Outside the Gates of Eden?

But Waiheke Island of all that land

For those who truly understand.

Apologies to Rupert Brooke - but Waiheke is a rather wonderful place.  It is the only island of the many in the bay of Auckland we have visited but I'm sure we're right.

We first went there 13 years ago.  Old friends, Rosie and Colin have a son in NZ and so bought a bach on the island. Baches are holiday homes which can begin life as little more than a beach hut but can evolve.  Like all NZ homes.  Our friends had bought their batch just before our first visit: we even played a small part in it's embryology.

Here are Eleanor and I, in 2005, working while Colin (on right) supervises and discusses with a friend the problem of getting decent labourers. 

Now it is an elegant but comfortable house and we were very happy to sit outside in the shade where we talked, ate and drank.  And I forgot to take any pictures so here are more from our first visit.

It still looks much the same except that what, 13 years ago, was a hippy-ish, just about getting along, place has become a bijou magnet for the wealthy with posh shops and eateries.  Property prices have gone up enormously.

Another couple, Rob and Sue, joined us for a very convivial afternoon.  After they left we realised it was Rob who had offered to sell us a house on our previous trip.  It was well built with, if I remember correctly, three bedrooms, all mod cons, big hot tub in the 3/4 acre garden.  The Pacific Ocean lapped about 50 yards down the road.  About £180K.  We chose St Werburghs, but, ....

(Serendipity alert: The title was from Bob Dylan or maybe the bible but it turns out that Auckland was named for George Eden, Earl of Auckland.  Funny old world.)

Auckland Houses.

Auckland is hilly.  From any high point of suburbia you can see lots of other bits of surburbia.  Forever there are small white houses in neat rows, some look like this:

 or this:

Those came from the Internet.  Here's my favourite:

Beautiful workmanship!

There are various family relationships.  Almost all are built of white painted wood (a touch of pastel creeps into some) with 'decorative features' (fretwork, columns, twisty bits).  They are small (2 or 3 bedroom max) with minimal front gardens.  They have corrugated iron roofs (I remember an expat Kiwi telling me she was really homesick for the sound of rain on corrugated iron).  And, most notably, they are all different.  We have never seen two adjacent identical designs.

I'm talking of the suburban majority, built perhaps in the early C20.  As you move towards wealthier areas you begin to see, maybe every 20 houses, a modern design where an older house was removed.  In some cases the original house is sawed into manageable chunks, taken away on a low-loader and re-errected elsewhere.

One other aspect seems ubiquitous.  Houses aren't things, they are processes and projects. The former case is an inevitable result of building wooden houses in a semi-tropical zone. The paint peels, the wood rots and insects devour them for a start but the corollary is that the same vegetative vigour means the gardens blossom and fill as shrubs turn into trees with massive epiphytes cadging rides; giant cacti and succulent produce leathery leaves with razor sharp edges or sharks teeth or are harmless in which case they serve as homes for venomous insects.

This is a garden tree:

 


Walking down the road we stopped to chat with a man, about our age, stripped to the waist hacking at a solid mass of razor edged plants.  It was 30° and hard work. Returning a few hours later he'd cleared maybe a couple of square feet.  If he doesn't act immediately something from Little Shop of Horrors will.  It can't be a coincidence that Richard O'Brian who created Little Shop of Horrors is from NZ.

Here's a picture of a sweet little baby plant to reassure you all.

Is diddums teething?

The more, as it were, existential issue is the project.  NZ is full of active people.  If you aren't sailing, playing rugby, surfing or bungy jumping what's left? Evening classes, TV or modifying your house.  Having now watched a bit of TV, it seems the choice is between Maori music and dance (best choice), reruns of ancient UK series and films dubbed into Chinese (?).  So, extend your house into the garden, add an extra storey, create a workshop or studio.  Later you can tear bits down and change them.  How about fretwork for the soffits? Damn, time to refit the windows .... maybe new age stained glass.  It's a lifetime's work done in the knowledge that when you go, the next owner will start all over again.

NZ at last.

Another more overnight flight.  I'm reduced to watching "You've Got Mail" , so old fashioned!  Has Meg Ryan ever not worn pyjamas in a film?  I think George Burns once said, "I'm so old  can remember Doris Day before she became a virgin" but even she, in The Pajama Game wore only the top half.  In the long dark watches of the night, I was reduced even further to "Wonder Woman". Due to a temporary (temporal?) glitch I missed the last 5 minutes so don't know if she survived or what was the secret Hippolyta had kept from her but I gather she saved the world anyway.

We first visited NZ about 24 years ago.  We went out one evening from our hotel in the centre of Auckland at about 9pm and failed to find anything to eat or drink. Everywhere was dark, silent and closed. Twelve years ago a small gay area had emerged on Ponsonby Rd.  You could get a meal even after 9pm.  Now Ponsonby is all cafes, clubs, posh clothes shop and coffee bars selling CBAs (Chicken, Brie and Avocado is the new BLT - probably is in Bristol as well for all I know).

