… Or does one, now? Right now, I’m in “National Park Village”, which is actually the name of the village. Right. The point is, Tongariro National Park is what Peter Jackson chose to be Mordor. Continue reading ‘"One does not simply walk into Mordor…"’
Monthly Archive for November, 2006
Page 2 of 2
I thought it was a bit cruel to leave you without any pictures, so I decided to make a sneak peek album. Ofcourse, I don’t really have a lot of time, so there’s just a few. “Beter iets dan niets” zeggen we dan. In de gallery, zoals altijd.
At 8 o’clock, Whitianga is a ghosttown with the lights on, the modern nighttime equivalent of a western shoot-out decor. Here, a three-storie building is a rare sight, a skyscraper. Endless rows of wooden houses surrounded by mowed lawns dominate. Endless, nameless suburbs, but one thing: there’s no “urbs”. This is it, the city itself, or at least what most resembles one in a 50-mile radius. Continue reading ‘Suburbiae’
November 7, 7.12 PM – Well, I survived the first few days, so I guess I’ll make through the rest as well. After Hong Kong (see the previous post) Air New Zealand flew us to Auckland, where we arrived friday 11 a.m. local time. We stayed there for the rest of the day and went to the Paihia at the Bay of Islands the next day. Continue reading ‘First days: Awful Auckland & The Beautiful Bay’
I finally left today, or actually yesterday. It’s now the 2nd, but I don’t feel like it was yesterday. Evening passed into morning without a night it seems. It’s about 17.00 here, I believe it’s 10 a.m. in Holland right now. I’m writing this from one of those “Free Internet Terminals” at Hong Kong airport. They’re unbelievably slow and buggy (I type about twice as fast as the text appears on the screen, sometimes it skips letters and if you don’t move the mouse every ten seconds the cursor will freeze for half a minute), but it works.
Hong Kong itself is a horrible, horrible city. It’s overcrowded, and it smells really funny. Imagine NYC, but with no work done at buildings or roads for 50 years, both detoriating, the former abbandoned by the citizens, the latter still in use with almost no rules to regulate the traffic, while still new buildings and roads are erected. That’s Hong Kong City. Sorry, no pictures. This hellhole thing will hardly let me write this, let alone download pictures from my computer.
Much to my own surprise I hardly have a jetlag. I am very tired now though, but our plane will leave in two hours and I’ll catch up some sleep then, hopefully. I’ll arrive at Auckland again early in the morning, and with a bit of luck my jetlag will be over ‘fore it started.
