Over the hills and back again

Last week I was treated to Dora's choral concert, joined by Andrew and Trish and several over choir-groupies. While not a music buff, I was super-impressed by what even non-professional singers can do with their voices. I filmed some of the event, which will feature in a future blog. 

Dora, me, Matt and Phoebe pencilled in last weekend for some intense tramping. However, it was raining so we decided – after much deliberation fuelled by hourly-changeable Met Service forecast – to go wine tasting in Martinborough instead.

On Saturday morning we therefore fled the drizzle. Matt drove us over the Rimutakas and across the Wairarapa valley to Martinborough, where we’d booked into a cosy little AirBnB at the last minute. We deposited our bags and hired a tandem for Matt and Phoebe (Dora and I were on our cheapo trail bikes).

We started with reds and dessert wines at Muirlea Rise, then moved onto whites at generous Martinborough Vineyard. Cambridge Road provided a "naturalist" almost fizzy wine (Roger: "do you plan it all with the moon or some rubbish?" Hostess: "...yes"), which kick started our appetites for a lovely lunch outside at Luna Estate. Once we’d eaten Luna’s food and tasted some of their wine, it was on to Colombo where the friendly dog made up for the brief tasting explanations (“this is a white wine… very refreshing… grapes from over there *vague gesture* … good in summer ...enjoy”).

We finished the day with a final tasting and a bottle of champagne-style bubbly at Brodie Estate, where the intermittent rain finally cleared to let the sun slowly warm our glasses.

Back at base, we put on our glad rags and headed to the Matinborough Hotel for a pizza and the first half of All Blacks v Argentina. However, some Phatt Rob Doger and comfortable sofas were too tempting to resist for long, so we settled down to enjoy some of Dora’s brownie-cake and ‘In The Loop’.

We’d left our Sunday plans purposefully flexible, given the aforementioned fickleness of the weather and the temptation of blo-karting just up the coast. A planning brunch at The Village Café however sent us down to the south coast to see the Putangirua Pinnacles, where Matt stepped in some mud with his waterproof boots, and I stepped into a river with my highly-permeable trainers.

Cape Palliser lighthouse was next on the ad hoc agenda, via a a Ngawi fish and chips stand that was almost overwhelmed by a rush of eight customers. I ran up the 250+ stairs and regretted it, and then we got up close and personal with some seals.

The day was now getting on, so we sensibly headed home. However, en route I demanded we walk up the Rimutaka Trig, a gamble that rewarded us with some awesome views and chilblains.

We’re now back in the flat and getting neck-deep in logistics as we head back to the UK via South America.

A thespie, foodie, escape-and-sauna type week

The Pickle King, a comedy with large glued-on noses, darker themes and echoes of Rushdie, was not the only play we saw during the week. Also set in New Zealand, but swapping the family-run Empire Hotel for an off-grid family home, A Doll's House modernized proved a powerful Friday night. At the end (spoiler alert) Nora tears down the translucent hangings of the set and throws open not only the doors to backstage but the fire doors onto the street and disappears out into the Wellington night.

On Saturday Roger went for a looong run with Tim and I did a big digital photo audit and back up (who had more fun?) so that we don't miss anything when we make an awesome panorama feature wall in our future house (in 2040). Here's a photo of Roger and Greg diving the Rainbow Warrior, and a photo of my favourite type of sea creature, the nudibranch. Both photos are now thoroughly backed up.

In the afternoon we joined Tim, Sophie, Phoebe and Matt for Roger's favourite pastime: an escape room. It was a big one, and we applied ourselves well, saving humanity (again) from the evil cyborg-touting secret ancient criminal underground organisation with a penchant for combination locks and UV light.

Roger dashed off to his football team Awards night, and after a drink at our favourite post-rugby bar Leuven with the team, I headed home to bake and watch a film Roger wouldn't watch.

Sorting, errands and choir practice took up Sunday, until 5.30pm, when we headed to post restaurant Logan Brown to have dinner thanks to some very generous friends (you know who you are). It was their leaving present to us but they took a little while to really review and choose the best Wellington restaurant (from afar).

The highlights were risotto bianco paired with a Loire Valley white and chocolate mousse with poached pear and Clearview (Hawke's Bay) fortified red wine. 

This is the week of the much-anticipated Madrigals choir concert on Wednesday and then EV World Awards on Thursday. Not sure what Roger's doing! In fact, he's already planned and run a very successful work event. 

And we had a daring Tuesday night, visiting the container sauna on the waterfront to escape the wet and windy night (picture not an accurate representation of the day).

A whale of a time spring training

Several days ago we tired of the five-day working week and took off the Christchurch on Thursday. We’d booked the trip some time ago, our original intention to ski in Queenstown/Wanaka. The weather gods weren’t on our side, however, so we went to Kaikoura instead – a tourist hotspot heavily damaged in an earthquake last year.

