Headed up to R & M’s* hut on the Poolburn Reservior for a couple of days on the 2nd of Jan. No, I was not on a Lord of the Rings tour. Even the locals seem to have abandoned that particular cash-cow - I’m sure there used to be a LOTR mural painted on the side of the house at the reservoir turnoff- now it’s a Moa.

Camping at the Hut is a fairly rustic experience - long-drop, plastic containers for drinking water, truck battery for lighting, pot belly for heating, gas for cooking. Since the last visit the Hut has been extended and now incorporates a kitchen with architecturally-inspired metal clad doors, which I’m sure Urbis would happily feature if they ever do a special on Fishing Huts of Central Otago. Next on the list of improvements is a bathroom - with a shower! Currently only contains floor joists and a shower tray, so only for the very brave or very dirty (or both) at the moment.

Spent a very pleasant evening sitting on the Hoff (rock platform overlooking the lake) having drinks and watching the sunset, then retiring inside for more drinks and random conversations - I do remember that we invented a new Olympic Sport of water bucket throwing (you throw the water, not the buckets). It did make sense, at the time…. Tried my hand at a few star trail photos and failed monumentally. The photography mojo was not with me on this trip at all.

Earlier we had pitched the tents snug against a sheltering rock because of the strong wind from the South(ish). Looked to be very slightly sloped, and I bent quite a few of the shoddy, cheap and completely impractical Fairydown tent pegs that were clearly designed only for lush, soft camping ground lawns and not, you know, the actual outdoors. Anyway, fast-forward a number of hours to a little bit past midnight and I’m crawling into my tent feeling all smug because I’ve brought a long-sleeved polyprop and a polar fleece hat, because it gets a little chilly. Fast-forward another half an hour and I’m in my sleeping bag and realising that a) it’s really, really cold and I don’t have enough clothes on and b) I am in fact lying on a slightly diagonal slope and have migrated down into a bit of a heap at the end of my tent with my feet jammed against the “wall” due to lack of grip between my thermarest and sleeping bag.

I try to rectify a) by first putting on a second pair of socks and my hoody over top of the polypro and t-shirt (and stupidly thin and un-warmth-giving cotton pj pants). This worked for about another hour before I gave into the cold and put my jeans on too. This worked.

Problem b) was trickier. Had a flash of inspiration and tried lying head downhill. This stopped me slipping but seemed to be a Very Bad Idea. I tried jamming things at my feet and randomly wishing I had a roll of that grippy stuff that nana’s use to stop their fancy plates from sliding off their china cabinets in earthquakes. Or that I was intelligent enough to spot a slope and not pitch my tent there. After trying a few sleeping positions (including one that involved me essentially spooning my thermarest), hours after going to bed, and after wedging the rest of my clothes under the end of my mat to make a kind of U-shaped valley (which kind of helped, but not really), my brain delivered me the startling and cunning realisation that the underside of my mat was grippier than the top and if I turned it over it would be less likely to slide. Which was true, and so I slept.

Next time, I’m camping on the flat. And possibly buying some of those ridiculous polarfleece trousers which I’ve previously scoffed at.

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Today I drove down to Invercargill for lunch (as you do), so I took my iPhone with my newly-bought TomTom New Zealand app on it (confusingly the app is referred to as both v1.0, and app version 8.150).

It is definitely much, much nicer to use than my old Uniden, which is simply horrible for entering addresses into (so horrible that I nearly threw it out into the Clutha River when I last used it). I’m told that the interface is pretty similar to the real TomTom units, although after a short while my passengers insisted I change the default voice from NZ Paul to Irish Sean. Sean (who was referred to as Paddy…) gave us lovely clear instructions in a lilting Irish brogue, although he did get mixed up between “bear” and “turn”. A 90deg change in direction is not “bearing” anywhere, Paddy).

There was a navigational incident in Invers involving me entering the motel address incorrectly, and another when I mixed up “Tay” and “Dee”. But we got there in the end, albeit via some suburbs that we hadn’t intended on visiting.

The maps (well between Dunedin and Bluff, anyway) are pretty spot on, although some of the speed zones are wrong (Waihola, and the motorway by Carisbrook), and while it does mark fixed speed cameras, it won’t pop up an “alert” unless you’re on the same side of the road as the camera, which in some cases is just useless, especially coming into Dunedin from the south.

