ruth and ed in nz

CHRISTMAS EVE
It’s always going to be a weird one – Christmas when you don’t really know anyone or have anywhere in particular to go. New Zealand definitely does Christmas, as do the marketing companies, but not quite to the extent of the UK and, as we weren’t watching much TV and mostly out of radio reception, we hadn’t quite been fully Christmas’d up. Christmas shopping in Taupo had got me going a bit, as did the twinkly glowworms at Waitomo – very festive!
We decided to spend Xmas by the coast (hoping for a sunny day to spend on the beach – ha ha) and chose New Plymouth so that we could be by the sea and find a restaurant that would be open for Xmas lunch. Obviously this assumed that we would be blessed with good weather – hmmm…
Christmas Eve evening we partaked in traditional drinks and found a good local bar with some live reggae music playing. NZ reggae seems to consist mostly of Bob Marley songs but it was good. We shared a table with a local kiwi guy called Grifen who was working at an environmental centre down the road. Turned out he was trying to set up some kind of corporate volunteering programme to get mentors for the teenagers at the centre and I promised to pop in there on our way out of New Plymouth on Boxing Day. He said the centre runs permaculture courses and that we could volunteer there for a bit if we liked. We had planned to do some WWOOF-ing (Working on an Organic Farm) over Xmas/NY but hadn’t found a place we liked so this sounded intriguing…
After we awkwardly ran out of conversation with Grifen (who called us his brothers and sisters… man) we left him to his other hippy friends who were dancing in circles with flowy skirts and long hair to Bob Marley classics. A rainy walk home to the hostel where we got very excited about having a TV in our own bedroom (small things…)!

CHRISTMAS DAY
As it should always begin… a long lie-in followed by TV, present opening and champagne (kindly provided by the hostel’s host). Our coastal beach plan was scuppered by the fact that it rained – lightly – but solidly ALL DAY!!! Unperturbed, we braved the elements and walked along the seafront to the Port (about an hour). Along the way, we met a local guy who said he had been told that there was a group of whales swimming about 50 metres from shore. No amount of scouring the ocean helped us to see them but we like to think they were there somewhere wishing us a Merry Christmas!!
After a quick G&T in a local bar, we went for our big feed at the Devon Hotel. We had booked a buffet lunch – the 2.30pm sitting. We arrived as they were clearing up from the previous sitting so we had time for another G&T (best make it a double this time) before dinner.
We paced ourselves and managed a total of eight courses:
Tomato Soup
Salad
Seafood (the bonus of being in NZ for Xmas)
Meats (turkey and beef) and vegs
Puddings (lots of chocolate, meringue, fruit)
Cheese and Biscuits
Coffee
Chocolate (Roses – the bestseller at the Warehouse (a big store) this Christmas season apparently!)
We were beaten, and slightly nauseous, by the end of all that. So there was only one thing for it – a sofa and a huge widescreen TV to watch movies. It started with MI3, followed by Wallace and Grommitt, Sea Biscuit (?) and then a UK drama about a family with autistic boys…
I called home and wished everyone a merry Christmas/Chanukah and then, while Ed spoke to his family, I drifted off in to a movie-filled sleep…

BOXING DAY
After more phone calls and slightly successful photo uploading on to CDs (it’s such a parlarva!), we headed to the Puke Ariki museum which houses tons of beautiful Maori artefacts. All the museums and displays here are presented so well – this one is particularly modern.
We decided we would drive out to Inglewood to meet the mystical Grifen again. The environment centre was a ramshackle place at the end of a very suburban cul de sac. The dancing girl from Xmas Eve was there – she is bizarrely also called Ruth Cohen (spooky!). Out popped Grifen (we’d woken him up) and he didn’t seem all that bothered by our arrival.
We sat, not really talking about anything for a while and then Ruth offered to show us her macrobiotic thing in a bowl that she grows in a cupboard under the sink. Quite weird but intriguing. We had a look at their ‘garden’, a sort of overgrown patch of ground with some sticks and things – not quite the organic farm as had been suggested. Deciding that it wasn’t really the place for us to stay for a few days, we asked if we could chat about the volunteering stuff that I had come to talk about.
Out came Jane – an Ozzie youth worker who wanted to start a school for kids revolving around permaculture, etc, and was staying at the centre to work with Grifen on their project. I imparted some knowledge about employee volunteering and they gave me some insight in to how it all works over here – government departments, funding, mentoring programmes, etc. All a bit weird but possibly a helpful connection…
Drove around Mt Taranaki – as it was named originally by the Maoris – or Mt Egmont as it was renamed by the Europeans. Why they feel the need to do this I don’t know and this one is quite a contested name change it seems. Spent the night at Karupokoru Beach campsite.

Tags: Travel

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