Wrapping up New Zealand

I arrived in Auckland in the midafternoon on a Monday. Even more than it hit me in Wellington, it is a city. It has every convenience, from department stores to Dunkin Donuts, and the roads were always busy and the streets full of people (which is only surprising because I haven’t spent time in a real city for so long). It is also clearly the tourist center of the country, with currency exchange booths and souvenir shops calling out in all sorts of languages. Maybe because of the tourists, but maybe because of travelers and immigration, it is an extremely international city too. Turkish, Chinese and Korean takeaway windows lined the streets, and very few of the shop owners I talked to had Kiwi accents.

All in all, it was just a city, but it was definitely a clean one. I saw street sweeping machines going around on the first afternoon, and their work was evident throughout the city. You can feel the modern planning that went into the city, with wide main thoroughfares for cars, some quaint pedestrian-only side streets, and crosswalk indicators with moving green men (which I was really excited about). After a busy afternoon of souvenir shopping, I took a relaxing walk along the waterfront to the Viaduct after dinner. The weather was too iffy when I was there for sailboats to be out, but I’m told it’s quite a sight when the harbor is full of sails.

Auckland's night skyline

Tuesday morning had a few quick visits to stores before I dashed to the ferry terminal for a ride to one of the islands in the harbor. It turned out that the iffy weather meant the ferry was cancelled, so I had a nice coffee and reevaluated and instead took a different ferry to Devonport, a historic suburb on the far side of the harbor. Included in my ferry ticket was a bus tour of the town that turned out to be pretty terrible, but it did get me to the top of Mt Victoria just as the clouds cleared for a beautiful view over the Auckland skyline.

Posing with clear views of Auckland

I finished my shopping, organized my bags, and got a final pie for my dinner. Then it was early to bed and early to rise for my flight out of Auckland. So just like that, it’s over… Fourteen weeks, eight HelpX positions, countless bus rides and acquaintances, and hopefully enough photos to prompt my memory in the coming years.

My reflections on this experience will be an ongoing process, but I’ve tried to write down some general ideas as I’ve gone along, and that’s what I’ll post now. As a bit of a disclaimer, I realize that it takes a certain type of person/family to be a host on HelpX, and so my impressions of the average Kiwi may be skewed in that direction.

As a general statement, people in New Zealand seem mindful of their environment and their relationship with it. They’re bombarded with information on skin cancer prevention, they experience earthquakes and extreme weather, and they are serious about protecting their native species/keeping invasive species out, to the point that the identification of one foreign fruit fly is enough to send a town into lockdown.

Efficiency was one of the major manifestations of this environmental focus, which was helped along by the temperate climate through most of the country. Houses were typically small, single story, uninsulated, and with little living space outside the bedrooms. They often face north to get more sunlight into the house, and trees are strategically planted to block the prevailing winds, keeping the houses warmer and providing sanctuaries in the yard. There was no central heating, so the small living area might be heated by a fire or electric heater in the winter, but the bedrooms would only be warmed by multiple duvets and a hot waterbottle. I was surprised to see some people burning their trash, which I’d always thought was bad for the atmosphere, but in their remote locations they said it was preferable to do that than transport all the waste out. With the currency and volume conversions, gas was averaging about 7 USD/gallon, so car trips were also planned and consolidated with care.

One of the houses I stayed in. You can see right underneath!

In addition to efficiency, self-sufficiency was important. I’ve heard this referred to as the “Number Eight Wire” mentality, in which early NZ farmers needed to be able to fix any problem (be it medical, mechanical, creative…) using the supplies on hand (which definitely included wire) or else travel for days into the nearest supply center. Luckily none of my hosts were quite that historically committed, but many had large gardens, animals and fruit trees, or else large freezers and pantries full of preserves so that they could provide for themselves in case of natural disaster. The terrain is such that there isn’t usually more than one way to get places, so even a small snowstorm could close a road and strand people, not to mention landslides, earthquakes, floods…

The garden at Mt Adde, complete with HAM radio tower

On the topic of food, I mostly escaped the classic Kiwi farm cuisine of “meat and three veg”, but I did eat enough lamb and potatoes to last me a long time. I will definitely miss some discoveries here, like sweet chili sauce, hokey pokey, Tim Tams, and pies, but food overall was one of my weak points. After about two months of appreciatively eating whatever was put in front of me, I really started to get tired of other people’s tastes and wanted my own comfort foods. Instead I had to smile and admire dishes like “I had this freezer pizza but then I added mashed potatoes and relish!” I did cook for my hosts on a few occasions – two different takes on chili and cornbread, some baking and one unspicy linguine shrimp scampi – but when attempting some other dishes I couldn’t find equivalent ingredients. I realized that a lot of my favorite foods at home rely on some sort of prepackaged starter, like biscuit dough for breakfast pizza or monkey bread, or steak sliced just so for cheese steaks, and processed food just isn’t done as much here.

