Raglan

On the coast, west from Hamilton, is Raglan, our last camp place. It provides a natural complement to Russell which is genteel and full of people like us with grey hair. Raglan is a surfer's town - the average age of visitors is about 30 years lower. If I buy a shirt at the opportunity (charity) shop wll I look like a surfer dude?

The campsite reminds us of Spain with lots of pitches permanently occupied by old, slowly mouldering, caravans with sun-faded awnings.  It a great working class gathering place - every day groups of friends are reunited and new groups form.  It is noisier, brasher than Russell, people talk to each other more: we've heard several peoples accounts of visiting the UK.  London, York, Oxford and Bath - a museum covering a whole country - but one person remembered my home city of Norwich which made me fleetingly nostalgic.

There is a safe bay to swim in.  You can almost walk across.  If you're lucky you might see an Orca - if you're very unlucky, one might see you!  It has wonderful sunsets.

On Saturday the whole town seemed to turn out beside the river.  The bridge has signs warning against jumping off which are casually ignored.  On the banks children amost too young to walk totter into the water alongside siblings, parents, grandparents and probably great grandparents.  Fresh fish sizzles on barbies, gazebos blow in the wind, teenagers go off in disgust to share their grievances about unreasonable parents.  The sun shines and all is well with the world.  Except that the sand is black rather than golden.

Black sand like a small Milky Way - with one step for mankind

At night we walk across a narrow stretch of grass to the bridge. The Milky Way sparkles, Orion is still disconcertingly upside down.  Kids have gathered to talk, bikes in piles, at the point where the river meets the sea (which seems appropriate). 

In the river a few couples are still swiming in the warm black water.  We can hear their relaxed chat.  The bridge supports are illuminated making it seem the elegant arch floats on beams of blue light.  The light attracts insects which in turn brings shoals of fish which jump and roil the water.

On the other bank is a backpackers' and surfers' hostel. A different, slightly older group lounge around in the darkness, laughing and joking to the clink of bottles. Inevitably one young man sits apart from the rest practising his guitar.

Next stop is Vancouver, but this is a good place for a few days of quotidian contentment.

New Zealand is a garden,

And gardens are not made

By saying "Oh, how lovely!"

And sitting in the shade.

But the makers of the garden did a great job - so we can sit in the shade.

That sunset feeling.

Leaving Coromandel, Visiting Hamilton

The people who mend NZ roads are wonderful.  We came into Coromandel along its west coast.  Storms had just washed away bits of road for a 25 mile stretch.  One way systems and traffic lights had been set up.  Thousands of traffic cones had been planted in neat rows.  Everything worked smoothly.  Eleanor was driving so I could just enjoy the view of the beach - about six inches from the wheels horizontally and a yard vertically.  The SatNav showed the road against a background of water (must be next year's model).  The gap between road and beach had once been wider:  telephone poles now ran across the the beach, at one point into the sea, later looping out again and ultimately back to the side of the road - victims of earlier storms.

I didn't take any pictures, just clung, white knuckled, to my seat.  Eleanor drove on unperturbed.

Leaving Coromandel Town several days later we took the mountain road after a couple of days of tropical downpour.  There were rock falls on the road, new streams sprang from cliff faces, sticky mud slides glooped onto the road.  Hundreds more cones had been deployed around the piles of rock and mud and the new water courses had been diverted back into culverts.  And it was still beautiful.

On the other side, after a short band of farm land we reached Whitianga, Coromandel's new gold coast (for those selling real estate at least).  Big modern houses sit back from the highway on the other side of which a landscaped buffer between road and sea has curving paths for walkers, cyclists and skate boarders.  There is a large marina and newer ones are being built with luxury homes attached.  Whitianga is the new New Zealand.

We weren't sure we'd be able to afford a coffee at any of the elegantly laid back bars so drove on into more farming country, eventually reaching Hamilton which is NZ's most boring city or its most vibrant depending on your point of view.  The city regions give a hint of what is coming: St Andrews (with golf course), Chartwell, Hillcrest, Silverdale, Chedworth Park, Glenview, Fairview Downs and Forest Lake sound like Edwardian suburban villas.  (There are of course Maaori names but I don't know what they mean) 

On the first day we walked though tidy suburbs with wide quiet roads to visit the museum which is wonderful.  One large display of art works titled "Modern[isms]"  looked at sources, blending Western, Maaori and Oceanic responses to European Modernism. Is the incorporation of Maaori motifs and styles  "cultural appropriation"?  I don't know but liked the pictures.  

