On Saturday, I returned the rental car and caught a bus from Gisborne to Napier. With a population of about 50,000, it's the largest town on the east coast of the North Island and is the focal point of the Hawke's Bay region.
Apart from the surrounding wine country, it's primarily famous for its wealth of Art Deco architecture. On February 3, 1931, the town was all but demolished by New Zealand's largest recorded earthquake, weighing in at 7.9 on the Richter scale. Most of the buildings were red brick and offered completely inadequete protection to their occupiers, 20% of which died from the falling masonry and susequent fires that engulfed the town. The ground in many surrounding areas rose by 2 metres, giving the then isolated semi-island settlement vast swathes of new land with which to expand into. When they rebuilt the town, Art Deco was all the rage and as a result, many of the central streets feature homogenous rows of upper-floor frontages.
After I checked into Stables Lodge backpackers, not far from the town centre, I went on a two hour guided walk of the Art Deco buildings, including a few interiors which you can't normally access. Having an Art Deco building or two isn't that special, but Napier has over 90 in its three main streets, one of the highest concentrations of this type of architecture in the world. Impressive it certainly is.
That evening the hostel arranged a BBQ and by agreeing to help out with the cooking, I got a free meal, which I thought was a reasonable deal! After dinner, I went for a walk along the beachfront and into town, before heading back to the hostel, where I got chatting to a few other backpackers in the lounge as we watched a film on TV.
On Sunday, the sun was shining relentlessly again and after a late start, I walked into town. I bought a book (Johnathon Strange and Mr. Norrell) and then went to get some lunch. I walked into a girl who I met the previous night in the hostel and we went up Napier's Bluff Hill, where you can see the town and surrounding area. When we got back down into town, she had to go off to the next stop on her trip, so I went to Opossum World, a free and mildly amusing exhibition on New Zealand's greatest pest. From there I continued on to the Hawke's Bay museum, which had a fairly good display on the earthquake, but of course couldn't match up to the likes of Te Papa (Wellington) or the Auckland Museum.
I returned to the hostel to find two new German girls in our room, who said that they were going to a cricket match and asked me if I'd like to join them. Not having seen a live professional match yet, I went with them to the stadium down the road. When we asked if we could get a discount for not seeing the first five hours, the woman said no, but after we began to walk away, she said that she'd let us in at the concession price. It turned out that it was an international match, the Blackcaps (NZ) vs. Sri Lanka, not bad for $6! So we sat in the evening sun and watched the last two hours of the match, seeing the Blackcaps lose by 20 runs in the end. Cricket isn't exactly the most exciting thing to watch at times, but at least it had a good atmosphere.
