One Of Terry's Corners Of the Online World

Well, queen_nephthys and I are sitting outside a cool cafe in Devonport, across the harbour from Auckland, sipping very good coffee and updating our travel notes. We did the touristy stuff today, went to the top of the Sky Tower, checked out a sex shop (very nice) and the goth chick at the Lush soap shop gave us a free bar of massage soap because it was our honeymoon and we described our wedding ceremony to her. I bought queen_nephthys her wedding present finally, a nephrite necklace, which is a good thing for a couple of reasons. One: I was fulfilling a commitment to her and two: I can stop looking for just the right gift now.

The Sky Tower was interesting. 180 metres above Auckland, they have sections of the floor that are slabs of 32 centimetre thick perspex. It took guts to walk across a transparent surface that far up, but we both did it several times and it gets easier the more you do it. Call it Extreme Walking. Other people seemed to avoid the see-through floor, but not us. We're a special breed of cat, as Chuck Connors once said, thrillseekers.

Auckland Harbour is beautiful, reminiscent of Sydney's in a lot of ways, which did make me feel a little homesick. More later, having a great time.

9.22 PM

For some reason known, only to Kiwi anthropologists, a hell of a lot of the fush and chups shops here in Auckland are run by Chinese people, as opposed to Australia where it's people of Mediterranean origin that get the gig. On a sampling of exactly one, I have to say that the single sole and only Chinese run fish and chip shop we tried tonight was shit. The chips were ordinary, the hoki fell apart as I tried to eat it and cascaded onto my lap and the floor and the paua fritter was execrable. We didn't eat it all, but on the plus side, the whole mess only cost us slightly over five bucks Australian. Next, we decided to explore the wonderful world of Aeotearoan supermarkets. We started at the top end, going to Foodtown which is a 24 hour per day megasupermarket franchise. A little Maori kid outside stopped us so we could sponsor him for a school walkathon for $NZ2. Maybe it was legit, maybe it was a scam, either way he was a nice kid.

Tomorrow, we're travelling up to the Bay of Islands, so we needed travel food. Mineral water, potato chips, coffee and a plunger... stuff like that. We ended up spending more than $100 on stuff. This includes late night snacks. So here's my review of NZ snackies or as queen_nephthys calls them, shnackie schmores. Start off with Verkers Gluten Free Beersticks. These are small salami sticks about the circumference of cocktail frankfurts but longer. They're good. Mild enough not to overpower a beer (though I'm eating them with L&P, but strong enough to be a man's snack food. Snack #2 is Lico Giant Green Olives. In the deli cabinet at Foodworld, with those funky slightly pinky downlights they have to make the meat look prettier, these things appeared a bright wasabi paste green. That was the buying point, poisonous green looking olives. Back here at the hotel, they're a more normal olive green, but they taste good. The pickling is mild but the flesh is firm and delicious. Another thumbs up.

queen_nephthys got a bunch of "mixed salami" which I considered a dubious choice. Her comment is "yech! Not as good as Don salami". I told her to try the dutch salami, but what can you do.

Now we're watching an American reality tv show where a guy is conning a free meal at a posh LA restaurant by getting his mate who looks like Brad Pitt to pretend to be punked by another reality tv show.

More manana.

Okay, it's Thursday and we're sitting in a McDonald's in Wellsford, some way north of Auckland. The weather's cloudy, but the bagel we had was good. A note on NZ pronunciation: there's a town on the Bay of Plenty called Whakatane, but due to it being a Maori word, it's pronounced Fuckatanay. The woman who does the weather on the morning show on Channel One seems slightly embarrassed when she says it. queen_nephthys didn't believe me about the WH=F thing until she heard the weather report. We're now heading up towards Whangarei, which is pronounced Funga-ray, and a couple of days on the Bay of Islands, but when we get down near Rotarua, we're definitely heading off track a little to go to Fuckatane.

The drive to the Bay of Islands is a roller coaster ride and not for the faint hearted. We did it well, having ventured down the Great Ocean Road in Victoria on a regular basis. We stopped at a cafe/information centre in Whangarei, where a nice woman looked up to see what the rules are about bringing wood products into Australia. The gist is that we should be cool with tikis and stuff.

Paihia sits on the western shore of the Bay of Islands a couple of kilometres south of Waitangi, where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 18something giving the British Empire dominion over New Zealand. In the summer, this is a happening place here in Northland. In the first week of Spring, things are a little quieter. This morning we took the ferry a mile or so across the bay to the town of Russell, which was once a whaling station considered the hellhole of the Pacific. This morning it was a pleasant, history rich village where "Watson's Dog", a friendly part alsatian bitch, escorted us around the town until we found a cafe for coffee and home-made muffins where she left us to sniff lamp-posts and bite tyres. Back in Paihia we drove up to Waitangi, which was half shut due to renovations at the Treaty House, so we bought some postcards and drove up the dirt road to Horaru Falls, a pleasant little waterfall area. After lunch, it was time for the boat cruise through the Bay Of Islands to Cape Brett and the Hole In The Rock. The crew and skipper of the catamaran-hulled boat we took up there were all women, something you probably wouldn't see in Australia, unfortunately. queen_nephthys sat on the front row of seats on the top deck, in spite of the chill air and wind as we toured the inhabited and uninhabited islands down the length of the bay until all that was left was the high, rocky spine of Cape Brett and the highly arched offshore rock that wave action had bored a fifteen metre high, nine metre wide hole through. A school of trevally boiled the water in front of us as we lingered off the entrance to the hole. Both of us were more than a little surprised when our boat gently eased into the gap, in spite of the Pacific Ocean waves that were rolling through it. There was about a two metre gap on either side of the boat, which didn't reassure us a lot, especially when the top deck started rocking like Jerry Lee Lewis on amphetamines. (I have video evidence of this happening, and also of both queen_nephthys and I giggling and laughing as wave action tries to force us both to swim to Argentina.)

Then we backed halfway back into the Hole, just for the hell of it while water roiled against the rocks on either side of us. This was even cooler than the perspex floor on the Sky Tower. After that, the gannet rookery where fur seals were wind-bathing was an anti-climax.

Dinner tonight at Cafe No. 6 was excellent. The bistro is owned by a German guy who married an Indian-Kiwi woman. The food was excellent. My seafood chowder entree was superb, as was the pepper steak and queen_nephthys's prawns with rice impressed her too. Tomorrow we drive between six and eight hours to get to Rotorua. Fun fun fun.

Next day 2.15 pm

After a seven hour drive in pouring rain we are here in Rotorua which smells the way a roast chicken does if you overcook it. Booked into the hotel, going to a hangi tonight, and all is well. Lots of Maori kids around me in the internet cafe playing Worlds of Warcraft and swearing when they get killed. The local park here has steam coming out of it in a hundred different places and as you drive into town, you can see steam vents in people's back yards. The skin of the world is pretty thin here.