Spiders From Mars / A Forest

19^th January 2010

My hatred of all things spider began at an early age and was confirmed nightmarishly at the age of eleven when, upon waking parched in the middle of the night, I took a hefty gulp of what I thought was water from the glass next to my bed before realising, to my unending horror, that I had unwittingly slurped a giant and very much alive arachnid straight into my gob. The fact that this most devious of spiders (and they do seem to develop ever more devious ways of torturing me) was still alive when I projectile-expunged it from my mouth onto the carpet only added to my belief that these creatures could only be the work of the devil himself. As I watched that spider twitching menacingly in a pool of water-spew, my younger self immediately declared war on its entire species - a war I would be prepared to fight until the bitter end.

For a long time, this was a losing battle. My arachnophobia frequently got the better of my common sense and compelled me to undertake a nightly series of almost certainly needless “spider checks” before I would be prepared to attempt to sleep - checks that sometimes involved the complete dismantling and reassembly of my bedding. That I never again uncovered another such loathsome specimen under my sheets or beneath my pillow was beside the point to my younger self – one had already infiltrated the supposed safety net of my bedspread and I wasn’t prepared to let it happen again. Certainly, the oft-quoted statistic about humans swallowing in their sleep at least one spider per lifetime was enough to convince me that no let up in my quest to be forever rid of the eight-legged bastards could ever be allowed. In any case, while my bed may not have thrown up any further arachnid traumas, spiders were very much present in other parts of the house - lurking hairily in cracks in the walls, spinning sinister webs at the backs of the cupboards and pulsing like black hearts under the bathroom plughole. Quite simply, they had to be stopped.

In the early days of the spider war, my main weapon was my dad, who would frequently be called upon to despatch any sighted enemy agents with a swift stamp of the shoe or slap of a newspaper while the rest of my family (my mum and younger brother Nic having also joined the cause by now) stood shrieking in the next room. Later, I took to the battlefield myself, at first with similar weapons of brute force, but later with the far more sophisticated, not to mention civilised, Spider Hoover. This ingenious device, discovered by my gran in a local mail order catalogue, consisted of a battery-operated suction pump attached to a long transparent cylinder in which the spider, having been hauled inside with a brief powersuck, would reside until you took it outside and deposited it in a bush or tree as far away from the house as possible. Not only did the Spider Hoover provide a quick and easy method of capturing offending arachnids (the old glass ‘n’ postcard method was fraught with potential danger and once ended up with a spider running up the length of my arm like an eight-legged Roger Bannister) but it also allowed one the begrudging satisfaction of knowing that no blood had been shed in the pursuit of a spider-free household.

One evening soon after I first met Holly, she spotted the Spider Hoover (my third model, I believe) on the kitchen shelf in my London flat and immediately thought it was some kind of breast pump. When I calmly explained what it really was, I think she probably wished it had been a breast pump. Kiwis, you see, don’t appear to suffer from arachnophobia. In fact, Holly was so appalled by the very notion of me being scared of spiders that it put serious doubts into her head about my masculine credentials. I tried to explain my fears (“come on, they’re fat black hairy blobs with eight legs and eight eyes – what’s not to be scared of?!”) but to little avail. New Zealanders, it soon became clear, are used to living side by side with spiders in a way that most of us Brits would never allow. They’re also far more inclined to “rough it” in their tents and batches and log cabins, while we swan around in posh hotels and ski resorts. And roughing it in New Zealand inevitably means sleeping in very close proximity to lots and lots of spiders.

I should be grateful really. This is New Zealand, after all, not Australia; the native spiders are not, as a rule, particularly large and only one species - identified by a distinctive white dot on its back - is capable of inflicting a poisonous bite on humans. It just seems to me that there are a heck of a lot of them out here. Part of the reason, no doubt, is that we’ve spent much of our first three months here living out in the countryside, where spiders the world over are far more likely to be found residing than in your average city apartment. And, seeing as I have come here unarmed (the Spider Hoover, on Holly’s strict instructions, is currently gathering dust in a box somewhere in England), I have been forced to approach my new arachnid-rife environment with a more diplomatic approach. Fortunately, the house spiders here are slightly less terrifying than their British counterparts. Rather than being big hairy black things that lie in wait in darkened nooks and crannies, the spiders here tend to be of the more spindly and small-bodied variety and prefer to hang from the ceilings of rooms and thus at least give you a bit of a warning about their intentions. Though I still conduct the occasional de-spidering if I happen to see one in the vicinity of the bed (in the absence of the Hoover, this usually takes the form of an admittedly primitive scrunch-attack with a tissue), I’m more inclined to follow the “if you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you” mantra that my dad tried unsuccessfully to instil in me as a child.

Unfortunately, just as I thought I was getting to grips with the idea of living peacefully with the Kiwi spiders, I came face to face with one that made my childhood spider-swallowing episode seem like a walk in the park. A fist-sized Avondale Spider, a breed I later discovered had been brought over from Australia and is to be found only in and around the Waitakere region of NZ (ie. right on our doorstep), had somehow found its way into the house and was stationed in all its disgusting glory above the threshold of the back door. Upon espying it, I immediately forgot everything I had learnt during the previous two months and screamed like a girl while Holly - lion-hearted heroine that she is - removed the beast with the improvised use of a floor mop. To be honest, I don’t think even my trusty old Hoover would have been big enough to deal with that one.

