The Pizza Of Death

Would you like arachnid with that?

We may have some strange dietary habits in New Zealand but none stranger than what has been dubbed by the media, the Pizza of Death.

Rotten corn is a Maori delicacy and 'Mountain Oysters' are sheep's testicles in disguise, which are eaten with great gusto in the rural hinterlands of many countries including this one.

The aforementioned pizza is a different matter entirely when is comes to sustenance.  The newspaper report states that:

A Domino's customer dubbed his takeaway the "Pizza of Death" after finding a poisonous white-tailed spider hiding in the box.

The Palmerston North man said his brother found the spider under the fold of the box after eating a slice of Meatlovers.

There are two varieties of white tail spiders in New Zealand and both are Australian imports and venomous.

Domino's New Zealand general manager gave the customer an apology, a refund and a free pizza.

The spider is be sent for testing to see if it had gone through the pizza oven.

Not only does Australia export it poisonous fauna it also has to deal with pig-eating mice. A South Australian pig farmer has spoken of a plague of mice so ravenous that they are eating his prize stock.

In desperation he has resorted to a home made remedy to rid his farm of the plague.

"I mix icing sugar and cement. The icing sugar attracts the mice, they eat it and then the cement clogs them up."

The answer to both of the above problems is quite simple; broaden the mice's diet to include spiders.  Once they get a taste for these they will forgo the pork and New Zealand pizzas will be once again fit to consume.

A Policeman's work is never done

All That Glitters - A Photographic Journey

Click on the book above then click again to see the larger images in the portfolio

A three day road trip to Tauranga is now complete and the above images cover some of the sights we saw enroute.

Revisiting old haunts such as Maketu was one of the highlights.  It is now famous for its meat pies but has a much earlier claim to fame; as the landing place of the Arawa canoe in 1340 which brought  Maori to these shores. Quite a sailing feat of some 2,000 miles, navigating by the stars and the waves.

It was the middle of the kiwifruit and mandarin season and Te Puke in the Bay of Plenty, is regarded as the heart of kiwifruit country.

The fish life under the wharves at the Port of Tauranga in Mount Maunganui was prolific and  local fishermen were getting some good catches on both rod and hand lines.

We were blessed with unseasonable warm weather but have returned to the promise of rain in Auckland over the next couple or days.

Tauranga Travels

The trip down to Tauranga was uneventful with the morning fog still clinging to the hills. Following State Highway 2 from the southern side of the Bombay Hills we skooted across the Hauraki Plains, stopping for a  break at Ngatea.

I remember the Plains well as I had an Uncle who owned a farm at Kerepehi, near Paeroa. He was not an "uncle" in the strict sense of being a relative, but was an old army POW friend of my father's.  Brian Wiggins and his wife Buster had three daughters and they treated me as a son during my holidays with them.

The second of these when I was 11 or 12 could be termed a "working Holiday", as I worked as a farm hand learning to milk, hay-make and take an active part in the day to day routine of dairy farming. Throwing hay bales and stacking them on a truck, or in the shed, was also a great muscle building activity,

Earlier holidays on the farm had seen me roaming the hedge rows looking for birds eggs to add to my collection. This I might add was well before the days of conservation so a Pied Stilt egg was highly prized as was the art of being able to 'blow' and egg to remove the yolk inside without damaging the shell.

Two other memories I have of these times were learning to ride a motorbike - a Norton 500CC - and doing a 'ton' (100 MPH) as a pillion passenger on the same bike; clinging on, literally, for dear life to the jacket of the farm labourer who was the proud owner of the machine. This was also without any form of crash helmet which in hindsight was foolish in the extreme.

Church - Waihi
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This trip to Tauranga was much more sedate and we left the Hauraki Plains and went through the gorge that intersects the lower Coromandel Peninsila to Waihi, the site of New Zealand most intensive, open cast goldmining operation.

The Martha Mine started as an underground digging but later in its life open cast methods were used.  With the high price of gold it was reopened in recent times.

White Shed - Martha Mine
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