Finland/Iceland trip diary - day 3

Once again, the late night yesterday necessarily meant a late start today. I complain about it every year, but it’s always true: I’m getting slower and slower. At one time I would have written this diary, scanned all my usual web sites and more – now I’m straining merely to tick off the first of those. Mind you, almost everything on the web sites is transient and barely worth knowing anyway – I’ve often wished I could hypnotize myself into simply not caring about the news. Strangely, Ally spends much less time on the web than I do, yet whenever I mention something I've come across, she seems to already know about it. Even, for example, the article in yesterday’s New York Times on the obscure topic of Japan’s high volume of abandoned dwellings. Very annoying.

Everywhere we go, we see posters for the forthcoming Helsinki production of Billy Elliott, which sounds like an interesting cultural transplant. Less widely advertised is the pending series of concerts by Motley Cru and Whitesnake and Motorhead and Bullet for my Valentine! They’re all on the same poster, as if it’s inherently a package deal. And maybe it is. We started out on a weightier cultural note today, by going to the Museum of Contemporary Art to see a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition. I’ve seen many or most of the images before in various places, but they never get tired, nor do the ripples of Mapplethorpe’s life and environment. The museum didn’t have too much else on display unfortunately, although in the entrance hall a young couple was writhing slowly and sensuously around each other on the floor (maybe it’s a set assignment at the local theatre school or suchlike, because when we left it had changed to a different young couple) and in a second floor studio, a trio sits as if hypnotized, chanting mysteriously. Who’s to say what constitutes an “exhibit”? Maybe the visitors are more on display than anything else?

We then walked up the north eastern part of downtown and took in a couple of standard tourist sights, both surrounded by a larger throng of tour-bus types than we’ve seen anywhere so far. First was the Rock Church, a church built directly into a cliff in 1969, a pleasant if modest architectural achievement. A short walk from there is Sibelius Park, containing a monument to Sibelius in the form of several hundred steel pipes, evoking an evocative cloud of creation, or perhaps a giant misshapen claw. Near to that there’s an effigy of Sibelius’ face, set into something that vaguely resembles a steel fish. The latter in particular seems to evoke an endless stream of silly photographs. Walking through a non-descript but pleasant neighborhood, we came to the Olympic Stadium, from Helsinki’s hosting of the 1952 games. It’s a functional-looking but not overly dated structure, without the flourishes of such stadiums now, and all the more commendable for that. We walked back alongside another lake before arriving back downtown, more or less back where we started.

It’s difficult to get one’s bearings in Helsinki – you’re virtually never walking directly north-south or east-west, and we keep finding that one familiar spot has bent into another in a way we didn’t expect. I’m particularly unsure of things because I overly rely on Ally to do the navigating. But it doesn’t matter if we sometimes end up taking the long way – there’s always plenty to look at. As in all European countries, you still come across stores that seem to get by on almost nothing. Last night we walked by a place with a window display of light bulbs and hair dryers. It wasn’t even in a cheap neighborhood. Or you see toy shops devoted to the kind of heavy-molded plastic doll that you’d have assumed went out of production in the 60s. Or convenience doors selling nothing but two kinds of juice and a selection of two factory-made cakes. It’s very endearing. Anyway, we sat on the stairs in front of the cathedral for a while, and explored further in that neighborhood. We came back through the harbour market, where I was on the verge of impulsively ordering some salmon soup and reindeer meatballs before Ally basically shut down the idea. I had to settle for a sandwich from the hotel lobby instead. Readers, this is something I’ll never forget.

We spent a few hours in the hotel. It doesn’t look like Ozu’s had to wear his cone again. He’s just curled up fast asleep, shutting everything out. I bet Ozu would never have voted against salmon soup or reindeer meatballs, especially not the latter. We had dinner in a place we’d booked from Toronto, signing up for its eight-course tasting menu – Ask Restaurant. In hindsight we might not have booked it if we’d known we would already have had two such good meals, but it worked out wonderfully anyway. Spanning almost four hours, the official menu reads: kohlrabi and beef; white fish and turnip; chanterelle forest; potato and bone marrow; parsnip and pike perch; beetroot and wild duck (actually two courses); blueberries and milk; gooseberries and butter. Most of those descriptions though only give a vague idea of the actual item; not to mention at least five other little servings that came out along the way. Along with the accompanying wine pairings, it was a remarkable (and, of course, expensive meal). As it got later, we engaged in more banter with the servers, eventually ending in a discussion on the possibilities of a novel called “Potatoes are in my Blood.” I hope I don’t forget about that.

