Willow cannot come to the computer right now as she will be drinking sangria on the veranda, here, with her mum, watching a local shepherd walk his goat. Please leave a message and she will get back to you on Monday 3rd September. Hasta aquel entonces
to Z. It is almost the furthest we could have gone from the little island of Britain. A journey of 24 hours, 4 countries and 13 hours later. A journey through the sky to bring us to the Land of the Long White Cloud. Aotearoa. New Zealand.
is for Best ice-cream in New Zealand. Our first stop when we landed, was to drive up to the peninsula and have an ice cream. Boyesnberry ice cream is marvellous. It won the Silver New Zealand Ice Cream Award
is for Christchurch, the largest city on the South Island, pop 300,000. Twas our first stop in New Zealand and a city to set the scene for the country’s ‘borrowed’ towns - taking scottish, spanish and english architecture and blending it to create disneyland-like streets.
is for Dunedin: our next stop and a city that boasts the world’s steepest street and a near exact replica of Glasgow University. We sampled some rather weird coffee and took a ride on the taieri gorge railway, originally started in 1879 to provide easy transport for livestock and provisions to the upspring of gold mining settlements.
is for Elspeth - one of my best friends, a doctor, a one-in-a-million and a certified, bonidfied citizen of New Zealand. She lives in Christchurch and currently works in plastic surgery, not the boobjob kind, but the saving-skin-cancer kind. Doctors have a law, that they must stop if someone is injured. During the holiday, a hells angels crashed in front of her parent’s camper van. Elp ran to his rescue. I think her patient wished she’d been a bike miracle mechanic rather than a doctor.
is for Fiordlands. New Zealand is very remarkable for is small size, and very wide glacial valleys. When a glacier erodes away the bottom of a valley near a coastline so that it drops below sea level, a Fjord is formed. The first european settlers in New Zealand called these areas Sounds. I’m not entirely sure why, but a Sound is different to a Fjord. In order to rectify their misnaming, the Kiwi’s called the area the Fiorlands. All they need now is a ‘j’.
is for Glaciers. The reminants of the glaciers that created the Fiordlands still exist. We took an early evening helicopter ride over Fox Glacier and it’s neighbour, Franz Josef. I was surprised to read that it was a geology student who discovered that the Fox Glacier was again moving down the mountain.
is for History, and not much of. The country of New Zealand is a very young country. It was settled less than 200 years ago but was first found by the dutch explorer, Abel Tasman, in 1642. This is what gives it cities and towns a feeling that they came out of a box and would fit perfectly on a model railway track. The country of Aotearoa, on the other hand, is over 1200 years old. The first settlers were polynesian sea travellers who called their land the ‘island of the long white cloud’. These were the Maori, the first people of New Zeland. A people who, before the europeans came along, had no written language and remembered history through song.
is for increadible scenery through Arthur’s Pass - a visual orgasm for our eyes… and the best was still yet to come.
is for Jumping. Out of Airplanes and off bridges. While the first modern bungee jump was made in Bristol in 1 April 1979, the first commercial bungee jumpwas done in Auckland, New Zealand by a Mr A J Hackett.
is for Kaikora. After Arthur’s Pass and picking up Elp’s parents, here we headed - a small fishing and surfing town on the east coast of the South Island. We stayed in the theatrical Apopka Lodge, a hostel filled with driftwood-framed photographs of the first white family to settle there, alongside elk heads mounted on dark red velvet wallpaper. Here, we became entertainers of the sea, singing and swimming alongside wild dusky dolphins.
is for Lakes. I forgot to mention Te Anau! a lovely lake where we stayed during our first week at the Backpackers Lodge on the hillside. Here the quest for Gustav’s dream kitchen, ended, and we spent a day Kyaking in…
is for ilford Sounds. Here we took a days trip kyacking around the marvellous sounds. The Maori legend says that the Earth Mother, Papatuanuku and Sky Father, Ranginui (great names!) gave their son a greenstone hammer to carve out the south Island. They say he needed practice alot of practice, and by the time he reached Milford, he had reached perfection. While we were in New Zealand, a man had tried to cross the Tasman Sea in a kyak and had drowned the day after he saw land. His wife and son had been waiting in Milford Sounds to greet him.
is for Name. The name New Zealand actually originates from Dutch explorers naming the islands after “Nova Zeeland”, a place in holland. Captain cook then anglicised this name to become the name we call it now.
is for Organisation of fuel distribution. Elspeth is a paranoid petrol petroller. In our first week travelling, we had 6 fuel stops. Distance travelled: around 900 miles. Our Second week, we had 2 fuel stops; distance travelled: around 700 miles. I don’t think I need to say who drove the first week.
