England T20

The England cricket team are currently touring New Zealand. The first competition is three Twenty20 games, played in Auckland, Hamilton and finally in Wellington. Having lost the first match, the Black Caps were able to turn the tables on England in Hamilton, levelling the series and making the Wellington game the decider.

As an employee of the series sponsor, we had free tickets, so, after a short visit to D4 for some pre-match refreshment, a bunch of us headed down to the Westpac stadium to watch the match.

Despite losing in Hamilton after winning the toss and deciding to put The Black Caps in, England followed exactly the same tactic in Wellington. Was this to be a "that's the last thing they'll expect" -type thing, like generals ordering troops over the top in World War 1 for the umpteenth time?

Out came the Black Caps, and proceeded to put on a fairly lacklustre show of batting. No-one really got hold of the innings and the boundaries were few and far between. By the end, they'd put on 139/8. Not a big target in T20, and the England openers were able to dispose of it in 13 overs without troubling their No. 3 batsman.

Guptill sends one to the boundary

First blood to England, then. But now the ODI series starts with three games in Hamilton, Napier and Auckland. The first of these is under way as I write, with England all out for 258.

Hertz Wellington Sevens

Last weekend the annual Hertz Wellington Sevens competition came to town. This is the fourth leg of the IRB Rugby Sevens competition, which is played in Gold Coast Queensland, Dubai and Port Elizabeth (RSA) before heading to New Zealand. It then goes on to Las Vegas, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, before finishing up in Glasgow and London.

The unique aspect of the Seven competition in Wellington is that the audience get dressed up in fancy dress, and the event turns into a giant party throughout the city. Whilst the rugby is played at the Westpac stadium, many bars in town host their own parties and many people get dressed up despite the fact that they have no tickets to the actual event. The partying goes on long into the night.

I went down to the Chicago Bar on the waterfront and snapped a few of the costumes:

The competition was interesting as the traditional strong teams are now being challenged by some of the lesser countries, as rugby sevens is going to become an Olympic sport in Rio in2016. Countries such as USA are ramping up their ability, and there are some surprise contenders in this year’s competition, including Spain and Portugal. But the real surprise at the tournament was the Kenyan team, who were narrowly defeated by England in the final. New Zealand finished 3^rd, which was a disappointing result for them, having been knocked out by Kenya in the semi-final.

In the past, Sevens was seen in New Zealand as a route through to the senior All Blacks team. However the sport is evolving and the old assumptions that countries with a strong RU side will automatically be in the top echelon is no longer the case, as more specialist Sevens players are now making their way. Let’s see what happens at the next leg in Las Vegas.

Botswana Butchery

After an exhausting afternoon's rafting, we were booked into what appears to be the best restaurant in Queenstown - Botswana Butchery. We hadn't thought far enough ahead to bring smart clothes, so turned up in t-shirts and shorts. But Queenstown's a pretty informal kinda place, and in fact we weren't the only ones so attired - although a few people had put on long trousers and shirts.

Botswana Butchery

As the name suggests, meat is the main order of the day here. We started with duck livers (me) and rabbit risotto (Nicola), then both went for Wakanui eye fillet, with pinot noir & thyme sauce (me) green peppercorn sauce (Nicola). Were they good? They were bloody marvellous! We (I) wanted pudding, but by then we were stuffed (the starters had been quite rich), so I had a coffee and we called it a night there.

Kawarau River Rafting

Back to Queenstown again on Friday - we're wearing a groove in the Gibbston Highway - we first headed to the Skyline gondola for a ride to the top. We were intending to have lunch there before the afternoon's activities, but it was fully booked, so we admired the scenery instead:

Overhead, tandem parachute jumps were being launched - think we'll give that a try next time we're in Queenstown:

After stopping in the café for a tea and coffee, we headed back down into town to find a bite to eat before setting out to find the Queenstown Rafting shop on Shotover Street, to begin our white-water adventure.

The bus drove us out of town to their centre, where we changed into wetsuits and were issued with hard hats and lifejackets. Properly attired, we then took another ½-hour bus ride to our starting point. We were then split into groups, largely based on linguistic ability of the guides - there were a fair few Asian groups travelling with us as well as a French family. Our guide, Chief, gave us the safety briefing and basics of rafting, then in we got and away we went! The Kawarau River is graded 2/3 - most of the rapids are grade 2 with one 3 at the end. One of the first things we did was take a dip in the river - after the bus ride in 26° heat in wetsuits, we wanted to cool down! The river is icy cold, being mainly meltwater from the snowfields above, but you soon get used to it in a wetsuit. The biggest challenge is getting back into the boat. We made out way down through the rapids, which were quite fierce in places, but without the big drops that we'd had when we went on the Barron River in Queensland - so us "old hands" felt quite blasé about it! the final stretch is a 400 metre grade 3, which was pretty cool! We were slightly hindered by one of our boatmates who didn't seem keen on getting his paddle wet, which meant we were a bit unbalanced on each sides' rowing strength.

