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| Double rainbow at daybreak over Caroline Bay, Timaru |
The last blog posting in April was about our Easter week in Hawaii, and we are headed back to California very soon for six weeks, but some Kiwi-centric things worth mentioning happened before and after that week. For example, towards the end of the March blog, I talked about the local excitement over the Black Caps advancing in the Cricket World Cup 2015.To summarize, the team went into the quarterfinals undefeated, and for the first time ever, earned a berth in the Championship Game after exciting victories over the West Indies (called "The Windies") and South Africa. I don't pretend to be an expert on cricket, and won't bore you by trying to impart what little knowledge I have beyond the basics. The brand of cricket played in the World Cup is the ODI (for One Day International) was first played in 1971, making it a virtual newborn offspring of the traditional game which dates from 16th century England.
The biggest differences between the two are:
- ODI, as implied by the name, takes one day, not multiple days, and
- Each side has innings (in baseball a half-inning), not two.
The results that the basic skills of batting and pitching (aka bowling) are the same, but the strategy is quite different. The ODI format produced several dramatic matches that went down to the last out (aka wicket). Along the way I learned the star Kiwi batsman
Martin ("Two-toes") Guptill is so-named because of a childhood forklift accident. I was also introduce to a very foreign concept,
the Duckworth-Lewis method. In a rain shortened ODI, it is felt for certain strategic reasons, the side batting last has an advantage, so two English statisticians (Mssrs. D & L) developed a formula to quantify this and "even things out". This was applied for NZ vs. South Africa, with the result that the Black Caps
had to score 18 more runs than RSA to win, a very strange concept to me.
The final was held on March 29th in the cavernous Melbourne Cricket Grounds in front of a massive crowd against four-time World Champion Australia. This was the first match NZ played away from home soil, and the size of the stage and the field seemed too much. It was clear early that it was not their day, so after a fairly excruciating seven hour forty-five minute match (including a 45 minute tea break) rival
Australia prevailed.
February 6th is Waitangi Day, commemorating the initial Treaty signed between the Crown and various Maori iwi (tribes), and that has come to mean one thing to us........GERMAN SAUSAGES!!! One of my German colleagues, Dr. Bernhard Kuepper celebrates his birthday around W. D. by grilling an assortment of Teutonic treats. YUM!
Bernhard was one of the first people we met in Timaru. He arrived a year or so earlier, and gave us a motor tour of the town and country. It was a dark Saturday night and we weren't sure where we were headed, hoping we weren't in the clutches of some serial killer. Of course we were not: he is a swell guy and trusted friend, the instigator of our weekly Tuesday dinners, who loves his Land Rover and his other passions. Alas, he is leaving this week to work as a cardiologist in Australia. We wish him well, hope he decides to return, and he will be greatly missed.
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| BK, Cake, and Rover |
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| Detail of decoration |
One of first memorable excursions in NZ was in June, 2010 with niece Laura Fayne, when we drove through a snowy but beautiful central Otago on our way back to Timaru from Queenstown.
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| June 2010, photo by LFH |
I have wanted to go back ever since, especially since hearing such good things about the
Central Otago Rail Trail, a 152 km route following the path of the now-defunct Central Otago Railroad. It is the first of multiple such trails re-purposed for biking and hiking. The gradual grade and the multiple small hotels and town along the way provide an excellent multi-day adventure. We took a weekend in March to do reconnaissance for a possible future outing with a sister or two.
We chose Ranfurly as a central location to explore the region (and caught the end of the NZ v. Windies Quarterfinal CWC match in the pub with the locals;
great craic). Nearby is Naseby, a small and charming gold-mining town, now known as home to a few hundred people and the Southern Hemisphere's only dedicated indoor curling venue. At little higher elevation with an Alpine feel, it would be at home in the Gold Country in California.
It is a village of old mud-brick buildings, a green ideal for an afternoon cricket match, and even a Giant Sequoia to make us feel at home.
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| Sequoia sempervirens |
Continuing to explore the territory, we stopped at
Hayes Engineering Works Historic Site just outside of Oturehua. In the late 1800's, the ingenious Mr. Hayes invented a number of things and in true Kiwi
DIY fashion, started manufacturing them here.
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| The factory |
Mr. Hayes international breakthrough claim to fame was the development of the
Hayes Wire Strainer, a simple yet ingenious device still widely used to tighten up wire fences, pictured below.
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| An early model of his wire strainer |
A bit further along is
Saint Balthans where you will find the possibly haunted Vulcan Hotel, dating from 1882........
and Blue Lake formed in huge pit created by sluicing for gold.
Following the trail by car reveals one modest jewel after another, such as Ophir, with its post office (inside and out) and the 1880 vintage Daniel O'Connell suspension bridge.
If you want, you can take the Taieri Gorge Railway from Dunedin to Middlemarch to reach one terminus of the trail.
We did not expect to see
this.....
which the kind ladies in the Middlemarch Museum explained is
The Playpus, a poorly designed nearly lethal submarine made in 1873 with hopes to find gold washed down into Otago Harbor in Dunedin. It didn't work.....they forgot to provide adequate ventilation.
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| Two kind Kiwi museum ladies |
The most unexpected discovery came on our trip back to Timaru when we passed by Macraes Flat, where we found Frasers Pit, a mammoth open pit gold mine. Leading up to the pit was barbed wire fence over which are draped over 300 animal hides and heads, mostly boars. Most of the locals in Timaru I asked about it were unaware of its existence. When I later Googled it, I found it is known locally as
"the pig fence" and was featured in a photographic exhibition in Perth, Australia.How bizarre!
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| Frasers Pit |
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| The Pig Fence |
April 25th-ANZAC Day
This is the most hallowed day each year throughout New Zealand and Australia. Our first day in NZ in 2010 was ANZAC Day, and we have been in Australasia on this date four of the five years since. 2015 was a really big deal here as it is the 100th anniversary of the day Australian, Kiwi, and other allied troops landed in the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey in WW1. I personally have had a hard time with this holiday, as it commemorates a tragic event, a futile and bloody failed venture. It would be hard to find a more atrocious example of the madness of mankind than WW1, unless you consider WW2. How do you honor the service and sacrifice of the warrior without glorifying war? In New Zealand, it is often said that that is when NZ "came of age" in a "baptism of blood". I have to think somehow they could have found their identity as a nation without participating in this far-away folly.
The Kiwi actor Sam Neil wrote and produced a film shown on local Maori TV,
ANZAC 2015:ANZAC: Tides of Blood, which grapples with these questions on a very personal level. It helped me understand this all better. If you click on the link, I think you will be able to stream it. I highly recommend it to those who are interested.
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| Photos from the 2015 Centenary ANZAC Day remembrance, Timaru, NZ |
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| Lest we forget |
We are now headed back to California for six weeks to resume (briefly) that part of our lives.
Just a brief Coda that gave me a chuckle:
I regularly check my spam filter because sometimes I find a message I don't want blocked. Most of the spam is poorly-worded enticements to order Viagra and other ED remedies. Just before Mothers Day I found these three subject lines from quarantined emails:
"Increase your
intimate response"
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"Give to your gf
nights of pleasure"
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"Send Mom Somewhere
Special"
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After a brief start, I saw that the third line was not what I feared, but was from "jetsetter.com.