Afterwards, walking back after midnight, we barely passed anyone on the street until we reached our square, which is a wonderful kind of experience – three days ago we didn’t know Helsinki at all and now, in a certain experiential sense, it’s all ours! We didn’t go into the Public Corner, but walking past we could see that the woman wasn’t on the poker machine tonight, so that was good news too. Unless of course she’d just temporarily stepped away at the moment we happened to walk past…

Finland/Iceland trip diary - day 2

Not too surprisingly, we got going rather slowly today, which didn’t matter at all. We spent the day covering more or less the entire downtown map of Helsinki. At the end of this we decided that the market we saw yesterday was indeed the one we remembered from a decade and a half ago, contrary to our impression yesterday. In part, it wasn’t as recognizable yesterday because it was the end of the day and they were packing up, but time had also distorted our memories of it a bit. Perhaps nothing on those long-ago trips is quite as we remember it, including the bill. We went into a store selling the same wooden sheep I mentioned, and it costs over 400 euros. Even allowing for inflation, it’s hard to imagine we were ever quite that captivated by it. They also come in bigger sizes though so we did exercise some restraint in that regard.

It was another warm but not scalding day today and Helsinki confirmed itself as a fine walking city. Throughout our strolling, we were tempted away from the street by a trail along the water, or an open-air market, or a patch of shade. There’s a park right behind the hotel containing a botanical garden, and behind that an inlet that defines the right shoulder of the downtown core, a few paddle-boarders calmly moving along as if on a non-urgent errand. We eventually circled round and walked back down to the southern end again, looping up with the beach we found yesterday. As in all Scandinavian cities, there’s an easy mix of transit – the volume of cars doesn’t seem too heavy, bikes are much more prominent than back home (although not as much as in Copenhagen say), trams and buses come and go regularly, and all of this seems to exist in a natural unstrained harmony. There’s a buried corridor right down the middle of town, seemingly on an old underground railway track or something like that, reserved solely for pedestrians and cyclists – I imagine most cities would envy that. The city certainly has its modern flourishes – a new concert hall, a modern art museum: it has plans for a new Guggenheim museum, although that’s been subject to controversy. Still, perhaps inevitably, the spaces surrounding those areas tend to be stark and rather unengaging, compared to the time-beaten old squares (and Helsinki has a lot of those).

We happened on several markets, both interior and exterior, and had lunch in one of them. Even by normal city standards, Helsinki seems defined largely by eating – every block just piles one choice on another. Fast food isn’t particularly prominent, but we’ve walked past dozens of open air cafes, and just about every kind of ethnic speciality (we’ve seen at least four Nepalese places, just for illustration). Local delicacies like salmon soup recur frequently – I’ll have to try that somewhere. Perhaps it follows that the streets aren’t necessarily bursting with physically attractive types as per the Scandinavian legend. Apparently the government has a plan to stamp out smoking within thirty years, but I’d say they have a long way to go on achieving that. This is all only to say though that the city conveys a very easy, naturalistic quality; it’s extremely easy to be in. I think we’ve been seeing more baby carriages than we do in most places, which gives an impression of normal life winding around the tourist attractions. Certainly more often than at home, these baby carriages are in the custody of men rather than of women.

Finland, of course, is one of the more expensive places that one might choose to vacation in, and we’re dealing with this issue by choosing not to think of it in the least. This seems all the more necessary because, the web tells us, our investments back home are being decimated by the ongoing market decline. Finland knows all about this, its economic situation apparently being rather dire, in part because of the decline of Nokia and of its paper industry. Of course, it’s hard to pick up on this when you’re just a tourist, but I suppose the easygoing qualities I’ve described above could be taken for a lack of economic vibrancy. I certainly don’t think we’re seeing quite as much forced cellphone activity as you do everywhere else – I don’t even know if we’ve walked by a phone store. Maybe people took the Nokia thing personally.

