Yesterday we finally checked out of the tomb-like hut. I was not sorry to leave it; aside from the tomb-like bedroom and the remnant distaste from illness, it was very grimy feeling. We left Waihiki – for the first time I saw many places in daylight – and took the ferry back to Auckland, and then and an Uber to the airport to catch a flight to Nelson. Along the way we dropped the Gentleman Friend’s mother off at the bus stop as she was going to Taupo to meet a sister. Our Waiheke taxi driver had started off the Waiheke philosophy circle and was very interested in Wittgenstein so the GF’s mother had a long, somewhat struggling, chat with him about it. Struggling because they spoke very different languages in a way: she is highly trained, and he was learning for himself, so their approaches were different indeed.
Our flight to Nelson was uneventful, aside from the weirdly long queues at the bag drop off (Jetstar was the airline) and a truly horrific family – two parents, two children, in front of us. The children were very badly behaved and for one I could muster no sympathy for the parents, as they were as raucous and had not brought anything like, say, colouring books or even a phone, to occupy the children and prevent them from jumping around and shouting. Worse yet, one child did have a book, not that it was ever cracked open, and it was an abridged version of The BFG, which horrified me.
Nelson is at the northern tip of the South Island, and the landscape was immediately very different, with low yellowed hills and a far more sweeping feel than the North Island. We were collected by the GF’s aunt, a remarkable woman who appears to have lived a very interesting life indeed, including working on a California cannabis farm in the 1980s. Her partner, a very pleasant if talkative gentleman, was curiously obsessed with her past and recounted her stories in great deal, saying almost nothing of herself. It’s a very stylish house, and blissfully clean. We went down for a stroll to the Mapua wharf where I hoped to find a pair of rubber slippers to wear inside the house (as my slippers broke on Waiheke), to no avail: the only shop was a hat shop.