East coast, west coast

I’m not long back from Aberdeen, where among other things I was doing some planning with Justin for September’s mullet adventure to the west coast of the USA.

We’ve pin-pointed the mullets, and have a vague route lined up, taking us from southern California almost to the Canadian border.  It will be a packed fortnight.

I must confess, however, that apart from the mullets (and seeing a few friends out there) I’m really quite ambivalent about visiting the USA, and am not too bothered about many of the sights.

Justin, on the other hand, is very enthusiastic about the trip, and is keen to track down things like Death Valley, Apple HQ, the Space Needle in Seattle, and much more.  Whether or not we will visit Las Vegas is something of a moot point between us.

He’s also set on the idea of driving through the mean streets of Los Angeles, playing “Straight Outta Compton” full-blast on the car stereo.

I’ve said I’m fine with that, just as long as it’s the Nina Gordon cover version.

Oh, here are some photos from this past weekend.

Colour

Albania is a beautiful country. I’ve been there three times and read countless books on it.

However, its beauty - best seen in the dramatic mountains and hardy people - is rugged, unkept and wild, rather than asthetic or conventional.

In great contrast to this beauty, however, was the urban architecture. From my first visit, in 1999, it was clear that towns and cities like the capital, Tirana, were in a horrendous state.

Although there were some fine buildings - including some grand Art Deco in the government quarter - the ubiquitous ugly communist tower blocks, delapidated open spaces, and a general drearyness to the city almost (but thankfully not quite) disguised Tirana’s quirky, captivating and edgy side, which I instantly came to love.

However, the past few years have seen change, and I was delighted on my subsequent trips (2001 and 2003) to see various changes for the better. One of the most obvious ones was the bold, almost garish, splashes of colour put across the brutal concrete buildings.

I was reminded of this in an article on the Al Jazeera English website about the mayor of Tirana who has been behind many of the improvements. It also brought to mind a similar article on BBC News I remember reading a few years ago.

The Al Jazeera article was brought to my attention in a recent entry on Stepping Stones, written by an Albanian-based blogger who contacted me some weeks ago about a certain place called Mullet in Albania. But that’s another story.

It made me recall my trips to Albania with fondness. I have plenty stories from that part of the world, and really must blog them one day. I have photos somewhere too, but sadly they’re all pre-digital, and I have none to hand; and no scanner anyway.

Ah well, I’ll just have to take plenty photos on my next visit, which will probably be at the end of the mullet mission, to visit that village with the amusing name…

Stunned Mullet

There’s a pub in Palmerston North, a town on New Zealand’s North Island, called the Stunned Mullet.

I heard about it while on my travels last month, although because it’s not an actual place and thus not on the list, I didn’t make time to visit it.

All I managed in my hectic schedule was to pass through Palmerston North on a bus, but had there been a bit more time it might have been nice to stop, have a drink there and take the obligatory photo.

However, one of my friends in New Zealand emailed me the other day to say that they’d recently visited the town and passed the Stunned Mullet. They attached a photo they took.

“It appeared to be quite a boring pub,” my friend wrote, “but it was a Sunday morning and apparently Palmy is a place to be on a Saturday night, so maybe it is less stunned than it looked.”

So it’s nice to know what the Stunned Mullet looks like, at least from the outside.

Besides its fish-inspired pub, there was another amusing story that people told me about Palmy.

Apparently, some years ago, John Cleese commented that Palmerston North was the sort of place you would go if you felt suicidal but didn’t quite have enough courage to go through with it.

As an act of revenge, the town named its rubbish dump after him.

TV and radio interviews

The TVNZ piece from Farewell Spit was broadcast on Wednesday night’s Close Up show, and you can also watch it on the web.  It’s quite surreal to see myself on telly, but it’s a really good piece and a nice memento of a fun day’s mullet-hunting.

And while we’re at it, I’ve also tracked down an audio file of my RadioLIVE interview with Marcus Lush earlier this month.  Sadly you can hear background noise towards the end - I was conducting the interview from a phonebox in the foyer of my hostel in Napier and of course nobody walking past would have assumed for a moment that I was doing a live national radio broadcast.  Also, as you can hear, the interview ends rather abruptly as we collide with the 8am news. 

But apart from that, it was good fun and I think I did quite well.  I also enjoyed meeting Marcus later on in the trip in Invercargill.

My inbox has now gone mad with emails from New Zealanders, which I will have to go through at some point, and my website is about to exceed its bandwidth.  I think I need to go and hide in a bunker for a while.

New Zealand pictures

Last night, I uploaded a pile of photos to my Flickr page, completing my New Zealand set.

It was a frustrating process - firstly because they were all sitting on my personal laptop (which of course is missing its wireless card), and so needed to be transferred to my work laptop and uploaded from there.

Secondly, I found that a CD that I had burned photos onto while down under got badly scratched and a number were lost - including many from the wonderful day at Motutapu Island, and the visits to Mullet Creek and Mullet Point north of Auckland. 