Traumatising though this incident had been, it wasn’t enough to completely shatter my new-found spider-facing confidence and I was therefore able to approach our recent two day sojourn “roughing it” in Holly’s dad’s forest in the King Country with a far lesser degree of trepidation than I might have done a year ago. Now I don’t want to give the impression here that I am a complete novice when it comes to the great outdoors. I did, after all, spend a year of my school career as an RAF cadet, which entailed several intensive expeditions to the English countryside and nights spent in tents comprising little more than a sheet draped over two paltry wooden sticks. But it is true that such experiences in my life have been few and far between and our two days in the forest opened up to me a whole new world of al fresco adventure.

Firstly, on our way down to the forest, located approximately three and half hours’ drive directly south of Auckland, we paid a visit to the world famous Waitomo Caves, where I had my first ever encounter with the remarkable glow worm. Though I have long been beset by a morbid fear of spiders, I am generally on friendly terms with most other insects. Holding wriggling garden worms in my palm, for example, has never been problematic for me, so I entered the glow worms’ dwelling with excitement rather than trepidation. After an initial walking tour through an impressive cave that resembled the inside of a slowly-melting cathedral, we were loaded into a wooden boat that ferried us along an underground river surrounded by thousands of glow worms. With everyone obediently following our guide’s plea to be silent in order to preserve the cave’s ambience, it was a mesmerising journey, with the worms on the walls and ceiling resembling nothing less than a field of glittering stars in the night sky.

After a brief stop for lunch, we continued on our journey to the forest, a massive 130 hectare block in the middle of the mountains that Holly’s dad Philip has co-owned with some other relatives for the past fifteen years. Forests have always held a strange fascination for me, no doubt inspired by my love of books such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a child, and one of the things I miss most about England is the atmospheric walks I used to take through the knotted old woods near my home town. I had never before, though, been fortunate enough to walk through a privately-owned wood guaranteed to be free of other ramblers and travellers. Indeed, the only animal lifeforms we encountered during our stay there were a couple of wild goats and an unexpectedly quick-footed hedgehog.

Densely populated with over twenty thousand trees, from steely oaks to skinny pines that towered far above our heads, much of the forest felt beautifully untamed, though this did have the downside that our feet and legs were cut to shreds by the low-lying brambles and blackberry bushes that had grown out haphazardly across the walking tracks. Most scenic of all was the fresh water river that runs for over three kilometres right down the forest’s spine, and as I walked up it, often tummy-deep in water, I was ecstatic to be able to tick off another personal first. Though there were no fish or eels to be seen, the waterfalls and highly distinctive rock formations en route were more than enough to keep me mesmerised, even when the water temperature felt sub-zero and my right arm was aching from holding my camera far enough away from the water that there was no risk of it meeting the same fate as its predecessor on the beach at La Rochelle…

After a long afternoon of exploration, both in and alongside the river, we returned to what would be our lodgings for the night – a custom-built log cabin with the most basic of amenities, bunk-beds and an external “long drop” for a toilet. In former times, I may have baulked at such conditions but my time in New Zealand has taught me that the country’s incredible natural scenery is almost always best experienced by getting down and dirty with it, rather than from the cosy confines of a hotel or organised tour. It was this outlook, I think, that allowed me to sleep relatively worry-free, in spite of the fact that I knew I was sharing my bed not only with Holly, but also with several of my former arachnid adversaries. I took this not only as a sign of progress in my long-running war against the spider race, but also a more general realisation that the home comforts of my life in London aren’t necessarily as important to me as I thought they were. In the absence of electricity, we relied on cold food for sustenance, candles for reading light and a battered set of Chequers for entertainment, not to mention a hole in the ground for you know what. And though I can’t suddenly claim to be a born-again Hobbit after just a couple of days in the great outdoors, the experience did at least teach me that a night without the laptop and the television is not only an achievable feat, but actually bloody good fun as well.

Jonny

New Year

10^th January 2010

In my tender 27 years of experience, New Year’s Eve sucks. In fact, I hate it. However and wherever you choose to spend it, it is almost always characterised by a sense of desperate anti-climax, stomach-churning social awkwardness and an overdose of horrible alcoholic concoctions to which you’d give a planet-sized berth at any other time of the year.