is for Picton. After Kaikora we drove up this harbour town, where you take the ferry across to Wellington. A very nice peninsual here with a lovely walk down to the sea marking old Maori Pa’s - guarding settlements set up to watch against other tribes. When the Europeans tried to first settle New Zealand, they were defeated by the ferorcity of the Maori’s. If the Maori’s had managed to band together, the europeans would probably have given up. As it was, the internal wars between the Maori’s were not resolved…
is for Queenstown. A town we all would have liked to visit, but didn’t have the time. We drove past the local bungiejump (see J is for Jumping) but decided to visit the Chard Farm vineyard instead (see W is for Wine).
is for Roasted poo. New Zealand may have remarkable scenery, but they really do have crap coffee.
is for So beautiful. After Picton, we stayed one night on D’urville Island Resort, named after the French Explorer D’urville, who charted French Pass - the sea between the island and the mainland. We could have stayed there longer. A beach view from our bedroom, glow-worms in waterfall grottoes, Kayacking and Stingrays, hikes up the old school track, our neighbours the Takahe Bird. And there was still more to see, do and relax in. The resort was owned by a South African who had one undersized leg. When he was 4 years old, he was in an accident and broke his leg. When the doctors came to take off the bandge, they removed it rather clumsily. What they didn’t realise was the leg had been badly burnt, and the skin had disintigrated. His leg is undersized because he only has one muscle left.
it for Tramping - the Kiwi term for tramping. Beware when taking a kiwi tramp, as their grades of difficulty parallel their fitness levels. Elspeth and I took a walk that was described as “fit for all ages”. There was hardly any track and as Elp exclaimed “my gran’s rather fit, but she would never have been able to do that!”
is for Unexplored territory. Most of New Zealand is unexplored, and perhaps more noteworthy, unnamed. If you so wished, you could go find a mountain, and name it after your favourite sheep.
is for Very tasty food.
is for Wine. There are 10 main wine regions in New Zealand and our second last day was spent travelling through one at Wairau valley. Our first stop was Johanneshof wines, a german owned vineyard guarded by a very old dog. Next was an Organic Vineyard owned by the director of the Harry Potter movies and here we had a very interesting chat about organic growing, the fall of the American empire and chinese wine. Fromm was a very nice winery, swiss owned that probably did the best pinot’s out of the lot. Stay away from Spy Valley. Unfortunately for us, the South Island is more focused on Chardonnay’s but it still has a good selection of Pinot Noirs. Amongst the ones we tried, these in particular stood out:
Fenton Road, Central Otago
The Tiger, Chard Farm, Queenstown
Pinot Noir, Fromm, Wairau Valley
Pinot Noir, Johanneshof, Malborough
is for ‘Xcellent holiday. Brilliant trip. But I don’t think i’ll move there. The country definitely lacks an essential ingreadient that I seek for.
is for “You think you’ve done it without any problems… then you’re boyfriend’s passport falls apart and theres a strong possibility you might have to leave the country without him”. Luckily the NZ customs called all 3 countries and made sure he could pass through. As it turned out, Nico didn’t show his passport once after leaving NZ.
is for zzzzzzzzz… the jetlag wasn’t that bad… I was a willow zombie at work (the day I landed)… but the readjustment to a normal human being wasn’t too painful.
I’ve just been to Krakow for the christmas markets with my mum. I can best describe it as christmas without the commercialism. Poland is a really lovely country, lovely in its reluctance to embrace advertising and consumerism. Perhaps what shows this best is the presence of fur coats and scarfs. In a country where the temperature drops to -30º, fur is a luxurious commodity. Anti-fur ideas are not necessary. A bit like vegetarianism in Africa. My mum said that before the anti-fur ideas inflitrated New York, streets were lined with wholesales fur stores, and a fur coat would be passed down the family, from parent to child, an heirloom.
The city was not always polish and Krakow itself is filled with marks of the very fluxtuating polish history. It was part of the Austrian empire in the 1600’s, and previous to that was taken over by the Russian Tartars, whose influence remains in the traditional polish peroigies (dumplings) with a cheesy variety called rushka (russia). It is a crime to remove anything from Kracow that is from before the 1940’s. They keep everything preserved. And this is the remarkable thing about the typography in the city. Art-nouvea type sits next to tradition polish wooden signs and french flourishes.
I wasn’t expecting to hear so many french and italian’s in Kracow. There were a few english but the ping pong pong of polish language, like jingle bells, still dominated the city. I do think they have the best sound of any language to mean thankyou - “chinqueee-ay”.
