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New Zealand, 24 September - 19 October 2007
For the second month in New Zealand, I rented a campervan. The price was amazingly low, about US $27 per day. The campervan was not large, the interior was only 10 feet long (not including the cab) and 5 feet wide, but it came with a gas stove, a sink, a tiny refrigerator, microwave, a pair of benches and a table. The table could be removed and the two benches dropped down to form a double bed.
The table was useless. Everytime I put something on it, the table wobbled so much that the bowl or glass would spill its contents. It was also a pain in the neck to set up and take down every day. I finally settled on an arrangement in which the bed was half set up with a sheet on it, the other side left as a bench, leaving a place to stand in the "kitchen" and at the side door. I have done most of my cooking and eating sitting cross-legged beside the little two burner stove, using the cutting board laid across the burners as a table (I never did turn on the propane stove).
New Zealand
I have to say that the south island of New Zealand is the most dramatically, stunningly beautiful place I have ever seen. On the west coast, steep mountains drop down through primitive rain forests of tree ferns, tree-sized club mosses, conifers, plants with tiny flowers, and beech trees, all covered with moss, populated with strange birds including kiwis and penguins (alas, I saw neither). The rainforests stretch down to pebbly beaches flanked with huge rock formations, pounded by immense waves. On the west coast It rains nearly every day, but it is also sunny most days (locals talk about experiencing four seasons in a day). Cross over one of the four passes heading east, and you are surrounded by rugged snow capped mountains, alpine lakes, steep ravines, waterfalls, and white water. Two glaciers (Fox and Franz Josef) drop down the west slopes in valleys lined with rain forest. On the east side of the mountains, the land is in a rain shadow: Dry barren mountains, greenery along the streams and rivers, and painfully bright, clear, blue skies. It is as if Olympic National Forest, the Cascade mountains, and Wyoming were all pushed to within 30 miles of each other. Go on to the east coast, and the weather is like San Francisco: cloudy with mist and drizzle but not so much rain as the west coast. Many hills create a variety of microclimates.
Overall, the temperatures here are mild. The town of Cromwell near the center of Otago (the southern-most state of NZ) has some of the most extreme temperatures in NZ, with summer highs in the 80s-90s F and winter lows in the 10s-20s F with low humidity. What makes the weather extreme is the wind. Sailors talk about the Roaring Forties, the winds and waves that occur between 40 and 50 degrees latitude. Well, NZ is in the Roaring Forties with winds and waves that have had 8000 miles to pick up steam. When I was in Wellington the day before I crossed from the North to South Islands by ferry, the sustained winds were around 75 mph, and the locals were unfazed. Bicyclists still rode along a coastal bike path (although they were all going with the wind. At a campground on the west coast, the winds made my camper bounce up and down by at least an inch all night. And speaking of bouncing, the morning I camped in Murchison, I felt someone standing up and down on my bumper and they just wouldn't quit. I raised the curtain to see who was being so rude, and saw no one, but I did see the camper parked next to me also bouncing. The cause was apparently a moderate-sized earthquake. While I didn't hear of any news about the one I felt, three weeks later a 6.7 scale earthquake and several hundred smaller quakes over the next week near Queenstown made the news.
In many ways, New Zealand is very much like the Western US. The small ranching towns here look like the small towns in Wyoming and Kansas. Cattle, sheep, and tourism are the main industries. Many small towns founded during gold rushes. Dogs are working animals. Roads full of RVs. Everyone is friendly. Why, except for people talking funny, the stores being different, the plants being all wrong, the lack of insects and wild mammals, electricity is 220V, internet access is never free, and people drive on the wrong side of the road, I could easily imagine that I'm back home.
New Zealanders
I have seen few fat people in New Zealand. This is in spite of the fact that all of the fast food franchises from the US are fully entrenched here. They have McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King, Domino's, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, and Subway. A local favorite is meat and cheese pie, fatty enough to make a super-sized meal at McDonald's look positively healthy. At one point during the volunteer work, the team leader treated us to about 15 pounds of deep-fried hash browns AND french fries. Nothing but salt, grease, and potatos.
These people either have a lot of self-control (I don't think so) or get a lot of exercise. Part of the explanation must be New Zealanders love of sports.
