The bus left Edinburgh at 8-ish.
I get the idea that they’d have liked to have left earlier, but some people had been told to go to the wrong place for pick-up, which complicated things.

There were also a couple who had misread the date on the ticket, but they managed to fit them on anyway.

This image, I think, illustrates why I didn’t take many pictures from the window of the bus, despite having a window seat.
And also why I didn’t need sunblock.
I was hoping it’d be doing this while the Loch Ness part of the trip, for maximum spooky, but that didn’t happen.

First stop of actual significance, because a roadside cafe with a gift shop doesn’t qualify, was Glencoe, site of some of the worst manners shown by a guest in recorded history.

Nowadays it’s the site of some skilled, daring, and at times ambitious tour bus parking.
Also a piper, who might be in that scrum behind me.
This probably counts as a ‘photographing photographers’ selfie, if I’m keeping track; Not sure if that’s better or worse than the non-selfie version, to be honest.

There were a lot of tour buses, plus regular tourists in regular vehicles.
As such, taking a photo without a bus or selfie stick in it took some doing.

Early attempt.
Looks like I’m trying to product-place the tour company, but I’m pretty happy with how the landscape came out.
(this is, incidentally, the bus I was on, or at least part of it)

Foreboding clouds, impressive hills.
Still kind of looks like a car ad.

OK, so I just zoomed in on the phone before taking this one.
I like the clouds though.

A sea of clouds, above a sea of tourists.
I mean, I could crop it, but I find the cluster of people, cameras, cars, and cameras on sticks to be sort of funny.

The tour guide, I should mention, did talk about why we were stopping here, why it was important, and so on.
I’d love to claim that it felt sort of dark and foreboding, but … that’s just the landscape and the weather.
Sorry.

Looks a lot like chunks of the South Island though, doesn’t it?

Possibly the best themed WiFi symbol ever, with added Man-In-Kilt in the background. 

Next was Loch Ness.
More accurately, due to a slightly delayed start and some time spent stuck behind a truck or two, next up was an accelerator & brake mad dash, along very winding roads carved into hills, in a very large bus, to make the Loch Ness Ferry sailing.
It was a lurchy experience.

Some folk were dropped off at Urquart Castle, to explore the ruins & be collected later, while the rest of us went on ahead to catch the ferry which went back up the loch to said castle.
I’d opted for the boat ride option when the weather was frankly a bit shitter, back at Glencoe.

There was a substantial covered & enclosed area on the boat, with obligatory coffee vending setup.
It was also very loud; Engines + Tourist Commentary + Multiple Small Children Who Were, Frankly, Over This.
I ran away to the upper deck, where there was rain of a sparse but stingingly cold nature, and much fewer sources of noise.
Also people who were a bit more interested in seeing the Loch itself.

I should note that I do not put much faith in the argument that an insurance company wouldn’t have covered a bunch of triathletes competing in Loch Ness for a million pounds against ‘monster attacks’ unless they believed there was something there. Rather, I think they could barely keep the grins from their faces as they took the premiums, and were maybe wondering about offering Sasquatch coverage too.

Eventually, we made it to the castle, or the remains thereof, and picked up the folks we’d dropped off.
(It’d have been much more atmospheric if the mist & cloud had hung around at low level, but such is life)

Yes, I took a lot of pictures of a castle, and yes, I’ve subjected you to most of them.
Trust me, I deleted the really crap ones.

I didn’t notice it at the time, but I’m finding it interesting that in some of the pictures it’s obvious that this is a ruin, and in others, really not.

And that’s it for the photos.

There was a lot of time spent on a bus, passing through scenery of a spectacular, or at least pretty nature, but cellphones don’t do well at landscapes, particularly from a moving vehicle. Thus, no pictures.
The Highlands are well worth a visit though.

In that it is actually colder, thus more chill, and this allowed me to relax more.

I left myself with plenty of time to get to the train station (King’s Cross), so I had time to kill, which I spent sitting at a table on a balcony level, watching the huge train schedule board update & the 1300h Edinburgh creep steadily closer.
(The most immediate departure is on the left-most board, so they slowly work their way right-to-left)
Password-Not-Required WiFi from one of the food places helped while away the time, by which I guess I mean “give me access to the final episode of Season 6 of Game Of Thrones”, though I did make a tactical blue by zipping away the straps on Big Red before getting to the platform.
The train, you see, was a billion carriages long, and I was at the one at the far end.

Train wasn’t crowded, and I got a window seat, so that I could do my usual trick of falling asleep, but with a nice view!
Briefly considered taking the trip down-train to get a coffee, but as it was 8 carriages away, I decided that I didn’t need one that badly.

Getting to the hostel in Edinburgh wasn’t without complication; The GPS Navigation Thing on my phone, which I’d decided to test out, was getting confused by tall buildings and the fact that Edinburgh Waverly Station is several stories below old Edinburgh, so it was having a tough time figuring out a route, and kept directing me up & down the same road.
I just went with climbing a lot of steps (The Scotsman Steps, in fact) while ignoring the GPS until it started giving me directions which weren’t flatly contradicted by observable reality, then followed those.
GPS, and assisted navigation technologies in general, are tools for navigation, not replacements for it. Can’t stress that one enough.

My first three nights were in a 4-bed dorm. Once again, I got a top bunk, which is no big deal.
Room-mates this time included a German chap who I don’t think I ever talked to, who had carefully arranged his stuff at night to create, unintentionally I’m thinking, a barrier for me to get to the ladder to my bunk, someone in the other top bunk who left absolutely no impression on me at all, and … D.

D. was an older lady, who started off the afternoon seeming OK, came across as a bit … off … by early evening, and was bitterly ranting and smelling of booze by nightfall. Frankly, I was glad of the window being open, because the booze-fumes were strong with this one.
Fortunately there was no vomiting, bed-wetting, or other obnoxious hostel-drunk behaviour, and the bitter ranting was confined to that one incident. Or my demeanor of  “Frankly, I don’t give a crap” paid off?
She eventually left, to go teach somewhere else in the UK, but not before she upset another resident by eavesdropping on a phone call and going into a racist/nationalistic bigotry diatribe about the subject in question; One of the staff told her where to put her opinions.

