New Zealand Discoverer
Day Eleven – 7 March 2012 – Day of the Nelligan and the Three Hour Cruise
Weather: partly cloudy,
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Eight and a half hours of blissful sleep.
As I went out for breakfast, I asked if my internet code was good today and the clerk said yes. Then I had something scream in the back of my head – and it wasn’t a cat in my hoodie – and I asked her if I got another 100mb.
You know where this is going.
Yeah. The 100mb is for a 24 hour period, not for a calendar day. So the rest of my photos have to wait.
Breakfast was made to order today. When I told her I was with the tour group, she told me that I could have eggs, sausage, bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms. Identical to all the other breakfasts except I can get the eggs anyway I want. I go for scrambled cause they’re likely not to be creamy. And they weren’t. The mini sausages were typical sausages too. I had toast just to be daring this morning.
Raisin toast!
I’m living on the edge! Heh.
I was back in my room by 8 am and packed up my luggage and found Doctor Who on the tube. I have two and a half hours until its time to go.
I got a bit of stuff done on the computer but at ten cents a mb, I’m not downloading any more photos just yet. And certainly not videos. I realized they’re like 90 mb each. No wonder I used up that gig in Christchurch. I went out after 10 to check on the damage and I had used 120mb above my free limit. Now, I don’t know if they use the same math, but 10 cents a mb would mean $12, right?
They charged me $6.
Still scratching my head over that but I’m not complaining. I should have put up the rest of my pics, cause you never know what the next hotel is going to charge.
We boarded the bus at 10:30 and were off to Picton. Nellie tells us that Picton was named for one of the Duke of Wellington’s generals. The town is located on a true sound – a valley carved by a river then flooded by the sea. It leads out to the Cook Strait which Cook named after himself and it’s here that he realized that New Zealand was really two islands.
As we drive, we pass a house that looks like its a B&B and Nellie said they offer something for free.
Internet? I ask.
Ha.
Nope. They’ll let you walk their dog for free.
We arrive in Picton after about a half hour. It’s a picturesque town on the sound. Very pretty with a nice park and walkway on the shoreline. Our ferry is just coming through the sound as we arrive.
We get an hour to buy out the town before John will take us down to the dock. I pick up a couple of fridge magnets and another wicked sandwich.
Yeah. They know how to make sandwiches here. I usually get a chicken sandwich on bread with seeds in it. Then you get a real surprise as to what accompanies it, like egg, peppers, carrot, lettuce, cucumber, cheese etc. All on one sandwich. Delicious.
With a Coke.
And a chocolate muffin.
Can’t beat it.
I chow down on it on a bench on the shoreline then go look for the bus. John takes us to the dock and we have to walk aboard. Some opt to take the golf cart up the ramp. We walk up then take about ten flights of stairs up to the main deck. There’s a shop, food court, reclining chairs (which everyone races for to get at the front where you have a wall of windows looking out over the front of the ship) and bar.
I check out the food court and get a second Coke and then watch a movie on my smart phone after taking pics of the sound.
The crossing doesn’t take as long as the 3 hours seemed to imply. Before long, we’re pulling into Wellington harbour which is shrouded in mist.
We make our way down to the bus and are off before long. With the late departure, we don’t have a lot of time to visit the Te Papa museum and some opt to go to the hotel instead.
I check out the museum. Nellie tells us to first go down a set of stairs near the entrance to see the rubber mountings that the building is sitting on. It enables the building to shake with the earthquake. No idea if they’ve tested it yet.
Then we go inside and Nellie had told us to hit the 3rd floor to see Awesome Forces, a very interesting display on the volcanoes and earthquakes of New Zealand. It has an interesting animation that follows a camera going through the mantle through the centre of the Earth and coming out the other side. It indicates dept and temperature as it goes. It’s almost 6000 degrees down there.
