I had an early start again today. Not really from choice, the traffic noise from 8 feet from my head was a little too much to sleep past around 5.30am.
At 8am I was in the car, far earlier than planned. I passed Lake Taupo, larger and more protected than Lake Rotorua, line along its edge with beach houses, beaches and campsites. The road around it was line with boats, everybody in New Zealand deciding to go fishing on a Friday.
As the lake receded in the mirrors I saw today’s destination. It’s quite hard to miss.
I did miss all of the good photo opportunities. They were gone before I realised they were there and traffic was too heavy to make turning around an attractive option. That photograph was from the carpark of a museum I stopped to visit, so if you’re unsure, the important bit has snow on it.
Getting there I’d had a few miles of barren landscape, low scrub over a parched earth. “This is unusual, wonder what caused this,” I thought to myself, as I drove along Desert Road.
The museum was ok, providing background on New Zealand and its transition from a Maori nation to its current blend then offering a New Zealand perspective on the wars in which they supported the UK. The first was the Second Boer War, which I didn’t realise had New Zealand contribution at all.
To be fair it’s not really discussed much in the UK. I guess the difficulty we had in winning it was a tad embarrassing, and some people would prefer to forget the invention of concentration camps. The Boers fought extremely well, taught the British army (and allies) a number of lessons. They also speak Afrikaans, a language 70% based on Dutch and German, making it ironic that someone from South Africa once got angry with me for saying it sounds to me like a blend between those two languages. Maybe she just hadn’t spent any time in Holland or Germany and was ignorant of the history of her own country – seems likely, given she was South African.
The New Zealanders were happy to fight alongside the British, as big an adventure as the First World War would be to the Brits in 1914. Somewhat different outcome though, which is probably why New Zealand had plenty of volunteers for that one too.
A large chunk of the museum was unsurprisingly devoted to Gallipoli, more surprisingly presenting it in very factual terms. A lot of the historians and public writing condemn the British for incurring so many Anzac casualties in what has in hindsight been called a foolish campaign. I think personally that a lot of the criticism was written by people keen to discredit the man behind the offensive, a certain Winston Churchill.
The campaign nearly succeeded. If it had, it would almost certainly have knocked years off the war, saving literally millions of lives. I think it was a gamble worth taking, and the gamble failing to pay off doesn’t negate the decision to take it. Plus of course, the British didn’t exactly use the Anzac troops as cannon-fodder: three times as many Brits died as men from Australia and New Zealand combined.
The real reason to visit the museum though was a small sliver of bronze.
Yeah, that’s a purple ribbon attached to a small chunk of Russian bronze. I’ve seen those before, and indeed the museum has around a dozen of them. None of the others has that little bar halfway down the ribbon.
Only three men ever got that bar. Only one of them lived through earning it. That’s his medal, and his bar.
The museum was on the edge of a tiny village, half a dozen cafes in 200 yards of main road. I popped into one of them, admired the thousands of pens on the walls, ordered coffee and their pizza.
It was a good pizza. The slices couldn’t handle the weight of the topping but instead of it sliding off the whole piece broke off. No stinginess on the cheese with this one.
I drove around the outside of the mountain, stopped in a lay-by. I’d programmed it into my satnav, so this was a preplanned stop. The sight was a railway viaduct, steel frame across a canyon. I took a photograph, moved on.
What I wanted to do was get above the snow line on the mountain. I failed. I did get above the tree line, reach the snow resort, the ski lifts, ten different carparks at the end of a road. But it was the end of the road, and I could go no further except on foot. Had it been visible I might have tried but the snow was still quite a lot higher and could only be seen in the distance. I passed.
I started back down the slopes of the mountain, stopped to talk to someone on a pedal bike, an 18km descent ahead of him. When asked if he was local he replied that he was from Auckland, “just north from here.”
His accent suggested he was from Delhi, more than just north from here. He was waiting for his wife, so we chatted while waiting for her to catch up with him. He works for a Danish company and his boss had been to Iceland, which is what the landscape at that altitude resembled. Nothing taller than an inch or two was growing, just lichen and moss, small pink flowers nestled in the shelter of stones.
His wife arrived behind us, surprising me by being in a car. It started to rain so I bid them farewell, left her stood in the rain photographing him posing on his bike as though cycling down the mountain.
My final stop for the day was further down that slope. A small waterfall, large enough to justify the 15 minute walk and steps to reach it in the rain. I’m not sure it was large enough to justify scrambling over the rocks at the end, where I managed to get stuck, stood astride a deep gap above rushing water. I recovered by taking off my camera bag, and swinging it across, reducing the weight on my knees enough that they could just spring the rest of me to one side. Getting back was easier, a firmer launch point and a larger landing area.
Only 3km walked today, the museum, a lazy lunch, the rain and a reasonable drive all contributed to my knee getting less work. The drive was intentionally circular.
Tonight’s hotel has a distressingly bad internet connection. It offers a connection for 20 seconds every ten minutes, which entirely breaks the modern web. Pages rely on background threads loading data and lack the error handling to recover should those fail, even to retry. This makes even accessing the Google homepage a painful nightmare. What’s most insane is that an open pipe can pull down data at 16Mbps and sustain it; the challenge is getting a pipe to open in the first place.
Slow internet is easy to manage. “can’t establish a connection to the server at www.google.com” is just shitty. So I’m having to hit ‘refresh’ a dozen times on each web page to get it to load, waiting for it to time out in-between every time. To put this in context: It’s literally taken me 16 minutes to check the spelling of ‘gallipoli’.
(The fact that the router has only been up for 18 hours suggests that it’s just a worthless heap of shit that needs constant rebooting, but that’s Huawei for you.)
The hotel also shares with every other hotel in New Zealand an utter lack of noise insulation. In the two hours I’ve been here I’ve had a constant stream of thuds and voices from people going up and down a nearby staircase. This doesn’t bode well for sleeping tonight, which, given the state of the internet connection, is about the only thing left to do.
I did check the hotel restaurant but it’s overpriced so I just added a large bar of rum & raisin ‘50% cocoa’ chocolate to the lunch pizza and decided that would suffice for the day.
I at least have a nice sized room. Checking in the lady on reception told me I had a single bed and a king sized bed, as though this was important for a man staying alone. In a serious voice I cautiously asked, “Do I have to use them both?”, got an astonished glance and a smile.
Sigh. I now have a link. In related news, the router got rebooted. Go figure.. Although 3 minutes later the link died again. It’s better, but still bad. Very bad. Bad enough that I’m worried about trying to post this update. Hmm. Ok, the modem just bounced again. Now even the modem is reporting, “Internet unavailable”. Connection for a few seconds and now the modem is offline again. Great. Now my phone is reporting it’s connected to wifi but my tablet is telling me there are no wifi connections available – and yes, my phone was suffering the same connection issues as the tablet. Now my tablet’s refusing to acknowledge a hotspot from my phone; the network here is so shit it’s broken my tablet. Sigh. Reboot time..
Fortunately rebooting fixed the tablet’s ability to find wifi networks. No success on actually making the hotel’s one work though – my phone hadn’t had success in hours either. If this gets posted on the correct day (Friday) know that it’s only due to extreme belligerent persistence and that I’m going to be upsetting a receptionist in the morning anyway. It’s 10.10pm and I’ve been trying to post this since 7pm, and it’s seriously annoyed me.