A fair-weather tramp: Rotorua and Tongariro

When I was reading up on this trip, I found out about the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. It is supposed to be the best day hike in New Zealand, possibly the world. But it’s 19 km long, and that’s about as long as the longest hike T. and I have ever done together, the Rim Trail of the Grand Canyon. (My mom and dad will never forget it.) Unlike the Rim Trail, you hike up (and down) a significant amount. Then, independently, T. mentioned the Alpine Crossing and what a spectacular “tramp” it is supposed to be. We agreed to try it when we got to Tongariro National Park.

First, we had a stop at Rotorua. It was easy to get there from Tauranga, because all roads lead to Rotorua. Katherine suggested we take the scenic, winding road (we should already have realized that all roads on the North Island, no matter how major, are scenic and winding). It was pouring rain, so we didn’t look for hikes along the way. Instead, we arrived at the visitors’ centre in Rotorua and asked an unsmiling guy if he had any suggestions for a rainy day.

He basically said no. I kept waiting for his inner Kiwi to emerge and be cheerful, but he was one exception to the rule. Even Rotorua’s museum, which I read was a good one, was a no go: it was closed in 2016 for not meeting earthquake standards. 

Here’s a hint: When travelers arrive on a rainy day asking what there is to do, don’t keep saying no to everything they suggest. We almost just drove out of town!

Which would have been a shame, because Ohinemutu was fascinating even in the rain. Ohinemutu is a Maori village where the meeting of Maori and European cultures is quite evident. So is the sulfury underground for which Rotorua is famous. Thermal pools bubble up from the earth seemingly everywhere, and can just erupt into people’s homes!

Steam from underground vents

We learned this from our own personal Maori encounter—not a commercialized cultural experience (there are lots of those in Rotorua) but a visit to St. Faith’s Anglican Church. “Welcome to our church,” one of the women said, and proceeded to tell us about the underfloor heating the timbered church gets from the geothermal source beneath. 

The most striking feature of St. Faith’s is an etched window that was done in honor of the missionaries who introduced the Te Arawa people to Christianity.

Here, Jesus is depicted wearing a Maori cloak and walking on the water. But instead of etching the Sea of Galilee, the artist has left the window clear, so we can see the actual waters of Lake Rotorua.

We also saw some native birds walking around—whio, or blue ducks. From the names on the churchyard gravestones, the mix of cultures is clear, as it is from the cenotaph on Lake Rotorua, just behind the church.

The god of war, so close to the Prince of Peace. I suppose they will both continue along together until the final victory some day.

We had our rain jackets, having never put them away since our arrival in NZ, but we were still tired of everything being wet. Luckily the Thermal Holiday Park was just down the road. The woman there was very nice, and gave us a campsite right next to the women’s bathroom. (All four of the previous rainy nights, we’d had a long walk.) The weather being what it was, T. thought it was an excellent opportunity to use the washing machine and, especially, the dryer.

I think at this point I should mention the camp chairs and table which, in a fit of optimism, T. had rented from the camper van people. We should have known when they weren’t included. The table is a collapsible thing, flimsier than something you’d backpack with, and once we had the legs out we never could figure out how to fold them back together. All we’ve been able to do with it is stand it on our campsites and try to dry swimsuits on it. But of course that didn't work either, because it rained so often.

The other thing that has proven utterly useless in our camper van is the chemical port-o-pot. We didn't want this, but they have to include it or the van can’t be labeled “self-contained,” meaning you can take it to any campsite (not just campgrounds with amenities included). As it happened we never “freedom camped” anyway, but who knows, in good weather we might have. When we are on the road this stupid pot sits in the back, framed by the useless table, which we can’t get back in its bag. Because of minimal space, once we set up camp, the toilet sits in the passenger seat.

We had no further ambitions than laundry in Rotorua, but later that afternoon the sun came out. Couldn’t miss a chance like that, so we made our way a few kilometers down the road to a forest park of California redwoods. Needless to say these are not native trees—they were planted in the nineteenth century—but of all the introduced species in NZ this is a rather benign one. We had a lovely walk.

Back at the campground, we took advantage of the thermal pools. It’s good that this part of the North Island has so many hot pools, because that’s one thing we could enjoy outside in cool weather. This night, it wasn’t even raining. Amid the sulfury smell, every now and then the misty clouds would clear and I could see the stars. For the first time in New Zealand. Good thing I kept my glasses on in the pool.

