There's a Light... in Hamilton, New Zealand

On this trip I was hosted by Tourism New Zealand.

As the poet John Whitter famously wrote:  

For all sad words of tongue and pen
The saddest are these, 'It might have been'

I was thinking of those words as I stood in Embassy Park in the New Zealand city of Hamilton last month. For before it was a park, this rectangular space off the main street contained the Embassy Theatre.

Opened in 1915, the theatre was used for stage productions and other public event for many decades, until the stage was removed and it became purely an ageing cinema.

By chance, this era coincided with the arrival of Richard O'Brien, who would later create the musical The Rocky Horror Show and its movie spinoff, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

O'Brien at that point was cutting hair for a living, in a barber shop housed within the theatre building. As a result, he caught a lot of late-night double feature movie screenings - an experience which acted as inspiration for his gender-bending musical which drew heavily on that B-grade material.

The actor/writer became famous when the musical and movie became international hits in the 1970s. But I don't think the upright burghers of Hamilton were entirely proud of the highly sexualised stage and movie output of their once local lad.

For the Embassy Theatre closed as a cinema in 1989, and then - get this! - was demolished against protest in 1994, when the work it had inspired had already been a phenomenon for two decades.

Imagine if the creaking old cinema had survived, and had been refurbished by the city into a small cinematic arts centre. Nowadays Hamilton could have a wonderful old cultural asset in its heart, perhaps drawing visitors from everywhere for a weekly Rocky Horror Picture Show screening at midnight Saturday.

Belatedly there's been recognition of the one that got away, and the park where the cinema once stood has been transformed into a celebration of the musical and film. It contains a prominent statue of O'Brien as the character Riff Raff, and various other quirky features including sound and lighting.

It's a fun place to visit... but ah, what might have been. As they sang in the musical:

Rose tints my world
Keeps me safe from my trouble and pain.

Embassy Park is at 218 Victoria St, Hamilton, New Zealand. See the live camera feed at riffraffstatue.org.

The Pancake Rocks of Punakaiki, New Zealand

On this trip I was hosted by Tourism New Zealand.

The day after I arrived at Greymouth on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, I was taken to the Pancake Rocks. This geological feature in tiny coastal Punakaiki is a standard feature on the local sightseeing list. As it was a wet and windy day, I hoped it would be worth the trip and not deserve Dr Samuel Johnson’s infamous line about the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland: “Worth seeing, but not worth going to see.”

Luckily, it was worth visiting. At first glimpse I assumed it was simply a set of eroded rock formations, a sort of scaled-down version of Victoria’s Twelve Apostles:

But once we left the vehicle and started walking along the circular track which grants views of the rocks, I started to see what the fuss was about. Not only do the rocks present interesting craggy shapes, but they’re constructed of multiple horizontal layers (hence ‘pancakes’):

It’s an intriguing feature. Even better, according to signage along the path, scientists have no clear idea how the rocks happened to form in this very specific way. It’s nice to think there are still wonders in the world.

The path winds in such a way that new views are regularly revealed as it twists and turns above the ocean. At one point, looking back, it appeared as if the ruins of a great ancient city were standing above the water: 

In addition to the formations, there’s the attraction of the turbulent ocean which sloshes around them, forced up through blowholes, and crashing powerfully through surge pools such as the one below:

The Kiwi sense of humour is never far away, even in the midst of such natural grandeur. This set of formations was given extra meaning by the sign in the foreground, ascribing animals to each rocky outline:

Once you’ve seen that rodent on the right, you can never go back.

Wine on Waiheke Island, New Zealand

On this trip I’m being hosted by Tourism New Zealand.

On our first afternoon of this New Zealand trip, Narrelle and I hopped on a ferry from the Auckland CBD to Waiheke Island. This pleasant spot is about 30 minutes away across the water to the northeast, which makes it a perfect spot for a) commuters to escape the stresses of city living; b) travellers to get a taste of island life.

