Day 5: Friday, March 1, 2002
Crafts in Hokitika & drive to Nelson

Today was craft shopping day in Hokitika, and then on to Nelson. We checked out of our hotel and then drove into town. This town turned out to be a bonanza! We practically bought out the town.

Craft Coop, Hokitika

We started in a co-op craft store that had different types of crafts from different artists. We ended up buying a beautiful knitted baby blanket for Jamie & Nicole's baby (the shower is right after we get back), plus a wood cheese board for us, and I got an amusing sheep fridge magnet for my parents. Then it was on to the wood store, where I got a gorgeous little box with lots of inlaid woods in a nice pattern. We also got a beautiful wood block cutting board for George. Oh, and a wood carved penguin Christmas ornament.

Glass blower, Hokitika

Next we went to the glass blower gallery, which had hundreds of glass figurines. We watched in interest as the guy made glass penguins. He was very skilled at it, pulling the orange-hot glass out of the oven and then confidently snipping and sculpting the glass into a penguin with its wings out. I was surprised to see him use a kind of scissors to cut the wings from the body, but I guess that makes sense. The woman at the store said he was one of two sons who grew up with the business and he and his brother come up with the designs for the figures. Walendo ended up buying one big and one little blue penguin figurine.

Glass penguins, Hokitika

I had been wanting to find a novel by a New Zealand author about New Zealand, so we stopped in a bookstore and I browsed till I found a couple and bought them. Then we stopped at a French cafe for tea and a croissant. There were a bunch of french people there chatting with the owner. Walendo went outside to sit at a table while I ordered, but then when the French people were done chatting they went outside and told Walendo that they had that table. There wasn't anything on the table to reserve it, but they seemed to believe they had rights to it. He moved because there was another smaller one available. But soon after we sat down to wait for the food, one woman at the other table started smoking and she was upwind of us. So there we had moved to avoid conflict and then they smoke right in our faces. We decided to physically move our table to an open space upwind of them so we wouldn't get smoked on. I couldn't tell if the woman understood why we were moving the table, I hope so.

Wool shop, Hokitika

Next we found a little shop that was selling wool goods, and we both wound up buying sheepskin slippers (so what if Walendo had already bought some at a flea market in Melbourne), and I got some wool long underwear for skiing. The prices were great, as always. Then we found yet another wool shop (you could tell it was a wool shop because of the huge sheep entranceway), and at first I just bought a nice carry bag (NZ$25, US$10). But then after we left and Walendo was having cheap Chinese for lunch, he talked me into buying some skeins of wool for knitting that I'd been eyeing. The wool will be good forever and it's cheap, so why not?

Hokitika street

So back we went and I ended up buying enough to make him a sweater plus one or maybe two for me. Even though he'll probably never wear a sweater (he never gets cold), he got into the spirit of it and helped me pick out wool he liked, and promised that he would try to wear it. I guess that'll be good enough. Finally, we escaped from the town with no further damage. Even though each thing we buy is such a good deal, it does start to add up.

Next we drove up to Nelson, going along the coast by way of Graymouth and then the scenic route to Westport. Parts of it were similar to the Pacific Highway, but the cliffs weren't nearly as dramatic, although the greenery is like rain forest, which is a cool effect. It was very windy driving, so again it required concentration. Eventually, we picked up the road inland to Nelson. The scenery was of pretty rolling hills again, with lots of lush ferns along the road.

Lineup of cars at bridge accident

All of a sudden, as we came around a turn, we saw a long row of cars parked on the road. The guy in the car in front of us came over to us and explained that there had been an accident ahead on a bridge, and no one could get through. People were out of their cars walking around, some went up to check it out, others read or listened to music in their cars. No one seemed that frustrated or stressed the way they would in the States. This was the only road going up to Nelson, so we just had to wait. We had our reservations at the hotel, so we didn't have to worry. We chatted with the guy in front of us, who was from New Zealand but was living in Denmark with his Danish wife. He wants to come back here while still earning Danish currency, which isn't easy to do. He was thinking of being a translator, or running a nice lodge, though he didn't like the idea of working from 7am to 11pm and also having to be nice to crabby people. :-) There was another guy who had a German Shepherd that was kind of big and gangly. The dog barked at me, and the guy said it was because I had big eyes (sunglasses), which he didn't like. Libby wouldn't have done that. :-)

People checking out accident

After a short while, we could hear two massive logging trucks that we'd passed a ways back as they approached the curve. They were going pretty fast and you could tell there wasn't nearly enough room for them to stop. I was standing outside the car but Walendo was still in it, and he said he calculated as he looked in his rear mirror whether he was safer in the car or out of it (there were probably ten cars behind us by then). He got out of the car. As the trucks came around the bend, you could hear them slam on the breaks and they just barely managed to move into the right lane before they got to the cars parked on the road. They went for quite a long way before they were able to stop. If the bridge where the accident happened had been closer, they would have hit it before being able to stop. It was a dramatic moment, but everyone wound up safe. The sad thing was that once they stopped, people let them back into the left lane, which meant we'd have to pass them again. Sigh.

