Heather Hapeta lives in Aotearoa-New Zealand: real travel, real adventures, real stories, real photos. Recent destinations Vietnam, Cambodia, Taiwan and Hong Kong – now NZ destinations due to COVID travel restrictions
During the school, summer holidays Christchurch was invaded by penguins. Each was designed by local artists, and numerous schools, to be displayed throughout the city as a pop-up penguin art trial.
I saw some mums with the kids as they kicked them off on a map, I also believe there was an app that people could follow too. I randomly came across about a dozen and here they are for you to see.
Like the giraffes that were scattered around the city a few years ago, these too will be auctioned with the proceeds going to the Cholmondeley Children’s Centre. (www.cholmondeley.org,nz )
Adding more photos as I continue to test my laptop and WordPress.
‘Have tea with me’ an old man indicates – I do. Muscat fish market, Oman, sailing down the Nile kung fu … Bruce Lee I believeAn NZ shag with beautiful eyesPelican in FloridaThe kiwitravelwriter, arrives on Talang-Taland Island, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. photo by Gustino from Sarawak Tourism Board, who hosted me)Peacock Fountain, Christchurch Botanic Gardens
When will you start travelling once we have COVID-19 under control or at least contained? Check out the map below-the world is a huge place.
my office map 🙂
If you’re a kiwi you’ll soon be able to travel all over New Zealander again. What will be your destination, and will it be to visit friends and family or as a tourist or traveller? What about a trans-Tasman bubble? Will you go to Australia? (or NZ)
Peacock Fountain, Christchurch Botanic Gardensquintessential Australia – a sleepy koala
If you’re not resident in New Zealand, when and where, will you start travelling to?
birding in Florida perhaps?Cycle trip in Thailand?Off to the Moulin Rouge in Paris perchance?
My belief is that tourists will stay home for quite some time however, as always, solo travellers, nomads, and backpackers, in general, will be the first onboard planes heading to exotic destinations. Backpackers, of course, are a state of mind – it’s nothing to do with their luggage or the amount of money in their bank account. They are the explorers who want to learn new things, to meet new people, see new things and of course, taste new food!
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So what places are on your travel list my bucket list is so long that at my age I know I will not be able to tick many off
Unless of course, I meet a tall dark handsome stranger who is happy to fund my travels – I’m open to that!
It’s not often I get to bird watch in the centre of the city – of course, Christchurch has the Avon River which attracts native and introduced ducks and other birds, but these little darlings are different.
About 300 critically endangered black-billed gulls (the most endangered gull in the world) have come to the city for summer. Normally nesting on the braided river beds and Canterbury they have set up camp and their nests in inner-city Christchurch, choosing a high-rent area, but pay no rent.
Their preferred, inner-city apartments, are on the site of a partly demolished commercial building one of the many (80%) quake-damaged inner-city buildings. Here, surrounded by islands of concrete and reinforcing steel, no predators are able to steal the eggs or chicks.
Some chicks, unable to fly, and used to nests on the shingle of the Canterbury Plains this high-living has caused problems. When they fall out of their nest they land in the water below, and unable to fly would drown. However, locals who are keeping an eye on them, let the Department of Conservation know and see here, life rafts have been created for them
Really busy right now so instead of words here is a photo-based blog of water from around the world – well not all over the world, just some that were already web-sized and still on my laptop.
China, India, Wellington and Christchurch, New Zealand and Florida too – which is where the mermaids are to be found.
The very first feathered signs of spring arriving have landed in my old home city. Along with the daffodils, the godwits have landed in Christchurch (New Zealand) – arriving from the Alaskan Arctic Tundra where they raise their young.
Christchurch (and a few other places in New Zealand) is where they escape the Alaskan winter and have a summer holiday while feeding up large, building up their weight and strength before heading north again to reproduce.
godwits coming into land on the beach side the Avon-Heathcote estuary
So, in a few months, this annual, epic journey by some 80-thousand Eastern Bar-tailed godwits will migrate back to their breeding grounds.
the sand dunes are alive with bird watchers saying farewell
Their journey – of 11,500 kilometres – usually takes about six days! Its nonstop when they head south while heading north they have a few stopovers in Asia
Christchurch locals farewell them from our shores and when they return the bells peal out to welcome them back to their summer feeding grounds here on the Ihutai/Avon-Heathcote estuary such a short distance the centre of our city.
Happy anniversary to New Zealand – and tomorrow morning (19th Sept) I’m attending a breakfast at Te Papa (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) to celebrate, and commemorate the women who fought for the right to vote – and look to the future too no doubt.
It’s 123 years since the woman of New Zealand, our wonderful suffragists, our early feminists, won us the ability to vote in our general Parliamentary elections. Some, but certainly not all, women had been able to vote in various non-Parliamentary elections.
