Wintry weather

It's cold outside (well, cold for here - I am sure that my Canadian and UK friends would beg to differ - why, it's not dipping that much below 0, and it was a whole +5C when I went out to play hockey yesterday), we have had snow across much of the country, and, yes, as per the UK, a good chunk of the workforce (mainly on South Island) got to stay at home due to the roads being shut. It's the winter holidays, which means no orchestra tonight, so it is the perfect time to curl up by the gas fire and enjoy one of the perks of being a member of SFFANZ - my review copy of the latest George R.R. Martin arrived at the beginning of the week. At over 950 pages, and hardback, it's not one which I can carry on the train (without doing my back an injury), but I'm sure that the sofa cushions will prop it up perfectly.

It's a small world, after all...

I'm sort of getting used to the fact that Wellington is like a village. That there is a high likelihood that two people from completely random sides of my life will know each other, usually through another, totally random, facet of theirs. I can take the knowledge that now, over 18 months into our lives here, I am going to meet someone that I know every time I walk down the main street. That I will see a colleague or friend when I go shopping on a Saturday. And I like it. It makes life a lot more friendly and a lot less anonymous.

What I'm not going to get used to is meeting someone at work, and finding out that they used to work round the corner from me in Bristol. Or than someone else used to live not five minutes' drive from my in-laws on the south coast. That's going to get me every time...

And the hockey team is currently at the top of the grade - we're going great guns as we head into the second half of the season!

Catch up...

It has been incredibly busy once again; this weekend we had four different 'engagements' happening at the same time; a hockey/cinema fundraiser, a Ceilidh being run by a couple of members of the orchestra, a work social and the monthly Phoenix committee meeting and social. We opted for the Phoenix social - John is on the committee now (and was standing in for the Secretary whilst he was away), so he couldn't really miss it, and it also gave us the opportunity to pop in to see another friend (and give him a lift to the social).

We've had a mixed few weeks with hockey - a couple of draws were a bit frustrating (especially last week's, where the opposing team scored the drawing goal with less than a minute remaining!). We are still bouncing around the top of the league (there are only three points separating top 6 out of 8 teams!), but we're going to have to up our game if we want to ensure we get through to the semis and finals at the end of the season.

We've had our orchestra concert; a gorgeous rendition of Alfred Hill's Viola Concerto (part 1) (part 2 and 3), which has very rapidly become one of my favourite pieces of music. We also played Bizet's L'Arlisienne Suite; most people know the first movement, but the fourth (Carillon) has a fantastic wind section which I got to play the second oboe part for - one of the few pieces where the second oboe part isn't in octaves or thirds to the first! All great fun; and now we have a couple of weeks off before we get into practising for the weekend workshop - the Firebird Suite and L'Apres Midi d'un Faun, which I'm very much looking forward to!

We also had our week away up in Auckland (a few photos in the previous post); a brilliant Sci-Fi convention weekend, where we got to catch up with old friends and make new ones. It is always nice to get to spend a few days where insanity is the norm and conversations are wide ranging from the serious to the silly. We then stayed in the Parnell area to unwind from a very hectic few months at work, and to do some touristy bits and pieces.

We had a superb tourist boat trip around the harbour; it included hop on and hop off on a couple of islands, so we have walked up a (probably extinct) volcano. Rangitoto Island didn't exist 600 years ago, and the lava fields are still very 'raw' (I got a nicely grazed knee from slipping on the clinker on the way back down!), with the vegetation in some areas in very early stages of growth (you can still see the lichen that will rot into hummus, which in turn provides the basis for small seeds to bed on). It does mean that in places it looks very bleak, but in others, particularly right at the summit and down on the shore line, there is an abundance of vegetation. Not so many birds, but, according to one of the signs, this is more due to the fact that there is currently not enough fresh water to sustain significant numbers.

We also stopped off at Motuihe Island, which is in the process of becoming a nature reserve (at the moment, the walking tracks are more hope than anything else - we got our feet very wet pushing through long grass until we got down to the beach and decided to take a short cut back across the sand and rocks!). It was very peaceful, though - there were only four of us on the island for a couple of hours until the boat came back to pick us up! On the way back to Auckland Harbour, we were treated to a pod of dolphins playing around the boat, which was absolutely stunning. It's the first time I've seen them close up, and they were definitely playing, including diving under the boat several times, and doing back flips out of the water. One of my 'must do' items ticked off very unexpectedly!

