Paihia

Legoland at the beach!

This week was the annual lads weekend away. This is a tradition that started about 6 years ago and has featured venues such as Rotorua, New Caledonia and of more recent years, the Bay of Islands. The last 3 years we have stayed in Russell but this year decided on Paihia. This event usually features renting a big and ostentatious house. This time of year they go for a fraction of the summer rates. Our group then proceeds to spend the next few days living like millionaires and lounging around eating, drinking and talking a whole lot of crap. Having stayed in some of the finest houses in NZ we are all now highly qualified in critiquing architecture and decor. This year the house was a strange mix of high quality interior fittings and exterior design that just doesn't work. When I first saw it I assumed it was an old house that had been renovated but this place was built about 10 years ago. For some inexplicable reason the designer seems to have been going for that awful 1950's NZ beach house look. It's a wooden house featuring old style linear weatherboard. Anybody who uses this stuff for a modern house is fucked in the head. All you achieve is to make it look like a state house with big windows. Then they used aluminium joinery which is great stuff but just looks wrong in this kind of house. Finally, instead of going with a corrugated iron roof which would have been correct, they used red tiles. The result is that is looks like sometime a kid would make from Lego. Having said all that the interior was beautifully done and I would go back there again. The biggest problem with the place was the big TV screen and Sky decoder being in the main lounge/dining room. TV rooms should be hidden in a basement somewhere. TV sucks the life out of people and kills conversation dead. Shane woke up on Friday morning at 8.30AM and switched on the TV. He proceed to have a Sky marathon and spent the next 16 hours flicking through the discovery channel, the living channel, the history channel and the nation geographic channel. I can't figure out why anybody would go on holiday and just sit watching crap on TV. I hate the way a TV dominates a living area and draws everybody in. Switch it off and you will get good social interaction, good conversation and everyone engages with each other. Switch it on and the result is a bunch of non communicative people gazing at the screen or in some cases falling asleep.

Pahia beachfront

Paihia is a bit of a dump. Whereas Russell is quaint and historical, Paihia is purely commercial. Take away all the souvenir shops and the tour operators and you've not much left. The place is really busy at new years....if you want to ride a jetboat, go big game fishing  or swim with dolphins this is the place for you. But at this time of year there's not much going on. I felt sorry for all the backpacker types who have come all this way to see awful weather and a one horse town. Everything touristy in this country depends on fine weather. That  means December to April. NZ is really one of the best places in the world for these 4 months. If you're thinking of comming here during May-September....don't. You won't like it.