Boot Camp
Trip Start
Oct 15, 2007
1
60
97
Trip End
Aug 24, 2008
Wellington,
North Island,
New Zealand
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
We went to the Post Office, who told us that, despite being the main office for Wellington, they didn't deal with Poste Restante. They did give us details of the correct office and, as someone who had been leaving the car park had given us the rest of his all day parking ticket to use, we left Lucy where she was and walked into the city.
Having found the Post Office and collected our mail (the registration documents for the van), the next task was to find somewhere to stay. We had decided that we would like to be in the city centre so that we could sample some of the bars. We stopped off at Visitor Information for some advice, stopping to watch the Air Guitar contest that was taking place in the courtyard outside.
The guidebook listed a campsite on the outer edge of town (which Visitor Information also recommended) and a hostel with some camping space much closer to the town centre. Armed with pies and drinks from a nearby supermarket, we made our way back to the van and negotiated the Wellington one way system to Rowena, the hostel with the camping area, which turned out to be a huge ramshackle building with a small car park and an even smaller patch of grass for tents.
The car park was pretty full, although one vehicle with a fold out tent on the roof had taken up two spaces. At least this indicated that camping was possible in the car park. Jacob stayed with the van and Kirsty went to speak to the owner.
Rowena turned out to be a grumpy old man, who, as Kirsty approached, was sneering at a customer who had asked if it was possible to get a private room. A little put off, Kirsty asked in her friendliest, politest manner if it was possible to camp in the car park. Mr. Rowena was shirty and snappy in his response, but said that yes, we could if there was a space and gave us prices.
Jacob was still in the same place as nobody had yet vacated a space. We decided that as, although we were permitted to camp, there was no space to do so, we would see what the camp site recommended by the Visitor
Centre was like.
We drove out to Hutt Valley, finding the site behind an Industrial Estate. Already less than overwhelmed by the setting, we asked about prices and public transport. Although it was possible to take buses into the city, buses coming back to the site stopped running well before midnight. Overall, that would be a no, then.
We headed back to Rowena, where, miraculously there was a space available. A space that measured approximately one inch longer than the van. Jacob, with the aid of a handy shoehorn, parked up and we went in to settle the bill with the owner.
It was about half an hour since Kirsty's previous encounter with Mr. Rowena and his mood had not improved in the meantime. We were greeted with a rather surly "What can I do for you?", which came out sounding like shorthand for "What the hell do you want, you pair of scruffy bastards?", so we explained that we had now got a space, so we would like to pay for the three nights we were intending to stay.
"No," came the response. "I don't want any more vans."
We explained that he had already said that we could stay if we could find a space...which we now had...so what had changed? Furthermore, as we had been able to find a space, that must mean that a van had left, so there weren't more vans in the car park, and if more vans was all he was claiming to object to, then he was effectively telling us that he didn't have any reason for us not to stay.
This was all to no avail. Mr. Rowena was throwing a huff and there was to be no reasoning with him. He wasn't "going to sit here arguing about it all day", apparently. This from a man who was quite clearly standing up.
We didn't particularly want to argue all day either, we just wanted to know why he'd said yes, then as soon as we came to give him money, said no. In other words, we wanted a civil answer to a civil question.
At this point, he told us to leave.
As we were being chucked out anyway, we saw no reason to carry on asking him for his reasoning, in calm, reasonable tones.
"I told you he was an arsehole" said Kirsty
Obviously this didn't help, but neither had polite, reasoned discussion. Besides, he was.
Our ensuing torrent of abuse put off a few backpackers who were approaching the check-in desk, which was satisfying. It wasn't only us whose money he lost out on that day. In fact, if there hadn't have been an audience of sorts in the car park as we left, he'd have lost his rickety wooden fire escape to our bull bars. Instead, Jacob, a model of precision manoeuvring, left it intact.