I discussed the ending of Wonder Woman with a shop assistant there while Eleanor looked in vain for something that hadn't been designed for a malnourished hobbit obssessed with Hello Kitty.  He couldn't remember the ending either.  What was the point of it, he wondered.  Me too.  Women with metal underwear?  Nobody, he said, was that weird. 

Auckland itself seems much more crowded, busy, cosmopolitan and, especially, hot. However our AirBnB is quiet and peaceful.  There are chickens in the garden, a banana palm with evil looking buds,  a small lime tree with lots of fruit and a rampant bed of squash. 

The garden has been visited by a steady stream of monarch butterflies all coming to the same bush to lay their eggs - the bush hasn't many leaves and I worry for the health of the million caterpillars - and the plant.

The photo doesn't do credit to the monarch: she has a wingspan of 3 to 4 inches and glides elegantly around the garden as if she owned it.

Nearby there's a very posh organic, fairtrade, hand knitted from tofu, almost free from everything, NZ produce supermarket.  For about £8 you can buy a small jar of honey.   Across the road is a forbiddingly strange, matt black cuboid.  A mysterious narrow walkway leads around it.  All that's missing is "Abandon Hope All Who Enter Here".  Follow the path out of sight of the organic shop and enter a door.  Surprisingly you are in a supermarket selling ordinary stuff at about half the price.  Leave quietly, make sure nobody is watching.

Continue across some grass to a tree lined path to the bay.

We relax.

Last Day in Singapore

Having visited Little India, Chinatown was the obvious next choice.  Our Malay taxi driver had told us where to find their biggest market but we forgot!  The Malays are the original occupants so I guess they don't have their own enclave.

Chinatown was very hot and full of people trying to sell me hand made suits.  One felt the material of my shirt and trousers and looked very sad.  "You could have nice, good quality clothes", he said.  "Then my friends wouldn't recognise me."  He looked sadder.  Only later did I think of a better response: "I already have a Chinese tailor, he's called Ox Pham". 

I had hoped to visit a Chinese temple but instead ....

There was also a mosque but, though some Chinese are muslim, the people in it looked Indian.  As did those at the Hindu temple.  It says a lot for Singapore's multiracialism.

We did look at some local food delicacies

But decided you can have too much authenticity.  The first option are dried winged lizards, the second are dried sea horses.  Yum, crunchy!

We went back on the cool, cheap and incredibly efficient RMT underground to the National Museum, revamped and reopened last year.  It's a good museum though we skipped the more harrowing bits about WW2.  As always it's fascinating to see history through other another nation's eyes.  Raffles was a cad, but his Dutch counterpart was too cautious so the English got away with a lot. But no sign of bitterness.

One exhibit was an old film of Lee Kuan Yew being interviewed by journalists after Singapore was thrown out of the Malasian confederacy.  It was incredibly moving.  The goal he had worked all his life for was snatched away by the refusal of Tunku Abdul Rahman to accept a Malaysia with equal citizenship for all.  It had the making of a Greek tragedy, a variation on Antigone perhaps.  How do you balance the greater duty against the lesser?  And which is the greater?  Lee Kuan Yew chose Singapore which seemed crazy at the time but it worked.  Much can be said against the state he created but articles I've read tend to show his shortcoming against a Western model rather than against other SE Asian states.  I'd call that success.

After the serious bit we visited the museums rotunda where high tech graphics create 360 degree images on the walls plus 180 degree images on the domed ceiling.  The current exhibition has a semi-abstract woodland scene, animals potter about, trees grow and sometimes shrink away again, every so often the trees produce blossom which falls upward to the ceiling to fall again as multi coloured petals.  We lay on the floor watching it.

Petals falling from the ceiling.

The pictures don't do it justice as I couldn't use flash.  When I get home I'll do some photoshopping.

A last thought on Sizngapore. Our hotel had electric sockets which accept British, American, Australian/New Zealand and most European plugs withot needing an adaptor.

Somehow that seems apropriate for this amazing little country.

Eating Singaporean Style.

Eat your heart out Jeff Coons!

This elephant was just outside our hotel window.  Very tasteful, about twice normal size and contructed of plastic roses in all colours (including blue and green). Woven into them are LEDs for night time when the flowers can't be seen. 


It's the edge of Little India, a maze of small streets where street food venders slot into spaces between hardware shops, travel agents, barrows selling unidentifiable objects (food?), a mosque, and something called 'Singapore Beauty' (I don't know what it sold but the rate was S$50 for 20 minutes).

We ate here on our first night.  The place we chose seemed popular with locals and was pretty much what you'd get at an old fashioned India restaurant in Britain.  But a fascinating area to wander around.

