Good news... back in December, I was contacted by the NZTransport Agency to see if I would be available to be a 'keynote speaker' on the Shiny Side Up events that run at a number of venues as a 'road show' across both islands of New Zealand. Naturally, I said yes though I had a feeling they'd ask me to do a couple of spots as a virtual presenter via Zoom.
Anyway it all went quiet till about two weeks back when they got back to me and asked if I could give a fresh presentation for all ten venues (12 talks) via Zoom.
I said yes, then thought... let's see if I can wangle the trip over - after all, it's always better to do these kind of things face to face, not least because it makes questions so much easier... anyways... after a bit of to-ing and fro-in, authorisation finally came in at midnight Burns night and after a lot of hunting for flights, we're all booked up. We're flying back via a few days in Sydney to visit friends (I'm hoping I might be able to make a side-trip to Geelong to visit Chris Hurren's MotoCAP testing facility) then LA to drop in with my brother's family.
So now I'm busily putting together a brand-new talk for the shows.
We were last international flight to land, but the onward flight to S Island was cancelled and we only got out of Auckland by hire car y'day after three days in motels in the city. Went down with food poisoning 24 hours after a BLT in an airport cafe in San Francisco and spent the first night on the loo. Next day was spend the airport waiting for a flight that eventually cancelled after loading all our bags on board.
So we missed the entire S Island leg of the tour, and after I pointed out that plans to fly up to Queenstown y'day morning, in order to collect the hire car, then turn round and make a 12 hour drive straight to the ferry back to N Island made no sense, the organisers eventually got a hire car in Auckland - an 8 seater minibus!!! Now near Wellington with friends trying to figure out what we do next - the next two events are cancelled as they are in Napier and Gisborne which are badly affected.
Footage on the TV is pretty darn awful. Unfortunately, that was the exact area I hoped to head to for our five day downtime mini-holiday.
But at the end of the day, we're just inconvenienced. People have lost homes, businesses and lives.
The news today - 8 deaths, but 4500 people "they haven't been able to contact yet". Is that as bad it sounds? There's been limited coverage here about the whole event.
Flight OK from Heathrow to SFO and bumped into Brittany, the American girl who's also on this tour - we've met before over here. We had time for a BLT in an airport bar before taking off promptly - when they started encouraging people to head to the boarding gate early 'because of the weather closing in', that was the first we heard of Cyclone Gabrielle.
Our flight in from SFO was the last to land at 6am before they closed the airport for the rapidly approaching cyclone, so our onward 10am connection to Queenstown down in the south of S Island was cancelled.
Jamie the event organiser found us a motel near the airport and got us on a flight next morning. It was mid-afternoon when I started to get stomach cramps and by evening I was on the loo, alternatively leaning over it and sitting.
I finally got a couple of hours sleep but felt awful when we returned to the airport next morning for an 11:30 flight. Everything was fine until about 20 mins before take-off when the wind got up. Something over two hours later they cancelled the flight and shut the airport again shortly after. They then unloaded all seven internal flights simultanously onto the small domestic carousel which jammed. Judy somehow got our hold bags off almost immediately but Brittany's huge bags didn't turn up for over two hours. Six hours at the terminal feeling weak as a kitten. Then it was off to another hotel, this one a slightly nicer one in the old town, where I collapsed on the bed again. I sat out the Queenstown show.
The wretched cyclone pretty much 'stuck' for two days so no flight out Wed either so a third day in Auckland. At least by lunchtime I felt good enough to go meet a chap called Terry and his wife for a light lunch, and Judy and I took a walk around the area later before a light supper.
Thursday. Jamie got us a flight to Q'town - that was where the hire car was. The next event was same evening in Nelson, back on the north coast of S Island. Only issue. We've have to be up at 5am, at the airport at 6 for a 7:30 flight that wouldn't land till 11, then find the hire car. If we were on our way by 1pm we'd be lucky. Unfortunately, since it's a 12 hour drive, we wouldn't have made it anyway, not even via Zoom. "Take your time and just head to the ferry" said Jamie, but we had an early ferry slot, and couldn't miss it since they've been disrupted too. So quite where we would have stopped for the night I have no idea!
So I pointed out that it was not going to happen. I said I'd find a car in AUK so we wouldn't have to fly south, then turn round and drive north again. Jamie finally realised the timings were just daft, and found us another hire car in AUK for Thu morning.
They are like hens' teeth this time of the year anyway, and of course lots of people have been attempting to switch from unavailable flights to driving.
So it turned out to be a Hyundai 8 Seater very much like Pingu would have been before conversion only with all the latest gadgets. Luggage vanished in it. Managed to pick it up something over an hour early, which was a good thing because we only just made it to a place called Levin (an hour north of Wellington) where we stopped with a friend an hour before I connected to the Nelson event.
We spent y'day morning having breakfast with a chap called Steve who was a NZTA guy who worked on the 2018 / 19 events - he's now a contractor, then a couple of hours planning logistics for the rest of the trip before driving the extra hour to Wellington.
The NE is a disaster zone and no surprise our Napier / Gisborne events are cancelled. Gisborne cut off. No power / cell. Water purification plant has failed. Navy delivering emergency supplies. Suddenly realised the constant sound of helicopters in Auckland was almost certainly emergency response. Passed a convoy of ambulances heading north on the road y'day.
I never know whether Jamie the organiser appreciates what I think are helpful suggestions but I've suggested all the presenters get together before one of the in-person events, and do an online 'round table' style discussion session that can be filmed, streamed, uploaded... whatever... with questions from viewers etc. to put a little extra into the event - I feel very aware I am being paid for my time here and don't want to be thought to be getting a government sponsored holiday whilst a big chunk of the country struggles.
