s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

I have decided that when I sleep, I really do prefer to do it horizontally.

The train was perfectly comfy, as trains go, and I had the little inflatable neck pillow thingy I’d wisely bought before the long flight here, and yet. I envied the backpackers, snug under their grubby down sleeping bags, asleep on each other like they do this twice a week, which they probably do.

Auckland has a spiffy new underground train station:

..which they call “the Britomart” for reasons I don’t really understand. It’s all shiny and new, and in the way of all shiny new modern underground mid-city construction is wreaking havoc with local traffic patterns.

I was supposed to pick up my rental car on “Beach Road”, so I asked some of the train crew how to get there. They laughed and told me Beach Road had been torn up for the Britomart, and didn’t exist anymore. I told them I was told to go and pick up a rental car there. They shrugged and pointed to the less-used exit from the platform. Once I’d gone up the escalator and wended my way through the maze of chain-link fencing off the construction site, I asked the station guard posted outside for directions to Beach Road. He pointed out some buildings that looked like they were probably around a mile away, and told me concernedly that it’d be a 20 minute walk. Ehn. It was a nice morning. I walked the direction he pointed for maybe a couple hundred meters before I came to an intersection with my rental agency on the other side of it. “Beach Road” was clearly marked on street sign — the road I’d been walking on. Clearly, all the construction had addled the locals’ geographic sense pretty badly.

My rental car was, of course, a shiny red Echo hatchback. Takanini, the place where the quarantine cattery is, is just off the southern edge of the free map of Auckland they had at the rental place. Luckily, a woman who was not enough of a local to have her sense of direction affected by the Britomart construction knew where it was, and showed me and the guy renting me the car which highway to take.

Car and directions acquired, I headed up a nearby hill that the guy at the rental place assured me had cafes that would serve me breakfast. I paused to snap this pic of the morning cityscape:

then perused my options among the just-opening cafes. I found one with a rainbow flag stuck prominently on the door and ordered up a bowl of porridge as big as my head, with sultanas and apple chunks, brown sugar and fresh cream. Mmmmmm…

Takanini was maybe 20 minutes south, and I stopped and got serviceable directions to the road I was looking for from one of the ubiquitous Indian-run dairies (dairies are something between a Quickie-Mart and newsagent), with the result that I drove past the Quarantine place something like two hours early. So I drove around the countryside (it was countryside around here), watched the little planes take off from the local aerodrome, and wandered through a gigantic nursery/garden center thing that made Mahoney’s look understocked. At some point, I will have to do some kind of lengthy post on local gardening. Most of the plants — even the non-natives — are unfamiliar to me, in part because of the different climate, where begonias grown in bushes, rosemary is a hedging or container plant, and there are calla lillies blooming in Auckland right now, and in part because a lot of the garden plants are things brought over from South Africa, which we didn’t see a whole lot of back in New England. My first couple weeks here, I kept trying to take pictures of different plants, just because everything here seems to have a different *architecture*, but when I’d look at the photos afterwards, they’d just look like pictures of bushes, or leaves.

Anyway, I went as far as the next town down the road — this being the bustling metropolis of Clevedon (which had two evidently competing dairies, a chemists, and a feed store, but no traffic light), where I took this pic, just so y’all could see what the land around there looked like:

Managed to get myself on the wrong road coming back & had to ask directions from some nice ladies at the Kennel Club, who despite their street finder seemed to have a touch of Britomart syndrome, as they could find the road I wanted, but not the road we were actually *on*. One of them seemed to have a seat-of-her-pants idea how to get back to the garden center, though, and that got me back to the Quarantine place.

Where I saw my cats !

They *did* remember me. Slow Top, especially, did his best to lick all the skin off my nose, and was definitely up for some social grooming. Azami took some petting, but was mostly interested in climbing me so she could see if there was a way out of their enclosure higher up. (She’s standing on top of the scratching post in the picture above — you can totally imagine her rattling a tin cup along the fencing.) Rasputin, poor thing, was pretty clearly unhappy — he kept his tail tucked for most of the time I was there, and only after I’d hung around for an hour or so did he start acting more like himself, picking at my shoulder and chirping. I can’t wait to get him to the apartment so he can settle in. They *all* fully expected me to let them out. “Great ! You’re here ! You can work the door ! …Um, the door ? Hello ?”

It was great to see the cats, but also weird and jarring. I haven’t been talking to them on the phone, or emailing them. So it felt kind of like there was this part of the life I had, the life I don’t have anymore, that had suddenly appeared here, in the middle of my new life. Later in the day, I’d remember visiting them and it would feel unreal. It still does. In a couple of weeks, they’ll be here with me. A few weeks after that, Stephen will finally be here. But… I miss my old life. I wish the rest of it could come here, too.

Visiting hours only last until 1:30 (which was just as well, since the cats, having gotten over the excitement of my visit, and having determined that I wasn’t going to be letting them out, were piling into their cosy heated bed to continue their interrupted flob), so I drove back into Auckland to hang around and maybe see some stuff. My dance teacher suggested a couple of places to shop for shiny things, which I did indeed find, despite the fact that they were on what was described to me only as “K’road”. (Stephen and I had found K road — which is short for Karangahape — on our last trip. In fact, we bought a sari for Maura at one of the shops my dance teacher pointed me to.) Also found this open air market in one of the civic squares:

It’s not as obvious in the photo as it is in person, but that shiny building at the back with what look like retro space rockets on the front of it is a cinema. Also took a spin ’round Victoria Park Market, which I vaguely remember wanting to check out the last time we were here:

After that, there was a lot of driving around in search of dinner. I really wanted a sit down dinner in a proper restaurant, but I couldn’t find where they were hiding the proper sit down restaurants. (I *did* drive past the New President hotel, where Stephen and I stayed when we were here.) I ended up back on K Road, and ate at a Turkish kebab place for the sole reason that one of the guys who worked there was smoking a shisha out front. (He admired my hat — thought it was Kurdish, in fact, which is funny considering a guy at Victoria Park earlier had decided it was Thai.) Then I took the car back, and found the entrance to the Britomart solely because I’d walked out of it that morning and marked where it was — not much for signage. Still had a couple hours to kill before the train, so I walked out the other end of the station and found myself on Queen street, at a little shopping mall where Stephen and I had eaten breakfast at “Muffin Break”, waiting for a brief shower to pass. Stuck my head half-heartedly in a couple of tourist shops (greenstone is cheaper in Auckland, I note), then wandered back to the station where the guard (who’d seen me go out) asked if I needed help, since I seemed to be wandering aimlessly. Told him I was just bored, then he and I helped a Japanese exchange student and her host mother haul her luggage down the steps into the station (since the entrance wasn’t complete and only had stairs for the first flight down).

The train back was largely uneventful, except that I seemed to be the only person on the platform interested in helping young Japanese girls with too much luggage (another one showed up with a gaggle of overburdened friends and a very large cardboard box). Definitely good to get back to Wellington (which is lovely in the morning light — must try and get pics), and to my horizontal bed.