David Kreps Blog

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 15: Uluru

So, at last, I have been to Uluru. To the Uluru Kata-Tjuta National Park, to be precise. It was a 24 hour stopover - the flights from and back to Sydney essentially free, included in the globe-trotter ticket I bought for this trip downunder. I arrived at about 1pm at the Voyages Resort, where there are hotels for all budgets, (and the cheapest is dear for a backpacker) all run by the one company that got the government concession here. The first thing you notice as you get off the plane is the heat. It is 36deg here. The Park is some 40km from Uluru, outside the National Park, adjacent to the new airport. My room is basic, but I shall only be putting my head down in it so I am content.

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26 09 07 - 02:21 - da5idk - | two comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 14: Sydney

Back to Sydney! Delightful dinner with fellow Kaotician (and its original founder) Phil Morle and his wife at their lovely home overlooking the bush in Hornsby, followed by a day out in the City seeing the sights, drinking tea outside the Opera House - and several beers in Sydney's gay village, Surrey Hills. A lovely day indeed. And then back to Sean's for the weekend - to make him a new website!

23 09 07 - 00:47 - da5idk - | No comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 13: Last Day NZ

The last day's drive was long and exhausting, from Queenstown all the way north east to Christchurch. Lake Pukaki on the way in the bright sunlight was in one of its very bright blue moods, according to the lady at the tourist stop, who sold me a breakfast bar with a smile. Lunch in Fairlie's award winning bistro was really delicious, reading through the local paper with an excellent coffee and a warm chicken salad worthy of a town a good deal larger than little Fairlie. And finally Christchurch - initially a very unappealing and seemingly endless strip of low-rise warehouse-style industrial and commercial buildings beside the road, and then suddenly, at the centre, a veritable Upper Stratford-in-the-Wold (if such a place can exist) more typically English than you're likely to find anywhere outside the nether regions of Shropshire or Herefordshire, utterly quaint, whilst at the same time circled with enormous modern high-rise towers, in the lake of industrial units. A very strange city indeed - all at once picture-postcard English village, international windy city, and highway strip town. The Heritage in Cathedral Square - like all the Heritage Hotels I have stayed in in New Zealand, was lovely, and the restaurant here, in the old Government building next to the hotel tower, particularly good. Last but not least, the Antarctic Centre at Christchurch Airport is an experience not to be missed! - though I should have left longer than an hour to get round it all. And so goodbye to New Zealand, and hopefully see you again!

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23 09 07 - 00:29 - da5idk - | No comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 12: Coach-Cruise-Fly

OK so the second gig of the holiday, presenting to colleagues at Otago University in Dunedin, has gone well, and I am back in Queenstown, for the day trip to Milford Sound, and fun on my return! The day began early with a several hour long coach drive through three deep u-shaped glacial valleys across to the west coast of south island and Milford Sound. Here we joined a small ferry for a cruise down the fiord and out into the Tasman Sea briefly, then back up the fiord, to the small airport where I took the twin-prop Britten Norman Island Hopper back to Queenstown, sitting next to the pilot! To round off the day, I took the gondola up the mountain overlooking Queenstown, and completely on the spur of the moment went (tandem) paragliding, off the top of the mountain and back down into town. See here for slideshows of some of the most amazing scenery I have ever seen in my life! (more)

19 09 07 - 08:17 - da5idk - | three comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 11: South Island

So today I arrived in the Scotland of the southern ocean. And it really is that. The scenery, as you fly in over the snowcapped mountains down into Queenstown, is what can only be described as gobsmackingly spectacular. I was blessed today with brilliant sunshine and deep blue skies - a blue only rivalled by the blue of the rivers and lakes that sit in the dips between the mountains. It really is stunning. (more)

17 09 07 - 11:27 - da5idk - | No comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 10: Te Papa Museum

The road from Tongariro to Whanganui, and on down from there to Wellington, takes the whole morning to drive, but past some very stunning scenery - including a wonderful waterfalls.

At Wellington itself - the capital, although a smaller city than Auckland, but similarly a harbour town - I went straight to the Te Papa ('the People') National Museum, which proved to be well worth it.

Here were a number of excellent exhibitions about the flora and fauna, the history of New Zealand, and the tectonic geology of the country - including audio-visual record of the 1995-96 eruptions at Ruapehu, over the chateau where I stayed.
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16 09 07 - 07:21 - da5idk - | No comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 9: Three Worlds

Today, in the Tongariro National Park, I have been to three places: a Maori land of mountain gods Ruapehu, Tongariro, and Ngauruhoe; the area used for the filming of Mordor in Jackson's Lord of the Rings, and some amazing volcanic landscape. All three map onto one another in a jumble of reality and virtuality that was at times slightly confusing. The Mountain Peaks were gifted to the New Zealand people by the chief of the tribe whose land the park now covers, in a bid to save them from the ravages of the encroaching farmers who now had the right to buy land from individual Maori - something which set against the old communal way of life was a legal nonsense guaranteed to serve the interests of the settlers and not of the Maori. In 1887 it became one of the very first National Parks in the world, and grew in size over the coming century as the government bought out the holdings around the peaks.

