Auckland Anniversary Weekend

I’d always thought it would be attractive to live ten minutes from a beach. Finding a house in the city seemed to put paid to that. But when I went for a walk to explore the local area, I found that we were indeed within ten minutes of the nearest beach, and between ten and twenty minutes’ walk are four different beaches. By beach, I do not here mean stretches of golden sand, but little alcoves and bays where the sea is accessible and you can go for a swim.

The walk also revealed that we are living within a very affluent area of Auckland. While our road is busy, being just off the motorway, step one side and you are in quiet streets with magnificent houses with views of the sea. There is an interesting range; on the one hand there are the traditional clapperboard villas, like ours but even grander, with ornamented fretwork verandahs and beautiful gardens, and on the other hand there are stark, modern buildings of concrete, steel and glass, some of which are stunning in their sharp, austere grandeur.

When I first came here, New Zealand and Auckland in particular, was basking in Americas Cup success, which had revitalised the harbour area and given the whole city a vibrancy. In later years, there seemed to be an economic slump, with the Viaduct Basin restaurants and bars noticeably less popular and lively than before. This has changed again, though: those restaurants are buzzing again, and certainly the property market has heated up. There is a lot of building going on, with new spanking apartments around the harbour, while the Marine Parade around the tip of Herne Bay is full of sections (plots) which are having new palatial sea-view residences built on them. The Auckland property papers are also full of fantastic ‘real estate opportunities’. At one time, a St Albans house would have been easily exchanged for something rather splendid, but now you would have to check carefully. Certainly, you would still do pretty well on the exchange, but there are areas and houses within Auckland where you would need to sell quite a few St Albans houses to make the deal. St Albans houses, though, tend not to have a beach ten minutes’ walk away.

After my long exploratory walk, which included watching my first New Zealand cricket game in Bayfield Park (if you exclude a England/NZ one day international glimpsed in Eden Park from the top of Mt Eden in February 2002), we all wandered down to the nearest beach for an early evening swim.

That was Saturday. Conrad had had a good day at Parnell on Friday after a distinctly difficult first day. In the evening we went to see Tilly and Andy, friends of Stephen and Jennie’s, who have lived here for just about three years. In true Kiwi hospitality fashion, because we didn’t have transport, Tilly drove over from the North Shore, picked us up, took us back for a very fine meal and wine, then drove us back home again. They are very settled in their lovely house, and are adamant that their move to NZ was the right one: no regrets and certainly no intention of returning.

Sunday took us to Devonport, which is the other side of the harbour from the main city.

Has anyone ever seen an ice-cream flavour made up of vitamin letters only? We stopped for an ice cream before getting on the ferry, and the Vitamin A E C (not sure if that’s accurate) caught my eye. “Is that just vitamins, or does it have a flavour?” I asked. “It’s lemon, orange and carrot,” the vendor explained, passing me a small spoonful. And it wasn’t half bad. So not bad, in fact, that I had one. An unusual combination of flavours, but very refreshing.

You can drive over the harbour bridge to Devonport and negotiate your way round in thirty to forty minutes, or you can catch the fifteen minute ferry across the water. We, of course, had no option, but it’s a far more attractive route to Devonport anyway. We walked along the beach, picking up shells and throwing lava stones into the waves, to North Head, the outermost volcanic mount, which is also the site of an ancient Maori pa, or fortress. Lunch up there, with fantastic views of the city, before descending on the other side to walk up Cheltenham Beach. This was busier than any New Zealand beach I have ever seen before, but in English terms, quite comfortable. It’s a lovely long beach lined with trees, unlike, for example, Swanage, which I have seen so packed you’d find it difficult to put down your bucket. We paddled along there, then cut back inland to climb Mt Victoria, the other volcanic hill in Devonport. Up there we basked in the sun and watched the radio-controlled gliders before dropping back down into the village, and catching the ferry home.

