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