I have experienced many things in New Zealand, have seen many places and have shown you pretty much everything in pictures and reports.
But one place I have yet always skipped. A place I knew from the beginning would be special. From which I knew right after the first visit I wasn’t done with. The one I am sitting in right now and have the great task to write something fitting about.
Napier.
Here I first arrived after I had one month in Wellington and had visited Rotorua. Here I came back often, when I lived in Hastings and worked in the orchard. Here I went in the last days before setting out to the South Island after leaving the family. Here I returned with my parents and now even with Elvis.
Here I have friends.
But that is a long story.
And you shall hear it:
Those who especially in the beginning of my time here read my blog carefully, must know about the ol’ tragic tale about my travel bag. Against all the vendor’s promises that one has not been sent to New Zealand, so that I have to travel with a substitute. So far, so bad.
My actual bag would have had shoulder straps and I am sure I would have carried it on my bag, walking up and down the hills of Wellington when I lost my way.
Yes, my first official act back then was to lose my way in Wellington.
But I sure got aid. From Klaus and Jennifer. Those two lovely ones were quite easy to get talked to and even offered to drive me to the hostel, which I accepted.
In fact I was on the other end of Wellington and not as much central as was planned.
The following is history. We met again several times in my time in New Zealand and at the moment I sit in their house at their table and sip, you could have guessed it, tea.
But only at a later stage I got to hear Klaus’ and Jennifer’s side of the story. That one is quite different from what I thought it would be.
For they didn’t coincidentally stopped at the shopping window, where I started to talk to them, but the waited on purpose for the person behind them.
As my trolley produces this monotone ‘toktok-toktok’ noise as I pulled it across the pavement. And that exact noise made them stop after a while, to see who had been following them for a while now towards the city border.
Without this sound, that my ‘false’ bag produced, they would just have entered their car just there in the next minute and would have driven off.
And, oh, what would I have missed!
I would have seen Napier as a beautiful city, but nothing beats friends in the end.
No Milford Sound or sunrise at the beach or the majestical mountains; nothing beats a get-together with friends!
Not only in Napier I found friends, in many corners of New Zealand I now know lovely houses and I am profoundly grateful for that.
This entry I will leave without pictures and thus, finish with a cliffhanger.
For in over a year, at every visit in Napier more and more pictures were shot and collected, from which I now have to pick the best, to show you this special case of a city
As to give this town its due, pictures are needed. And I’ve got heaps of them. 😉
TO BE CONTINUED!