After the final stretch we got our boats ashore and stacked them on the trailer, and were then bussed back to the centre where we showered and changed, before getting a ride back into town. I was talking to the driver who took us back into town about the Shotover River rafting, which I had deliberately not booked as it's graded 4/5, which can be pretty hairy stuff...but from what she was saying, it sounds like it's not as scary as we thought, and she reckoned that as long as we didn't go in Spring, when the meltwater is at its highest and the river is in full spate, we should be OK...so next time we're in Queenstown we'll give that a go as well.

Mount Difficulty

In the morning we drove down to Clyde and Alexandra. Clyde is where the river is dammed to make lake Dunstan, by which Cromwell sits (having been mostly relocated out of the way of the lake).

At Alexandra, we walked along the shore of the river Clutha, New Zealand's second-longest river. On the way back, we stopped at the Cromwell lookout, which (unsurprisingly) looks out over Cromwell and lake Dunstan.

How's the serenity?

We then carried on to Mt Difficulty to taste some wines, and also have lunch, which we'd booked some time ago.

We arrived on a lovely sunny day. Mt Difficulty is in the Bannockburn wine-growing area of the Central Otago region, and is one of the better-established vineyards in the area. Well known for its "Roaring Meg" label, I tried all styles of wines before settling down with the pinot noirs, which are the speciality of the region. We lunched off a cold platter of mixed cheeses, meats and pickled vegetables, washed down with more of their wine, all very civilised and leisurely.

In the evening we chilled out under an almost-full moon.

Life is hard.

TSS Earnslaw

The TSS Earnslaw, "The Lady Of The Lake" is a twin-screw steamship that was built 100 years ago and is still running on lake Wakatipu. Previously used to transport freight as well as passengers, it is now used only as a tourist attraction, running between the dock at Queenstown and Walters Peak homestead, a high country sheep farm.

We'd booked our trip and dinner, and arrived at the dockside a little before 6, to board. Whilst steaming along the lake, we took some pictures,

Nicola finishes one beer and reaches for the next.

...including seeing down into the engine room, which is opened up so you can watch men shovelling coal into the furnaces, and the engineers about their engineering. Communication between the bridge and engine room is still via an engine order telegraph which can be seen on the left of the picture:

We arrived at the homestead for dinner, which was followed by a demonstration of sheep shearing by Bob, who told us about the history of the farm whilst shearing a sheep:

Around 9pm our ride returned:

We hopped on board for our trip back to Queenstown, and the drive back to Cromwell.

Wanaka

Boxing Day morning dawned slightly less warm than the previous day. We set off for Wanaka fairly promptly in the morning, and after parking conveniently next to the i-site, we found only two of the town's complement of cafés was open, and both were full. After walking around a bit to confirm this, we returned to the first one we'd found and saw what must have been the mid-morning rush had lessened somewhat, and we were able to sit down inside and enjoy a coffee and an Afghan.

We perused the map obtained from the i-site and set off on a walk towards Waterfall Creek. This followed the lake shore around through Roy's Bay.

We walked round the track to find, as I had surmised, that the waterfalls would actually be found substantially further upstream. 

Waterfall Creek - where's the waterfall?

There was a slipway for boats, and a few people picnicking in the area. After admiring the scenery and trying unsuccessfully to photograph greenfinches: 

There's a greenfinch in here somewhere (actually there's three)

We turned around and retraced our footsteps back to town. on the way, a pair of biplanes flew over in formation:

When we got back to town we headed for The Trout pub for a spot of lunch, before going to Stuart Lansborough's Puzzling World to meet Nicola's uncle Bruce, who lives in nearby Luggate. We'd arranged to meet here, and had a coffee in the café before exploring the puzzles - which consist of optical illusions, holograms, and other things that mess with your head, like the perspective room, the tilted house and the wall of following faces. 

Afterwards Bruce took us up to the War Memorial, from where we were able to see all of Wanaka and various other points of interest including Mount Aspiring, Roy's Mount and part of the Cardrona Pass, which we were to drive through to get back to Queenstown in the evening.

Mount Aspiring