The sun was shining again the next morning when we headed towards Lake Taupo. We stopped off at Huka Falls for a short walk to the lookouts.

The Waikato River, the country’s longest river, is the only outlet for Lake Taupo, the country’s largest lake. It is forced through a narrow chasm at Huka Falls. 

Lake Taupo

 We continued towards Turangi where we saw some trees with striking autumnal colors. 

A scenic lookout shortly thereafter gave us a glimpse of our climactic goal: Tongariro National Park.

Our campground at Whakapapa Village featured yet more nice staff. We were greeted with “Kia ora,” Maori for hello, which is not uncommon in New Zealand. The campground had a bathtub, lots of hot showers, a drying room (where we finally dried those swimsuits), a nice big kitchen, and WiFi. What Whakapapa also had was a bad weather forecast. In fact, the shuttle bus that takes hikers to and from the Tongariro Alpine Crossing was not even running the next day.

“A fair-weather tramp” is how the Lonely Planet guidebook described it. The excellent visitors’ center informed us that the precipitation (you guessed it) was forecast to be snow at 1,500 m, plus there would be gale force winds at Red Crater, the high point of the hike. I pictured us slogging up and down in the snow for no views, and crawling along the ridge. A hike that would have put us at the limits of our collective endurance on a good day was not going to work in this weather.

But T. hadn’t bought all those layers for nothing. So the next morning we put on our merino wool and our rain pants and trudged off into the rain.

Here’s a thing about layers: Don’t wear cotton. Or if you do, don’t wear it next to the skin. Cotton’s wicking properties are so poor that you’d be better off not wearing that layer at all. Nobody got hypothermia during this hike, but at higher elevations it could be a different story.

Considering all the warnings, we got lucky with the weather. We set off on the Ridge Track, a short walk up through the beech forest where we were camped beside Whakapapanui Stream.

It was raining while we walked in the woods, but we were partially sheltered there. Then when we got to the ridge, the sky cleared. We even got some sun, and good views of two of the volcanoes in the park, Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe. The latter starred as “Mount Doom” in The Lord of the Rings films.

That only took half an hour so we went on to the Taranaki Falls Track, a two-hour loop. We started on the lower track and again, avoided much of the rain simply by walking through the woods.

It was coming down pretty hard when we got to the falls themselves. I asked some German-speaking women if they had just come from the upper track, to make sure we didn’t head off into an exposed wasteland! Luckily the rain eased off and we even got some sun over the tussocky-type landscape and the old lava flow that the falls plunge over.

There was snow higher up!

In the last, forested part of the hike it got pretty rainy again, and by the end we were getting hit with pellets of hail. Nonetheless, we got the sequence of weather in the right order. And when we got back we made the most of the drying room as well as hot coffee, Chunky Soup, and hot buttered toast.

There’s something I’ve learned in the past twenty years of traveling, and it holds pretty true for Europeans everywhere. If we run into Europeans outdoors doing something hardy, such as the women at the falls or the “kids” in the sea at Hot Water Beach, they are German. If we run into them in the camp kitchen, such as the three guys who were always in the kitchen in Tauranga or the family cooking in Whakapapa, they are French. Where are the British—holed up in their “caravans” reminiscing about their rainy childhood holidays? 

No, in fact we sat at supper (in said camp kitchen) with a young British couple who were preparing to do the Alpine Crossing the next day. Weather permitting. The shuttle was scheduled to run again, at least. It was the first day in a week that was not forecast to be “sh*t,” according to the young man.

Of course, I was bummed not to be going with them, but it had been a very cold afternoon. The sun had come out, and with it my down jacket! We took advantage of the clear weather to walk over to the Chateau Tongariro, a grand old 1929 hotel that had a roaring fire in the bar. It was the closest I’d get to a Hawke’s Bay winery.

Anyhow it was time to move on. The next morning while we were packing up the van (in the rain) I was at the door when T. emptied the kettle into a mud puddle, spraying both my pants legs. She apologized, but I started laughing hysterically. It was the perfect end to our alpine visit—everything so wet that the very campsite appeared to her to be a drain. Worse than Ireland. 