This is all society’s fault, of course. We are programmed from an early age to “celebrate” the dawn of a new year, as if “having a good time” at the stroke of midnight on 31^st December were some kind of condition for entry into civilised society. When someone asks you what you’re doing for New Year’s and you reply, “not much”, it is tantamount to admitting you’re a witless killjoy with no mates. But really, is there any real incentive for doing anything vaguely out of the ordinary on this apparently most sacrosanct of evenings? For a start, it’s all but impossible to gather a half-decent quota of friends together in one place as they’re either dispersed throughout the country with their respective families or, as is more likely, far more organised than you and have already made far more exciting plans. Then there’s the nightmare of actually trying to find a venue that isn’t a) closed for a private party, b) slapping on exorbitant New Year’s Eve premiums, or c) rubbish. There is always, of course, the budget option of staying in and having a few mates round for a dinner party but that inevitably means spending at least half the night being exposed to the background radiation of TV’s pitiful excuse for a New Year’s shindig. Cheesy to the point of nausea, such shows, which fester with the inane banter of half-pissed celebrity guests interspersed with roving reporters desperately attempting to stave off hypothermia whilst simultaneously trying to sound enthusiastic about the accompanying throng of people standing around doing not very much as they wait for the obligatory midnight fireworks display, are enough to make you wish you'd gone to bed at 7 o'clock when the going was still good.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, one is forced to somehow negotiate the stroke of midnight itself in a way that somehow preserves oneself a small modicum of dignity. In the context of a booze-fuelled evening stood next to a bunch of strangers in a pub or restaurant, this is all but impossible, especially when your fellow revellers start holding hands and drunkenly braying to the tune of that godawful drone Auld Lang Syne with its 85 choruses and 157 verses. If you’re stupid enough to choose the “stand around awkwardly in the middle of a freezing street to sample that ‘special’ new year’s atmosphere” option, you’ll most likely have frozen to death by the time midnight comes around anyway, but even if you haven’t you still have to overcome the inevitable fact that everyone’s watches will be slightly out of sync and thus endure a mind-melting cacophony of different countdowns before being subject to the customary piss poor Catherine wheel. Even if one decides to run with the low-key dinner party option, you are still not saved from the humiliation of having to go round the room wishing each person a happy new year and desperately trying to decide upon the most appropriate accompanying gesture from a menu containing, in no particular order, the one cheek kiss, the double cheek kiss, the triple cheek kiss, the hug, the cuddle, the hand shake, the back slap or some other indecorous bodily interaction.

Bearing all this in mind, it was to my great relief that my first New Year’s Eve in New Zealand offered up a far more enjoyable concluding chapter to 2010 than I thought possible. This was no doubt helped along by the fact that Holly had the great fortune of being born on 31st December and therefore provided a far better excuse for a proper knees-up than your average New Year’s Eve. We also had the bonus of being offered the chance to spend it up in the Coromandel peninsula, where the parents of Holly’s very good friend Julianne own a batch house within a stone’s throw of the beach at the resort town of Whangamata (pronounced, inexplicably, as Fongamatar by the locals). The batch provided an excellent base at which to gather a perfectly-sized group of friends to see in the new year without the need to splash out inordinate amounts of cash at a local bar or club. As with Christmas, the exemplary weather helped no end to facilitate a more dynamic programme of activities than I would have been able to experience back home and we were able to spend our final day of 2010 relaxing on the beach, stuffing our faces with greedy portions of fish ‘n’ chips on the batch’s terrace and playing outdoor drinking games into the wee hours of January 1st without the slightest call for a scarf or hat. And, thanks to Holly's serendipitous birth date, we were all able to gorge ourselves on great guilt-free servings of birthday cake throughout.

The generosity of Julianne’s parents Lyn and John in allowing us to stay with them for the rest of the weekend meant that our first days of the new year were not spent suffering from the customary post-Christmas depression but exploring some of New Zealand’s most beautiful coastal scenery. Though Wanagamata itself is something of a magnet for teenage party-goers desperate to indulge in all possible pleasures (legal or otherwise) while away from their parents, the multitude of beaches nearby offered a variety of opportunities for more civilised seaside fun. The gorgeous bay of Pokehino, for example, reachable only via a thirty minute trek through thick native bushland, provided a secluded tropical haven as yet undiscovered by even the most fastidious tourist guides. Its small white sand beach, flanked by New Zealand’s defining pohutukawa trees, was a perfect spot for a relaxing afternoon of reading and swimming, even if a sudden explosion of tiny jellyfish did their best to scupper our enjoyment of the latter.

Further up the coast, we made a visit to the more widely-known Hot Water Beach, where hundreds of eager bathers had congregated to dig pits and trenches which automatically fill up from the natural warm springs that flow underneath. More spectacular, and certainly more tranquil, was the beach around Cathedral Cove, a yawning hole carved straight through the rock which opens out onto another stunning tree-lined beach.

With reports from back home suggesting that the UK is seemingly on the brink of another ice age, my excitement at spending time in such a beautiful part of the country more than compensated for the sadness I felt at missing out on my own friends’ and family’s celebrations. But after experiencing first hand how much fun Christmas and New Year can be in the middle of the summer under crystal clear skies and brilliant sunshine, I think I’m more likely to be encouraging them to come out here for next year’s festivities rather than rushing to book a flight home myself…

Jonny

The Holly And The Ivy

28th December 2010

In recent weeks my friends and family in the UK have expressed a natural curiosity about my experiences of a summer Christmas “down under”. With most Brits – myself included, until now - knowing only dark, cold Decembers and the annual bombardment of festive merchandise promoting idyllic Christmas scenes of snow-dusted cottages and sledging Santas, it is difficult for us to imagine celebrating such an instinctively wintery time of year in shorts and a t-shirt on the beach. Given the arctic weather conditions to which Europe has been subject in recent weeks, the notion must seem all the odder (not to mention galling) for everyone back home, though at least the residents of my home town Loughborough have finally been able to tick off the ever dreamed-of white Christmas, something that has typically transpired the one year I’m not there to witness it.

