propellors in the mist

Another early start, this time to flee the motel and head for the airport for the journey north. Hopefully Dunedin's rush hour doesn't start until well after we're out of the way though heading out of the city is usually OK. Even when you miss a few turnings and take an amusing ten-minute detour through suburbia before getting back onto the highway; at least we left plenty of time. Bugger: had we not lost ten minutes I could have justified stopping for ten minutes to look at the pretty mist-wreathed sunrise taking place in the rearview mirror. I assume it's maybe something to do with the sunlight getting a nice unimpeded run across the Pacific through lots of atmosphere which makes the sunrise here so deeply colourful. Not far from the airport so there should be time to catch it when we get parked.

Hmmm. Almost. Slightly more mist here and less sun peeking through and the foreground is less pleasant when comprised of car park than of a few simple trees. At least the eyes saw it.

It's a shame air travel is so expensive and environmentally detrimental when it's so pretty. Maybe airships will eventually return to the fore to enable nice and slow and peaceful and quietish travel in nice underslung downward-view-friendly gondolas, hopefully also with clean windows to permit efficient photography through them. Luckily there are a few spare seats on NZ5048 so that I was able to get a relatively transparent window-seat through which to admire the mist hugging the east coast and through which to have looked out a few minutes ago to spot the now-familiar layout of Christchurch beneath. Unfortunately I didn't notice in time to have been able to pop across to an empty seat on the other side of the cabin to get a picture of the marvellously calderic Lyttleton Harbour from a slightly higher vantage point than previously but the only available window on that side was sufficiently gakky to have meant it would have been annoying to try and photograph had I made it in time; again, just something to remember.

Oooohprettyviewagain. Multiple layers of mountains. Pity about the blue haze. The photographic results aren't clear enough to bother blipping (that glacier on the way over Greenland took a fair bit pf processing to clean up) but it'll be nice to be able to play what-does-the-Google-Earth-version-look-like when home.

Coire. Look at the arrêtes on that...

Wellington looks almost exactly like the opening shot of Brain Dead. Much much much warmer than Dunedin, too. I suppose there'll be even less chance of rain in the north. Not much time to poke around.. after a walk to the centre of the airport from Gate 13 and then back when we decoded the signage then another walk to the centre of the terminal and back to find a toilet which wasn't close for cleaning it was time to re-board a slightly smaller version of the Dunedin-Wellington aircraft for NZ8044 to Napier, a hire car and some coastline.

Distracted by the worrisomely large size of the new car (I got used to the Corolla but that was on the wide and empty roads of the south) then by the scratches they hadn't listed on the docket we completely failed to notice that the car was an automatic despite the request for a manual. Unfortunately they didn't have any manuals sitting about in the car park though I reckon it would be worth attempting to swap later. More than anything else I'd be paranoid about the left foot feeling left out and braking inadvertently though Nicky wanted to attempt to practice round the car park; not a very pleasant experience as she refused to attempt to pretend doing very slow stop-at-crossing urban-style driving and instead raced round and round at thirty (mph) in a car park which had a twenty (kmph) limit. At least she was attempting to use the pseudo-manual mode so that there is less risk of the car suddenly deciding it needs to be in a higher gear and suddenly whooshing forward. Scary, though.

Quite sunny here, isn't it? Still lots of people all wrapped up, though. Some of them moving quite fast at the same time. SWEATY PEOPLE. The woman operating the prison tour was likewise slightly overdressed compared to us even though the claimed to originally be from Strathaven and should thus have a more sensible idea about what cold is. Reasonably entertaining tour though the prison isn't really what one would expect a prison to be like insofar as it's all corrugated iron rooves and feels more like a temporary army barracks than somewhere designed to keep people who kill other people away from the other people. Although we had been marvelling at the relative crime-free-ness of NZ compared to home we are now slightly concerned about the possibility to being attacked by gang initiates at service stations following the tour guide's tales of her nephew's facial reconstruction and the apparent concentration of gang-type nastinesses around the area. As far as we could see the only thing Napier really suffers from is the standard cafés-shut-at-four NZ ailment and an unfortunate dip in the standards of customer service to which we have become accustomed over the past two weeks...

Although I'd seen a Starbucks up and open slightly earlier on we kept looking for somewhere mildly more local on the offchance that it might continue the bettered-muffins trend experienced throughout South Island. We eventually chose another franchise-looking but not-Starbucks coffee-plus-sandwiches shop over an open-but-more-restauranty Turkish place and ordered a bit of flan and soup for Nicky and a coffee and chocolate brownie for me. I was half-expecting the surly operative to complain that it was too late to be serving food as she had a terse and intolerant end-of-shift mood about her but she took the money and told us she'd bring the stuff over which (after about fifteen minutes) she eventually did, though without the brownie and without a word of "here you are" or anything. We gave it another five minutes (it would, after all, take a wee while for Nicky to eat the vastness of soup and reasonable flan-portion) and tried to work out if what we'd been charged included the brownie or not but were impeded by the lack of receipt and a dearth of soup-price-statements on the tariff board. More out of curiosity than hunger I eventually got up and stood at the counter for another minute until the operative reappeared and said "we ordered a chocolate brownie too..." and would have added "have we been charged for it?" had I not been interrupted with a flatly curt "you didn't order a brownie" before she retreated to the staff cupboard.
Luckily they had some comment cards around behind the sugar and milk and Nicky had a pen in her bag. Another staff had turned up by this point and (cheerily and pleasantly) cleared away the plates whilst I was filling it in and possibly told her miserable colleague as we got an half-sarcastic-sounding "thanks" as we exited. Still, in order to maintain this apparent statistic of telling three people about something good but ten people about something bad I would recommend that readers do not visit the Napier branch (if there are any others) of the 'Esquire' coffee facility on Street.

...and to continue the apparent lurch in standards I got a really grumpy cashier at the supermarket slightly later on; I'd popped out for wine and nibbles and found one supermarket closed so went for another nearby one which looked a little bit like a local version of Kwik-Save on an Asda scale which only had trolleys rather than baskets but which had the required food-items. The cashier looked like she'd been the recipient of a few too many gins and botched cheap facelifts so you couldn't really tell what she was thinking but I was so surprised at the viciously-barked "bags?" after my pleasant evening-greeting that it took a couple of repetitions before I could say "if you have carrier bags then yes please, I would like one, thanks". I hope not all the North Island is like this. Maybe it's just because Napier's suffering a bit from out-of-seasonal affective disorder. Lucky we only booked the room for one night...