Things from my notebook that I couldn’t wrangle into any sort of narrative After I’d checked in at the hotel in Christchurch, I went up to my room, swiped my room card and opened what I thought was my hotel room. Instead I found myself in a small space, faced with three doors. I felt [...]
There comes a time in the life of any New Zealander from the generation known as “X”, when one must look back and wonder what happened to the Play School toys. Big Ted, Manu and Humpty now live at Te Papa, the sign at the Otago Settlers Museum says. The bear, the wahine and the [...]
I didn’t meant to go to the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame. It was an accident, I swear. See, I’d been basing my travels on my 1969 edition of the Shell Guide to New Zealand (edited by Maurice Shadbolt, cover by Colin McCahon), so anything opened in the last 40 years was off my [...]
The road to Bluff is desolate and beautiful. But it’s also so isolated. It seems like the sort of place where people would only willingly live if they had a really good reason, like running away from extreme levels of parking fines. The sky was grey, but the landscape had a strange brightness to it. [...]
If I ran a museum, it would not have a mannequin of an historic person, such as a miner, a blacksmith or a fisherman. And it would not have a motion-triggered recording of said character talking about what life is like in his historical time, voiced by a New Zealand actor struggling with an accent [...]
“Hagley Park is the second-largest manicured park in the world. It’s the largest in the southern hemisphere.” The airport shuttle driver provided a commentary for the English tourists in the van. “It’s a real asset for the city. I always love seeing people walk along the river, jog along it.” It was a cheerful, sunny [...]
I rented a car ($20, cheap) and was upgraded from a Corolla to a Camry. Not that it made any difference from the driver’s seat, but perhaps people would gaze at me and think, “Oh, she’s a driving Camry – a sensible family sedan. Good choice.” My aim was to head for Akaroa, and I [...]
New Brighton, or Brighton, or B-Right-On is a seaside suburb. So is Sumner, but the difference is that while Sumner is quite nice, Brighton is a bit shit. The trouble with New Brighton is that it used to be a boom town. For a couple of decades, it was the only place in New Zealand [...]
Simon and David were two businessmen in their mid 40s. David was visiting Christchurch and it was Simon’s job to give his colleague a tour of the city. Today they were visiting the Canterbury Museum and had stumbled across the Bluff Paua House exhibit around the same time I did. But before we were allowed [...]
Wellington is quite a nice place, Ron the taxi driver tells me. Well, at least it was the last time he went there – which was in the ’80s, when he was in the circus. Though, he says, he did have trouble finding a hotel that would serve him a drink. The pressure of conversation [...]