I found adapting to a hot Christmas quite jarring at first and in the weeks building up to the big day I didn’t feel quite as festive as I usually do at this time of year. Part of the reason, I think, is that New Zealanders don’t throw themselves into the party season spirit with quite the same vigour as we do back home, perhaps because they want to save themselves for the extended summer holidays many of them take in the weeks immediately after Christmas. Also, many of the traditions that we commonly associate with Christmas back home, from the drinking of mulled wine to singing carols by a roaring log fire, are clearly inappropriate when temperatures reach the upper end of the twenties and the only fire you want to be stoking is the one heating up the barbecue. Strangely, though, Kiwis continue to partake in many of these customs despite their incongruity in this climate, presumably as a result of New Zealand’s origins as a British colony. They even produce Christmas cards depicting the same snowy scenes you’d expect to see on the British versions, even though it’s probably been several millennia since snow last fell in Auckland during the summer.

Though New Zealand has its own indigenous “Christmas tree” - the red-flowered Pohutukawa - most households here still opt for the traditional European pines and firs to adorn with gaudy baubles and tinsel. Conveniently, the house in Kumeu has a multitude of such trees growing on the surrounding land and with the help of Holly’s sister-in-law Liz and a long-armed saw we spent a fun/exhausting afternoon in the first week of December lopping down a ten-foot branch from one of them and dragging it indoors for decoration. We later came to regret our early advent enthusiasm as the formerly verdant bough had turned brown and wilted by the time Christmas week came around and we were forced to go through the whole branch-hacking process all over again to ensure we had a vaguely respectable tree for Christmas Day. Perhaps we’d be better off sticking with a plastic one next year.

Christmas Day itself is, of course, a family occasion and every household will have its own special way of doing things, often with idiosyncrasies that would seem utterly bizarre to an outsider. I grew up, for example, strictly forbidden from opening any presents until after the Queen’s Speech had been broadcast at 3pm – this despite the fact that the address is pre-recorded and has already been played out on the radio earlier on Christmas morning. The wait for my five-year-old self was, as I’m sure you can imagine, interminable. Thankfully, this family tradition has slackened somewhat in recent years (helped along, in part, by the insistence of myself and my younger brother) and we have tended to enjoy a more relaxed afternoon gorging ourselves on the obligatory roast turkey lunch and catching up with the relatives we hadn’t seen since the previous Christmas.

The most frustrating thing about Christmas Day back home is that the weather usually confines everyone to the house after lunch. There are, after all, only so many hours one can bear sitting around in multi-coloured hats playing charades without a significant intake of sherry. The Antipodean summer Christmas, on the other hand, allows for a far more dynamic programme of activities and I was particularly pleased to be able to burn off some turkey calories with a game of cricket with some of Holly’s relatives after we’d finished eating lunch at her dad’s house in Auckland.

Though I missed my customary binge on “the trimmings” of a Christmas roast (bread sauce, pigs in blankets, chestnut stuffing – you know the routine), I enjoyed the diversity of food on offer at a more buffet-style lunch, with the turkey accompanied by a range of cold meats and imaginative salads. Traditional Christmas pudding and brandy sauce was conspicuous by its absence but I was more than compensated by an array of other delicious desserts, including the famed New Zealand pavlova and a particularly decadent tiramisu.

Otherwise, Christmas Day was much the same as back home, complete with crackers containing rubbish jokes and useless plastic gifts, operatic renditions of carols blaring out of the stereo and the horrible realisation, around 4pm, that you’ve eaten far too much and pray that the toilet is far out of the earshot of your fellow revellers. Oh, and they even watch the Queen’s Speech over here, a full seventeen hours before the UK gets to. My dear old granny would be mortified.

Christmas Day was made for indulgence and I was pleased to discover that the evening festivities here were no less extravagant than the afternoon’s. Retiring back to Kumeu, we were treated to a delicious spread of barbecued food courtesy of Holly’s mum and were still sitting outside eating and drinking close to midnight. Skype - that wonderful tool of modern communication - then allowed me to wish my family back home a merry Christmas on their Christmas morning whilst feeling slightly queasy at the thought of the gargantuan food binge still awaiting them. Though I was sad to be unable to spend this most family-oriented of days with my own relatives, I felt very fortunate to experience another culture’s take on festivities, but still with so many reassuringly familiar elements and with Holly’s welcoming family making me feel very much at home. Our Boxing Day excursion to the Eden Park stadium, where we watched New Zealand comfortably outscore Pakistan in an entertaining Twenty-Twenty cricket match, even helped to stop me missing my usual trip up to Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane for the traditional post-Christmas football match, though my subsequent discovery of a 3-2 loss to Hull perhaps went further towards softening that particular blow…

Jonny

Capital City

Tuesday 14th December

During our recent European travels I was particularly struck by how rarely a traveller’s arrival into a big city anticipates the charms that lie ahead. For logistical reasons, airports and train stations are hardly ever centrally located, resulting in often arduous journeys though suburbs and districts that no sane travel agent would ever put on a tourist map. It’s a pity, for example, that visitors coming into London via the Heathrow Express train service are first greeted by the rather bland – and sometimes downright ugly – scenery of the city’s south western council estates, rather than, say, the looming marvels of St Pauls or the Houses of Parliament. One city that spectacularly breaks that mould is Manhattan, and I vividly recall being awestruck by its distant metropolis of skyscrapers as I approached it by taxi from JFK Airport on my very first visit to New York.