Even though the theme was christmas cheer, I heard many people asking directions to Auschwitz. I’m not to sure about the tourist thing in a place such as this.
Highlights of the trip include:
The homemade vodka shop
St Mary’s church in Rynek Glowny
Mulled wine, sausage and the Pig on a spit at the christmas market
The underground Indigo jazz bar that, unfortunately, didn’t play any jazz
The Staircase in our hotel - the Hotel Rezydent
View the flickr set
“Go to Hel” - not exactly the thing i’d normally write on a postcard to my parents. But there it was. Plucked from a list of phrases milked with mentions of Hel. Note the missing ‘l’ at the end of this word. Not a typo. This missing letter, stands to distinguish the multi-columned monument of Hell - the Enternal Fire of the Damned - to the singular column of Hel - the Quiet Fishing Seaside Resort of the Polish.
A Bit of History
Hel is at the tip of the Hel peninsula, stretching about 35km out into the Baltic Sea. It stretches back towards Gdánsk, a city absorbed in Polish history stemming from its main position as a port to the Baltic.
The peninsula’s skeleton is thus. The railway and road provide the backbone. This is surrounded by a thick layer of forest where many Poles spend a happy hour searching for the seasons’ mushrooms and berries. The forest layer is further surrounded by an epidermus of beautiful white sands. The peninsula was not always this structured, and was once a set of small islands. A polish king decided to protect the peninsula with sea walls, thus creating the towns chalupy and kruznica that are there today.
Gdánsk, meaning town located on Gdania river, was at one point known as the german translation, “Danzig”. At this point Danzing was under the order of the rather funkily named Teutonic Knights. The city remained Danzig until right after the Second World War when it was flattened by the Red Army and returned to Polish possession. Nice!
Our Trip
It takes a while to get to Hel. There isn’t a Highway to Hel, only a single carrige way road that follows the railway line to the tip of the peninsula. We flew into Gdánsk airport but missed out on actually seeing the city itself thanks to bus No. 110 chugging along at 20m/p/h to Wrzeszcz station. From there, a 2 hour train journey took us up past the famer’s fields of Gdynia and, the excellently named, Władysławowo, and then along the Hel peninsula to Hel.
Arriving at the luminous station we were greated, as the guidebook said, by landowners asking if we wanted rooms. We’d already booked somewhere so declined offers to ‘ein room’ and wandered on up the main road. After thinking my worst thoughts had come true, we finally found our residence for the next 6 nights. After taking in the view - a dilapidated house filled with pigeons and peacocks - we took off in search of nutrition.
“The Fish is Hel is amazing!” Beautiful buttery halibut. Absolutley delicious. Another favourite of mine was Zurek served in a bread bowl, a traditional polish ’sour’ soup with potatoes, whey and sausage. The beer was pretty darn good as well - Okocim replacing Zywiec as one of my favourite beers. Krupnik vodka is still my favourite with its honey colour and way it silks on the tongue…
The town of Hel has a rather quaint personality that makes someone like me feel like they have gone back in time. Cute little café’s and ice cream places perch along the boardwalk and main road. Local’s sell seashell necklaces and fluffly seal’s. Wooden changing huts line up along the beach and the place is filled with a calm you would attach to 1950’s england.
Nevertheless, Hel’s personality has fluxuated over history. The only church in Hel, has, as nico stated, ironically been turned into a museum. Occupied by Russia, Germany and Poland, the small town has adopted it’s varied owner’s architecture and cuisine. In the late 1800’s it was officially cited as a seaside resort for polish holiday-makers only to change during the Second World War when it was the main polish defense against the german ships. The battle of the Hel peninsula was the longest lasting of all the polish attempts to fight off the germans.
The one thing that has remained constant is the traditional man-powered fishing boat. Fish is at the heart of Hel’s commuity and it can be seen in the religious fresco’s of christ preaching to his disciples in a fishing boat, and read in the weather beaten faces of the local fishermen. Having read the book Cod a while ago, the significance of fish is something that I find very interesting. While in Hel I was reading The Fish Can Sing by the icelandic Halldór Laxness. Slow to begin with, it was the perfect book to read while in the fishing village of Hel. The themes of fish, community, simplicity, culture and nature swam in my mind and with nico’s paragraph’s from “No Logo”, the hooks of privitisation and capitalism hung hungrily in the air.
I would suggest go to Hel soon. Go to Hel before Poland becomes too developed and absorbs too much of west europe’s languidity. Go to Hel and eat fish!
