Toppan

 Tokyo

Ugly Dumpling

Auckland Airport is home to a friendly shopping mall where mostly local people come to store.

At Ugly Dumpling you can have excellent Chinese food. For the enthusiast, the meal can be expanded to include Chunky Fries with aioli.

Street

 Auckland

Love hotels and how to avoid them

Booking hotels is Japan is not hard. Booking.com helps. And Jalan.net. And Google.

Watch out for love hotels, though. These are just among the list of innocuous Ryokans and Western hotels. Fortunately, they are usually easy to spot by their un-Japanese opulent furnishings. Sometimes, it is stated that a room is for adults only. Most reliable, however, are the reviews. A love hotel has no reviews. At a real hotel, Stephan, Juanita, and Kees leave their real-life comments.

Verdediger

 Waitomo Caves

World record haircut

In the afternoon, we drive to Te Kuiti to drop off things at the post office that we cannot take with us to Japan. This requires an enormous amount of paperwork because every hairpin and toothpick has to be listed. The lady of New Zealand Post assures us that summarizing everything under the category “Tourist purchases” is absolutely not sufficient.

After this penal work, I go in search of a barber. Following the NZ Post lady’s instructions, I find a barber who, unfortunately, is out for lunch until 1400, according to the sloppy sign on the door. At 14:05, a pickup stops at the door, greeting me with a blast of a horn. A tall Indian gets out. He wears a long white robe that contrasts with his full beard.

He greets me gruffly, opens the door, gestures for me to sit in the barber chair, and wraps a barber’s cape around me. He then turns on the hair clippers and tackles my haircut with the most casual movements.
Within 5 minutes, he whips the cape away again—a new world record.“Cool.”
“Thank you. $25.”

A boy with a 1980s mat slides past me into the barber’s chair. The cape swings through the air, and the clippers I can hear the clippers hum again.

Raetihi lost believe in itself

Raetihi

Raetihi is apparently in the process of shutting down. At least half of the stores and business premises on the main street are boarded up, and the population doesn’t seem to believe in it anymore.

Up

 

Te Anga

Clear lines in Whanganui

Whanganui

Whanganui surprised us nonetheless. Maybe because the weather was nice. The town has a real downtown, a steamboat, and the Durie Hill Elevator. You can reach the Elevator through a long tunnel that runs right through a mountain and then takes you straight up to the top of Durie Hill.

The sun drew tight lines through the city.

Whanganui
Whanganui
Whanganui
Whanganui