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15 09 07 - 06:56 - da5idk - | one comment - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 8: Into the National Park

Well today has been pleasantly slow and quite lacking in excitement - a welcome respite after yesterday's highlights. I stopped off to take a walk down to the better lookout of Huka Falls, and another round the Taupo Museum, had a rather nice Clam Chowder in an eatery in Taupo, then took the long way round (and more scenic route) down the west coast of Lake Taupo to the National Park, and on up to Mount Ruapehu and the Grand Chateau hotel - which is splendid.

Here it is time for a relaxed dinner in their splendid Edwardian style restaurant, while the rain pours down outside.

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14 09 07 - 06:29 - da5idk - | No comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 7: Chief Tourist

So this morning I had the Great Sights bus tour that took in Te Puia, the Agrodome, and Rainbow Springs. Really from the sublime to the ridiculous. Te Puia we only had an hour at, but was quite fascinating, and I determined after only 15minutes there that I would be coming back to spend the afternoon there. Te Puia is kind of "the Maori Experience" - on the one hand slightly commercialising the culture, but on the other run by and for Maori, and really supporting the perpetuation and survival of the culture. As well as the interpretation areas, for tourists, (including a Meeting House, like the one at Waitangi, but somehow more for the tourists than for the people?) it is also a living museum, incorporating an active teaching carving workshop with many (male) students who learn the dances as well as the carving arts, and a weaving workshop where the (female) students learn the weaving arts with the twine derived from the native flax. The carving is much finer today than of old, with modern tools, but the designs are traditional. I noted with interest that I recognized the flax plant as one my parents had in their back garden, a great big thing it was, beside the tiny apple orchard at the top of the garden, with sharp blade-like leaves that shot out of the ground. Here it was, at Te Puia, being scraped down with an abalone shell, the fibres parted and woven into thread, from which all the clothes of the Maori were made.

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13 09 07 - 11:41 - da5idk - | No comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 6: The Real, the Virtual, and the Surreal

So I spent the beginning of the week in Auckland, mostly in my hotel room, cooking for myself, and preparing a Keynote presentation on my Mac to deliver to an audience of academics and web professionals at Auckland University for [CODE], the Centre of Digital Enterprise, who organised the Seminar, on Tuesday evening. My presentation, based on a chapter I have written in a forthcoming book to be published this Autumn, is entitled "Virtuality: Time, Space, Consciousness and a Second Life" and is available as a QuickTime movie - about 42Mb. Essentially it's about reality and virtuality not necessarily being that different, or as opposed as one might at first think, particularly from an experiential point of view.

The seminar went very well, and I was well received, and have made some interesting contacts at Auckland.

Then today I drove south to Rotaroa, arriving in the evening after a long day's driving and two rather interesting stopovers. The first was the Waitamo Caves - the Ruaraki cave to be precise - where I discovered that the glow worms are not actually worms but maggots, and what glows is not actually them but their faesces. So "glowing maggot shit" doesn't sound as good as "glow worm" in the tourist books. The stalagtites and mites however were fairly impressive, though not as impressive as ones I have seen on the south coast of Spain.

Then I went to Hobbiton. Yes, really. To the set used by Jackson to film the sequences in the Lord of the Rings movie that take place in Hobbiton. Really quite an experience. I was struck by the fact that Hobbiton, as a virtual place that has never existed, exists with such power in the imaginary through Jackson's films, yet the 'real' place is just a tired sham, a mock-up facade of seeming with no substance but what our memory of the movie can give it. The virtual, in short, more real than the real, in this case. How apt. (more)

12 09 07 - 09:06 - da5idk - | No comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 5: Kaori Holocaust

Today's special was supposed to be a catamaran cruise around the Bay of Islands out to the Hole in the Rock, with the possibility of whales and dolphins to see along the way. However the weather has turned for the worse, and the cruise was cancelled. I got a refund, which was good, because it was them, not me, that cancelled. More fool the people who dropped out because of a spot of rain! Anyway I have to confess I was as much relieved as disappointed - the swell looked quite sickening, and I am not certain whether my untrained sealegs could have coped with it; I was up for it though - any chance to see dolphins and whales is not to be missed: but the chance was gone. Never mind.

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09 09 07 - 08:28 - da5idk - | No comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 4: The Far North

So today I have had a long coach tour trip around the Far North - the spit of land that juts north-west into the Tasman Sea from the top of North Island. It has been a long day, but there have been some notable highlights. The view from my room at the Copthorne in the early morning was a good start, although the jetlag is still robbing me of anything more than a precious three to four hours of good sleep.
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08 09 07 - 11:51 - da5idk - | No comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 3: Waitangi

Success with the car, fortunately - courtesy of a nice young man at Auckland Central Police Station who stamped the print-outs of my scanned documents as corresponding with my passport, and allowing me to drive until next Saturday on this stamped photocopy. AVIS were satisfied, and I finally got away from Auckland in my automatic Mitsubishi Lancer at about 10am. I have to say it performs pretty well, and I am content with it.