We returned to the hotel after five hours or so and both had a bit of a nap. Naturally, we checked in on Ozu via the Urban Dog webcam. He’s been licking and chewing on himself in recent weeks because of seasonal allergies, and although that’s mostly behind him now, I felt I should leave them his protective cone just for safety. Yesterday when we checked in, he was wearing the cone, which makes for a bit of a sorry sight. Today he’s back to normal. Later we went out in search of a restaurant called Juuri, specializing in Finnish tapas (or “sapas”) – we once again covered a big chunk of downtown in search of it (although we discovered on the way back that there would have been a considerably more direct route). They had just one table available, but that’s all we needed! It was a wonderful meal, and the only real caveat is that you just wanted the tapas to be bigger. I don’t know if real Finnish people eat them though – everyone in the restaurant seemed to be a visitor, and on the web I can hardly find the term "sapas" except in connection with Juuri itself. On the way back we returned to the Public Corner, agreeing we wouldn’t stay as late as last night. We managed that, but just by five minutes. Didn’t I say you can’t stop at one Karhu!

It doesn’t take long to immerse yourself in little local stories. We recognized several patrons from last night, one of them an Asian woman who spent hours on both nights sitting in the back of the place playing electronic poker or something. This can’t possibly be good and it seems to me someone should stage an intervention. I don’t suppose she’d appreciate it from us though…

Finland/Iceland trip diary - day 1

We weren't very worried about our flight to Helsinki because we were going on Icelandair through Reykjavik, and it’s so startlingly cheap (compared to Finnair at least) that we ended up indulging ourselves and booking business class. It’s a modest business class compared to some – no fancy pods or fully horizontal sleeping quarters – but it’s certainly easier to sleep in the larger seats, with no one sitting next to you. In fact, we’re booked in the exact same seats, in the fourth row on the right hand side, for all four legs of the trip. We flew out of Toronto just after 9 pm, having gone to see the fine film Mistress America and then out for lunch earlier in the day, and were both asleep before they served dinner. We arrived in Reykjavik about four and a half hours later, and easily made the connection to Helsinki an hour later. We had breakfast on that flight, but otherwise slept through much of that too. So by the time we arrived in Finland, at around 2 pm, we’d more or less had the equivalent of a night’s sleep.

We took a taxi into the city. It followed the familiar pattern (for us anyway) of many such initial European journeys – a rather non-descript light-industrial stretch, although with more surrounding greenery than we’d probably get back home (this portion of the journey passed very quickly, given that we had a stereotypically aggressive cab driver); the slow build-up of the city (very sleepy today, it being Sunday); then an escalating density that makes us think we'll be hitting the really good stuff in a few minutes; then the cab suddenly turns up a pleasantly tree-lined side street and there’s our hotel (I’m quite sure our European hotels are almost always on pleasantly tree-lined side streets). It’s the Radisson Blu Plaza, a safe brand-name choice, which delivers those nice little extras – not just a coffee maker in the room, but a Nespresso machine too! – along with some semi-inspired local “touches.” Walking to the room, the numbers are lit up in the floor, alternating with offsetting circles of light, suggesting a budget-challenged sci-fi show’s notion of “futuristic” set design (we later realized that the numbers are lit up in blue, red or green depending on the status of the room occupant, which seems like a very gaudy way of asking not to be disturbed). It’s the only hotel room I’ve seen that supplies the guests with sunglasses. And there’s a TV embedded in the bathroom mirror. It doesn’t actually work – it just displays abstract patterns of static, which is probably more appropriate to the bathroom.

We went out for our initial walk, with a map from the hotel lobby, but no real plan otherwise. Actually, we had a small plan, because we spent an afternoon here some thirteen or fourteen years ago on the way home from Norway. We had a stopover which was long enough to take a bus into town, where we walked around a harbourfront market area and bought a souvenir wooden sheep, which we still have. It seemed like an obvious idea to go there again and see how it compared to our memories, but we never ended up finding it. Our hotel is centrally located, across from a casino, with many surrounding restaurants and sidewalk cafes; today, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, the neighbourhood seemed to be aspiring to Paris. The “fashion district” is just a few blocks away, then we started heading towards what we thought was the water – this shouldn’t be hard to do, as the city is on a peninsula, with water in basically every direction. But as often happens, we managed to bury ourselves right in the centre, getting lost in street upon street. This didn’t matter of course – it’s fun just to keep going and see what happens, or whether anything will ever happen, just taking in the general European-ness. Our guide book comments that Helsinki “isn’t quaint, it isn’t regal, it isn’t even terribly old,” and at first impression that seems about right – it’s not particularly distinctive, visually or tonally. But it also feels integrated, unforced, and at ease, and if it’s not terribly old compared to say Rome, you should compare it to our neighborhood of glass condos.

