New Zealand Vacation

Thursday, January 25:
Wellington, NZ

Landing in Auckland, I got my first taste of some NZ peculiarities. In the customs declaration, they asked if I was carrying any foodstuffs or hiking boots. Hiking boots? They are really concerned about isolating their ecosystem from that of the rest of the world. They have some unique flora and fauna that could be seriously endangered by competition from outside organisms, such as those that might be transported on muddy boots. My boots passed muster. So did the Entenmanns. Thence we took a short hop to Wellington, the capital city.

In Auckland Airport I noticed a kiosk where they were renting cell phones. What a good idea! We picked one up, and it came in handy many times. There were, however, many places in this sparsely populated country where we were out of range of a transmitter.

New Zealand consists primarily of two large islands, called, unimaginatively, the North Island and the South Island. The total area is about 2/3 that of California. The population of the country is only 3,700,000, nearly three-quarters of whom reside on North Island, however. Some 86 percent of the people live in urban areas, and about half of these in the four largest cities and their environs. We had decided to explore the South Island, which, as you might gather from the above statistics is largely empty of human habitation.

Wellington is situated at the very south end of the North Island. We disembarked sometime in mid morning, and took a taxi to a B&B that Jenny had set up for us in advance by e-mail. (Sorry that's not marked on the map. Neither Jenny nor I remember its location at the time of my posting of this Travelogue, some 21 years after we made the trip.) Unphased by almost 20 hours in airplanes, we undertook to do a little exploration, since it would be our only chance to see something of the city. The place reminded me a little of Mount Tabor: small gingerbread-laden private houses nestled shoulder to shoulder on steep terrain. A new motorway (one of the few 4-lane roads we saw in the country) cut an incongruous and out of place swath through this neighborhood.

Our first stop was a botanic garden a short walk from the B&B. I was struck, as I would be many times during the trip, by the impression that the place could have come out of the computer game, Riven. Things seemed preternaturally sharp and brilliant, as if they were drawn in acrylics. Vegetation was lush and unfamiliar, with a predominance of ferns and palms that seemed more suited to the tropics than the low ‘60’s temperatures that prevailed. The garden was situated on a hill, at the top of which was a disused observatory. The abandoned buildings and machinery added to the Riven-esque air of the place, right down to a series of paving stones on the path with obscure geometric designs.

From the top of the hill, we took a cable car down into the town proper. This quaint relic was restored from an original 1907 system that used two cars on either end of a single cable looped over a pulley at the top of the hill. As one car climbed, the other descended on the same track. In the middle, the rails diverged briefly into two side-by-side lines, giving just enough room for the two cars to pass each other.

We changed money in town. The NZ dollar is worth about 42 US cents in the exchange rate, and buys considerably more than that in country. The smallest unit of currency is a 5-cent piece. A penny would be too small to buy anything. They abandoned paper dollars a few years ago. They have one and two dollar coins, and the smallest bill is a fiver.

New Zealand is entirely on the metric standard, with miles and gallons gone the way of the dodo. I wonder how they did it so peacefully, while we put up immense resistance when it was tried back in the ‘60’s.

In town we came across an outdoor sculpture symposium. About 8 to 10 stonecutters working in a public park under the curious gaze of passers-by. (And one non-conformist chipping away at a wooden piece.) We wandered along the quay side where entrants for the America’s Cup yachting race were being prepared, and finally found our way to the Te Papa museum.

This is a new museum dedicated in part to New Zealand and its history, culture, and peoples. And it’s also an art museum, natural science museum, technology museum, and museum of whatever else happens to strike the fancy of the curators at the moment. One of those places you could spend a couple of days in. It was here I got my first glimpse of the Kiwis’ fascination with the Maori.

The Maori were aboriginal inhabitants of the islands before European settlement. As was the case in most places where Europeans interacted with indigenous populations, the native culture was subverted, trampled, and in large part destroyed. There appears to be a general nationwide breast-beating mea culpa attitude these days with much fuss being made over the native culture and people. The language is taught in the schools. There are bi-lingual signs all over the place, and Maori names and art motifs show up wherever you look. To me, it seems a little forced, but probably better to go overboard in that direction than the other.

We got back to the B&B and hit the rack early for a full day tomorrow.