On the way home form the ferry we were treated to a display by, I assume, the New Zealand air force aerobatics team, part of the anniversary weekend celebrations. As they were turboprop planes, they didn’t quite have the thrill of the Red Arrows, but they hurtled around, made hearts in the sky and flew upside down, and had all the residents of Ponsonby out on their balconies to watch.

Monday was Auckland Anniversary day itself, and this year they combined it with ‘Adios’ to the Americas Cup team, which is about to leave for Valencia for this year’s races. The harbour was crammed with various activities, including a regatta, a radio-controlled yacht regatta, a show of historic boats dominated by huge tugs, and a chance to queue for hours to meet the Americas Cup team. We didn’t bother, but we could see the members being interviewed for television across the harbour, sitting underneath their boat, still veiled to keep its design an exciting secret.

Everyone has said that we’ll need a car, and with some reluctance, we have come to agree. We’ve booked to go to Rotorua next weekend, and if we are to make the most of other weekends, we’ll need to get about easily. Various people have advised us that we would be able to buy one cheaply, then sell it when we leave, thus costing us only a few hundred dollars plus petrol. So today we bought a car – for £110. Yes, it’s a bit ropy, and it needs a new quarterlight in the back where it was broken into. And you have to turn the ignition with a pair of pliers. But for £110! We’ll need to spend some money getting it fixed up, but it should still end up being a pretty cheap car. I had registered on TradeMe, a bit like a NZ eBay, and had bid for a number of cars. I missed one by $10 when the college’s servers went down, and missed another despite being the only bidder because I didn’t match the reserve price. All these, though, were between three and five times the cost of the one we’ve bought, through a contact at the college.

A phonecall in the afternoon brought news of Richard Barnes, first met as a first year pupil in my first term at St Albans School in 1989. If someone had told me then that I would be meeting this little chap with the sweet singing voice again over 17 years later in Auckland, I would have found it difficult to believe. He’s in Auckland on a Camp Modin recruitment drive, Auckland Monday and Christchurch Tuesday, before moving on to Australia. Since their visit to Auckland coincided with the bank holiday, their recruitment turned out to be a bit of a washout, and they were not harbouring great hopes of Christchurch. However, it was great to see him, although briefly, before he jetted off again.

Two Down, One To Go

Yesterday Rosanna coped with her first day, and this morning I have seen Conrad to the bus on his way to Parnell, so that just leaves Deborah and Louis at home. State schools start on 7 February, lucky devils, and Deborah and Louis have an interview at the local primary next week.

Conrad had his interviews at Parnell yesterday; his tutor is an English physicist who worked on the British satellite and once had the misfortune to live in Stevenage. We’ve had to pay an arm and a couple of legs for enrolment, uniform and text books, but the school has given Conrad a temporary scholarship so that we don’t actually have to pay fees, so they have been pretty generous. The uniform is actually quite stylish – Conrad was even wearing the PE shorts and shirt when I got home – so they are clothes that he will be able to wear again. Logos for the school are pretty discreet. The best thing is that Conrad actually said he was quite excited about school – it’s along time since I’ve heard him say anything like that. Let’s see what he says tonight.

Rosanna and I had to cope with one of the big events of the school year – the annual assembly. Half an hour, once a year. Imagine that!

Classes are bigger than I am used to. I have three classes: two AS English Language and one AS Drama. The English classes are 18 and 20 strong, while there are 21 in Drama. This is particularly problematic as there isn’t any rehearsal or studio space, and we have to cope in a relatively small classroom. I have been told, though, that when we get into serious rehearsals, we can use a dance studio down the road.

Accustomed to tight top buttons, neat ties and tidy hair, it’s also a bit of a change to have assorted colourful, mop-headed, t-shirted and bejeaned youths in the class. The girls – sorry, young women – tend to be the colourful ones, carefully groomed, while the young men are, unsurprisingly, the mop-headed and scruffy ones. Almost universally, though, they seem sharp, alert, interested and motivated, making good suggestions and asking probing questions. The only thing which gets in the way is the air conditioning, which makes such a noise it’s hard to hear the more quietly-spoken, but without it, you’re soon sharing a Turkish bath.

