Designer gal pals, Rotoiti reunion and Coromandel Capers

Lake Rotoiti as the sun breaks through and calm returns after the first cyclone.

Summer madness in New Zealand! Gorgeous weeks of soft balmy weather punctuated by short sharp tropical cyclones ravishing the green hills and blue bays, flooding rivers and streams and creating havoc on holiday makers and business's along the coast.

Sadly for us our dear little Wee Woody sank in last Sundays cyclone. Tragedy as it was going like a dream and we had many months of fun to be had out of him. Now the trusty Merc engine is stripped down to parts soaking in a  tray of oil, the boat seats are adorning some far off beach or underwater garden! Pip and the McGregor clan brought Wee Woodster back from the deep looking very sorry and bedraggled. (Pics to come later)

 All the while I was in Auckland deep into getting a quick smart reno under way on our old home. Carpet and vinyl, tick, painter, tick, new loos, tick, kitchen appliances, not quite,  kitchen refinisher, tick, Tree shaper, tick! February is the month for all this action which I hope will transform our rather tired house into someone’s next home.

Chrissy Simmen and Sue Kirk, of interior design duo Kirk and Simmen, came to town to help me finalize colours etc, then took me on a stomp around the hotspots of Auckland fashion Monday last. First up was ‘Department Store’ in Takapuna, a total concept store put together by the likes of Karen Walker and Stephen Marr with separate floors showcasing Simon James homewares, Karen Walker, Top Shop and Stephen Marr hair and beauty. After scooping up a few goodies we sipped lime infused tea and woolfed down delicious chicken stuffed toasted sandwiches and banana bread laced with nuts and sesame seeds

Green and Glorious, the cool style of Department Store, Takapuna

Back over the bridge, Ponsonby is overflowing with unique and eclectic boutiques. Sass and Bide was full of temptation. Lovely slouchy pink jumpers teamed with snakeskin hotpants or ink streaked white maxi’s. We loved the jodhpur jeans in camel too. Along the road Miss Crabbs showings were too die for. Divinely tailored silk dresses and cobweb like hand knits reminiscent of the styles I once created for Suzanne Turley’s Downstairs boutique in Parnell circa 1977-8. Trelise Cooper’s Seconds store is the design junky’s secret. On any given day you can find a wondrous collection of rainbow coloured raiment at discount prices. We walked off with all sorts of goodies including a lovely grey damask three quarter sleeved coat.

Miss Crabb, Macy Home, Sass & Bide, Chrissy.

Newmarket is the destination for shoe shopping with more choice than I had imagined. The gorgeous dress shops of Nuffield Street and the Teed St area make Newmarche a treat for window shopping and totally disastrous for the bank balance. Country Road had some very cool clogs and very high suede sandals which sadly stayed on the shelf.

A quick dip into Martha’s to check out the linen fabrics for my house reno and we were done for the day. Phew!

Dinner at down the roat at Mama Rosa at the Melanesia Rd shops was seriously yummy. This place has been around for at least 30 years and still dishes up traditional Italian. My Terakihi with lemon and capers was fresh and delish. Chrissy’s seafood risotto was generously laden with scallops and prawns and succulent fish.

The girls had given me lots of great tips for the staging of the house by the time I waved them off the following morning.

Our catch!!; Susie and Rosie; Three bathin' maidens! in hot rock pool.

After a few hours busting my guts clearing weeds, leaf litter and the remnants of spring bulbs from the garden I joined my friend Susie for the three hour trip south to Lake Rotoiti. For the next the two days we indulged in a girls reunion with old friend Rosie at her lake house there. After a huge cyclone just days ago, the sun came old, flood waters receded and we were treated to picture perfect lake weather. Warm sunny skies. Fresh clear air. We did early morning fishing on the mirror calm lake as the sun came up. Sadly no edible results ensued, just a renewed awareness of the beauty all around. We even tried jigging on Lake Tarawera later in the day, under the instructive eye of Darren from Clearwater cruises, to no avail. We three are now mistresses of the jig however ! Not a dance, but a combo of tiny flies weighted by a sinker, danced off the lake bottom with a jigging movement of hand and rod. After a lesson attaching  lure’s the only little critter we landed was a 10cm long smelt! Along the way we learnt about the history of Lake Tarawera, its once huge volcano and the cataclysmic eruption in 1886 which buried Maori villages and the famous Pink and White terraces for eternity. The area sits on hundreds of fault lines on the Ring of Fire and is surrounded by old volcanoes. Darren talked of the next eruption here as a ‘not if’ but ‘when’ occurrence.  Might be a thousand years or one hundred. Mt Okataina is growing at a rate of one foot per year!!!! Deciding to live in the moment we three dived off the launch and swam like Maori maidens !!! to a rock pool filled with hot thermal water gushing from a crack in the rock. After languishing there we swam back to the boat for another quick fish before heading back to Rotoiti.

