Big Birds Across The Sky

At the entrance to the departure lounge in Auckland airport stands a huge vaguely Viking figure, a twelve foot high warrior resting on his sword.  It looks neither Maaori nor recognisably European and turns out to be from the set of Lord of the Rings - an oxymoronic giant dwarf!   With this unlikely tutelary figure to protect us we set out for another 13 hours of breathing recycled farts and watching unintelligible movies swamped by engine noise between being fed meals you would, I hope, eat nowhere else.

Eventually we arrive and stumble bemused, dazed and blinking into a blindingly sparkling view of snow streaked mountain tops and dark green forests.  It must be Canada.  And this is just the airport.

"Canada", said Saki, "is all right really, though not for the whole weekend".  Based on this first sight alone we could probably manage several years. It isn't 29°C any more, maybe 29°F though.  Refreshing.  And what is this white stuff? 

We commute with relative ease (if you look lost for more than a couple of seconds here, someone asks if they can help) to our airbnb flat in the upmarket, hipsterish Vancouver district of Kitsilano.  Things are different here.

If you see two images, please adjust reality.

The view from the apartment isn't bad:

A short walk to the sea.

We spent yesterday wandering down to the cold sea shore then along it to Granville Market. A collection of shops selling everything but mostly food and drink.  It was cold and we were happy to sit, watch what was happening and chat.  We eat and drink then cross the river as it begins to snow.

We take shelter in the vast warm attrium of HSBC, a very welcoming bank. Hot air comes from ducts in the floor next to which sit about twenty or so people, mostly cycle couriers, some shoppers or tourists, one or two more ragged people who may have no where else.  A vast pendulum - maybe 30ft long - swings slowly back and forth.  Time passes.  The bank operates insouciantly around us.  How very Canadian. The snow stops.

We find ourselves some cheap warm clothes at the Army and Navy Store.  The store itself feels vaguely sinister, it is dusk and the men's section is "across the alley", a prototype for every alley way you've seen in an America movie: it's dark, steam seeps from pipes, dumpsters (wheelie bins) probably contain zombies or shield mafiosi.  Ahead of us a man with three large unwieldy carrier bags seems to be having an argument simultaneously with himself and the door.  I open the door and he staggers through only to cross the alley and restart his argument on the other side.  I open that door as well but he doesn't notice and continues to disagree with himself. I think he is losing the argument. The men's section seems to contain several other customers with similar problems. We shop quickly and return to our hipster pad. I am now equipped to be a lumber jack and Eleanor would be a credit to any chic ski resort.

A rather busy day by our New Zealand standards.

Raglan

On the coast, west from Hamilton, is Raglan, our last camp place. It provides a natural complement to Russell which is genteel and full of people like us with grey hair. Raglan is a surfer's town - the average age of visitors is about 30 years lower. If I buy a shirt at the opportunity (charity) shop wll I look like a surfer dude?

The campsite reminds us of Spain with lots of pitches permanently occupied by old, slowly mouldering, caravans with sun-faded awnings.  It a great working class gathering place - every day groups of friends are reunited and new groups form.  It is noisier, brasher than Russell, people talk to each other more: we've heard several peoples accounts of visiting the UK.  London, York, Oxford and Bath - a museum covering a whole country - but one person remembered my home city of Norwich which made me fleetingly nostalgic.

There is a safe bay to swim in.  You can almost walk across.  If you're lucky you might see an Orca - if you're very unlucky, one might see you!  It has wonderful sunsets.

On Saturday the whole town seemed to turn out beside the river.  The bridge has signs warning against jumping off which are casually ignored.  On the banks children amost too young to walk totter into the water alongside siblings, parents, grandparents and probably great grandparents.  Fresh fish sizzles on barbies, gazebos blow in the wind, teenagers go off in disgust to share their grievances about unreasonable parents.  The sun shines and all is well with the world.  Except that the sand is black rather than golden.