I'm convinced that every man over 40 played rugby in his youth. Every middle-aged man I've met says that he had. Even Ernest Rutherford, the nobel laureate in physics from New Zealand, played rugby in college. Everyone here has "All Black" (the national rugby team) fever. People here fly All Black flags on their cars like Americans flew American flags after 9-11. The All Blacks have been undefeated in pool play, and have qualifed for the quarter-finals. They are ranked one of the top 3 teams and have a good chance of winning overall. It is said that a visitor to a foreign country should learn the culture of the people. Well, I have done my best to become knowledgeable about rugby and have watched every NZ game at the World Cup so far.
Friends here tell me that one reason for rugby being so popular is that 30 years ago, rugby, cricket, and lawn bowling were the only organized sports to choose from (and rugby was the only manly option). In recent years, volleyball, basketball, soccer, golf, track, and other sports have gained in popularity.
New Zealanders also love the outdoors: they fish, hunt, tramp (hike), bicycle, sail, kayak, ski, surf, and climb. They even garden with a passion. They run farms as a hobby. It helps that that the temperatures are mild and there are few biting insects in the country.
Then there is this bungy thing. I know that I talked about it last month, but I have to make two corrections. I have come to believe that Kiwis don't do much bungy jumping. They provide it for the sake of tourists who believe that this is the country for bungy jumping. And, I continue to see ever greater varieties of the theme: I saw people dangling at the end of a 100 ft tether suspended under a helicopter doing a series of sharp turns. I saw ads for something called a skyline, in which a person is trussed up in a horizontal harness, suspended under a looong steel cable along a river canyon, and sent off flying like a bird. I have seen Zorb: a huge inflated clear plastic ball with a person packed inside that is sent bouncing down a hillside. I have seen pictures of early explorers in the 1850s climbing up steep cliffs on rope ladders, their dogs hoisted up the cliffs in slings. Wellington, like Auckland, has a bungy jumping facility in the middle of downtown.
In the past their love of adventure has gotten them in trouble. Whenever Great Britain gets into a war, New Zealanders have enthusiastically joined in on the fun, from the Boer War to Afghanistan. During World War I, 117,000 young men enlisted out of a country that had only about a million (now four million) people. If you figure that there were only 500,000 men in 1914 and that a majority of that number were below the age of 17 or over the age of 40, that figure represents a significant percentage of men between the age of 18 and 40. Of the 117,000 soldiers who enlisted, 59,000 were casualties (around 15,000 killed during the war, unknown numbers who died of wounds or were permanently disabled after the war). There must have been a serious shortage of marriageable men after WWI. New Zealanders fought at Gallipoli against the Turks and then on the Western Front. You would have thought that the passion for war would have been diminished, but just 24 years later, New Zealanders fought in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, most notably at Monte Casino.
New Zealanders have a lively, if peculiar, sense of humor. Consider the doctor that I visited. Consider New Zealanders' celebration of corrugated metal as an art form (see pictures). Nigel, a friend of Skip's that I stayed with for a night, told me that "Vegan" is derived from a Native American word for "terrible hunter". I got suckered into stopping at an auto junkyard by believing a sign out on the highway that said "Vintage Car Museum". Consider that the "haka", the traditional dance of the Maori people performed for greeting dignitaries, starting wars, and beginning rugby matches, is done with their faces distorted, eyes wide open, tongue stuck out and wagging, body parts being repeatedly slapped, frequent stomps and shouts. Women have their own dance with the eyes, tongue, and shouting, but instead of body slapping they have graceful hand movements. It sounds strange, but it is captivating (and intimidating) to watch. And the men's dance is just plain scary.
I think that part of the New Zealand psyche is feeling left out and ignored by the rest of the world, but saying that they don't care. They claim (from what I have read, correctly) that the first powered flight was achieved by a New Zealander named Richard Pearse in 1902-03, before the Wright brothers in December 1903, and no one listens. New Zealander's subscribe to the conspiracy theory that before the Smithsonian could obtain the original Wright Flyer, the museum had to sign an unretractable statement that the Wrights were the first to fly a powered aircraft. New Zealand produced in the 1930s a horse named Phar Lap, which may have been the best race horse the world has ever seen. Treacherously, at the age of six she mysteriously died of poisoning on a tour in the US. To make matters worse, the Australians claimed that Phar Lap was Australian born and bred. Kiwis I met routinely claimed that the moa was the largest bird ever (its contemporary, the elephant bird of Madagascar, also driven to extinction by Polynesians, weighed 1200 pounds - about twice as much as the moa). Kiwis I met claimed that the Kauri tree was the largest tree in the world by volume (I haven't seen the stats, but I'd be surprised if it is larger than the giant Redwoods of California). They claim that Lake Taupo is the trout fishing capital of the world (in the 1880's, they were routinely pulling 30+ pound trout out of the lake and surrounding streams; today, trout are lucky to reach 4 pounds).
