A leisurely morning and we packed up and left. This was difficult with my suppurating eczematic fingers, but had to be done and so was. In any case we took a taxi to the bus station, there to wait for hte bus to open. I stayed with the bags while the Gentleman Friend sprinted off to find some packed lunch for a five hour journey to come. He was a long time returning and in the meantime the bus driver, a small but square Maori gentleman, arrived and gave detailed instructions on how he envisaged the bus check-in and loading would go. I got increasingly anxious as groups of people were called up, and the thought of my ripped up fingers picking up and loading two suitcases and two carry-ons was not pleasant, but fortunately just as the driver called for passengers for Taupo, the GF returned with a tale of a bagel assembler who arranged each sprig of dill with the care of an artiste despite having been told that a bus was about to leave.
We took our seats in a rather stuffy bus, just in front of two of the pimpliest teenagers I have ever seen. Not that they were actually covered in pimples, though they were certainly a little on the spotty side. The girl was plump and pale and both self-possessed and full of complaints and a low but high-pitched barrage of ‘fucks’. The boy was gangly and dissatisfied, angry at the world, and wore a large soft cap pulled down over his eyes and when he stood he looked like an ambulant question mark. Both were full of sex and hormones.
I worked most of the way but kept an eye out the window as the scenery changed from the pleasant surroundings of Auckland to pretty-but-uninteresting farmland, to truly beautiful green hills, forests of tree ferns and puffs of white smoke from small geysers. We arrived at Taupo on the shore of a vast caldera that now cups a lake but once sent the world into an Ice Age. We found a taxi to take us to where we’re staying, a large house with really beautiful westward views over the lake, with mist and hills and even, in the distance, snow-covered mountains.
The owner is a man in his sixties who appears to have recently inherited his childhood home from his mother after her death from cancer. He is something of a Kiwi bloke, and remarked with what I gather is a fairly Kiwi mix of resignation and lightness, that his brother had died suddenly two weeks earlier. I think his mother must have also died very recently, he had that brittle air that one learns to recognise.
We strolled out for dinner at a restaurant that, well, was of its type. Immense servings, all accompained by onion rings and chips and a tiny beaker of boiled vegetables coated in a creamy sauce, with a clientele that was also quite large. It felt almost American, but the food was tasty including the desserts, so I was quite pleased with the choice. The light changed and changed over the lake, blues and silvers and reds and greens, from ice to flame to ice again. Very beautiful, this is the Aotearoa whose beauty one had heard of.