Eventually we did hit the water, but at the south end of the city, far from our original intention. We came to a beach – not a very big one, but crammed with people (because the world over, you have to make the best of what you’ve got) and we bought an ice cream from a vendor who identified himself as Cyprian. Naturally, everyone speaks English if you want them to, but otherwise we barely heard any English in the streets today – it’s probably not a major vacation destination for non-Scandinavians (actually, the plane from Reykjavik was the emptiest one we’ve been on for a while). We walked up along a coastline path, dotted throughout with cafes – all very active and happily occupied today. For most of the way, you’re looking across at various small islands – some of them have restaurants, with boats taking customers back and forth every twenty minutes or so; another has a museum; another a fortress. We came to a market that was packing up for the day, but not the one from the earlier trip. Helsinki has its own London Eye-type wheel near there, because I guess that’s what places do. We walked back past the cathedral, although we might have taken the white columns and green cupolas to indicate parliamentary pomp more than spiritual rapture. Earlier this year, a music promoter caused a minor scandal by placing a thousand racy photos of rapper Nicky Minaj on the steps leading up to it, but today they held only people.

We went back to the hotel and slept for an hour or so. At around 8.30 we wandered for a while and eventually went into a restaurant called Aino, tempted mainly by my notion of ordering reindeer. It was entirely our kind of place – white, clean design, modern wood surfaces, no nonsense. Ally had cauliflower soup and a carrot crepe; I had salmon and the reindeer. It was a wonderful meal, and went by super-fast so we decided to have a beer near the hotel, in the outside space in a bar called The Public Corner. We ended up staying until 1.20 am, so I guess it was more than one beer (you try drinking just one Karhu!). The Public Corner isn’t actually on a corner, but is embedded into a row of cafes and apartment buildings, facing an enormous square, with the railway station on the far side. I assume the square is often used for events, but today it was just a huge cobbled space – back home, developers would certainly be petitioning to build on it. Even late on Sunday night, the people-watching was of excellent high quality. I remarked at one point how, compared to home, more people were just sitting by themselves having a drink; at one point I went to the washroom and when I came back, after a mere two-minute absence, two of these single-person tables had merged, and the man and woman were chatting away as if they’d been together forever. Maybe Helsinki is the true City of Love? On the other hand, as we’d seen earlier, the apparent attempt by some to create a bridge of love locks doesn’t seem to have acquired much momentum…

New Zealand trip diary - day 13

In contrast to the first night, we spent our second night in the lodge among maybe seven other couples, so dinner was more of a group affair. We most enjoyed talking to a Scottish couple, of whom the woman in particular was refreshingly feisty and happy to say whatever entered her head. And at one point on our table of eight people, there were maybe three separate conversations about Christchurch going on all at once; it constantly seems like a wound that’s nowhere near to healing. Another couple on the table live there, and were just here for the night, for their wedding anniversary; they hadn’t been downtown in three years, and it almost sounded like they might never go again. Anyway, it was fine, but as soon as dinner was over we left (perhaps not with the greatest finesse, in hindsight). We sat up in our room for a while longer, and ended the night looking at the stars, which were clear as we’ve seldom seen them – we could have been drawing textbook-quality constellations and formations. It was windy though, which presumably accounted for the wireless Internet going down for a second night in a row – I guess it must be a big recurring problem there. Anyway, early on Sunday morning I spent an hour or so sitting in the library area, where it still worked. Strangely, since the previous day someone had moved all the ancient volumes of Colliers’ encyclopedia from one bookshelf to another. However, Coz’s Fatherhood was still in the same spot.

After breakfast we walked around for a couple of hours. We’d saved a little bit of bread and pastry from our walk the previous day, to feed to Marcus the sheep (yeah, I know how that sounds). We walked the entire length of the driveway where he’d followed us the other day (which takeslonger than you could imagine) but although we saw the other sheep, Marcus wasn’t there. Then we did the nature walk we did on our first evening here, except in reverse this time, and not in the rain; then we went into the gift shop and bought a few things – gloves, a sweater. We were talking about how we wouldn’t be seeing Marcus again (and hoping that didn’t mean he was the night’s dinner) and then suddenly there he was, all by himself in a fenced off area, even with his own little kennel. It turns out he doesn’t like bread and pastry, but he's ridiculously fond of company, putting up his front paws (I know that’s not the term, but it seems like it should be) and lapping up all the petting he can get. Later on, a woman who works at the lodge, and lives on the premises (as they all do) said he’d escaped from the other area and come to her door around 7 am, crying to get in and sending her dog into a frenzy. He’s a wonderful little character, but you have to be worried for his future (apparently though they did have another similar sheep in the past, who after a couple of years gave in and just accepted his role in life).

