Wedding in New Zealand |
Feb 1996
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Diane had taken an extraordinary leap of faith the previous year by following me to South Africa on the strength of a remarkably brief acquaintance, three weeks to be precise, so heading over to her neck of the woods in New Zealand to tie the knot seemed a reasonable compromise that would go some way towards redressing the balance. Diane left for her hometown of Invercargill on the South Island a week before I did to attend her friend Lynley's wedding as a bridesmaid, and when I followed the same gruelling flight path from Cape Town to Invercargill via Malaysia, Auckland and Christchurch a week later it became clear that intercontinental weddings were not for the faint-hearted.
My first conversation in New Zealand was with a girl behind the counter of a gift shop in Christchurch Airport who greeted me like a long-lost relative, followed closely by another bubbly girl who gave me a detailed account of the topography of the South Island from the window of our small plane on my final leg from Christchurch to Invercargill. This good-natured friendliness was a good start in a new country for any stranger in a foreign land, and in keeping welcome I would soon learn that the good-natured manner is kind of open friendliness was par for the course in this part of the world, where everything looked clean and green no matter which way you were facing. Even Diane's mother Daniella who I had yet to meet was beaming with delight at her front door when I pulled into the drive, although Diane said she would have been just as pleased if I had three heads so long as I took her daughter off her hands. And there was Diane's brother Bill, about my age, as gentle a soul as you could never expect to meet without a single bad bone in his body. I had a feeling that this was going to be a good trip.
Representatives from my side of the world were a bit sparse on the ground for our wedding in New Zealand, but there were at least a handful of people that I would be able to recognise on the dance floor. Sheryl, my sister and only blood-relative to attend the wedding had made the pilgrimage to Invercargill from her home on the polar opposite end of the earth in Edinburgh; Julian, a former work colleague now living in Brisbane made the trip over the Tasman on account of his promotion to best man, replacing best friend Pete who was unable to make the trip from Sydney; and Gill, my former long-distance running partner who just happened to be in the neighbourhood while on a prospecting trip of New Zealand with her partner Alistair. They all enjoyed their brief holiday in the South Island though, and Sheryl would later recount the fun that she, Bill and Julian had when they teamed up and went on a trip to Queenstown the day after the wedding.
Invercargill is a small city at the southern tip of the South Island, not too far from Antarctica if the chilly weather is anything to go by, and some of the old dears of St George Baptist Church were abuzz with the preparations that our small wedding had brought to their end of town. This left Diane and I with little to do in the days leading up to the wedding, other than find appropriate dress-wear for the occasion, so we took the opportunity to grab Sheryl and explore a bit of the South Island in Diane's dodgy Ford Fiesta before the big day.
Our first stop was in Queenstown, the high-octane adventure town set against the Southern Alps on the shores of Lake Wakatipu just two hours north of Invercargill. The postcard scenery on our descent into Queenstown from Devil's Staircase drive on the eastern shore was enough to take your breath away, although ho-hum to locals like Diane who had been accustomed to New Zealand's clean and green beauty since birth. We took a ride to the top of Bob's Peak in a cable-car called a gondola, where we enjoyed spectacular panoramic views of Queenstown, Lake Wakatipu and a mountain range in the distance called The Remarkables. One evening we took a steamship cruise on the TSS Earnslaw across the lake to Walter Peak High Country Farm where we were treated to dinner, a sheep-dog demonstration, and hundreds of sand-fly bites that kept us itchy for days afterwards.
The next stop on our journey was in Arrowtown just twenty kilometres north-east of Queenstown, a historic mining village that experienced a gold rush when gold was discovered in the Arrow River in 1862 and which served the best tea and scones known to man. Our final stop was at the glowworm caves of Te Anau, a small town two hours south-west of Queenstown and gateway to the Fiordland National Park and Milford Sound. We boarded a scenic cruise across Lake Te Anau and switched to smaller rowing boats to enter the limestone caves on the western shore, rowing silently through underground streams in subterranean darkness to witness the incandescence of hundreds of little glowworms attached to the walls and roof of the caves, a sight we weren't likely to see anywhere else on earth.
We still had some time up our sleeve before the wedding when we returned to Invercargill a few days later, and used it to explore more of the neighbourhood and local attractions. We made a trip out to Bluff on the southern coast of the South Island about twenty-five kilometres from Invercargill, one of the earliest European settlements in New Zealand dating back to the 1820's which boasts, among other things, a bungalow completely covered in paua shells as well as the world's best oysters, if your'e into that sort of thing. At the Tuatarium in Queens Park in Invercargill we had to search long and hard to find the elusive Tuatara, a lizard-like creature which, though small in stature, is found only in New Zealand and is the only surviving member of a distinct reptilian order that lived alongside dinosaurs during the Triassic period. Apparently. Although it was hard to tell what it was that turned more heads in the sanctuary, Tyrannosaurus rex's little cousin or Julian's outlandish new hair-style.