Black sand like a small Milky Way - with one step for mankind

At night we walk across a narrow stretch of grass to the bridge. The Milky Way sparkles, Orion is still disconcertingly upside down.  Kids have gathered to talk, bikes in piles, at the point where the river meets the sea (which seems appropriate). 

In the river a few couples are still swiming in the warm black water.  We can hear their relaxed chat.  The bridge supports are illuminated making it seem the elegant arch floats on beams of blue light.  The light attracts insects which in turn brings shoals of fish which jump and roil the water.

On the other bank is a backpackers' and surfers' hostel. A different, slightly older group lounge around in the darkness, laughing and joking to the clink of bottles. Inevitably one young man sits apart from the rest practising his guitar.

Next stop is Vancouver, but this is a good place for a few days of quotidian contentment.

New Zealand is a garden,

And gardens are not made

By saying "Oh, how lovely!"

And sitting in the shade.

But the makers of the garden did a great job - so we can sit in the shade.

That sunset feeling.

Leaving Coromandel, Visiting Hamilton

The people who mend NZ roads are wonderful.  We came into Coromandel along its west coast.  Storms had just washed away bits of road for a 25 mile stretch.  One way systems and traffic lights had been set up.  Thousands of traffic cones had been planted in neat rows.  Everything worked smoothly.  Eleanor was driving so I could just enjoy the view of the beach - about six inches from the wheels horizontally and a yard vertically.  The SatNav showed the road against a background of water (must be next year's model).  The gap between road and beach had once been wider:  telephone poles now ran across the the beach, at one point into the sea, later looping out again and ultimately back to the side of the road - victims of earlier storms.

I didn't take any pictures, just clung, white knuckled, to my seat.  Eleanor drove on unperturbed.

Leaving Coromandel Town several days later we took the mountain road after a couple of days of tropical downpour.  There were rock falls on the road, new streams sprang from cliff faces, sticky mud slides glooped onto the road.  Hundreds more cones had been deployed around the piles of rock and mud and the new water courses had been diverted back into culverts.  And it was still beautiful.

On the other side, after a short band of farm land we reached Whitianga, Coromandel's new gold coast (for those selling real estate at least).  Big modern houses sit back from the highway on the other side of which a landscaped buffer between road and sea has curving paths for walkers, cyclists and skate boarders.  There is a large marina and newer ones are being built with luxury homes attached.  Whitianga is the new New Zealand.

We weren't sure we'd be able to afford a coffee at any of the elegantly laid back bars so drove on into more farming country, eventually reaching Hamilton which is NZ's most boring city or its most vibrant depending on your point of view.  The city regions give a hint of what is coming: St Andrews (with golf course), Chartwell, Hillcrest, Silverdale, Chedworth Park, Glenview, Fairview Downs and Forest Lake sound like Edwardian suburban villas.  (There are of course Maaori names but I don't know what they mean) 

On the first day we walked though tidy suburbs with wide quiet roads to visit the museum which is wonderful.  One large display of art works titled "Modern[isms]"  looked at sources, blending Western, Maaori and Oceanic responses to European Modernism. Is the incorporation of Maaori motifs and styles  "cultural appropriation"?  I don't know but liked the pictures.  

A big gallery upstairs showed the work of NZ artists influenced by cubism. The work of Louise Henderson effortlessly dominates the show.  Her subjects include portraits, studies of people, views from an attic studio in Dieppe, N African views (suggestive in colouring of Klee's pictures of the same region), still lifes and abstracts.  An attendant told us (slightly exasperatedly) that Henderson had turned one of her pictures upside down before signing it.  An awful lot of visitors had helpfully pointed out that one picture had been hung upside down.  The joke was wearing a bit thin.  The picture is called "Houses in Dieppe".  We thought of two possible points to the joke.  What do you think?

