Art Deco adventure

A few days after visiting Christchurch, still struggling with the aftermath of earthquakes of over 5 years ago, we visited Napier, a town with its own unique earthquake experience. The town was destroyed in an earthquake in 1931, and its claim to fame these days is that it was rebuilt mostly in the then-fashionable Art Deco style. Walking around, particularly after visiting Christchurch, I marvelled that so much was built so quickly (mostly in 1932 and 1933, although some major buildings were built later due to money issues), in the middle of the Depression, and that they went to the effort to produce decorative and fashionable buildings.

We took a walking tour in the morning - 1 hour, although I think one of the longer tours would have been better (they run longer tours in the afternoon, but we wanted to get an overview straight away in the morning). One thing I didn't know was that, although the earthquake was obviously very destructive, destroying nearly all the buildings in central Napier and nearby Hastings and taking the lives of 256 people, it also had a fringe benefit. The land was lifted up by about two metres, which caused a lagoon around the city to drain and thus added around 40 km sq. of dry land to the area. Without this, Napier would have had little room to grow and would probably have remained a small town to this day (it currently clocks in at a respectable 61,500 people).

Most of the Art Deco buildings are essentially just square concrete blocks, fancied up with windows and decorative façades. This was a fortuitous mix between the rectilinear Art Deco style with the realisation that many of the ornately-decorated Victorian buildings had been particularly fragile and dangerous during the earthquake. The individual buildings may not compare to the likes of the Empire State building or other well-known Art Deco designs, but Napier has the most concentrated and coherent ensemble of Art Deco architecture in the world.

The ASB bank (I think originally a BNZ bank), one of my favourites for its elegant simplicity

Ceiling of the bank foyer, it is notable for incorporating Maori designs

Inside the bank

Ceiling detail (I can't remember what these are called. Awnings? Porticos?)

Trinity Church, built in 1876, so one of the few city centre buildings that pre-date the earthquake

St Paul's. As far as I can find out, the original was destroyed in a fire in 1929, just about rebuilt, then destroyed in the earthquake. There's a real kick in the pants for you.

How awesome would it be to work here? (You can, if you become a real estate agent. Nothing's perfect.)

Marine Parade. The trees date from before the earthquake - they just hung on and enjoyed the 2-metre ride

The Masonic hotel. The Queen once stayed here

You mostly have to look up to enjoy the Art Deco architecture

The Public Trust building in the neo-classical style, another pre-earthquake survivor

This is hard to see, but I enjoyed the "Self Help Shoppers Fair". I assume it means you can pick out your goods yourself, rather than them being behind a counter, but I like to imagine a more neurotic scene 

The "Six Sisters" on Marine Parade

Street lettuce!

Cutting-edge neon lighting in the theatre, built in 1937


We were in Napier on a Saturday, and as the following day was our 2-year anniversary, we decided to go out for a fancy dinner. We chose Pacifica, a fine-dining restaurant that offers a choice only between two five-course dégustation menus, which change nightly. It describes itself as "Michelin-quality food" but with relaxed service, so we had an enjoyable time critiquing the meal as to whether it really was Michelin quality. (Not that I'm an expert, but it was fun.) We both had the seafood dégustation (you can choose between seafood or meat emphasis, sorry vegetarians), and it was overall good quality, with some courses hitting the spot better than others. The service was attentive, friendly and relaxed, although one of the waitresses did the "squat down beside the table" thing, which personally I don't like. One thing that you definitely can't fault the restaurant on is the price. Jules took the wine-matching option, I didn't because they were all whites and I don't really drink whites. I had two glasses of bubbly, a red and a glass of port (mostly because Jules got a sherry with his dessert and I had wine envy, even though I usually steer clear of dessert wines, digestifs and so on). The bill for two came to $201, which is 121€ at current rates. I also liked that you could watch the chefs at work (although it meant peeping around a woven mat).

Glammed up for the evening. I even blow-dryed my hair, which I never do (can you tell?). (I was amazed by the number of women who seemingly bothered to do this every day in a campsite!)

First course was a John Dory sashimi, our least favourite dish. I suppose good to start low and end high

Corn tortellini. This was my favourite course, mostly because I was unenthused looking at it on the menu and turned out to really love it. 

