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Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
We landed in Wellington about 22 hours after we began our trip to New Zealand. Steve and I were admiring some large fish in a tank in the airport--actually, I think Steve was hypnotizing them by twirling his fingers in front of them--when Eddy and Matthew tackled us from behind and gave us the rock and roll welcome to New Zealand.
It's beautiful here. So far, we've only seen Wellington. It's very much like San Francisco, with narrow, winding roads, steep hills, and colorful little buildings perched up close to the street. Matthew and Eddy live in a neighborhood called Brooklyn, and their house overlooks a steep, wooded canyon called the Happy Valley--no kidding! From their living room window we can see a small triangle of blue where the two sides of the valley come together: it's the ocean. We've only driven between here and downtown Wellington so far, but Eddy says it's a 30-minute walk from here to his workplace downtown at the Hummingbird, a very snazzy restaurant/bar, with great food, wine, atmosphere, friendly folks, etc. Steve is playing a solo show there tonight. The poster for the gig says it's the "Best Observations Point to Witness the Ascent of Venus DeMars, Direct from MInneapolis, USA."
It's a bit cold here. I am tempted to wear gloves while typing this journal entry. Matthew and Eddy said they had heat (as if it were an option?), but now that we've arrived we realize it's not central heat, and kiwis don't seem to generally need it. Everyone was wearing T-shirts yesterday, even though it was windy and in the 50's. The exception was a guy named Le Gaze, who is a French emigre--he had a parka.
I did go for a walk in the neighborhood and warmed up when I was walking back up the steep hills. The streets need to have switchbacks to get up the hill, and there's a drop-off cliff at the end of Matthew and Eddy's backyard garden. On my walk, I was looking for a public path through the woods, but there doesn't seem to be one. All the promising-looking paths ended up leading to people's back doors or were very narrow access roads for new house sites. There seems to be a building boom going on in this neighborhood, which allows a person to see fairly precarious-looking construction for houses and garages (i.e. no Minnesota-type foundations, just pieces of wood nailed together on the steep side of a mountain). Matthew says that everything is supported by pilings driven into bedrock, so that must be what provides the stability. In addition, there are earthquakes here, so wood is probably a good, flexible material for housing. But it's still wild seeing garages and houses suspended in air, clinging to the hills.
August 25-26
Monday I was supposed to start taking an online class, and I kept on checking the course's D2L website, but the class wasn't up yet. It finally occurred to me that it was 10:30 at night in New Zealand, but 5:30 a.m. in Minnesota. Time to journal instead!
It was drizzly and foggy most of Monday. From the house, we could watch little clouds of fog rolling in, then thick clouds would envelop the whole house, then it would roll away, and the process would begin again. Flights were delayed or cancelled at the airport because of the fog. But it was a good, misty day for walking.
So Eddy, Steve, and I walked down the hills into town through Central Park, about a 40-minute walk. Matthew joined up with us at a sushi restaurant, and afterwards headed off with Steve for a rehearsal and a radio interview. The New Zealand portion of the band only has two or three rehearsals before the big Thursday night gig.
Eddy and I ran some errands around town, talked with his friend Rebecca, then took the cable car up to his parents' house (Graham and Win Kennedy). Graham is a retired linguistics professor who finished his doctorate at UCLA, and Win is a retired doctor, so we had lots to talk about. If I’m understanding things correctly, Graham wrote the New Zealand portion of the Oxford English Dictionary!
Their house is near the botanical gardens, in the Kelburn neighborhood not far from the house the author Katherine Mansfield grew up in. I’ve been reading a collection of her short stories while I’ve been here to get a sense of the New Zealand ethos. Mansfield’s father purchased a farm in the area around the turn of the century and eventually developed the neighborhood with housing (the cable car access helped), etc. The early days on the farm are described in “Prelude” and “At the Bay.”
I want to go back to explore the area more, but we were on our way to Eddy's brother's house for a big family dinner--eleven people, plus an 8-month-old baby. Everyone crowded in the living room by the electric fire (the only heated room in the house), including cat and baby playing on the flokati rug. Good people, good talk, good food!