(from Auckland Art Gallery) 

On our second day we visited Hamilton Gardens.  We spent the whole day there, it's very different from Singapore's Garden by the Bay but equally impressive.  Substituting plants as necessary they've recreated gardens from Renaissance Italy, Tudor England (also an Arts and Crafts example), Moghal India, China, Japan, 1960s California, a Maaori kumara patch, a sustainable  garden, .... I've missed some and lots more are planned.  The layout is almost a maze (think Ikea) where, somehow each garden is complete and doesn't overlook its neighbours.

Japanese Scroll Garden
(raked gavel and rocks out back) 

English country garden

California poolside

There was a rabbit nibbling the grass in the Arts and Craft.  I congratulated a gardener on this charming bit of verisimilitude: " .... aaaargh a rabbit!  Must contact the head gardener!  Quick!"  A bit like velociraptors getting loose in Jurassic Park.  I was told that if they didn't act vigilantes might. 

Anti-rabbit guard  

In an earlier blog I mentioned how noisy the countryside is.  Here is one culprit.

And here are several of them in a bamboo thicket (Chinese "cosmos" garden).

We only had two days but you've probably guessed where we stand in the "Is Hamilton Boring?" debate.

Not Being There Yet

Today was to have been the next Kiwi Experience.  Beyond Coromandel Town are the mountains, a small road twists through them offering stunning views of peaks and bush, not to mention the exciting prospect of falling off the road - like bungy jumping without ropes.  The sense of romantic mystery is intensified by the layer of fine mist covering the peaks.

Unfortunately the fine mist has thickened. A bit.  The first ridge is just visible as a hazy outline but the rest of the mountains are quite gone.  Chance of dramatic views, zero; chance of rope-free bungying much improved.  Rain begins to fall steadily. Then it gets harder, and harder, a 24 hour deluge.  The Kiwi experience they don't advertise.

A brief lull and we walk into town to buy a few things.  It may rain for forty days and nights so we buy rather a lot.  Jokingly, I ask the cashier if I can borrow the trundler (NZ for 'trolley') to carry it all.  "I don't have a problem with that", she says, "just bring it back later."  Imagine Tesco saying that.  Taking it back is more of a problem.  The rain has paused for long enough to get people onto the streets.  I push the trundler round and through bare foot boys on bikes, hikers sorting their packs on the sidewalk, chatting friends, giggling school girls, silver ponytailed bikers and an old Maaori guy singing Midnight Train to Georgia.  I feel a bit silly.

The rain starts again.  The groundsman looks worried. He's cordoning off more and more of the site with the sort of tape you see at crime scenes.  "It's the gloop", he says,  "Grass forms a mat, but when it rains the gloop gets everything."   I had a silly thought - maybe vans could be absorbed whole: glooped.  Maybe it wasn't gloop but 'The Gloop', like The Beast, The Old House, The Shining.  The Haunted Campsite - an idea for a horror story.   "What about our pitch?"  He looked, I thought, a bit nervous. "Should be OK" he said, uncertainly, and hurried off to get more tape.

Our pitch was fine, a few inches higher than the rest.  We were on a tiny plateau about three or four inches above the surroundings.  Perfect size for a van - might have been measured for it.  Maybe the Gloop had swallowed one and we were parked on top.  A silly idea.  Except for the mushrooms.

They'd appeared with the first rain. Unurprising except the colour.  Flesh pink.  Grouped like obscenely swollen fingers trying to drag themselves from the ground.  What weird, unholy eldritch horror was this?  What unspeakable chthonic force, could it be?

Then the rain stopped and the sun came out.  It was time to leave, I turned off the Kindle leaving H P Lovecraft's classic "Camping in the Mountains of Madness" unfinished.  I've always wanted an excuse to use 'eldritch' and 'chthonic'.    











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Bush Walking

Paths are well marked in NZ and, following on from the theme of the last post, walking is definitely 'experiencing' if only at a wimpy level. So we set off for a casual stroll, through Coromandel Town onto a path which would give a clear view of the bay.

