I spent Friday and Saturday diving on the Great Barrier Reef. The timing was simply based around flight schedules, but by a happy coincidence, Friday was also my 40th birthday. If you need to spend such an occasion on the far side of the world from most of your loved ones, it’s hard to find a better place to do it!
I rented a little camera mounted in an underwater enclosure, and took lots of photos. But I found it was capable of taking short movie clips as well…
Spotted in an airport a couple of days ago.
I’ve been having a fabulous few days of vacation but have been moving from hostel to airport to boat to hotel sufficiently regularly that I haven’t had a long-term solid internet connection for quite a while. I have lots of photos and movies to upload but all my connectivity has been on a pay-by-the-minute basis recently, so you’re spared most of them for the moment!
This comes to you from the Inbox Cafe in Cairns, Queensland, which has a pretty good internet connection, great food and coffee, and very friendly staff. Recommended. Even here, though, it’s tricky to get a video upload to YouTube to complete. I’ve heard good things about Blip.TV, though, and might give them a try soon, because they offer FTP upload as an option, which is likely to be more reliable, I think.
In the meantime, here’s where I spent the night before last: on a dive boat on the Great Barrier Reef.
I rented a little underwater camera so will post something more sub-aquatic soon. But now I have to catch a plane to Sydney…
A couple of days ago I was in Napier. It’s an interesting town because it was almost completely destroyed by a big earthquake in 1931, and they rebuilt the centre from scratch, with the result that it has the most complete set of Art Deco buildings you can find in such a small area, anywhere in the world.
It’s almost too good – you might imagine you were one a movie set if it weren’t for the rather garish signs which New Zealand shops tend to have on them. These were perhaps the quietest ones:
Above the awning-level, though, there are restrictions on what people can do.
This isn’t a movie set, of course, it’s the real thing. And there are some nice touches lower down, too.
It’s only relatively recently that they’ve realised what a treasure this is and started to capitalise on its tourist value. Before that, the main emphasis was the beach (which is also very pleasant).
It makes me think of the David Suchet Poirot dramatisations, which draw heavily on Art Deco. There are fewer palm trees in most of those episodes, though.
The Art Deco Shop is in the old fire station:
and the owner had a great car parked outside:
My good friend Robert Feakes asks, gently, whether I might implement a Tolkien/non-Tolkien filter on Status-Q in the same way that some sites give you a non-Flash option! Point taken.
If it’s any consolation, I didn’t actually know that the Tongariro area was the site for much of the filming before doing the hike: I had simply heard that it was a fabulous walk, but then recognised some of the scenes en route. And since I’ve now moved out of the main filming areas, gentle reader, you will probably be spared much more in the way of Tolkienesque references.
Robert also commented, “it does trouble me that New Zealand is now seen as ‘LOTR-land’ (sort of ‘Herriot country’ with more battles and orcs) rather than a splendid place in its own right”. And he has a fair point. I was always bemused by the ‘Inspector Morse tours’ of Oxford for a similar reason. For me, NZ has always been an enchanting place and, frankly, if more people get to see and appreciate its amazing beauty because of the LOTR connections, that’s probably not a bad thing.
The good news is that all evidence of the film sets was removed after filming, so there’s little danger of it turning into a theme park.
Today I did the Tongariro Crossing – one of New Zealand’s best-known walks. Very many thanks to Pete Burgers for recommending it! Thanks from my heart, at least; my legs may not be so grateful. It’s a 7-8 hour hike through, onto, and over some amazing volcanic scenery, and I’m now completely exhausted, so am heading for bed.
I’ll be posting some more photos over the next couple of days, but here’s a question for Tolkien fans which has always puzzled Rose and me: Since the great eagles are able to pick up Sam and Frodo from Mount Doom at the end of their mission, why couldn’t they just drop them off there in the first place?
I had a great time last night visiting Catalyst, who provide software and services to some pretty high-profile NZ projects, but also seem to have a lot of fun. I liked them immensely, and it’s always encouraging to see successful businesses built around Open Source.
Some of them are helping with OLPC on the side, and I was able to play with one of the laptops for the first time. I was quite impressed.
I think I’ve lost my UK mobile. It may be in the back of a cab somewhere, or under a plane seat, or lying in a Wellington gutter. Anyway, I can’t find it. (So friends and family should note that it is not a good way to contact me at present!)
Normally, you have a good chance of finding mobiles simply by calling them. But this one is switched off, or the battery is dead; I just go straight through to my voicemail.
I want a way to switch it on remotely. Perhaps a phone could wake up every half hour, check for any messages, and if you had sent it a special text it would respond in some way – emailing you what it could deduce about its position, for example, and staying on for a while so you could call it.
The frustrating thing is not knowing whether it’s here in my hotel room somewhere, or hundreds of miles away in Auckland airport, or lurking under some Wellington restaurant table… I may never know.
A couple more shots of the boat used as the Venture in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. I wasn’t a huge fan of the film, but the boat made for interesting arty photographs.
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Most of the rust was painted on for the film, by the way.
And now for some lights on the Wellington waterfront:
I’ve long admired Hans Rosling’s TED talk; a wonderful demonstration of the importance of being able to visualise data.
Hans is from Sweden, I’m from the UK, but we met tonight in New Zealand. And he’s just as nice as you would suppose from the video.
There are some really beautiful woods just outside Wellington.
I was on a tour visiting some of the sites used in filming the Lord of the Rings movies.
Fans should picture Frodo yelling “Get off the road!”:
or me saying “Ooof! I think I broke something!”:
Mmm. One of the good things about being on the far side of the world is that you don’t have to endure your friends’ pitying looks.
Others won’t have a clue what I’m talking about and should just enjoy the views of Wellington scenery:
Or this fine bust of Arthur Wellesley looking out over the city that bears his name:
This is Weta Workshop, where much of the LOTR magic was created:
And the boat used in King Kong:
I’m in Wellington, New Zealand, where I arrived yesterday after about 22 hours of flights and airports. And that was from Seattle – already quite a distance from home.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, Tony Blair is congratulating Nick Sarkozy. In French. Pretty good French, too, in so far as I’m a judge. Certainly better than Margaret Thatcher’s.
The fact that I can watch it, comment on it, even rebroadcast it from my hotel room in New Zealand also says a lot about how the world has changed since Maggie’s time.
John thinks he’s worked out why I’m departing tomorrow!
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