Shouting, swearing and punching the steering wheel in frustrated anger, Jacob drove us through town, pulling up outside the YHA to see if they had any spare car park space we could rent. Although their car park was tiny and, as such, full, they were much nicer people and gave us a very useful piece of information: if you head along Ocean Drive, just past the swimming pool, the car parking stops being for a maximum of two metered hours, and becomes much friendlier. Free, in fact, if you're only there overnight, and the princely sum of five dollars between eight in the morning and seven at night. Buy little pay-and-display ticket things from the local 'dairy' (Kiwi speak for corner shop) and that's you sorted.
Our parking spot was right by the beach and therefore right by the public shower/changing room block. So, five dollars a day and we were a short walk to the city centre, had sea views, a ten second walk to the beach and use of toilets and showers. All in all, a good thing Rowena had turned out so badly. Granted, we were on a public road, but it wasn't as though it was the main drag and traffic quietened right down at night.
Having parked, dressed the back of the van so as to be able to be nicely inconspicuous about going to bed on our return, we walked into town in search of a night out. Every town in the world contains, of course, an 'Irish' pub, usually meaning a pub which, aside from the shamrocks painted over the door, is largely indistinguishable from any other pub in town, but has a selection of Guinness bar towels and is called Brendan O'Flaherty's. Well, Wellington probably had one of these, but what we weren't expecting to find was a 'Welsh Pub'. The Only Welsh Pub In The Southern Hemisphere, if the sign was to be believed.
Jacob first moved to Wales in 1997, Kirsty in 1998. We left last year. We were quite au fait with quite a number of Welsh pubs, as you may expect. Their one unifying feature however is...well, that they don't have any unifying features. The few traditional bits and pieces you might imagine them to have are picked from the same list as the stuff you get in English or Scottish pubs. Very similar to quite a few Irish pubs, as it happens. Our curiosity piqued, we crossed the road for a nosey. It was shut.
We would have to return, but for now, there were more places to be visited. We found a 'British' pub next. However this may be starting to sound, we did want to sample Kiwi pub life, but this place was advertising a happy hour and free pool. Bit of a no brainer. Not a bad place actually. They had Newcastle Brown Ale on tap, which is not something you find very often at home, and it was surprisingly good. A lot of beers of the British Isles tend to be rubbish overseas (although brewed to the same recipes, they use locally sourced ingredients which cannot really be expected to produce the same results), but this was pretty reasonable.
On to another place also advertising happy hour and pool tables, but unfortunately their pool room was closed. They had a pool table in the corner of the bar, surrounded by stacked furniture, which we had to keep moving during the game to get enough room to swing a cue. We gave up.
Another drink, then on a bit to a place who were doing a quiz, which sounded like it might be a laugh. We ate, and the quiz began. We'd checked to see if there was any point in our bothering (we asked if the questions were very Kiwi-centric and the English barman had a look and said he'd have known a good few answers). We did quite well, considering how much rubbish the barman had been talking. A picture round, for example, showing closeups of Kiwi chocolate bar wrappers to identify, that sort of thing. Yeah, cheers.
Anyway, we came third. This was partly due to Jacob's encyclopaedic knowledge of all things pointless and partly due to the fact that it wasn't completely knowledge based - the 'passing a lemon along the length of the room using only teaspoons clamped in your teeth' round stood us in quite good stead, for example. There wasn't a prize for third place, but the barman who had talked us into it gave us a $25 bar voucher for our trouble, which we promptly spent. A good night.
Back to the van for a sleep, and, in the case of one of us, to allow the hangover to stew for a while. Jacob's mum, although not often one for the drink, has never had a tendency towards hangovers. His dad, however, knows the feeling of the Devil moving furniture inside his head only too well. He had about a fifty-fifty chance then really, as far as which 'morning after' experience life was going to deal him. Cheers for that, Daddy-O.
In the morning, Jacob decided to go for a swim in the sea to chase away the hangover. Kirsty, as usual, had no hangover and furthermore, had no intention of voluntarily going into water that cold.
