Living in Seattle isn’t exactly living on the plains of North Dakota. We have plenty of hills and living on Beacon Hill, as we do, I am used to walking uphill to get home from downtown, and I’d certainly think twice (or six times) before trying to walk home from the QFC on Rainier Ave, for instance, with a few bags of groceries, and one reason we haven’t biked much with Ari is that our ability to find reasonably level places to ride with him is hindered by the geography. But I don’t have an overall sense of the city as being hilly, even though it is, because the hills are fairly gentle. Leaving Wellington for the weekend to go to Whanganui though, one of the first things we noticed was how relatively flat it is. Streets where you can see houses for blocks and blocks instead of 3 at a time. Wide streets, with sidewalks on both sides. It felt so calm. Relaxing almost.
Whanganui (I love these audio pronunciation links) lies near the mouth of the Whanganui River, just a few km from where it meets the ocean. It’s a prosperous town, with its river history and associated manufacturing, as well as being surrounding by agricultural areas. The weather is much milder than it is in Wellington – we stayed in a cottage surrounded by an enormous vegetable garden and were amazed to see tomato plants (can you say “to-mah-to?”) already bearing fruit. It’s the equivalent of early May at home. We think we’ll be lucky to even get flowers on the two tomato plants we have braving our windy deck. Our lovely garden also boasted a super-engineered hen-house, where 4 chooks (I’ll have to find the derivation of that) laid us some warm eggs for breakfast. Whanganui boasts a really nice art museum, the Sarjeant Gallery, as well as a fine regional museum – all 4 of the exhibits we saw at the former were good, and Ari enjoyed them as well. Unfortunately, the regional museum, where we had hoped to see an extensive collection of photographs from the late 19th/early 20th century detailing local Maori life, was closed for fumigating. Oh well. 
I think we will likely head back to Whanganui, as our visit this past weekend was completely spur of the moment. Two days before the weekend, when it looked like the weather wasn’t going to cooperate with our planned camping trip, I checked the MetService forecasts for every place within 5 hours drive of us on the North Island and landed on Whanganui as likely to have the best weather. We had no plans before we arrived and didn’t know much about the town. After a couple of days there, though, we both felt like we could even live there. The river runs north into a national park and is the longest navigable river in NZ – there are lots of operators who do jet boat and canoe trips along the river – mostly starting farther up and going deeper into the park, and we are hopeful we’ll find the time to do a few-days trip a bit later this year. Not clear if we’ll find anyone who will rent us canoes or kayaks with a kid under 8 years old, but there are other options. Meanwhile, for this introductory trip, we found a jet boat operator who does some trips closer to Whanganui and into the lower part of the national park, and we enjoyed three hours with him and 2 other couples hearing about some history of the area and taking in the scenery. Because he is Maori, he had some good legends to tell, and he shared some of his whakapapa, or family/tribal history with us.
I learned something new about Whanganui after we got back to Wellington, which is that the spelling of the name (Wanganui vs. Whanganui) generated quite a bit of controversy recently. Apparently the last mayor Michael Laws (who just declined to run for re-election in last month's elections, so he is gone now), who has had his share of controversial episodes during his political career, made a big fuss about the spelling change when the local "iwi" or (a Maori social group designation, kind of like a tribe or clan), petitioned the New Zealand Geographic Board to add an 'h' after the W to reflect the actual Maori spelling of the word meaning "big harbour." (When the town was first given its Maori name, the consonant "wh" was not yet formally recognized as separate from "w" but there may also have been an issue with the regional dialect, which didn't make use of the "wh" sound -- so it's all a bit confusing. Wanganui spelled without the "h" doesn't mean anything.) The Mayor fought the request and got a referendum on the ballot regarding the issue - the vote came out overwhelmingly in favor of leaving the "h-less" spelling as-is, but voter turnout was low. Given his background and continuing second job as a radio talkshow host (who apparently, while Mayor, referred to the recently deceased King of Tonga as a "a bloated, brown slug" and refused to lower the flag to half-mast to recognize his death in 2006), it may not be surprising that in September/October 2009 during the spelling dispute, Laws was accused of "bullying" school pupils. They had written to him, in Maori, asking that he cease opposition to the Maori spelling. He wrote back that they should concentrate on "the real issues affecting Maoridom, especially child abuse and child murder." This of course made the national news. Clearly, racism mixed with politics is not the sole province of U.S. shock jocks. The result came down to the official name being allowed to be either alternative, but with all Crown agencies moving to the Whanganui spelling. The media release is interesting and you can read it here. I include all this because it is an example of the ongoing tensions between Maori and pākehā (this article is more interesting than the wikipedia entry on pakeha).
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