Another is New Zealand’s capital Wellington, which dangles the bait of a sparkling modern port backed by splendid suburban hills as one docks at its harbour on the Interislander Ferry.

Actually, the most dramatic spectacle on our journey from Picton on the northern coast of the South Island to Wellington on the southern tip of the North was the serene hour-long passage through the Marlborough Sounds, a succession of tree-festooned peninsulas opening out into the Cook Strait at the South Island’s north eastern edge. On the map, the Sounds resemble a leaf that’s been nibbled away at by a hungry slug. From the ferry, they look like a series of half-submerged alligators crowned with the occasional millionaire’s mansion.

The unspoilt early morning skies contributed to an idyllic panorama and had we been better prepared with more wind-proof clothing we would have stayed up on deck to admire it for the entire journey, a regret reinforced once we’d ventured down to sample the swampy slop that passed for coffee in the ferry’s café. As we emerged from the Sounds into open sea the North Island was already visible in the misty distance, though I remain impressed by how culturally and politically unified New Zealand’s two principle land masses seem to be, despite the still-significant stretch of water that separates them. The north and south of England, for example, have no such physical divide yet if you didn’t know otherwise you might assume that Londonders and Mancunians come from entirely different planets…

After rounding the underbelly of the North Island, we eventually came within sight of Wellington, recently voted the “coolest little capital in the world” by Lonely Planet. I was keen to see for myself whether it lived up to the hype, particularly in light of my previously-stated reservations about Auckland, which is by some distance the larger of the two cities. Initial impressions were certainly favourable as we strolled along the sea front, taking in the sights of a bustling quayside and wondering whether the notorious Wellington winds were a myth, so calm was the air and still the water.

Like Christchurch, though, we found the central shopping district to be mildly disappointing. Though we welcomed a condensed city centre that was, unlike its big brother up north, easily navigable on foot, the streets themselves were rather characterless and, apart from the vaguely alternative Cuba Street, it seemed to lack the hip cafes and unique shops that make Auckland’s finest areas so distinctive. I was forewarned that Cuba Mall’s Bucket Fountain, allegedly a “sculpture” comprising a series of brightly coloured containers passing water to one another, was a “love it or hate it” affair, but the fact that our encounter with it coincided with two teenage girls leaping into it and throwing soap suds at each other ensured that it fell into the latter category for me.

Again, we found that Wellington’s most enticing attractions were not in the centre but around its outskirts. The Botanical Gardens, for example, proved to be an unexpected highlight with the cable car ride to the top of the hill that houses them providing fantastic views back down over the city.

We also got waylaid for several hours in the seafront’s Te Papa, a superb national museum hosting comprehensive collections of natural, geological, political and cultural Kiwi history. Ironically, though, the most crowd-pleasing spectacle there was not Kiwi at all, but the world’s largest preserved Giant Squid, which even in its cadaverous state prompted fear and disgust with its tentacles’ rotating hooks and melon-sized eyeballs. Our visit fortuitously coincided with two excellent temporary exhibitions: a borrowed collection of European Masters from Frankfurt’s Stadel Museum and a career-spanning retrospective of Kiwi photojournalist Brian Brake. I’d never heard of Brake before but after seeing his mesmerising photo sequences on, among others, an Indian Monsoon and 1970s Sydney, I’ll definitely be checking out more of his work in the future.

Though Te Papa, the Gardens, and Parliament Buildings (which include the architectural wonder the Beehive) proved to us that Wellington had more than enough to keep the casual tourist happy, the city’s reputation as a model place to live only really made sense once we ventured further afield to the suburbs. While the majority of Auckland’s outlying hills have been left as rugged parkland, Wellington’s have been landscaped to allow its wealthier residents to build homes on them with glorious views out over the city. Far from ruining the natural landscape, for once the buildings actually enhance the views from below, with the houses all afforded appropriate space and extensive tree and plant growth encouraged between each plot of land. Thanks to the generosity of Holly’s relatives Margaret and Tim Fairhall, we were fortunate enough to experience these lofty suburbs for ourselves when they invited us to stay at their former B&B in Kandallah, around 15 minutes’ drive from the city centre. As well as offering luxurious accommodation, their place unexpectedly granted us the opportunity to see Wellington’s best kept secret, a beautifully detailed miniature recreation of Germany’s Black Forest railway network that Tim has been building in his garage for the past twenty years. Given that the Fairhall’s imminent move to a newly-built townhouse on the waterfront is going to force Tim to dismantle his grand project at the start of next year, we felt incredibly privileged to see it at all, though we were heartened to hear that he plans to start a whole new railway scene in the basement of their new property, this time based on 1950s Saxony.