Lamb and two veg at Blue Mtn

Steak & pepper pie

Whenever I was on tourist excursions and getting takeout, food options were usually quite diverse. New Zealand is still a very young country, and there is a huge influx of immigrants every year bringing food with them. In fact, of the hosts I stayed with, about half had emigrated to NZ in their young adult life. As travel gets easier, it’s almost expected that Kiwi kids will take a year or more to travel and live abroad (called the Overseas Experience or OE) before settling down, and they’re probably bringing lots of culture back with them too.  

Despite these worldly influences coming in, there are some phenomena that the Kiwis refuse to change (or have adapted for their own use). It’s still totally acceptable for people to not wear shoes to the store or to school. On all the long busses I took, there was never the silly business of getting a paper ticket specially printed just so it could be torn in two. With one company you paid online or in a store and then remembered a pin to type into the driver’s smartphone for confirmation. The most amusing difference, I think, was that they still allow a little bit of natural selection. A lot of places which would have guard rails and warning signs if they were in the US were just left open. They either trust that people will have the common sense to not go too close to that steep dropoff, or figure that if they do fall and hurt themselves then they deserved it. (It probably helps that there’s almost no suing culture in NZ since their healthcare system covers all injuries that are deemed accidents.)

On a more personal level, this trip has been a much more fun experience for me than my time in Europe. I definitely value my European experience as a time of massive self-growth and learning, but the day-to-day encounters with French society were not nearly as pleasant as the ones in New Zealand. The two trips are so different in so many ways that it would be unfair to try to compare them side by side, but I often caught myself thinking “when I come back to New Zealand I’ll make sure I stop here again”, whereas my parting thought with Europe was more along the lines of “I need a break before I do this again”.

HAVING SO MUCH FUN IN NZ!

That’s not to say that it was easy all the time. All in all I have to acknowledge that I am extremely fortunate to have been able to come at all, and I was so glad to be in New Zealand and not grad school this year, but being in a new exciting place doesn’t magically make every moment enjoyable. It still rains in paradise. Self-doubt isn’t obstructed by national borders. There were letdowns and disappointments in all aspects of my trip, but that’s just part of life.

Really, truly, overall, this was an amazing trip. I have seen otherworldly places and met fascinating people, and I cannot wait to go to New Zealand again. I think I’ll do it with a campervan next time.

And finally some random tidbits:

• In the southern hemisphere, I’ve been looking at the moon upside down. This means that the trick I learned in 7^th grade for determining whether the moon is waxing or waning doesn’t work. At home, if a line dropped through the middle of the moon makes it look more like a “b” it’s getting bigger and if it looks more like a “d” it’s getting smaller, but it’s the opposite here! It took me a while to work that out.
• It’s not uncommon for places to charge an extra 2-3% for paying with a credit card. Also, they have no pennies, so all cash purchases are rounded to the nearest 5 cents. Tax is included in the advertised price, so the amounts often come out evenly anyway.
• I still do not like marmite or vegemite.

Proof that I tried

I’m in Melbourne now (with a ten hour time difference) and will be spending the next ~three weeks on the east coast of Australia. I won’t make any promises on blog entries while I’m here, but I’ll consider it. Thanks for reading about my adventures, and I’ll see you in the USA!

The place where spirits depart

The Far North

My bus ride through the north island was the longest I’ve been on yet, with a stopover in Auckland for 30 minutes. I hadn’t actually set foot in the city yet, and the walk around the block during the bus layover was another shock to the system, since it was even busier than Wellington. I arrived in Waipu just after dark in the midst of a rainstorm, and Peter drove the short way from town to his family’s home.

When picking this last HelpX position, I ended up turning down a few places further north where I would have done fruit picking. Even though my intentions for the trip at the outset were to learn about food production, I didn’t want to be put in a situation where I was going to be an employee more than a visitor, and the Grant family just sounded cool. As it turned out, they were cooler in real life than in their profile. Peter is a freelance photographer who has recently gotten into the art of hula hooping through his son’s involvement in a local circus (specifically juggling). His wife Alice is trained in reflexology and craniosacral therapy and has a treatment area at home. She is British, and both the kids were born in England, but eight years ago they set off on a sailboat through the Caribbean and Polynesian islands and made a new home for themselves near some of Peter’s family in NZ. In addition to their individual work/hobbies, they also run two coffee/ice cream trucks called Zippy’s Cafe that have quite a presence in the community, and their daughter Olive manages one on the weekends.