Female ratepayers, that is landowners, had been voting in local body elections from 1875; two years later they could stand for school committees, then in 1893, after years of campaigning, New Zealand women, whether landowners or not, became able to vote in the national Parliamentary elections.
Annual celebrations in Christchurch 19th Sept
Our suffragists certainly led the way, with the USA, in the face of most states allowing it, granted the same right to their women in 1920 (19th amendment) then, in 1928 all women in Britain were able to vote: before that, from 1918 only female property owners over 30-yrs had been able to vote.
Given our history I get upset at the lack of knowledge by a wide swathe of New Zealand, including the media, using the term suffragette to refer to our suffragists.
That term was coined about 15 years after New Zealand women were voting therefore New Zealand women were not suffragettes. First used in a newspaper it was a derogatory term but eventually was captured by the women of the USA and UK but was and never should be used in relationship to Kate Shepherd and our women ancestors, including my maternal great-grandmother, Elizabeth Rowe: my grandmother, Mabel was born in 1893 so it has always been easy to remember both dates!
One of the great things about the 1893 Electoral Bill was that while Māori women were given the vote too not ‘just’ women with land, unfortunately, Chinese women, in fact all Chinese, did not get the vote until the early 1950s.
Suffrage day (19th November) is often also called White Camellia day, as women who supported enfranchisement wore a white camellia.
Don’t waste the courage and strength of our brave 19th century women by honouring them and making sure you always vote – it was a hard won battle, albeit very different to those in the UK in particular.
During the 2014 election Kate appears on Wellington pedestrian lights
detail of the newest Kate artwork
Two women proud their great grandmother & gt gt grandmother signed Kate’s petition
Kate Sheppards home in Christchurch . a private home now
Detail of Kate and others with the petition in the wheelbarrow
Kate Sheppard memorial behind the Council Chambers
Kate Sheppard memorial, Oxford Terrace Christchurch
As a pioneer of his time, it’s only fitting that cutting-edge technology is used to tell his story, said Christchurch Arts Centre CEO, André Lovatt. “We’ve carefully kept the beautiful heritage features but have injected the space with new energy by using state-of-the-art storytelling techniques that will appeal to people of all ages.
The original Lecture Theatre is exactly as it was – graffiti and all – which adults will love as this was how the ‘den’ was until the quake shook Christchurch (2010) and many buildings have had to be strengthened. The Arts Centre has had major work done too. It was great to sit in the old lecture theatre just as I, and my kids, have done for years. Well, it’s the same . . . until the digital screen at the front starts playing a movie commissioned by the Arts Centre. A great example of the saying ‘same same but different.’
I spot the host – from the across the road, 5 star, Classic Villa checking out the den too
Much of what Rutherford discovered all this years ago, in what was really an old cloakroom, led to the technology of today and now visitors can learn about the old with the new, in fun and exciting ways.
For more than a century, the Arts Centre site was home to Canterbury College and from 1890 one of its students was Rutherford. He was a regular Kiwi who became known as the father of nuclear physics and in 1908 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. See more about the Den here
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The kiwitravelwriter with Sam Mahon’s FOOL Feb 2016
Staying in this ever-changing, emerging city is, for me, best done by having accommodation in the city centre, so thought I’d tell you about the hotel I was hosted in earlier this year. Breakfree on Cashel (Street) impressed me as soon as I arrived as, the electric jug was easily able to be inserted under a tap for filling: why is this simple thing so rare around the world!
More and more is opening in post-quake-five-years-on Christchurch and I’m excited to be going down again in a couple of weeks – this time for the WORD Writers and Readers Festival in the newly opened The Piano Centre for Music and the Arts( official opening in Sept) at the end of New Regent St and directly behind The Isaac Theatre Royal
I thought I’d repost this piece so visitors to Christchurch know the Arts Centre needs to be on your bucket-list esp. as the Great Hall has reopened. I will be back in the city in a few weeks to check out many events at the WORD Readers & Writers festival and will absolutely be off to the Art Centre which is one of my favourite haunts.
Over the past five years, returning to the city of my birth, Christchurch, New Zealand, was often like returning to school – but the old three R’s rule of reading, writing and ’rithmetic had been replaced with different R’s – I often had to ask if it has been reopened, renovated, relocated or reduced-to-rubble. Unfortunately, with something like 80% of the inner-city, my old stomping ground, demolished because of quake damage, many were reduced to rubble or relocated.
Of course many of my favourites have another R as they remained-open or have reopened after minor damage was repaired, while a few had to close temporarily while neighbouring buildings were ‘de-constructed’.
A few of my special city-centre places in the remained open (or just closed briefly) category are, The Classic Villa; Canterbury Museum; Botanic Gardens; and The Antigua Boat Sheds.
Two months before the September 2010 quakes, a mayoral candidate said…
Kiwi Travel Writer talks food, travel, and tips 