Hangover suitably banished, we showered and headed into town with the intention of making use of the wireless
network that apparently covered the majority of the city centre. We intended to combine this with breakfast, but ended up spending quite a lot of the day catching up on e-mail and some admin. We also looked around some of the shops and invested in an inverter for the van, which would allow us to run the laptop and charge the camera battery - one step closer to van based self sufficiency...
The 'Welsh Dragon' was still closed when we went back to check it out, but there was someone waiting outside for it to open, so we thought we might as well wait for a while too and sure enough, the place soon opened up.
The Welsh Pub experience was...unremarkable. It was run by a guy who was originally from Abergele (just up the coast from where we'd been living) and was filled with Welsh paraphernalia (flags, rugby posters, love spoons and the like). We had a pleasant enough pint of the local brew - they weren't serving Brain's or anything - and left as we'd decided to go to the cinema to see Sweeney Todd (and very good it was too).
After the movie, we treated ourselves to a meal out at a place called the 'Tasting Rooms'. Kirsty had calamari and Jacob, appropriately enough, had a fantastic beef wellington. Really good, melt-in-the-mouth, my-compliments-to-the-chef beef wellington. We also had a pitcher of Monteith's Celtic Red, which we chose from the beer menu based on the tasting notes that were included. Very civilised.
The following morning, it was Kirsty's turn to feel under the weather, although this time it was not alcohol-induced. We decided, therefore, to have a quiet day, so started by getting our laundry done, exchanged the inverter (which had just beeped its 'something's wrong, I'm shutting down' alarm at us constantly when we tried to use it), then went to the Te Papa museum. The musuem is located in a large building on the waterfront, which cost $300,000,000 dollars to build. It houses a huge variety of exhibits. We spent some time looking around, visiting the sections focussing on natural history, sculpture, New Zealand's immigrant history and New Zealand achievements and inventions.
Of particular interest (especially to Jacob) was the Britten V1000 motorbike. In 1992 John Britten, a Kiwi biker and engineer, designed a racing bike and built it on the cheap in his garden (engine, frame, the whole nine yards). A few of them were built, winning a variety of races, not just in New Zealand but worldwide. Pretty impressive stuff really. The bike is quite an unusual looking beast, as you might expect, and Jacob spent a while ogling at it.
There was also a corrugated iron 1974 Holden Kingswood station wagon. Jeff Thomson, a Kiwi artist, wanted to use unremarkable day-to-day materials in striking contexts, so made a variety of sculptures out of corrugated iron, including his car, which was, despite how unwieldy it must have been, his only mode of transport for three years.
We saw a strange show about...well, we weren't really clear on that. The audience was seated on a ragtag collection of old chairs and armchairs in a junk shop. A series of fairly disjointed images were shown on a screen and occasionally, one the junk shop objects in front of the screen would be lit by a spotlight and would move in some way (clock hands spinning, balls rolling, plastic 'fish mounted on a plaque' wiggling and singing). The meaning of all of this remains, largely, a mystery, although it would probably be quite fun if you recognised any of the old adverts and newsreel footage.
After Te Papa, we bought some bits and pieces from a nearby supermarket and had a picnic on the beach. We were mobbed by seagulls and discovered that they will make a fair effort at eating just about anything. They quite happily picked at a peach stone, bread was quickly gobbled up and they even made quick work of a bit of cheese, but they didn't seem that impressed with the olive. Various gulls fought over it, one would claim it victoriously, fly off with it, land a short distance away and spit it out, whereupon various gulls would fight over it again.
The picnic finished, we set about converting the van. We had booked a ferry over to South Island and had got it cheap based on the fact that we would be sailing at 2am and that the van was not a campervan, as campervan fares were approximately double. We had been advised by people at the Backpacker Car Market in Auckland that we should just call ourselves a 'van', as the ferry company meant proper, professionally built campervans. To be on the safe side though, we stowed all of the bedding under the bed shelf and the boxes of stuff on top of it - voila: Lucy is undercover.
We killed a bit of time by going into town and playing a few games of pool at the British pub, then drove to the ferry port. The staff didn't take a second glance at Lucy in stealth mode. Excellent. South Island, we're on our way.