We were driven to Christchurch, which took about an hour and a half – the driver was incredibly well-informed on everything we saw or passed and delivered a more or less seamless commentary, but I slept through most of it. In the past he’s driven Bill Clinton, Bono and Shania Twain (who likes the region so much she bought a farm). The flight to Auckland was uneventful, then we had four hours or so there, which passed by well enough. Still, it’s a shame our last outdoor walk in New Zealand couldn’t have been something better than the ten minutes along the green line from the domestic to the international terminal. The flight back to Vancouver was about as easy as it could have been – we both slept for a satisfactory chunk of it. I watched the recent crime thriller The Drop; Ally watched the New Zealand classic Once were Warriors…I assume New Zealand Air would be the only airline on which that’s a standing choice.

We were originally supposed to fly out of Vancouver at 2 pm; which would have given us a couple of hours there, but Air New Zealand called a few months ago to say that flight was cancelled and we had to wait until 4 pm. Not only was the 2 pm flight not cancelled, we didn’t even get seats together on the 4 pm flight (both having to occupy lousy middle seats). Something smells rotten about that whole thing. And we had a brief period of anxiety when it seemed that even the 4 pm flight might be delayed due to a water main burst in the air traffic control room (or some such catastrophe). But in the end we got off on time.

It was a great trip – we planned it fairly immaculately if we say so ourselves, seeing a good cross-section of the country while minimizing the amount of time lost to travel and other logistics, and luck was with us throughout in matters such as the weather. People keep asking if we’d go back, and of course it’s one of those things – in terms of the pleasure of being there, we certainly would, but it’s on the other side of the world and there are many nearer places we’d also like to revisit, or haven’t seen at all, so I suppose the odds are that we won’t...

Many times when we said we were from Canada, it was clear from the responses that the New Zealand image of Canada is formed much more by the western Rocky mountains, and by towns like Jasper and Banff, than by Toronto; many people told us they’d been to Vancouver and on from there, but I’m not sure anyone ever mentioned our own city. At the end of the day, I suppose Toronto is another arbitrary creation of glass and concrete, in what would otherwise be an innocuous spot on the map. But despite its limitations, we never seriously think about wanting to live anywhere else. We arrived home around midnight, but of course things weren’t truly back to normal until Ozu arrived home the following afternoon. And so here’s the end of the story.

New Zealand trip diary - day 12

Grasmere Lodge has a rather more formal approach to things than your regular shack in that you congregate for a drink around 7 and then have dinner in 8, most likely eating in groups. We were a bit unsure about this because we’re lousy in such situations, but it ended up as yet another fine evening. We went first for a stroll on a nature trail that surrounds the lodge, taking forty-five minutes or so; it was a very nice walk, but it soon started to rain and we ended up drenched. On the way back we walked through a field of horses, some of which started following us, so we have the new marker of being stalked by cows, sheep and horses all within the same day. Anyway, we soon dried off. On Friday night, as I mentioned, we were the only guests, and the only other people around for dinner were the former operators and continuing part owners, Olly and Vicky Newbegin, up here for the special Cass weekend I described before. They mostly live in Christchurch, so we had yet another extended conversation on that topic, among many other things (not least, Olly’s memories of his first visit to the US in his 20s, seeing Miles Davis and John Coltrane perform on the same night, and other musical wonders; subsequent Internet searching suggests he could also have talked at length about his amazing Porsche collection, but we never got there). Several hours went by most easily. Then we returned to our wonderful room and drank more wine. I stood outside by myself for a while in the darkness, enjoying the sense of total exclusivity and uniqueness, which our home city can’t really provide for all its own marvels.