Accident on one-lane bridge

Eventually, I decided to see the accident. I walked about 500 yards to the bridge, and was able to walk up right close to it. I kept expecting someone to tell me I couldn't get closer "for my own protection" or something silly, but other people were checking it out and no one seemed to mind, so I kept going across the bridge. I took a few pictures so Walendo could see the accident. Apparently, a truck had smashed into a passengar car and had kind of wrapped itself around it. The front of the car was completely smashed in, and it was kind of tucked alongside the joint between the truck's cab and trailer. It wasn't clear how they got that way. People were saying that the car was a tourist who didn't understand the right of way system, but the car's side had the right of way, so I wasn't sure how it happened. Maybe the truck had already been on the bridge and the car wasn't going slow enough to stop in time.

What impressed me was how efficiently everyone was going about the business of clearing the mess. There were a bunch of firefighters and police who were quickly working out how to move the truck and then the car. They didn't seem to mind people watching as long as they stayed out of the way. As a result, most people walked up, looked for a while, and then left, their curiosity satisfied. In the States, there would be just as many people controlling the crowd and worrying about liability as there would be people trying to clear the wreck. The whole incident was refreshing, both in the reactions of the people who had been delayed and in how the officials handled it. I walked back to the car, showed Walendo the pictures, and not long after that, the cars started to move.

Riverlodge Motel, Nelson

Now, of course, we were in a long line of cars, with the logging trucks ahead. Everyone seemed wary of passing one another, maybe because we'd met each other in person and maybe because of the scare of the accident. Two of the big trucks let us pass fairly soon, but we got stuck driving behind one of them for a long time. Finally, we got back our nerve and passed again. We got into Nelson about 7pm, an hour later than we'd expected. It was good that we'd reserved the hotel because it didn't look easy to find a place. We were staying at the Riverlodge Motel, which was nice, and just a few blocks from the main part of town. It had a pretty big room, and was quite nice for a good price. The proprietor recommended a few places for dinner and gave us coupons, and we wound up going to one of them, the Cafe Affair.

River near our hotel

As we walked into town, we expected Walendo to recognize it from the last time he was here but he didn't recognize much. Either it had changed a lot or his memory is bad. He did recognize the river through a park near our hotel and Cobbs, a pub room where he'd stayed, so that was good.

The Cafe Affiar was a nice, casual place where you order at the counter and they serve nice sandwiches and hot meals. I had a chicken panini, he had ribeye steak. When I went to pay, I told them what table I was at, and she asked me, "You had the banana?" I said, no, that wasn't right.

Cafe Affair, Nelson

She looked some more and we were both confused until I figured at that she was saying "panini," not "banana." This New Zealand accent is hard to follow at times! (They seem to pronounce the ee sound as a short "i" sound, as in "hit," so "pa-nee-nee" sounded like "pa-nih-nih," which sort of resembled banana to me.)

The cafe had some internet terminals, so we checked mail after dinner. We'd gotten an amazingly nice note from a reader of our book, which was very rewarding. He had some questions, so we'll respond tomorrow when we have time. We walked back to our hotel a roundabout way so Walendo could find things he recognized. He found the hostel where he stayed and the square he thinks he recognized, but not the pizza place he ate at. So much has changed.

I had been hoping to find an ice cream shop on the way back, but we didn't find one. This hasn't been a good country for ice cream. I had given up, but then we went by Mobil station with a food-mart, so we went in to find an ice cream pop or candy. I couldn't find anything that interesting, but when the attendant saw we were looking for chocolate, he came out from his counter and showed us a new ice cream pop they'd been carrying and said he recommended it. He also pointed out an area of candy we hadn't noticed. Now there's something that wouldn't happen in the States! (It turned out that the ice cream pop wasn't that good, but it was worth it for getting such friendly help at a gas station food mart.)

Once back to hotel, we took stock of all the stuff we bought. Clearly we're going to need another bag for all our stuff, which we'll look for tomorrow. Tomorrow is the Saturday open air market, where we'll have the chance to buy yet more. Yippee.

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