Also in that neighborhood is the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary for birds, primarily. Until Europeans arrived, New Zealand had no mammals (except for bats), just birds and reptiles. The lack of predators allowed for development all kinds of birds, including flightless birds, many of which are now extinct or threatened with extinction. The sanctuary is an old reservoir rainwater area that isn't needed anymore, and someone had the brilliant idea of creating a fence that could keep out the cats, the rats, and other critters that would prey on bird life. We heard about it from Eddy's brother-in-law Mike, who’s an abseiler (a.k.a. rappeller) hanging from ropes to build a pedestrian suspension bridge in the wildlife sanctuary. There’s a lot of work here in this steep country for someone willing to swing off of a rope down the side of a cliff, skyscraper, what have you. This is not the sort of country where you can be a passive, lazy, lie-about. At the Wellington Harbor, this quote is inscribed in stone:
It’s true you can’t live here by chance,
you have to do and be, not simply watch
or even describe. This is the city of action,
the world headquarters of the verb –
Lauris Edmond. From The Active Voice.
August 28
Where to begin? I think I'll parse out the last few days in several entries. I don't want to miss things, but there's a lot that doesn't fit together neatly.
First, Thursday (Aug. 28th) was a glorious day. After two days of sheeting, cold rain and wind, where we and the rest of Wellington kept close to gas and electric fires because no one in this country has central heating--have I mentioned that before?--the sun came out. O my goodness, what a mood change for the entire region. Steve was spending the day getting ready for his show, so I walked into Wellington via Central Park again, stopped for refreshment along the way, nearly bought shoes, boots, silly dresses, etc. but kept going. The good thing about nearly maxing out your luggage weight is that it reminds you to not add much to the suitcase for the return trip. Alas. But I had weightier things going on. I was going to church(es).
I wasn't expecting it to be this way. I saw a tourist thing about Old St. Paul's, and I like old churches, and it was Anglican, so I thought I would be visiting a close cousin. It's a beautiful, old church, by New Zealand standards, i.e. mid-1800's. It's all made of dark wood--good for New Zealand earthquakes, good for a warm, comforting interior. It feels very much like being in a ship. For those of you who haven't done the church tour before, that's why the central part is called the nave--it's like the interior bottom of a sailing vessel. But something felt lacking, and I soon realized what it was. The building hasn't been decommissioned, but it's no longer a real church. People can rent it out for weddings, etc., but there's no congregation. It isn't a living place anymore. The congregation moved to new St. Paul's.
I discovered that new St. Paul's is just up the street, and the Anglican cathedral of Wellington, so I decided to have a peek. But just as I was on the cathedral steps, I heard a marching band playing a Sousa march nearby. I had to investigate.
There they were, leading some kind of military honor guard, marching around in front of the New Zealand parliament buildings. They were in front of the old building—the new parliament building, known as the Beehive, is next to it. They paraded and played, stopped and did several formations as a leader barked out commands. Two of them stayed fairly distant, as if they were supposed to guard the roadway, but they still had to do all the same about-face turns and arm gestures that the rest of the corps. It was sort of like watching dressage horses. The band played occasionally: twice through something that sounded like a national anthem, and once through “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” Some assistants set up a podium, which no one stepped on, and then they all marched back to the bunker they’d come out of. It was a kind of Yellow Submarine moment.
After that excitement, I explored St. Paul’s Cathedral. It’s very modern (begun in the 1950s), but still has a beautiful cathedral expansiveness and airy sound. It felt lived in, which was nice. I returned later in the day for evensong. There were all of five people in the congregation, but it was still nice. The choir had just returned from a tour of England, so it was all very British stuff—Charles Villiers Stanford and Ralph Vaughan Williams. I did feel a little out of place in my short dress and patterned tights with the skulls on them, but the beauty of being a tourist is that you’re allowed to be mysterious and never have to explain yourself.
Then I caught up with Matthew and Steve before the Friday night performance at the San Francisco Bathhouse. More on that later!
September 1
I want to catch up with a few of the museum visits we did while it was raining last week. I think I've mentioned the wind and rain often, right? As I'm typing this, dark clouds are blowing past the houses at the top of the ridge across the valley at quite a pace. It looks like there might be a storm coming in, which doesn't bode well for our flight tonight for Auckland, but I guess I'll deal with that when necessary. The weather here changes very fast.
Last Wednesday I went with Steve to the Katherine Mansfield house/museum. She only lived there for the first 5 years of her life, but she wrote about it a bit, and the house contains a lot of family history. It's a typical 19th century Victorian. It reminded me of visiting the Swedish Institute, but was much smaller, darker, and colder.
I've been reading Mansfield's short stories while we're here to get a sense of New Zealand through her eyes. I've always liked her writing--crisp, vibrant, and simultaneously wide-eyed and innocent, then wicked and worldly. She does interesting things with changing point-of-view. Sometimes there will be a sentence or two where we see the scene from the cat's point of view, then it shifts back to the principal people. There are also a lot of filmic scene changes.