The first thing you notice in a NZ wood is the noise.  There are tickings, whistles, rustles and what are almost certainly chompings.  Every tree is covered by things either eating it or eating the things that eat it.  It formed a constant backdrop until we emerged at the viewpoint.

Coromandel Bay

One thing we'd seen many of, and would see every fifty yards or so for the rest of the walk, were traps.  Maoris called NZ "The Island of Birds" - when they arrived there were no land mammals (except two sorts of bat).  Lots were later introduced, some generally seen as benign (eg the hedghog), other as pests: rabbits, rats, possums etc.  Stoats were introduced to reduce the rabbit population but succeeded in decimating bird species by eating their eggs.

The traps we saw were aimed at rats and stoats and were obviously part of a drive to get children involved in pest control.  The basic argument was rats and stoats eat kiwi eggs and kiwi are the endangered national bird.  Eight year olds painted "we love kiwis" or "kill all rats" on the traps and added bait - often eggs (chicken I assume), sometimes unidentifiable bits (meat?) and sometimes what looked like torn up plastic bags.  None that we saw contained either rats or stoats.

As we climbed the first hill we could also see evidence of NZ's gelogical instability. The photo shows a layer of sea shells about a foot below the land surface and about 100 feet above the current sea level.

Virtually none of the plant life was familiar except blackberries and thistles - both presumably invaders.  We continued to climb though denser woods, at some point transferring, unknowingly from a 'day' to  a 'bush' path.  Day paths are easy walking, vegetation gets trimmed back, there may be a gravel surface, they may even be wheel chair friendly.  A bush path is anything else.  

The path got steeper and muddier.  I think New Zealanders like corrugated iron because it reminds them of their country - up and down.  It wasn't completely wild. Some of the rises and falls had flights of steps.  The longest run I counted was over 100 steps.  At the bottom, turning a corner you saw another flight going up again, and then, and then, .....

Eventually they stopped, we were as high as we could be, clear of woodland for a few moments.  It started to rain, good steady NZ rain which continued for the next hour.  No more steps though, just slithering and sliding up and down muddy slopes, across a causeway in a mangrove swamp, up a mud slope with, fortunately, a rope to hang onto ... part of the way.

The last obstacle was a stream with stepping stones.  We nearly crossed successfully but were by then too tired and muddied to care.  We walked back to town dripping water and mud. A  Maori lady smiled and said "Hello" so we were recognisably human I guess.

We travel with only cabin luggage and now everything was wet and dirty.  It all went into the campsite's big washer and then drier while we sat in our van wrapped in the big faux fur bankets which came with it for just such occasions.

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading", said Logan Pearsall Smith.  At the moment I tend to agree, especially sitting here in my furry comfort blanket.

Being There

NZ is all about experiencing stuff.  Look in any brochure: you can white water raft across rapids, climb into the caldera of an active volcano, swim with dolphins, paddle a Maori canoe, attach rubber bands to your ankles and jump off bridges.  I'm told the current younger generation is all about doing things; the previous younger generation which wanted to own things have been retired.  Now it's, "Been there, done that, but don't want the teeshirt".

Eleanor and I are more of the looking at, talking about, thinking about but not needing to risk (or pretend to) life and limb. You can paddle a tiny boat into and underwater cavern to see glow worms, or like us you can stroll below an a bridge, move aside the ferns and also see glow worms.  How boring we're becoming.  So we decided to experience something. Which in our case usually starts with a meal.

Driving Creek Cafe would fit very easily into St Werburghs, vegan/veggie organic everything, with a quote by the Dalai Lama on one wall and a poem by Janet Frame on another.  It's facebook page shows it better than I can; it's Trip Advisor's top eating spot in Coromandel but that's a bit unfair - it just totally different.

Here's a house sparrow helping us out with the chocolate cake - no longer so common in the UK but everywhere in NZ.

