Day 6 continued
Planned to sit out on our balcony and watch Wellington slip away into the distance, but just as we started to move, the sky clouded over, the temperature dropped, the wind blew more fiercely and it started raining. A shame as I had already bought my glass of rose in advance, at an increased price because they add GST when we are in port.
Pizza for dinner again. Interestingly, it’s the most Xmassy I’ve felt this year, eating pizza there, as they play lovely Xmas carols. The area is set up like an outdoor piazza, or more precisely like a mall set up to look like an outdoor piazza. Fun, anyway. We had a wander around afterwards and discovered a Mah Jong lounge, full of specialized electronic tables that the Mah Jong tiles rise up from like magic. You hire the tables for your group for however many hours you like, and have bottomless cups of Chinese tea. It was very busy and (Asian) adults of all ages were playing. Very wholesome.
We didn’t go to the show as it was Dream Boys and we weren’t in the mood for beefcake. My daughter and I discovered that neither of us could make it through more than the first ten minutes of that Channing Tatum movie. Good to have tastes in common.
Day 7. Napier.
Cool and windy, unusual for summer in Hawkes Bay but pleasant for us. Caught up with family, whom we have been intending to visit for ages but have been too slack. Went to the aquarium first, which was very impressive. It was fairly full already with people from the cruise. There were a lot of volunteers working there, who seemed to latch on to us to explain things to as we clearly spoke English. I have to say, little blue penguins look almost majestic as they fly around underwater, except that they are such tiny little things. On the surface they bob around gamely and look quite comical. As with every natural history museum or tv show, there was something about pollution and mass extinction to help us face reality. Shame on you, mankind!
After a brief stop off at the in-laws lovely house, for a quick coffee and to be racked by jealousy at what it is possible to do with a large garden in this climate, it was time to get away from civilization and head out to the wild. We took a walk around Te Mata peak. It wasn’t a total escape from civilization as it turned out, as every man and his dog (and wife and children and SUV and baby in a backpack and even a yoga mat in one case) was out there as well, but I don’t think we met anyone from the cruise out there. The walk ends in a totally unexpected but extremely impressive stand of giant redwoods, which I could understand would be an excellent place to commune with nature doing ‘salutations to the sun’ or ‘the downward dog’ if you were that way inclined.
Due to bad planning and an abundance of JAFAs down for weekend weddings, we didn’t manage to get lunch at the place we had hoped to, but at least we managed to get a good coffee which are sadly lacking on board ship. We made it onto the last shuttle with five minutes to spare, in time to witness some drama as one poor lady had spent the entire day trying to find her father, who had wandered away from his group earlier in the day. Apparently the police had been involved and everything. She had just been phoned from the ship to say he’d made his own way back a few hours before. Poor thing. I suspect dad won’t be invited on the next family trip.
A long luxurious free lunch later, and here we are lounging in the sun on our beds, getting over all the fun and unaccustomed exercise. I am reading The Hound of the Baskervilles, in an ancient analogue hardcover version, as my daughter has snaffled my kindle for another series of dystopian teen novels. I think Benedict Cumberbatch does the closest version to the source novels of anyone that I’ve seen.