“Taste” is a well-chosen noun here, as Waiheke is well known for its wine. We were meeting the Wine of Waiheke tour at the dock, which would take us to three wineries over 3.5 hours.

We were picked up by minibus by guide Jill, who’s lived on the island for many years. Aboard we had 15 tour members from a wide variety of places: Australia, the UK, the USA, Canada, the Philippines, South Africa and Colombia. I like that friendly “temporary community” vibe you get on a tour with a good crowd, and that was happening here. As the afternoon wore on and we sampled more wine, we swapped stories and learnt everyone’s back stories.

First stop was Mudbrick, one of the first wineries on the island. The name came from its original mudbrick buildings, but the place has developed greatly since then and is now a complex involving a cellar door, restaurants and a rooftop terrace with views. That’s where we had one of our wines, a tasty syrah, which we enjoyed as the wind whipped up.

Next stop was Cable Bay, a winery named for the nearby body of water which connected the island’s communications cable with the mainland. The wine I liked best here was their viognier, and our wines were accompanied by an excellent spread of cheeses. At the end of the tasting session we had a look at the atmospheric cellars and their barrels. 

The weather was getting dicey as we headed across the island to our last winery, Te Motu. As she drove, Jill told us some background on the island’s history. 

I was curious as to why one of its towns is called Ostend; it was obviously a link with Belgium, but was it named after an early settler from that country? In fact, as Jill explained, a group of New Zealander ex-soldiers who had fought in World War One had been given land to settle on the island, and it had been named Ostend in memory of those who had suffered on the Belgian front in that conflict.

At Te Motu, we were met by the winery’s “concierge” Skipper, a friendly dog who stayed with us for pats as we were enjoying the tastings. My favourite here was a rosé.

By now we tour members were on thoroughly chatty terms and knew almost everything about each other; but as always on these occasions, it was time to part. A quick drive back to the ferry terminal, and we were on a boat back to Auckland. 

It was a brief introduction to Waiheke but I’d like to come back on a more leisurely schedule; maybe stay over for a few days and use its hop-on-hop-off tourist bus service to see the sights. And to sample more wine.

For details and bookings for the Wine on Waiheke tour, visit its website.

Walkways of Wellington, New Zealand

This article was the very first I had published as a full-time freelance writer, and appeared in the Christchurch newspaper The Press in early 2004. As it never went online and is still relevant, here's a lightly rewritten version. The trip was taken at my own expense.

If you want to let yourself go and expose your inner tramp, you ought to head for Wellington. But it’s not what you think – 'tramping' is the Kiwis' term for hiking.

Walking is one of the great attractions of New Zealand: including treks through stunning landscape, sleeping in huts or tents, living rough in the company of nature.

But if you’re an urban kind of person and the great outdoors doesn’t appeal, you can still get in some walking and be at a restaurant or theatre by sunset, if you’re visiting Wellington. This hilly city has a series of walking tracks, or walkways, running through its green spaces.

Upon the founding of the city in 1839, extensive swathes of land were set aside for the recreation of the inhabitants. Although areas of this 'Town Belt' have been chipped away since then, it’s still an impressive amount of greenery.

The three major Town Belt trails are the City to Sea Walkway, the Northern Walkway and the Southern Walkway. All of them have their attractions, running variously past botanic gardens, historic sites and scenic highlights.

The Southern Walkway is the most varied and interesting. Starting at Island Bay, it meanders north through hilly green space above the city, then descends to the attractive harbourside beach at Oriental Bay.

Along the way, there are impressive views of both the city and the south coast. The walk is tranquil in parts like Mount Victoria, where several Lord of the Rings scenes were shot, then becomes wild along the coastline.

Since the walkway is so close to civilisation, it’s easy to break it down into smaller sections, using public transport to get there and back.