The drive north from Auckland along State Highway 1 is blessed with stunning scenery, which ranges from the volcanic to the sub-tropical into the deciduous and quasi-savannah, descending finally to the delightfully tranquil Bay of Islands.

Here are the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, and the very experience of ancient, native New Zealand that I hoped for, and will treasure for a long time to come. Some 2-3 weeks before the main tourist season, I was fortunate enough to get all three Maori guides at once, practicing their 'spiel' together on the season's first Guided Tour. There was a young man, brimful of enthusiasm and belief; an early 40s woman, wiry, earnest, at once worldly and mysterious; and an older man, in his late 50s or early 60s, wrinkled with wisdom, solid, knowing, both serene and simple. Their tour began with the young man walking backwards before me relating the creation myth of the Maori people, telling me the names of their gods and goddesses, and some of the foundational stories of their people. It was fascinating. They asked me questions and I had to confess my own genuine interest in the ancient peoples of the world and the oral tradition of native wisdom found the world over; my own interest in the Celtic oral tradition in Europe; my genuine interest in the Maori, more than in the settlers, on this, my first trip to New Zealand. Indeed, as I told them, since arriving in New Zealand yesterday evening, the Waitangi Treaty Grounds is my first stop, my first 'tourist attraction', the first place I wanted to see - three and a half hours non-stop drive north of Auckland.

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07 09 07 - 05:40 - da5idk - | No comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 2: New Zealand First Impressions

Arriving at Auckland international airport at 5pm on a weekday afternoon, the first thing that struck me, after the hustle and bustle of Sydney, was the shere tranquility. There was a rather small town air to the place - not dissimilar from Stornaway Airport, on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, from which I took the first flight on a Wednesday morning in June last year. Auckland airport is somehow more refined, evidence of a richer economy than that of Lewis, but just as quiet, and inexplicably Local.

There is a quality to the light here. The Maori courtesy bus driver was very down to earth, friendly, polite without being subservient or wishing me a "nice day," somehow just genuinely helpful and pleasant without being in any sense my inferior - so refreshing an attitude, that I really took to him and was very amenable to anything he suggested. He thought I might be better sitting on the bench waiting for 10 minutes than getting into the van and indeed I sat there, soaking up the atmosphere, looking at the sky and at the trees, in the strange but homely atmosphere that I can only attribute to the light..... and perhaps the stillness.... and the odd calm in the air that is a quality not of silence but of gentle sounds that do not invade one's consciousness.

I fell in love with the place immediately.

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06 09 07 - 10:41 - da5idk - | No comments - § ¶

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 1: The Licence Saga

Here's the first entry for my downunder trip for September 2007. I have flown from Manchester to London, then London to Sydney, where I met up with Sean Bridges, a friend of 20 yrs standing, known to the world as Bikeboy - one of the best street performers in the world. In a quirk of fate he was returning from a month's tour of Canada, with a few days stopover in the UK to see his son, and landed 7mins after me in Sydney! (George Bush arrived on Airforce One a couple of hours later!) Sean has just bought a new house and is yet to move in so, after meeting up with his Australian girlfriend Brianna we went to the Bondi Beach steak restaurant (Sean's favourite eatery) and then stayed at cheap hotel together. The following day (yesterday) was a tour of Sydney courtesy of Sean and finally checking in to Wake-Up, Sydney's best backpacker hostel, full of young people and activity and fun, while Sean drove off to Adelaide for his next gig.

At Wake-Up I spent what time I was able to, online, liaising with my lodger at home trying to correct the one big mistake of my pre-planning : I have forgotten to bring my driving licence! The card is something I used to always keep in my wallet. However my house was burgled at the beginning of August (hence the decision to bring forward my house-moving plans) and amongst the items stolen was my wallet. So everything of value has ended up in a cashbox since - including my new replacement driving licence. I am reminded of a journey to Spain in 2004 with my former business partner, who on that occasion was the one to forget his driving licence. I only had mine, I confess, because I always used to keep it in my wallet! Now I am victim of the same mistake. So my lodger has smashed his way into the cashbox for me, and scanned the card and paper licence and uploaded them via ftp to a temporary folder from where I have downloaded them, all in the hope that I can convince AVIS to let me hire a car tomorrow morning. He has also taken them down into Manchester's Trafford Business Park and put them in a FedEx envelope that will arrive at my hotel on Monday next week. So if AVIS are not happy, at least I will be able to hire the car on Monday, and will have to get the coach up to the Bay of Islands for the weekend. Oh what fun. It is all part of the strange ID game that today's increasingly small world presents us with. Papers! Papers! One must have one's papers! (more)

06 09 07 - 01:32 - da5idk - | No comments - § ¶