Bundaberg in the land of Oz

Well, it is Sunday the 27th. and we have been here for 9 days. The facilities here at the marina are very good and one doesn't pay for the showers - same as Noumea. The weather is getting hotter, especially over the last few days when rain was expected, but all we got was higher humidity. We are starting to get a bit more used to it though and will certainly need to before we go north next April. The marina is near the entrance to the Burnett River and is 2 kms from Burnett Heads township where there is a hotel, bottle store, post office and reasonable supermarket. The supermarket (IGA) gives us poor old yachties on Shank's Pony a lift back to the marina with the purchases.
The marina itself runs 2 courtesy shuttles per day into Bundaberg City 20 kms away and there is also a very efficient bus service. At the marina there is a food takeaway, 2 fish shops, a restaurant, a chandlery and the marina shop which sells clothing and other knickknacks as well as having an ATM machine. All very service oriented and friendly. Also the people who organised the Port to Port Rally of which we are a part have been very welcoming and they have been organising various outings for us as well as a dinner on the 30th. Tomorrow we are going to a boomerang factory and a wine tasting!!
One disadvantage for us is that there is currently a 25% difference in our respective currencies but we feel this is to quite a large extent offset by generally cheaper prices here. There is no doubt NZ is an expensive place to live. And, if recent predictions about the Chinese economy come true the Aussie dollar will drop substantially but then so will the Kiwi. Certainly the world generally is not looking good and is on something of a knife edge right now. There doesn't seem to be much awareness of all that when you read the NZ papers which up until now have been full of various party policies as if NZ just existed in some sort of vacuum. It's somewhat the same here too, although the papers here do have much better coverage of world news.
On the subject of party policies we watched the election coverage on the NZ Herald website last night and generally we are reasonably pleased with the result, except that it's a shame that National won't be prevented from carrying out or called to account for their future actions, particularly selling what's left of NZ down the river. ACT and United Future will of course support them and the Maori Party will go wherever they see the greatest short term advantage. So their support is assured. However, we are pleased that it worked out that we were able to vote in Noumea and play however small a part in bringing Winston back into Parliament, so that there will be some strident and transparent opposition in the House. In many ways it's gratifying to see the vilification constantly heaped on him by the other parties and especially the media. They must be worried about something - no doubt being constantly exposed will cause them some anguish. And it's also good to see that there was a positive vote for MMP. It may be flawed but it's certainly more democratic than the old system of FPP. And it should be possible to tweak the legislation so that the flaws are dealt with.
We are experiencing some frustrating problems with the boat. From advice received here it seems certain that the watermaker HP water pump and another part have been supplied with brass internals whereas they should be high quality marine standard stainless steel to withstand high pressure salt water which is extremely corrosive. Just another example of the shoddy, "cheapest is best" philosophy which pervades so much of work in NZ these days. And we had a replacement electric element put in our hot water cylinder before we left NZ and the person who did it (not PJ) managed to jam it between the copper coils which are part of the heat exchanger system inside the cylinder. They have possibly been damaged and we are unable to get the broken element out. So we are looking at a replacement cylinder which, as the old one is at least 25 yrs old, may not in itself be a bad thing but there's a space problem and the only one that we have been able to identify to date doesn't have Australian certification so cannot be installed!! The alternative is to do some modifications to the space to accommodate a rectangular cylinder but then we will have to find another place for the engine start battery!! There used to be an Australian manufacturer of circular cylinders but they went into liquidation a few months ago after over 100 years in business - no doubt another victim of cheap nasty Asian imports! The joys of cruising on a yacht. It's not all G&T's at sunset!!
Cheers and lotsaluv from us........
www.tiaretaporo3.blogspot.com

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