The hostel itself, which I’m not naming because of reasons, is architecturally … interesting.
It’s two terraced housed knocked together into one space by putting doors through on the Ground & First floor landings, and because the floor plans are mirror images, there are two spiraling staircases on either side of a wall, one counter-clockwise & one clockwise. Also, there are two kitchens, so you can pick which one suits your mood better.
Reminds me a little of Tamson House, from Charles de Lint’s Moonheart & Spiritwalk.

And, Edinburgh.
Well, there’s a castle, which we visited, as you do, and learned various historical things from tour guides.
There was a chap who was in character as the Earl of Moray, talking about the re-capture of the castle from the English, and demonstrating on a willing volunteer the armour & weapons of the day.

It took me a little while to work out that he was in character, and not some miscellaneous title-holder who happened to be interested in re-enactment; The references to being captured by the English sort of gave it away.

On the way back from the Castle we stopped in at a bar Gulo T. used to work at, mostly because it was open, to see how it was going. Ended up staying a while, for a very nice evening of sitting at the bar, chatting to the barman & the other patrons, and watching him curse at the register for not having the actual stock listed, and for being vastly too expensive when it did.
They’d only recently re-opened, and there were issues, like a couple of the keg lines which were just producing foam, and a coffee machine he had no clue how to work.
(I was tempted to offer to take a look, based on having played with the one at AECOM, but wasn’t quite sure how to make the offer)
In any case, probably one of the best pub evenings I’ve had; Gives me an idea of what having a local must be like.

Getting to & from Edinburgh’s centre involves going through the Meadows, and there’s often something entertaining happening, such as people playing cricket while wearing kilts, presumably because they can.
There have also been people practicing slack-line walking, and recently some very committed Mormons, given how long they’re out there.

Other Things, …

We climbed Arthur’s Seat, which has some spectacular views of Edinburgh, and where I took no photographs because it started lightly raining and the rocks get really slippery.
We also climbed, some days later, Salisbury Crags, where the weather was less trying-to-kill-you, and where I took these.

They’re setting up for the festival, or more accurately for many festivals, so there’s an enormous cantilevered seating structure outside Edinburgh Castle.

Over the course of the week-and-a-bit I’ve been here, I’ve noticed a lot of general-purpose Scottishness going on.
There are people wearing kilts & the like who are obviously dressed up for an important event of some sort, stores selling miscellaneous Tartan things, and the odd Piper in public places where tourists might spot them and comment favorably.

There are also people just wearing the things because, apparently, they want to, and bands who’ve included a piper … Well, it’s distinctive as all hell.

I’m not sure where the haggis-flavoured crisps come in.

Went to a Tai Chi class, which was a lot of fun, and a new thing for me.
Granted, I had no clue what was happening during the run-through of the form at the start, and only noticed the bit of said form that had been taught at the class once it was already gone, having been too focused on trying to face the right way, not collide with either of the other students, and at least be standing on the correct leg with my limbs in roughly the right directions.
The process of learning one move, and one move only, on the other hand, was rather relaxing & quite fun, as it turns out.

By pure fluke, I managed to be paying attention at the right time to (I think) get a picture of Southend Pier.

Unlike last time, I actually remember getting through Heathrow.
(checking back to my diary of a couple of years ago, it looks like the memory loss happened after the fact)
I did spot an escalator/ramp combo running down from Passport Control to Baggage Claim which seemed familiar, and a Biosecurity Check room which matched up to a memory which had come adrift from any context.
Things went smoothly; The only thing they wanted to know was where I’d come in from, and biosecurity/customs appears to work on the honour system, as the only person in the bag-scanning hall seemed to be taking a shortcut to somewhere else.

Rather than navigate the Underground at 6pm, I’d booked in for a night at an airport hotel one terminal over, so a short train trip got me there. (The Heathrow Express to Paddington wasn’t running, so I was even more glad to not be heading into London)
Yotel Heathrow is convenient, small, and oddly purple.
Even had a violet light in the room.

It was small enough that you had to plan a move or two ahead in terms of making space to do things in.
Comfy enough for a night’s sleep though, and they have ‘free’ coffee/hot chocolate.

I stayed at an AirBnB for the next few days, working on the theory that I really just needed somewhere to be jetlagged in for a while.
Turns out that when you don’t have a convention to go to, and thus an external schedule to keep, jetlag can last a whole lot longer. The humid weather didn’t help.

The AirBnB experience was, I think, a lot like living in a haunted house.
There were other people living in other rooms in the place, but as they were mostly out, I never saw them, or only saw them once before they moved on. Essentially, it was an empty house where things moved when I wasn’t looking & there were noises in the night.
Not sure on the whole AirBnB experience; This place was clearly being run as a hostel/hotel/BnB by the owner, who didn’t live on-site, and who I’m guessing didn’t visit that often. A lot of minor maintenance issues, like a student flat on it’s way out where nobody can be bothered fixing things & the landlord isn’t contactable.
That said, the bed worked, the WiFi worked, the system for getting in worked (combination lock-box on the front door with the key in it, key to the room left in the door to said room, and a message from the owner telling you the combination & the room name – Mine was Piccadilly Circus, with a replica of the official street sign on the door), and it was close to the DLR.

The other thing it was close to was Greenwich, right across the Thames, and accessible by a walking tunnel dating back to 1902.

There’s a dome to the right of the ship, which is the roof of the access stairway/lift for the Greenwich side.
Just behind me is the Old Royal Naval College, which you can see they’ve just finished repairing after that spaceship crashed into it in the movie Thor: The Dark World.

And this is the view from the other side.
Near as I can tell, based on the road layouts & house designs, where I was staying used to be a wharf complex (the road is named Empire Wharf), with warehouses & all that, and got redeveloped into residential. All of the houses around were done in roughly the same style, even if they weren’t part of the same building, and when you crossed one of the roads running around the perimeter of the Isle of Dogs, that suddenly changes, and there’s a lot more variety in age & design.
I need, or at least want, to do some more digging into this, to see how the area developed over the years.