Ruben and Olive hanging out at Zippy's on the beach

They only arrived in Waipu five years ago, so their home is still a bit of a work in progress, and home improvement is what helpers have mostly been doing for them. At some point recently they’ve put on an addition of an eating area, mudroom and porch, and one of my first jobs was to put putty in every single screwhole on the floor and the outdoor trellis and then sand it all smooth. The majority of the rest of my work was priming and painting the trellis and the solid overhang.

Trellis finally completed

This is a feijoa, which I helped process for the ice cream

One of the hardest days, and one of the highlights, was working on the coffee truck at a local festival. Alice and her usual employee worked non-stop making the drinks, and I was in charge of taking orders, making change, and passing the drinks out to the correct people. It was a good thing that they made me a coffee at the beginning of the day because we didn’t have a break in the line for a solid three hours in the middle. It was also good that we weren't selling ice cream there, because that would have complicated things. They way they do it is by putting a scoop of ice cream and whatever fresh fruit the person wants into this blend and swirl machine and catching it all in a cone. Pretty yummy.

I’m not sure if I’ve talked about NZ coffee on this blog much before, but I’d heard that Kiwis were quite particular about coffee and have experienced mostly instant coffee in people’s homes. This has puzzled me, but what I’ve learned is that there is almost no equivalent to Dunkin Donuts coffee available for sale. To put it another way, at home you do easy, and when you go out you do espresso. So when I say that the Grants have a coffee truck, what I mean is that they have an espresso truck, and when I say they made me a coffee at the beginning of the day, what I mean is that they made me a flat white, which is what people expect when they order “coffee” from any serious coffee shop. There are basically six available drinks: short black (espresso), long black, (espresso+water), flat white, latte, cappuccino (espresso+milk of increasing frothiness), and mochachino (cappuccino+chocolate, yum!). After nearly two weeks with the Grants, I might actually be addicted to these delicious drinks.

Because he took advantage of some unexpected last-minute opportunities, Peter ended up being away from home for the majority of the time I was there, so I was often home alone during the day painting while Alice and Olive were working Zippy’s at the tourist beach or boat launch. Well technically Ruben was home on school holidays (two weeks starting on Good Friday) too, but he was playing computer games the whole time and is too young for a driver’s license, so I was the one who had to drive their car to the beach for supply runs when they were getting low on cups or milk or something. The beach was gorgeous and overlooked a bunch of islands that rise sharply out of the water. I can also now say that I’ve driven both manual and automatic cars on the right and left sides of the road (legally!)

Their dog Elsa enjoying a trip to the beach

Looking out from Zippy's spot

My adventure for this time period was to take the bus a little further north to Paihia, the gateway town for the Bay of Islands. Although the scenery was totally different, Paihia reminded me of Queenstown in that it consisted almost entirely of traveler accommodation, places to eat, and places to book activities. It was definitely a tourist town, but that didn’t stop it from being beautiful.

My bus arrived in the early afternoon, and after checking in at my hostel I borrowed a kayak for an hour and paddled around three of the 144 islands that make up the region. It was almost warm enough to swim, but I decided that I got wet enough via the paddle-drips and the holes in the bottom of the boat. When I returned I started talking to a Dutch girl about her kayaking plans for the next day, and then we decided to meet back up in a few hours to go to Russell together.

Out on the water

View of Paihia from an island

Stingray thing in the water under the ferry pier!

Russell, according to my guidebook, was formerly known as the “Hellhole of the South Pacific.” It was the first permanent European settlement in New Zealand and was mostly populated by whalers and crew members passing through in search of alcohol and prostitutes. Nowadays it’s a quaint, quiet town with a more authentic feel than Paihia. Russell is technically on a peninsula, but because of the layout of land and roads the quickest way to get there is via ferry from Paihia, but still with this easy option it’s often skipped by tourists. Marlon and I were determined, so we took the ferry ride, looked at some art galleries, climbed up and down a huge hill to a beach for a while, and then climbed back into Russell’s town to get dinner by the wharf.

Oneroa Beach in Russell

Russell pier from our dinner picnic spot

On Friday morning (which also happened to be Anzac Day), I got up early for an all-day bus trip to the top of New Zealand. Our first stop was at a café and gift shop that specialized in things made of kauri wood. Kauri was a type of tree that used to cover the north island and grew to gigantic sizes. Lots were toppled by some natural disaster and buried in swamps thousands of years ago, and lots more were felled in the early logging industry. More on that later.