On a final Wellington note, one of my most heart-cockle-tickling experiences there was watching streams of football fans pour into the concrete monstrosity that is the Westpac Stadium for a game between the local Phoenix FC and Australia’s Adelaide United. For a moment, I had to do a double take, so reminiscent was the scene of a typical Saturday afternoon in the streets around an English football ground. It was gratifying to know that even in a country in which the beautiful game is far from the top of the sporting pecking order, football fervour is at least alive and well in the capital. If only Auckland would get its act together and submit its own professional league team, I might actually be able to watch a live game over here for myself…

Jonny

Everybody's Talking

Thursday 9^th December

The oddest thing about living in London – and I mean genuinely, sense-defyingly odd – is that no one talks to each other. I don’t mean, obviously, that people do not converse with colleagues in the office or with friends down the pub or with their partners at home – even Londoners aren’t that blinkered. When I say that no one talks to each other, I’m referring specifically to those situations where strangers are thrust into close proximity – the sort of situations where the only appropriate thing to do, you would think, is to talk – and decide, contrary to all natural instincts of kinship and solidarity, to ignore each other. The prime example of this is, of course, on the Tube, where millions of Londoners spend at least an hour of every working day crunched up together in conditions that wouldn’t pass health and safety standards for battery hens, but almost never communicate, or even exchange the merest flicker of eye contact, with the people around them. Given the intimacy of these scenarios, where one can often find one’s nose precious millimetres away from another commuter’s ear (or, if they’re particularly lofty, armpit), it seems absurd that any sort of verbal interaction with our fellow passengers should be strictly prohibited. Indeed, so rarely does one have a conversation with a stranger on the Underground that those occasions when one does are vividly memorable. I recall, for example, one instance where, as I stood on the eastbound Circle line platform at Paddington station scanning through the previous evening’s football headlines in my just-purchased copy of the Guardian, I received a momentary fright when the man standing next to me suddenly piped up, “Cracking game last night, wasn’t it?” A perfectly friendly, almost certainly innocent gesture, those non-Londoners amongst you might think, but to me it was the unequivocal sign of a man who was completely unhinged.

The reason why I mention this is because one of the most immediate things that struck me about New Zealand was just how much strangers love talking to each other. Whereas in London, striking up a conversation with the person sitting next to you on the bus would most likely be interpreted as a creepy come-on and guarantee that their seat was hastily vacated at the next stop, in New Zealand it would seem odder, perhaps even impolite, if one did not make such a gesture. The difference is just as marked in the style of service one receives in shops, bars and cafes here. Though standards have certainly improved back home in recent years, one would still rarely be treated to much in the way of conversation by a waitress in a café or barman in a pub. Here, though, service comes guaranteed not only with a smile, but almost universally with a cheerful enquiry about how your day is going or where you’re from. Even the guy behind the ticket desk at Auckland’s Britomart station – the type of person we tend to caricature back home as bored, stoney-faced and monosyllabic – was so happy to chat with us and hear about our time in England that we were still bantering away about the decline of Liverpool Football Club several minutes after we’d completed the purchase of our two train tickets. (Maybe there’s something in the football thing?)

Of course, it helps that there are far fewer people in New Zealand – approximately 4 million compared to 60 plus back home – and that places are generally less busy, thus allowing the likes of our friendly ticket man to natter away to his heart’s content without having to rush to deal with the next customer (there was no one in the queue behind us that day – again, an unthinkable phenomenon in the London Underground). Similarly, I’ve been struck by how forthcoming the bus drivers are here though given how few passengers they tend to carry at any one time you can forgive them for indulging in a little light-hearted repartee over the intercom. One such driver on the route from Queenstown to Arrowtown in Central Otago was even cheeky enough to suggest that I was taking Holly out there to propose over a candlelit dinner!

While this talkativeness is clearly attributable to Kiwi culture, it is by no means limited purely to Kiwis. We’ve encountered all sorts of people here, from all different parts of the world, who have demonstrated just as much sociability and volubility as the locals. We have even, believe it or not, met a number of Brits who have seemingly shaken off the shackles of awkwardness and stiff-upper-lippedness imposed by certain elements of our society and fully immersed themselves in this ethos of affability. My most memorable experience of this to date was outside a pub we stopped at one balmy evening in the tranquil town of Nelson, our next destination on from Christchurch on the northern scalp of the South Island. Having plonked ourselves down on a couple of deck chairs in the beer garden (a pleasant change from the one-foot strip of pavement that passes for an outside drinking area around many of the pubs in Westminster), we soon found ourselves engaged in conversation with the 50-something couple sitting alongside us: an England woman originally from Slough and a jovial, heavily-tattooed Scot who apparently regarded us as such instant confidantes that he divulged (after another couple of pints, admittedly) the deeply personal information that he had an alcoholic brother who had stopped him seeing his own family for the past 30 years. The conversation, which ranged from nostalgic reminiscences about the homeland to some invaluable advice about the quickest route from Nelson to Picton, where we were due to catch a very early ferry the next morning, seemed to exert some kind of magnetic pull over the surrounding patrons, as we were soon joined by a series of equally genial characters eager to share a piece of the action.

Perhaps less interesting than the people we met there was Nelson itself, which had some pleasant enough streets but little else beyond the beautiful hill-top Cathedral to keep travellers there for long.

I hear Nelson’s real treasures are to be found in the surrounding countryside but for us it was a convenient stopover at the end of a long driving day that had taken us all the way up from Christchurch along the scenic Kaikoura coastal route.

Though we didn’t have enough time to make too many stops, we enjoyed the roadside seal-watching opportunities and ate a hearty lunch at possibly the world’s most scenic service station, the rustic, sea-facing Kekerengu General Store. Less appealing was the northern town of Blenheim, which seemed to embody the worst of New Zealand’s predilection for insipid shopping streets pimpled with plastic and concrete.

