Clive is going to do a post about our time in Taupo but in the meantime we’re going to jump ahead a bit. I’m too impatient to wait for him – not like me eh?
We ended up flying from Auckland after the semis (the less said about those the better) down to Nelson where we rented a car for our week on the South Island. We spent the afternoon in Nelson, checking out the art deco cathedral which was a little grey and depressing for my taste, and then heading to the Founders Heritage Park which is a replica historical village where you can also sample the local organically certified brews which were quite delicious. We happened to be visiting at the same time as an exhibition of urban art with pieces from Banksy and others of a similar school – I haven’t seen a great deal of this type of art and I don’t pretend to understand the meaning behind all of it but the exhibition was fascinating.
One final piece of important business we had to attend to before we left Nelson was to visit a location of extreme historical importance – the site of the first ever rugby match in New Zealand, which was played at the foot of Botanical Hill on 14th May 1870 where Nelson rugby club trounced the lily-livered pansies from Nelson College 2-0. For those of you that don’t follow rugby, Clive and I are striking a ‘line out’ pose in the photo below.
From Nelson we drove to Picton along some of the most stunning coastal road I’ve ever seen (our photos don’t even come close to doing it justice). Picton is nestled in one of the many bays formed by the various fjords that are part of the Queen Charlotte Sound on the NE coast of the South Island and the views are breathtaking. We were hoping to do some of the famous Queen Charlotte track while we were in the area, which you can walk or bike, but the weather on our one full day there was awful so we had to knock the idea on the head (we’ll be back) and instead we headed down to Blenheim and the South Island’s wine country – hoorah!
On the way to the wineries and because the weather as still awful we decided to stop in at the Omaka Aviation Heritage museum which has a good portion of planes from the personal collection of Peter Jackson who also helped design the exhibit. The result is an incredibly engaging display of original and replica first world war fighter planes made from wood and fabric which frankly boggle the mind. One of the most famous displays depicts the downfall of Baron Von Richthofen, the infamous Red Baron, including the original canvas swastika that was cut from the wing of his downed plane. Another that sticks in my mind shows the different ways that the two different sides in the war solved the issue of wanting to mount guns to planes that were flown by one person and were powered by propellers at the front. How to prevent the pilot from shooting his own propellor?! One company completely changed the design of the plane and mounted the propeller behind the pilot which frankly looked very odd but in my opinion was preferable to the second option of relying on a design that set the timing on the machine gun to ensure that it missed the propeller blades, at least most of the time…
And then it was time for wine tasting, probably one of my favourite pastimes 🙂 We head first to the evocatively named Spy Valley winery (you can imagine why we headed here first) where we tasted about 8 of their wines which were frankly delicious, made all the more frustrating by the fact that we couldn’t buy much because we’d have to drink it all before we left NZ. From here we went for lunch at the Herzog winery where we ate delicious pork belly and lamb in a formal garden in the sunshine which had finally appeared. Simply blissful. The pork was nearly as good as Mum’s it was that good. Another glass of wine with lunch then some more tasting at St Clair via a detour for some handmade chocolate at an unexpected chocolate factory stop meant I was pretty tipsy by the time we got to Cloudy Bay, the final stop on our tour. We rationalized our multiple purchases here by making them gifts for Clive’s family in Queenstown – there’s always an excuse if you look hard enough.
boltsintotheblue 
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