Oh My, Oamuru

so coordinates were reset for Oamuru.

We did not have a good day. Breakfast was awful, the traffic appalling, it was hot and sweaty, we had an accident in the car when we were rear-ended by an Insurance Broker (bet you can’t find that phrase in too many other blogs!) and when we arrived at our gloriously steam punk hotel we were told that we didn’t have a booking for the next night. But I think we had grown tremendously laid back in Kiwiland because we just shrugged, got changed and went out for a marvellous dinner.

We left the hotel’s seagulls to fend for themselves

Already Oamuru began to cast a spell. When the first settlers arrived there was no wood available so they had to build using the local Oamuru limestone and in these Victorian days they build some cracking buildings. The whole town fell into decline at the turn of the century so no one had the money, nor the motivation to re-develop the decaying Victorian town. So it remained mothballed until someone realised its splendour and the tourist opportunity offered by the architecture and … the penguins.

The next morning we decided to explore the town. I quite fancied a look at the Little Penguin colony at the end of the esplanade and then we passed a little train and these two enchanting characters.

“Can we buy a ticket for the train?” we asked. ‘The train is free today because it’s only going halfway,” they said, “to the beer and wine festival.” But we had a whole town to explore, the Steampunk capital and anyway, it was only 11am.

The beer and wine festival was a hoot. We decided to be good and walked along to visit the penguin colony first, which was great because we saw the seals that weren’t at our destination yesterday and had obviously travelled especially to see us. We discovered that many, many people travel extraordinary distances to pay huge, and I mean huge, amounts of money to watch many very small flightless birds walk up a beach. There were other people who paid rather less money to stand on a beach, talk to flightless, bearded brewers and sample their amazing wares. Guess which we did?

Soon, sufficiently fuelled, it was time to make to make the move to the world of the steampunk. Steampunk is an insane, creative movement, which started (apparently) in the fifties and still continues.

It is a bit like a geological unconformity where strata of rocks are missing in a sequence and time has a hiccup. Steampunk is where our future (and our fantasy futures) are overlain on a Victorian past and all the other bits are missing. Where steam still rules, sparks still fly, machines hum and spin. It’s Mad Max, the film of HG Wells The Time Machine, the machine of Frankenstein’s creation but where we must use them to address our current future and fantasy futures – alien invasion, war, terrorism, genetics – you choose. The most evident component of the steampunk movement/cult is the look, the costume, a wonderful mix of Victoriana and, well, practical weirdness, which must, of course, be mainly black.

The whole experience was consuming, enjoyable and just weird:

And all this was contained within, what else but the real Steampunk HQ:

The rest of the town, down by the harbour then seems completely influenced by steampunk (or was it the beer?) just wonderfully alternative, arty, creative and great. We visited the museum, an interactive experience where you could dress up and just lose yourself in old Oamuru.