So, stuff I did?

For the first while, “had a bad time due to jetlag, with maybe a minor lurgh of some sort” would cover it.
Did do some tourist things, like the Museum of London Docklands (which was fascinating until they got to an entire wing dedicated to the wranglings of committees for development from the 70’s onward) and the British Museum (which I’ll be going back to, as it was just too humid a day to be in a crowded place).

After a few days I moved to a hostel in Greenwich, St. Christopher’s, which is over a pub.
This becomes important later.
This was my first ‘bed in a dormitory’ stay of the trip, and indeed my first of that type of stay in a very long time.
I’ve stayed in hostels before, but had gone with private rooms. This wasn’t an option here.
The setup at St. Christopher’s was pretty good; You enter through the bar, but there’s a prox-card door to get into the hostel proper, another to open the door to the room, a specifically assigned bed, and a locker big enough that I could have fitted Big Red in there twice over without issue, in the form of a rolling metal cage which took up half of the under-bed space, with the other half being the locker for the other bunk. I got the top bunk, and it was pretty comfy, and also under a window, which was a useful thing, because holy crapballs  did that place get hot. Even with a pedestal fan going and the windows open it was still too hot to need the provided duvet most nights, and I only closed the window when absolutely needed, such as heavy rain.
On the subject of that window … Yeah, the pub was loud. To the extent that there was a jar of earplugs in each room, provided for free, and on Friday & Saturday nights they were really needed, as the loud music didn’t stop until 2am. Rest of the time it only ran 10pm to Midnight.
This place had piped music running constantly, not at ear-splitting volume, but at a noticeable level, even at 7am during breakfast.

With no particular demands on my time, I just sort of relaxed into being in the UK.
Got a cellphone number, wandered semi-aimlessly around using the Underground, and the River Buses, and my own two feet, and didn’t really do much of great consequence or importance.

Also, there was a crow mooching about at one of the River Bus stop.

The dorm experience did mean that I met people, which was kind of nice.

• There was the Indian IT Guy in the bed below mine, who’d only just arrived and was plowing straight into work & getting himself set up
• The woman from New Zealand in one of the other top bunks, who was transitioning between holiday & working holiday
• The English guy below her, who seemed to sleep most of the day & go out at night. Maybe he was working; It’s unclear, and he was hardly ever there & awake to be asked
• The South African chef in the last lower bunk, who really did sleep all day.
• The automotive mechanic in the bed above him, who … was very confident in the things he was demonstrably wrong about, such as which showers worked, or how the complicated skylight windows were operated. This made his pronouncements on Brexit somewhat harder to take seriously.

The UK’s vote to Stay in the EU or not happened while I was at St. Christopher’s, and … I didn’t see that result coming.
Also didn’t see the four main promises of the ‘Leave’ campaign vanishing within the next day coming; It was obvious that some of them were total bollocks, but the speed with which the clawbacks & technicalities & so on happened was impressive.
No idea what the end result of that will be.

I’m keeping my eye on the Scottish Independence Movement. Having only just started to make use of being an EU Citizen, I’d like to keep making use of it, and I can’t do that if the UK exits. If Scotland goes independent & stays in the EU, however, and if I can put myself in a place to become a Scottish Citizen when that happens, it seems worth doing. 

On the weekend, Gulo T. came to town, so we did Tourist Things!
Specifically, the London Eye.

There was a festival of sorts going on, called ‘Udderbelly’ ‘Underbelly’, and in the background here is an inflatable purple cow, lying on it’s back, containing a stage. {edit: the Festival is Underbelly, the purple cow stage is Udderbelly}

There was also a festival happening in Greenwich, the Greenwich Docklands International Festival,

… and we saw part of one act; A thing called Block, which had people doing dance & circus acrobatics using big movable blocks to make & re-make their stage space. They were doing things like building walls, or getting people walking on top of blocks which were being put in place to make a path as they moved.

For this one, I’m going to start at the end, then double back to explain how I got there.

At the end of day one in Dubai, I wanted nothing to do with the place; Too chaotic, too noisy, too strange, felt like everyone was staring at me, and I really just wanted to hide in my hotel until it was time to go back to the airport.

By the end of day two? Complete reversal; I can’t claim to understand the place, or have a handle on it, or even that it makes sense, but it’s no longer scary, and I’d like to come back.

The flight was the 17½ hour direct from Auckland to Dubai.
I’d booked the aisle seat, and I’m not regretting that choice;  Being able to get up and go for a bit of a wander, even if only to the bathroom, is a good thing on such a flight.
So is free onboard WiFi, which I took blatant advantage of by feeding different email addresses into to extend the window of free access; There are certain advantages to knowing every email address on a domain, so that you don’t use one that someone else has.
Having to get up to let Middle & Window seats out is a small price to pay, though the times that Window chose left something to be desired; Such as when the food or beverage cart was in the aisle and there was no physical way to get out of my seat which didn’t involve bouldering skills I don’t have. Or when the cart was a bit further back, so that he couldn’t get to the bathrooms anyway, the way forward being forbidden, blocked by the Curtain Of Affluence*.

(* That which prevents the viewing of Business Class. It is … Forbidden … to my people)

Slept more than I expected to, but less than I’d like.

There was a lot of walking involved once I got to to Dubai International.
To the extent that I was worried that I’d missed a sign, not turned when I should have, and was heading to the Arrivals Hall in the next Terminal, or possibly the next city. The concourse, which seemed to look down into the departure & gates area, just kept going in a mostly-straight line, punctuated with the occasional annex for toilets and baby-stroller storage.

The arrivals hall, …
OK, have you seen Fellowship of the Ring?
The bit in Moria, outside Balin’s tomb, with the enormous hall with the pillars?
It looks like that, but with better lighting, more terrazzo, and a Costa Coffee kiosk.
Oh, and a bunch of baggage conveyors.