Ironically, the one place in Nelson that we didn’t find especially sociable was the YHA Central Youth Hostel, where we spent the night before our early drive to Picton. Considering that hostels usually guarantee you at least a couple of random conversations with fellow travellers, there were curiously few people about and those that were visible tended to be gobby teenagers swarming around the kitchen. Perhaps, though, when there are so many opportunities during your average day in New Zealand to chat to strangers in pubs, at train stations and on the bus, the hostels here are maybe best left for what they were designed for - a good night’s kip.

Jonny

Back Down South

Wednesday 1^st December

Having spent most of my life in the relative seismic oasis that is the UK, I can’t say I’ve had too much direct experience of earthquakes or other such natural disasters. Of course, some Brits – particularly those ill-fated enough to have spent the past week living out of a sleeping bag in the departure lounge of the snow-immobilised Gatwick Airport – will contest that we bear more than our fair share of environmental havoc through our schizophrenic weather patterns, but after witnessing for myself the trail of destruction left by Christchurch’s recent earthquake, I can confidently say that we have it pretty easy back home.

My only previous brush with seismic activity was about a decade ago when I happened to be staying in the West Midlands during a rare British earth tremor. Though the spontaneous, violent shaking of a building one is residing in would be disconcerting at the best of times, I can assure you it is ten times more terrifying when one is awoken by it in the middle of the night. Unsure whether I was still dreaming, my first thought, naturally, was that the house was under attack from laser-wielding aliens in flying saucers. My second was to get the hell out of there as quickly as my still-barely conscious body would allow so I launched myself out of bed, rocketed down the staircase, crashed out the front door and landed gracelessly out in the porchway. At which point, were we really being invaded by an exterminating army of space monsters, I would almost certainly have been blasted into oblivion by a multi-coloured death ray. Fortunately, at that exact moment, the tremor abruptly ceased and I had just enough time to gather my senses and withdraw into the house before the neighbours had a chance to glimpse my feeble, semi-naked form cowering on the doorstep.

Amusing though this episode seems in retrospect, quakes are rarely laughing matters for those unlucky enough to be caught up in those at the deadlier end of the Richter Scale. Despite my overly imaginative, half-awake state, the manner in which the radiators rattled feverishly as the quake took hold was genuinely frightening and I can only imagine the terror engendered by a much stronger tremor. What required no imagination was the physical damage the 7.1-measuring one inflicted upon the buildings of Christchurch, where we recently spent two enjoyable days during my first return visit to the South Island.

As we walked around the central city we stumbled upon a number of quake-wrecked shops and eating establishments, some of which looked as though nothing less than a bomb had gone off inside them. The strange thing, though, was how random the devastation appeared to be. I had expected entire streets to be mangled and crumbling but instead we found little pockets of destruction right alongside completely intact structures. In fact, much of the downtown area appeared remarkably debris-free, with some streets’ damage signposted only by the presence of a digger or crane, presumably being used to help stabilise the foundations of those buildings that, despite superficial appearances, have been left structurally unsound. So while one should not underestimate the suffering endured by the quake survivors (and let’s remind ourselves that, almost miraculously, everyone was a survivor of this one), the message we took home was that Christchurch is very much open for business.

Of course, even if the city were not in desperate need of a tourism injection, Christchurch should feature on the itinerary of all newcomers to the country anyway. Culturally, there is as much, if not more, to appreciate here than in the far larger Auckland city centre and the Art Gallery boasts a particularly impressive collection of permanent exhibits and short-term showcases. We especially enjoyed a retrospective on hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck, whose unnervingly life-like giant and miniature men I had first encountered in the old Saatchi Gallery on London’s Southbank.

The gift shop and café-crammed Arts Centre, meanwhile, is worth visiting for the building alone, which is an impressive homage to the quadrangled Oxbridge colleges that inspired it.

Visitors with time on their hands should also tick off the Botanical Gardens and Cathedral, which are both more worthy of a city the size of London than this 390,000-populated township, but they might have more fun standing in the central square listening to the cosmic diatribes of New Zealand’s self-proclaimed “Wizard”, a bearded, red-robed eccentric who seems to spend his days lecturing the populace on an imagined war between religious priests and magical warlocks.

If there is anything disappointing about Christchurch, it is the main shopping district, which, earthquake or no earthquake, isn’t much more inspiring than your average English market town centre. I’d been told that Christchurch was the most English city in New Zealand but I was expecting something a little bit more characterful than the bland high streets seemingly beamed straight over from Sheffield and Nottingham. Though we came across some great cafes – most notably the labyrinthine C1, brewers of the best coffee I’ve yet sampled in this country and proprietors of some geek-gratifying sci-fi memorabilia – and the odd interesting second-hand book shop, we felt the city centre as a whole lacked the distinctiveness of the more historical English towns it was clearly trying to ape. The areas around the centre were lovely, though, and I particularly enjoyed the Oxbridge-reminiscent scenes of boater-hatted students punting young couples gracefully along the River Avon.

Our favourite discovery during our stay in Christchurch was not actually in the city but a small settlement called Lyttleton about fifteen minutes’ drive south of it. While Christchurch itself is landlocked, Lyttleton provides alluring access to the sea through both the South Island’s largest port and a series of secluded little beaches along its coastline.

