Goldilocks in hot water

Dad tottered to the relative pomp of Riwaka’s Anzac wreath laying ceremony where he met a few former soldiers from Korean and Vietnamese conflicts. These included the self-announced “patron” of the local RSA. We did not stay for tea.

A goosebumpy antidote was Shane McGowan singing ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’…courtesy of RNZ in our garden, an hour after.

“A big Turkish shell sent me arse over tip, And when I awoke in me hospital bed, And saw what it had done, Christ I wished I was dead -

"Never knew there were worse things than dyin’."

....

I may be able to resist finishing The Doctor the one novel written by a marvellous British actor once noted as “the thinking woman’s crumpet”. The lead character in The Glittering Prizes TV 70s mini-series that is still well worth watching, Tom Conti is a mere vowel away from his own hero’s main obsession. The lady who works in the local garage and reads five books a week suggested I might like to read it.

Savouring Ian McEwen’s Saturday: it’s worth five million other books.

….

Clearing other people’s stuff is easier than clearing your own. Lovely daughter Claire spent 10 days sorting the Taupaki mausoleum. I’m doing the same for Dad and he’s enjoying it.

Kaiterikeri from Kimi Ora.

When he had his living alone assessment yesterday, we agreed I was surplus to his performance so I headed off nowhere in particular. The Kimi Ora spa retreat  was “just right” to quote Goldilocks and also, Shania Twain, who wrote as much over her photo in the entry hall. I relished the heated pool and  infared sauna with a choice of colour therapy. Afterwards, Lily and I meandered over the salt marshes to Kaiterikeri.

Who says you can't lick your own nose?

Avian evidence.

They drive among us!

Ms Geek.

The glorious sky was reflected in stream, sand and sea. The gold of Kaiteriteri’s sands is treasure indeed.

I will definitely return.

Dad passed his assessment. He’s not sure how he did it.

At home in Pauline's garden

Sunday morning on laptop: two free range eggs and two pieces of toast, one spread with honey from the Bethells Valley. The dog in the bed nestles warmly by my feet. The coffee is Jimmy’s Roast from Riwaka’s Resurgence* Café.

For Jimmy read James Cagney. This is a gangster of a brew. Jimmy’s Roast – “It’s better than a cap in ya ass”  - is shovelling along the thoughts slightly dampened by two days’ solid rain and yesterday’s long drive through Motueka Valley. The moisture enhanced the flaming autumn yellows, reds and oranges but the best may be yet to come.

The old fellow has driven himself to church. He’s not well. Ingredients for a clear vegetable consommé are pootering away in the pressure cooker: included are chopped ginger and quinces. The latter is renowned for healing both ends of the elimination spectrum.

But the quinces add too much weird flavour for a plain broth. He hangs out for pumpkin soup so I finally make some and he feels much better.

Today I cleared the clutter of nearly a month’s travelling from the car and set up the back seats again. I wonder how long I’ll stay. Bringing in some extra stuff from the car may be a sign – I made an extra effort to pretty up my living space and put up photos of Claire and Louise.

The concrete bunny has a measure of dignity.

Johnny-Jump-Ups.

Quinces and honesty.

This year's dahlias.

On Thursday, Dad is being assessed for his ability to stay in his own home. He’s been looking in vain for his medals for the Anzac wreath laying at Riwaka tomorrow and, to his credit, he’s decided it doesn’t matter that he can’t find them. He doesn’t have to prove anything!

Being here is a bit like walking into a ready-made life. I already know all the major players in Dad’s life and am meeting new people nearly every day. Going out with Lily-put is a bit like having a best friend who’s a babe-magnet. On Friday, her fluffiness snared two pleasant people who went out of their way to speak to her/me. One, a local historian who has lived at Riwaka all her life, invited us into her home to meet her niece who has cancer.

At the first Qi gong session, Edith instructed a group of six in the most basic moves to visualise and lure the purest energy (even before it has time to divide into ying and yang) from the void into our minds and bodies. The movements included squats that I have yet to practise.

Early next day (hopefully brimming with qi gong energy) I joined a group heading for Mt Arthur in the Kahurangi National Park. The beech forests just blew my mind. As an overweight and under-exercised ex-smoker of four months’ standing, my breath was in pretty short supply going up over tangled tree roots. My companions were incredibly supportive and insisted on numerous breaks. I chose to take the Nokia phone - lighter than the camera - now I’m wondering where to find the right size of USB cable to download them.

Photos of a purple fungus and my first sighting of a weka will surely come when they are ready.

Pauline’s garden is a pretty good place to be.

This morning.