I set out on a good five kilometre tramp from Island Bay. The sea is stunning here, a stretch of pale blue-green dotted with islands. The most significant of these is Tapu Te Ranga, known in local Maori legends as a place of refuge.

Its name means 'Isle of Hallowed Ways', distinctly classier than the names given to it by European settlers: Goat Island, then Rat Island.

From here, the walkway hugs the coast to the treacherous waters of Houghton Bay. Along the way, I saw an unusual selection of houses hugging the hillside just back from the coast. Wellington is hilly almost everywhere, so local architects have been inventive. Triangular buildings, thin tall buildings, and steep steps slot into the landscape.

Then the walkway climbed through Sinclair Park. To my mind, 'park' means a stretch of lawn framed by cultivated plants. But this was bushland, thick with trees and often steep. The payback was the impressive set of views on the ascent, with Cook Strait stretching out below.

I eventually reached the top of Mt Albert, 178 metres above sea level. From here, the city stretches away in all directions. To the east is Wellington Airport, with its regular flow of aircraft, looking ridiculously small from this distance.

On either side are the waters of Wellington Harbour and Cook Strait, and northward lies the city centre, sprawled across the flat land known as Te Aro. On a clear day, the walker can see the mountains of the South Island from here.

From Mt Albert, the trail descends, eventually squeezing between the mountain and a solid-looking fence. I was surprised to see apes wandering about on the opposite side. Then I realised this was Wellington Zoo.

It’s also the halfway point of the Southern Walkway. Feeling that five kilometres of occasionally steep walking was enough, I called a halt and checked out the wildlife. The zoo houses some distinctive New Zealand creatures, including the tuatara, kiwi, mopoke and weta.

I'd had enough walking, and caught a bus back to the city centre.

Installed in one of Wellington’s many cool cafes, the tired tramper composed a postcard home, recounting the perils and ordeals of hiking in New Zealand. While enjoying that cafe latte I’d so richly earned.

Maps and other details of the Wellington Walkways are available at this link.

Buried Village: Te Wairoa, New Zealand

I visited Te Wairoa in 2011 courtesy of Tourism New Zealand.

Just outside Rotorua in attractive green hilly countryside is the former village of Te Wairoa.

I say 'former' because it was buried in mud by the massive eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886, just 3 years after Krakatoa famously blew its top off Java.

The village then lay hidden for decades, before being excavated. Now the partly reconstructed buildings sit within beautiful green grounds, accessed with the aid of onsite guides. There's also an excellent museum within the 1930s tea rooms, where visitors can have lunch.

It's a surprisingly interesting and engaging slice of a terror-filled moment in Rotorua's 19th century life.

It's also a glimpse into the early days of mass tourism. In its heyday, ladies and gentleman were rowed across a lake from the village to bathe in terraced thermal pools.

These were sadly destroyed in the eruption - after the alleged sighting of a ghostly Maori war canoe as an omen of doom.

I visited Te Wairoa in 2011. Here are some photos I took of its fascinating remains...

For more details about Te Wairoa, including opening hours and entry fees, visit its website.

Cacao & the Writer: My Chocolate-Coated Travel

In my work as a travel writer, there are recurring themes.

One of them, I realised the other day, is chocolate.

I was writing a chocolate-related travel article for a major publication, in this case related to London. As I typed, a reference to cacao reminded me that I'd seen a cacao pod in person in Borneo, when I'd visited Malaysia in 2009:

This got me thinking about other times that chocolate had featured in my travels.

