24/01/11 to 29/01/11: TE PURU

We landed at Auckland at 1a.m. Monday morning and Nic and Lin (our ex-neighbours in Knowle for 9 years, and ex of Rancy in Bourgogne), bless them, were waiting for us and took us home to Te Puru.
We've had a restful but very eventful week, not least 2 cyclones, landslips, high humidity and hot summer sun.

Te Puru is just over an hour by road  from Auckland, north of the old gold-mining town of Thames, on the west coast of the Coramandel peninsula.


 This is where we are staying , a stone's throw from the Pacific.
 

'Bellbird House': anyone who knows Nic and LIn will not be surprised by the scaffolding and 'building work underway'.

The 'BACH' where we are staying. Many houses in New Zealand have these 'sleep-outs' in their gardens. This one comes with all mod.cons., including air conditioning!

'NIC W': kindly loaned to us while we are in the North Island. Steve is rapidly (?) getting used to the automatic transmission, and the Kiwi speed limits.



Nic and Lin's sea-fishing boat: snapper we hope. Keep looking at the blog for what transpires, as we can go with them on one of their regular trips.

 The deck view......sea gull included. We have to keep pinching ourselves. You can't imagine sitting out looking and listening to the heart beat of the Pacific....

The view from the beach

The view towards the sea across the Reserve and beach.....

Flower beds of tropical plants and natural drift wood demarcate the boundaries

 The view to the neighbouring houses...

 And, as beautiful as it all is during the day, looking out to sea at sun set.......

And the gardens......

And NO TEMPLES but a Buddha to greet us in the morning......

This is just a taster.

 More to come on our visits within the Coramandel Peninsula, the green lipped mussels (for those of you following our regular food bulletins), and the landslip caused by the second cyclone.

HONG KONG SMILES

As we sit in Sydney Airport waiting 7 hours for the next flight with available seats to Auckland, we need some cheering up, and what better way to do it than to remember the things we have seen and heard in the past 2 weeks in Hong Kong  that made us chuckle.  Our Quantas flight from Hong Kong was two hours late which meant that we missed our connection.  It happens.  The reason given indeed brought a smile - the waste system has a heater to stop it freezing during the flight - it had broken down.  On reflection perhaps it was a no-brainer that they had to fix it. 

Thinking of waste pipes...........what about this toilet-roll holder in a restaurant in Repulse Bay??

A novel use of bamboo AND here is a better one - ROY CHAPLAIN ALERT - used with string to form scaffolding on small as well as tall buildings.  Unbelievable!!  Perhaps we should get growing in the garden in Knowle for the next job on the house.......



With all those years in Business and Education between us, and all those seminars and work shops sat through in the pursuit of  'Blue Sky Thinking', if only it were this easy................

This one speaks for itself. What would Marx have made of it?

Is this a Chinese equivalent of 'behind the bicycle sheds'?

Read the first sentence: that's all you are supposed to need to read.

These Areas were signposted all over the place. We thought it a delicious irony that in a city where it was impossible to avoid the constant movement of a great mass of people they should be encouraged to sit down.

Discrimination?? Why should small dogs have all the freedom?

'Inconvenience' is one way of looking at it if you've been attacked by a shark.

A clear case for theTrade Descriptions Act

The sign perhaps doesn't do justice to a shop full of gnomes and gnomemorabillia.

We passed on this menu. Maybe it was delicious but lost in translation.

Another  translation error? OR a excuse for ex-pats to get plastered?



21/01/2011: THE SYMPHONY OF LIGHT.

Our last night in Hong Kong and we pushed the boat out.

Mark and Ruth organised us a place on a trip across the harbour in a Chinese junk but before we set off on it....
Drinks in a roof-top bar overlooking the harbour

As you can see it got darker whilst we were drinking and the lights on the buildings came on..

Then the junk arrived.

and now on board more drinks, a blanket to keep warm and a romantic cruise around the harbour...

ground level view

but we went on the top deck...



CHEERS!!!

 

The junk took us to Kowloon

 in time to see the Symphony of Lights, a spectacular son et lumiere display of the skyscrapers and laser beams. The lasers couldn't be captured on camera, unfortunately, only on video.

The next Chinese new year is the Year of the Rabbit.

Then back across the harbour to Hong Kong on the Star Ferry, and dinner in an Argentinian steak house in SoHo (thanks to Mark and Ruth for introducing us to SoHo a previous night).  In anticipation of the next lap of our travels we just had to have a bottle of New Zealand Pinot Noir.....