Just two lessons today, and I’m not in tomorrow, so I’ll have to work out what to do with that free Friday. I did have the dawning realisation as I walked in this morning that I will actually have time to do some reading. That’s a luxury in itself.

But since I am not in tomorrow, then it’s the weekend, and I don’t have the internet at home, I’d better say now:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CATHERINE

I won’t say here how old she is, but let us suggest that if she were playing cricket, she would be modestly holding her bat up to the crowd before settling down again to make it a really big score. Have a good day, Bong!

Bionic Man

The Economics teacher looked at me quizzically.
“This may be an odd question,” he began, “but once recently we had some Cambridge training here, and there was a bloke who was either you, or looked very much like you, who only had one arm.”
He looked quite surprised when I said, “Oh yes; that was me.”

The explanation is, of course, that when I was here in October, I had a very freshly broken collarbone, with my arm in a sling under my shirt. The people in my group got the full explanation, but it seems that everyone else just assumed that I was one-armed.

Later in the day another teacher greeted me with, “Hi; you’re the amazing guy who grows new arms!”

It’s always good to start with a reputation.

Singing and Dancing

Don’t worry, not us. As an introduction to Auckland, we were offered complimentary tickets to see the musical theatre show which was being prepared in the college over the last ten days. It’s nothing actually to do with Senior College itself, other than that Kathy Parker is on the Board of the Centre City Music Theatre Summer School, and they use the college as their rehearsal space. Nearly 80 young people, aged from 8 – 18, gather in Auckland to rehearse a musical theatre show for ten days before performing it, this time in the Maidment Theatre in Auckland University. This one was devised by the director and was a compilation of numbers from various different shows, loosely based round the theme of growing up. The participants were in groups of similar ages, and each group took a part of the show.

I’m not a great fan of musical theatre, but the songs had been carefully chosen and included some witty and humorous numbers. If the group had rehearsed for several weeks, this would have been an impressive show; after just ten days it was pretty stupendous, with confident, punchy singing and fast-paced, synchronised choreography from all age groups. Particularly impressive was that the numbers had been arranged so that everyone got something to do, a chance at least for a few lines of solo, and all of them seemed to relish this opportunity. The only slight drawback was that they had all clearly been trained over the last week to sing in a particular Broadway style, so the girls in particular were all in the nasal Noo Yoik vocal range, without a great deal of a hint of New Zealand.

Afterwards we wandered across Albert Park, the children climbing in the tortured limbs of the trees, and Deborah delighting in the giant magnolias. The formal part of the little park is very English, but incorporates flowers you’d never find in England, while the outer park boasts magnificent trees you certainly wouldn’t find in an English park.

On Sunday we did what tourists do, and caught the bus to Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World. I’m afraid that largely we were underwhelmed by the underwater world; one of the most exciting bits was a spirited stand-off between a couple of American women in one huge coach party, fiercely protecting their place ‘in line’ against another coach load of Italians. The Americans won.

The ‘snowcat’ trail through the penguins was fun, and got us close to the glossy penguins in all their glory, both on the manufactured snow and under the water, but the rest of the aquarium is really a little disappointing, not a patch on, for example, the London Aquarium. Going through the tunnel with the rays and sharks gliding over your head was pretty good, though only really enlivened when a turtle joined in. The other tanked exhibits do not offer a great deal, and the information provided is sparse. It was also somewhat disturbing to discover that all the vegetation in the tanks is made of plastic. Not a great environment for the fish, I would have thought. At least we got to see March of the Penguins in the cinema area.

Getting to Grips

Just think; while I spent yesterday at work all day, the rest of the family spent the day at the open air pool at the bottom of our road, splashing in the sunshine.

Last day, for the moment, with a car yesterday, as I drove in to work and returned the vehicle to Kathy. That left me to see what the walk home was like. It took the best part of an hour, but bear in mind that I mooched in a few shops and took the scenic route right around the harbour, across Victoria Park, then up the hill, and as it was hot and sunny, I wasn’t putting on the speed.

