Napier: art deco, palms and Norfolk pines

We left beautiful Napier more than a week ago, and I have been slow to get this post written because I've been sick. In our first two days in Wellington, I had a sore throat and a runny nose. I called the national Health Line to see if they wanted me to get a covid test. Within an hour of the phone call, I was on my way to a drive-in testing station in downtown Wellington. I had the test, for free, and got the negative results the next day.

The complication is that the Health Line person told me to self quarantine until I had a negative covid test AND 24 hours free of symptoms. This was perhaps related to the fact that I called them on our 13th day out of quarantine, and covid can have a 14 day or longer incubation period. I quarantined for 3 days in our hotel in Wellington, and still had symptoms. We couldn't stay on at the hotel, which was fully booked -- along with just about every place to stay in Wellington -- because of the big rugby cup game in Wellington between New Zealand and Australia. So we drove an hour and a half northeast to the Wairarapa Valley, a gorgeous agricultural valley between two sets of tall hills. We are staying at a cottage on a vineyard (photos in an upcoming post), and I feel well enough to take ferry to the South Island tomorrow (photos of the ferry trip in an upcoming post, too).

The rest of this post focuses on our two full days in Napier more than a week ago. Napier is the most visually charming small city in New Zealand, shaped by a big earthquake in 1930, which destroyed the city. A lot of it was rebuilt in the 1930s in art deco style. I had been there in June 2017 with my brother, who wanted to play the gorgeous golf course on a nearby headland, Cape Kidnappers. I thought Dave would love painting some of Napier's buildings, and he did.

One of the first things I noticed this time in Napier was the trees. On my first morning there, on the way to a public swimming pool, I drove on a street that looked like southern California. 

On the way home from the pool, I drove along the beach, and that road is lined with my favorite Norfolk pines (shown at sunset with the beautiful light).

Dave spent our two days in Napier painting like a maniac. Some of the charming art deco buildings:

The last two photos are the most photographed building in Napier. Here's Dave's watercolor sketch of the first photo, as well as his sketch of the sound shell and colonnade on the waterfront. 

I had seen a lot of the downtown art deco buildings with my brother in 2017, but this time Dave and I found an art deco neighborhood, about ten or twelve long blocks where maybe a quarter of the houses are art deco. I really enjoyed the diversity of the houses, and was particularly fascinated by the trim details. 

The earthquake in Napier influenced architecture elsewhere in New Zealand. In a museum, Dave found the following photo of Wellington's town hall. Before Napier's earthquake, the town hall had a tower. After the earthquake the tower was removed for safety in case of another earthquake.

Napier is a deep water port in giant Hawke's Bay. I mentioned in the last post that we saw miles and miles of tree farms as we drove across the widest part of the North Island. Most of those trees get turned into logs and shipped overseas, a lot to China. Here you can see so many logs they look like toothpicks.

The photo above is taken from a hill within Napier that you can see in the photo below. Beyond the hill is a long headland to the north which marks one boundary of Hawke's Bay.

Below is the view to the south. The headland you can see in this photo is Cape Kidnapper, the southern boundary of Hawke's Bay and the location of one of the most dramatic golf courses in the world. In June 2017, I spent a delightful 4 hours in the clubhouse looking out at the view while my brother played the course.

The beach at Napier was gorgeous in the lovely weather we had. A photo of Dave, and a look from the beach toward town, with the beautiful rows of Norfolk pines lining the street.

As we drove to Wellington just over a week ago, we saw a wind farm. A brief video to end this post:

Hamilton, New Plymouth, Taupo and the road to Napier

We set out from Auckland on the blustery morning of September 29. We are headed toward Wellington, where we will take the ferry to the South Island on October 10, and we are zigzagging down the North Island. In the past five days we have visited (in this order): Hamilton, New Plymouth, Taupo, and Napier. This map helps you visualize the zigzag we have chosen:

The purpose in Hamilton was a former student of mine and his wonderful family. We had an hour or two to spare, so we visited the formal gardens along the Waikato River. The daffodils and primroses were on their last legs, but I saw several beds of hellebore, a plant I had never seen before finding it in the garden of our house in Dunedin where we lived from 2007 to 2017.

I don't know when I last saw forget me nots in a garden, but there they were, along with fuscias and climbing geraniums in full bloom.

The garden featured numerous tree ferns, native to New Zealand. In the days of driving that followed, we saw hundreds if not thousands of tree ferns on hillsides. Here's a close up so you can see their unique shape. They grow up to about 15 feet tall.

Foolishly I neglected to take any photos of my former student. Instead I captured his wife Jessica's work of art: a Maori ceremonial cloak with real feathers from six kinds of birds. 

While we were there, she was working on a smaller similar work, using Maori hand weaving techniques. 

Auckland to Hamilton took about an hour and a half, Hamilton to New Plymouth took 3 hours, passing through gorges and hillsides covered with tree ferns. If you look back at the map, New Plymouth sits on a curved piece of land formed by a volcano, Mount Taranaki. On our way into town, we could see the base of the mountain but not the top. We took some terrible photos because we wondered if that might be the only glimpse of the mountain that we would get. (Note to friends in Washington State -- they call it "the mountain" -- which felt familiar as we kept looking to see if "the mountain is out.")

We stopped just north of New Plymouth for lunch, and saw our first red billed gull. They are beautiful gulls that delighted us when we lived in New Zealand. Their legs are red as well as their bills, giving such a lovely color combination of white, red and gray. In the first photo below, the gull is pretty blurry, but I'm including it because you can see an off-shore oil drilling station (as well as my lovely Dave). The Taranaki area has a lot of offshore oil drilling and oil refining. I'll also paste in my favorite photo of a red billed gull, that I took about a decade ago.

