CBD by Miranda Spary
The NZOpen is here again and the very best thing about it is that we can have yoga on the lawn tennis courts at Millbrook instead of in the cramped little fitness room. It’s SO lovely doing yoga outside and our teacher even made a rainbow appear last year - he really is magic! Do try the magic again this year, Mark. Actually there is another very good thing at the NZ Open - you can have a go at the CLOSEST TO THE PIN competition (pin is a fancy golfing word for hole) -and you could win $5000. All you have to do to win the $$$$ is to make a donation to our excellent Wakatipu Community Foundation and you get two goes. I just read the rules, and you can enter as many times as you want, so hurry along to the 14th hole on the Remarkables Course and try your very hardest.
There were so many weddings and parties and whizzo things happening last weekend. I went to the 50th birthday party of PATAGONIA Queen Lorena - it was spectacular and her loving husband Alex cooked the best seafood paella I’ve ever had. Her mother made sensational empanadas and after having eaten more than is wise, suddenly not one, but three magnificent cakes appeared. Alex is setting the bar VERY high for other husbands and I’m not naive enough to imagine my husband will suddenly produce any cake at all, let alone one of these great glories.
And NZ’s greatest glory, Milford Sound, has a huge body of “experts” deciding on its future. I can’t believe anyone could think that letting cruise ships with their thousands of passengers come into Milford is a good idea. Haven’t they noticed what happened with the Costa Concordia? It took forever to clean up that one, and it’s in a highly populated and already polluted part of the world with all facilities nearby. How would Milford Sound ever cope with one of the inevitable dramas? Can’t they just let it stay pristine? There’s even a rumour about a big theatre for cultural shows for the cruise passengers. Ahem. Any “cultural” show that is just for tourists anywhere in the world is usually unspeakably crummy. When NZ was the guest nation at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the “cultural show” was cringeworthy. The pavilion was so stunning that there were massive queues even to get into it - the theme was “While You Were Sleeping” and the whole room was dark like being under a NZ night sky. All the media praised the space and silence of the pavilion and slammed the show as “ethnokitsch”. Couldn’t agree more.
Cruise ships aside, some big boats are fabulous and we took our daughter in law and our 3 years old granddaughter on the Earnslaw to Walter Peak for lunch. It’s VERY expensive (and a lot of that is to do with the way RealNZ is trying to minimise its impact on the environment) but the food was excellent and we all loved the sheepdogs and shearing and gardens and we’d forgotten just how much fun the whole day is, especially the singalong with Kate on the boat. Now our little one is back in Japan and our house is still littered with wands and crowns and tiny shoes - I miss the chaos!
And for anyone of the fairer sex (sorry, chaps!) don’t forget that it’s time to enrol or reenrol for Impact100. If you want to help this fabulous community, there’s just no better way to do it. 100 women (actually many, many more than that enrol in the Wakatipu) all donate $1000 each and then local groups apply to win the money for their cause. We vote on the ones we like most and we make a HUGE impact for these groups. I know it’s meant to be about philanthropy, but it’s just as much a way to meet new and fabulous friends and learn a lot about our wonderful part of the world.