For my birthday, we went to Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World, the first aquarium in the world to do a perspex 'tunnel' through the aquarium so that the visitors can see the fish going overhead. They had a stunning collection of sharks (one of their 'extras' is to go cage or free diving (depending on how brave you feel!) with them - another of my 'must dos' but slightly out of our budget range for this holiday!), and even had some baby carpet sharks which had only recently hatched (the mini aquarium that they were in still had one shark in its egg - you could see the shadow of the baby!)

We did also find the most stunning chocolate cafe in Parnell; their cafe menu had about six pages of different chocolate drinks! We only managed three visits over the week - we may have to make further trips back next time we are in Auckland!

Some Auckland photographs

Because I've been so bad at writing words recently, have some photos of our recent (a few weeks ago now!) trip to Auckland...




We travelled up north by train, which was an incredibly relaxing way to go. Mount Ruapehu dominated the scenery for about half an hour of the journey.



The Skytower from the Rose Garden park in Parnell.


Rangitoto Island, a volcanic (now believed extinct) island off of the coast of Auckland; it didn't exist until roughly 600 years ago!


A thrush at the top of Rangitoto Island, which had very little birdlife (according to the signs, because of the lack of fresh water), until we got to the summit, and then there were small birds everywhere! Most of them were paying very close attention to a couple of backpackers who were having an early lunch break...


The silvereyes were also more interested in breadcrumbs than they were with me and the camera.


On the way back to Auckland harbour, we were treated to a pod of dolphins who played around the boat for about ten minutes. I got a lot of photos of empty water!



Even though our hotel wasn't near fresh water that we could sea, there was a small kingfisher sitting outside the window on the first morning.

Speeding through the year

Can someone explain to me how it got to be June tomorrow? Life continues apace, particularly since we didn't get raptured last week (disappointingly, my desk with its mountain of work was still there when I got back in on Monday morning...). Though apparently the countdown is now on until October, when we get to go through it all again!

Hockey is going well - though the game on Sunday was a teensy bit stressful, not the match itself, but getting there. Rather than it being at our local astroturf, we were playing at the national hockey stadium the other side of Wellington. Whilst we have played there before, this was the first time for me driving there. I knew roughly where I was going, and I'd looked it up on the map, but I am not one for keeping directions in my head. What I should have done was write out the instructions from Google, but I have a sat-nav, so, I thought, no need. Unfortunately the sat-nav decided that it was going to take an early holiday, and didn't even find a satellite until after I'd driven into Wellington and off the wrong junction of the motorway, onto a one way system, which wasn't labelled as such. I discovered this the hard way, turning round in a car park to try to get back onto the motorway, and seeing that I was turning into the path of oncoming traffic. Fortunately, this being Wellington on a Sunday morning, it was one car, still quite a way away from me, and I was able to pull up onto the pavement whilst I worked out what the heck I was going to do! The sat-nav glitched in and out of contact with the satellites, so I'd get an instruction, and then it would all disappear again. What I hadn't realised was that at some point it had decided that it wasn't going to take me to the stadium, but was instead going to head back towards the previous location we'd visited, most of the way back home! I realised this when I suddenly found myself back on the motorway, heading in the opposite direction, luckily just before I passed the last turn off for 8 km. However, already being 5 minutes late for the warm up, I might have been a tad stressed by this point! Reprogramming the sat-nav didn't take too long, and it gave me a couple of directions before dying completely, but those were sufficient to take me to a location I recognised, and from there I could muddle my way through, arriving with 10 minutes to spare. It takes me 8 minutes to put my goalie kit on...

So - last time I trust technology - I sent John out to the AA shop (he's on holiday this week) to pick up our free allocation of road maps that we get for being members! Hopefully my next journey will be slightly less stressful when we go back to good old fashioned drawings. On the plus side, we won 5-2...

Ooops...

I know, I know - it's been a few weeks - sorry! Things have been a little bit crazy recently, both at home and at work. Very long days at work + active social life = not a huge amount of time at home, and my brain hasn't been hugely active in order to get a blog post written...

