Feestpaleis/Wellington blog

Last week, we received a very special phonecall on our brand new landline, from Antarctica! Our good friend Dan is a geologist who spends a lot of time on that continent. See his blog to see some beautiful photos and to learn more about this remarkable place and the work Dan and his colleagues are doing. He has finished his fieldwork for this Antarctic summer and had some free minutes on his satellite phone, which he spent on congratulating us with our new phone line. It was really great to hear from him again, especially considering he was outside in the cold, on Antarctica, operating a satellite phone!

The ship that will take him and his fellow antarctic dwellers home before winter starts departed from Hobart, Australia last Friday, and will reach Antarctica in about two weeks time. Dan’s planning on coming to Welly - the place where he grew up and where his family is - in April. We can’t wait to see him again!

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We had a great night yesterday as we attended our first concert in Wellington. One of our favourite bands, Calexico, played in The San Francisco Bathhouse, a nice small venue in the centre of town. We’ve seen Calexico a few times in Utrecht, so we knew we could expect a good party. The sold-out Bathhouse was dancing and partying while Calexico was playing a good mix of songs from all their albums. They are really great and versatile musicians. Opening for Calexico were Wellingtonians The Phoenix Foundation. What a great surprise! Great music, great show, I’ll have to check out the local music store and get their music.

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We’ve returned from a week of surfing and camping on the east coast! Thanks to all of you who tried to call us for our birthdays or just to say hello! We got your messages when we returned home. I know, in this age of mobile technology, we could have heard your voicemails sooner, but we had no network service in most places we camped - this is New Zealand remember, it’s empty - so we switched off our mobile phone altogether.

We had a great time, some stormy days but lots of fine ones and explored some wonderful spots. It was very educational surfing different kinds of waves, a great experience but most of all fun. We packed our trusty van with mattress, chilly bin, some clothes and our surfing gear and drove from break to break. Some statistics:

Nastiest wave: Waipatiki Beach, head-high, messy, rocks, onshores, tough paddle out and a tricky takeoff since the waves went from fat and bulky to vertical in a very short time. I got a few short rides and many wipeouts, while Willemijn was participating in a nice little ultimate frisbee beach tournament. There were a few shortboarders doing their thing, but I didn’t feel very comfortable on my 9′6″ longboard, especially after a friendly local said he broke his longboard on a similar day a few months earlier, snapped in two by a wave crashing right on top of it. My board and I are still in one piece fortunately.

Most perfect wave: the reefs of the Mahia pensinsula. How beautiful! A nice small swell and light offshores produced perfect little peelers everywhere. While the experts were surfing at some of the tougher breaks, we had lots of fun on some user friendly waves that we had to ourselves - we were told that it could get crowded on some days though. We could paddle out around the breaks without getting our hair wet and just wait for incoming sets. We met some friendly aussie surfers that both had over fourty years of surfing experience, and another guy called Stu who shapes his own boards. Here you see the peninsula in the distance, and two opposite coasts of the narrow stretch of land connecting it to the rest of New Zealand:

Biggest wave for Willemijn: one of Mahia’s beach breaks. After a long battle with the white water to paddle out and some take-off attempts, she scored a nice ride on a wave as big as herself. Willemijn’s rides are usually really long, so I didn’t see her for a while since she surfed all the way to the beach.

Biggest wave for me: One of the beach breaks in the Gisborne area. With bonus points for being the toughest paddle - it took a few attempts to conquer the bulldozing whitewater. I like my longboard, but it sucks for paddling out since you can’t really duckdive under the incoming waves with a big board - apparently, some people can, but I have never actually seen it. These were the first waves I’ve surfed that were bigger than myself, I could see the wave beginning to break above me. I was very stoked with my cunning stunt bonus: while pulling out to avoid the wave closing out on top of me, I managed to launch myself high up in the air and landed seconds later (it seemed like half a minute!) behind the wave. Fortunately, Willemijn witnessed the whole show, otherwise nobody would have believed me.

Most dramatic scenery: Castle Point is a small town of baches that attracts a big weekend crowd from Wellington (since it’s “only” three hours driving), especially if the weather’s nice. We hadn’t been there before, but it is beautiful. We didn’t expect much from the surf - we thought it was small and crowded (mind you, there were at least 20 people in the water, that’s a heavy crowd after a week of empty breaks!), but the atmosphere was relaxed and friendly and we had some great surf in waist- to shoulder high waves.

Biggest disappointment: The first thing we did after we got back home was drive to our local break, Lyall Bay. Since there was a nice south swell running on the east coast, we thought Lyall Bay might have something going, but all we found was weak, choppy, windblown knee-high ripples - with backwash bigger than the incoming waves - and hundreds of people in the water! It was ridiculous, ten people paddling for the same crappy wave. After lots of slalomming and near collisions we decided to leave the madness and have some cold beers on our own deck, enjoying the summer.