Mansfield seems more like a real person to me now after reading all these short stories and seeing a documentary about her at the museum. She left New Zealand for England when she was 19 years old, in 1908, but kept writing about New Zealand experiences and settings. She committed herself totally to being a writer and embracing new ideas, including issues of sexual revolution, a woman's role in society, free love, philosophy, etc. She was one wild woman!
She was married to the literary critic John Middleton Murry and hung out with the likes of Virginia Woolf, was buddies with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, and wrote constantly. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 34, after a few years of moving to one convalescent area after another. She spent the last three months of her life at the Gurdieff (sp?) community in France. I will keep on reading her when we get back home.
Wet, miserable weather is a good time to see other museums, so we've been to Te Papa, the national museum, a couple of times because it's free. It's huge, containing old art, new art, natural history stuff, regular history stuff, anthropological stuff, things you would find in a science museum (i.e. an earthquake simulation house), lots of new and old Maori art and artifacts, a couple of Maori maraes (meeting houses that have spiritual significance), and more that I can't think of at this point. It's a fascinating combination of old and new/contemporary, plus everywhere you turn there are interactive learning demonstrations and games. These are aimed primarily at kids, but they're smart and informative enough to keep adults entertained as well. Steve and I played one game where we were aliens resettling from another planet and had to choose which plants and animals to bring with us to survive in the new environment. The outcome: we did survive, but barely. In the natural history area, Te Papa has whale and shark skeletons and various stuffed critters, including several species of kiwis.
Speaking of kiwis, this past Saturday we went to the Wellington Zoo and saw a live kiwi. This is not an easy thing to do. They are nocturnal, shy, and endangered. The zoo created a building where day and night patterns are reversed, so the kiwi will think it's nighttime when the people are visiting the zoo during the day. We walked through the house that was lit somewhat like a photography darkroom (i.e. a few red lights). Everyone walked very quietly, not wanting to frighten the kiwi. We all waited for our eyes to adjust. No kiwi.
Finally Steve and I left to see the rest of the zoo. After seeing lions, tigers, zebras, kangaroos, sun bears, birds, monkeys, bats, various sizes of wild cats, pigs, and a Mexican walking fish, we tiptoed into the kiwi house once more. We waited for our eyes to adjust to the dark. Still no kiwi. Then a couple of families with screaming children came in. Suddenly the kiwi was running back and forth from one shrub to the next, really hopping like a rabbit. Moral of the story: to see a kiwi, bring a loud child with you.
September 4
We weren't getting to see as much of the New Zealand countryside as we were hoping, so we've been doing some extra excursions. Last Sunday, August 31, we took a train/bus wine country tour to the Martinborough region near Wellington, also known as the Wairarapa. For those of you scurrying to your wine cellars to check the labels on your bottles, note that the other major wine-making district in New Zealand is the Marlborough region on the South Island. Same beginning of word, same ending of word, different middle.
Martinborough is a relatively new area for vineyards, i.e. 20-30 years old, but they seem to be making a name for themselves in the pinot noir varietal, so now we know even more about pinot noir than we did after watching the movie "Sideways." It was a fun and educational time, balanced between little and big vineyards. The guy at Muirlea Rise, the littlest vineyard, does everything himself, including bottling and chasing birds, so we probably learned the most from him. Another smaller vineyard was Murdoch James. Alana had our favorite wines. We'll need to see if they're distributed to the US when we get back. The biggest and oldest (sort of a Martinborough pioneer) was Te Kairanga. They have a distributor based in St. Paul, so we should be able to find their wines at home! The woman overseeing the sampling there knew where Minnesota was because she listens to "A Prairie Home Companion." That's the second time someone from New Zealand mentioned Garrison Keillor--Eddy's father was the other one. This was an improvement over someone, hearing we were from Minneapolis, rhapsodizing about the Mall of America.
Auckland
Monday night we flew from Wellington north to Auckland to spend the last few days with friends Andy and Phil, who we know via Emily Goldberg (filmmaker). The flight is about an hour long and pleasant, but we feel obligated to tell our friends that the days of traveling with a lot of heavy luggage are over, and you will pay dearly to transport that electric guitar and amp head back home. Ouch!$?$!