New Zealand music is a strange mix of Maori, British and American. Maori influences have merged with Hiphop. Younger Kiwis are into Grunge, while older Kiwis listen to classic rock. Interestingly, country-western is popular in the ranching areas in southern NZ (could appreciation of country-western music be a consequence of spending too much time with cows?).
Architecture is a mix of corrugated metal modern and corrugated metal Victorian. They are farmers, ranchers, vintners, tour-guides, and outdoorsmen. Even in the cities, there is a sense of the frontier. Christchurch is a traditional jumping off point for Antarctic expeditions. Every town and nearly every home has a garden. Very few homes are rundown or unkept.
Everyone I have spoken to has been friendly (and the friendliness rises when they discover that I'm not from NZ). People have been generous with their time, offering directions and advice. New Zealanders are trying to do the right things environmentally, and race relations between the Maori and the Settlers seems more like sibling squabbling. But everyone has a dark side, and in New Zealand, one dark side is their road rage. Except for driving on the left side of the road, the pace and flow of traffic is similar to that seen in the US. Driving here as an American has been fairly easy. It also helps that there are not that many roads and except for the major cities, traffic is light. Drivers here seem to be safe, but they have very bad manners, do not cooperate, and can jump into hostility and even road rage in an instant. I have crossed a street at a light a little late so that the light turned green while I was in the last lane to cross. The car in that lane jumped forward 3 feet, slammed on the brakes, and laid on the horn. One of the team leads, driving a van with a trailer, needed to drop off a couple of volunteers at a hostel on a side street in Auckland. We were stopped for no more than 90 seconds, but the driver in a car that pulled in after us started screaming that the road was not a parking lot and then proceeded to lay on the horn nonstop for at least 60 seconds. I stopped to pick up a hitch-hiker at the start of a one-lane bridge on a road with no other cars in sight. A car comes around a turn and pulls up behind me, and the driver becomes apoplectic, honking, and waving his middle finger at me. If the car had been waiting for another vehicle to cross the bridge from the other direction, the driver would have waited serenely the same amount of time. No matter how small the inconvenience, NZ drivers seem to go postal when someone does the unexpected. I mentioned this to Nigel, Skip's friend, the retired police officer, and he said not to take it personally, New Zealander's are also the targets of road rage. He said that the New Zealand perception of American drivers is that they are very polite, but the perceived explanation is: "Well of course they are polite to each other. You never know who is carrying a gun."
The other dark side to New Zealand is their drinking. It is a problem that has arisen more in the past five years, following deregulation of liquor sales, reducing the drinking age to 18, cheap liquor (cheaper than Coke, it is possible to buy mixed drinks in cans), and aggressive marketing. Alcohol is freely available on campuses, even in cafeterias. Students at the University of Otago drink throughout the day, leaving their empties along the walkways where the bottles get broken. Binge drinking is extreme, and drinkers wander off by themselves, potential victims of assault and alcohol-induced accidents (like walking into lamp posts). Alcoholism is becoming a national epidemic.
Touring New Zealand medical facilities
I left out a minor detail in last month's web posting. During the second week of the volunteer work, I started having abdominal pains (like dude, 8 on a scale of 10). After coping with it for six hours, I finally woke up the team leader at 0400 and asked to be taken to the local hospital (the poor guy waited for the next 8 hours in the work van for me to be processed, tested, and released). After all that, they found that I didn't have appendicitis, an aortic aneurysm, a necrotic section of colon, and a few other things, but they never found out what it was. Whatever it was, the pain diminished by noon on its own. The advice they gave me was to see a doctor if the pain recurred. The good news is that the hospital seemed quite good (although slow) and the price was about a third of what I would have expected to pay in the US (about US $300).