Okere Falls Store, store produce, our old bach, tied up at the Okere Falls jetty, little island in Okere Bay

After being abroad for six years it was a true pleasure to be back at the lake with my girlfriends. My family had a  remote lakehouse in a secluded bay for forty years or so.  I grew up half fish half boat walla, taking long walks in the bush and exploring every cove by dingy, learning to smoke illicit cigarettes just out of parental sight around the point, taking our little boat to the hot pools for dips in the thermal water, holidaying until my late teens when the house was sold. It’s still my favourite place to be, a mix of memories filled with Maori legends and spirits and ghosts of people and times enjoyed, a childhood idyll full of fun and blue skies. As I sit in Rosie’s boat visions of other times whip through my mind, of what was once but is long gone. I am filled with a sense of profound greatfullness that  I am able to come back here with my girlfriends who shared those times so long ago.

Before heading back to Auckland we stopped in to see another dear friend, Jo and her daughter Becca at their lakehouse. After quick trial of her inflatable paddle boards and a leisurely chat on the deck, Susie and I headed back to the city via the Okere Falls store for good coffee and sustenance. Visits to this old general store for milk and bread had been a daily adventure during my childhood in the sixties. Trips were made by boat, then a quick run barefoot across the tarmac holding a jerry can for petrol at the old bowser and the hope that we’d get an icecream for our troubles. Memories of the local widows standing around chatting outside the store, dressed in black with blue inked moko’s on their chins, grey hair tucked into headscarves. True pre-teen independence was the day I was allowed to take the boat and my sister and little brother to the store on my own! Parental confidence that I could captain my little boat and defy the pull of the rapids, rushing down into the falls and the Kaituna river, to tie up safely at the jetty, where the water was the swiftest running in the whole lake, was an integral part of my growth and independence as a kid. 

Now the old store has been reincarnated as a gourmet deli and café offering a stunning array of artisanal products and coffee complete with beer garden at rear and self composting toilets! Business here is boosted by the Kaituna river rafting operation nearby which takes adventure seeking punters over the Okere falls and large drop off at Hinemoa’s Steps downriver. 

Back home alone in Auckland, I survey the fine work Clive the tree doctor had done. The house definitely is starting to look trim and tidy again, on the outside at least.

Today my little family are off south again to Whangapoua to visit Vicky and her family for Auckland Anniversary Weekend festivities. With a cyclone forecast we could be in for some rough seas and wild weather.

Mac's new Gal Pal.

Mac (on left) and Maizy Wood getting up-close and comfortable tonight on the sofa.

Trip to the Far North and Kingfish lodge.

After a week spent in Auckland starting to get the reno of our old home underway, buying our new getabout wheels and catching up with our boys and my parents Pip and I headed back north to the Beach on Friday to find glorious weather, calm water and guitar strumming rellies ready to party the night away.

Saturday saw me hit the road again for the 2.5 hour drive further north to my lifelong friend's coastal property to spend her birthday with her and boyfriend Al.

Road sign, Nikau palms, Cabbage trees, wild flowers, Tauranga Bay;Visa North from Susie's deck, old wharf pilings, Susie's beach, skull.

Birthday lunch was a boat trip away from Whangaroa wharf, down the Harbour, to Kingfish Lodge just shy of the Harbour entrance. The lodge has a long history as the place for big game fishers to congregate and party once the day's fishing is done. We toasted Susie with bubbles overlooking the bay, then ate crayfish bisque and fresh snapper along with the most delish corn bread on the dining deck. (Katrina our server kindly shared the recipe with us!) We loved the relaxed atmosphere of the place and were sad when our boatman called us for the trip back to the Whangaroa wharf. There we had a quick stop into the game fishing club to ogle at the huge trophies the lined the walls. Some 456 Marlin were caught or tagged and released in 2010...which seems pretty staggering really!!! Seems like a hell of a lot of stoopid Marlin out there!