Let that be a lesson, boys and girls.

However, there’s still plenty from elsewhere, including Wellington, Auckland, Napier, Mullet Bay in Southland, and one of the highlights of the trip, the conquest of Mullet Channel on Farewell Spit.

Farewell Spit is a beautiful part of the world - a long finger of sand jutting out of the north of South Island, and a haven to all sorts of bird and marine life.  I was kindly offered a tour by the excellent Farewell Spit Eco Tours who’d read about my mission in the local paper, and whose website and blog gives an amazing overview of the kinds of wildlife you can see there.

TVNZ came along for the ride too, and I believe the piece they put together will be broadcast soon and will also be online.  I’ll let you know the link as soon as it goes up. 

Mullet Bay, Southland

The street names are Scottish and it’s rained more today than the rest of the trip put together - it could almost be back home.

I’m in Invercargill, where I arrived at only 4pm, yet have managed to fit in a drink with a star of NZ telly and radio, a visit to the beautiful Mullet Bay, and some kindness from some lovely people.  And the kindness of strangers has really been a major theme of this awesome trip.

Mullet Bay was a very scenic spot, and thankfully the weather cleared.  I’ve got an early start on my trip back up the east coast tomorrow, though, so will write more about this - and the whole trip - another day.

Suffice to say that I’ve bagged all five of NZ’s mullets,  and I will aim for Christchurch or thereabouts tomorrow.  If like today I manage to pick up some hitch-hikers, it should be a fun journey.

Haasta la vista

Um Bongo Kia Ora from the village of Haast, on the west coast of New Zealand’s south island.

It’s a curious place.  I picked it for an overnight stop mainly because it looked on the map to be about nine hours’ drive or so from where I started out this morning.  Which (including breaks) it was.

However, it’s not somewhere I would instantly choose to come back to.  It’s a wee place, not much life to it, and the supermarket round the corner from where I am staying is long-closed down with newspaper in the window.  Even worse, there’s no evidence of a pub.

Haast is so far from anywhere (in any direction) that I am sure it’s the sort of place where everyone is their own uncle.

That said, the drive down was gorgeous - the scenery on the west coast is spectacular, reminding me of the north of Albania (albeit with better roads and less chance of encountering wolves).  The mountains are huge, the forests lush and green, and it’s been raining heavily.  It’s like Scottish scenery turned up to 11.

I continue my trek towards the south tomorrow.  Next stop probably Invercargill. 

Mullet Channel, Farewell Spit

Yesterday’s adventure to Mullet Channel (not Mullet Creek, as I understood it to be) was excellent.  More about it later.

This is just a quick blog before I head off on my two-day road trip to the south of the island, to bag Mullet Bay.

I’ve got a pile of CDs, half a tank of petrol, it’s scorchingly bright, and I’ve lost my sunglasses.

Hit it.

Napier

A very quick hello from Napier, where Napier’s rods were invented.

It’s a nice town, but it’s currently raining so I am enjoying the excuse to stay indoors and take it easy.  And do a few media-related things…

Tomorrow (Wednesday) at around 7.50am NZ time, you can hear me on RadioLIVE.  After that I’ll be catching a bus to Wellington, and from there I’ll head to the South Island - where it looks like I’ll have TVNZ following me to one of the mullets over there.

Which will be interesting.

Mullet Bay, Motutapu Island

I have just had a quite amazing day on Motutapu Island, which is a short ferry ride from Auckland.

Not only was the island - and Mullet Bay particularly - a very, very special place, but it was made easier by the lovely people at the Motutapu Restoration Trust.

The Trust does volunteer work parties on conservation zones where they are trying to restore the forests to their natural state, and a trust member had written to me to invite me along in exchange for a tour of Mullet Bay.

Not really much of a deal in their favour - I am one of the least botanically-minded people with little clue of natural environment matters, and probably contributed little to the country’s ecological heritage in my morning’s labours; while I gained a huge amount in terms of finding out about the island’s fascinating history and of course seeing the stunning Mullet Bay.

If you ever happen to be in the area, I can well recommend giving up a day to support the trust’s work.  From reading up on New Zealand, it’s very clear that the country takes its natural environment very seriously and regards it as an integral part of its economy and even national identity, and it was great to witness the cameraderie, pride and enthusiasm of the people who help keep New Zealand beautiful.

(Cynics, of course, would point out that probably the only reason New Zealanders put so much focus on natural heritage is because as such a young country it’s the only sort of heritage they have.)

In other news, I have been sorting out more of my plans for the next few days.  They start with a couple of nights in Napier, a city in the east of North Island famous for its Art Deco architecture.

Whether it is also famous for Art Garfunkel architecture, I am not sure.

But with my first three days in NZ having been exhausting and exhilarating, I am looking forward to taking it easy.

Oh, and one last thing - here’ the photo and article in today’s Sunday Star-Times, reporting on my visit to Mullet Point the other day.