The great thing about a place like Grasmere is that you express a wish and then everyone applies themselves to making it happen. We said that for our last day we’d like to take a good scenic walk, maybe five hours or so, and then everyone launched themselves into figuring out what would be the best route, the appropriate accompanying logistics and so on. In this particular case it became almost a family project – the current and former operators, Tom and Olly, both drove us out to the starting point; five hours later, Tom brought his partner and baby daughter along when he picked us up (after dropping in on the Cass bash). They’d selected a track which wouldn’t be too affected by the previous evening’s rain nor by the predicted westerly winds, called the Hog’s Back Trail, leading to a tiny village called Castle Hill (which Olly apparently had a hand in founding – the more we hear about him, the more he sounds like a benign local Godfather). It was a perfect choice, not just for the reasons stated, but also because it complemented the other fine walks we’ve taken – somewhat drier terrain, with a feeling of clay and gorse, but also with plenty of woodland stretches; a somewhat softer grandeur to the landscapes, but again with mesmerizingly designed skies (just look at the photos). We only saw a handful of other walkers, but there were plenty of mountain bikers, especially as the day went on. It wasn’t a particularly tough walk in terms of ups and downs, but still tired us out well enough.

The lodge chef, Jean-Pierre (they have an actual French chef called Jean-Pierre) made us a lunch which even included little quiche-type things that he’d cooked that morning; I’m telling you, they were really on top of everything. The only trouble was that by the time we were ready to eat it, the wind was picking up despite their best planning efforts, so we had to wait a while to find the right spot. The New Zealand climate is a bit of a puzzler. You often go through huge temperature swings; on today’s walk for example we eventually found a sheltered spot to eat our lunch, and ten minutes later my fingers were white and twisted as if on the verge of frostbite. But almost as soon as we started walking again, I felt overheated and had to take my jacket off (there’s a lot of putting on outer layers, then taking them off, then putting them on again, etc.) I mentioned before the ease of sunburning – apparently New Zealand has the highest skin cancer rate in the world. On at least five days during the trip we’ve felt moisture in the air in a density which at home would be a certain sign of rain in the immediate future, but here it's always receded without coming to that (our luck with the weather continued to the end; apparently things got much worse in Christchurch on the day we left). But it’s hard to make sweeping statements about a country based on two weeks, no matter how engaged you think you are. Someone at work had said to Alison that one of her prevailing impressions of New Zealand is of all the people walking barefoot in the street. We haven’t seen that at all.

By the way, the Chronicles of Narnia films were apparently shot close by, and so was a British production of The Lost World, at which time Bob Hoskins and James Fox stayed in the lodge for a month or so (haven’t asked if that’s the extent of the celebrity guest list). The only issue today was that the Internet wasn’t working this morning, with the serious consequence that I couldn’t take a look at Ozu in our room. However, while waiting for it to be fixed, I found that I could get online by sitting in one of the library areas (I think the place has three such areas, where people might play pool, chess or board games; watch TV (the rooms don’t have them); or read such books as the Coz’s Fatherhood (to take an example which, by divine providence, I found in my eyeline). Anyway, I monitored Ozu on and off for half an hour or so, and he never moved from the same droopy position on the bed in the little dog space. I haven’t seen him in the big dog space for days, which I take to mean that he’s given up on trying to keep up with them, and that he’s just grimly sticking it out before he gets to go home. Which won't be too long a wait as a percentage of his entire stay, but unfortunately still isn't particularly close if he's counting the hours…

New Zealand trip diary - day 11

Last night we took a cab back to the Court Theatre, which is a great facility despite being located in a warehouse, and we saw the play One Man, Two Guvnors. This was big in London and New York a few years ago, and even won a Tony for best actor, but as far as I know has yet to be produced in Toronto. It’s a flat-out farce, driven by sheer silliness and dexterity, and works very well as such, although if I were the director, I would have been pushing the cast to work even faster. There’s a certain amount of picking on the audience, and at one point the lead actor targeted me in the audience (we were in the second row) and asked me where he should take the object of his desire on a first date. Despite being new in town, I shot back Tequila Mockingbird, which seemed to be a fine answer and earned a smattering of audience applause (of course the character rejects that suggestion, over his object of desire’s objections, and the play grinds on). This was an especially high stakes moment for me as the previous audience participant ended up covered in fire extinguisher foam (it’s confirmed later, for anyone who wasn’t sure, that she was actually a plant).