Whangaroa; View from Kingfish Lodge; Fishing boat at Whangaroa;  Kingfish Lodge; Big Game fishing boat; rooms and surrounds of Lodge; Susie, Julie and Al; Snapper with Asian sauce and curried cauliflower with grilled pineapple; Crayfish Bisque; Orange syrup cake with praline and vanilla bean ice cream.

After a quick Sunday afternoon driver home through the summer countryside, and a quick stop to remind myself how cool the Hundertwasser loos are in Kawakawa, I met up with Pip back at the beach house. Life hasn't quite ticked over into neutral yet, we are both still jobless, though I am overseeing the reno of the house so that's keeping me occupied for now. The purchase of our little car makes life easier and jobs will come!!

Kawakawa is sizzling with Hundertwassar artwork, the loos are his most famous installation here, using glazed urns and pots as pillars nd wine bottles as windows.

Dinner tonight was gathered from the sea even though the weather has turned misty and rainy. Scallops from our bay gifted by a friendly diver, Piper (small long thin fish with a beak) the boys netted below house, snapper caught by Pips brother, Pipi's (clams) we gathered on the Tuatua bank after a quick boat ride through the rain. Wash that all down with a jolly good little enzed Chardy...what more could you want. After a sundown walk along the beach, where we met our new neighbours from France who'd moved into the old farmhouse today, we finished up with Plum Kuchen, a recipe given to me by friend Dina in Toronto!


Dina's Plum Kuchen (Old Polish Jewish recipe)

Stone and halve 10 plums
Grease a quiche dish or pie dish
Cream half a block of butter with 3/4 cup sugar (2 sticks butter)
Add 2 eggs and stir in.
Add 1 cup flour and 1 tsp of baking powder and stir or beat in. ( I throw a pinch of salt in if unsalted butter is used)
Pour batter into greased dish and spread smooth,
Cover top of batter with plums, cut side down until completely covered. Start in centre and work out.
Mix 1/3 cup sugar and 1 - 2 tsps cinnamon and pour over plums to cover.
Bake for 35 to 50 mins (seems to depend on oven) at 180C until golden brown and toothpick comes out clean.
Best Served warm with 1/2 whipped cream -1/2 plain good yogurt mixed together or good vanilla ice cream. 
Can be frozen.

Farewell Canada Eh!, Bula Vinaka Fiji and a safe landing in Aotearoa!

Packed and ready to roll as the snow starts to fall in Toronto Dec 10 2010

As the snow started to fall on Friday Dec 10th, the large red shipping container, now stacked with our worldly goods was locked up ready for the long slow trip, via the port of Montreal then Antwerp, to Auckland, New Zealand.

Exhausted, from two weeks packing up ourselves, we did a final clean up of our empty apartment ready for its new inhabitant, tv host Ambrose Price of ‘the design adventures of Ambrose Price’.

Pip and I left our home of six adventurous years in North America quite easily in the end. The scent of a new adventure Downunder in our nostrils. Our last few days were spent with dear friend Roberto and his little dog Pearl sleeping on a blow up bed in his study. The last night in Canada we stayed at the airport Sheraton and simply walked across the hall to check in and out of the life we’d got quite used to. 

Picture perfect day to arrive at Bounty Island

We ended the day (albeit a rather long day that included a night over the Pacific and jumped the dateline missing out Wednesday altogether) on a tiny glass bottomed boat, gliding over bright coral and tropical reef fish towards Bounty Island, just 25 minutes via fast catamaran from Port Denarau, Fiji. 

Early morning dips, Bure 11 amidst island blooms, sunny brekkie.

 -14C and snowing one day, 30C clear pure sunshine the next. We had four days on Bounty, a tiny heart shaped tropical paradise billed as perfect getaway for the ‘alternative traveller’. Pretensions, preciousness and princesses need not disembark here. Bounty Island is the a place for dining on the sand in togs and sarong morning, noon and night, swaying gently in a hammock under the shade of a coconut palm, breathing flower scented air and chasing gorgeously coloured fish around magical branching coral reefs. Shabby chic without the chic, but totally charmed by the smiling comfort of the Fijian staff who quietly take care of all your needs.

Becoming well known for their cultural show, Lovo and Firewalking, Bounty’s Fijian staff move slowly (Island time) but are passionate about their place in the world. The Firewalkers prepare their fire of hot rocks and timber, the ceremony is overseen by an elder and follows a time honored tradition. Hot rocks are leveled and the fire spread out using long poles, then young walkers approach in an almost trance like state, toes curled upwards as they pad over the burning rocks. Showmanship to the fore as they stop for the crowd, pausing atop the rocks. A great swath of leaves and branches are tossed back on the fire after the ceremony is over.
After the show another group sang traditional Fijian songs like Isa lei, the men performing the war like club dance. 

