Geraldine: 2nd and 3rd days of the Holiday

Notes written on 8.11.12 

After we left Waitaki Waters, we stopped not much further up the road for a cuppa.  It was an official rest area, situated right next to a river - but I'm not sure what river it was.  It may have been the Waitaki.

After we'd had our drink, we walked down to the river, onto the pebbly beach, and finished up playing at throwing sticks in the water and seeing whether they got into the main current or not, and then throwing stones at them to shift them. This wonderfully childlike operation took quite some time, but as the preacher at church had been saying on the previous Sunday, there are times when Time isn't of any importance.  This was one of those.


We had plenty of time between Waitaki and Geraldine, so we took the detour into Waimate, a place we’ve never given more than a passing glance to before.  We stayed there for about an hour all up; I discovered the lovely church, and Celia bought herself a pair of secondhand jandals for $2 (that she subsequently never used because they hurt her toes; once upon a time the only thing she wore was jandals!).  We went to the supermarket and found the statue of the man sitting on a log of wood; there were two rather aggressive bull mastiff type dogs sitting nearby, chained, but tending to growl at passers-by 

Church in Waimate

We travelled on and stopped in Makikihi (where they make the chips) to have some lunch (I'd always thought the spelling was Mahikihi, but Google tells me I'm wrong).  We could see the sea in the distance but couldn't quite find the road to it, which didn't matter.  In the end we stopped on a bit of grass on the side of the road across from a field utterly full of some wheat kind of growth, still green and only about two foot high, got the new gas stove out (that Celia's been dying to use) and had boiled eggs.  Delicious! (though a little difficult to hold, since we didn't have egg cups.  Celia improvised, as she always does, using a rubber glove that is intended to holding hot items from the oven.  Not sure what that was doing on board, but...)

Gas stove with billy boiling (eggs inside)

We lunched on a long deserted piece of road, but in spite of that two women walked past at different times. One, a Dutch lady, had a relation of Marley, our dog (we'd had to leave him behind with a good friend).

In Timaru I finally managed to get to see the Aigantighe Gallery - it's pronounced Egg and Tie, apparently. I've always missed making the detour to it before.  It had an exhibition of Aoraki Polytechnic students' work on in its main gallery, and that was pretty good, but the permanent collection was more interesting.  Some Frances Hodgkins, which as always didn't greatly appeal, some lovely works by C F Goldie, and three or four Colin McCahon, one of which was four tiny paintings in a black surround: two of them just glowed. Quite the most appealing McCahon I've seen, I think.

And onto Geraldine where the large camping area is in the middle of town (like the other place it's not very full, which is nice) and where this morning the birds have been singing their hearts out since 5.30.  One blackbird was doing a solo about 4.30, which is when I was first awake. It was a glorious phrase by phrase song with each phrase quite different.  (We'd gone to bed about 9.30, I think, so being awake that early wasn't entirely surprising.

This camp is rather more full of signs telling you not to do things than the very welcoming Waitaki Waters (and you had to ask at the office for any cutlery or crockery, rather like kids going to their Mum for permission), but it's a good site, and the weather has been great.  It gets very cold at night at present, so last night we added an extra blanket each - Celia of course insisted on bringing these and of course was right! - and that made a big difference.  We're going to stay another day here: we found that there's a big garden area along by the river with rhododendrons and places to walk and sit so we'll go over there and just take it easy.

Getting the tent up hasn't been fraught with trauma even though it's a bit of task but in general.  It doesn't take too long, though I actually had to lie down after I'd been hammering in the pegs, as I was feeling a bit dizzy.  I lay down on the seat on the outside table next to our tent, got Celia to pull me up because I couldn't manage it myself and then felt as if I was falling off the edge of the world.  Very odd feeling.

The birds are still going strong - it's nearly seven-thirty, and I'm looking out while I type this at the wonderful green grass, the massive trees, the bushes.  What a wonderful spell of weather we've been blessed with considering that it was hailing and raining and utterly cold on Monday!

Later on the 8th (Thursday)

We've just spent about an hour talking to a couple from Cornwall who've been touring around NZ.  They're retired teachers and one of their sons is a teacher by trade as well, although I don't think he's been doing it for some time; it's more lucrative in the IT world into which he fell by default.  They've got a son who's just moved to Qatar as well, and they've spent a big of time in a small town in Uganda with an ongoing project assisting women with adult education.  They were interested the Kiva loan scheme as something that might help them support the people in Uganda.

We've had a fairly quiet day, not going far.  Spent the morning mostly just reading in the sun - it's been beautiful today - and then we walked down by the river and read down there for a bit, and then went and visited the 1066 shop where they sell handmade knitted garments in the front sections, beautiful stuff with a variety of colours woven into them, (as well as the biggest woollen pullover in the world) and in the back is this metal mosaic copy of the Bayeux Tapestry, of all things!  This guy, Michael Linton, has spent 20 years and about two million tiny metal pieces (which came from parts of commercial knitting machines) putting this thing together.  Wikipedia notes that Linton's creation is an approximately half scale mosaic version of the Bayeux Tapestry.  It was created over a period of twenty years from 1979. The work includes a hypothetical reconstruction of the missing final section of the Tapestry—events up to the coronation of William the Conqueror on Christmas Day 1066.

Linton is a man with a mind that enjoys puzzles, and he's included an intricate puzzle in the tapestry copy that no one has solved yet, though a couple of schoolboys made great strides into it one day.  He also invented half a dozen puzzles that are distinctly difficult.  We somehow managed to buy one, as well as the DVD Rom on a pen drive which not only has all the tapestry on it, but all the books he consulted, illuminated manuscripts, puzzles, games, brass rubbings and much, much more.  And then on top of that we bought a book of puzzles in which you have to decode letters into numbers by deduction.  We spent about two hours this afternoon and only finished two of them!

Later a photographer came by wanting some footage for a promo on Geraldine that she's making and so we became temporary film stars. We've also been high on the popularity list of a particular blackbird that's been cheeky enough to sit on the table while we're feeding.

Not the best shot, but it gives some idea of what we saw. 

Before we had our tea we drove up the hill nearby and discovered a walk through the bush.  I went on my own and Celia picked me up at the other end - after she'd discovered a beautiful view of the Alps nearby.  So we haven't gone far but have fitted in quite a bit of reading and talking and puzzling.   And puzzling over the way the camp manager approached us and implied that we'd been using the power without paying for it.  We told him that we'd paid what the person at the desk told us was the cost, yesterday, but he gave the impression we'd tried to hide using it because Celia put the cord away before we went a walk!  I felt quite niggled at being unjustly accused, and even when I went over to sort it out at the office the women there (not the one who'd served us yesterday) still ignored what I had to say and basically gave the impression it was somehow our fault they'd undercharged us!  All this fuss over $3 a day.  It would have been better for their PR if they'd just said there was a misunderstanding and told us to forget about the additional money.

Nice and tidy as this place is, we've been a bit underwhelmed by the kind of 'punitive' attitude the signage takes around the place; this bit of nonsense over the power confirmed our feeling that this wasn't our favourite camping ground....