Blackball

Blackball these days is just another tiny town in the middle of the hills – but it has a curiosity, the Blackball Hotel. Nowadays named Formerly the Blackball Hilton, it was for a short time known as The Blackball Hilton until the Hilton chain got their lawyers onto it. The name was an ironic pun – a local joke in a tiny town in the middle of absolutely nowhere - but it also had to do with the fact that the town is the birthplace of the New Zealand Labour movement following a famous miners’ strike. The miners have long since gone, but the spirit lives on - and inside the hotel 

That said, there’s ‘humorous punchy’ and there’s ‘just plain bolshie’. When I visited all I found was a dreary dirty pub festooned with old Labour and Communist party banners, with a miserable woman at the bar who brushed aside my cheeriness with ‘why on earth are you here?’ I tried explaining that I’d I read the story in the guidebook and thought ‘that sounds rather jolly – they’re obviously people who like a joke’, but she was having none of it. Clearly reading guide books and touring the country in Toyota Corollas was just evidence of my capitalist wickedness. I drank a bad cup of coffee and got out as fast as I could.