* For some of its journey, the Riwaka River flows through underground limestone caves, returning to the surface at the Riwaka Resurgence, a deep icy-blue swimming hole. Last year, Claire, her mates and I jumped in.

Time melts at Riwaka

My tap on the old fellow’s window at 4am received a soldier’s shout in return. Even now he has the reflexes.

Time seems to melt at Riwaka.  A week has gone by with little effort.

Dad quavers and blusters by turns.  He doesn’t ask if you’d like to hear him read his poems, he just rears up and acts out vignettes. They are emotional, sometimes incomprehensible unless you know the circumstances, often ingenious and always unexpected.  He has an unusual way of marshalling his thoughts.

His spur-of-the-moment performances enliven the unhurriedness. He will say over and over how he loves making faces at the babies in the supermarket and flirting with their mothers. A Catholic convert he delights in calling the priest “vicar”.

Dad is an extraordinary chap for whom life has presented a series of challenges: sounding like an improbable English toff in a place where sloppy speech is the norm and spending most of his adult life as an undiagnosed bi-polar and dyslexic – thereby - being generally out of step at every turn. He has cultivated a wicked sense of humour; which sees him through most situations or he sees through them: that's uncomfortable for some.

It’s relaxing to stay where not much happens. I find things to do like extracting the juice out of grapes that would otherwise rot on the vine. Squeezing grapes through a simple tool is a quite fiddly but enjoyable task, especially outside in the sun; the resulting liquid has to be strained for spiders’ legs and whatnot. Delicious.

Tomoko our neighbour and I walked to Riwaka wharf with her daughters Hikaru and Hana. It was cold in the shadows, warm in the sun with hilarity, discovery and new friendship. The natural world provided a spectacular backdrop and in the foreground the girls pick up tiny, shelled creatures and ages-old marble in shades of maroon and lightest violet.

Waiting for the night ferry

The “nasal clairvoyant” – Lily - collects her messages from the dog world as eagerly as we do email. She pushed through long ornamental grasses beside Te Papa with determination verging on obsession. 

Inside Te Papa, news reports played from the 70s and 80s on the Springbok tour, abortion law reform, Bastion Point and the homosexual law reform bill.  Was it just so recently that these issues bled over our screens? And yet, they’re more than our children’s lifetimes in time, now passed into history.

Come evening, we sauntered through the grounds of the old timber government building that looks like an Italian stone palace. As the Beehive’s lights winked, I kept an eye on the Bluebridge building to meet the eight o’clock deadline of squeezing into the freight ferry.

 Performances worthy of the trucking Oscars were enacted before our tired eyes. From the milquetoast Nissan Pulsar, I watched monster rigs avec trailers bearing massive earthmoving machinery back into the bowels of the ferry. Now who cannot back a trailer! Once oil tankers, stock trucks, and heaven know what else, had been tucked in for the voyage, we made our timid way.

The night freight ferry over Cook Strait is a good option if you don’t like crowds and enjoy travelling at night. There is space to sleep just about anywhere and the very few passengers attempted to do that while trying to ignore Thunderdogs followed by Wilson and Hooch barking it up on the big screen. Ms Lily had to stay in the NP.

The freight ferry is slower than the usual three hour crossing so it wasn’t until 1am that we were let out at Picton. It was a somewhat ghostly ride through vineyard country, punctuated by moving over for the rigs, lights ablaze like Spanish galleons, streaking towards us slow movers from both sides of the road. Even though I hadn’t slept much due to “never fear, Thunderdogs are here”played at high volume, I was able to keep alert until Nelson, where I bought a coke and chocolate bar from a highly uncommunicative petrol attendant. No wonder he prefers the graveyard shift.

The highway to Mot has been souped up with many new cats' eyes to guide the unwary motorist and so, gratefully, at 4am, I pulled into the father’s driveway. The house was locked.

Hills and vales of Maui's fish

Kapiti Island

The journey through the North Island is beginning to feel a bit like the ‘road less travelled’. A friend who lived in her van for six months says travelling alone can be lonely; I discover that in just a few days. The night at the motel in Wairoa coincided with Coronation Street, for which I was pathetically grateful. It felt like being home.

My ‘luxury’ item, the bells and whistles pressure cooker, came into play the next morning, schooshing up a lamb stew in 15 minutes. With meaty smells wafting, we drove through Hawkes Bay's hills, hills and more hills of beautiful design on the way to Carterton. The ravine landscape (below) I found exquisite, partly because the dwelling looks so insignificant.

At Napier, I chanced upon a quality Japanese shop called Raku, where I found a five-and-a-half-hour candle to give to our good hosts, Mary and Fred. They were very gracious when I alighted on them at their new home in Carterton just before dinner. It was so good to see our Nina the next day resting on her sofa in Carter Court; she enjoyed my next lamb stew made ever so swiftly in the pressure cooker.