The blustery weather you can see in the photo above disappeared the next day, and we could see the tip of Mount Taranaki (but not the bottom), and again we took photos. But that evening we were rewarded by a full view of the mountain, hurrah. We drove around town trying to find a good place to get a full view, and found an empty horse racing track.

A couple of other views of beautiful New Plymouth. The first one has New Zealand flax in the foreground, and the second one has a Norfolk Island pine.

On Friday October 2, we set off to drive east across the widest part of the North Island, our longest day of driving at about six hours. I had never seen Lake Taupo, the biggest lake in New Zealand by far, so we chose a route that would enable us to drive along the lake. First way northeast, then south east -- many more miles that a crow would fly. As always, Dave had his binoculars handy. The boat in the background is some sort of tour vessel.

I have always loved swans and had never seen a black swan before living in New Zealand. The ones we saw on Lake Taupo were more gray than black, and has some white spots. Behind the point of land in the distance is the bulk of Lake Taupo, 46 km or 28 miles in length.

After we left Lake Taupo and continued to head east toward Napier, we saw many hillsides covered with tree farms. Big hillsides. One hillside after another. I wrote an earlier post on this blog about the differences between native forest in New Zealand and tree farms. Take a look at the photos that illustrate the differences. We also saw lots of young lambs with their mothers. They were the age that I call "teenage." We were driving too fast to take photos, but I'll include a few photos I took when we lived here so you can see the cuteness of baby lambs in the spring. The sad or amusing thing is that the farmers grow the lambs until they reach 17 kilograms or 37 pounds, and then they are turned into delicious, tender lamb chops. We can remember spring after spring driving outside of Dunedin. First you see adorable tiny lambs close to their mothers. They really do jump straight up -- so very cute. Then they get to be teenage lambs, hanging out in groups of two or three with their friends. Then the next time we would drive past the same field -- all the young lambs would be gone. These are South Island photos, but what we saw the other day looked very similar.

Napier deserves its own post because of the amazing art deco buildings, the Norfolk pines everywhere, and the two paintings Dave completed there. Coming soon. If you missed the earlier posts about our arrival in New Zealand, here they are:

First week in quarantine

Second week in quarantine

Spring in Auckland

My own website is here with weekly blog posts about Christian spirituality: lynnebaab.com

Spring in Auckland

We got out of quarantine on September 24 and spent that whole day -- blustery with rain showers -- buying a car. At the end of the day, I went grocery shopping, and for the first time, it became real to me that we had left late summer in the northern hemisphere and had entered into spring in the southern hemisphere. Here's the moment when spring became real to me:

"Fresh, in season" asparagus, a spring food. You need to see what it was like to enter the grocery store:

There was a short line of people waiting to sign in for contact tracing. The next day, Dave got the app for his phone to be able to capture the image to the right of the table and send it to the New Zealand contact tracing folks. In the supermarket, about 10% of the people had on masks. I wore mine because of just coming out of quarantine. (New Zealand had a case about 10 days ago where someone who had tested negative twice during quarantine got sick with covid after they got out! Scary!)

In another store, shoppers who didn't have the phone app were asked to put their name and phone number on a slip of paper and drop it into a box. 

For Dave, one of the highlights of Auckland was most of a day spent in the Auckland Art Gallery. He was absorbed in a photography exhibition of everyday scenes taken from unusual angles. Here's one that he loved. Can you tell what these two objects are? (answer at the end of this post)

When I drove into central Auckland to pick Dave up at the museum, I passed our quarantine hotel. Here's what it looks like from the outside. Quite poignant to see it from a very different angle. 

Here's a picture of me, looking happy about being out of quarantine:

Seeing friends in Auckland was the biggest highlight of our five days there. For those of you reading this in the United States, imagine our joy at hugging friends and sitting in a living room talking to them without a mask -- the first time hugs from friends and living room conversations with friends for 6 and a half months. Surreal. Strange. Then comfortable and normal. 

I fell in love afresh with the trees and other vegetation in Auckland. Way back in my early adult life, I had a Norfolk Island pine as a house plant. In Auckland, they grow big and tall, which delighted me the first time I visited here, and continues to give me deep pleasure. The early missionaries loved Norfolk pines because the new growth at the top looks like a cross. My brother, who worked in the lumber industry, said that Norfolk pine lumber is so interesting to look at because the pine knots all occur in one place over and over on the trunk because the branches attach in layers, rather than being scattered up and down like other pines.

Dave did a pencil and pen sketch of a tree he loved. He'll paint it later, but I thought you might enjoy seeing the black and white version -- the initial stages of one of Dave's watercolor sketches.

I drove past so many things I wanted to photograph but couldn't: a yard with five orange trees groaning with fruit, wisteria blooming, a rhododendron that was blooming but looked very unhappy in Auckland's subtropical climate. I'll end this post with some photos of spring flowers and gardens, so you can see the vegetation that I enjoyed so much.

In the center of that last photo is a cabbage tree, native to New Zealand, which looks like a yucca plant with a trunk. They also grow around Dunedin, much further south, but there they tend to grow as individual trees. This was quite a different look -- a cabbage tree nestled in with other trees.

Answer to mystery question: The odd geometric photos Dave saw in the museum are cruise ships from above.

If you want to see more landscape photos of Auckland, here are some previous blog posts I wrote about Auckland from when we lived in New Zealand:

The little volcanoes of Auckland

Old wooden churches in Auckland

Stained glass windows in the Auckland Cathedral

Some scenery just south of Auckland

Two views of downtown Auckland

Here are the two posts I wrote from quarantine: first week and second week.