The bad news was that pain episodes continued several more times and I did see a doctor. After a couple of office visits, blood tests, sonograms, and X-rays, he determined that I had cholecystitus, an inflammation of the gall bladder. Cholecystitus is usually caused by gall stones, but none were visible in the sonograms. Instead, I had a sludge buildup with several bright polyps on the inner surface (usually non-malignant). I also had a fatty liver, a possible precursor of cirrhosis. Throughout those few days, the pain got progressively worse. Eventually, the doctor gave me a whopping dose of a narcotic that knocked me out for 16 hours, apparently relaxing the gall bladder enough to let go of whatever was stressing it. For that, I may have to include him in my will.
I can even overlook his peculiar "bedside manner". He went into a long lecture, full of graphics and metaphors. He started with a demonstration of how the gall bladder works by filling his cheeks with air, then squeezing them with the palms of his hands with appropriate "raspberry" sound effects. He then said that my gall bladder was diseased, probably from a lifetime of sinful over-consumption of fat. The gall bladder would probably have to be removed, but I might be able to continue the remaining 3 months of my trip if I took a course of antibiotics and ate an extreme low fat diet. He also said that given the shape of my liver, I shouldn't drink any alcohol. He then went into another graphic demonstration of the danger of continuing my sinful ways by swinging his arms up and down, swivelling his desk chair left and right, and shouting "Danger, Will Robinson!", which he thought was hilarious enough to repeat (I am not making this up). He then gave me the punchline: If I keep on with my sinful ways, I may be dead in 3-5 years.
This whole episode came as a surprise to me. I had been doing pretty well health-wise. I have been getting a lot of good exercise. I've been losing weight. In retrospect, I think that what happened is that I was losing weight too fast while bicycling and started eating whatever I wanted, including a lot of fried foods and a lot of ice cream. I came to think that I was invincible, that with enough exercise I could eat anything that I wanted. But, when I stopped riding the bicycle, I didn't stop the bad diet. In the following eight weeks with the help of all-you-can eat visits to Chinese buffets and the Golden Corral restaurant, I gained 20 pounds, achieving a faithful reenactment of the movie "Supersize Me".
Its funny that the threat of imminent death did't generate much motivation for change. But boy, the risk of losing my round the world tickets in order to go home for surgery definitely got me on board a healthy diet plan.
Fine dining in New Zealand
I have seen many interesting restaurants, coffee shops with wonderful looking desserts, bakeries, all the fast food places I'm used to seeing back home, steak and cheese pies, ice cream shops, all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets, Thai restaurants, sausages, venison, and more. Unfortunately, I have no idea what they taste like. For the past month, I have eaten fresh fruit and vegetables, granola with yogurt or skim milk, green tea with honey, vegetable soups, baked potatoes topped with beans and coleslaw (a NZ dish), and cucumber and tomato sandwiches. I have eaten in restaurants exactly six times: I had a salad to die for in a health food store, sushi, a couple of vegetarian meals in Indian restaurants, a bowl of mussel chowder, and a bowl of leek and potato soup. Oh, and for dessert, I have a few gummi bears at night (I'm not a strict vegetarian, after all). For variety, tonight I am eating from the gummi safari pack with gummi lions, rhinos, hippos, zebras, elephants, etc.
Cost of Living
New Zealand is not cheap. It may be cheaper than Australia or Europe, but it is not the bargain the Brits I'd met had told me (remind me not to go to Britain). A few things like renting the campervan were a bargain. But car purchases are about 20% more expensive here than in the US. Gasoline is around US $5 per gallon (gas in Britain is $8.00 per gallon). Restaurant food is more expensive: a bowl of soup for lunch is typically US $7.00. Likewise for packaged foods and drinks in grocery stores. Consumer goods can be highly expensive. I went to buy hiking boots in Auckland, and the prices in the outdoor shops ranged from $300 to $500. A pair of Wrangler blue jeans is considered a boutique item, costing US $75. Digital cameras seem to be inflated by at least 50% over US prices. Judging from ads in the windows of real-estate offices, a 1200 square foot home goes for US $300,000 out in the middle of nowhere, and double that near a city.
Fortunately, they have a local equivalent of K-Mart, called the Warehouse (with a really obnoxious TV jingle: "Where everyone gets a bargain!"), where I found a pair of cheap hiking boots for US $25 that started falling apart after only two weeks and a brand of blue jeans that I had never heard of before, only available in one length (34 inches), for US $24. The quality may not be so good, but the price is a bargain (the jingle says so).
The good thing about expensive food is that I wasn't tempted to stray from my fresh produce, cereal, vegetable soup, and gummi bear diet.