Fifty yards down the road is Driving Creek Railway.  Forget train spotters muttering about gauges, 2-4-2 engines, left flanging widgets and all that stuff.  This is an art work that took a life time to create. Barry Brickell was a potter and potters need clay so he bought a small bush covered hill of the stuff (about 60 acres for NZ$ 8000).  To fire pots you need fuel and bush provides wood for that as well.  If, in addition, you want to conserve NZ's unique flora you can have the extra satisfaction of cutting down invaders (e.g American pine),  firing your pots with them and then replanting with indigenous trees.

To make this possible, Barry built a railway, laying all the track himself.  Here is a film of the very early days.  His and other pots and artworks decorate it.  The decorative bricks are made of local clay, fired in kilns made of bricks fired from the same clay and fueled by wood from the site.  I can't compete with a few photos but look on youtube to see what it's like now.

Barry died a couple of years ago and is buried beside the track.

And I made a small friend:

I'm not sure where it came from but I think it wanted protection  As soon as I saw it, so did others and they started snapping.  I encouraged it onto my hand so lots of pople got good pictures ... except me who couldn't take a photo because I was too close.  Afterwards I put it down safely away from all the feet!

Stars that Shine and Twinkle

You don't often see the Milky Way in England, too much light pollution, but in the NZ countryside the stars seem more and brighter.  Even on the edge of Russell you can see the Milky Way but I have poor visual/spacial awareness and am disconcerted by an upside down Orion.  Once you get him you have the Seven Sisters, Taurus, Sirius and Andromeda - but in NZ I don't.

Any way up, the Milky Way is a wonderful sight.  Hard to photograph so instead here's Henry Vaughan lines which almost do it justice:

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;

We leave Russell the next day driving towards Dargaville through long stretches of agricultural (cattle) countryside and single street towns with old fashioned looking signs over shops very different from those in chic Russell.  One town, whose name I forget, advertises itself as having Hundertwasser Public Toilets.  I'm afraid we didn't stop to try them.  What the locals probably don't notice is that their shop signage makes an equally colourful picture.

The weather (day time temperature is rarely below 16°)  and the space, contribute to the presence of many makeshift homesteads scattered beside county roads.   A rainbow painted bus with a couple of sagging awnings can be a home,  a couple of containers with windows cut out or just a few straggling tents.  There are some small communities comprising little more than a collapsing wooden shack leaning against an old coach, with canvas draped over its edges along with a few sheets of rusty corrugated iron.  This would all be unimaginable in England though I suspect only because of the scarcity of land (and the weather).

Further south the land begins to resemble, to some degree, how the Lake District would look if the hills were allowed to spread themselves more generously across the land.  A hundred mile square Lakeland perhaps. Though similarities mask differences: the trees growing on the slopes are usually impenetrable bush which would require machetes and chain saws to cut through. Also you don't get many tree ferns in Cumbria.

In the midst of this we suddenly find ourselves next to Hokianga Harbour with it's beautiful blue water and vast sand dunes. 

The small boy in the picture just happened to be there - I didn't bribe him, honest!  Perhaps he is the dolphin boy; the hamlet where we stopped had, at one time, a friendly dolphin which formed a particularly close relationship with a local child. It seemed so significant that a statue was erected to commemorate the pair. Later the statue was moved from the roadside to a local museum and a replacement statue put by the road. Oddly the original child was a girl, the replacement statue shows a boy.  Make of that what you will.

Here is the big tree I mentioned earlier.  Kauri wood is massively protected - to see the tree you must first wipe your feet and then spray them  with disinfectant.  The picture doesn't show the scale of Tane Mahuta, it is wider than a bus, over 50 metres high and perhaps 2000 years old.

And then we stop at a new site.  Walking down the road we meet a woman picking blackberries. (remember it's autumn here).   When it gets dark we also scour the hedgerows, not for blackberries though: beneath a bridge, under damp ferns we find our own small Milky Way -several dozen glow worms shining brightly.

Not quite Vaughan's style but I'll echo W H Davies (with a bit of a bodge)

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stop and stare?
...
No time to see, .....
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.