesterday, but there were great black clouds looming before we got far north. It stayed warm and didn’t rain until we were nearly at Otematata. But later on, while both of us were having a bit of a kip, there was a heavy hailstorm, made all the more effective by the stones rattling down inside the metal chimney.

Back on holiday