For our second night we decided to splash out a bit.  Trip Advisor knows millions of places to eat Chinese food in Singapore but two were within easy walking distance of our hotel.  One did traditional, proper, Chinese cuisine.  The other offered 'Chinese fusion' cooking which clearly didn't appeal to some reviewers.  So we went there, Lokkee (on Handy Rd, just past Oldham Lane - how English that sounds).  If you don't like things which fuse alternatives, upset traditional realities, have fun with differences .... well no doubt Singapore can cope but the new seems much more appealing to us.

Lokkee is inside a seven storey shopping  mall.  It looked very conventional, decorated in the usual style with Chinese landscape prints and line drawings of  terracotta warriors. It was some time before I noticed the warriors wore starship trooper helmets.  And Chewbacca, R2D2 and the gang had infiltrated C18th rural China.

We started with spring rolls crossed with tacos: small crisp corn flour cones packed with traditonal shredded shrimp and sweet corn.  An alternative kept the Chinese spring roll outside but filled it with a layer of cheese and then minced beef upsetting both burger fans and spring roll traditionalists.  The menu said the chef was 'intoxicated with the possibilities of fusion' or maybe, they added, just drunk.  

Prawn dumplings with honey roast pecans and ice pears (some sort of melon?) were good but otherwise we went for tradition: wild mushroom chop suey and completely old fashioned duck in pancakes.  And we chose Jasmine tea, not coke.  Eleanor struggled with, but eventually resisted, the opportunity to try a deep fried roll containing bacon ice cream - wimp!  It could be a big hit in Glasgow.

Raffles Hotel

Everybody has heard of Raffles Hotel but they may not know the address: 1 Beach Road.  If you should visit it (it's closed till late 2018 so don't go immediately), you may expect a beach - otherwise why that road name? Since Singapore became a republic the island has increased in size by 23%.  The new beach is miles away and the old one submerged  beneath new developments on land reclaimed from the sea.  Singapore is growing.  Its population is more than NZ's.

And much of it is beautiful, modern and exciting with a very young population.  Recently James Dyson bemoaned British students studying 'pointless' subjects like Arts and Humanities.  Next door to our hotel is the vast Lascalles University of the Arts,  walking to a restaurant last night we passed the equally large Singapore Arts University.  I wonder who's right?  Singapore feels as though it already well into the 21C, Britain doesn't.  To illustrate, has your home town got one of these. 

Every modern city needs a ship in the sky or it won't look like an SF movie set.  And Singapore also has megatrees based on 'Avatar' - says so in the brochure (sorry, forgot to take a picture!)


We visited the Garden on the Bay yesterday and could have stayed all day.  It puts most other botanical gardens we've seen in the shade: there are Chinese gardens,  Indian ones based on 'earth art'), and ones featuring plants from Malay myths.  All very multicutural, except the Indian nor Malay sources have nothing to do with gardens.  The Chinese is authentic.  Except many of the (highly symbolic) plants, especially the weeping willow, won't grow in Singapore and others have been substituted.

I'm not complaining but 'authentic' seems a very old fashioned virtue here.  We visited one of the great domes featuring mountain plants.  The dome contains an 8 storey mountain complete with 100ft high water fall. 

Don't ask if it's real, we're in a happily postmodern world and it works.  It's authentically inspiring.  Did you know Lego can grow?  

There is also a Lego Venus Fly Trap - but that is too scary.

And as paradox is a big postmodern thing, how does anyone know the way to a lost world?

We've come a long way.

About 7000 miles at about 350 mph to be more precise. Singapore Airlines like to emphasise how slim and attractive their stewards (of both sexes) are. And they are. Standing next to one I feel like a big brutish yahoo.

Unfortunately economy class seats were designed with cabin crew in mind not yahoos. I shuffle and squirm. I watch "Victoria and Abdul" (squirming even more) then a French movie about a teenager tricked by his parents into being a helper at a summer camp for old age pensioners - I won't bore you with the plot, you can guess only too easily (what has happened to French cinema?). I recognise only two names on the music channel: Carol King (Tapestry) and Dylan (The Free Wheeling ditto). I am a dinosaur. So I watch the sat nav display, gaze into the darkness and watch the twinkling lights below.


Our route takes us over a number of places I visited many years ago. Mashad looks beautiful from the air, when I visited in about 1972 it was a big centre for turquoise and agate. It's now Iran's second largest car producer. I must have dozed off and missed Tehran - which from memory is not a bad thing. Too cold in Winter (when I was there), too hot in Summer and a very short Spring and Autumn.


Aleppo and Damascus I probably won't visit again nor pick oranges in the Youth Hostel garden in Bagdad. My trendy but impractable boots began to fall apart in Herat where a friendly cobbler mended them and I bought an authentic Afghan coat which continued to smell of sheep until it fell apart. There was sugar shortage in Khandahar so we drank black tea while sucking mint Imperials. Odd the things you remember.


We also flew over Karachi (of which I remembered little except lots of men with hennaed beards - I might try that!) and Mumbai (it rained and there were several geckos and a quite friendly rat in my hotel room). And so to Singapore for the first time. From the past to the future ... but pictures tomorrow if I can cope with the technology.