Ancient Kauri tree transformed into a staircase

The first major attraction was a drive up 90-mile beach, which is actually registered as the first highway in New Zealand. You do have to go around low tide, but the entire “highway” is resurfaced twice a day by the tide, so we got going pretty fast. There was a stop for photos and then we continued up the beach to the sand dunes.

Driving on the beach! (I got to sit in front)

Beach photoshoot

The landscape at the sand dunes looked like something I’ve seen on a preloaded computer background, but in a good way. It was spectacular, and we could climb all over it. We were all given a sandboard (a boogie board with a nice slick bottom) and instructed on safe technique and then could fly down the dunes as many times as we wanted. I managed four times from the very top. Woohoo!

Climbing up the dunes

Ready for the ride down

From there it was back on the bus and to a road that wound over the narrow strip of land that makes up the very top of the country. There were two cool things to see when we stopped. The first was a sort of checkerboard pattern in the waves where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean come around either side of the island and meet each other. It wasn’t as cool in real life as I thought it would be based on other people’s descriptions, but still cool to know it was happening. The other sight is the Cape Reinga lighthouse, which marks what is almost the northernmost point in New Zealand, and sits in a place that is very important to Maori tradition. According to their beliefs, this is the place where spirits depart for the ancestral homeland. When I’ve been to places with significance like this, I try to imagine them as they would have been 200+ years ago, with no access road, no stairs or pathways, no guard rails or hoards of tourists. I think it makes them even better.

The meeting of the seas

Cape Reinga lighthouse

On the way back south we stopped at Gumdiggers Park, which is a tribute to the men who had the extremely physical careers of digging gum (rubber, I think) from the thousands-of-years-old buried Kauri trees preserved in swamps. After the above-ground trees were depleted, someone somehow figured out that there were more of these trees buried 3-10 m below the ground, and then set to work. The gum was somehow processed for something rubber-related, and the wood has been used for building and making tourist trinkets. The park had a path winding through the woods between deep holes that had just been left in the ground. They had also set up a replica village with their very basic houses and tools. It was all a reminder of how much more comfortable and easier life is for the average person today!

 

Part of a trunk at the depth they found it

When I got back to Waipu the next day, I only had about 48 hours until I would be leaving for Auckland. I spent some time finishing up painting and doing a computer project with Alice, I washed all of my clothes, and I did a thorough analysis of the contents of my bag. Somehow, amazingly, everything still fits inside, but I got rid of a few old and stained pieces of clothing to make room for anticipated purchases. Hopefully I’ve left myself enough to wear in Australia!

In real time, I’ve been in Auckland for a day and a half, and I’m leaving for Melbourne in fourteen hours. An entry on my time in Auckland and overall reflections is in the works, and I’ll post that at some point soon. I believe I’m functionally adding two hours to the time difference between where I’ll be and home, so realtime communication will only get harder, but it’s just three weeks til I’m home, and then communication will be really easy. Wish me luck for a safe and painless international flight in the morning!

Making the most of miserable weather

In the past thirteen days, I’ve seen the sun three times. Considering that in the rest of my trip combined it’s only rained on a handful of days, I really don’t have much to complain about. In fact, I should be happy for all the farmers who’ve been in near-drought mode all summer. But the transition into autumn has meant cold, cloudy days and adjusted plans.

When I left Nelson, I took a bus to Picton, which is in the heart of the Marlborough sounds. It was a quiet town of hotels, restaurants and tourist shops that seemed to just be waking up when I got there at 11am. I wandered around for a few hours and got some delicious greasy fish and chips before getting on a ferry to cross the Cook Strait.

Lunch spot in Picton

I’ve heard some horror stories about rough conditions on this crossing, but luckily the seas were calm for me. The first hour was through the sounds, where green islands rose straight up out of the water and jellyfish filled the black water below us. Then we had an hour of crossing the strait and another hour of entering into Wellington Harbor.

Sailboats in the sounds

Posing on the boat

The last rocks on the south island

Arriving in Wellington was a bit of a shock to the system. It is a city! Technically, its population is actually smaller than Christchurch, but it was bustling with activity whereas Christchurch had a ghosttown sort of feel to it. It is the busiest place I’ve been through in two months. I think I might have hyperventilated for my entire trip across the city for fear of getting run over by a car or making a wrong turn into a bad neighborhood. But in the end, it is still New Zealand, and I arrived no worse for wear at Nikki’s apartment, who I’d met through Amanda when I first arrived in January.