This morning I walked in more directly and timed the route.
6 minutes to the bus stop if necessary
12 minutes to the supermarket
15 minutes to Victoria Park market (think Camden Market in miniature rather than St Albans market)
18 minutes to the Les Mills gym (I put that in for Garry, who always says I should go, but I’m getting far better exercise walking past)
23 minutes to the hotel where we usually stay when on training trips
25 minutes to Queen Street, the city centre
28 minutes to the doors of the College
That’s pretty good, the rough equivalent of walking into school from home, so Rosanna and I will easily be able to walk in and out every day. Conrad will have to go further (though he is still not confirmed), and will travel by bus. If Louis gets a place, there are a couple of schools within very close walking distance.

It’s the weekend. No big plans yet, though we are probably going to see the show that a young people’s theatre school has been preparing in the college over the last week or so.

Induction

Induction days must be the same the world over, but this was quite an interesting one. Clearly the ethos of the college is excellence, and talking everything up. This begins with all the new staff, extends to the students and the college itself. There are key watchwords which provide a focus for the ethos: trust and support. Parameters are very clear, expectations are very high and the days are very long, beginning at 8.30am and finishing at 4.35pm. Within that day, though, all students have their own work time built into the timetable to foster a culture of self-reliance and motivation. The lessons are 85 minutes long, five per day, but staff too have generous amounts of non-contact time which give a chance to do careful preparation and assessments, while it is also expected that staff will be available for students to make appointments to discuss work or difficulties they may be having. It will be interesting to see how all this works in practice. It’s some time before that happens, though; further meetings tomorrow, training on Friday, then student enrolment and tutor meetings on Monday on Tuesday. We begin teaching on Wednesday. Since I don’t work on Fridays, that will be a pleasantly short teaching week. The following Monday is Auckland Day, a public holiday, so I can look forward to a long weekend. There is no half-term holiday, so the long weekends are going to be pretty precious.

The College itself is virtually in the centre of Auckland, just behind the main shopping street and a stone’s throw from the Sky Tower. Externally it has quite interesting brickwork, but is a fairly unprepossessing building. Inside it’s a labyrinth on four floors, very compact, so with about 500 students, I expect it will be a bit of a crush between lessons. Luckily, I already know my way around reasonably well, having conducted four training sessions here over the last four years. There are also quite a few faces of the staff who are already familiar to me, so although a new member of staff undergoing the new staff induction, it’s probably a bit less daunting for me than for the others, who include two young English women.

While I was enjoying my first day at work, the rest of the family explored a bit of Auckland, wandering around the harbour, visiting the Maritime Museum and doing some shopping. It’s a good job I packed an extra bag in one of the suitcases.

And while online on January 18th, let us all wish Deborah’s brother Tony a very happy birthday. It’s not yet his birthday in the UK, but it is here!

Auckland Admin

After breakfast, meet the landlady, go through the inventory and sign the tenancy agreement. Though expensive, the rent does include all furniture and fittings, so we can sit, sleep, cook and eat, water, electricity and gas, and even the phone rental, so all in all it’s a very good deal. As you can see from the pictures, it’s a very attractive house. Below are the view from the upper deck, the view from the stairs looking into the kitchen, and the downstairs rooms. It must be cold in the winter, though. They don’t seem particularly interested in heating over here; there are two big open fireplaces, but that is all.

Shelly Beach Road is quite busy, as it is, in effect, the slip road off the northern motorway as you come off the harbour bridge heading south, but having said that, once you’ve lived on Beechwood Avenue, it’s not significant.

Later in the morning, time for an enormous supermarket shop, to get in all the necessaries (for example a litre bottle of Banrock Station Shiraz/Cabernet for $10 – at that price it’s a necessary). Then into work to pick up and sign a contract, then a visit to the bank to set up a bank account, all done and ready within about 30 minutes. None of that British insistence on a fixed address for the last six years and so on; passport and contract were all that were necessary.