A yummy crunchy swiss chard chip hiding a mussel and prawn broth (should have photographed it sans chard). This was a mid-field runner for both of us

Sesame-crusted albacore tuna with salt-and-pepper squid. Jules' favourite and my runner-up. I loved the melt-in-your-mouth tuna (having previously never really liked tuna that didn't come out of a can), but the squid was a touch flabby

My final course - I'm usually a dessert girl, but dessert was coffee-themed :( The cheese was nice, but you know, cheese is cheese unless it comes on one of those groaning cheese carts and you can have as much as you like

Jules' dessert - a yummy vanilla ballotine sadly flanked (ruined) by mocha and espresso creams

A slightly tipsy selfie back in the van after dinner

The Masonic sign at night

Marine Parade

Like most of the stops on our trip, I'd never visited Napier before, but had always wanted to. It's a lovely little city to spend a couple of nights and even celebrate a special occasion. I think it's always good to show that there are things to see and do in New Zealand that aren't outdoorsy or beachy-type things (as fun and amazing as those may be).

Like a rolling stone

There have been several days on the trip that have essentially just been driving days. The longest drives we did in one go were around 6 hours on paper, but it inevitably takes longer with breaks and so on, plus we aimed not to drive at night, so it was quite easy to spend most of a day driving. These days tend not to be wildly exciting, so I've glossed over them mainly, but I have a few photos from the trip between Queenstown and Christchurch which are quite nice, so I'll use the opportunity to write a little bit about life on the road.

Most days, we were up around 8 and out of the campsite around 10, which was usually check out time. Campground life usually doesn't lend itself too well to lazy mornings in bed, plus we had plenty of early starts, so were pretty much in a rhythm of getting up at a reasonable hour. It is possible to "freedom camp" i.e. just park your van any old place, in many areas in New Zealand, as long as your camper is self-contained (has a toilet, essentially). We never took advantage of this, mostly so we could plug in to electricity each night and also in order to use the facilities like toilets and showers. There is a toilet in the van, but what goes in must come out, so it was pretty much for emergency use only. I, personally, classed needing the loo in the middle of the night as an emergency. Jules tried to argue that I should get up and use the campground facilities, but I argued that represented an undue burden on me, since I always have to get up at least once and he never does (TMI?) I won that round, although since he was the one who ended up emptying the toilet, one might question who was, in fact, unduly burdened by that arrangement.

I've never been particularly attracted to the idea of camping. Sleeping in a real bed instead of in a tent made things a lot easier of course, and for the most part it was fine.
Things I didn't like:
- even in not in the middle of the night, it's a pain to have to go out of the van and inside to use the bathroom/shower etc. It was always a dilemma, since I've not a big fan of wandering about in public in my nightwear, but on the other hand I basically want to be in my jimjams as soon as I'm "home" for the evening. A dressing gown my mum got me came in handy for this.
- talking of the bathrooms, none of them were horrible, but a shared campsite bathroom is never going to be that great. Sometimes you had to queue for the showers, sometimes they were cold, or you had to pay, or they were on a timer, or they weren't that clean, etc.
- we had great kitchen facilities in the van - an oven, four burners, a microwave, a fridge-freezer, etc., so we can't really complain. But we did learn that we had to scale down the ambition of some of the things we wanted to prepare. We didn't have a pot large enough for pasta, so ended up making spaghetti in the frying pan, for example, and anything that required multiple pots and pans at once was pretty much impossible due to space constraints. We started off basically wanting to cook like we did at home, but it just needed a different mindset, really.
- Obviously, the van's pretty big, so good for sleeping in, not so great for popping down to the shops. Parking and manoeuvring was sometimes an issue. I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time with a motorhome in a city.

Good things:
- We never did freedom camping, but we also never booked anywhere in advance. It was great having the freedom to adjust our plans, knowing in the absolute worst-case scenario, we would always have a bed for the night. It was easy to decide on the fly to stay an extra night somewhere or move on earlier.
- Everything in the van always needs to be stowed away securely before you drive, otherwise the consequences range from annoying rattling to potentially dangerous objects flying around. This took a bit of time each day, but you quickly get into a routine with it. It's definitely quicker and easier than having to haul bags in and out of a hotel and live out of a suitcase the whole time. There's something kind of nice about the "a place for everything, and everything in its place" set-up, and the van has all kinds of cute little buttons and latches and hidey-holes, so it can feel quite fun tidying up!
- The cost. We didn't have to pay rental fees, of course, but paying for campsites was at least half the price of any motel rooms we saw (and I imagine those are not your fanciest motels). It usually cost around $50 a night, which seems a bit steep considering they don't have to clean up after you or provide anything much beyond electricity and a bathroom (and even then, they sometimes charge you to take a shower), but it still definitely helped our budget.