Nikki is studying in a clinical psychology program in Wellington, and she had a pretty social weekend planned. One of the disadvantages of HelpX is that I’m spending the majority of my time people over the age of 60. They’ve all been great people, but the prospect of a weekend spent with a bunch of people my own age was excellent. On Friday night we went to a potluck with her friends from the program, and on Saturday she was having a flatwarming party with the six other people in her apartment.

 Saturday was one of my beautiful sunny days, and we went on a long walk through Wellington, down the iconic Cuba St, through Courtenay Place (where the city planners obviously made a typo, but oh well), and then down to the waterfront. We watched some people sailing and paddleboarding in the calm harbor, and then went into the Te Papa Tongarewa museum, the national museum of New Zealand. It started with geology, then animal life, then a bit of Maori culture and finally the last 150 years of European settlement and development. We went through it kind of quickly, but it was nice to see all the information in one place.

It's my place!

Wellington waterfront

Kiwis in Te Papa

On Sunday I thought about going to a wildlife reserve, but that’s when the rain started, and I realized that I hadn’t been able to stay in my pajamas and lounge around for two months, so I took advantage of that opportunity. We did make a quick trip to a nearby beach in the afternoon when it looked like things were clearing up, but took refuge in a café soon after arriving. The drive there took us through the neighborhood of Miramar, where the studios for Lord of the Rings are. 

Driving past "Wellywood"

Mural at the beach cafe

On Monday I got up early to take a bus to Raetihi, where I’d planned a five-day HelpX with volcano views. Unfortunately I didn’t check the weather before I went, so I only saw the volcano once in five days. It would have been a great access point for hiking the Tongariro Crossing, but with the clouds and rain, none of the shuttle services were operating.

View the majority of the time

View for about three hours one morning

Luckily it was a pretty nice setup. Chris and Tania were a young couple who run a guesthouse for skiers (who ski on the volcano!) and live in the apartment next door. Since it’s their off season, I lived in the massive guesthouse and cooked my own food and did about three hours of work per day. When it wasn’t raining I weeded their garden, and the rest of the time I watched their two-year old son. He’s going through a massive dinosaur phase, and I think I got pretend eaten by a dinosaur about 150 times over those few days. It definitely kept me active!

Dinosaurs on display

On Friday I took the bus to Taupo for another short HelpX and another chance of hiking the crossing. I was staying with Debbie and Marty, but the work was just with Marty, which I decided I preferred after a day or two. I haven’t decided yet how I’ll review this experience on the HelpX website, but overall I wasn’t very comfortable there. Debbie complained about past helpers to me, particularly about their eating habits. According to her, helpers were getting too expensive to feed, so we’re no longer allowed juice, fruit, alcohol, or any snacks. Breakfast options were limited to white bread or cornflakes. There were a number of other very particular expectations on a list given to me when I arrived, which led me to question whether the helper-host relationship is as equal as I had been thinking. All their previous reviews were quite good, so maybe I’m just sensitive or something, but I’m still working out my overall feelings on them.

Aside from that mini-rant, the working with Marty was quite good. I sold eggs at a farmer’s market while he was selling microgreen kits. We weeded around the house, I seeded a bunch of microgreens for next week, I dug compost, and we landscaped around his hydroponics tent. I was able to take a walk up to Huka Falls, which looks like a horizontal waterfall, and I borrowed a bike one evening for a short ride along the lake.

Free range eggs

Little boxes of future lettuces

Huka falls

Steaming lake!

After much debate, I decided to “go for it” on what the forecast said would be the nicest day of the week and walk the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. This is another of New Zealand’s Great Walks, so I was able to take a shuttle from the end of the road to the trailhead. We practically drove into the clouds on the way there, and I set off straight into the fog. Right as I got going, though, the clouds lifted a bit and I was able to see most of Mt Ngauruhoe, which was used as Mt Doom in the Lord of the Rings movies. At one point in the hike I got a bit off track and was accidentally climbing up it for a while, but I set myself right and continued up into the clouds.

Ngauruhoe is the big cone shaped one

Soda springs

Almost seeing the sun

The midsection of the track was truly alpine territory. In parts, the trail itself was barely distinguishable except for where there wasn't as much moss and tiny flowers on the rocks. The mountains that I was hiking around were all actually volcanoes, so the rocks I was walking on were multicolored from past eruptions. The views weren't as nice as they would have been without clouds, but I was still glad to see what I could.

Colorful, uneven path

Descending a cloudy ridge

The Emerald Lakes

Danger!

In the midst of another rainstorm, I got on another bus for the long trip to Auckland and then to Waipu, where I’m starting my last HelpX position.