The hostel booking website I use listed two hostels for the town of Wanganui. One was affiliated with a large hostle association and with respectable ratings and an unremarkable description. For the hell of it I chose the other. The unreviewed, unrated hostel whose pictures showed an old Edwardian house (their term, not mine - it's big and old.) on the banks of the river. You meet all types in these strange hostels. The German couple on vacation in the New Zealand winter in this shit of a town, who some how today ended up in charge of the front desk. The Canadian kid on a working holiday who drove down from the ski place he was employed at for a second job in town (Not much snow and they'd over hired for his spot). The rugby player who didn't feel like driving home. The journeyman worker, arms covered in tattoos and with a vicious goatee who bitches endlessly about the state of New Zealand TV then settles down happily upon finding a British travel/cooking show. The retired pensioner who says that he just wanted to stop and spend some time in his home town. No family here though, no friends to stay with, nothing really to do. Really just nothing including a reason to stop talking to anyone he comes in contact with. Well informed on seemingly all issues, able to relate to people from all walks of life. Occasionally by dropping the title of a brother or aunt when appropriate, but never mentioning a wife or a kid. Seemingly happy and obviously alone, talkative and with everything to say. Lacking only an audience. A nightmare of how life can turn out, sleeping ten feet away.
Not that all hostels leave you with that downtrodden feeling. Maybe it was the crappy weather, although my Seattle roots if anything have made me immune to it, or maybe it was the warning in the guide book I borrowed the night before that made Wanganui so depressing. 'While it has a reputation for gangs and crime, the visitor has nothing to worry about as long as they turn a blind eye to what may be a drug deal on the corner.' I saw no such things but while walking the path along the river to the sea and then back again through a more inland root I saw nothing up lifting. Big, loud dogs, factories for processing lamb and making cat food, every lawn unkempt and every store looking for its better days. The seaside town of Napier was a very different story. After having been a very decadent place in it's heyday and then suffering a disastrous earthquake in the 30's, it immediately rebuilt its entire art deco city center. The result is very neat. Whereas other throw back towns seem artificial and manufactured, this one is real. The paint is a little peeling and a little faded on the odd building because, well they've been there for eighty years. The posters in the hostel for past art deco festivals proclaim it as the 'not to serious art deco festival'. And so it is because nothing is forced. Beneath facades of that past are all the modern shops you expect to see in any town center and the teenagers on the weekend are no more reverent then they need be and neither is the ben harper/jack johnson cover band playing the corner cafe on Saturday.
This hostel had it's own crew of characters of equally fitting nature. The slightly built geology student from Austin whose brain I was able to pick on the geological aspects of new zealand geography (as he explained it, the tectonic plates are sliding both under and across each other. Although he confessed that as he is only entering his sophomore year this fall, he has no idea why exactly that motion creates so much activity.) and later swap book preferences. The Italian from Milan who spoke the brokenest of English and talked of doing some trekking down south. The Korean couple studying English in their spare time and in practicing, discussing john Lennon, Yoko and the Beatles. The intonations of these exchanges between this familiar couple in the foreign language were great. Wonder, awe, questioning and consensus conveyed in a textbook manner but sounding as strangers conversing while their body language told the truer. This hostel too had it's older occupier. The woman had returned from teaching English in Madrid for a wedding of her son to be held in several weeks. In previous lives she had raised a family in Napier as well as been a teacher and ran this particular establishment at one time or another. She confessed that it was a cheap place to stay and far more peaceful than her families dwellings. Quick to converse and adept at recognizing when a conversation had run it's course, she would sit every afternoon with a cup of tea and packet of biscuits - holding court for whomever wandered her way.
No comments:
Post a Comment