Highlights of the campervan tour follows:
Raglan, 24 September
Small artist colony on west coast of North Island.
Tirau, Rotorua, 25-26 September
Tirau is the town that celebrates corrugated metal as an artform. Not only are most buildings constructed with corrugated metal, but statues and signs are fashioned with this versatile material.
Rotorua is the NZ version of Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Yellowstone Park, a big tourist town full of gardens, thermal springs, and geysers. I also visited the Agrodome: sheep farming as a theme park, complete with working dogs and working machinery, bringing fine wool from sheep to sweaters in the gift shop. Its almost like you get to pay for your sweater twice, once for the item itself and once to watch it be manuractured. I also saw "Zorb": People rolling and bouncing down hill in a double-walled, clear plastic ball.
Tangariri National Forest, 27 September
A volcanic eruption of Mt. Tangariri in AD 186 wiped out most life on the north island. Dust thrown into the atmosphere affected climate for months and was documented by both the Romans and the Chinese. I camped and hiked midway up the side of the volcano and drove up to the ski resort at the snow line.
Wanganui, 28 September
Found a small motel and inexpensive campervan park filled with long-time residents who looked as if they would otherwise be homeless. The owner had an arrangement with the local hospital to let his customers eat nutritious lunches and dinners in the hospital cafeteria for US $3.50 per meal.
Sanson, near Palmerston North, 29 September
Skip (my karate teacher) had suggested that I get in touch with friends of his. When Skip was in Tonga with the Peace Corps back in the early 1970s, Nigel Withell was there with the NZ equivalent of the Peace Corps. Nigel was the only other volunteer who made it out to the remote island where Skip met his Tonga family and where his exploits in the book "Aware" took place. A couple of years ago, Nigel and his wife Margeret were in British Columbia and came down to Spokane to visit with Skip and Shirley.
Nigel is a retired police detective, who now works as a private investigator part time. They also run a 35 acre sheep ranch in their spare time. I had a very pleasant visit with them, spending several hours watching rugby (local matches as well as World Cup), watching Nigel try to Rube Goldberg a patch for a leaking freeze plug on his farm tractor because the parts stores were closed on Sunday, and looking at pictures of Skip and Nigel when they were in Tonga.
Paraparaumu Beach, 30 September
Lots of wind and rain. Took a walk down to the beach to watch the waves crashing onto the rocks. Otherwise, I stayed in the campervan all afternoon reading.
Wellington, 1 October
I found a station wagon made with corrugated galvanized iron in the "Made in New Zealand" display at Te Papa, the national museum in Wellington (see pic).
After spending the day staggering around Wellington in 70+ mph winds, I went to the ferry pier at around 8:00 pm to wait for my crossing at 8:30 the next morning. There were parking lots that cost money, but I saw some cars parked along the side of the access road, so I pulled in behind them. The spot was beside a railroad switching yard and some tracks crossed the road at a 45 degree angle. Other cars were parked across these tracks, but being minimally cautious, I inched the van forward enough to avoid being on the tracks. I then settled in for the night and fell asleep. Around midnight, a ferry carrying railroad cars arrived from the south island.
Imagine dreaming about being stuck on the tracks when a train is approaching. Then, imagine waking up and the reality doesn't seem to be any better. A diesel locomotive pulling a string of cars was passing only 3 feet away from the side of my van. Bolting upright with a rush of absolutely useless adrenaline, all I could see was the walkway on the side of the engine. I mean the rust on the screw heads on the handrail of the walkway. For a moment, despite having checked the distance to the tracks the night before, I was convinced that I was going to become some kind of poster-child for dumb, cheap tourists.
There is something unfulfilling about having your adrenal glands dump a whopping load of adrenaline into your blood stream, and then having absolutely no use for it. My body was ready to push the door off of its hinges, sprint a quarter mile, and wrestle wild animals. But all I could do was try to talk mheart down to a normal rhythm, which the adrenaline did nothing to help.
When I looked around, I saw that the cars that had parked on the tracks the night before had all left or had been towed. Later that night (funny, but I didn't sleep much after that), I watched a pickup truck patrol the tracks, presumably to clear autos that were in the way. Apparently my van was far enough off the right of way that they had let me sleep. Given the sense of humor of Kiwis, I wouldn't be surprised if someone had set up a camera to get my reaction on film and are even now submitting it to NZ's version of Funniest Home Videos.