And so... a new day. The storm's finally dissipated out to the east and the country's weather is returning to something more normal. We're going to take the train into the city - the station is four mins away - and wander the old quarter.
Looks like we'll have to hope the insurance covers the onward leg of the Air NZ flight we ourselves bought.
Wossname wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2023 10:03 am
The news today - 8 deaths, but 4500 people "they haven't been able to contact yet". Is that as bad it sounds? There's been limited coverage here about the whole event.
I imagine a lot are cut off and without power, and that means landlines as well as cell are down because even landlines mostly go via wireless transmission from the switch. But the reports are that in places the flood water rose so rapidly people ended up swimming out of windows to escape. Most buildings are single story and I've seen footage of flood water up to the roofs.
We're out of contact with a couple in Whitianga on the Coromandel. The road around the peninsula has just washed into the sea in a number of places. Gisborne on the other side of the NE coast is only accessible by sea, I gather. All the roads in the area are still out.
Just checking road closures... road between Napier and Gisborne now marked as 'closed till May 2023' and most of Coromandel is now accessible but you can't get across the top (that's marked as closed till Feb 22) nor the bottom (also closed till May) which means a huge detour...
Others appear to be clean-up operations and marked with opening dates in Feb.
On the road at last... 8 seat Hyundai people carrier - last rental car in Auckland apparently!
Have made it to the Wellington area and went on Zoom on Thursday. Now in the middle of the five day 'downtime' between events that we'd planned. We drove to the Wairarapa today and did a bit of wine tasting. We'll take the drive down to the lighthouse on the southernmost point of the island tomorrow morning, then turn inland and head up to the volcanic heartland for a couple of nights.
But things aren't good up in the NE... at least 11 are confirmed dead and more than 6000 people still haven't been contacted. There are disrupted telecommunications, shortages of freshwater and damaged roads making access almost impossible to some areas. 28,000 homes are still without power, according to the latest government announcement, and with supply chains disrupted, moving goods to those areas is difficult. Roads and power are not expected to be restored to some areas for weeks. The clean-up likely to take much longer than that.
I realised the constant sound of helicopters in Auckland was almost certainly emergency response. We also passed a convoy of ambulances heading north on the road as we headed south on Thursday. And New Zealand has also finally admitted it needs international aid.
Sounds horrendous, although when you look back on it it will maybe have morphed into an exciting adventure. Maybe the original plan to do it by Zoom had its merits, though?
All over for another year! It's been a strange trip, no question.
I've explained how due to a prior engagement in Manchester, I'd missed the first event at Invercargill, doing that one on Zoom from London.
Having landed as the cyclone built up, we got stuck there with no flight out and I left things as we headed south out of Auckland in what was said to be the last hire car in Auckland. I'd already missed the Queenstown event, and since there were no flights to Queenstown on S Island (where our original hire vehicle was waiting) for a couple of days, we simply abandoned any attempt to get to the third event in Nelson. That turned out to be just as well - the ferry broke down, stranding a couple of our presenters on S Island! So I delivered that presentation too via Zoom from just over the other side of the Cook Straight, from friends in Levin. We just about had time to collect the Hyundai, set off on the long drive there, get a cuppa on the way and arrive in time for another before I went on air.
The next two shows were scheduled for Napier and Gisborne up in the north-east of North Island, but these were both cancelled, due to problems from the cyclone. Gisborne and the wine producing area up there were particularly hard-hit. That gave us a bit of downtime, so we drove back towards Taupo and then Rotorua. We had two nights in each doing touristy stuff, before driving back down to Kapiti near Wellington for the only day-long show.
We then took ourselves back to Whanganui where we had three nights including a couple of days touring before the evening event, then it all got a bit quick-fire - Rotorua, Auckland and finally, the longer afternoon event at Whangerei.
We had some good moments - the wine tour in the Wairarapa, the visit to Mt Terenaki's visitor centre, the lake cruise on Taupo, the river cruise up the Whanganui river and the drive north along the Whanganui river road stand out - but if only the events had been organised a little earlier so that I flew out before the cyclone. Losing those four days stuck in Auckland and missing two events was very frustrating - it's all very well saying "time off" but I was very aware I was there to work.
Most of the presenters got together for a meal after the final event in Whangerei before we went our own separate ways. As a team, we all get on really well, and as each of us hears the others' presentations, we have all made little tweaks in the way we've delivered them to cross-reference what we talk about.
We had one final night in NZ in a scuzzy motel in Auckland (it looked OK on the internet) before we had to be up at 3:15 for a 4am transit to the airport for our flight to Sydney, where we were visiting friends. Since we were close - well, close in Australian terms - Judy and I took a short side trip to Melbourne. Yes, another plane. We then hired a car to drive the 60-odd miles to Deakin University at Geelong to visit Chris Hurren's lab before flying back again next morning. At least I spotted a roo in a field. We did have time for a bit of touristing including a concert at the Sydney Opera House before our second-to-last (thirteen hour) flight delivered us to our final stopover of four days / three nights in a cold and biblically wet Los Angeles with my brother and his family. Our pilgrimage to the Malibu shrimp shack had to be cancelled because the coast road was jammed - land slips.
We caught our seventh flight on Wednesday evening and landed at Heathrow about 4:30 yesterday, finally getting home just before 7pm.
I think my main memory of this trip will be 'planes, trains and automobiles'!
Seven flights (London to SF, SF to Auckland, Auckland to Sydney, Sydney to Melbourne and back, Sydney to LA and finally LA to London - It would have been eight flights if our Queenstown connection had got away).
Two hire cars (the Hyundai and a Chinese-built MG), plus one loaner (Toyota Prius).
And three train journeys (into and out of Wellington, down to Sydney Harbour and back, and of course the tube from Heathrow back to London).
