Saturday, November 21st, Napier, New Zealand
Bob: Napier is a relatively small city but has a large commercial port about 5 kilometers away where the Sun Princess docked. We took a free shuttle bus into town and were dropped off at the Information Centre right beside the beach. I purchased a guide for the Art Deco buildings for which Napier is known, and there turned out to be 93 of them! Fortunately they were all located in a fairly compact 3 block by 3 block square area in the middle of downtown Napier. So we decided we could take our time and walk slowly around that part of town to give each of these quaint old buildings a gander and take some pictures in the time we had available. |
Monika: The dock in Napier was truly in the commercial harbor and we were not allowed to wander at all. Instead they had free shuttle buses that took us to the visitor information center of Napier. However, we were greeted by a gentleman in 1930's attire standing by a 1930's car. The reason is, that the town of Napier was destroyed by an earthquake in 1932. The town fathers decided to restore the city in Art Deco style and two years later they had an Art Deco town that now is a tourist attraction because of it. Indeed the Visitor Information had a booklet describing 94 such buildings you could see during an Art Deco walk. |
Bob: Starting at the 1936 T & G building with its graceful domed cupola on top of a clock tower, we turned into the city on Emerson Street but immediately turned left onto Hastings street to see the Art Deco buildings lining both sides of that block. One of these was Jessica's, an Art Deco building designed by Stanley Fearn in 1932 that currently housed a kitchen housewares store something like a Williams-Sonoma store in the U.S. We found some nice hand-blown goblets with bubbles in the glass that were on sale, but wisely decided to wait until we were done with our walking tour to purchase them. Returning to Emerson Street, which seemed to be the main shopping area of the historic district, we meandered slowly along. For most of its length, Emerson Street had been converted into a quasi pedestrian mall with one lane of traffic kind of zigzagging through it. I kept shifting from one side to the other of the street, trying to take pictures of the Art Deco buildings on each side. That occasionally had me running afoul of the traffic in that almost invisible central lane, but fortunately the New Zealanders were tolerant drivers. |
Monika: The downtown Art Deco city is about 3 blocks wide and 5 blocks long with the aforementioned 94 Art Deco houses. Bob read the description of each one so the walk took longer than expected. But it was really interesting to see the differences in the houses and the parts that are uniquely Art Deco. We started at the bay, and walked the 5 blocks along one of the main streets admiring the different houses. At a houseware and ceramics store I saw some beautiful wine goblets for only $5. We decided to come back for them later |
Bob: After three blocks on Emerson Street we paused for a bit at Clive Park, a little park with a fountain in the center of it. Just across the street a cenotaph stood as a War Memorial, originally erected for the World War I veterans I think. New Zealand soldiers have served with Australian soldiers as part of the ANZAC forces in both world wars and other conflicts since then. |
Monika: At the end of the main street was a little park with a nice fountain. Back in 1932, the city fathers had set up a tent city in that location to function as a market while the stores downtown were being rebuilt. |
Bob: The Art Deco Centre was located in the old Napier Central Fire Station one block over on Tennyson Street. Their gift shop was filled with memorabilia and reproductions from the Art Deco era, which we generally like, but nothing was quite attractive enough for us to break down and purchase it. Returning toward the beach on Tennyson Street, we stopped off to view the interior lobby of the Municipal Theatre built by J T Watson in 1938. The lobby interior has been preserved in essentially its original state and showed off the clean, modernistic lines of that era very well, I thought. The Napier Antique Center, just a block down from the Municipal Theatre, was another well preserved Art Deco building originally designed by E A Williams in 1932. Our guidebook called it a "Stripped Classical" design, which apparently means the exterior decoration has been minimized and flattened, but part of the exterior design elements were some Maori patterns that were both quite unique and quite fitting for multi-cultural New Zealand. The antiques inside the shop were also very attractive, but once again we managed to escape with our pocketbooks intact! |
Monika: We walked back down to the water on the next street over, enjoying and reading more about the houses on this street. |
Bob: Continuing down Tennyson to the intersection with Hastings, I was reading a description of the Hollands Building built by Arthur Marshall for E.A. Williams in 1932 when all of a sudden I read that it is "now jointly occupied with the former Robert Holt building on the corner. Wow, who knew I had a building named after me! What fun! I carefully documented the moment by taking a picture of my namesake building on the corner as we turned left on Hastings to explore another full block of Art Deco buildings. Curling around the end of the block into Herschell Street, I searched in vain for "Toad Hall", a building that was supposed to be just across the street somewhere. Where Herschell touched obliquely on the Marine Parade, the main boulevard along the beach, we turned left to walk down past the last remaining Art Deco buildings and then crossed the Marine Parade to walk back along a beachfront promenade to where we had begun our little walkabout. Finding the rear entrance of Jessica's on the Marine Parade, we hopped into the shop to purchase our two goblets and then hustled back to the Information Centre to catch the next shuttle back to the ship where we rested for the remainder of the afternoon. |
Monika: Finally at the Marine Parade we walked along the street and then back along the beach, passing a rather beautiful old fountain where children were cooling off. We backtracked to the ceramics store and bought two glasses blown out of recycled glass in a beautiful rich blue. |
Bob: But when we turned our new international cell phone on (as we were within range of the shoreside cell phone transmitters), we finally got the message that our new grandson Emmett Judson Holt had just been born and everyone was doing OK! Feeling very relieved, we went to dinner so that we could brag about the big event to Ed, Gail, Colleen, and Keith. It's such fun being grandparents! |
Monika: Back at the ship we had a late lunch and then relaxed in our cabin. We finally got the text message, we had been waiting for during the last four days: Emmett Judson Holt, our newest grandchild, had finally made his appearance and all was well with mother and child. We were greatly relieved to get the message and marvelled at the technology that lets us keep in touch half a world apart. All aboard was already at 3:30 since we were supposed to leave at 4PM. So at three I went to the promenade deck to watch us take off. A small band in 1930's clothing was playing dixie style music and townspeople in 30's getup and driving old cars had also come to wave good bye. Around 3:30 the ominous message "Will so-and-so please report to the front desk" came on, implying there were 3 people who had not checked back in. This was repeated a couple more times. And indeed, 30 minutes later a security van with lights flashing came driving up to the ship. Out came a man in a wheelchair and his wife and two elderly ladies. A steward from the ship came quickly to help push the wheelchair while the wife hustled besides them. The two elderly ladies, however, took time out to take pictures of the old cars. Remember, the whole ship is watching, waiting to be off. Finally a junior officer came out to hustle the two along, so that the ship could pull in the gangplank and prepare to take off. We finally did drop our mooring lines and slowly steamed out of the harbor. The harbor is L shaped and the ship had to do an intricate left-right maneuver. We had two tugs attached, one in front was pulling and the one in back was keeping the ship from hitting the dock. I was in back watching all this, when I saw I tiny black creature come up for air, so it clearly was not a fish and did not look like anything I had ever seen. The lady next to me remarked: "Oh a fairy penguin" and looking closer I could make out two tiny wings. I tried to get a picture, but with only 3x it is not as clear as I could have wished. But it was an enchanting moment. After dinner we went to the Princess Theater relatively early, 45 minutes before start of the show, and got seats for the production show "The Piano Man". It was rather well done with one especially funny part, where the guys had evening suits half black half white. They did some rather funny choreography emphasizing the two part suits. It was really fun. |
| Index |
| Prolog | Map of Cruise around New Zealand | Map of Drive through Victoria | Epilog |
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