Holiday Plans!

The Hong Kong Weather Gods deserve to be dragged off in strait jackets for their strange and erratic behaviour.  For weeks it's been 24 C one day, 8 C the next, 34 C the next, 0 C the next, 30C at noon and 13 C by sunset, and so, right across HK, beds were piled high with everyone's spring, summer, autumn and winter wardrobes because no one could work out how to dress.

But yesterday an icy wind from the North (which sounds like it should be a metaphor but isn't.) ousted our own capricious W.G.s and now the weather has settled into downright-freezing and they are, for the first time ever, factoring in "wind chill" temperatures along with the regular temperature in the weather reports.

Normally, at this time of year, we'd be whizzing off to holiday somewhere warm except, instead, we're going to New Zealand in a few days so Keith can spend time with his dad.  And yes, it's in the Southern Hemisphere and so it should be summer down there, but we're talking about NZ so it's going to be cold, cold, cold! It always is.

You'll recall that we went to NZ last Christmas and I spent the entire holiday sitting around a freezing house that no one would admit was freezing, wrapped up in blankets and reading Helen's interior design magazines while Keith, Reuben and Paul helped John install and set up his new computer. It was like endless days of watching paint dry and so I've told Keith that I will be very unhappy if this happens again and have insisted that this time I'd only come if WE DO STUFF.  Lots of stuff!

New Zealand is truly one of the world's most beautiful countries, and growing up in Fiji where constantly beautiful landscape and scenery is our idea of wallpaper, I count myself as an authority on this subject, and so it means something that NZ definitely gets my tick of approval because it's endless "chocolate for the eyes".  Yet there I was, last year, for endless days, NOT seeing any of it!

This holiday I want to go to Waiheke Island for several days, and into Central Auckland, and maybe see Great Barrier Island, although I don't really care so much if we miss that one.

And I want to go to the Auckland Museum because it's nearly 30 years since I last saw it and back then it was just soooo SAD  I want to know if they've finally got their act together!!

Back then, in the early 80s, they were clearly going through an identity crisis of enormous proportions.  Like, can you believe that they had all these exquisite Greco-Roman artifacts - including dozens of epic-sized Ancient Greek marble and bronze statues, hidden in dark corners and all facing the walls - stacked up in jumbled unsorted messes in little side rooms, while their halls were full of really icky and third-rate statues of Indian gods, all spotlit and on pedestals?

Everything on display was so genuinely bad I asked important-looking sorts to explain and was told "We don't want to perpetuate the myth that Culture is something that is owned only by Old White Men as in the Western Cultural Tradition. We want to show a more representative culture in here." which put me in a right snit and forced me to give a testy reply "Indian art has as much to do with NZ as Greek art. From what I can see, all you're doing is replacing first-rate objects obviously collected with great taste and an eye for what is good, with these truly tacky bits of tat that show no taste or relevance whatsoever.  Whoever is now running this place should be taken out and SHOT!!!"

Hopefully I was being horrible to the right people because they deserved it, but I felt really mean when we went to the next floor and saw the brand new Pacific Island Culture wing because they definitely got that right. I recall thinking "Ah, here they know what they're doing."  because the entire Pacific was represented, and in beautiful cleverly-thought-out comprehensive comparative displays that winged the viewer straight into all the different histories, societies, mores, and all that other stuff that make up the Pacific's Polynesian and Melanesian island cultures. 

And, from what I could see, our myriad Island Groups surrendered their best because every artifact was first-rate and beautifully wrought. And it's right too that we'd see this as our very own Culture-Keeping Place since New Zealand, as the largest and richest of all the Pacific Islands, should take the responsibility for showcasing everything Oceanic because the rest of us are too poor to do ourselves justice!

Kudos, Auckland Museum, at least for this part! 

As for the rest?  Mmmm?  No, wait a sec.  I loved their wing of 19th century scientific stuff; all those cases of mummified, taxidermy-ified now-extinct species and I particularly loved all those giant moas. They were very impressive.

But that was all 30 years ago, so it will be interesting to see how much the place has changed.  I think I've given them enough time to work through their problems and I'm hoping to see something great and grand and relevant and RIGHT!

So Auckland Museum is definitely on the agenda.

I'll let you know!