Robyn’s Secret Passage

It turns out that all the snow I’d seen in the central North Island was actually, like, the result of a major snowfall, not just normal winter conditions. It looks like my trip back north was coincidentally timed in between two closures of Desert Road.

So I’m back in old Mt Eden. In my absence, my landlord managed to evict the noisy couple in the flat next door, so there’ll be no more booming TV or full-on cooking at 2am.

I’ve spent the weekend mostly sitting on the couch, watching DVDs. I’ve discovered the magical world of audio description, sort of like spoken subtitles for blind viewers so they don’t miss out in visual action. It sounds potentially lame, but the audio description track for “Kinky Boots” was poetry. Read by a lady with a sultry English accent, it succinctly summed up the important visual action with language that matched the playfulness of the film. In fact, it was more interesting than the film itself.

I can also report that the subtitles for “Sione’s Wedding” were disappointing. They claimed to be for deaf and hearing-impaired viewers, but they weren’t, as there was no music or sound effects subtitled, and both those had an important role to play in the humour and feeling of the film. Plus the subtitles themselves were poorly punctuated. It is good to see a New Zealand DVD with subtitles, but the standard should be higher.

Anyway, like The Monkey wrote in a recent entry, “It’s good to go away, but it’s also good to come home again.”

This morning I went to the Museum of Wellington City and Sea. Because Te Papa is so awesome, Wellington’s city museum has to pick a theme and stick with it, and the theme is yo ho ho, the sea (and the city).

There was a chronological history of 20th century Wellington (and plenty of historically significant building pr0n for me to salivate and/or weep over); Wellington’s nautical history, including the Wahine disaster; and a look at ye olde Wellington, including Maori legends read by Joanna Paul.

But the trouble was, there was a school group there too. No matter where I went, the school group followed. I was quietly viewing the Wahine exhibit when, “Now, I want you to look at things like the table with the hole in the middle, and think about why the hole might be there.” (Answer: it was for the ashtray.)

I tried getting as far away from the kids as I could, but no matter where I went, they followed. No, children. Run away, little ones!

I had a look in the Film Archive. There was a display of that guy who make all those films, but that was a bit boring. The only other thing to watch was a 1994 edition of Sale of the Century, which looked like the first episode after it switched to TV3. At first I thought maybe it was a selection of TV from that era, but no. It just an episode of Sale of the Century on loop. And I watched it all.

Then I went to the City Gallery and discovered a curious thing. There was an exhibit of the works of Guy Ngan. He’d done a lot of metal decorative things for civic buildings in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, including the blue stuff atop the Bledisloe building in Auckland, which I have always admired from afar.

But the centrepiece of the exhibit was a giant aluminium wall sculpture (is that the right word) he had made for the Newton Post Office in 1973 (NZ Post had been renovating the building and didn’t want it so they donated it to the Auckland Museum). Now, the Newton PO is where I have my post office box. Its fairly ordinary. The only redeeming feature are the hand-drawn posters that feature delightfully sexist buxom ladies. But it warms the cockles of my heart to think that at one stage some wall inside the PO would have been covered with this massive artwork.

Later I met up with Max who made some nice spaghetti and meatballs and even nicer steamed pudding (yes!), which is perfect for a chilly Wellington winter night. We watched selections from his awesome collections of DVDs, and I can’t think of a better way to spend my last night in the capital.

Tomorrow it’s time to head back up north.

I was planning on another day in Palmy yesterday, but just after I wrote my last LJ entry, I logged into MSN and Regan Idolblog messaged me with the news that not only was he in Wellington, but he had tickets to the Sunday taping of the NZ Idol performance show. OMG OMG OMG.

So I hopped in my car and hooned down to Wellington, and - as if by magic - the rainy grey skies turned into brilliant blue skies and golden sunshine along the Kapiti Coast. When I arrived in the capital, I was reminded of how happy Wellington makes me. It’s just such a cool city.

I wandered around town for a bit before heading over to the St James. I have to admit that part of my decision to go to the Idol taping was because it was in the St James. I’d never been there before and I wanted to check it out. It is indeed a nice old theatre, although I’m not too sure about the barn-like new foyer that’s been build on next to the old theatre.

I haven’t had the opportunity to see any of the current Idol series and I don’t know who anyone is, but I did learn the following: there is this one guy called Ben and he is quite cute, but he is also a really good singer and if you say he isn’t you are just jealous.