Nelson (South Island), 2 October
Another night of high winds, so strong that the camper was bouncing up and down. I visited the first of many museums on the South Island, this one describing the role of NZ soldiers in the Boer War, WWI, and WWII. About 30 km south of Nelson, I found a road-side monument to Lord Ernest Rutherford, the Nobel laureate in physics for his work in understanding the inner structure of atoms, along with demonstrating that alpha particles were Helium nuclei and sharing in the development of the Geiger counter. Interesting coincidence that I was just reading about Rutherford the night before in David Bodanis' book "E=MC^2".
Murchison, 3 October
Small town in central, northern South Island, notable for the earthquake mentioned eariler and being really cold.
Charleston, 4 October
Charleston is a ghost town from 1860s gold rush (most towns on the south island were founded in the gold rush of the 1860s) on the west coast. The campground was filled with a bunch of old retired guys who hung around the communal area all day gabbing.
Waitiki, 5 October
Another day of high winds. Spectacular views of the cliffs along the ocean. Pancake rocks (thinly and regularly stratified rocks) and blow holes (ocean waves funneled up through caves into vertical geysers). One memorable event was that I encountered on the road a large (chicken-sized) flightless bird (a weka I believe) that was walking in an erratic pattern all within one square meter of road surface. I watched it for about 2 minutes, then honked to try to scare it off, but it just looked at me a moment and resumed its aimless walking.
Franz Josef Glacier and Fox Glacier, 6 October
The approach to the face of the glacier was blocked by a fast running stream and a sign recommending that people not approach due to the danger of surges from blocks of ice falling off of the glacier. A note about warning signs in NZ: They do not tell you that you cannot do something, they tell you how idiotic it would be to do it. They tell you the danger and let you assume personal responsibility. Some people stopped at the sign, others went on. I like their attitude.
I stopped and talked with an Australian family, mostly with the teenage daughter who wants to become an American and for some reason was infatuated with the idea of living in Winchester, MA. She asked me all about my favorite places in New England. They invited me to look them up when I got to Australia in a couple of weeks.
Glacier tours, using crampons and ice axe, are a popular tourist attraction. The only indoor ice-climbing school in the southern hemisphere is located at Franz Josef (see pic in New Zealanders section above).
Alas, the All Blacks lost the quarter finals to France, ending their World Cup play. I sent an email of condolences to Nigel, who replied that the sun did in fact rise the next morning.
Haast, 7 October
Steep cliffs of rainforests that come right down to the beach. Spectacular waves, crashing through gigantic monoliths. Passed a sign indicating "Penguin Crossing".
Wanaka, 8 October
Left the west coast, crossing the Southern Alps by way of the Haast Pass. Most of the mountain tops were blanketed in clouds, but the few gaps in the clouds revealed steep, snow-covered peaks. Descended into dry terrain much like Wyoming on the east side, with painfully clear blue skies.
I stopped at the War Birds Museum in Wanaka, where I spent more than an hour talking with a WWII veteran who had flown P-40s and F4 Corsairs in the Pacific theater against the Japanese. The museum had a flying British Hawker Hurricane, a Russian Polikarpov biplane from early WWII, and a static display British deHavilland Vampire, a British jet airplane test flown in 1943.
One of the displays paid tribute to the 1100+ women fighter pilots of the Soviet Union in WWII. They were as successful as male counterparts: The top woman ace had 17 kills in an all woman fighter group. Another woman shot down two German aircraft on her first day and accumulated 12 kills before being shot down herself. Legend has it that she flew into combat with a dried white rose in her cockpit and a white rose painted on the fuselage. Because her body wasn't recovered until after a determined search by her female mechanic, she didn't win the "Hero of the Sovient Union" designation until the 1990s. Perhaps the bravest women pilots flew in an all-women's night bomber regiment, flying 24000 night bombing missions in obsolete biplanes. Knowledge of these women had been kept secret from the West, not so much by the USSR, but by western governments apparently not wanting women to fly combat.
Cromwell, 9 October
Gold mining was the primary driving force in the founding of nearly every town in central Otago in the 1860s. Sluiceways, mine shafts, tailings, pipes, and iron machine parts dating from that period can still be seen. Along with mining came postal services, stagecoach lines, roads, farming, and hotels (and claim jumpers, highwaymen, and prostitutes). Most of these towns have a downtown area containing buildings from that period. Gold mining persisted on into the 1950s, gradually replaced by cattle, deer, and sheep ranching, as well as fruit farming and wineries.