Tonight we’re going to pick up a bed being loaned to us for Louis, and now we are waiting for the plumber, as the tap in the kitchen leaks when turned on. It’s home from home! Who’d have thought we’d be straight back into plumbers after just a week away?

And tomorrow, it’s back to work, with induction and staff meetings. Doesn’t that sound depressingly familiar?

Ancient Trees

We left the Bay of Islands, driving across the neck of the Northland in order to journey back to Auckland down the west coast, through Waipoua Forest, renowned particularly for its ancient kauri trees. The winding forest road demands active driving, up and down and round sharp twists and bends, flanked on each side by towering trees and ferns, a riot of shades of green and leaf shapes.

We stopped twice to take short tracks into the forest to see some of the most ancient and massive kauri trees, including Tane Mahuta, the ‘lord of the forest’, 2000 years old, 168 feet high and 46 feet round its trunk, with thirty other species of plant and tree living within its branches. Photographs don’t really give any sense of the scale and majesty of these mighty trees, whose massive silence dominates their sections of the forest.

Of course there are far fewer kauri trees than there were. They are excellent timber trees and the settlers used them extensively, harvesting the kauris for buildings, ships and furniture. It’s a very strong, straight and beautiful timber, which is demonstrated, as well as its logging history, at the extensive Kauri Museum at Matakohe, much further south. With a full reconstruction of a sawmill, is demonstrates the process whereby a huge trunk of timber becomes manageable planks of wood, as well as the shift from manual sawing and planning to steam-driven machinery. The museum also shows numerous pieces of polished timber and items of furniture, illustrating the variations within kauri timber. These ranged from a lovely mottled wardrobe, full of intricate burrs and whorls, to a smooth, fine grained table about 16 feet in length, the top alone of which weighs over a ton.

South from Waipoua Forest is farming country, and at times it was difficult to believe we were on the other side of the world, with gently rolling hills, fields divided by trees and dotted with Friesian and Jersey cattle. It looked more than anything like Hardy’s Wessex. Closer inspection showed very unBritish trees, and the roads are lined with agapanthus, crocosmia and red hot pokers growing wild. In Dorset too, you tend to get fewer dead possums on the road. Here the possum replaces the hedgehog in frequency of roadkill, the car doing what it can to restore the ecological equilibrium of New Zealand. Three cheers for every splatted possum, a small token in the fight to retain New Zealand’s indigenous tree and bird population.

Then back to Auckland, stopping en route for snapper and chips and a stroll on Orewa beach – delicious.

The landlady said on the phone the key would be under the stone, and there it was. Finally back home in Auckland, in our house for the next three months, with the harbour bridge just visible from the back and the Sky Tower lit up in all its glory at the front. So here we are, at home in Auckland, at 66 Shelly Beach Road, Herne Bay, Auckland 1001, New Zealand.

Islands in the Sun

At last, a day offering what we came to the Bay of Islands for. Gloomy first thing, but brightening, so we thought we would take the risk and book a boat trip. It was the right decision, as by the time of embarkation it was bright, hot and sunny. We spent the day touring the Bay, on the route of the original ‘Cream Trip’, which ferried provisions around the communities in the Bay and took the cattle farmers’ cream to market. The cruise still delivers newspapers and groceries around the islands as it takes its passengers to see the sights. The commentary was interesting and full of anecdote. A lunchtime stop on Urupukapuka Island was idyllic, and would have been welcome at twice the length, but we had more sights to see. A feature of this stop was a ‘submarine’ trip in a boat where passengers sit in the windowed hull, two metres below sea level, and are taken out to see the fish. Because of the recent poor weather, visibility was not great, but the crew dropped feeding buckets to attract the fish close to the craft, so we saw plenty.

The journey out to Piercey Island and the famous ‘Hole in the Rock’ was also suffering from the recent poor weather. Though the skipper termed it ‘moderate seas’, it was the maritime equivalent of yesterday’s trip down Adam’s landlord’s track, multiplied by a few. Although the conditions were too rough actually to go through the hole, it was nevertheless an impressive sight, especially as the seabirds gathered in large flocks to feed off schooling fish at the surface nearby.