Andy drove us around the city Tuesday, showing us literally the high points. Auckland has about 48 volcanoes, so we skipped the Sky Tower and went straight to Mount Eden, where we could see the city 360 degrees around us and down into the volcano's deep, grassy crater. Cows lunch here too (we had to cross a cattle guard on our way up the volcano), but Mt. Eden, a.k.a. Maungawhau, is considered sacred, so it looked as if the cows were being kept out of the crater itself. We also drove along the waterfront (ocean inlets and harbors) and stopped at a few other scenic overlook points. One image that stays is that of Rangitoto, an uninhabited volcanic island that lurks in the harbor, watching over the city like a crouching cat. They think it erupted around 600 years ago, and there are Maori footprints in the sand and volcanic residue that indicate people running to the next island. The name literally means "blood red sky." But despite the violent outbursts, Rangitoto seems like a guardian spirit of the place. It reminds me a lot of a mountain in New Mexico that Georgia O'Keefe painted repeatedly.
We had a great dinner with Andy and Phil Tuesday night, and I only mention it here to say that we toasted Emily Goldberg with champagne for bringing us all together. Thank you Emily! :-)
Wednesday we got our real kiwi bushwhacking experience. Andy took us to Karekare Beach on the west coast, where scenes from the movie "The Piano" were filmed. It's a beautiful black sand beach, and because it's still late winter/early spring, we only saw one other person there, a surf-boarder who took his board to the next beach when he saw us wander towards the water. But before we could get to the beach, we had to climb up a few hills for the views. It was like walking through a jungle, with giant ferns, palms, and hooting, friendly birds everywhere. We picked a few sprigs of freesia growing wild on our way up the trail, so that scented our path. We stopped to eat our picnic lunch on a tiny promontory that the three of us barely fit on. No guardrails, no quick moves, or there would be a several hundred-foot drop to the beach and ocean below.
The sand on the beach was delightfully warm, but the ocean is still cold, about the same temperature as Lake Superior. I understand that it's calmer on the eastern side, but the west (facing Australia) is known for rugged beaches and a dangerous undertow. The black sand seems to have more glitter to it than ordinary sand. I made a sand angel and spent the rest of the evening shaking black sand out of my hair.
Today Steve and I were talking about what we will miss most after leaving New Zealand. I know I'll miss the sounds of birds, especially their morning songs, and the scents of so many flowers in the air. Steve says he'll miss the people and the flat white coffees, sort of an extra creamy cafe au lait. We leave New Zealand at 7:30 p.m. Thursday night, and we'll arrive in San Francisco at 12:45 p.m., i.e. earlier on the same Thursday afternoon. Who said time travel isn't possible?
Postscript: Andy and Phil were wonderful hosts, and their generosity even extended to our flight back to the US. Andy is a flight attendant and mentioned to his flight attendant friends that we were on their plane, so although we were in coach, we got the champagne treatment! It certainly made the 13-hour flight to San Francisco less painful. Thank you, Andy and Phil!
Post-postscript: We learned a new term on this trip: "chimping." It's taking a picture of yourself with the camera and then turning it around quickly to see what you look like. Yikes!
Also, I was so focused on writing about New Zealand that I forgot to mention that on our way out of the country, we had a long layover in Los Angeles. Our friends Rick and Chelsea met us at LAX and whisked us away to Venice Beach, where we waded in the ocean waves, poked around at crabs hidden in the rocks, and ate dinner at a restaurant along the shoreline. It was a great break in the journey. Thank you, Rick and Chelsea!
P.P.P.S.: I also forgot to mention that we did see the glowworms! For those of you who are unfamiliar with the glowworm mystique, they are sort of like fireflies, but they're larvae, so they're worms. I don't think we have them in the US. They have tons of them in New Zealand, and I believe they are also in Australia, England, and elsewhere in Europe. I had hoped to see them in the Waitomo Caves between Wellington and Auckland, but that part of our trip got changed, so I was disappointed, but only temporarily. We heard that there were some along a path at the Wellington Botanical Gardens. Eddy gave us directions, so we took the cable car from Lambton Quay to the top of the hill and walked down the street in the dark, making a couple of turns to the right and down the hill. But it didn't look as if we were going in the right direction, so we gave up and started walking back to the cable car.
A man walking his dog asked us if we needed directions, observing that we were standing on the sidewalk studying a map. I sheepishly mentioned glowworms, and he knew exactly where they were. We had been going in the right direction, but just hadn't gone far enough! So we retraced our steps, noticing meanwhile how the stars look different in the southern hemisphere and are very bright in Wellington. At the bottom of the street (Glenn), we ran into another side of the Botanical Gardens. Following the kind dog-walker's instructions, we followed the path to the left, and within a hundred feet or so we could see the glowworms glimmering on the steep bank next to the path in the exposed dirt and massive tree roots. They looked very much like stars in the sky, but closer, as if they were glowing on a map of the sky.
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