Lawrence, 10 October
Another old gold mining town with a museum. The campground had ancient, rundown shacks (made of corrugated metal, of course) for the showers and toilets. To discourage complaints from overly fastidious campers, a sign said that the facilities dated from 1860s and that campers should be honored to have use of such an important historical site.
Dunedin, 11-14 October
Cliff Abraham was a classmate of mine from the University of Florida Neuroscience Department (cref Nick Hall) and had lived with me my last year in Florida. Cliff had taken a postdoc at the University of Otago in Dunedin (we think that this is the southernmost university in the world), married a Kiwi wife (a clinical psychologist named Philippa), and has three sons, the oldest a senior at the University of Otago, the youngest still in high school. In the intervening 25 years, Cliff has risen the academic ranks to full professor and Department Chairman of the psych department.
I spent four days with Cliff and his family, going to see albatrosses on a reserve south of Dunedin, the Otago museum, and the Botanical Garden. Its interesting that, although neither of us are the same people we were 25 years ago, it was easy to fall back into the conversational patterns we had back then. Jokes that we hadn't used for years re-emerged. The two of us were able to piece together events and memories that we wouldn't have retrieved individually.
One interesting tidbit of practical Dunedin history: The roads in greater Dunedin were drawn up by city planners looking on maps lacking contour lines. As a result, some of the planned roads went straight up the sides of some very steep hills. For whatever reason, the original plans were followed verbatim (and apparently without argument). As a result, the road to Cliff's home is at least 20 degrees (doesn't sound like much but it can be rather intimidating). The world's steepest road (in Guiness World Book of Records) is about four blocks away. It is so steep that asphalt cannot be used as a road material. In hot weather the asphalt starts to flow downhill. It is so steep that if a car stops, it usually burns rubber trying to get started again.
Moeraki, 15 October
I stayed in a campground overlooking the fishing boats in the harbor. Down the beach and in the surf rest the "World Famous in New Zealand" giant spherical boulders. I also stopped at a seal colony, where the observation deck was only five feet above some bored and sleepy seals. In Oumaru there is a commercially exploited penquin colony, where $15 will get you a seat in bleachers that overlook the nightly march of 30 or so Blue Penguins from the ocean to their custom built burrows above the beach. In the wild, Blue Penguins hike up to a kilometer from shore to an isolated burrow in the rain forest.
Waimate, 16 October
Despite being a small town, Waitame has a very nice park with a formal garden, bird display, a sports field, an oval track for cycling or skating, and an inexpensive campground. The library had the best internet deal I've encountered in New Zealand ($4.00 per day).
Christchurch, 17-19 October
Drove to Akaroa, a harbor town on a fjord on a near circular peninsula east of Christchurch that looks like the remnants of an ancient cauldera, then on into Christchurch. After sight-seeing for a day, I need to mail home cold weather gear and other things that I won't need in Australia or Thailand, do laundry, and clean up the campervan prior to returning it. I fly to Auckland on 20 October, then on to Australia the next morning.
Christchurch is one of the jumping off points to Antarctica. The city museum has a gallery full of huts, tools, and tractors recovered from the 1958 International Geophysical Year expedition to Antarctica. Another gallery is dedicated to prior explorations. And, there is a huge tourist attraction near the airport that provides an up-close experience of Antarctica, complete with freezers with fans for you to simulate the climate, snow mobiles, penguins, etc., and its all indoors.
Epilogue
RVing has been nice, better than I had expected, and not as claustrophobic as I had feared. It has given me some ideas of how to live comfortably in a small space with few things and little furniture.
New Zealand has been an interesting experience for me, and I don't just mean the spectacular sights, unusual wildlife, museums, friendly people, etc. New Zealand seems to have done something to me. Scenes of beauty blow me away like never before. I haven't been angry (well not much), even when others have been hostile towards me in traffic. I have worried less about past sins and future problems. I feel a fondness for people I interact with. I seem to be more serene, softer, calmer. I laugh out loud more, even when by myself (should I be worried?). I have been at ease here.
I cannot say if it is the place, the pace, the change in diet, or being by myself for so long. Maybe it's getting older. Whatever the case, life is good.
Copyright (c) 2007 by Dick Delanoy
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