Come in, Major Tom

Across the bay is the Awaroa Lodge, which has grown over time into quite an establishment, with 27 rooms, a restaurant, a cafe and various other services. Everything at the lodge has to be brought in either by sea or via the road we came on. Electricity is from a huge generator and all communication is via a satellite link.

The lodge has recently been taken over by new owners, Barry, a Brit, and his his Chinese wife, Selena. We met them on the boat that brought up across the inlet. Barry was kind of complaining that the lodge cost him 60,000NZ$ a month just too keep open, with 900NZ$ per week going on diesel for the generator. Which brings me to the Internet. In the past Tom had an account to connect at the lodge, but everything seems to have been changed by the new owners. Now it costs more and apparently doesn't seem to work quite as well. But then Tom does have a habit of doing things a more difficult way than most of us (I seem to have quite a few friends like this) and has been wandering around the woods trying to find places to connect. This has been a very frustrating task for him as his computer has been crashing all time. I, on the other hand with the trusty Linux, have just wandered over to the lodge, paid 8NZ$ for one hour, sat in the bar with a beer and linked up via the wireless connection. It is slow but it does work, though I am not posting pictures at the moment because of the slow speed.