You can't beat Wellington on a good day!

we have a new photo site here: http://picasaweb.google.com/mikeeg555/NewZealand

You can't beat Wellington on a good day! And finally we have had a few of them, even in a row! We are now in the height of summer (unless the southerly winds are blowing up from Antarctica, which forces me to shiver in bed wearing my hoodie and slippers like last night), but then this afternoon the sun dried my washing in only half an hour. We have been taking full advantage of the good weather to cycle around the peninsula to reach the best beach-side cafés, thrash about in the harbour a bit in kayaks, do some hiking to seek out glowworms, and I finally went swimming in the sea for the first time in the Southern Hemisphere! I even found a dead baby shark on the beach, its teeth stuck into my finger like Velcro, so I saved them as proof of my battle.
My jobs are still fine, and at Fidel's Café Mike has been promoted to Kitchen Hand, so he is reinventing himself as Master Pizza Chef. And, much to my delight, he is applying his new skills at home, though not very often as he still consumes a good 80% of his meals at the café, and he gets paid for his time too! What a charmed existence.
Wellington has been an exciting place to be in the summer, despite only having a population of 200 000. But it is the national capital. They seem to have at least two festivals going on at any one time, at the moment is the Asia Pacific Festival and the Fringe Festival, and this weekend is their carnival. A few weekends ago was the Rugby Sevens matches, the most bizarre Welly event to date, at least 30% of the people in the streets were walking in groups of 5 or 6, dressed up in matching costumes. Like way way way more costumes than at Halloween. Nothing thematically related to rugby as far as we could decipher, they were just off to watch the match dressed as Marilyn Munroes, or Smurfs, or aliens, or Fembots, or as Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.
Since Christmas we have actually managed to get out of town quite a few times, every time we can both manage to wrangle two or more consecutive days off we use our thumbs to jet up the North Island (too expensive to ferry down to the south island for just a weekend trip, we're saving that mammoth journey for May). Big thanks to all the sheep truck drivers, old Maori ladies with grandkids in the back, horse-trainers, pumpkin delivery men, farmers, marines, German tourists, tattooed bros, and students who cart us all over this little volcanic country!
In January we attended a music festival at the historically potent village of Parihaka, where the non-violent reactions of the Maori people when their land was being confiscated by the British in the 1800's were said to have inspired the movements of Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. We got a new perspective of the event from our first helicopter ride: the barefoot pilot flew us over the village nestled at the foot of the snow-capped conical Mount Taranaki, where it is rumoured that you can snowboard in the morning, and surf in the afternoon. While the clouds clung to the mountain top most of the weekend, once they parted, they provided a stunning background for our photos of the festival volunteers on horseback, crowned with the white feather symbolic of their passive resistance. And the music was inspiring too, but on the Saturday afternoon, after the 5th tedious hour of bands playing Bob Marley covers, we were forced to seek out other sources of entertainment.
After our dusty festival weekend, we hitched into the nearby city of New Plymouth to meet up with Vivien, who I was a Personal Assistant for in Scotland. She and her new Aussie Personal Assistant, Sarah (who's couch we plan to surf in Melbourne in June) were on a 6 week tour of Australia and New Zealand; its always exhilarating to catch up with someone on the other side of the planet!
Our last days of 2006 were spent in the smelliest city in New Zealand, Rotorua, where the city park is dotted with natural hot springs boiling and steaming away, geysers erupting every half hour, and large puddles of mud bubbling and leaping playfully. Rotorua is famous for the traditional Maori concerts and feasts they put on for the tourists: the hotspring steam pit-cooked food is divine, but the show is terrifying, and Mike was glad that he wasn't chosen to represent our table by accepting the "peace token" from the threatening, hollering, puffing warrior chief. Our favourite memory was the beach near to our campground (our tent site was, incidentally, thermally heated!) where the hot water flowed out through the sand and into the moonlit lake shared only with the silhouettes of floating black swans. If you pick the right place to dig, right at the water's edge where the hot spring water mixes with the cool lake water, you can be sitting on warm sand with your feet in warm water, but if you move an inch back, you might scald your feet!
A few weeks ago we took a few days off to hitch up the East Cape, a remote part of the country with dazzling beaches and lots of little Maori communities. We stayed with cousins of Karlee's, a friend we met in the UK, and they showed us a proper East Coast good time. They took us mussel collecting off the longest wharf in the southern hemisphere, showed us their marae (Maori meeting house adorned with carvings of their ancestors and family history), and invited us to a hangi. All the hangi food (cooked in a pit dug in their garden and buried with hot rocks) was collected by them from the sea or from their garden: crayfish, sea urchin, mussels, abalone, potatoes, wild boar, lamb, pumpkin, sweet potatoes. The night before we had shyed out of going on a wild boar hunt, an event that was so extraordinarily far out of our realm of experience: imagine us going into the forest with a knife and a hunting dog! And one of our host's cousins was from the tiny village of Whangara, where the Whalerider movie was filmed, so he graciously brought us to his beach and marae, and let Mike have a go at surfing on the movie prop whales that are left crumbling on the beach. He said when other tourists turn up uninvited, they send them packing back up the road, so we were glad we didn't show up on our own.
We are working on securing our plane tickets home, and have decided to do a little detour to Australia in June, and Mongolia (via Beijing) in July, so as soon as Air China releases the tickets, we will know when we are coming home. We're still aiming for August for Mike to begin university in Nanaimo in September. He just got notice of his university acceptance letter today! We'll save the celebrations for later this week when his cousin, Nicole, who is on a world tour for 6 or 9 months, is blowing through Wellington. That will be the first family that we have seen since my Grandma Betty last April in Italy! That seems like a lifetime ago now...but I guess it was on the other side of the world, still can't quite wrap my head around New Zealand's isolation. But we know that we are not forgotten, a few weeks ago we received our Christmas presents from the Germains finally!