But there is a great story behind Tongariro National Park. Its three volcanoes (Tongariro is the other one) and the surrounding lands were part of the Land Wars, or what the colonial government called Maori Wars. In 1887, Chief Horonuku te Heuheu Tukino IV deeded the mountains to the government of New Zealand, on the condition that they become what was then only the fourth national park in the world. It was an extraordinarily farsighted decision by a chief who recognized that the land’s true value to future generations lay in its natural beauty, not in being divvied up for more pastures. It is also a good example of a government agreeing on this longterm interest with the people who lived in the place first, rather than simply taking land from them.

Bust of the chief, Whakapapa Visitor Centre

I am grateful for such foresight on the part of our ancestors.

The good, the bad, and the ugly: Coromandel and the Bay of Plenty

When my great-grandmother was born, at the end of the nineteenth century, only one country recognized women’s right to vote: New Zealand. The country has been going its own way ever since. Just a few years ago there was an election here and, no matter whom you voted for, the prime minister was guaranteed to be a woman. Imagine an election where being a woman was not even an issue.

There are a lot of good things about New Zealand. The weather, during our time here, has not been one of them. I’m not going to say that this is the longest stretch of bad weather I’ve ever been in, because I remember a month in Oxford when the cloud settled over the valley like a smothering blanket. Nonetheless, we’ve had rain more than we have clear skies, both day and night.

Our destination on the first day of our camping trip was Hot Water Beach. This name is somewhat misleading. You’re supposed to dig a personal spa pool, and then hot water bubbles up from the volcanic earth. We saw lots of pictures of people basking in these shallow hot pools. There were even warning signs about how dangerously hot the water could be. 

Armed with our rented shovels, or spades as they call them, we headed for where the map said the hot water was. Not where everyone else was digging—they reported tepid water. But the sun was out, and we enjoyed digging a very deep hole.

Photo courtesy of T.

We found, however, no water at all. Then we dug where everybody else was digging, and finally some water came in, but it was cold water from the sea. We were about to give up when some German young people (“kids” as they are to us) told us the hot water was in the sea!

So we waded into the Pacific and danced around for a while, getting our toes hot. It was fun, just not as advertised. That, in fact, would be a good slogan for our entire time in New Zealand.

Hot Water Beach

The Auckland Airbnb I mentioned in my last post was the coldest place I’ve been. I think that says a lot, considering we’ve been in a camper van ever since. (There was also the small matter of the guest bathroom being off the family kitchen, but never mind.) But now we were hardy campers, prepared for whatever we would encounter. We started with a lovely, winding, up and down drive across the Coromandel Peninsula, which is how we arrived at Hot Water Beach and camped at its “holiday park.”

We should have known en route that we were going to have to work for our fun in New Zealand. We stopped at a scenic lookout (one of many in the Coromandel Forest Park), but the view was not from the parking area. There was a walk up to it, a short but rather steep “track.” It was worth it though.

Despite the clouds, we were discovering another good thing about New Zealand: It’s beautiful. Around every bend. People kept telling me the South Island is more beautiful and if that’s true, I don’t know how I could ever endure traveling there. Here on the North Island we literally pulled over at a gas station to take pictures of the view from it.

The evening was cool and rainy. I could write that about many evenings in a row, but the new day was so much better. We actually got warmth and sunshine at Hot Water Beach. And by the afternoon, we were headed for Hahei Beach and a long, and fairly vigorous, hike to Cathedral Cove.

There was a nice variety of beach views on the way, and a couple detours to coves where you’d really have to snorkel to enjoy.

There’s also a World War I memorial forest en route. 

Cathedral Cove is only accessible down steps from the track, or by boat. It’s the highlight of this area and I could see why.

Te Hoho Rock, Cathedral Cove

I remember the verse to “Oh, Susanna” that went “It rained all night the day I left.” That’s what it felt like. It didn’t help that at this campground, ironically part of the “Top 10” chain, we were as far from the bathrooms (in pouring down rain) as it is possible to be. I’m sure camping under these trees is lovely on a dry night. T. made a dent in how miserable it all was by frying bacon and eggs in the morning. Anyone who grew up in England, Wales, Cornwall, or probably elsewhere in those islands has tales of camping in bad weather. Shivering in the rain in a caravan park is a rite of passage for British people, just as traveling and working overseas is for Kiwis.