There are displays on the type of quakes that NZ suffers and how the plates are joined here. Christchurch is on the type that caused the tsunami in Japan where one plate edge is being dragged under by the plate that is diving down and then after years, the upper piece snaps back up. I imagine the good part about this is that once pressure is released, the worst is over and it should stabilize for some time. Unlike the side by side slip type of faults that can continually move – like in California.
One interesting display in the area is a house that will shake like a deep 6.1 earthquake. Not as violent as I expected but Nellie said that the Christchurch earthquake, a 7.1, was a shallow one which is why it was so bad. Plus the fact that they’re built on soft ground and the liquefaction was able to do a lot of damage.
After checking out that section in detail, I went out to wait for Nellie with the others at 5:45. It was windy (it’s called Windy Wellington, but for some reason, the locals don’t like that) and we sought refuge against a wall while we waited.
Then it was 5:50. Then 5:55.
But in all that time, the traffic on the road next to us is constant so we all expected that John was caught in traffic. We weren’t panicking.
Then at about 6, we see Nellie running across the parking lot of the gas station across the street. No bus, just Nellie looking like she’s in a marathon. She gets across the four lanes of traffic and tells us that John’s in a jam but will be along shortly and said it was faster for her to get out and run ahead to let us know.
We thought she’d ran maybe a couple blocks but when John shows up, the one couple on the bus said she had ran like ten blocks.
Holy cow! And she was already coming down with the bus bug so the run will either wear her down or clear her up.
Dedication or what?
We start off for our short tour of Wellington. As the capital city, it’s major employer is the government.
And John says “Yeah, and they all get off work at 5:30.”
LOL
Nellie notes that much of Wellington is built on reclaimed land as a result of an earthquake in the mid 19th Century. It uplifted the land and left it above sea level and the locals thought it a great idea to build on it.
Now, call me silly, but if natural forces uplifts a huge section of land suddenly, do you stand there and think “hey, I can live on that” without thinking “what goes up, must go down.”
Well, living on the land won out and now hundreds of thousands live on this reclaimed (though I wouldn’t call it that – I’d call it claimed land. Reclaimed is something I’d think of having been damaged or swampy or something you dump tons of rock into).
Course, Mother Nature may one day reclaim it.
Nellie goes on to tell us that in 1928, an opera singer by the name of Pavlova sang in Wellington and invited the hotel chef to the performance. He so loved the show that he went back to the hotel and made a dessert which is called Pavlova.
Now, there is dispute over ownership of the origins of Pavlova. Australia claims it was made there first. The dispute is ongoing.
Wellington is also the home of Peter Jackson.
Who? We ask in jest.
His work on the Lord of the Rings has dubbed the town as Welliwood. Weta is here, too, I hear. (The special effects company that did the FX for LOTR).
We drive up through lessening traffic (the civil servants are all gone home) and pull up next to the parliament buildings. One of them look like a huge beehive with ten stories above ground and two below (where civil defense is located).
The Prime Minister works on the top floor. The design of the building is by a guy named Spence who was at lunch with some government officials and was asked to design a new parliament building. On the table was a box of beehive matches.
The rest is history.
After a quick photo, we go to our hotel, the Novotel. First things first, internet. Free in the lobby for 30 minutes for 8 megs. Opening my email would probably chew that up. But they do offer 100 megs in the room for $15. Sold.
I check my email on my smartphone first then run up to change for dinner. The room is like all the others but again, no safe. I have one big bed too.
I leave my batteries charging and go down for dinner. It’s a set menu with three or four choices for entree, main and dessert. I go for the beef salad, sirloin steak and mud cake.
No one can complain about that. I heard the fettuccine was delicious. The mud cake was too much for me to finish.
And that’s saying something.
Back in my room, I signed up for the 2 hours/100 megs of internet. I had to call to get hooked up. It wouldn’t do it automatically, but I was on by 9:30 and figured I’d either use up the 100 megs or fall asleep before 11:30.
I was right.
Go to Day Twelve
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