We saw no dolphins, but heard that the special “Dolphin Cruise’ had failed on the dolphin front too, so clearly conditions weren’t quite right. It was a great day though, and the locals are clearly so proud of where they live, the skipper thanking us for giving him the opportunity to show us round his ‘little bit of paradise’, without a trace of irony. I doubt even St Albans Cathedral tour guides can manage that. The only disadvantage was trying to find a comfortable place on the boat amongst the Saga passengers, who weren’t willing to give an inch of their precious space, of which each of them took up rather a lot. Not the best advert for retired Brits abroad.

Kerikeri

Ah, a fine glass of Ngatarawa cabernet/merlot and here we go.

Not so rainy this morning, so off to Kerikeri via the Haruru Falls. This is where we planned to walk yesterday before the downpour, so we missed the mangroves, but saw the falls thundering down with the mist of droplets blown off in the breeze.

En route, phonecalls to both Adam Doughty and Andrew Blanshard proved fruitless – I must have copied out the mobile numbers wrongly, or the mobiles were turned off, and neither was answering his landline. Undaunted, we drove to Kerikeri, where we were sweet talked at the Mission House into joining the NZ Historic Places Trust. The history they are concerned with is truly ancient. It goes all the way back to the 1820s. Imagine that! The Mission House and the Stone Store (first stone building in NZ) were very interesting in giving a glimpse into the lives of the first pioneer settlers.

Then up into Kerikeri itself to browse the shops and the estate agents’ windows. A five bedroom house with ocean views set in 2.5 acres for £280,000. Anyone tempted? All you’d need would be a job, but they aren’t easy to come by in this neck of NZ. That is, unless you buy a small holding and grow fruit and veg to sell at the roadside. We stocked up on bright, ripe peppers, sweetcorn, tangelos, apples, courgettes, cucumber, tomatoes for a fraction of supermarket prices.

Then, in the middle of Kerikeri, someone called out my name. Across, the street, grinning broadly, was Andrew Blanshard, ex-pupil and tutee, manic cyclist who did the Three Peaks Cycle Ride with us a number of years ago. Who needs the phone when you can bump into people in the street? Andrew was full of beans, loving his job working for the Department of Conservation, one of only two state-paid archaeologists in the Northland, or ‘Paradise’, as he called it. We may bump into him again later.

We toured a few artists’ workshops and galleries, and admired the swamp kauri tables in one workshop, where the wood has been carbon-dated to 39,000 years old. They dig huge trunks of prehistoric wood out of the land, and the cut timber is finely grained and glowing, astonishing for something so ancient.

Before setting homeward in the rain, I tried Adam’s phone again, and got him. What a welcome was his invitation for a cup of tea! So we headed off to his place. It’s down a very long drive, he told me. Don’t take the wrong turning. When we say drive, forget tarmac or sweeping arcs of gravel. See a narrow unmade track, full of mud and potholes. Then take that wrong turning and go down a farm track with high vegetation between the wheelruts, big pools of brown rainwater and sliding muddy bends. Imagine the water leaping up and splashing across the windscreen with its furious wipers as you bounce and rattle along the track. I have never driven a 4×4 before, and sneer at them when they bully their way around the terrors of St Albans streets, but careering down this route made me very glad that the car Kathy had lent us was a 4×4. I have to admit, it was good fun. But it had to come to an end in the middle of nowhere next to a tractor when I realised we must be wrong. A quick phonecall confirmed that we had to do a u-turn and do it all again!

We found Adam and Sarah in their wonderfully isolated house, surrounded by giant tree ferns and gum trees, with fantails, harriers and parakeets flying around. The children had just been delivered to guide camp, so we disturbed their tranquillity with our children. They talked interestingly about New Zealand education, Maori history and their hippy landlords. They seemed settled and happy, enjoying the tranquillity and verdant surroundings, though they are very conscious of the distance between them and home. They may come and see us in Auckland at some stage.

And so finally home, through an incredible deluge. This time, though, we were at least in the car.