Getting to the hotel was easy enough; I bought a travel card for the Dubai Metro, as my hotel was specifically chosen to be on a transport link, and an airport worker mistook my “reading the signs and figuring it out” for “lost tourist”, was heading in that direction anyway, so guided me.
(I was a little suspicious, so paid attention to what was going on, and while the “I’ll carry your bag for you” when transferring between trains was probably well-meant, there was no way in hell I was letting go of that handle)
I probably would have figured out the change in trains at Union Station, and the change in platforms required, but it sure was easier to just follow someone who was heading that way anyway.

Finding the hotel was easy; You can see it from the station.
Note paranoid screenshotting of local map, just in case I got lost.

Despite turning up six hours early, the nice folks at Hyatt Place Dubai/Baniyas Square found me a room right away, a nice VIP one no less, possibly to get my stinky self out of their nice clean lobby.

The View, of Baniyas Square, at around 7am.
Note almost total non-squareness of the space.

The hotel were also very apologetic that they couldn’t do free breakfast today, explained that because it’s a closed-off space it’s OK to eat there during sensible hours during Ramadan, and warned me not to eat or drink outside of the hotel.
They said I’d get a fine; Makes me wonder what it’d be like if I wasn’t white.

I showered, and I slept for a few hours.

Then I took a wander around the square, felt as though I stood out like a sore thumb, and went back to sleep for the afternoon.
My t-shirt selection, which I’m realising is entirely nerd stuff and con shirts … felt misplaced here.
Woke up for a bit at dusk, found that the idea of venturing out into the noise & chaos filled me with dread, and went back to sleep.

Day two was completely different.
I’m going to assume that sleep deprivation was not my friend when dropped into a new & very different environment, and I guess I’ll be trying to plan for that in future.

My best non-jarring option for shirts was my warm flannel shirt, which didn’t seem like the best option in a desert environment, so I went for a walk to the edge of Dubai Creek, to see how it would work.
Surprisingly well, as it turns out. The low humidity meant that the heavy fabric really didn’t matter, so I was able to wander along the quayside for a couple of kilometres without issue, though I did take the metro back. It was right there, and was airconditioned.

I’d not realised that the creek was a commercial port, if a small one.
Wooden boats which were clearly motor-driven, but also obviously built with more traditional designs in mind, are pulled up there, and the cargo get stacked & loaded & unloaded right onto the quayside. Kind of a different approach to, say, Auckland, where it’s all locked away behind fences & in containers.
The loading system here seemed to be “If you crouch down, we’ll lift it onto your back, and then steady it while you stand … OK, now go”.

With the shirt situation sorted, I went out to do Tourist Things!
Well, one tourist thing in particular – The Burj Khalifa, with an observation deck 555.7m up.

There’s a lot of view.

Also, there’s a outside deck, admittedly with very tall safely barriers, but it is open topped.

In other news, I need a beard-trim.

The haze was too great, but I’m told that somewhere out there is “The World”, still under construction.
And still looking for enormously wealthy people who want to own their own geographically representative island which they’ll only be able to access by boat, and which will be really difficult to build on because you can only access it by boat.

Pretty happy with this next one, as a picture.
The building, by the way, is Dubai Mall. All of the building, because it’s ridiculously large.

Getting to the Burj Khailifa involved a Metro ride, then a walk down a very long twisty … concourse? hallway?
I couldn’t tell at the time, but it’s an enclosed air-conditioned structure, with windows & travellators, which winds between buildings & across streets to deposit you at Dubai Mall. It’s over a kilometre long, from the look of it on Google Maps.

The mall itself is enormous. Ridiculous.
It has a waterfall.

A bit lower down on the building, there are another couple of floors of observation deck & souvenir store, with another external platform. Oddly, there’s a better sense of the building from down there, but much like Olympus Mons, you’re not really aware of the object while you’re on it. It can only be seen from a distance.

Self-portrait in mirrored window.
My combination of boots, jeans, flannel shirt & hat made me look like I was cosplaying a 2000’s Rap video.

And then there’s this.
My first … involuntary souvenir of the trip, a free gift with the elevator ticket.
I have no idea what to do with a plushy building.

In the evening, I caught up with Craig O., who I worked near at AECOM.
His desk was diagonally behind mine.
He’s living & working in Daubai, and is, from the look of it, having a fantastic time.

We had dinner over at Dubai Marina, which is rather more modern & high-end than where my hotel was.
And a great deal more expensive, I’m guessing.

And that’s it for Dubai.
Like I said, I had a complete change of heart concerning the place over the course of 48 hours, and I’m thinking that a lot of the negative impression was just being dead tired; It’s hard to be positive about anything in that state.

I think I’ll be back.
Maybe to work, because they have money, and I do like money.
And maybe to tourist, because they have a ski slope in a mall.

That said, there are clearly some downsides to the place; It’s a good idea not to get into unpayable debt, for example.
Not sure what worker health & safety is like, but I’d not be laying good odds on a robust system being in place.

Baniyas Square at probably a bit before midnight. It was less blurry in real life.

And in the morning.

Downlighting in the closet gives a certain undeserved grandeur to my hoodie.

This is probably the first hotel room I’ve ever stayed in that didn’t have Gideons Bible.
Some of them also had a Book of Mormon.
This one … Takes another path.

This interested me, from a civic point of view.

Whereas it’s the disclaimer on this one I was drawn to.
“Bears no accurate perspective to anything” is something I’d have dearly loved to tag some work with over the years.

Complimentary in the sense of no charge, not in the says nice things sense.

Checking out was mostly done the night before, so it was really only handing over my key cards that needed to happen.
Naturally, I slept crappily, so my biggest challenge was to not fall asleep at the Bus Station before the bus got there.
The Christchurch Bus Station has been designed with weather in mind. Buses pull into glassed-in little bays, automatic doors open, and the whole thing is intended to limit your exposure to the outside world.
Unless you’re on an InterCity bus; Then it’s a standard pavement & roadside loading for you, so you stay in the waiting room until you see the driver open up the big luggage hatches, and scuttle across at that point.

I’ve had better bus trips, to be honest.
Also worse.
The piped music was very loud for a while, then it was turned down, and finally off. Sadly, this allowed the two elderly ladies directly behind me to natter pretty much constantly, mostly on a theme of Anything different to how I’d do it is wrong, with a slight foray into how a person’s preference for floral shirts over solid colour, combined with his encyclopedic knowledge of female celebrities, meant that he was Trans but hadn’t admitted it yet.

