Some pretty 19th century gravestones, mixed in with more current ones. 
Lee didn’t know she was posing…
The verse on this next one reads a lot like a Burma-Shave ad…
Queenstown Iron
and brass…
Milford Sound tour, part 2
Some pics from the trip…
These crazy mountain parrots, called keas, have a thing for weatherstripping on cars… so they sit outside the entrance to a tunnel where cars sit and prey on people.
Milford Sound tour
Milford Sound, where you can take a 2-hr boat trip out to see the rocks and waterfalls, is (choose all that apply)
- A 6-hour drive from Queenstown across countryside where not a lot has happened, ever, despite the driver’s heroic attempts at commentary
- One of the wettest places in NZ with up to 30 feet of rain per year (Well, the driver said, you got to experience it the way it really is)
- Breathtakingly beautiful, what with the steep mountains, glacial cataracts, etc, and probably even more so when not obscured by clouds
- The most visited attraction in the country
- Officially checked off our to-see list
Queenstown arrival
We flew into Queenstown yesterday afternoon for some sightseeing and to spend a little more time with Mitchel and Caroline. It’s a short 2 hour flight from Auckland, which ended with some turbulence and a spectacular approach along the valley.
A ski town in winter, Queenstown makes its summer tourist reputation on adrenaline sports… which we won’t be participating in. But for our first evening we got beautiful weather to stroll around town: Key West meets Park City meets Montreux.
The buskers were out in force. First we saw the mesmerizing but unphotogenic Kosmic Zone, with a beat-boxer, a synthesizer-er, and a didgeridoo-er. They had a good audience but the trancelike music might or might not have opened people’s wallets.
Then Sven From Sweden, whose patter and crowd skills were super funny, even if his tricks were probably more showy than difficult. He also had a big audience and really seemed to rake it in at the end.
And then there was jazz guy seated by himself next to the toilets. Maybe he just enjoys playing outside… he certainly wasn’t making a living.
Fergburger has been recommended over and over, but the 100+ people outside queuing up made us even happier that we’d run into Taco Medic first.
I can see clearly now
We rang in the New Year with sparklers and actually stayed awake long enough to see the fireworks from the Sky Tower. Here’s hoping for literal and metaphorical 20/20 vision in the coming year.
Random Samba
New Year’s Eve dinner at an Asian-BBQ fusion restaurant started off with a little samba troupe… there was no obvious reason for it, but apparently every year there’s a different entertainment. It went on just long enough to make us worry that we would have to endure the drumming for the whole meal, but then they shook and shimmied off into the night…
It’s Alive!!
Just like last year, one of the baby seagulls disappeared from the nest, and then emerged on the ground a couple weeks later, happy and well-fed. Now both of them are flapping and hopping … it won’t be long till they fly away.
Niece, nice!
Mitch and Caroline arrived today for their 10-day tour of NZ… yay!
In an effort to keep them on the right time zone we marched them all over Auckland, but by mid-afternoon it was nap time 😴.
Tower and Inferno
From the Sky Tower today we had a bird’s eye view of the damaged convention centre roof. It burned a couple months ago when a worker left his blowtorch on while he wandered off for a smoke break.
The fire will delay the facility’s opening by unknown months.
Pie-pun’ hot
I often make some sort of a pun in the titles of my posts. ‘Pie’ shoulda been easy material to work with, but I’m traumatized… the New York Times did a little year-end quiz of famous faces, and one of the people I got wrong was a famous YouTuber called PewDiePie. Never heard of him till then, which is apparently a stark OK Boomer dividing line… I’m officially an Old. My first pie pun ideas were Sweeney Todd, the Beatles, something about how pies r round, not squared. Weak stuff.
And how you relate to pies in NZ matters… pies are the national food, along with fish and chips. A politician got absolutely shamed last year for eating a pie with knife and fork at an event. Man of the people my sweet patooty.
Of course, a pie here is a savoury thing, mostly, and of a size to be eaten (messily) with one hand. If you’re a tradesman, you can reasonably eat a NZ pie while driving down the motorway and at the same time explaining to a customer on the phone why you’re a few days late.
Anyway, the pies at the Pie Shop in Kumeu are really good.
What SUP, Doc?
I got to try Isabella’s stand-up paddleboard yesterday. It’s a fairly racy board, therefore less stable than the big ones you can rent down at the waterfront. It was fun! I don’t need another sports hobby so it won’t be something I’m likely to do more of, but I was glad to give it a go.
And the winner is…
In the category “Best picture of a minivan”…
Kereru
That is a kereru or wood pigeon enjoying a snack of puriri berries. The kereru looks like a regular city pigeon more or less, but is about three times the size. They’re somewhat endangered because they make a nice meal…
Tutukaka market
The Saturday market outside the only store in Tutukaka caused me to question my assumptions about the ‘authenticity’ of the whole farmers market thing. Specifically, in my mind, the actual farmer is supposed get up early, harvest only the things at the peak of ripeness, wash and bundle it all, load the produce into crates and boxes and drive into town to stand humbly before me hoping for a few dollars. But that model only makes sense for farms at a very particular scale… if “the farmer” is actually a person or a family. But if in fact the work is done by a dorm full of migrant laborers, overseen by professional supervisors, and the landowner is a body corporate of some sort, who’s the farmer anyway?
At farmers markets we’ve been to, I’m pretty sure some of the stands actually operate like I romantically expect them to. In Parnell, it’s the honey lady, some of the fruit stands, the sausage seller. But others are probably retailers who’ve never set foot on the farm in question. Hmmm.
In Tutukaka, a single van full of Indian guys pulls up and unloads crates of every fruit and vegetable you can reasonably imagine. There’s no way it all came from a single field or greenhouse! Predatory shoppers, most of whom are holidaymakers (like me) who would not be uncomfortable at a Junior League meeting in Amherst or Millbrae, wait with carefully disguised eagerness. Money changes hands, and nutritious fresh meals are prepared for all the above-average children.
In fairness, the plastic crates were stamped with something about a growers cooperative… so maybe the whole farmers market concept as I imagine it is actually operating in the background… but it’s a distribution system, only cutting out the actual physical store, rather than a 1:1 connection between a farmer and a market stall.
And in even more fairness , nobody said it was an actual farmers market… maybe it’s actually just a fresh produce market in a town that would otherwise be too small for fresh seasonal veggies… In which case, awesome!!! And we got exactly the fresh herbs we wanted… so the system works!
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 