February 24: Rain delay in Tolaga Bay

The tail of a cyclone turned today into a soup. Nice to peer from our Inn window as squall after squall dumped buckets on Tolaga Bay. In general, New Zealand, because of its relatively small land mass compared to the surrounding waters, does not affect the incoming elements like, say, North America does. So it just gets blasted. Fun to watch and be so glad we are not outside, huddled with 50 head of cattle under a pohutakawa tree.

We snuck down the road for "breaky", which was mostly grease with trimmings. Nap followed. Roy, the caretaker of the inn, overheard us asking about wifi options in town and offered the balance of gigs on his "some sort of device that uses cell connections to access the web". Even in the ferocious weather we were able to do email.

Roy is an interesting story. Late 60s, with a passion for photography (his local photographs cover the Inn's walls), he has been the ever-faithful "one man show" running the Inn for years: cooking, cleaning, fixing, managing. The Inn is owned by an absentee Kiwi and has been for sale for 6 years running (1.2 million NZ$) with no market in depressed Tolaga Bay. He had been wanting to move on, but for some reason has not. He has endured 9 assalts at the hands of drunk locals and now mainly serves only tourists and a few regular "truckies" who drive logging trucks south to Gisborne. Anway, a few years ago, a well off British lady passed thru the Inn and their common passion for photography helped a relationship to blossom. Current plans are for her to cash out her UK house and join Roy as "first class gypsies, photographing their common path around the world".

Guess we'll never know the end to this story, but the passion was sure there...

In early afternoon, the rain halted, steaming up the air. Just out of town we found the 600meter concrete wharf that made Tolaga Bay famous in the 1930's, til the road and trucking took over and turned the towns to ghosts. That was big times for the Inn as well.

Another fine dinner at the Inn and oh yes, Ellen found another ginger pussy cat...