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New Zealand has a lot of things going for it, but internet access is not one of those things. Basically, you have three options for broadband access: ADSL, cable and wireless - I won’t mention satellite because that’s not really an affordable/usable option for us.

ADSL sucks, because the upstream speed is limited - to 128Kbit for affordable plans. But the biggest suckinesses of adsl are the bandwidth caps and being forced to sell your soul to Telecom: Because we’re so far away from the rest of the world, international internet access is expensive, which means that ISPs limit your monthly usage to, for example 15Gb, after which you pay extra or suffer slow as speeds. And you’re forced to get a Telecom account and a landline, even if you don’t want it. Just recently, legislation ordered Telecom to “unbundle the local loop”, so this will hopefully change in the future.

Cable is great, in theory, because you get mucho up- and downstream speed and you can use it for a home phone too, which means that you don’t have to deal with Telecom, and it’s cheaper. Unfortunately, Telstra/Clear, NZ’s cable provider, sent me a letter, two months after I asked to be connected, thanking me for my “recent inquiries” but it wasn’t commercially viable to connect us since we live too far away from their network. Bugger! Does it really take two bloody months to figure that out??

So, our next option was wireless - great in theory, but again, we live too far away and on the wrong side of the hill from their existing network. no go. A shame, because NZWireless looks like a decent company and I would’ve loved to be one of their customers. The guy that came to our place for a site inspection was friendly and knew what he was talking about.

So, unfortunately, our last option is getting an expensive, useless Telecom landline and finding a decent ISP - not an easy task because there are hundreds of plans and tens of isps.

So, still no internet at home…

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Me and my colleagues were happily hacking along when another minor earthquake hit just now… everyone was looking at eachother in anticipation, but it was only a small one and over in about 2 seconds. I wouldn’t want to be on the 7th floor of my office building in central Wellington when The Big One hits…

Pffew, I’m still not used to it. I eat 9 meters below sealevel for breakfast, but these quakes are just plain weird.

See Geonet for more info.

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Last weekend, we teamed up with friends from Nelson (north side of the South Island) to spend the weekend camping in Kaikoura, a little town on the northeast coast of the South Island, famous for its abundant sealife. Off Kaikoura’s coast are three ocean trenches, bringing cold and nutrient rich water close to shore because of tidal upwelling. This means that whales, dolphins, seals, orca, sharks and other sea creatures populate Kaikoura’s coastal waters.

We hauled our backpacks and surfboards onto the Bluebridge ferry and left for Picton, where we were picked up by Bronwyn, who was in Willemijn’s team during the World Ultimate Frisbee Championship in Sydney. We stuffed our packs in the back of her four wheel drive, tied our boards to the roof, opened a nice cold Summer Ale and set course for Kaikoura. It was pissing down - we even had a bit of hail - so our original plan of pitching a tent somewhere didn’t seem particularly appealing.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped at a place called the Kekerengu Store, a cafe in the middle of nowhere, to have some coffee. We met some fellow dutchies who were touring New Zealand on motorcycles and after some smalltalk about the rain and the great outdoors we discovered that one of them studied philosophy at Utrecht University, at the department where Willemijn and I spent many years studying and working! It’s a small world…

We gave up the idea of camping when some of Bronwyn’s friends with local knowledge managed to get us into some decent accomotation, on the beach, very close to some of Kaikoura’s famous surfbreaks. Bronnie’s partner glenn and his son Felix were waiting for us in Kaikoura and after fish and chips and a few beers we went to our accomodation. The rain was gone the next day, so we could have lunch outside and after that, it was time to hunt and gather our dinner!

glenn brought his spearfishing gear plus some extra masks, and after some scouting around (”going on a little reckie”) we found a promising spot to do some spearfishing. glenn caught some nice Butterfish - also known as Greenbone because they have green bones - and Blue Moki. I had a go at handling the speargun, but since I didn’t have fins I had to go after the fish swimming with my arms, which I couldn’t because I was holding the gun… Unsurprisingly I didn’t catch a single fish.

So I left the catching to glenn and made myself useful gutting some fish.

And Willemijn skillfully skinned and filleted some of our dinner.

The next day, we checked the surfspots nearby. The swell wasn’t classic and the most famous pointbreak in the area wasn’t breaking, but fortunately there were a few small but fun waves almost on our doorstep!

Here’s the insanely crowded lineup, with Willemijn paddling in while I’m on my way back out:

Parallel to the coast runs the Kaikoura Seaward Range, with some peaks reaching 2600m. Ocean, rainforest and the mountains in the background….

What can we say, we’ve had heaps of fun in a beautiful place with wonderful people!

Check the rest of the photos.

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