Since I last posted, we have had another couple of friends come to stay. This was a lovely weekend, as I'd not seen my uni flatmate since 2002, far too long a time. We went back to the seals and also took a trip round Zealandia. We were treated to a gorgeous display of bellbirds, and I may have even caught some of their song on video (I haven't had a chance to get it onto the computer to see how good the sound was!) - I wasn't able to actually catch the *birds* on video as I think I need to practice a little bit on catching moving objects; I did get a lot of shots of empty branches and out of focus leaves!

I've also been having fun with hockey - we ended up finishing the initial round robin top of our grade (without letting a single goal in), so we have gone up to the next one. Sadly, we didn't win our first game in the higher grade, but it was very close (and should have been a draw, but I'm not allowed to criticise the ref's decision ;-) ), which gives us the confidence to know that we are playing at the right level, rather than potentially coming up a grade only to be knocked back down again at the end of the season.

We're enjoying the freedom that the new car is giving us; we have been out at friends' houses for the last two Saturdays for playing board games (I've got a new game which I'm really enjoying, a re-release of a game which I'd played with my cousins which I was a child; it's called Survive; Escape from Atlantis, and is great fun - as you get to attack other people's characters with sea monsters, sharks and whales, you can make silly noises as much as you like!), and have also been able to help another friend with his house move.

We're gearing up for our next orchestra concert - fortunately, I'm not having to do too much practice as I've already played two of the four pieces before (Slavonic Dances and L'Arlisienne), and the remaining two don't have too difficult a piece for the oboe. Which is a good thing, as I'm not getting that much time to play outside of rehearsals.

Seals

We had visitors this week - two of our UK friends have been in NZ for a couple of weeks travelling round and they arrived in Wellington on Sunday night, flying in in one of the autumn's first gales (it was apparently a bit of a heavy landing...). They were staying with another friend up in Upper Hutt, but I booked myself a day and a half off work (unfortunately I had meetings on the Monday morning) and met up with them for a bit of sightseeing. It was bitterly cold, and we almost got blown away up on the look out, so, once they had had a look around, we decided that an indoor venue would be a little bit nicer, and we headed down to Te Papa for a couple of hours (which I'm now getting to know quite well! There is still something new each time we go, though, so it doesn't ever get boring - this time, we visited an exhibition of the photographer Brian Brake). Then, a quick trip up the Cable Car to the Botanical Gardens (some plants still in bloom, even this late in the year), and it was time to head back to the Hutt for some supper. We visited one of our local Indians, Little India, and had a very pleasant evening.

The weather was better on the Tuesday (still windy, but there was no ice in it), and so we headed round to Owhira Bay, south of Wellington itself, where the map said there was a seal colony where the seals spend the winter months. We parked up, and began walking - there was a track which could be driven on, but only for four wheel drives and motor bikes (we saw a couple of each, but we were able to share the path easily).

The air was very clear from the Bay, and we could even see South Island and the snow on top of the mountains.


The wildlife was out in force, with cormorants sunning themselves between fishing dives.


The tide was going out, and had left behind this beatiful starfish. It was still damp underneath, so I got the bottoms of my jeans wet and put it back in the surf - I couldn't leave it for the seagulls!


Even though the wind had dropped slightly, the waves were still crashing on the rocks - this wasn't a place for going surfing!


We headed on round the bay, and came across a Seal Watching tour coming round the bend the other way. They told us that there were a number of seals very close by, and, indeed, when we rounded the bend, we nearly walked right over one pretending to be a piece of driftwood


and another lying in the middle of the pathway at the very aptly named "Devil's Gate." The signs up told us that we had to stay further back than 20 m, and not to get between the seals and the sea. Fortunately, this one was very much enjoying his doze and barely blinked as we walked between it and the side of the cliff (we left it its escape route to the sea, just in case!)


The sea was still whipping round the rocks when we crested the hill through the "Gate"


and when we looked down, we spotted a number of seals below.


This one was very much enjoying his snooze in the sun, so much so that he really didn't mind me getting in close for this shot.


Then, as we were watching, another seal came out of the surf onto the rocks in front of us.


We were also very lucky to spot this Little Kingfisher who was very interested in us as we passed.


The seals certainly weren't phased by us at all - one distinctly appeared to be posing!


As we turned to head back, a yacht appeared sailing round the bay.


I am sure it was far calmer sailing further out from the rocks!


It was a glorious walk in the late autumn sunshine, and a place that I definitely want to visit again.