Pure and Deep in Auckland was a tight, minimalist, contemporary show, and this was basically the opposite, making for a fine counterpoint. We took a cab to the St. Asaph Street Kitchen (I was born in St. Asaph, a different one obviously) where despite the “…till late” thing, the guy had to check that the restaurant staff were still able to make us a meal; fortunately, they were. Then we walked back maybe eight blocks to the hotel, and although I’ve made this point several times by now, it’s still eerily remarkable that you can walk that far through a world-famous city (one of the year’s top travel destinations per several sources) and see no one else walking, not on the other side of the street, not anywhere (we did see one cat), and virtually no traffic. We kept registering new sights – a row of storefronts where a hairdresser seems to be open for business, just a few doors down from another that’s still a wreck, still with an almost four-year-old notice on the door inviting applicants for positions. This is something we’ll truly never forget.

“Climb aboard one of the world’s most famous train journeys,” says the blurb for the KiwiRail TranzApline railway, “between Christchurch and Greymouth. Cross the fertile farmlands of the Canterbury Plains, and enjoy thrilling vistas over deep gorges as you travel alongside the ice-fed Waimakariri River. Traverse the mighty Southern Alps, where spectacular views of the chiselled alpine landscape will take your breath away at every turn. Descend through thick stands of native beech forest to your destination, Greymouth – a great base for exploring this unspoiled region with its mighty glaciers, wild rivers and famous Punakaiki pancake.” We didn’t do the last couple of sentences – we caught the train at 8.15 am and got off a couple of hours later, not quite halfway through the journey, at the tiny station of Cass – the only passengers to do so (to the apparent bemusement of some of the others). The journey is indeed spectacular at times, but the train was packed and noisy (unfortunately we were sitting right behind a group of American seniors, and you know what that means) and the carriage which is open for better viewing was full of people with selfie sticks.

We were picked up and driven to the Grasmere Lodge, a couple of miles from Cass, where we’re spending our last two nights. Since we couldn’t check in, we embarked pretty soon on a two and a half hour walk down to the nearby Grasmere lake, where we followed the trails for a while before sitting on a hillside and surveying the astonishing landscape. At one point I counted at least seven layers to the landscape – the sky, two mountain ranges (one with snow, one without), a row of trees, the lake with a grass frame on either side, and the yellow brush flowers in the foreground. Even the world’s most beautiful landscapes might ordinarily be content to constitute, say, four stunning layers.

During the walk, we attracted the attention of a herd of cows on the other side of the wire, and they all followed us for a vast distance, bunching together so that you’d seriously fear for your safety if you were caught in the middle (see for yourself!) When we came back though, many of the cows had entirely disappeared from view, reminding us of the African safari where animals might roam vast distances. In the beef-rearing run of things, those are some pretty lucky cows. We also attracted the attention of a lamb who very loudly tracked us for as far as he could, and then did the same on the way back. We later learned that his name is Marcus (doesn’t it seem like every damn sheep nowadays is called Marcus though?) and that he’s spent too much time around humans; they’re trying to reintegrate him with the other sheep, but it’s not really working. We thought of offering to take Marcus home as a nice friend for Ozu, but I guess Ozu might not be entirely sympathetic to the idea.

We had lunch, and then the owner took us and another couple (from Christchurch, so that was an inevitable conversation topic) on a drive of the property and the surrounding area, which I’ll summarize basically as saying that three or four local landowners appear to own the equivalent of Toronto (but of course with a miniscule fraction of the population). Although Cass apparently has only one resident, it has a mini-golf range, and an annual cricket tournament/booze-up for which a few hundred people show up and camp – it’s happening tomorrow, so the formation of the camp is fairly well advanced. Our room, which has little in common with the Cass campsite, is enormous (we got an upgrade!), with a gas fireplace and terrific chairs (and a mini bar we can empty out for no extra charge, if so inclined) and for Friday night we’re the only guests in the whole place (the Christchurch couple were on the way home), by ourselves at the far end of a very long lodge, separate from the main building. So we just have to hope one of us doesn’t go nuts in the manner of The Shining.

New Zealand trip diary - day 10

Last night we walked about ten or fifteen minutes to Victoria Street, an area where lots of new bars and restaurants have been opening, and went into Mockingbird, which follows a Mexican tapas kind of concept. It was very enjoyable food and people-watching, and we stayed a pretty long time (whereas at home restaurants usually have a defined closing time, most places here seem to advertise their closing time only as “..till late”: in our experience though “late” often ends up being relatively early, and we’ve frequently seen people turned away as the wheels of closing time start to grind, but maybe that speaks to the places we're drawn to). We walked back afterwards, struck again by the vast barren spaces, by the almost total absence of people and cars. Within a block of the hotel there used to be a Starbucks and a book store – you can still see the signs behind the boards; don’t know what else was there, but presumably it would have been a street in fairly constant motion. Not now...

