Napier Day Trip

My last blog entry was a bit depressing for my liking, so I am gonna push it to the bottom by filling with highlights from the Napier day trip.

It was one of those...days when we were working hard out towards the final week before the sem break, hui came up with her spontaneous idea. "hey! let's go napier to celebrate our sem break, i'll get hold of a car"

So off we went, nice bright and early on a saturday morning. The weather seemed to be on our side too, it was sunny for the entire day.! The drive was 2 hours long on a.... very questionable manual car with the back seats jammed packed with JUNK FOOD.

Introducing the paricipants

From left: Chong (1st year Horti,) Hui (4th year food techi), Brad who's got blocked by my big head (4th year mechatronics) and me.

First stop: The beach!

sry for the quality, but this was taken using my fone. The beach was nice~ especially on such a nice day. But what was funny about the beach was that instead of the usual sand, the beach was covered with gravels, it was really bizaare. But I miss the water so much, so it was nice to see the sea again.

Beside the beach was....

A 'Sunken Garden' and yes that was the name of it. I thought perhaps the ground got 'sunk' because of the earthquake or something, but the lady at i-site it was just the part of the design when the architect designed it. It was a really special garden in my opinion, quite small, but had really artistic fountain and really nice sections seperated by channels of water.

With noon approaching, our stomachs were rumbling, we met up with Brad's friend Mark, and told him to find us a cafe with nachos (Brad was craving for them)

Hui and Me we our lunch. MUNCH TIME!

And.. that was our lunch, nothing fancy really, kinda like.. takeaway/cafe kind of place BUT Brad got his nachos, and the meal was cheap. ($6.50 for a roast pork meal) So it was all good. ^^

With a tour guide under our disposal, we gave Mark a map of Napier with circled marks of where we want to visit.

First there was the Art Deco. It's basically.. just an art shop. But the artworks are there to preserve the artworks from the period which Napier was struck with the earthquake. So it's very... early 1900s. Not really my style, but it was worth a look.

Then there was the theatre, again, nothing spectacular, but perhaps looking more modern than I would expect. I've taken this particular foto because I thought the design look hauntingly like the theatre in the game Shadow Hearts (which i only played for teh first 2 hours) BUT it did make me have chills down my spine when we walked in... the theatre in Shadow Hearts had zombies @_@

We were aware there was an aquarium at napier, but non of us were overaly excited about it, until Mark said "it's the national aquarium, they recently renovated it, you should go check it out"

Me force feeding Hui a chocoalte fish.

The aquarium... well... In terms of the fishes on display, it's nothign better than what's at Kelly Calton. The lady at the reception made a huge deal about how there's a feeding time at 2pm. And well.. what exactly is the attraction? a diver.... chucking pieces of fish fillet at the fishes in the tunnel thing.

My attempt to take a pic of Dory~~ but it was just swimming too fast

What I did enjoy from the aquarium was seeing Kiwis for the first time... yup... I've never seen Kiwis awake and running out of all those times I've visited Auck Zoo. But this time.. there were 2 of them.. running, chasing each other, digging for things. It was really great!!! I guess with all the recovery programme of kiwis, and the fact that they carries the largest egg in propotional to its size, i've always imagined kiwis slow, fragile birds, but in fact, they run around quite fast and agile. Seeing kiwis.. that along made up for.. the rather disappointing aquatic life display at the "NATIONAL" aquarium.

Next we went and found a look out overlooking napier port.

As expected from a port, there's nothing pretty about it, except hey.. it's so much smaller compared to auckland one and... the scenery behind sure is pretty.

Then there was... a Botanic garden

Which is questionable as a garden, because it had.. heaps of... cages with different types of birds. Hahaha, there was not much there.

As Napier seemed to have, nothing else to showcase, we went to Mark's place, and started shooting glass bottles with his air gun.

Muwahahaha... glass bottles, I SHALL TERMINATE YOU!

I did manage to shoot a bottle, after gazillion trials :P

That was the end of the trip, it was then another 2 hour long drive back to palmy... this time however, the drive seemed longer as our car was thirsty for petrol, and there were no petrol station for about an hour after the car is giving us signals that it's thirsty. We made it to a BP though (quite miraculously) I think.. the car fuel detection thing is coo coo, so it probabily started giving false signals earlier than it should've... thank goodness for that though, or else it'll be a super long walk back to palmy.