I spent a lot of time sleeping & listening to podcasts.

They quietened down after Kaikoura, when one of them fell asleep, gives chance for the guy at the back with what looked like a partially completed Mongrel Mob tattoo to talk himself up a bit.
Back to napping & podcasts.

The bus damn near emptied at Blenheim, and was wonderfully quiet for the run into Picton.

Tombstone Backpackers was pretty much where I left it, which was a relief.

The Complimentary Cat greeted me with a Mra! when I opened the door, which could have been “You disturbed my nap”, “Oh, it’s you again”, or Poing’s suggestion, “I ordered a petting and lap-providing monkey hours ago! Why does room service take so long in this place?”.

And that’s pretty much how my afternoon went; Providing lap services to the Cat, until the room got cold with the windows open, and I got hungry, at which point the cat was offered an exit option & I went to ‘cook’ the can of chilli I’d been carrying around since Greymouth.
At one stage I temporarily relocated the Cat, in order to put my feet under a blanket, because it was getting cold. The Cat interpreted this as “Ooooh! A Cave!”, and this was the result.

I would be interested in finding out whether anyone has done work on, for want of a better phrase, the micro-geography of social spaces.
The kitchen at Tombstone (that was an odd thing to type) is OK in the social sense; People talk, though mostly about food, access to kitchen equipment, what on earth they did to their rice to give it the consistency of bricklayer’s cement, that sort of thing.
The dining area? Dead. Those folks who were traveling together talked, the rest … nothing.
I’m wondering whether a setup of many small round tables leads to people sitting in groups with their backs to the rest of the room, because that’s how round tables work, and the smallness of the table leads to people not sharing because they’d be right in someone’s face.

It’s just a thought, but I did notice a big difference between the Picton & Greymouth hostels in terms of dining room socialness.

I woke overly early, as one does, or at least as this one does, though I did sleep pretty well once I ditched the blanket (I’d needed it the previous time, but there were maybe more covers on the bed this time? it certainly felt heavier) , so I was showered and somewhat ready to go when the alarm went off.

I was even more ready, super extra double-plus ready, when the text from Interislander Ferries saying “Yeah, we’re running about 45 minutes late” arrived, or, as I interpreted it,”Go ahead and have a second coffee with breakfast; You’ve got time”.

The Tombstone does a complimentary breakfast, which I was never awake early enough to take advantage of last time, but was determined to have this time.
As it was, at 7:45ish, it was Me & Gary the owner/sconemaker, for this breakfast included fresh-baked scones, so we chatted a bit about where I’d been in my travels, and how the hostel was going, and which other hostels I’d been to.
It was a good chat.
And a good scone.

Could have nabbed a lift to the ferry. but I chose to walk, mostly because I get bored easily.
And it’s not like Picton is very big, or my bag is that heavy, despite how it feels.
Thus, I ambled via the Awesome Playground,

saw misc boats from the ferry terminal deck,

and got increasing suspicious about the ferry setup; There’s nowhere you can be which will let you watch the ferry dock up-close (the Aratere, at least), and the Bluebridge folks make sure you’re buttoned up before docking.
What don’t they want you to see?
What was added to the Aratere when they lengthened it?
And why are there clawmarks on the pier?

Much like Arthur’s Pass Railway Station, there was a creepy moment on the ferry.

Because there’s a gangway tube thing at the Interislander terminal, foot passengers get on board well before the vehicular ones (It was the other way around on Bluebridge), and because I was sitting close to the entryway, I was the first one on, and walked into the enormous empty lounge, which lead to empty aircraft-style seating, connecting to an empty foodcourt & an equally empty bar.
It filled up quickly … actually, it never got full, even when the group of teenagers going to the/a Stage Challenge arrived & spread themselves out over the couches … but for a while I was having thoughts of the Sapphire & Steel episode with the empty station hotel all over again. “Report On An Unidentified Space Station” would also apply, I think.

Unlike the other ferry, this one had a viewing deck up at the bow, which was kind of nice.

Within Queen Charlotte Sound, and indeed Wellington harbour, things were pretty calm; Out in Cook Strait there was an interesting pitch/roll combo going on, which mostly seemed to be there to amuse small children when the ship hit a decent roller & sent spray everywhere.

Also, there was a scone trolley.

And so, in the primitive conditions of scone trolleys, foodcourts, a bar, a movie theatre showing Batman vs. Superman, (which I skipped), and a playground for the kids, (who I think were playing at shipwrecks, which seems … fate-tempting), we made it to Wellington.

Well, not the centre of Wellington, but there’s a wee bus which took me to a somewhat familiar location.

Getting to Arthur’s Pass involved a trip through the now-standard South Island scenic grandeur, which my cellphone is not really capable of capturing, as demonstrated here;

Got in as darkness happened, which is why the other backpacker getting off at AP & I missed the wee sign saying which way to turn once you’d left the station access underpass to get to the hostel.
Robert from Germany guessed right, based on having seen some buildings that way, and turned out to be correct.

I’d booked a double room, which in the context of the YHA Arthur’s Pass apparently means a separate building, which the owner didn’t want to put me in because “it doesn’t work out”, so I ended up with a four-bed dorm to myself.
I’m assuming they have a zombie problem, and one person in an isolated building cannot maintain a proper defense.
Or it’s a Kea problem; That seems possible too.

Finding this on the notices inside the door adds further weight to my Zombie theory, though it maybe could be Kea in a Zombie suit; That can happen.

Haven’t seen a Kea, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard them, and there was a suspiciously parrot-ish shape against the night sky.
Also, the hostel owner approved, in a loud & amused way, of my ‘food that doesn’t squish’ dinner choices.

I got overenthusiastic on the heating, it turns out.
This place has in-floor heating, and if you’re a little bit patient, it’s plenty warm enough.
The toilets & showers also have in-floor heating, though the portion of the outside world you have to pass through to get to them does not. It’s covered, so there’s no risk of being rained on, and it did rain, but it does add a certain swiftness & motivation to the walk, particularly if you forgot to put socks on.