There were many Ben fans sitting near me. They screamed a lot. My ears started to hurt. He’s probably a shoo-in for the top 10.

Then I drove back to my motel in Palmy, discovering along the way that since having Lasik, my night vision is quite shit and I probably shouldn’t drive at night.

Even though I wasn’t planning to go to Wellington, now that I’ve been there I think I’m going to have to go back and make that the last stop on my tour de North Island.

So I bid farewell to Wangaz and hit State Highway 3, heading southeast.

Ratana
I was hooning along when I saw an signpost pointing to Ratana. “Hey, it’s that place,” I thought. So I turned off and drove to Ratana Pa. It’s a curious little place - a settlement wholly centres around the Ratana movement. There’s the temple, some houses and a few other related buildings, and that’s about it. It’s all very nicely kept, but I felt a bit weird being there.

Feilding (i before e, except after journalism school)
Mr Slack recommended Feilding because it was sale day. I also discovered that it was market day too, so I bought some apples and fudge. Feilding appears to be a town for a rich farmers. I was surprised at the number of little boutiquey shops that sold the sort of nick-knacks that people with too much money buy.

I wandered down to the saleyards (sadly I was too late for the guided tour), but I saw some farmers up on the platforms admiring the bottoms of the cows, or whatever it is they do up there. It smelt like fresh cow poo, which isn’t an entirely unpleasant smell, but you’d probably have to have grown up on a farm to appreciate that.

There’s a clock tower in the middle of Feilding. It was playing music from a speaker, which seemed to alternate between a Spanish guitar type song and some ’90s house music. This is a direct threat to Stratford’s glockenspiel clock tower.

Palmerston North
It seemed like a good enough place to stay for a few more nights, so I found a nice motel (albeit one where some middle-aged bogans were having a loud party last night). Yesterday I visited Te Manawa, the art gallery, museum and science centre.

The art gallery had a good selection of exhibits, with Lauren Lysaght’s “Trifecta” works, a garden made of old racetrack signs of horses names and betting slips, retrospective of Natalie Woodhams, and two films by Annee Olafson.

The museum had an interesting exhibit on Savage Crescent, one of the first state housing developments in New Zealand. It included an old government propaganda film from the 1940s (I think), that showed a young married couple unable to afford to buy a house or even able to rent a nice one. Yes, well.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do today. I seem to have exhausted Palmy’s treasures in one day. I could, like, drive out to the wind turbines.

New Plymouth
I was going to go to the Bowls Museum, but it was closed. Actually, it was unattended, but to have got it attended would hav involved going into the adjacent bowling club, and that might have made me look like a bowls enthusiast.

Inglewood
This is where the FunHo! toy museum lives. You’d never get away with naming a toy company that these days. I had a look at the collection of old FunHo! toys, and I was reminded that FunHo! made excellent sandpit toys.

Whangamonona
From Stratford I went along the “Forgotten World Highway”, aka The Road Between Stratford and Taumarunui. About halfway along that is the little settlement of Whangamomona. There’s a hotel, so I had lunch there. A self-proclaimed farmer’s wife, who was helping out behind the bar, made me some potato wedges. The walls of the hotel were covered with various photos of the area, as well as a good 100 years of local rugby team photos. Once a year Whangamonona declares itself to be an independent republic, but at the moment it was just being a nice little settlement.

Stratford
Stratford-upon-Patea is taking the whole Shakespeare thing a bit too seriously now. Like, having all the streets named after Shakespearean characters is cool, but the mock-mock-Tudor is a bit much. Nailing black planks of wood diagonally across a 1950s fibrolite shack does not make a Tudor building.

Hawera
There’s a water tower in Hawera. I walked up it, but didn’t go all the top because I got that fear-of-being-inside-large-concrete-spaces thing. However, it did offer lovely views of the ‘Naki and the mountain.

Patea
I took a photo of the giant concrete canoe - the one they sing in front of in the Poi E video. Across the road is the Poi E Information Centre, but it appeared to be closed. Further down the road was the HQ of the Patea Maori Club, which was totally awesome to see.

Wanganui
Where I am now. There appears to be some sort of school-sport-related event in town, meaning all the nice motels are full, so I’m staying in one that the Lonely Planet describes as “clean” and “good value”. However, it is “a cracker day out there,” as the computer/kite shop man just said to another customer.