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oct 11, 2000 Multimedia schools, museums, and the streets of Wellington ... (more)

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october 12, 2000
As promised, my last morning in Wellington brought grey dark skies, and sideways rain. In the morning, Dave Wood, a local multimedia developer operating as "PixelPump" met me as i checked out of the Tinakori Lodge.

We shared educational multimedia projects over coffee at the "Tugboat", a restaurant situated in, yes, a retired tugboat tied up at the downtown waterfront. In fact, we had my graphite iBook chatting it up with Dave's tangerine iBook. Like myself, Dave had started multimedia with the venerable HyperCard, moved on to solid work in Director / Shockwave, and were scratching our heads about Flash.

By strange coincidence, we had almost parallel stories about Dalmatians and accidents resulting in shortened tails, but that is a long tangential thread- check out the namesake for my web site.

today's photos

- all photos   o o o o

o o Getting to Queenstown

Dave then drove me to the airport, shared another "cuppa" ("cup of" coffee) and I was on my way to the South Island. Just in that time the weather had improved from driving, wind whipped torrential downpour to a windy pale gray drizzle. The first leg of the flight was to Christchurch, on the drier east coast, and once over the coastline, the visibility improved dramatically, proving clear views of the rugged snow-capped Kaikoura Ranges and the flood swollen rivers dumping their loads into the sea. The landing at Christchurch was clear and sunny.

I set next to a guy who was part of a larger group, all connected to the filimg of the Lord of the Rings movie in the region around Queenstown. He was a "body double" for the Lord Aragorn character, filling in for large crowd scenes, distant shots or overhead filming, etc. Although his part may seen small, he took playing the character quite seriously as much as the lead actor might.

The connecting flight to Queenstown however, had to cross the Southern Alps and as we approached the vicinity, there was no sign of opening in the clouds and the pilots felt it was unsafe to try to land, so our plane was diverted to Invercargill on the southern tip of the South Island. From there we were herded into a bus for a 2 hour ride to Queenstown.

That was one un-expected glitch. The second glitch was halfway to Queenstown, as we crested a snow covered pass, a huge crashing sounds came from under the bus, and the cause was a blown outer tire. The bus driver (nor anyone else) could get a cell phone to work, and busses that passed were packed, so the driver slowly drove on the bad tire to the small village of Athol. We descended on the local cafe with orders of coffee and snacks while we waited on the arrival of the repair service.

An older gent showed up and quickly began removing the lug nuts with a large ratchet and long pole. It took him about 15 minutes to get the old tire off (it had a hug blow hole in it and was extremely bald on the sides) and the new one on.

It was after 8:00 PM when we rolled into Queenstown, which after dusk and shrouded in rain, did not show any details but it was glorious to be there. Tomorrow promises to be a clear, photogenic day.