YHA Arthur’s Pass

DOC Visitor’s Centre, with train station in the background

I got to a place of breakfast too late, and had poorly-chosen bar nachos for breakfast.
I say poorly chosen because nacho hiccups while climbing eleventy-billion steps are less than fun.
Nice scenery though.

First up was a little waterfall, the name of which entirely escapes me, but which was probably the Avalanche Creek Waterfall.
Because that’s not a portentous and doom-filled name at all.

Then there was the Devil’s Punchbowl.
The guidebook says that it’s 150 vertical metres; They don’t mention, and I think that it’s important, that this figure is what you get when you add all of the up & subtract all of the down. There were a lot of steps.

So, that happened, and I lived, though regretted the nachos.

It’s worth pointing out that, while there are “Don’t Feed The Kea” signs up, some of them, in the places closest to food-vending areas, have been vandalised in very specific ways;

It got cold at night.
Snowfall cold.

Here’s the area outside my room/the bathrooms for the outside-access rooms/the kitchen. (there’s a bit of a lawn area)

My room was the left orange door in the centre of the shot, and yes, that concrete got REALLY cold in the snow.

Though not as cold as this “Nope” picture was to take.

Naturally, I was not going to just sit there and look at the snow; If nothing else, I had the warm hat Poing Critter made me to test out. Also my merino base layer (not pictured).

This was supposed to be a picture of my Indianapolis Colts hat being artfully covered with snow. Not Sure If Working.

Looks like it’s raining.
Isn’t.

Tourists from probably Malaysia making a very little snowman.

There were a number of them, from Malaysia & Taiwan, in what looked to be multiple independent groups, out there playing in the snow. To be fair, it was the first time they’d seen it.
My excuse? Not sure; Mind of a child?

One group did ask me how to drive on snow.
They had no chains, because nobody thought they’d need them.
“Slowly and Carefully” was about the best I could do. I did advise that they talk to the folks at the DOC Visitor’s Centre, and tried to warn them about black ice, but I’m not sure they really understood.

Very warm hat is indeed very warm,

and snow-resistant!

And here’s what it looked like in the morning.

I ate breakfast outside, on the off chance that Kea would turn up, but none did.
Heard them a lot though; They sounded unimpressed with the cold.

“You’re an alpine parrot, Barry; Harden up!”
“Easy for you to say, Trev.; You haven’t got a poo frozen halfway out.”
~ long pause ~
“Barry, do you know that when you fly like that, you look like a feather duster?”

Once the sun got over the mountains, the snow more or less vanished.

And so I walked through a mostly snow-free, though still pretty damn cold, Arthur’s Pass on my way to the train.

To wait in an empty train station, clearly designed for more people than were currently using it.

With a locked & disused ticket office opposite the waiting room, with lights showing over the top of the boarded-up windows.

The only lights on inside the whole place.

‘Cause that wasn’t creepy at all.

And I certainly wasn’t thinking of that Sapphire & Steel episode with the station hotel.

Nope nope nope.

It was an early departure from Nelson.
Like, 7am or something similar?
Naturally, I woke up super-early, so I had time to kill, as I walked through rain which wasn’t quite bad enough to warrant pausing under a tree to get my raincoat out.

That rain did cause some trouble later on, when the wipers on one side of the bus stopped working. Naturally, it was the driver’s side.
I didn’t much like the look of the weather when we got to a stop at Punakaiki/Pancake Rocks, so elected not to take a wander down the path in order to look at said rocks.
This turned out to be a good plan, as it absolutely pissed down a few minutes after we got there, at the level where you had to raise your voice to be heard, and even the folks running the cafe were making the “Fuuuuuck” expression as they closed the doors into the more exposed ‘terrace’ section.

Tried to get a picture or two of the rain, but they were a bit crap, so here’s some mist being all portentous. Or something.

The hostel had offered a pickup from the train station, which is also the bus station, and it made the whole process much … What’s the word? … Drier.

Lunch happened at the Monteith’s Brewery down the road, on the grounds that it was close, warm, and … no, that’s it.

The hostel room, of which this is the only picture I took, was very nice.
Had a ranchslider onto a wee deck, so that I could look at the rain, an actual radiator heater (I’m told that the dorm-style rooms, or at least one of them, didn’t have those. Then again, my room was at the far end of the building, and one of the walls looked to be the outside cinderblock wall of the building, so maybe it needed it?), and a big warm blanket, which came in handy on the colder days.

Met the first actual New Zealanders of the trip; Adrian, who was just generally traveling, and Dora, who was doing nurse intern things in Greymouth.

There’s not too much to say about Greymouth, or at least my Greymouth experience.
It rained a lot, there are some walking/cycling paths that are nice if you like ambling along the top of flood defense structures, though you’d want to be confident about the weather, there’s a lot of remnants of the city’s time as a coal exporting port, and the beach here doesn’t look like one of those forgiving ones.

A couple showed up on Saturday who’d come for the surf, then taken a look at things and thought “Bugger That”.

So, what did I do?
Hung out in a pretty sociable hostel, with interesting folks from all over the place;

• Dimitri from Switzerland
• Adrian from Tauranga
• Fran from Yorkshire
• Claus from Bavaria, who wasn’t actually staying there, but came by in the evenings to use the internet, and maybe shower?

Went to see X-Men: Apocalypse with Dimitri & Adrian. Film was good, walk back was bloody cold, with creepy mist-drifts, and still, nobody can make Cyclops into an interesting character.

On the last night, went to a nearby pub to use up some free drink vouchers & completely fail to see a motorbike race I’ve forgotten the name of that Dimitri wanted to see, because it was on a different Sky TV channel the bar didn’t have. Or something.
Also in the group, along with Dimitri & Adrian & Fran, was Harry from a slightly different part of Yorkshire, who was in the process of seeing all of NZ. In a couple of weeks. Before selling his car and leaving.
There was not a lot of wiggle room in his schedule, but he did have some extra beer which had been sloshing around in his car, which lead to a somewhat late night, but a good one.

