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Napier
I say Jeeves... what's that rummy rumbling?
Saturday 24th April 2005

Coming from the depressing ugliness of central Wellington, Napier is a much more attractive town, a fact that not even our problematic journey there could erase. The recently purchased 1981 Honda Civic has been intermittently having problems with its OverDrive and half the journey across the North Island was spent with a madly revving engine at 80kph. This was still less annoying than the return journey two days later when it packed up altogether but I get ahead of myself.

Napier is located on the east coast of the North Island on the southern side of the wide Hawkes Bay. The centre is brimming with 1930's architectural stylings and prides itself on being the Art Deco capital of New Zealand. The tragic reason for this is the massive earthquake that devastated the area in 1931, killing several hundred people, injuring many more and leaving most people without homes or businesses. Aside from the damage caused by the quake itself, a fire shortly afterwards effectively finished off the town or would have done were it not for the tenacity of the locals.

Over the following years the city was rebuilt and restored, mostly in the Art Deco style that was popular at the time, and this unified design theme, along with the shared unfortunate history has given Napier a firm sense of community. At least that's what the museum reports. It was hard to establish what sort of cohesive community the area may or may not have when there's no one around to ask. No locals anyway. On both the evening of our arrival and the following night the town centre seemed to be bereft of life beyond the occasional fellow tourist mooching about and photographing the decor.

Actually the evening we arrived the natural world seemed to be putting on more of a show than man with one of the most spectacular sunsets I've ever witnessed. What with messing around with exposures settings and shutter times on my camera, I took dozens of photos of the light filtering through the clouds and only a handful of the vintage buildings which had been the reason for our visit.

One such building is the Masonic Hotel which Jo had found online and where we stayed. Resplendent with Art Deco glasswork and furnishings the room we got was large enough to have slept an entire family. It's location couldn't have been more central and the prices were reasonable too. Mind you, a slightly damp and chilly Anzac weekend is probably considerably less than at the height of summer.

Coming to Napier on Anzac weekend meant that Jo and I had the Monday off (just as well considering how long it took to get there and back in a car with an effective top speed of 80kph) but it also meant that an awful lot of things were closed for the weekend. Thankfully one of them wasn't Marineland, a aquatic centre with dolphins, seals and penguins on the seafront.

With the usual goals of entertainment and education about marine creatures, Marineland has been open for more than 40 years and its central attraction are two common dolphins called Kelly and Shona. Despite being nearly twice as old as the average life span of wild dolphins (and seven more than yours truly), Kelly and Shona are both perky and playful. Shortly after our arrival a show with the dolphins illustrated their capabilities in terms of speed, accuracy and intelligence through the traditional repertoire of jumping over things, hitting floats dangled on strings and balancing balls on their noses. Since at no time were either of the dolphins whistling The Star Spangled Banner, I can assume we're currently safe from Vogons.

Obscure cult references aside, the display gave me a good excuse to mess about with the multiple shot facility on my Canon, which I'd never really found much of a use for. Effectively the mode means that for as long as you hold down the shutter button, it'll keep taking pictures in a reasonably rapid fashion. I'm not sure of the exact interval between photos but it's round about half a second or so, perhaps slightly less. This comes in very handy if you're trying to capture an otherwise uncontrollable event. With a family photo you can bugger about with exposure, focus, composition and f-stop until smiles are glassy, tempers are frayed and the family pet has wandered off in boredom, but if you want a shot of someone blowing out their birthday cake, people are going to get annoyed if you ask them to relight the candles as you fluffed the shot. Hence, with this mode, you can leave the camera rolling and (being digital) simply deleted all the duff shots on either side of the actual one you want.

