News From the Mysterious East

It was with some concern that I contacted my New Zealand correspondent.  I hadn't heard anything from him since his initial flurry with deer and tumbledown colonial architecture.  Of course it was possible that there was nothing to report but given his location it was also possible that he had been blown away one day never to return.


My correspondent lives in Wellington, New Zealand's capital and a practical example of what happens when you try to build a city in a wind tunnel.  My own experiences of Wellington are limited to being caught in a stairwell during an earthquake and being chatted up in a bar by a Maori guy who attempted to seduce me with his knowledge of the New Zealand division's actions in the Western Desert during WW2.  All I remember of the city itself is that it was raining and windy.


Eventually my sweating tech support managed to hook me up with my correspondent.  Apparently they'd had difficulty figuring out where New Zealand was.  They originally tried to connect me to some guy in Holland.  With an, albeit crackly, connection established I greeted my correspondent.


"What news from the land of the Long White Fleece?" I enquired.


"I fell off my bike," he responded.


I waited but apparently that was it.  He was in a hilly, rural part of Wellington (Wellington, basically) when he and his mountain bike apparently parted ways in a manner that was somewhat of a surprise to him.  I observed the formalities and, once I'd finished laughing, asked him if he was all right.  Apparently he was, more or less.  The bike was a bit battered though.


The mountain biking was a little bit of a surprise.  What with his mountain bike and my Tasmanian correspondent's predilection for wandering around the more tree intensive parts of her state it would appear that my blog is getting more like the National Geographic Channel every day.


"Why," I asked, "were you mountain biking?"


"It was too windy for sailing."


I will confess, gentle reader, that I thought the presence of wind was a rather useful thing if sailing was your intention.  However there are, apparently, limits.  It would seem that if you want to mess about in boats then it is rather a good thing if the wind doesn't pick up the boat you are messing about in and laminate it against the side of the nearest building or cliff face.  Since the wind in Wellington frequently reaches boat lamination levels I could understand my correspondent's concern.  At this point I felt it was my duty to point out that he had moved to Wellington voluntarily (something few people do in my experience) and that the broken mountain bikes and laminated sailing vessels were really all his own fault.  He thanked me for my input.


He also offered to send me photos of broken bikes and laminated sea craft but I wasn't that keen.  I was up to my hips in rampant wombats and poisonous snakes from my other correspondent's attempts to be helpful.  Instead I asked him to contact me immediately if anything interesting happened.  I may never hear from him again.