Somewhere during the stay here I’d booked the train trip to Christchurch, with a couple of nights in Arthur’s Pass, and fortunately noticed the “There Are No Shops Here” warning from the YHA, so I planned accordingly, with food from the canned and probably won’t squish, and is still edible if it does departments.
On a related note, my pack feels like it’s getting heavier and bigger.

The hostel-provided list to the train station was useful, and the train was, of course, late.
No big deal; It’s not like I had any tight travel connections to make.

I was trying to get a picture of the clouds streaming back off the hills, and I’m pretty happy with this one.

Various pieces of Greymouth’s port heritage.

Bloody Great Breakwater, intended to keep the river clear and navigable. Apparently it still works.

Also, there was a seal.
Or maybe a sea lion?
In any case, it had climbed ab impressive way up from the water for a critter with no legs.

And the sheltered bit of the river, as it flows through town.
It should probably be mentioned that the flood defense wall fairly looms over the street below. I had breakfast in what I was told was the best cafe in Greymouth (By a Japanese chap from Tokyo who also worked at the hostel, and whose name started with a Y-sound. I am not good at names), and all you could see out the front of said cafe was the road & the river-wall.
Said cafe was named “DP1”, and seemed to be an all-dreadlocked establishment.
No idea why it’s called DP1, though I’m wondering whether it’s a reference to cadastral boundaries.

Out of cleverness, I put various TV shows on my phone, so that I could watch them if the scenery got dull.
It didn’t, and indeed the road was sufficiently winding that looking out the windows was the only option; Nausea kicked in when I started reading something on my phone.

The Picton to Nelson road passes through various tiny little places, including the entertainingly-named Canvastown, a former pop-up tent town of gold miners & those who sell to them. They’ve discovered lumber now, from the look of it.

When I booked at Honeysuckle House (by phone; I was getting a bit desperate, as I’d found a few ‘no room at the inn’ hostels, and I only booked it yesterday) the proprietor had offered to get her husband to give me a lift if it was raining. Fortunately, it wasn’t and it was a pretty easy walk; Nelson’s not that big.
It’s another town surrounded by hills, but I didn’t bother trying to capture it on-camera; The phone really isn’t up to the task.

I did cut through some gardens on my way to the hostel, …

… and spotted an anachronistic-looking bridge†, which I checked out later, when I didn’t have a pack on.

Honeysuckle House is quite a nice hostel, run on a gleefully ad-hoc honour system from what I can tell; I extended my stay after the first night, when I decided that I didn’t really want to lug all of my stuff to Motueka & find a place there, and then extended it again by a night so as to not have two wildly early nights in a row.‡
Through all of that there was no thought of a deposit, or payment, and when I eventually tracked them down on my last day to settle up, they gave me a bit of a discount for having stayed so long.
It’s your classic high-ceiling two-story place, where the downstairs is the hostel, and the upstairs is the owners. Maximum capacity of 8 people, with one double room, one twin, and one 4-bed dorm. For most of my stay there was Me & a young woman from Nanjing staying there, with a German woman one night, and a French one another night. Comfy place, well-heated, had a lounge that nobody but me used, fairly standard kitchen, and free ice-cream.

Dinner involved a trip back into town to find an Iskender Kebab; This is all the fault of Cenk Gökçe, for having mentioned them in a Facebook post a few days earlier, and putting the idea in my head while I was in Picton, a town devoid of Kebab shops.
Really, I’m the victim here.
Also, it was a really good dinner.

Laundry happened, thanks to actual sunlight, and was the first official hostel laundry of the trip.
I’d hoped for fanfare, but what I got was clean dry clothes, so I’m OK with that.

Wanderings through town demonstrated that Nelson has a huge marina, through which I walked until I ran out of public access, and it was still going strong at that point,

riverside cycle & walking paths with various art items,

and the mural I’ve been using as my login image for the past few months.

Remember that bridge† I mentioned?

It turns out to lead to, and is part of, the Huangshi Chinese Garden, which sits inside Queens Gardens, and is part of a Friendly City relationship.

I’m not sure whether it’s my favourite bit of Nelson, but it’s pretty close, and it was certainly a very nice place to pass through on my way to & from things.
Also, the paving was interesting.

Part of The Nelson Experience involved a day trip to Motueka, to visit Cap’n Ghastly John, who I worked with back at Whitcoulls.
Getting there involved a fairly early bus, with an equally early arrival into a mostly-deserted town, which, while devoid of traffic and pedestrians, was not devoid of class, as the Bacon & Eggs I had for breakfast came with broadleaf parsley & an artistic smear of pesto.

I had time to kill before I felt comfortable taking the risk that people might be asleep, so I took a walk to the waterfront, to find … well, water. And a beach made mostly of rounded rocks. And quite a lot of view.

There was also the remains of a wharf, beside which were the remains of a ship.
I’m not sure whether they just parked it & walked away, letting nature take its course.

Caught up with John & nattered over cups of tea for 4 hours or so about, basically, what we’d be up to for the last decade.
(Incidentally, it seems to be a rare small town where the main drag isn’t “High Street”)

Took the bus back, getting in after dark, had a go at photographing the quite bright moon, …

… & watched a few episodes of Z Nation, which may not have been the wisest move.

Yes, it got funny; Episode 3 has the Liberty Bell in it, which they use to good & hilarious effect.
But Honeysuckle House is an old wooden building, and after watching three episodes, I was the last one awake, moving through a dark & mostly-empty house.

Like I said, not my smartest move.

Some early-morning phone-bingling led to a conversation with Steven & Monica about the planned Great Road Trip from Chicago to Indianapolis in August, which helped to firm up some plans for me.

Nelson is home to the Geographical Centre of New Zealand.

It’s the origin point for the District, which is in the centre of all of the districts – The Gravity-Model centre is sort of nearby, in an unremarkable patch of scrub.

It was a nice day, so I walked up there.
There was a lot of up involved.

Nice views though.

And because I wanted proof that I’d made it to the top of the bloody hill,

My other reason for extending my stay‡ was because Gen Con events registration happens at 4am NZ time, on a Monday, and I didn’t really want to be having to get up early to catch a bus the morning after having gotten up very early to hit the ‘Go’ button on my events wishlist.

