> They recently discovered electricity, but they still send mail via carrier pigeons. The pigeons take messages back and forth from Auckland, where letters then merge into conventional modes of transport.

To do justice to the people of Great Barrier Island, they don't *have* to send their mail by pigeon. But there is, indeed, a service so you *can* if you want to. It takes four hours to get to the island by ferry from Auckland; for comparative purposes, you could fly to Australia and back in roughly the same amount of time. That's a very fast ferry; in my boat it would take all day.

As I told our visitors, the Coromandel Peninsula has always been where people go when they can't stand the hectic pace of life in modern society, and want a peaceful existence someplace where you can drive all day and only see a single-figure number of houses. Great Barrier Island is where people go when they can't stand the hectic pace of life in Coromandel.

> Dave bought some cookies (biscuits!) called "chocolate afghans," and they were pretty bad.

The afghan atrocity is an example of how you just can't commercialise some things. Afghans are *the* best homemade cookies ever. They're huge, dense, chewy chocolatey mounds with cornflakes in them to make them kind of crunchy, and thick chocolate icing on top. Without exception, though, EVERY attempt to make afghans commercially has turned out to be completely repulsive. The warped, squashed, wretched objects Dave bought are the worst of the lot where taste is concerned, but the ones you get in supermarkets, where so-called afghans turn out to be geometric stamped-out flat circles with the icing coated in vile SHREDDED COCONUT, are almost beyond belief.

Brunnen-"it's about the same resemblance as a live cow has to a McDonalds burger"G