NAPIER - PREPARE TO BE DECO-DAZZLED

It was Duncan, Rhiannon and Megan, friends of the Average Family who had drawn the short straw for our five day visit to Napier. No sooner had we arrived at their home than we all piled into the van to go and collect McCauley - a huge Highland bull that was coming to stay for a few months. Getting him into the trailer was not easy then he decided to turn round, and that's how he travelled home, much to the surprise of following traffic when he peered out of the back!

The city of Napier was shaken to the ground by a catastrophic earthquake in February 1931. Hundreds perished under the rubble and in the following fires that raged through the ruins of the city. What followed was a fevered rebuilding programme in the style of the day and Napier rose from the ashes as the world's finest city of asymmetric buildings decorated with the chevrons, zigzags and lightning flashes of Art Deco and the stylised block and floral designs of Art Nouveau with a few buildings in Spanish mission style thrown in for good measure. We decided to do the city tour on foot and not take the spandangly version and be chauffeured around by Bertie Wooster in his cherry-red Buick and spent the day wandering around the dazzling streets that felt just as if we were on a 30's filmset.

The Napier Museum was excellent - a combination of a lesson in NZ geology, a film about the quake (complete with creaking and shaking seats) and lots of 1930's bits and pieces from in and around the home - lots of Bakelite and Clarice Cliff. We listened to recordings of tales from a few who had survived the quake. The first was Ida, a young optometrists assistant who was in the lab at the time the quake struck. Ida remembered cases falling of the walls and dozens of glass eyes rolling about on the floor as it heaved and twisted under her. Then there was Gordon, a young farmhand who had been sent down to the beach to burn rushes when the cliffs and cattle started to crash into the sea from above. He turned and ran only stopping when he thought it was safe and glanced back over his shoulder to see the most amazing sight - the sea had disappeared! The quake had heaved the seabed up by 2 metres and where there had once been water was now left high and dry and strewn with huge packhorse crayfish. Unable to resist, he went back and picked up as many as he could carry on his bike and rode back to the farmer's house of which he had been left in charge for the day and was dismayed to find that it had been totally flattened!

We would have walked out to the gannet colony of thousands of birds at Cape Kidnappers had they not all flown north for the winter three weeks earlier so we took a walk to the summit of Te Mate Peak instead. Set in a reserve of giant redwoods and native bush, Te Mate rises sharply from the plains and looks just as if a giant has taken a big rocky bite out of one side. We walked along the ridge track and couldn't understand at first what the wooden ramps that just disappeared over the edge were used for, until we realised that they were launching points for handgliders. We had a quick look around before scuttling off, just incase someone mistakenly thought that we were up for it ...