I did some tweaking of that list the night before.
Tried & failed to remember how to make Excel do a sheet with Day & Hour time entries, incrementing by the hour, and had already drawn up a rough calendar when I realised that I could just do it in my diary in pencil, which is what I did.
Got through priorities 1-19 before I got sick of it, & just filled the back end of the list with sessions of Numenera & Dr. Who.

There’s a post in it’s own right about Gen Con Events Reg., so I’ll skip over that for now.

It absolutely pissed down in the afternoon; I did try to get a picture of the storm rolling in over the hills, but it’s … Not as ominous as it was in person.
 Fortunately, the ice-cream was topped up at mid-day, which made for a very pleasant day of doing very little.

My last day in Nelson, having checked the weather reports, I took the hostel folks in Greymouth (my next stop) up on their offer of a pick-up from the bus station, through the wonders of email.
Also booked a hotel for the arrival in the US; Hilton were doing a sale which happened to include something convenient, and it’s at a brand (Doubletree) which is known for it’s warm cookie at check-in policy, so that’s a plus.
I stayed at one in Dublin, back in 2014, which is why I’m a Hilton customer loyalty scheme member, not that I have any usefully accumulated points. The cookie there was pretty good, and very unexpected; Shall have to see whether I can get a jar of them for the road trip.

My bus out of Nelson was at 0715h, so I packed up all of my stuff the night before, and even forewent a morning shower (is ‘forewent’ a real word?) to allow myself more sleeping time.
Naturally, I woke up before my alarm.

It seems worth mentioning, to me at least, that I’m post-dating these … posts. Rather than doing a day-by-day, like I’ve done for past trips, I’m trying a thing where I do a post for each place, and set it to publish on the day I left the place.
That said, I’m also kind of behind.

Finding the Tombstone Backpackers was ridiculously easy, as it’s on the hill right above the Bluebridge Ferries depot. (having walked off the ferry, they then had us board a bus for the 2-300m trip to the depot, where I was, eventually, reunited with my bag.

I didn’t think it was that heavy, but there being only one handle, and that a one-handed lift, maybe didn’t help? It’s kind of cumbersome in ‘bag’ mode.

Also, this is why it’s the Tombstone on Gravesend Place; The cemetery.

As you can see, I bravely let another backpacker (Is it backpacking if you also have a wheely suitcase?) go first, partially because she got her bags before me, partially so that I wouldn’t be the creepy guy walking right behind her at dusk, and partially to see whether there was going to be A Zombie Attack From The Graveyard!!

The Tombstone has an older & more eclectic bit, where the lounge and kitchen and so on are, and a newer accommodation bit, which … reminded me a bit of an office building. There’s nothing wrong with it, or with my room, it just lacked character.
I mean, someone tried their best with the decorations, in what I’m assuming is a homage to Demolition Man.

I still have no idea how they work, though they were a fair way from the bathroom, so maybe I missed it.

The view from the balcony outside was pretty good, if you like bush-clad hills, port infrastructure, and looking right up a ferry’s freckle.

So, Picton?
It’s small. You can see, and hear, the ferry terminal(s) from pretty much the whole town.
It’s ringed by hills, which is quite pretty, though difficult to capture with a cellphone camera.

I spent the first morning sleeping in, because I wanted to and nobody could stop me.
My diary notes say “Slept In A Lot” – Make of that what you will. I do recall finding breakfast at around lunchtime.
Part of that sleeping in may have been because I woke up at 4am, downloaded the most recent episode of Game of Thrones on my phone, working on the theory that a 4am hit on the hostel internet connection was unlikely to inconvenience too many people, then watched said episode.

Come to think of it, that may be closer to “Went back to sleep at dawn” than “Slept in”.

There’s not a huge amount to note about day one, other than that I was chosen by the hostel cat.

It was made clear that moving outside onto the balcony to read was unacceptable, even if the cat had moved from my lap of their own free will, because I could have been providing petting-on-demand while I was indoors, but outdoors I would be too far away. Steps were taken to rectify the situation.

Day two was bit dark and foreboding, which did make the hills look all misty & interesting.

I’d seen most of Picton by this point, or at least all of the bits which didn’t require tramping, which seemed … risky, given the weather, so I went to the movies & saw Captain America: Civil War.

1. The movie theatre in Picton is part of the Aquarium.
   You buy your ticket from the same desk as you’d get an aquarium ticket.
2. To get to the theatre, they take you through a side door, past the tanks-o-fish, and into a room which holds maybe 30 people?
   It’s got tiered seating, and beanbags, which is a nice option.
3. There was nobody else there, and they showed me in & just left me to it, so I rearranged the beanbags to my own specifications.
4. At the end of the film (which I enjoyed, though it’s more of an Avengers-lite film than a Captain America film, I think), I have a moment of wondering “What happens now?”.
   There’d been no mention of coming to escort me out, but also no mention of where the exit was, so I stuck my head out of the door & followed some signs which led me to an (unlocked) side door.
   I suspect I could just as easily have wandered the other way, back through & around the Aquarium, and looked at the fishies.

Rain eventually started, and heralded the return of the hostel cat, who was wandering across the roof, saw me, came over, and demanded to be let in.
And dried.
And to be provided with a warm lap for a few hours, while a storm came straight up Queen Charlotte Sound & into the windows of my room.

The cat was eventually ejected, or at least encouraged to go find dinner, after dark, due to suspiciously proto-chundering noises.
They could have been sneezes, I suppose, but I was not prepared to take the risk of having to launder the blanket. Or my computer.

And it rained all night, as the song goes, or at least until I fell asleep. Was quite glad of the covered area between the block where my room was, and the block where the kitchen, and more importantly the kettle, lived.
The cat was also there, and spurned me, as is only fitting.

Trying my hand at one of those arty ‘light smeared by rain on a window’ shots.

Next day, I was able to stash my pack at the i-Site, where they had huge lockers for itty-bitty prices, and took a wander around a suddenly bright & blue-skied town for a few hours, until my bus to Nelson arrived.