Thursday, March 06, 2003
Bay of Islands
I guess if you live in Russell, this is your morning commute:
Laila (Maui) e-introduced me to her friend Richard who lives on a little bay north of Kerikeri, so we drove up to meet him in person.
He makes a mean apple juice. The color, which you can't really see here, was a pastel pink, and even the thick froth was delicious:
Here's the view from his living room:
We took a stroll along the bay:
Penguins apparently march into this cave for the night:
But during the day it's quite a rainbow of colors:
We had dinner in Paihia, what turned out by the end of the trip to have been some of the best Indian curries in New Zealand--at a rather informal Mexican(!) restaurant called Poco Loco. We ordered the butter chicken, and the lamb roganjosh(?), and they were both excellent. Paihia itself was rather touristy, a bit reminiscent of, perhaps, Kehei in Maui:
My attempts to grok the Kiwi accent were hindered throughout my trip by the high internationality of the service folk. Our waiter was from Ventura, our waitress later (dessert at the hotel back in Russell) was from Vancouver, the woman on the phone when I booked the ferry to Picton was from South Africa, and so on... And of course the hostellers were from all over. Even the proprietors of the hostels tended to be originally from elsewhere--Germany, Holland, and whatnot. And then the accent itself changes from place to place within the country. I still really don't have a clear idea of what defines the Kiwi accent.
When we returned to Russell for the night, we were first in line
for the ferry and there was no one else around. You can imagine
we wondered for a while if we hadn't missed the last one... but
eventually a few more cars showed up, and then the ferry arrived
and took us home.