In 2010, when Narrelle Harris and I were travelling through Hungary, we dropped into the classic Budapest cafe Gerbeaud. My order was a csokoládé kávé, coffee blended with hot chocolate, amaretto and whipped cream. Alongside it was a perfectly formed slice of Sachertorte:

In May last year I was introduced to great Middle Eastern chocolate, not something I'd been expecting after the terrible chocolate we used to endure when living in Egypt in the 1990s. These locally handmade beauties were on sale at the shopfront of Salma's, a chocolatier in Muscat, Oman:

Closer to home, in 2007 I visited Adelaide and went on a tour of Haigh's chocolate factory. This South Australian brand has several outlets in Melbourne, and it's hard to resist its dark chocolate peppermint frogs. This was the factory shop:

In 2012 I travelled to Quebec City, Canada for the first time and was delighted to discover the Érico chocolate shop and museum, whose exhibits including chocolate clothing:

On the other side of Canada in 2013, Narrelle and I visited an excellent chocolate maker and cafe in Gastown, called East Van Roasters:

And while travelling on the South Island of New Zealand in 2011, I stopped with some colleagues for lunch at She Chocolat, a chocolate-making business with a restaurant overlooking beautiful Governors Bay:

So what's the chocolate-related story I'm writing at the moment? Can't tell you... yet. Follow me on social media (see the links in the right-hand column) to find out when it's published.

I will reveal it has a historic context... and this is how it ends up:

Tasty.

Mind the Gap: The Novel & the Art of Travel

Two days ago, my debut novel was published by Harper Collins. Entitled Mind the Gap, it's a fast-paced adventure novel spanning continents and worlds.

To give you some of its location-hopping flavour, here's the official blurb:

Darius Ibrahim is not having a good week.

He's been threatened by a knife-wielding maniac on a London train, interrogated by a mysterious warrior woman beneath the city's streets, pursued by a military death squad in Melbourne, had his new girlfriend kidnapped and held hostage in Prague, and been captured and taken to another world.

And it's barely been three days since his life started to fall to pieces.

On top of all this, he's developed a bizarre ability that allows him to teleport in quite unusual circumstances - an ability that several deadly enemies will do anything to gain control of.

In a desperate struggle involving alternate worlds, Egyptian mythology, ancient prophecy, malevolent felines, underground railway stations and the power of dreams, can Darius long survive the arrival of his newfound power?

It's great to see it finally out there under the umbrella of a major publisher.

An interesting fact is that I started writing this book over ten years ago, during my final, unloved, salaried office job. To keep myself sane, I wrote 500 words a day at work, and emailed them home to myself.

By the time I visited Wellington, New Zealand for a holiday late in 2003, I'd written 15,000 words or so. In NZ I wrote a good chunk more, and it became inevitable that I'd actually finish writing the whole damn thing.

There's a lot of travel in the book, and it inevitably reflects the places I'd travelled to by the time I started writing it.

So Darius, the hero, starts off in London. In fact he's riding the London Underground the first time we see him, and the Tube and other underground railways play a major role in the plot.

The Tube fascinated me from the first time I rode on it. Dating right back to the 1860s, it seems to be a vast creature with a personality all its own - and a subtle air of mystery in its subterranean tiled passages.

He then pitches up unexpectedly (read the book to find out how) in Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne is my adopted home town of 16 years now, a city I love passionately.

It was an absolute delight to include some of its attractions - its trams, its alleyway bars, its majestic State Library - as part of Darius' only relatively quiet interlude.

He next appears in Prague. In 2014 that's a city I haven't visited for 21 years; but back in 2003 it was relatively fresh in my memory and I had fun placing spy-like intrigue, a kidnapping and a dramatic chase scene among its beautiful cityscape of elegant spires.

Our hero is then snatched away to Terra, a parallel version of Earth in which magic is an everyday part of life. The city he ends up in, Kahe-Ra, is a parallel version of Cairo, in which I lived for two years in the 1990s while teaching English.

The parallel name borrows from the Arabic name for the Egyptian capital, El Qahirah, and hints at the name of the ancient sun god Ra. Egyptian gods feature significantly in the plot, as it turns out.

Terra's Bubastis takes the same name as its Earthly counterpart (now an excavation site), which was a centre of worship for the cat-headed god Bast. She is also key to the plot, much more so than Ra.