The South Island was swamped by all things Caledonian when the Scots migrated to New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century, and Invercargill was no exception. Many of the street names such as Dee, Tay, Tweed and Forth reflect names of rivers in Scotland and the local dialect has a long way to go before the 'wee' this and 'wee' that can be rubbed out of it. It has a population of just over fifty thousand and, for a relatively small city, has some impressive architecture and enough going on to keep you interested. On one occasion we all went out for a night on the town for dinner, drinks and dessert, and on another slightly more formal outing we joined Diane's ex-work mates for a dinner at a place called 148 on Elles.
Diane and I were married at the St George Baptist Church in Invercargill on Saturday the tenth of February 1996. We had both managed to procure good wedding attire from a hire place in town and to this day are still pleased as punch that it cost us just a little over a hundred dollars all up. There were around fifty or sixty guests at the service which was conducted very solemnly and proficiently by Russel, who, being a minister but still a Kiwi, still managed to slip a word or two about the rivalry between the Springboks and All Blacks into his message. The wedding day itself passed by in a bit of a blur and it was probably as well that we had it video-taped so that we could see what actually happened later on. I do remember Diane entering through the doors of the church though, because I thought she looked beautiful. Exquisite. All the madness since our brief encounter in the lobby of our London Hotel the year before seemed to culminate in that single moment, as though the magnitude of what we were doing had only just become apparent. It wasn't just a pretty face I saw, it was a woman with love and commitment in equal measure and I knew then that she would stand us both in good stead for a long time to come.
The wedding service and signing of the register was followed by a light lunch in an adjoining hall that the old dears had put their backs into, and then it was off to Queens Park for a couple of hours of fun and photographs before the start of the wedding reception. Queens Park is a two-hundred acre tourist attraction in the centre of Invercargill since 1856 and consists of a botanical garden, aviary, sports grounds and, to my delight, an eighteen-hole golf course. We would spend a lot more time in Queens Park in the years to come, but it served us well on this occasion as a backdrop for the wedding photos of our small and enthusiastic bridal party.
The wedding reception was held in a hall of the Civic Theatre in downtown Invercargill, complete with waiters and waitresses scuttling between tables, a disc jockey and dance floor, and a long bridal table at the top of the hall that was elevated just enough to give us a majestic view of our minions and the great unwashed below. The evening ran quite smoothly. I ploughed through an ad hoc speech that drew enough laughter from the audience to put my earlier attempt at the engagement party to shame, and, to Diane's dismay, was complimented by Daniella's rendition of the time Diane had hidden in a suitcase under the bed as a child after feeling neglected and unwanted by her parents.
The disc jockey was from a local radio station and on good form that night. After Diane and I had cut and shoved slices of the wedding cake down each other's throats he encouraged us to the dance floor where we muddled our way through the initial phases of Strauss's Blue Danube waltz to get proceedings underway, and it wasn't long before he had all of the guests swanning and swirling about on the dance floor and swapping dance partners to keep the interest alive. The mixture of of people and colours on the dance floor was one of the last memories I have of our wedding celebrations that day. The other was the twenty minutes or so that Julian and I spent crawling over the tarmac in the rain and pitch-black darkness in search of a contact lens that Diane had lost - and Julian miraculously found - in a parking lot outside the Civic Theatre complex.
Diane and I finally escaped the madness and spent the next few nights at the Ascot Park Hotel, an upmarket establishment situated in sprawling lawns at the east end of Invercargill on the highway out to Dunedin. As enjoyable as the wedding had been, not to mention the efforts of all those involved, it was nice to be away on our own again and remember why the wedding had occurred in the first place. When we returned home again a few days later it was only long enough to see Sheryl and Julian off on their return journeys to Scotland and Australia respectively, before packing a bag or two and setting off on a week-long honeymoon around the South Island. Our flurry of international flights and travel over the past year had depleted too much of our budget and free time to be able to contemplate a more exotic honeymoon outside of Diane's immediate neighbourhood, but time and place didn't really matter at that stage and it was good to be away and for a bit and learn to put each other first again.
The first stop on our honeymoon was a return to Te Anau and the Fiordland National Park. We drove on northwards towards the Milford Sound and stopped off at a plthe Mirror Lakes on our way to the Milford Sound but were unable, possibly on account of the mildly turbulent weather, to witness the mirroring effect of the
The first stop on our honeymoon was a return to Te Anau and the Fiordland National Park. We drove on northwards towards the Milford Sound and stopped off at a plthe Mirror Lakes on our way to the Milford Sound but were unable, possibly on account of the mildly turbulent weather, to witness the mirroring effect of the
The first stop on our honeymoon was a return to Te Anau and the Fiordland National Park. We drove on northwards towards the Milford Sound and stopped off at a plthe Mirror Lakes on our way to the Milford Sound but were unable, possibly on account of the mildly turbulent weather, to witness the mirroring effect of the
The first stop on our honeymoon was a return to Te Anau and the Fiordland National Park. We drove on northwards towards the Milford Sound and stopped off at a plthe Mirror Lakes on our way to the Milford Sound but were unable, possibly on account of the mildly turbulent weather, to witness the mirroring effect of the
The first stop on our honeymoon was a return to Te Anau and the Fiordland National Park. We drove on northwards towards the Milford Sound and stopped off at a plthe Mirror Lakes on our way to the Milford Sound but were unable, possibly on account of the mildly turbulent weather, to witness the mirroring effect of the
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