Monday 7 February 2005
Hi all, and welcome to the inaugural Rantspace Tour of New Zealand, brought to you by Guru G, M34tb4LL, Grumbler, Lumpy Trauma Overlord, Decay, and Droidy.
Last night ended at rather varying times for all of us - some were in bed by 9pm Sunday night, and up by 2:30am, others stayed up until 3am and got woken up by the alarm at 4:45am, and still others got to have a phone call wake them up at 6am.
Today's first challenge was to get to the airport and meet up in one bunch.
Today's second challenge was to get through the duty-free area without spending the last of the Aussie dollars.
The plane trip over was fairly uneventful, we took up the entirety of row 24 of our Air New Zealand flight.
Even though we had some semblance of a breakfast courtesy of a bunch of fast food outlets at the airport,
we were provided with another breakfast, a second breakfast if you will, on our flight. We had the choice of ...
- Hot: Frittata with potato and stuff
- Cold: Cereal and yoghurt and muffin
Both of these options came with a bowl of apricots and orange/mandarin segments. There was much sharing about with the plane food - bowls of cereal, fruit, tubs of yoghurt, and milk were travelling across the aisle. Grumbler's assessment of the frittata (it's a QUICHE! only without the crust thingy), was that it was all a bit plain, the sausage appeared to be OK according to Lumpy, the fruit bowls I thought were interesting in that the orangey mandarin segments tasted more like apricot than the pieces of fruit that looked like apricot which were also in the bowl.
The plane movie was "Her Majesty", and we also had the opportunity to listen to Canto-Pop, J-Pop and Mandarin-Pop... Decay chose instead to play COD, Mashed, and Hearts on his laptop, Lumpy read a book, M34tb4LL fell asleep and caused a dent in his head, Grumbler napped, and G and Droidy both brought out the Gameboy SPs ... I don't know if any one of us bothered to watch the inflight entertainment.
Nevermind, eventually we landed in Christchurch, where its been a bit muggy, but otherwise a pleasant enough temperature. We rescued the Warthog, christened it the Big Warthog Bus, then decided to swap it for one where the sliding door handle thingy was not broken. This second one had some teething problems at the beginning, in that the setup of the Ford Transit was rather unlike the one that Decay had driven in Melbourne ... Starting the car meant that the brake had to be pressed, while the button for neutral was selected. Grumbler found this out for us when he went back to pick up speak to the girl at the Rental Car counter. Lumpy's first impression was that Africa wasn't quite how he imagined it to be.
We checked in to our hotel of multiple rooms, went for a walk, for the day's nth challenge - find an esky/chillie-bin/ice box. The helpful dude who checked us into our rooms here suggested going to Farmers, a department store that seemed more along the lines of a Harris Scarfe with more furniture that Myer would sell, and gave us directions on how to walk there. Our first navigational task outside of the warthog proved to be OK, except that Farmers didn't stock chillie-bins this season. The next suggestion was to go to a place called Smiths, a couple of blocks past Cathedral Square. Guru G and M34tb4LL went to a penguin store in Cathedral square and wandered about in the area, while the rest of us went on a mission to procure a Chillie Bin. Eventually we stumbled upon the store called "Smiths", which is kind of Harvey-Norman-like in its scope, only to find that the only chillie bins they had were the full on powered by cigarette lighters fridge type contraptions...1600.00 was kind of too much to spend on something we were going to be using for all of ... 11 days. We stumbled upon a whole bunch of outdoor stores, Snowgum, Kathmandu, Kiwi Disposals, where we were recommended to go to The Warehouse, which was in the South City Mall (?). In the back right hand corner of this place (Best and Less crossed with the product lines of KMart?) we found our Chillie-Bin!
A couple of freezer blocks (well, fridge water bottles) thrown in, and the nth challenge was completed!
We walked back to Cathedral Square to meet up with G and M34tb4LL, and then walked back to the hotel a different way to how we went originally. Guess what we saw ... Challenge n+1... Dinner at Winnie Bagoes was up for tonight... plenty riding on this dinner, with the challenge being thrown down by Sambo, that their pizzas were better than the Vulcan from our local favourite, Piccolinos.
However, that challenge would have to wait a little longer, as we had some supermarket shopping to do, to fill up the chillie bin with chillie bin items. The Warthog was proving a challenge to manoeuvre out of angle parking, but Decay somehow managed to get it out of the car park, only to vow to park on the street instead. New World was the supermarket of choice for today, and we Shapes-ed it up like mad people. Sambo may not be on this trip, but we're still going to be eating Shapes on his behalf...
Finally, the challenge was on. We got to Winnie Bagoes, and set ourselves the task of choosing from their menu ...Decay, Lumpy, M34tb4LL and G sampled a drop of some NZ beer (Mac Gold, for those keeping track - brewery in Nelson, tour may be in the pipeline), to aid in the selection of appropriate pizza. Our final choices:
- Mexi-lime Chicken - no extra garlic
- Spicy Lamb - no extra garlic
- Italian - no anchovy, half olives
- Sicilian - no extra garlic
The Sicilian was chosen as the pizza closest to the Vulcan of Piccolinos, the others were chosen cos they sounded quite tasty, even if they mightn't be standard configuration pizzas. Winnie Bagoes, we discovered, is more your gourmet pizza place, rather than being your local pizzeria like Piccolinos. The gourmet pizzas aren't a fair comparison for what Piccolinos offers, the test would be whether a standard configuration pizza would match up to the might of the Vulcan.
The pizzas arrived more or less at once, sitting on round wooden slabs, which is a really good way of serving it up to a bench seating of 6 people. The pizza smells wafting about were really quite enticing ... but the truth would be in the tasting.
| |
Guru G | M34tb4LL | Grumbler | LTO | Decay | Droidy |
Average |
| Mexi-Lime Chicken |
6.5 | 7.5 | 8 | 7 | 7.5 | 7.5 | 7.333 |
| Spicy Lamb |
9 | 9.5 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 9.5 | 9.333 |
| Italian |
8 | 7 | 6.5 | 7 | NA | 6 * | 6.9 |
| Sicilian |
7.5 | 5.5 | 7.5 | 6 | 6.5 | 6 | 6.667 |
NA - Decay didn't try this one because it had mushrooms
* - Droidy doesn't normally like mushrooms but for a pizza with mushrooms this was good.
The verdict is in - the general consensus is that while the Spicy Lamb Pizza was by far the tastiest of the night, and is definitely some very fine pizza, it's not the pizza to compare a vulcan by. The Sicilian was judged to be the pizza with toppings closest to what of the Piccolinos Vulcan, and while it was tasty, the Vulcan beats this offering hands down.
Quotable quotes:
- The Mexi-Lime chicken didn't seem to mention anything about coriander being in the list of toppings. Most of us aren't huge fans of Coriander, so if it were mentioned, we would've requested it to be left off
- The Italian had feta, olives, roma tomatoes, sundried tomatoes, mushrooms, and salami, whereas the Sicilian had tomato, olives, salami. It was missing some kick in the salami.
- This line left intentionally blank
We did try to do something else touristy before crashing for the night in our rooms, but the Christchurch Gondolas, while open from 10am til late, were not open quite *that* late. Ahh well, sleep time for us (:
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