Rome features later in the book, as does its Terra parallel Eternus (a play on the "Eternal City" nickname). I'd visited there only two years before commencing the book, so memories of its piazzas and ancient monuments were fresh in my mind. As was a cat refuge set among old broken pillars, something I couldn't resist adding to the story.

It was a lot of fun slotting my fictional characters into those oh-so-real streets I'd visited in the years before, and a chance to relay the cities' distinctive charms to the reader.

I only became a travel writer in 2004, so there are a great many new places I could include in a sequel. For plot purposes they should ideally be cities with underground railway systems, so that could take in the likes of Warsaw, Berlin, Shanghai, Montreal, New York, Los Angeles and Sydney.

Sydney's defiantly retro Museum station keeps asking to be placed in the sequel each time I pass through it (as I did a few hours ago on the way to Sydney Airport).

But so does Kings Cross station. Yes, Kings Cross has potential. Time will tell.

Mind the Gap is available from your favourite ebook retailer for a mere $2.99. You can find more information and download links by clicking here.

Christchurch: A City on the Mend

I've spent the past week in New Zealand, and my first stop was Christchurch as part of a group of journalists invited by Tourism New Zealand.

It's been a mere eight months since the major earthquake which devastated its historic city centre, so I was interested to see what the situation was like now, especially for travellers who might like to visit. 

There was little visible evidence of quake damage on the way from the airport through the Christchurch suburbs, but as we reached the centre we started to notice buildings which had bracing applied to their exteriors to stabilise them, awaiting repair.

Here's an example, a building in the Arts Centre which was once part of a university campus (you can see one of its spires sitting on the ground on the right):

Further on, we reached the edge of the 'Red Zone' to which entry is not possible, dotted with buildings awaiting demolition. Here the vista was more startling, with half-collapsed shops in the foreground and the ominous leaning tower of the former Hotel Grand Chancellor at the rear:

However, among the wreckage there are already green buds of hope and renewal. Just after we left Christchurch, a section of shopping mall was reopened in an ingenious set of shipping containers re-engineered as temporary shops. And over the coming months the Red Zone will steadily shrink, to be replaced by a proposed new city centre with a pedestrian-friendly layout and better integration of the Avon River.

Speaking of which, just a short walk from the Red Zone, the famous punting on the river continues to be a popular attraction. We joined a boat, and passed the happy punters you can see below:

Our next stop was the Banks Peninsula, an oval-shaped promontory which juts into the Pacific from the eastern coast of the South Island. On the way we stopped at She Chocolat, a chocolate-making business with a restaurant in a beautiful setting overlooking Governors Bay. Its timber premises had stood up remarkably well to the force of the quake. Here's a (tasty) selection of their output:

The Banks Peninsula is a collection of ancient volcanic craters, smoothed by the passage of time and with some very attractive scenery. Here I am at a popular lookout point:

In the centre of the peninsula, on a long harbour which stretches in from the Pacific, is the town of Akaroa. A beautiful holiday village, it was founded by French settlers in 1840, at almost the same moment that New Zealand was claimed by the British. They stayed on under British rule, and you can still see some French elements about the town:

 

The next day we headed into the harbour on a dolphin-spotting cruise. As we located them outside the harbour mouth in rougher seas, it was a somewhat queasy experience for me. But hey, the diminutive and rare Hector's Dolphins were cool:

Finally, we climed the hills behind the town to visit the 19th century Giant's House, originally a grand residence for the first bank manager in Akaroa. Over the past few decades its gardens have been transformed by a local artist into a riot of colourful statues with a mosaic finish. It's an amazing place, popular for weekend visits and B&B stays:

 

Overall it was an interesting few days in and around the quake-rocked city. As the aftershocks have subsided, the city is tackling the damage with great heart; and with less affected places such as Akaroa within reach, Christchurch does seem like a place that travellers can now visit and thus contribute to its return to normality.

Disclosure time... on this trip I travelled courtesy of Tourism New Zealand.