The Puke Ariki Museum and Gallery at Jetcharm – Day 44

Today we are going on a bit of culture crawl starting with the Puke Ariki Museum. Again, I hope I pronounce that correctly.

We rock up to the [puke ariki] museum and instantly the outside looks pretty awesome, the design is like woven metal in and out of each other all away around. Extreme bridging wa wa wa.

We decide to start our way from the bottom of the museum and work our way to the top visiting exhibitions as we go. First one is a temporary museum called Voyage into the Deep. From this name, you can probably guess that it is about the underwater world. We arrive down there and there is a big replica of the Nautilus from the Jules Verne book. It’s been really well designed there is a lot of activities around so we start playing around.

There’s a simulator of a submarine and it’s like two player game. One person has to control whether you go up or down the other person has to control whether you go backwards forwards to the sides. I’m going to go inside the ladder because it looks exactly my size. Then there is another little game which is basically a moving table where you try to move a little ship. Laura tries to lift early scuba diving gears and she’s having a hard time. There is a lot of different plaques and information about the depth and we play and read all of those because we are freakin’ nerds.

And then there is escape the submarine the activity. 2, 3, go! Faster, faster, faster…

That is not fast. I’d like to see you do that. I challenge you to Escape Hatch. 3, 2, 1, go!

That’s so small.

So after that exhibition we go into the settlers exhibition which is the i guess the adults section of this museum. This sort of place you can find in most museums in New Zealand it’s sort of like the trinkets and the little things found all over New Zealand when the first European settlers arrived. So there’s all sorts of things there but obviously all Taranaki specific. There’s old Taranaki rugby shirts and dresses from Taranaki maidens back in the day who needed to be saved and drills because there’s a lot of oil and drilling in this part which I didn’t really know about until now. I have upgraded my camera.

the next section of the museum is native wildlife. So there is a lot about kiwi birds, there is this big shark which I was looking for what to learn more about and I couldn’t find where there was written more about it so I’m reading about a manta-ray and other things then there is a big section about a kokako. so if you remember the kokako bird is the bird that we saw the release of in Sanctuary Mountain not so long ago about two to three weeks ago.

Mount Taranaki is a huge part of this region and the whole region centres around this one isolated volcano in the middle so obviously there’s a lot to be said about this volcano. And a coll thing about this is there is some makeshift lave tubes you can go and crawl underneath and and watch some pretend lava above you and stuff so we just go chill out in the tubes for a while. There is also a Maori exhibition that we did visit and was very interesting however like most Maori exhibitions in New Zealand you are not allowed to film them so for this reason we don’t have any footage so I want to put it out there, it’s great exhibition and you should check it out but we’re not really going to extend our talking about it for quite a while because well we don’t have anything to show you.

This is Fresh Thrusday which is an event that we call at the Jetcharm Barber Shop in New Plymouth. We have a tiny community art gallery that holds a monthly show and every month anyone is permitted and encouraged to submit work for a show based on a theme. this month our theme we actually have a double theme because it is our one year anniversary show, so the double theme is demi gods and roses. At this event they have a few nibbles to eat including some really nice rose cupcakes which are delicious and also they do gold coin donations in order to buy beer and wine so I have a couple of glasses of wine Robin has a couple of glasses of tuatara beer which is really nice and also on the bar was a bowl with submissions for a new theme for next month and a load of little bits of paper and a pen so you could submit your own themes for next month. robin being the original thinker that he is writes backpacking for his theme, I’m the more creative of the two and my theme is worms because you can do a lot of work with worms, you can watch them do stuff in soil and you can make wormy art you know. that was pretty trippy I’m excited about discovering even more of the art scene of New Plymouth in the next couple of days and that was a pretty awesome day. late night great people, great activities. I am so happy. If i did not mention before we are in a barber shop and the owner of the barber shop is one of the locals we are meeting tonight and he sees robin’s hair and he is like: “Oh, you should really come in for a haircut very soon how about in two days? I’ll make an appointment for you straight away. Dear God. Sort that hair out.”