A poster announces that Kenny Rogers will soon be here performing his “Last ever New Zealand concerts” – so to repurpose the remark I made earlier about Onehunga, is that a promise or a threat? Actually, Auckland seems like a very long time ago – we’re at the point of the trip, especially after yesterday, where our memories are happily full, and to add any more might carry the risk of being counter-productive. This is not in any way to suggest we’re not excited about what’s left. We left the hotel this morning at around 9.30 am and had breakfast nearby (I had mushrooms on toast, which it seems to me would be a wildly popular breakfast item if it occurred to more people). Then we continued exploring Christchurch, taking in some different angles on the core, different street art installations, artists using flags or weaves or sculpture to express an element of what was lost. We wanted to know the location of the Court theatre, which used to be downtown but has for now had to move to a warehouse about forty minutes’ walk from where we are. Of course, the forty minutes is only if you know the way – we had to double back twice, eventually finding it semi-hidden behind unprepossessing chain restaurants and the like.

From there we strolled through a couple of neighborhoods, first Riccarton and then Merrivale, going through Hagley Park in between – I would have been ready to wager that Hagley Park might be the biggest in the world, but it’s a mere 164 hectares; New York’s Central Park for comparison is 341 hectares. Hagley Park might seem bigger because it’s acre after acre of basically the same thing (wonderful flat green grass). This coming Saturday by the way sees the Coca-Cola Christmas in the Park event, which the website says is “one of the happiest and most magical, musical extravaganzas on the Kiwi Christmas calendar!” (my initial web searches for this event kept taking me back to the blurb for 2010, another apparent Internet ghost). Anyway, these neighborhoods are all somewhat different in theory – this one’s a bit funkier, that one a bit more high-end, and so forth – but they all seemed much the same to us. It didn’t really matter – we enjoyed the walk. I wore my shorts for the first time on the trip today, although I could have worn them several times before if I’d had more foresight, or if we’d spent our days in more stable conditions (it often gets rapidly colder on the top of mountains, or on the decks of boats).

The earthquake isn’t as evident beyond the core (and of course you can’t always distinguish between what’s disaster clean-up and what’s just a construction zone, or a particularly poorly maintained residence) but it seems that churches in particular continue to be affected. I guess that’s not surprising given their age, and the economic difficulty of raising the money to repair them, particularly to the standards of the new building code (we passed a construction site promising condominiums built to 180% of the new building code, which to someone with no knowledge of the issue sounds like something that shouldn’t really be possible). As I wrote yesterday, Christchurch continues to be a challenge to our sense of normalcy. In the photo below for instance, the historic building may look pretty much like any other, until you notice there are no faces on the clocks. Time and time again, it feels as if it ought to be possible to revive such buildings virtually at will, by applying the construction equivalent of deeply exhaling into their lungs and pounding on their hearts, which of course only tells you again how little I know about the building code. And, in contrast to Hagley Park, downtown must surely have had more trees and other vegetation before the disaster; now it has entire blocks with little or none, which I suspect you register subliminally even if, overshadowed by everything else, you don’t notice explicitly.

We looked in a few stores for souvenirs, since we haven’t bought anything, but nothing grabbed us. We came back to the hotel mid-afternoon.  An example of the Novotel’s lack of classiness – whenever you use 300MB of data (which doesn’t seem to take long – we’ve passed it twice already, just through the usual browsing and maintaining this blog…oh, and periodically watching Ozu on the webcam, which I guess sucks up the megabytes, just like dogs take and take in general) you get disconnected with a warning about how they don’t consider this to be “Fair Play,” but then they let you reconnect regardless, once you enter your room number again. Maybe Internet access is a finite commodity in Christchurch for some reason, but if so they should be up-front about it, or charge a fee or something, rather than subjecting you to a series of vaguely wagging fingers. That aside, the connection actually seems faster than the one we had in Auckland (but not as good as Queenstown). But maybe they’re right, we should just force ourselves to stay off there (Ally is much better at this than I am; she’s making great progress on an actual old-fashioned book, Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies). I mean, Ozu aside, there’s only really the two things to monitor online – the disgrace of the Coz, or that of Canadian radio star Jian Gomeshi. Just like when we left home!