In Marineland's case, this was the dolphins hitting dangling floats, which I knew I had no chance of capturing manually. With my sloth-like reflexes and the cameras occasionally less-than-lightening responses I'd most like have wound up with a number of pictures of splashes. This way though, as well as a lot of photos of a float dangling pointlessly in an empty frame, I also got quite a good shot of Kelly. Unless it's Shona. To be honest I can't really tell which dolphin is which, although their trainers would insist that they were really very easy to differentiate. Kind of like strangers who insist of showing you their baby, despite the fact that they all basically look like a tiny Winston Churchill in a pastel coloured romper suit. Just nod and smile and then change the subject.

Post-dolphin frenzy, a sea lion whose name escapes me was brought out who could shake flippers, clap and play Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor. Okay, he could roll-over, but I'm sure he'd have given the piano playing a stab if they'd have had one.

After the show had finished an announced was made that those who wished to (and were inclined to pay 6 dollars) could have their photo taken with one of the Little Blue Penguins who are housed at Marineland. Jo was quite taken with this and so we queued up and Jo carefully clasped the hapless (and unfortunately blind) penguin called Sentinel. The resultant photo is now proudly on display on our fridge. As I wound up being in the photo as well, I'd left my camera with a nearby old chap and asked if he'd take a photo as well, although I did have to do a bit of explaining of how to use the camera and how he didn't need to use the viewfinder as the camera has an LCD screen on the back. Still he did take a photo and I've taken worse myself. As you're probably aware.

Returning to the non-marine attractions of Napier, we also visited the Hawkes Bay Museum (Hawkes Bay is the coastal area where Napier and nearby Hastings are situated) which houses an excellent section dedicated to the devastating earthquake mentioned earlier. Audio recordings from some of the survivors' recollections of the day are played through a radio. Both interesting and unsettling, they highlight the abrupt nature of the earthquake and the sudden transformation of the city in a matter of minutes. A shop assistant whose indecision about whether to leave her post whilst her colleague fled the shop saved her life; her colleague was buried under falling debris from the buildings facade. Children at play during a school break who were thrown from their feet, only to find their school reduced to a mere pile of bricks and dust by the time they'd had a chance to find their balance again. Lasting only a little over two minutes, the earthquake smashed the city, and a lot of what was left was incinerated when fire swept through the wreckage shortly afterwards. One particularly harrowing tales regards the partial collapse of a church during a service leaving one woman trapped but alive under a fallen beam. With fire spreading and the water mains destroyed there was no way to rescue the wounded woman and no way to keep the fire at bay. In a decision I can't begin to contemplate having to make, a doctor gave the woman a massive dose of morphine to ensure she didn't suffer and let her succumb to the blaze.

Jo and I found ourselves discussing the earthquake as we spent the rest of the afternoon walking the city centre's streets and admiring the striking architecture generated by the hard work and humanitarian aid of both New Zealand and the wider world in response to the tragedy. It disturbs me that, with it's location on top of several fault lines in the Earths crust, earthquakes such as Napier experienced are still a very real threat to New Zealand and yet high-rise buildings are built and are still being built in places like Wellington. I experienced a minor earthquake on the fifth floor of the offices I worked at during my time with the Ministry of Health and I can only imagine how much worse it'd feel to be on the 36th floor of Generic Skyscraper the next time the tectonic plates slip. The fact that most of Wellington is built on either very steep hills or reclaimed land... well I guess the Sunday School ditty about houses built on sand never made it this far south of the equator.

The evening was spent having a Corona or two in a local tapas bar called Jo Miguels, which was a really nice place and served very good tapas. Even the staff were friendly. If you're in the area, I can't recommend it highly enough.

As mentioned earlier, the OverDrive in the Honda packed up completely on our return trip the next day, but the problem was easily sorted by throwing money at it. $900 to be exact for a replacement transmission a week or so after our return. Though expensive, it did mean that the wee still-unnamed Honda was in perfect condition a couple of weeks later when she carted us across the western side of New Zealand to the district of Taranaki and it's alleged mountain. I say alleged as, due to fog, cloud and non-stop downpours we spent an entire weekend effectively failing to see it. Unless you count driving up the lower slopes, which I don't.