Today is the day that New Zealand sets the clocks an hour ahead. So it's officially spring! Other than bitching about rain, we haven't talked about the weather. Well, here was today's weather when we set out to transit from New Plymouth to Wanganui.
Not long after, it rained buckets for a couple of hours. By evening, though, it was partly cloudy and sunny.
The typical daytime high has been around 65ºF, often with a stiff breeze. Nights it gets down into the 40s. Far from tropical! A week from today we will cross to the South Island and get further still from the equator.
The touristical event of the day was a stop at the Tawhiti ("taffity") Museum. This is a fairly amazing labor of love by one guy to document New Zealand, and especially Taranaki District, history. In part he's done it by collecting; he has dozens of tractors and old cultivators and cream separators:
But also with dozens of full-scale dioramas, which (as with the Kauri Museum a few days ago) he populates with figures modelled after real local people. Marian likes this one:
and David likes this one, of Maori warriors planning a defense:
This last was part of a big exhibit about the "Musket Wars" of 1820-1840. During that period, before there was any significant European settlement, the Maori started to acquire muskets from traders. And they used them to fight wars between tribes—wars that in earlier days, fought with hand weapons, were not so serious. There was a stunning miniature diorama of a Maori army on the move to invade Taranaki region (as apparently happened several times).
It contained literally hundreds of figures, all different, as here:
We visited the city museum and city art gallery here as well, before buying some groceries and settling into a Holiday Park on the shores of the Whanganui River, which is New Zealand's longest navigable river—it reaches all the way up to Taumarunui, where we were several days ago.
There is a local controversy about these names. The town has been called Wanganui ("wong-uh-newy") since its founding in 1840. But it appears the founders got it wrong, because the Maori name should be written Whanganui ("fong-uh-newy"). (By the way, we have not been able to find out why the Europeans chose to phoneticize the "eff" sound using "wh" instead of, oh, maybe—an "F"?)
So the river and the district are WHanganui, but the town is Wanganui, and the mayor and city officials refuse to change it, although they are under some pressure to do so. It's a big eff-ing argument in these parts.
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