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More scenery outside our backpackers in Napier. This, a blue and green glass covering over the sidewalk. We finally, after a few days, decided to make our way to the Napier Tourist Information Centre where they had some nifty Maori-looking sculpture stuff. Or at least I suppose it was Maori-looking. I'd guess they could put any sort of interesting-looking sculpture there and I'd assume it looked like Maori art. A bit later, you'll see rock carvings done by some Maori folk in just the last couple of decades. Doesn't seem like there's much history here in New Zealand. It's all quite in the present. To me, this isn't such a bad thing. Wow. It's the Sound Shell Loo. What a great thing to have a sign for. A loo. Fenny and I decided to do some shots together. With the Maori-looking sculptures and on the beach. These waves were quite high and could probably break over your head should you decide to stand close to them. Some Asian guys and girls actually did run out into the sea and have the waves break over their heads. You could tell that they considered the water quite cold. I've never visited anywhere outside of Mexico where the water is warm enough to be pleasant. Pictures of the ocean. These are in case you missed the pictures of the ocean before. I know that sometimes I don't take enough pictures of waves breaking out from the ocean onto the beach. So just to make sure, I've taken many pictures for you. Fenny was quite bored with all the beach and park visits and wanted to go see sheep being sheared or skinned and being turned into capitalist product. So we packed up a bunch of snacks and water, and headed out to a local sheep skinnery (okay... so what do you call a place that takes shipment of many sheep skins and turns these into product?) We arrived about 1.5 hours early and decided it would be best to go to the... BEACH! So we hiked until Fenny was suitably hot and tired, but we hadn't arrived at the beach yet, so we settled on a lake with some shade. Fenny says it wasn't a lake. It was a beach. Fenny says this is very boring, and I should write exactly what it was. I think actually it was a harbour -- so the water would be salt water, but it was quite like a lake its behaviour. We watched children play. It was all good. This is Fenny and I sitting at the harbourfront eating sandwiches and thinking happy thoughts. See our happy faces? We were in the shade, and it was all quite pleasant. After some 1.5 hours, we made our way back to the little sheepskin factory to take a free* tour! We met up with some other tourists and began viewing the wonderful process of tanning and cleaning and drying sheepskins. Here a man examines someone else's hands. The Kiwis have a sense of humour, after all. Here is a little pair (pair?) of sheep jeans, drying alongside the sheep skins. Trivia: Don't dry your sheepskins in direct sunlight like this. Only proper sheepskin tanning factories have the right facilities for recovering from a sunlight-drying session. Fenny and I wanted to get a picture of us in front of the rare blue-fur sheep's skins. Here are some shots of all the sheepskins inside the factory. The man estimated they had about 16,000 sheepskins here. Here are more shots of all the sheepskins. Fenny demonstrates where you should be looking if you want to see all the crazy sheepskins. Did you look? Did you look at all the sheepskins? Well, look then! Notice this sign on the door saying this isn't the bathroom. I guess they got the question enough that they got all smartass and put that it's "King Arthur's Throne" on the door. This was the final part of the tour, where the employees tried to convince you to buy dead sheep bits. It seemed to work. Fenny bought some fuzzy little sheepskin booties to keep her feet warm in the freezing cold Wellington winter nights. Fenny is actually thinking of buying these to wear in the United States when we get there. It took us at least 45 minutes, but maybe like an hour to get to the sheepskin factory in the morning. Now it was a hot afternoon with the blazing hot moon shining down on us, and we needed to work our way back to the Criterion backpacker hotel again. We stopped on the way to take some pictures of a truck dumping ice onto a boat. We stopped in other interesting places for photo opportunities. There were some sticks sticking out of the ground, and some rocks, and some ships, and all sorts of photogenic things. At this point in our journey, we were still about an hour from the backpackers. We did not know this at the time, so our spirits were still high. We noticed on the top of a distant hill a strange object that looked just like a tree, but was HUGE. I tried to take pictures of it. Unfortunately, it looks more like a dark blob than a tree in this picture. The limits of technology. Later, when we were leaving Napier to go to Taupo, we saw the tree up closer. I caught the drama of a big cargo ship turning to go into the harbour in these photos. Nothing to note here, just looked interesting. We finally got back to Criterion and relaxed for an hour or two and when we finally felt rested, we went back out to see the last interesting parts of Napier. This was a little garden park that was on the way to the Last Interesting Parts. Here was one of the Last Interesting Parts of Napier. It was a big dinged-up reflective circle thing on top of a blue arch. Read the sign... Did you read the sign? Something about the millennium. It was boring enough that I didn't devote the energy to trying to figure out what it was saying. For me, it was just a cool-looking silver circle on top of a blue arch. The last of the interesting things in Napier. It was a statue called "the Spirit of Napier" or something the like. A statue of a nude woman on top of a fountain. It's pretty nice, anyway. The sunset. |
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