Nina likes to discuss Tama, her cat that other people seldom see. She told me about his visits to other rest home residents and the ginger cat. But as always, Tama was elsewhere - well of course he was - we didn’t see even a whisker. On Saturday night, M, F and I collected fish and chips from the good place in Masterton, with a special piece for Tama; he was watching from the shrubbery until we left.

…

It’s amazing how quickly you forget hours of travelling; it’s a bit like childbirth:  the results are worth it. Up and over the Rimutaka ranges brought us to the east coast and Otaki, home to Anna, Raven, Tia, Poppy and Ropati. The last three are chiahuahuas.

Tia

After a beach romp with four tiny dogs, we devoured a scrumptious crockpot curry (I had offered the pressure cooker but the slow curry was on the way) and settled down to watch the secret life of moles with David Attenborough.

Anna and I were so disgusted by the moles' noses that we laughed hysterically.  We weren’t expecting their flaccid pink noses to wobble quite that way.

Paekakariki shops

On the road again the need for a cooked breakfast on the way to Wellington turned into a hunt for the least-newish suburban seaside centre. Paekakariki won: more superb hills, but the cafe's French toast had the consistency of a wetex.

Foraging at Waihi, chased out of Waikaremoana

The journey has been fairly social, apart from the actual travelling part.  Now it’s doggy and me for the first time since we left our real home. Ooo weeee!

I was sad to leave Isabell in Waihi where we had great times, including stripping a crab apple tree near 

the perimeter of the open cast Martha Mine (pictured below). Ingenious Isabell used a cup hook on a long stick to bring the fruit down. I chased and bagged them. Forager’s jelly is bound to taste extra good. I like this photo of Isabell and her daughter Rosie.

At Tauranga, old family friend Ruth treated me to lunch while our respective dogs snoozed on front and back seats.

The night before last, our home was a studio with a view at Rotoiti Lake Motor Camp. Few people about: just the last of the summer camper van people watching their own televisions. It’s getting chillier.

Lily was allowed to stay in that camp and that was lucky. The next night was not so. We drove four hours over mostly metal roads to Lake Waikaremoana and were turned down flat by the motor camp but carried on to Wairua. 

Wild foal in the Urewera ranges.

First view of Waikaremoana.

Home of the Tuhoe, the Urewera ranges seemed devoid of people. Their cars were there at maraes and hunters’ 4WDs were parked on the roadside but, apart from the occasional car coming the other way, I hardly saw anyone the whole time. Lichen hanging off trees give the place an eerie feel and the trees are so tall and there are rather a lot of them...

I didn't feel too sad about not staying at Waikaremoana - the experience of the Ureweras was satisfyingly surreal and now I'm sitting up in bed in an uber comfortable motel in Wairoa, home of the Mongrel Mob. But I'm perplexed by DOC's Nazi stance towards dogs. Lily is just so much of a lap-dog and gets lumped in with pit-bulls and other potential kiwi killers in a National Park. 

Where will we go today? We have the choice of going further up the coast to Mahia or carrying on south through Napier and Hastings.

Gothic at Waihi: the pumphouse.

Send me an email!

First day out of Auckland

I was thinking all sorts of things driving out of Auckland today. What they were, I can't remember. A pity, but you can hardly stop on the southern motorway and jot them down before they float off.

Like the photo at the left;  dandelion seeds, they were there, now they've gone...maybe they went off germninate on fertile ground somewhere.

One of the things I was thinking is how very lucky I've been, in this running away thingy, to have had such marvellous help and people believing in what I'm doing, when I can hardly believe I'm doing it myself. I left Ian and Belinda's this morning after being thoroughly spoiled for several days and now I'm at Isabell's in Waihi, tapping away at her table. It was so good to re-discover Isabell: another example of the one degree of separation so prevalent in NZ.

And the wwoofer I picked up by the Bethells Bridge on the way out of the Bethells Valley (a couple of days ago) turned out to be someone who had corresponded with me when I was a wwoofer host. NZ is soooo small. I hope Stuart manages to make it back to the Mana place in Coromandel which is apparently, a very cool place to wwoof, with lots going on.

Today I visited Natalie the quilt maker near Ngatea. I want one of her exquisite quilts when I'm in funds again. So good to catch up...she directed me to Highway 2, thorough the Hauraki plains to Ngatea where the girls' great-grandfather Mick was town clerk and his son young Des launched his career as a clever wordsmith...

The photo downstairs is for you Belinda and Susie. It's by Theona from Kohukohu in a style you recognise xxxx