Now Voyager: Sunday recovery at Cuba Dupa

Into the Memphis for a coffee and catchup with Gloria. She has been seeing the sights and sounds and smells of the local festival and it has been such spectacular weather the crowds have been out in their hundreds, and perhaps thousands, over the two day annual festival. Wellington has a small population but it is supremely well catered for in festivals of the arts and certainly with food which is abundantly evident from the succulent scent coming for the dozens of Cuba street stalls selling their wares this sunny Sunday morning. It is 22 degrees, and slightly breezy, just perfect.

The Haka is taking place outside of Memphis with the recreation of the arrival of the British explorers to be met with this warlike welcome, which must have been a little frightening, given their peaceable intent, just to occupy this beautiful land. Something which they did successfully and to the detriment of the Maori culture and their land for well-nigh two hundred years. The so-called Waitangi Treaty, thefirst and only one its kind to be made by the settlng races with the indigenous inhabitants, was something of a whitewash, with equality in theory only, but in reality it was never the case. The British effectively stole the vast majority of land from the natives and doubtless used it to great advantage with their advanced sheep, milk and cattle industries, but in doing so divested the Maori of their ancestral rights and customs. Happily in the last thirty years the Maori have re-asserted their rights to a small extent and are now fighting in the courts of law to save certain land tracts which have disappeared from their historical ownership.

The is the result of too much time and money, and nothing to do, teenagers going for joy rides and teasing the police to the extent that police don't arrest them!

Amazing feat of endurance from a fifty-eight year old woman swimming the Cook Straits!