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Mother and daughter wait for the traffic light in central Napier beside an Art Deco building from after the earthquake of 1931
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Two story buildings dominate central Napier, a city of about 65,000.
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Sunrise illuminates central Napier, an immaculately tidy city.
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The old tobacco headquarters displays the essence of Art Deco with clean lines and a simple curve, a graphic masterpiece.
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The city is not short of sculptures and statues, this one displaying a representation of the ponga, the Kiwi silver fern icon.
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The Masonic Hotel in the heart of the city caters to aficionados with
Art Deco in every direction.
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The carillon in Clive Square rings out four tunes every half hour
between 11:30 and 14:00 every single day.
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Also in Clive Square is a small Edwardian fountain, yet another exquisite sculpture in this city of art that requires more than a couple of night’s stay to properly view.
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Other towns in the area --- Hastings, Havelock North, and Clive --- have their charms though none like Napier. Surrounding the Hawke’s Bay area are low mountains and rolling hills with agricultural fields or vineyards where possible. Four small rivers wind through the coastal plain to the mighty Pacific --- during Gabrielle’s unwelcome tenure these small rivers breached their banks to become large shallow lakes inundating almost the entire expanse of agricultural activity.
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We visited the Hawke’s Bay area in April 2016, attracted especially by its Art Deco theme with Maori motifs. Sculptures of these styles were scattered throughout the city. Building faces displayed the geometric and stylized forms of the 1920s and 1930s, found also in some 1930s architecture in Manhattan and Miami Beach but nowhere as concentrated as in Napier. Of course the locals capitalize on their stylized town and have built a local industry around the attractions.
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The metallic essence of 1930s chic-ness strolls a downtown street
with her sleek canine companion.
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A neonic couple attract the sartorially-inclined to a high-end shop.
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A small port accommodates a hefty cruiseliner and small freighters. Napier is very much on the itinerary of cruises around North Island, mostly because of the Art Deco theme. Freighters load mainly sheep wool, lumber, and wine for export.
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When cruiseliners are in port the tourists descend like locusts throughout the city, easy prey for the vintage cars prowling the streets offering city and regional tours.
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The bronzed “Pania of the Reef” resides near the shoreline, symbolic of Maori heritage in this marine setting.
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Also symbolizing the Maori heritage is a mural in Ahuriri on the city’s outskirts.
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The southern cape of Hawke’s Bay is Cape Kidnappers. A tour by tractor along the shoreline was on offer to avoid the several kilometre beach walk to the Cape, a superb outing and picturesque all the way. The Cape featured a colony of breeding gannets and our April visit was at the end of their nesting at the Cape as most had migrated westward, many all the way to Australia, the takapu being an exceptionally strong flyer.
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A tractor tour of the shoreline all the way out to Cape Kidnappers was on offer by an outfit named Gannet Beach Adventures, the tours timed for low tide only. Almost twenty passengers were seated marginally comfortably in the trailer towed by the tractor that followed the shoreline, sometimes with tidal wash rising to the axles. Tour guide/driver Rod had an entertaining spiel on the flora, fauna, and fossils along the way, the tour being a great bargain.
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The slow ride by tractor trailer followed a narrow corridor between cliffs and shoreline. The cliffs are unstable and falling trees teetered at the cliff-tops but Rod the driver was unperturbed, he’d done the drive much of his life.
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The cliffs dropped almost vertically to the shoreline, allowing only a thin sand beach to absorb the tidal wash. Tourists take their chances as landslides are common.
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The shoreline to Cape Kidnappers is most inhospitable for marine craft.
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Outcrops and tidal pools are just seaward to the thin line of barely navigable shoreline offered to the tractor trailers.
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The tip of Cape Kidnappers is dramatized by sculptured rock with a flat space filled with breeding and nesting gannets.
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The population density of the Australian gannet (or takapu) at the Cape has thinned out by April. A few still tend their nests and fatten up on
abundant seafood nearby before a migration.
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Takapus socialize and trade business cards prior to migration departures westward, many flying across the Tasman Sea to rich
marine feeding waters off the Queensland coast.
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From the top of Cape Kidnappers the walk is down to the shoreline
where tractor trailers await for the ride back along the treacherous
shoreline toward Napier.
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The Hawke’s Bay area was a delight to visit but haunted by the earthquake that razed the city in 1931, this being in an active tectonic area. The city then rebuilt almost from scratch with the attractive civic theme of Art Deco. But just two months ago, in February 2023 disaster struck the Hawke’s Bay area again with the devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle. Most if not all the photos you’ve seen here would have been affected by flood or erosional instability, many disastrously. The post-Gabrielle damage is best not to imagine as devastation was widespread throughout idyllic Hawke’s Bay.
We wonder of the fate of the thousands of gannets that were nesting in February. The tractor tour to the Cape has almost certainly been curtailed by landslides and debris at the shoreline. Infrastructure damage throughout Hawke’s Bay caused paralysis in services for some time, maybe even still. And we wonder about the survival of the art and architecture of a very charming town beset by two natural disasters.
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