 

Getting ready to sleep...
in an old train carriage!

The road to Kaikoura is only open 7am-6pm, so we stopped off at Waipara sleepers (where we last stayed during Simon’s visit) to sleep in a converted railway carriage.

#onlyaslightfilter

Arising at dawn, we drove up the coastal highway – still in a state of reconstruction – to try our hand at whale watching (for which Kaikoura is famous). However, we weren’t well positioned on the waiting list, so instead went to try our legs at Mt Fyffe, a three-to-five hour ascent just seaward of the seaward Kaikoura mountain range.

We saw the walk as training for November’s Inca Trail (coming to a blog near you soon), which it was. The spring in the air wasn’t quite as active as the spring in our step, leaving the top quite snowy. This allowed great photos, but limited the laziness of our lunchtime (where we enjoyed some juicy Craigend grapefruit). We descended to a nice little Bach we had hired for the weekend, stopping off at to eat a genuinely delicious rabbit (yes, RABBIT) covered pizza.

Another morning, another attempt at the whale watching waiting list, and another disappointment. Not to be downhearted, we saw what else Kaikoura had to offer, which turned out to be a lot.

A Cormorant/Shag

We went on a walking tour with Sue, a genuine Kaikourian. She told us about historic Māori wars, a more recent whale hunting past, and the very recent construction of an ugly and expensive council building. We then went sea kayaking with Connor. Connor showed us lots of seals, even more rare sea birds (Hutton's Shearwater or Titi) and the locale of some underwater hot springs that emerged post-earthquake, which he named after his daughter Hope.  

Dora tried to finish the afternoon with a nap, but I bundled us out onto a run around the Kaikoura Peninsula Walkway instead, which provided lovely sunset views of the coastline, risen from the sea in the earthquake, and a dark and spooky view of the forest on the way home. We arrived home safely though, in time to head out to see the All Blacks win a thrilling game against the Wallabies. Jubilation and relief erupted from the pub's previously nonchalant occupants on the winning try.

Third time lucky, we were upgraded from ‘the waiting list’ to ‘the list’ on Sunday, and thus boarded a boat to see the famous Kaikoura sperm whales. These mammals helpfully use noise to traverse the Kaikoura trench that attracts them to the region, so were fairly easy to track down with a listening trumpet on a stick. Although the trench is as deep as the Kaikoura ranges are high, our boat awaited their return to the surface, filled with tourists clasping poised cameras.

Sperm whale dives to the depths for another 45-minute feed, where is uses sonic waves to knock fish unconscious then hoovers them up. Dora looks on enviously.

An Albatross -

"And a good south wind sprung up behind; 

The Albatross did follow, 

And every day, for food or play, 

Came to the mariner's hollo! "

We were not disappointed. Two sperm whales, lots of birds, and a pod of hundreds of frisky Dusky Dolphins later we returned to the shore with our natural world needs sated. 

We fancied some relaxation after the busy days, so drove inland to Hamner Springs to ‘take the waters’. These smelled quite eggy, but were genuinely relaxing (until I tried to do an underwater forward roll and splashed everyone).

Our long weekend was coming to a close. A drive back to Christchurch – punctuated by a stop at a moderately good café-restaurant-bar – led us to the ‘Jucy Snooze’ airport hotel, where we crammed in some sleep ahead of a Monday morning flight into work.

Now back to the five-day week, we’ve continued to keep busy when not at work. We consumed some home brew and fantasy/drama Game of Thrones with Matt and Phoebe, saw a comedy called The Pickle King at a local theatre and rehearsed some songs ahead of an upcoming concert. 

All about the bakes, the brews and the bush

Crazy Owls for a work competition to raise money for KidsCan

Recovering from our big weekend, we had a quiet couple of weeks - a bit of swimming, singing, running and baking set us up nicely for the first key activity: bottling our Phatt Rob Doger brew.

Matt and Phoebe had conveniently jetted off to the UK over the bottling window, so we enlisted the help of craft beer connoisseurs Lucy and Rich to help us sterilise the equipment and photograph the action. Pretty much all the beer went in the bottles, but we won't know whether we were truly successful for another week, when we'll finally be able to drink it!

Roger played football on Saturday (a much-needed win) and I soaked up the sunshine in town doing some travel shopping and eating a Best Ugly Bagel bagel (which I did not photograph because I was on my own).

An unsuccessful straight face selfie

That evening we joined Sophie, Tim and (new friend alert!) Johnny for Beervana, after (un)wisely(?) eating a lot of homemade burrito at our flat. You may remember last year the emphasis was on sour beer; this year everyone seemed to be doing their beer in the barrels leftover from fermenting other stuff, e.g. whisky. There was some really nice hoppy cider too. We left the wider crew setting off to karaoke, in favour of sleep.

