Palmed Off

Trip Start Oct 15, 2007

Trip End Aug 24, 2008

Loading Map

Map your own trip!

Map Options

Show trip route

Hide lines

Flag of New Zealand Palmerston North, North Island, New Zealand
Sunday, February 17, 2008

The guidebook suggested that Palmerston North was a pretty nice place. 'Cafe culture', 'barefoot, hippy, walk-on-the-grass feel to the place', that sort of thing. Incidentally, there is no Palmerston South. The small, unremarkable village of Palmerston in South Island was named before the small, unremarkable village of Palmerston in North Island, so the North Island version had to qualify itself. Palmerston North became a large, flourishing city, whilst the Palmerston in South Island didn't, but the names stuck. Everyone calls the northern one 'Palmy' anyway.

The drive to Palmy was fairly uneventful, although Jacob was a little concerned at the state of Lucy's temperature guage as we mounted one particularly large hill. Still, she did alright for an old girl. We stopped at a lookout point to take some photos, then pushed on to Palmy.

It being late on Saturday afternoon, Palmy was closed. A touch disappointing. Normally, Saturday afternoon is the time to visit a city if you wish to see it in full swing. Here however, nothing swung. The 'barefoot, hippy, walk-on-the-grass feel to the place' was also absent. Jacob was slightly more interested in the place than Kirsty, which was entirely due to the Harley Davidson riders convention taking place that weekend. Valuing his marriage a little more than the chance to salivate over acres of chrome, he decided that Palmy would have to try a little harder if we were going to stick around. As a slightly freakish aside, exactly as the words 'Harley Davidson' were being typed just now, a dozen Harleys pulled up to the lights outside the cafe where we're sitting. A bit odd.

After spending considerably longer than expected in an internet cafe, looking up the recommended tyre pressures for the van (which seemed a bit soft), we inflated, drove around for a while and seeing that Palmy was still asleep and making no effort to wake up and convince us to stay, we left.

The Waikawa DOC site ("What the bloody hell do you mean? We've already driven three times further down this track than you said...oh, was that it? Yeah, that thing back there with the bush growing around the sign. How the hell am I supposed to turn a van this size around in a lane this size, in between trees that size? Without reverse lights. With someone behind us.") was rather out of the way. It was deserted (as is the norm), but for a crowd of ravers. They were not your usual dreadlocked crusty drivers of converted ambulances wigging out to techno under the stars though, this was a bit more school disco. DOC sites often have a cooking shelter thing, but this one had been annexed by the crowd and augmented with a marquee. There was quite a large teenage emo contingent and the odd mumsy looking type. It seemed like it was probably someones eighteenth, but it was definitely a party that went on until daft o'clock in the morning, in a tent in a field in the middle of nowhere.

So, not deserted in the conventional sense, although we were definitely the only ones camping in the camping area.
This meant that we could bag a nice spot next to the picnic bench, under the trees beside the river. The tree containing a nest with a bird in it made out of plastic. This somewhat startled Jacob when he went to use the tree for, well, what blokes in fields tend to slope over to trees for...and there it was, at eye level, not making any attempt to vacate. It being twilight, it took a few moments to realise that it wasn't real.

The music went on. We didn't know many of the tunes. We went to bed, feeling old.