Overall, I'm probably not going to be signing up to spend a week in the woods in a tent, but the motorhome lifestyle is quite fun!

Some things we ran across in our travels -

Ye olde New Zealand custom

Kind of didn't want to put my hand in here

The real white man's burden: having to come up with names for everything all at once. 

(There were many such imaginatively-named "no. 1 and no. 2" landmarks. I think the record was up to about no. 10 or 11.)

Back to our drive from Queenstown to Christchurch. We toyed with the idea of breaking the journey at Tekapo, staying the night and doing a tour of the observatory there. Supposedly it's a great place to see the stars, due to the lack of light pollution. However, it was a cloudy day with more clouds predicted for the evening, so we just made a brief stop at Lake Tekapo and kept going.

We crossed over the middle of the South Island via the Lindis Pass, 971m up

"Roaring Meg", a stream flowing down from a dam, generating hydro electricity

Mt. Cook, NZ's highest peak, is hiding in the clouds there

We hadn't been intending to visit Lake Tekapo, but I heard so much about it on the internet and from people in real life, that we decided to make the small detour to go see it. All the photos you see online of it are basically this:

Source

Well, when we got there, it was a bit cloudy, all of those flowers (lupins?) were pretty much dead, and we were suffering from major lake fatigue. Over the previous few days, we had been to lakes Wanaka, Te Anau, Manapouri, and Wakitipu, so when we got to Lake Tekapo, we were a bit meh about it all, to be honest. It's a fine lake, but for once, not really living up to the postcard image.

Beautiful clear water

Peach teats

Wai-o-Tapu was a pretty full-on morning, so we were both pleased to only have a short drive to our next stop, Taupo, where again we were getting out of the van for a night on terra norota. This time, we were staying at my parents' place, which is actually up for sale. It just so happened a real estate agent was showing prospective buyers around when we turned up, announced (politely, of course) that we were staying there and that it was our first time visiting the house. The real estate agent finished up and left without checking our credentials at all, so I think I might be on to a great scam here. Just turn up to an open home, tell them you own the place and then ring up a few days later with a funny voice and tell them you're taking the property off the market. Badda bing, badda boom, free house! Flawless plan. (Or at least just wait until the agent leaves and then steal a lot of stuff.)

We had two reasons for visiting Taupo - my parents' place and I have a cousin living there. Otherwise, it had usually been a drive-through kind of place on my itineraries through the North Island. Which is kind of crazy when you look at it, because although the town itself isn't the prettiest, it's on the edge of a huge and beautiful lake, fringed with impressive mountains.

There's even a bit where you can try to get a hole in one on a floating green!

The photos just show a tiny slice of the lake. I think you have to drive around Lake Taupo to fully appreciate just how big it is - 616 square kilometres. More impressive than its size is the fact that it occupies a volcanic caldera formed by the eruption of a supervolcano about 26,500 years ago. This was the largest known volcanic eruption in the last 70,000 years. It's truly impressive to sit on the edge of the lake and think that here was once a massive volcano, and to imagine the forces required to create a huge crater where it once sat. And there on the horizon are the volcanoes of Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro, as a reminder that New Zealand is still very much prey to volcanic and seismic activity.

In fact, I and my family were there during one of the most recent major eruptions of Mount Ruapehu, during the night of 25 September 1995 (celebrating my parents' Silver Wedding anniversary). We were staying at a hotel at the foot of the volcano, so had to be evacuated off the mountain. It wasn't a spectacular firey eruption, rather ash clouds, gases and mud flows (lahars), but still a pretty good story!

Driving on towards Wellington the next day, we got to get a better view of the mountains from the Desert Road. I teased Jules a little bit with this one, implying we were going through a real desert. In fact, it's just an area where little vegetation grows, due to the impact of volcanic eruptions through the centuries (I actually thought it was because of lack of rainfall, but apparently that's not true, it's because of the poor quality of soils and seeds and dry winds). Whatever the reason, it makes for a very different and impressive landscape. The variety of landscapes in a relatively small country is one thing that makes New Zealand so special.

With Mt Ruapehu, the erupty one

Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe (and Tongariro??)

The Desert Road

A van with a view!

Heather on the Desert Road

Mmm, Peach Teats. Calves love 'em!

The hills densely covered with NZ's signature sheep