One oddity is the seemingly unfinished instructions when reaching wherever you’ve told it you’re going - it’ll say “in 400 metres,” … and then nothing else. In 400m, do what, Paddy? Do what? Only after getting out of the car, locking it and walking to the house did it tell me that I had reached my destination - perhaps that instruction would’ve been helpful some time ago when I was wondering what on earth would be happening to me when I’d driven 400m.

All in all, a good nerdy gadget day, although I noticed that my generic dash mounting kit with the power cable doesn’t actually charge my iPhone (it just powers it), and when unplugged it chewed through batteries - I think it had used up about 80% off a full charge after about 2.5 hours (although my iPhone is now 15 months old).

All in all, a four trim-hazelnut-latte rating (out of five).

☕☕☕☕

Today we had most of the day off - things didn’t start till 3:30 (some people were flying in from as far away as Perth! Gosh….). We had breakfast in a little place next door to the hotel then had a stroll through the sunday market by the beach (which is what the marquees are in the second pic), the highlight of which was a frozen mango squeezy which I slopped all down my front (predictably). I took a few quick blind pictures of the beach with my snappy cam, which doesn’t have a view-finder, so I was pointing, shooting and hoping:

After that, coffee at one of the many cafes over the road from the beach, and then back to the hotel to move over to our proper rooms for the week. Pretty much everything seems to be within a block of the beach – if you’re not by the beach, you’re probably in New South Wales (I’m not kidding – one of our conference venues is over the road, which is in a different state. Awesome!). View from the hotel, with my iPhone:

After that, lunch at another cafe, then back to the hotel to do a bit of sitting-on-the-balcony-while-reading. The Institute started at 3:30, so downstairs to register (name tag, thick folder of sessions) and meet our group members.  We started off with some introductory sessions, then drinks, dinner, then back to our rooms for homework: questionnaire about our management style.  Result: unknown at this stage, but hopefully it won’t set any alarm bells of which would result in my immediate expulsion.

So now I know WHERE the Gold Coast is.  I must admit to some initial confusion about exactly where we were travelling to, the “Gold Coast” not being, as far as I knew, a city.  It turns out that Coolangatta Airport = Gold Coast, so here we are.

The trip over was uneventful and unblogworthy.  I should mention though that our dinner was about 1000x more appetising than that dubious grey mass that the Boss blogged about, but we’re on Air NZ and not Qantas.

Arrived at the hotel with M1 and M2 to discover a note on the front desk saying that they were having maintenance issues and would be back soon.  The note was laminated suggesting that this wasn’t a one off.  After 15 mins they arrived back and after explaining that they had a fire drill told us that they didn’t have a booking for us for tonight, but after some shuffling around managed to get us three rooms.  No apology for our 15 min wait.  Nice hotel, lovely rooms with good facilities and glorious air-con.  But the service…

After that: good calamari for dinner at the place next door, and a walk along the beach path (I thought we may have crossed over from QLD to NSW but it turns out that we didn’t) to Rainbow Bay, which has the most bizarre “Static” playground.  The oddest item was a thing that may have been a swing in a previous life, but is now tethered at all corners, meaning that once a child climbs onto it they can only be slightly jiggled.  And something which may have been play stocks, but no head is small enough to fit through it.  Sadly, it was dark and I didn’t take my camera, so no pics.

View Coolangatta in a larger map

So, I was lying on the couch, as you do, when I felt the longest earthquake *ever*. Within seconds the Twittersphere was alive with reports (with New Zealand trending to second place) … was it magnitude 8.2? or 6.6?  Turns out that it got adjusted to 7.8, centred in Fiordland, and reasonably shallow (quite close to the last big earthquake).  Oh, and there was another one, 6.1, about 20 mins later.

Even more exciting (for a lapsed Geographer) was the Tsunami warnings, listing Dunedin as being hit at 12:57.  Thankfully it didn’t eventuate, but there are now warnings in place for NZW, Vic, Tas and Lord Howe Island.  I laughed at the preposterous notion of Dunedin being hit until the flattie explained how it could *actually* happen (some kind of refraction around the island leading to a big watery slap on the east coast). 

But I live on a big hill, so I’m cool.