We spent a halcyon afternoon exploring these recesses with our friend Morgan and enjoyed a great night out in the town’s memorable Monster Bar, whose walls are bedecked with paintings of fantastical ogres and deviant dolls made out taxidermied animal parts. In some ways, we wished we had be able to find accommodation somewhere on Lyttleton’s picturesque hillsides rather than the hostel we ended up staying with in one of Christchurch’s blander suburbs. Though the facilities were perfectly adequate, we were not so impressed by being awoken two mornings’ running by the ear-anathema parps of our landlord’s saxophone as he treated us to a particularly disharmonious rendition of Scott Jolin’s ‘The Entertainer’. As if that weren’t maddening enough, we were also greeted by the grating sounds of a painter inconsiderately sanding down our windowsill and then irascibly ordering me to shut said window when I dared open it to let some air in. It was enough to bring back fond memories of a certain sleep-depriving West Midlands earthquake some ten years previously…

Jonny

Beaucoup Fish

Wednesday 1^st December

Beaucoup Fish

Five weeks into my New Zealand adventure and I began to feel myself fully immersed in Kiwi culture. Among the numerous native experiences I was able to tick off were jandal-wearing (though I still can’t walk in them and still cringe every time I find myself saying the word – there’s a reason why my spellchecker keeps underlining it, you know), pukeko-watching (can I take one back to England please?) and Speights Ale-drinking (well, it’s nicer than Fosters), so I knew it would only be a matter of time before I got to indulge in that other favourite Kiwi pastime – fishing.

Though you might imagine that growing up on a small island like Great Britain would naturally make me an aficionado of all things fishery, my childhood in Loughborough - which is about as far away from sea as it possible to be in England - was entirely rod and tackle-free (no innuendo intended). I therefore approached my first ever fishing trip with no small degree of trepidation, imagining all sorts of potential horrors, from being yanked overboard as my feeble English biceps lost their battle with the thrashing snapper at the end of the line to coming face-to-face with an airborne Jaws.

Of course, I needn’t have worried about any such calamity and our fishing expedition in the Bay of Islands turned out to be one of my most relaxing New Zealand episodes so far. We were accompanied on our trip by Holly’s father (and keen fisherman) Philip Miller, who had kindly invited us to spend the weekend up at his beachside apartment in the sleepy Northland coastal town of Paihia. Poseidon had considerately taken it upon himself to be on vacation, leaving us with an unusually calm sea and cloudless sky as we headed out into the Bay on a small commercial trawler. A brawny, bearded Aussie and two red-headed Canadian ladies completed the cosmopolitan (and half ginger) crew, which was skippered by a young Kiwi chap who can’t have been long out of high school. Philip muttered darkly that this guy wasn’t the usual captain and his inexperience was possibly in evidence when the first two spots he took us to ushered up a grand total of zero poissons.

Fortunately, our third and final location proved to be more fruitful and we were soon dredging up a fair number of snapper and other local fish. It took me a while to get to grips with the line, which seemed to delight in spiralling out of control at the faintest mis-timed touch. I found it difficult to distinguish between genuine tugs on my bait and my own unsteady hand motions and amused my fellow crew-members with my apparently “unorthodox” style of holding the rod, which, I admit, might have resembled a certain toilet-based stance from certain angles. Thankfully, I was able to throw their mockery back in their faces as the gods of beginners luck helped me amass a ship-best haul of six snapper. Admittedly, none of them were actually big enough to take home (New Zealand’s fishing laws are rightfully strict on the catching of infantile specimens) but I was happy. In any case, the rest of the crew were barely more successful, our final count of fillet-able fish numbering a paltry two.

Overall, I really enjoyed my first fishing experience, despite the frustrations of the first hour when we caught nothing at all. The best part for me, though, was being out on the water amongst these beautiful islands rising majestically out of the sea. A completely different landscape to Otago and the coastal areas around Auckland, the Bay is a truly tranquil spot that should definitely feature high on every budding New Zealand tourist’s itinerary. Paihia itself is a quiet little town but has enough amenities and eateries to keep its largely tourist and second homeowner population happy and courtesy of Philip we enjoyed two lovely meals out at the local Thai restaurant and rather more distinctive Swordfish Club, on whose fishermen-laden terrace we gobbled up battered cod ‘n’ chips as dusk descended pinkishly over the outlying islands.

While we were there, we also took the opportunity to catch a ferry across to Russell, a historic coastal village on the other side of the Bay from Paihia. A lovely wooden church - every bit as striking in its own way as its more ancient stone counterparts back home - and a beach-side strip of cafes provided a pleasant afternoon’s recovery from the morning’s fishing exertions.

As with Otago, I found myself wanting to return to the Bay of Islands almost as soon as we had left it but the wonderful thing about being out here for a considerable length time - rather than just a whirlwind holiday - means that leaving these places isn’t half as depressing as it would be otherwise. And, indeed, we know we’ll be back in the Bay in January for a wedding, which will no doubt be an altogether more raucous occasion. Maybe I'll actually catch a fish we can eat next time – or, more likely, fall drunkenly overboard after one too many champers.

Jonny