A big gallery upstairs showed the work of NZ artists influenced by cubism. The work of Louise Henderson effortlessly dominates the show.  Her subjects include portraits, studies of people, views from an attic studio in Dieppe, N African views (suggestive in colouring of Klee's pictures of the same region), still lifes and abstracts.  An attendant told us (slightly exasperatedly) that Henderson had turned one of her pictures upside down before signing it.  An awful lot of visitors had helpfully pointed out that one picture had been hung upside down.  The joke was wearing a bit thin.  The picture is called "Houses in Dieppe".  We thought of two possible points to the joke.  What do you think?

(from Auckland Art Gallery) 

On our second day we visited Hamilton Gardens.  We spent the whole day there, it's very different from Singapore's Garden by the Bay but equally impressive.  Substituting plants as necessary they've recreated gardens from Renaissance Italy, Tudor England (also an Arts and Crafts example), Moghal India, China, Japan, 1960s California, a Maaori kumara patch, a sustainable  garden, .... I've missed some and lots more are planned.  The layout is almost a maze (think Ikea) where, somehow each garden is complete and doesn't overlook its neighbours.

Japanese Scroll Garden
(raked gavel and rocks out back) 

English country garden

California poolside

There was a rabbit nibbling the grass in the Arts and Craft.  I congratulated a gardener on this charming bit of verisimilitude: " .... aaaargh a rabbit!  Must contact the head gardener!  Quick!"  A bit like velociraptors getting loose in Jurassic Park.  I was told that if they didn't act vigilantes might. 

Anti-rabbit guard  

In an earlier blog I mentioned how noisy the countryside is.  Here is one culprit.

And here are several of them in a bamboo thicket (Chinese "cosmos" garden).

We only had two days but you've probably guessed where we stand in the "Is Hamilton Boring?" debate.

Not Being There Yet

Today was to have been the next Kiwi Experience.  Beyond Coromandel Town are the mountains, a small road twists through them offering stunning views of peaks and bush, not to mention the exciting prospect of falling off the road - like bungy jumping without ropes.  The sense of romantic mystery is intensified by the layer of fine mist covering the peaks.

Unfortunately the fine mist has thickened. A bit.  The first ridge is just visible as a hazy outline but the rest of the mountains are quite gone.  Chance of dramatic views, zero; chance of rope-free bungying much improved.  Rain begins to fall steadily. Then it gets harder, and harder, a 24 hour deluge.  The Kiwi experience they don't advertise.

A brief lull and we walk into town to buy a few things.  It may rain for forty days and nights so we buy rather a lot.  Jokingly, I ask the cashier if I can borrow the trundler (NZ for 'trolley') to carry it all.  "I don't have a problem with that", she says, "just bring it back later."  Imagine Tesco saying that.  Taking it back is more of a problem.  The rain has paused for long enough to get people onto the streets.  I push the trundler round and through bare foot boys on bikes, hikers sorting their packs on the sidewalk, chatting friends, giggling school girls, silver ponytailed bikers and an old Maaori guy singing Midnight Train to Georgia.  I feel a bit silly.

The rain starts again.  The groundsman looks worried. He's cordoning off more and more of the site with the sort of tape you see at crime scenes.  "It's the gloop", he says,  "Grass forms a mat, but when it rains the gloop gets everything."   I had a silly thought - maybe vans could be absorbed whole: glooped.  Maybe it wasn't gloop but 'The Gloop', like The Beast, The Old House, The Shining.  The Haunted Campsite - an idea for a horror story.   "What about our pitch?"  He looked, I thought, a bit nervous. "Should be OK" he said, uncertainly, and hurried off to get more tape.

Our pitch was fine, a few inches higher than the rest.  We were on a tiny plateau about three or four inches above the surroundings.  Perfect size for a van - might have been measured for it.  Maybe the Gloop had swallowed one and we were parked on top.  A silly idea.  Except for the mushrooms.

They'd appeared with the first rain. Unurprising except the colour.  Flesh pink.  Grouped like obscenely swollen fingers trying to drag themselves from the ground.  What weird, unholy eldritch horror was this?  What unspeakable chthonic force, could it be?

Then the rain stopped and the sun came out.  It was time to leave, I turned off the Kindle leaving H P Lovecraft's classic "Camping in the Mountains of Madness" unfinished.  I've always wanted an excuse to use 'eldritch' and 'chthonic'.    











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