We meant to make our way down the east coast of the Coromandel Peninsula, but somehow I missed a crucial turn (evidently this happens a lot). Suddenly we looked up at a junction and I realized we were not on the road I had thought, but instead were headed for a farmer’s field. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise though, as the road across to Waihi took us through the spectacular Karangahake Gorge.

We stopped, in the ongoing rain, for a snack and hot drink at Waikino Cafe. Waikino is where the Goldfields Railway runs to Waihi. We weren’t going to wait an hour and a half for the train, but the cafe was lovely.

Waikino Station Cafe also had a roaring fire inside.

Via an information sign there, I also discovered that just down the road was a walk to a grove of kauris, the great ancient trees that once covered much of the North Island. We drove down there and saw a bunch of high school kids emerging in rain gear. Their guides told us they’d been “tramping” for seventeen days!

I don’t know why but every English-speaking country has its own word for what I would call hiking. Trekking, hillwalking, bushwalking, or here in New Zealand, tramping. One of the tramping boys warned us “There’s a river,” and we smiled and waved as we headed down the track. Well, there was a river all right. The track continues on the other side, to the kauri grove. On a good day we might have crossed it via stepping stones, but it was all overflowing today.

No wonder the kids were soaked. They must have been so wet already, after seventeen days, that fording the stream was like nothing to them. 

There is a surprising number of one-lane bridges on the North Island. They are marked with priority arrows, so you know whether you or the other driver has right of way. They should try that in some other places. Other features I noticed on the way were tours of a kiwi fruit farm, an establishment called The Convenient Cow, and “Rifle Range Road—No Exit,” which sounded rather ominous.

We were to learn more about rifles, kiwi fruit, and a whole lot more at our next stop, Tauranga. We were headed there because a girl T. knew from the neighborhood growing up got in touch on one of those Internet groups and said, “If you’re ever in New Zealand…” Don’t say this to us because we will take you up on it. The next thing you know, we were seated around Katherine and Peter’s dinner table, learning that we’d never eaten a ripe kiwi fruit in our lives.

It’s true. Kiwi fruit is not supposed to be green inside. It goes red, and the only reason it’s green overseas is because they spray it with nitrogen to keep it perpetually green, on its long journey from NZ. Kind of like a green banana. Not that there’s anything wrong with green bananas but what if you’d never even known what they could taste like ripe?

Peter, whom neither of us had ever met before that evening, also cooked us breakfast in the morning. Oh, and they lent us a car. They may be “Pomkis” (half Pom, half Kiwi) but Katherine and Peter admirably carry on the hospitality we’ve encountered everywhere in New Zealand. It reminded me of the anecdote in Georgia Beers’s novel, 96 Hours, about passengers on U.S. planes who were stranded in Newfoundland in the days after September 11. One host family lends the main characters a car. “What is wrong with them?” one asks the other.

“They’re Canadian,” she says. 

The maple leaf flying in Tairua

We were staying five minutes away from our friends, at a campground that is also Fernland Spa. This meant free admission to the hot pool, fed by mineral springs. Much of NZ is bubbling away volcanically, and people here make the most of it by putting thermal pools everywhere, including at campgrounds. So we had a hot soak when we got there. A way to enjoy the outdoors on a rainy day.

Photo courtesy of T.

Our New Zealand friends also introduced us to local brews, Mermaid’s Mirth and Blowhole. So the next day we were feeling ready to tackle a day trip through the Kaimai-Mamaku Forest Park and over to Matamata.

Matamata

Matamata was just a normal little New Zealand town until its residents were extras in The Hobbit movies. Through some deal that didn’t apply to The Lord of the Rings, they were able to preserve their Hobbit holes and various film set things, which now offers tours as Hobbiton. Now, I’ve been to the Harry Potter film tour twice, and never seen any of the films (the books are another matter). So we drew the line at Hobbiton, but did enjoy a break at the appropriately named Shire’s Rest.

We then stopped for a picnic lunch at Firth Tower. This tower was built back in the day as some kind of status symbol for its wealthy out-of-town owner; today it’s a museum. Its parking lot is also an example of one of the many bargain campsites scattered around New Zealand—provided you don’t want any facilities, such as showers. Good practice for America, I guess.

The weather was only somewhat cloudy that day, so we tramped through woods up to the lookout at Wairere Falls. 

