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| Napier's sunken garden, fronting the ocean, was one of the best features of the town, in my opinion! Known for its Art Deco architecture, it had so few buildings to see that the garden was where we spent the most time! |
| Erin's Journal 01-11-03 New Zealand Saturday in Napier was nothing to write home about. We left our hotel around the 10am checkout time, and drove into town. We parked at the oceanfront and walked a couple of blocks into town to explore a little. We did some chore stuff, like finding Glenn a new wristband for his watch (his old one had disintegrated to where he had to admit it was time to replace it, although he typically kept the old band just in case he could glue it back together!!!), and going shopping in a Kathmandu store (similar to REI back home). We got him a new towel (phew!), some new socks (to replace those with toes poking through), some utensils for each of us and a replacement cable lock to tie our bags together when in backpackers or when we leave our car behind in Australia. Then we quickly checked email but didn't stay long enough to respond to any, and made sure we stopped in at the photo place with Glenn's name on it for a photo op and to grab some business cards (for his OTHER life). By the time we reached the beachfront again, we wandered through the admittedly beautiful sunken gardens and watched some Par 2 mini golf, which was quite amusing but overpriced. We decided to indulge in some Subway for lunch, as the good old peanut butter & jelly sandwiches get really OLD to me when we've eaten them for 2 weeks straight for lunch! We sat out and ate them in the suddenly beautiful day (the clouds burned off?!), and called down to book a spot in a holiday park near Wellington for the next couple of nights. We left town around 1pm, heading to a little town south of Napier called Havelock North, where we drove up to a panoramic view of the whole area of Hawke's Bay at Te Mata Peak. This was truly a wonderful viewpoint, with steep cliffs falling away on one side to a river valley, rolling hills on the other side, and distant ocean on 3 sides. We stayed here and read our books in the sunshine for about an hour with the incredible view to check out every few minutes, then hit the road for Wellington. This drive was meant to be about 4 1/2 hours according to the locals, and that turned out to be about right. There are some steep mountains to go through right at the end, after following a mountain range and farmlands for the first 3 hours. On the south side of the mountains toward Wellington, we passed the riverside towns of Upper and Lower Hutt, where our holiday park was, to see Wellington at the tip of the peninsula. We arrived around 6:30pm, checked in to the relatively disappointing holiday park (we were in a cabin that looked like a tiny room in a clapboard rowhouse), and promptly took off again back up the mountainside to check out a raceway we'd seen advertised on the roadside. The Te Matua Speedway was nestled in a pocket valley surrounded by the mountains, and had surprising numbers of people in attendance. It was all local competitors from various areas of the north island, and there were several categories of racers. We got there a little after the starting races, but there were several rounds of racing for each category so we got to see all the racers more than once. I'd never been to an auto racing event before, and hadn't been all that excited about it, but I had a really good time. The streetcars were the most exciting, as they were very aggressive in their beat up cars and would ram each other into the wall at high speeds. And the highlight of the show was the last race: the demolition derby! There were more than 30 cars out there, some of them really beat up to start, and they were tons of fun to watch! People were screaming right along with me as one racer would bash the other, then back up and do it again, just to disable the other car! When it was finally over at around 10:30pm, we left feeling very satisfied with our evening and crashed at the holiday park as soon as we got back. |
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| Lower Hutt descends from the mountains toward Wellington and the harbor |