Crocheted bike rack covers.
Jump!
This platform on the Wellington waterfront invites you to just jump in. It might be 20′ to the surface of the water, and it must be cold, and this is the busy part of the harbor. All in all, no thanks.
I think this could only be built in a country with a national accident insurance plan.
The Hikitia
The Hikitia is a working steam crane, thought to be the only one of its kind that still operates.
No, no, it’s NORTH Warrandyte
After my meetings ended Friday, I got to spend a magical day in the Yarra Valley with my friends Paul and Amanda. They’ve recently moved to a fantabulous property about an hour outside Melbourne. North Warrandyte is the right side of the tracks, and their place is amazing.
You can just make out the cockatoos at the feeder beyond the deck.
We had a great dinner at the Grand on Friday, taking advantage of the shuttle service. Then, Saturday morning we all got our 10,000 steps in by walking around Warrandyte State Park.
This was gold panning country back in the day, and as you can see from the map the river takes a few turns. Somebody got the bright idea to blast a tunnel across that narrow oxbow so they could undermine their upstream competition.
Good engineering, bad business plan. They went bust shortly after completing the tunnel.
We saw massive numbers of parrots, rosellas, cockatoos , and other birds, maybe a dozen species I’d never seen.
This kookaburra let us get pretty close, but he didn’t laugh. There are YouTube videos if you’ve never heard one.
There was a big mob of kangaroos, including the mom with joey that you can barely make out in this picture.
But the closest encounter I had with the ‘roos was, shall we say, more grounded…
Then lunch and and pool time, and back on the plane. In flight bonus: made it through most of Game of Thrones Season 7, finally.
All in all, a great visit and a great little break!!!
Melbourne or bust
Air New Zealand got bonus points for personalised service on my quick work-related hop over to Melbourne this week. 
Another city, another hotel room view, ho-hum. But there were compensations…
I arrived on Ladies Day, part of the big Melbourne Cup horse racing week, and everyone from debutantes to the more matronly gets all dolled up with special hats and makes a day of it.
Prince’s Gate Hotel
Last week’s accommodations in Rotorua managed to hit all the historic boutique hotel notes just right.
No drunken dickheads
Tell it, refreshingly, like it is.
Hobbiton Tour
Short version: OMG great.
Long version:
Once upon a time a location scout was flying around in a helicopter and saw a really great tree.
There was a good little pond…
so they started to imagine how it would look as Hobbiton, the Shire.
Encouraged by Tolkeinsian omens such as preternaturally wise birds, and a contract with the local sheep farmer,
they started building hobbit holes. It was just temporary at first, enough to get the LOTR movies out the door, but then…
people started to show up. Hobbits, after all. People love hobbits.
A lot of people, willing to pay. Mostly hobbit-like in their demeanor, although there were some orc’ish moments with umbrellas and selfie sticks.
So they hired tour guides, leased a fleet of buses, built everything to a more permanent standard, and created an empire dressed up as a village.
Now there’s a complete infrastructure if you know where and how to look.
They added the Green Dragon pub (where yes you can rent it out and get married), so you leave even happier than you arrived. In addition to the good beer, you could buy a scone. Like this guy from our group, who I caught here rubbing the crumbs off his hands in a kind My Precioussss moment. He had gotten every LOTR trivia question right without breaking a sweat. It was very validating when he took his jacket off to reveal his Star Wars shirt. A poly-geek.
Please come visit so we have an excuse to go back.
Wai-O-Tapu
After my conference in Rotorua ended on Friday, Lee came down for the weekend!!! We booked tours on Saturday, here’s our morning activity, the amazing geothermal area of Wai-O-Tapu…
First stop, 5 minutes at the bubbling mud pits. Actually quite mesmerizing… If it hadn’t been raining so hard.
Then on to the Lady Knox Geyser.
Despite the big crowd with their over large umbrellas, the guy gave an interesting history of the site. This geyser is interesting in that it doesn’t normally erupt. There are a couple different layers of water, and normally the super-heated water is kept safely under ground by a layer of cooler water on top. But if you add soap to break the surface tension, as a group of prisoners washing clothes in the spring did about 100 years ago,
And wait a few minutes…
Wow!
Then on to the main attraction, the big geothermal park at Wai-O-Tapu.
The tour brochure promised us one of the 20 most surreal places on earth. I don’t really know what surreal means, other than through examples from Kafka, Dali, and so on. Does finding yourself in a cafeteria and gift shop waiting for the rain to die down instead of oohing and aahing at hot springs count as surreal? Quite possibly yes.
Luckily, they had rain ponchos for sale. Fortified with coffee and danish, off we went.
Altogether we walked about 2 miles on nice trails. There were lots of craters and bubbling mud and steam. Some were especially bright colored, some not so much. The rain lessened and the sun peeked out.
The very last pool on the loop was the most amazing green color… smart to put that one at the end!
Most surreal? Maybe, maybe not, but still pretty cool.
Black swans
Not so rare as all that! Shown here foraging on a hill at Hobbiton, and bobbing about on Lake Rotorua.
Get noticed
Wow, I thought, that’s cool and amazing!
Then later I saw a very similar van painted like the Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo. Hmmm.
Turns out it’s a rental company… making Jucy Lucy look all stodgy and corporate.
And-a the horse-a you rode in on
In Te Reo, the Māori language, most everything is pronounced in a way that is pretty consistent to how it’s written and pretty easy for English speakers to sound out. One exception is the “wh”, which is pronounced as an “f” more or less.
Rotovegas
This week, I’ve been at a work thing in beautiful Rotorua, about three hours south of Auckland. I’m not sure why it’s called Rotovegas, but it is, so roll with it. There was a dinner outing at the Skyline Gondola, which would be one of the smallest ski areas in America if it were a ski area. Or in America. Here, I’m just about to get on the little luge cart thingy and careen (career? both?) down the rain-slicked track. Way fun, and no scars unlike the last time I tried this with Frank in Utah.
This is the museum building, closed indefinitely pending seismic upgrades. Sad. In the foreground, people play croquet, not sad at all.
Rotorua is known for its stinky hot springs, which are literally everywhere… most of the town is powered by the abundant geothermal energy. Here are a couple shots of some outdoor springs in parks around downtown…
More hot springs in another post.
And actually, more of everything in another post… it’s time to go sit in the hot tub.
An early morning walk in Brisbane was a wonderful birdwatching event. I didn’t get a picture of the fruit bats, but they were cool too. 
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 