These are the highest falls on the North Island, and I was glad to get a chance to hike properly, after the aborted attempt the day before. By the time we got back to Fernland Spa, we were ready for another hot soak. The weather even stayed dry long enough for me to sit out at the picnic table and write; most outdoor furniture has been too wet to use.

I drove the camper van over to Katherine’s the next morning, while T. drove the borrowed car. We returned that and said our goodbyes, and Kath sent us on our way with a big bag of feijoas, a fruit I’d never before heard of, let alone tried. They are absolutely delicious, and I’m already sad that I’ll never get them anywhere else (unless possibly in the sorry state of an exported kiwi fruit).

Still life with kiwi fruit and feijoa

So, New Zealand is good, apart from the bad weather. And the ugly? Apart from a few logging spots, I haven’t seen anything ugly. I don't know how sustainable the logging industry is, but we did see a whole crop of new little trees planted near some old ones, waiting their turn.

The cat that hangs around our Tauranga campground

I don’t want to end on an ugly note, so let me mention the domestic animals that periodically brighten our stay in various places. Cats, of course, are a real problem in Australia when they go feral and prey on native mammals. But at the Katherine campground we met a lovely Jack Russell whose name, I could see from his tag, was Bob. The reason we never provided a picture of Bob is that he was camera shy. He kept hanging around us at the bar, yet every time one of us made a move, off he went. Sometimes you just have to enjoy the moment.

Auckland

I started to get the feeling at Auckland airport that people are extra friendly in New Zealand. Not that most people haven’t been friendly everywhere in the world, but you can just tell from little things. Like the person you order food from remembering you and giving it to you, instead of calling out a number. Or someone running out to pump gas for you, or bag your groceries at the store! When was the last time you saw a person actually employed bagging groceries (and being damn cheerful about it)? 

All this, and more, was awaiting us. We climbed aboard the airport bus (with announcements in English, Chinese, and Spanish. I wondered about the Spanish—evidently a lot of visitors come over from South America.) But it’s not the recorded announcements that made an impression. It was the extremely helpful bus driver, who introduced himself over the intercom: “Welcome to Skybus. I am your driver, Amman. Please let me know if you’re not sure which stop and I will be happy to help…” Did I mention this was Auckland, NZ’s largest city, with 30% of the country’s population?!

So our welcome was the first thing we noticed about NZ. The second thing was the weather. It is what I would call fall here. As in, leaves fallen on the ground, and cool weather. The rain reminded T. of England or Ireland, not that tropical kind of rain we got in Queensland or the Top End.

Of course, this means it is significantly different in temperature from everywhere we have experienced since Ireland (except at high altitude on Kilimanjaro). I was almost excited to get out some of my layers from that trek. What we didn’t realize, as we settled into our Auckland Airbnb, was that it would be cold enough for a space heater and an electric blanket, both thoughtfully provided. The enormous rectory-style house was colder than the outdoors; I’m sure of it.

We also weren’t expecting a typhoon. Well, I don’t think it was classed as one, but there were window-rattling winds that first night, and we were glad we’d flown in that day rather than the next day. We got up in the morning only to find that in many parts of Auckland, the electricity had gone out. We waited for ages for a bus into town, when finally one of those helpful, friendly New Zealanders popped along and informed those of us at the bus stop that no double-deckers were coming our way. There was a sagging power line up the road that they couldn’t get past.

We saw much worse damage to trees than this.

It was a blessing in disguise that we’d waited so long for a bus, because the rainy weather had broken, and the sun was threatening to shine on Mt. Eden, just opposite. So we walked up. Mt. Eden is the tallest volcano in Auckland and it was quite interesting to walk round the crater.

We also got good views all around Auckland and the harbour.

The mention of volcanoes reminds me that New Zealand is an extraordinarily young country, geologically. It formed and is forming all the time with volcanic eruptions, which I think must be quite disconcerting if you live here. Right now it’s hard to imagine the frothing heat of lava pouring down a mountainside. “It’s really cold for April,” people keep telling us. “You should have been here two weeks ago—it was summer then!”

NZ is also very young in terms of human habitation. Whereas the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia are the oldest continuous culture on earth, human beings have only been living in New Zealand for about a thousand years—which is nothing in historical time. The Polynesian ancestors of today’s Maori were themselves from somewhere else, and they have a better record of survival in the face of European colonization than most native peoples. Part of this is the Maori pursuit of war and treaty with the settlers who followed them, and part of it is the luck of NZ’s distance from other places. For example, a disease such as smallpox devastated North American communities when Europeans (unwittingly) introduced it, as they had no resistance. But these diseases never made it to NZ. It is such a long way from Europe that any sick sailors either died or got better before their voyage was complete.

