After the game we continued to head south. We were making it a long weekend because we had tickets for “Stomp” in Wellington on Tuesday. The sun was getting pretty low in the sky by the time we left Palmerston North so we decided instead of trying to make it down to Wellington that night we would find a place to stay in Levin. Levin turned out to be a pretty cool little city. We stayed in a motor camp and had nice dinner. The next day for breakfast we went to a little café that specialized in crepes for and pancakes, a split a banana and bacon crepe with maple syrup. Sounds kind of weird I know but oh it was so good. We then did a little shopping at the Saint Vincent shop in town Glenn found a nice New Zealand made wool jacket and I found a cool necklace. We then headed out of Levin and made our way toward Paraparaumu were we would be staying the night with some music friends. They had to work that day so we took our time and traveled kiwi style (stopping every few minutes).
First, we stopped to take a walk on the beach we even had a friend walk with us; one of the dogs in the house close by where we had parked decided to join us for our walk. We spent about an hour exploring and beach there were some colorful and different shells on this east coast beach. Back on the road we spotted a café that looked as like an old gothic church, we had to stop and take a look. It was a fun little café full of different knick-knacks and arts for sale. We had a cup of hot chocolate and some pumpkin kumara (NZ sweet potato) soup. Our next stop was a bush walk through some forest edging a little town, Waikanae. It was a nice trail and we could hear heaps of Tui making their guttural calls. At one point of the hike we heard a noise from behind us we stopped and turned to look just at that moment a giant wood pigeon flew passed just missing our heads. Wood pigeons are probably twice the size of normal pigeons; they spend most of their day eating fermented berries. They are then not only large but also drunk on the fermented juice so they can be hazardous when in flight. But don’t worry we survived our walk and made it to Paraparaumu safe and sound.
After a nice evening of music, good food and gab we slept well. On Tuesday we went into Wellington early to wander around the city. Since it was raining we decided to go to Te Papa instead and explore what the museum had to offer. We found out that it was Maori New Year and there was going to be a demonstration on the haka, the traditional war dance (you might have seen it performed in the movie Whale Rider or if you are rugby fans the All Blacks do a haka before each game). The demonstration was great and we learned that the haka is actually like a conversation between one main person and the rest of the group. The man that spoke about the haka describing it as a flock of birds one bird says something and the flock responds. After the demonstration we decided to go for lunch. We went to my favorite spot Cha and had a yummy noodle dish and of course some taro bubble tea for dessert. We then went back to the Te Papa Museum to see the Lord of the Rings Exhibition. It took us almost three hours to make our way through the exhibition. It was a great display of the costumes and models that were made for the movie. I was feeling a little funny at one point so we decided to take a breather I think the hobbit display had a funny affect on me—see picture below. What do you think?
We finished off our day with Stomp. It was a pretty good production but not as spellbinding as the one I saw in the Spokane Opera House. We did ended up running into two other couples that we knew from Hawke’s Bay pretty funny New Zealand can feel pretty small sometimes. It felt even smaller when Glenn spotted a guy that we had seen on TV in a program called Dancing with the Stars.