On rainy, squally Sunday we established that our packs would fit the gear we intended to take to South America, and gave into subscribing to a TV service on which we could watch Game of Thrones. Luckily Laura and Matt had invited us round so we couldn't accidentally binge watch. I made a pav! And we discussed personality tests - are you Powerful, Playful, Precise or Peaceful?

Ratanui

Wellington on a Plate was well underway the next week. We joined Lucy for a tasty alpaca burger at Bin44, after a small and eccentric celebration of Wellington cycling through the ages, powered by pedalling. 

Wellington on a Plate alpaca burger and matched beer

The golden bullet was back in action on Friday afternoon as we beat the weekend traffic via a cunning back route (thanks Google) over Paekaekariki hill to Trish and Andrew's. After catching up over dinner, we slept so well that the only Saturday activity option left was a gentle bush walk in Bushy Park. This nonetheless turned out to be very exciting: the Ratanui (largest Northern Rata tree) was majestic and the Saddlebacks (a type of bird) two a penny. We also learnt some plant names. A very civilised picnic with Peruvian tablecloth was cut short by the rain. What a useful campervan!


That evening we all enjoyed dinner with Chris and Andy and Sue and Dick, discussing the effectiveness of New Zealand's biosecurity. We watched the first Bledisloe Cup game in our pyjamas (actually just me in pyjamas) the next morning.

I had to get back to St Mary's, Karori, for an important choir rehearsal, but not before raiding the Craigend orchards and vegge garden for the most organic produce in the world! We went to Douglas' for supper - his signature Mediterranean chicken tajine and poached pears for dessert. 

Phatt Rob Doger, and Blue Bird Ski

Landing in Wellington, we picked up our luggage from the carousel and our old friend Rob from international arrivals. He was joining us from balmy/boiling Queensland, to dip his toe in New Zealand before exploring it further in the future.

On Tuesday we withdrew to our workplace offices while Rob enjoyed the Wellington sunshine. We met up in the evening to watch an advance screening of An Inconvenient Sequel, Al Gore’s follow up to An Inconvenient Truth. It was quite an ironic event: sponsored by a vehicle fuel retailer, watched by Al Gore fans, and carrying positive messages about the US’ environmental leadership despite the awkward Trumpian postscript. Worth watching though.

Rob went walking on Wednesday, then joined some of our friends for a pub quiz (Dora was choiring and I was studying). On Thursday we went out for dinner, ending up at Ombra after our first choice, the Boulcott Bistro, was flooded by rainwater! We finished off the introduction to NZ with a viewing of What We Do In The Shadows on Friday.

View from the Skyline Track, where Tim and I ran

Freed from work by the weekend, we took Rob up up to the wind turbine on Saturday, and had a clear view over to the South Island's Kaikoura range. We then joined Matt and Phoebe at the Occasional Brewer with to ‘use their equipment to brew our own beer’, which takes advantage of a tax loophole and will hopefully produce 40L of drinkable beverage – which we’ve named Phatt Rob Doger – next week.  We bid a sad farewell to Rob mid-brewing.

Sunday was fairly relaxed – a run and a brunch in Karori with Tim and Sophie.

We made up for this sedateness this weekend just gone. Dora pre-deployed herself to Christchurch for some work events (including a Great Gatsby-themed awards evening), and I joined her on Friday evening for a light run around Christchurch and a sleep in her snazzy corporate hotel. We arose at the crack of dawn to join Phoebe and Matt (again!) for some skiing on Mt Hutt.

 

Note the braided Rakaia River

The weather treated us well, with alpine triangles nestled beneath blue bird skies. The snow was good – despite some icy patches – and we spent a fun day sliding our way down mountain at breakneck speed.

Exhausted, we then headed to recuperate at Dee and Gerald’s welcoming home nearby. We feasted on home made sausages and great company, and slept deeply.

We awoke slowly on Sunday, to a hearty breakfast. I undercooked some eggs for everyone to enjoy. Matt and Phoebe headed off to explore Christchurch’s Port Hills. Dora and I lunched with her cousins Mark, Katie and John. We walked along South Brighton beach to build up an appetite, then joined Diana and David for tea and cake, the latter made earlier by Manon and Bianca, the daughters of Dora’s cousin Henry and his wife Tomomi, who were all also there. Following the family-filled fun we flew back to Welly. It was a bit bumpy and someone was sick.

This coming weekend we’ll be bottling some (hopefully) fine Phatt Rob Doger, then cleansing our pallets at the ‘Beervana’ festival.