Back at the bus stop, a young university student came by and told us she was on her way to a place where the buses were running, so we walked with her. She chatted with us the whole time. On the bus itself, we passed a movie theatre, started talking about what was playing, and got recommendations from the woman in the next seat! She worked for the power company herself, yet her power was still off. I am still adjusting to this spontaneous-conversation-from-everyone gig that is life in New Zealand’s biggest city.

We stopped at an outdoor equipment store so T. could buy a couple of thermal items. Not having climbed Kili, she was a little short in the mountain gear department. Eventually, we made it to Auckland Museum.

This neoclassical building is the type of great museum that isn’t fashionable these days: cultural artifacts on the ground floor, natural history above that, and on the top floor, a war memorial. Just to confuse matters, the whole museum is sometimes called the Auckland War Memorial Museum. It won’t surprise my readers that I love this jumbled kind of place. There's a giant Maori canoe downstairs, and upstairs you'll find the ice ax the most famous New Zealander of all, Sir Edmund Hillary, used to ascend Everest.

Skeleton of a moa

NZ’s isolation also gives it a unique evolutionary history. It split from the giant pre-continent comprising Australia, South America, etc. so long ago that no land mammals evolved here, except bats. Many of the roles played by mammals in other parts of the world are, or were, filled by unique birds. The various flightless types of moa are, sadly, extinct today.

NZ, or at least some of its outlying islands, also has a native lizard I remember reading about in my childhood: the tuatara. The tuatara has been around since dinosaurs were alive, and is distinct from any other living reptile. As far as I can see, the only reason the tuatara is not called a dinosaur is because dinosaurs are considered, by definition, extinct!

The war memorial part of the Auckland Museum was moving too. New Zealand punched far above its weight in wars of the British Empire, of which it was part (it even contributed to the American war in Vietnam). 

Anzac Day is coming, and poppies are being sold.

Most devastating of all was the First World War. At a time when NZ had only one million people, 100,000 men were abroad fighting the Great War—ten percent of the entire population.

Some wars, like the First World War, look more wasteful looking back on them in history. No doubt some genuinely believed that they were fighting a war to end all wars, but two decades later, the next generation marched past those war memorials (every town has one) to fight in the Second World War.

Looking back at the end of this war, by contrast, people must have had a stronger sense of what it was all for, as the full extent of Nazi atrocities became clear. This point is made well by an exhibition now on at the Auckland Museum, on the life of Anne Frank. Anne Frank’s story is well known through her famous diary. Primo Levi, himself a Holocaust survivor, is quoted at the exhibition as saying:

"One single Anne Frank  moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people , we would not be able to live."

The exhibition has many pictures of the Franks and those in their circle that I had never seen before, and goes on to quote a number of young people today on their experiences of prejudice, and the need to fight it. What I always find most moving about these stories is what we learn about those who did not have to go into hiding themselves, who were not Jewish, and yet took great risks to help people like the Franks. One of those, a colleague of Otto Frank, was Victor Kugler. He and another helper were put in concentration camps for their efforts, but survived the war. I always marvel at these types of responses when people like Kugler are asked what motivated them to help.

We made the most of Auckland in our limited time, but a Hi-Top awaited us. That was the type of camper van we took from Melbourne to Hobart, and we liked it so much we thought we’d do it again on the North Island. The remarkable friendliness of Kiwis continued at the rental place, where the guy helping us went over everything on paper (instead of making us fill things out ourselves on an iPad, as in Australia) and took his time showing us everything thoroughly. 

Handily, I’d seen a road atlas (and a lot of other good books) in Time Out bookstore the evening before. Right there in Mt. Eden, our neighborhood. It seems like ages since T. and I went to an independent bookstore, but they have some in Auckland. Get shopping! 

Then when we went to get sandwiches, we were talking about which route to take out of the city, so of course the man in front of us in line started talking to us. He and T. were so friendly that the woman serving asked if she was his wife! Then, corrected as to her mistake, she apologized—to me. 

Maybe she’d been on the horn to the Tiwi Islanders in Darwin.