goodbye, blue sky

waiting for my shuttle to the airport on this clear, cold afternoon. saw one last rainbow on my walk up parnell road.

friday night i went with H to a house party celebrating all things kiwi. the hostess had a respectably authentic-looking fake maori tattoo on her lip and chin; someone had brought pavlova garnished with sliced kiwi; and people were decked out in all blacks paraphernalia. all blacks = the NZ rugby team. huge at the moment, as NZ is currently hosting the rugby world cup. met a nice cross-section of young and old new zealanders and expats.

the weekend brought stormy weather complete with thunderclaps, pouring rain, and no camping. but we got out of town for the weekend and discovered a couple of rugged beaches along the west coast north of auckland. got to watch the first test match between the lions (the british rugby team) and all blacks in a pub on saturday night, another good taste of the local flavor.

monday i wandered through the auckland museum, which is located on a hill in the auckland domain, a huge park near where i'm staying. they have a superb collection of pacific islands art and cultural artifacts, including an impressive room full of maori pieces, including large pieces of ceremonial houses and canoes.

and just a slice of life: i took a taxi today to save some time, and during our 10-minute trip together my driver told me that he's visited 51 countries, that if i wanted to move here i should because one doesn't need much money to have a good quality of life here, and that having been all over the world he knows how lucky he is to come from here and to live in NZ.

hope you had a lovely weekend! bidding you a misty adieu from auckland...

sans campervan

what a mess of rainy weather today is. i just left raglan, on the west coast, this morning to come back to auckland to drop off my trusty vehicular home of the last three weeks.

i thought that in three weeks i'd make a decently thorough circuit of the north island, but that's emphatically not the case. think i got through about half of it, and that still felt sort of rushed. nearly every bend in the road brought fictional-looking scenery: stands of straight-trunked native kauri trees, undulating technicolor-green hills dotted with sheep, coastlines shrouded in fog for miles in shades of black sand and white. the male half of the couple i rented my van from asked me, 'so, when are you moving here?' when i arrived back at their property with a big, relaxed smile on my face. i told him i wasn't sure, that i hadn't decided on exactly where yet. definitely have a couple spots staked out, however.

so raglan, where i left this morning, was similar to the little coastal cali town where i grew up, except it's distinctly new zealand. it's a surf community, with artists and craftspeople and a very low-key vibe, protest signs along the road against black-sand harvesting. there are big, squat palms lining the main drag in the tiny downtown area, a little estuarine inlet sort of area just at the end of the road, and beautiful, uncrowded beaches just outside of town. raglan also claims to have one of the longest, if not the longest, left-hand surf break in the world...a claim that sounds sort of familiar...

before that coastal stop i did the dorky fan thing and visited te awamutu, the inland town where tim & nick finn (of split enz and crowded house fame) grew up. half of the small local museum is devoted to local maori artifacts and cultural exhibits while the other half is like a tribute to the finn brothers. earlier that day i parked the campervan at the waitomo caves, which house stalactites and constellations of glowworms. there's a tour there that takes you through some of the caves, at the end of which everyone gets into an aluminum (sorry- aluminium) boat in the water inside the cave system and checks out the colonies of glowworms hanging from the ceiling. it's lovely and weird, even if you are in a boat full of spastic fourteen-year-old boys on a field trip.

other highlights, besides every moment of jaw-droppingly gorgeous scenery and daily interactions with the stupefyingly nice natives, included soaking for three hours in thermal pools at rotorua while a gentle drizzle fell. i think i floated out of that place; i don't actually remember leaving... another thermal area called 'craters of the moon' exists near lake taupo, and i walked around checking out steam vents a-hissing and mud pools a-burbling. on the radio in taupo a local tourism PR guy was doing a brief report on the state of tourism in taupo, and he mentioned that most international visitors have never heard of the place. to which the host responded, 'well, they need to be slapped with a big smoked trout!...in a friendly way!' so: go to taupo. you can skydive there and stuff, and it's awfully pretty. look out for jolly-looking men bearing large fish, however.

i've met lots of artists, been 'good on ya!'-ed a zillion times for careening about the countryside on my own, and gotten quite drunk on the rejuvenating beauty of the landscape and friendliness of the people here. it is really a magical place.

tonight, here in auckland, i'm going with my friend H to a 'kiwiana' party (celebrating all things new zealand; i'm sure much will be lost on me). this weekend we're planning to do an overnight trek someplace and i sort of dread getting rained on, but i'm sure there'll be a good story - or at least a story - in there by the end of it.

back in oakland on tuesday... anyone up for lunch?

ta...

kiwi quickie

something new i've...
tasted: the heavenly vanilla-y lemony feijoa, my new favorite fruit;
heard: a cover of jimmy cliff's the harder they come in maori;
seen: a kiwi (the bird) in the wild!;
received: a beautiful hunk of a junk paua (abalone) pendant from a stonecarver;
given: a lift to 2 german girls trudging down a 9k road after a long hike;
done: hiked to the top of the pinnacles and looked down on the forested coromandel peninsula and the coast below;

...and my time's running out on this internet connection! more later...

from down under

melbourne, quickly, was a haze of discussions, instruction, and masses of information. i am amazed at the writers i met, not only by their breadth and diversity of worldly experiences but by their ability to stay out drinking till 3:30am and then manage to show up the next morning and be coherent.

got way lost today in auckland. had no map in hand except for the one which was supposed to show me how to walk the 16km hike across the city. i also made the not-really-a-mistake mistake of asking locals how to get to X street. they sort of knew where i wanted, but usually i'd follow their directions and wind up on the wrong street and then ask someone else a block later or keep walking. note to people who do not want to walk 32km instead of 16km in one day: sometimes it IS better to ask three times. like that buddhist saying: 'go down seven wrong paths, walk around in eight circles.'* or something like that? suffice it to say i didn't finish the hike but did about 1/3 of it plus got off track and explored some other parts of the city.

day after tomorrow i'll be hopping into my campervan, the basic kind with bed and cookstove but without a shower (it does have a 'portable loo,' whatever that means). i love kiwis. i love new zealand and i've only seen a day's worth of auckland plus the supremely stunning green coastline i glimpsed from flying in. i love that an old tasmanian man who got stuck squished next to me in the shuttle bus from the airport demanded, 'you all right, girl?' when i got my seatbelt fastened, and then proceeded to joke and laugh with me for the next half hour and wish me well and safely along on my travels. he asked if he could come with me instead of his wife (chuckling from the back seat) and the old couple they were traveling with. in response she said, 'my luck is turning!'

so for now i'll just wish you ta, cheers, and wonder how you're going.



* not an actual buddhist saying