Our very handsome guide Neve taught us about Fijian natural herbal remedies, the importance of preserving local turtle populations, the necessity for marine reserves, the need and support given to kids on outer islands for good education and scholarships to university by resorts like Bounty.

Noni berries steep in jars making a highly stinky juice used for general good health and tummy upsets.

Young, ever smiling, Matt (called me Mum because of my son Matt) was maitre d’ presiding over meal times in the open air dining room. Breakfasts were of island paw paw, pineapple and lady finger bananas, juice, coffee and toasted island sweet bread. Baked beans, scrambled eggs and porridge for those so inclined. Lunches included odd combos like spag bol with coleslaw one day, fried fish and coleslaw another. Best was the native Lovo, pork, chicken, fish and veggies cooked on hot rocks under the ground (same principle as our Maori Hangi or Umu (Polynesia) or Imu of the Hawaiian Lu'au), giving all a lovely smokey flavour. Two choices are offered for dinner each night and plated artistically. All are home cooked and tasty in the way of a good home kitchen rather than restaurant.

Plate of food cooked in underground pit. The Lovo pit being prepared.

Laid back Pete took us on a snorkeling safari in the long boat. Steering the outboard with one foot, Pete tied up to a buoy on a  reef behind Beachcomber Island. We spent an entrancing hour there floating between great towers of flowering corals, colours ranged from bright purples and soft mauve's to palest pinks, whites, sharp acid greens and soft yellows, ochres and blues. Little clouds of iridescent fish like Christmas decorations darting amongst the branches lighting up the reef. After-wards we stopped off on a sand bank for a swim. Just the two of us in the middle of the brilliant blue sea. Gorgeous.

At night the southern stars are so low down over the sea you do feel you could touch them. Sometimes we’d wake and go out onto the beach and watch the shooting stars and satellites strike across the heavens. The Southern cross just visible. Our little pitch roofed bure, twenty paces from the high tide line, with doors left wide open while we slept so we could catch the breezes and see the beach and sea the moment we woke was heaven after years of enclosed apartment living and air-conditioned summer days and nights.

Leaving Fiji is pretty hard really, it’s a place were anyone can find their comfort zone, ours was Bounty Island this time and we loved every moment of it.

Arriving home in Auckland the week of Christmas was pretty hectic. We started to feel our feet were on the ground when we picked  McGregor up from prison (Quarantine). To be honest he looked quite bemused to see us there and was more interested in rolling in the grass than re-bonding with his Ma and Pa! Don't blame him really. That huge flight and 35 nights in a pen will have to be atoned for.

Christmas Day was fun being amongst our extended families which had grown to be full of adult sized people in our six absent years. Turkey and all the trimmings were dished up across the land on a warm evening. At our house there were 17 dining at a long table outdoors on my parents deck this year.

Christmas decorations at beach house.

Boxing day saw us on the road in borrowed wheels, northbound to the Heads beach house.

Two weeks later, surrounded by Pips extended family in the north, we have now settled back into kiwi beach style, gathering our kai moana (seafood) each day, with long swims, tennis and walks to the store. Pip and Matt fish for snapper in the mornings, I’ve been gathering and smoking pipi’s (rather like clams) and shopping at local food stands for seasonal veggies.

Water sports, smoked pipi's, freshly caught snapper and the smoke box.

So life goes on in the South Pacific, summer temps range around 20C to 25C, nights are cooler and there is always a little breeze to keep things comfortable. With kayaks to paddle and a laser to sail, our trusty little runabout ‘Wee Woody’ on its mooring, fish hooks in the sea and verdant lush exotic greenery everywhere its not hard to understand why people come to New Zealand and never want to leave. (and I haven’t even mentioned the wine and coffee yet!)

Pips morning catch!

But I will at a later date but for now......OMG…we are sampling gorgeous fragrant pinot gris  (Whitehouse) and soft fruity Riesling's too die for along with chardonnays big, bold and buttery or grassy herbaceous sav’s from a plethora of boutique vineyards, most new to us. There is no need to drink wine from any other country in the world. Its all here at prices that make drinking good wines each day a pleasure. The latest trend in bubbles is a sparkling sav from Villa Maria or Shingle Peak!Very nice on a warm afternoon!

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