Saying Yes

Fourteen hours after returning to Auckland from Adelaide, I was setting up for my class in Onehunga -- three days with 17 talented quilters, exploring line and color, talking with them about their work and their lives. There was a lovely moment on the last day of class as people dug in to finish their final projects just as a chorus of voices joined in graceful harmony wafted into our room from the rehearsal next door. The colors and compositions pinned to our classroom walls became the visual part of the joyful offering. 

Because my rule for this trip was to say YES! to everything, from bike rides to dinners to local tours, the next day was scheduled to a gnat’s eye brow with social events to which I had answered Yes: an early lunch with one group of friends, late afternoon coffee with another, dinner with Yoke’s family. Before I fell into bed after the day’s whirl, I repacked for the next day’s flight, off to Blenheim on the South Island to dye and discharge fabric with a lively group of quilters from Christchurch, Marlborough, Wellington, and Whangarei. Every class offers up its surprises; this one yielded the chance to dye fabric in a huge garage/workroom (I wish my studio was as large!) while being supervised by a phalanx of hart and deer trophies that would have made any great white hunter jealous. I was beginning to feel a little spooked when I remembered the rule: YES, I said, then shot the animals myself – with my camera, of course, and got down to the business of mixing the dyes.

Marlborough sits at the northeast corner of the South Island, an area of peninsulas and islands that look from my airplane window like lace floating on the Queen Charlotte and Pelorus Sounds. Blenheim is in a valley with Cook Strait out to the east and high country mountains to the north and south. The Marlborough area, once filled with cherry and apple orchards, is lined now with endless rows of vines, monoculture made visible. Wineries fill the landscape and offer great places to stop for a meal or a wine tasting, but I’m not sure where locals source their stone fruit or Galas these days.

There was time to say yes to meals with friends, a short drive over unsealed roads for a view of the Sounds, a nip over the Richmond hills to the art town of Nelson-- but not time enough to explore a fraction of the beaches, mountain roads, and galleries the area has to offer. I think I need to go back. I have my answer ready for the next time I’m asked:YES! And maybe there’ll be time for the mussel festival I missed by a day this trip, or lunch at the wonderfully adorned Mussel Pot.

Back in Auckland, I had a day to spend with Ailie, to continue our longtime search for the best gelato in Auckland (we agree that Spencer’s in Glendowie walked away with first place on this trip) and to be sous-chef for the party Ailie was throwing that evening to farewell me home.

Old and new friends, great food, engrossing conversation, delighted laughter: the evening’s abundant magic danced in my head on the long trip home. It was a short and full six weeks, reminding me of the advice someone gave me a while ago: Life is short, but it’s up to you to make it wide. Thank you to Yoke, who shared her house and family with me, to Ailie who accompanied me on the back roads and to the big city in Australia, and to all the friends who rearranged already full schedules to make time to say yes! when asked to come out to play. Till next time.

Festival City and (No) Kangaroo Island

The civil engineers who designed the road between Horsham and Adelaide must have known that the scenery, flat and almost empty for miles on end, might render drivers catatonic. Interspersed with the place names (Dimboola, Gerung Gerung, Kiata, Nhill, Tintinara, Culburra, Coonalpyn, Coomandook) and signs alerting you to “mountains” you might otherwise miss, including Mt. Zero,  elevation 340 meters, were billboards with dire warnings: Fatigue is Fatal, Survive This Drive, Take a Break, and my favorite, the alliterative Drowsy Drivers Die. Despite the long flight and time difference, Bill was kept alert by the challenge of trying to remember to stay on the correct side of the road (and by panicked reminders by Ailie and me) as we made our way to Adelaide.

Adelaide was supposed to be a stopover on the trip, a place to rest after the drive and to collect Cyril from the airport the next day. It turned out to be the highlight of my stay in Oz this time around. 

The city was alive with concurrent festivals, and in our short stay we lucked into a free concert on the river to ring in the Fringe Festival, the opening day of the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and a talk by one of my favorite authors at the inaugural day of the 2014 Adelaide Writer’s Festival. If we’d been so inclined we could also have joined the thousands of people heading toward the Clipsal V8 races in the east end of Adelaide – but we didn’t need to, since we could hear the strange buzzing sound of the racecars, like an armada of megamozzies, from across the city.

After a few last minute purchases (dark chocolate passion-fruit cremes from Haigh’s for me, some flash new boots for Ailie, shorts and a t-shirt for Bill, who had forgotten that he was coming to southern hemispheric summer when he packed) we headed south to Cape Jervis to catch the Kangaroo Island ferry. The KI to-do list was short: relax, do some beach hopping and see and photograph enough wallabies and kangaroos to be able compare and tell the difference between them. Two out of three’s not bad.

Our house in the trees was comfortable and laid-back. The beaches were many, varied, and luxuriously empty.

 But the wildlife (except for the unfortunate roadkill roos and possums grotesquely lying feet up on the verges) never emerged from the bush in our presence -- I guess, like any island local toward the end of tourist season, they were sooooo over us. And so it passed that the kangaroos I photographed on Kangaroo island where those pressed into bricks or fashioned into mosaics near the ferry terminal. Or were they wallabies?

We did see what seemed like a small city of NZ fur seals in Flinders Chase National Park, and Bill claimed the wildlife-spotting prize for pointing out the koalas hanging out in the gum trees behind the visitor’s center. I expressed a little skepticism as I wondered how recently Disney had installed these particularly lifelike Koalanimatrons, and wondered how hard it could have been to include some wallabybots while they were at it.

Big Things in a Big Country

New Zealand has its giant kiwi fruit in Te Puke, it's humungous carrot in Ohakune, its scarily large trout in Gore. 

So why was I surprised to see Australian megafauna gracing a roadside attraction on the way to Horsham from Halls Gap? I'm still regretting my split-second decision to speed by this house-sized koala. What was I thinking?

As we continued northwest to Adelaide after visiting a friend in Horsham, we slowed to enter the town of Keith, where I spied a sign listing  "Land Rover On Pole" as one of the town's attractions.  Another colloquialism? I wondered. Maybe they're warning us that we're heading into a really rough road, with 4 wheel drive advised, I thought. But no. These Ozzies say what they mean and mean what they say, for indeed in the town park there was a Land Rover and yup, it was, as advertised, on a pole. We fought the all but overwhelming urge to stop and investigate the need to put an SUV on a stick and drove on.

But when I got back to NZ and did some research, it turns out that a less direct route to our destination could have taken us by an oversized statue of a plate of potatoes and forks, ready to be served to a carb-loading giant. This one is for my Spud Buds back home. A little butter, a little salt, and I could imagine a very happy giant.  Road trip? 

I know I'm In Oz When....

I know I'm teaching in Halls Gap, Australia when: 

I sip my morning coffee on my cabin veranda and watch the kangaroos hopping to gather for their al fresco breakfast

.

I look out of my classroom and notice this Victoria license plate.

 

I put a kookaburra in charge of supervising safety procedures at the cutting mat.

 

I add new expressions to my growing antipodean list of idioms. "A blind man would be glad to see it," one student declared while reassuring another her craftsmanship was good enough. "A ball of muscle," another student replied when I asked her how her evening had been. Turns out that's the Ozzie equivalent of "Box o' birds, mate," which I learned from some Kiwi friends years ago and am still lobbying to add to the American lexicon.

I borrow a bike, gratis, from the local backpacker's accommodation by leaving the owner with no more information than my first name.

I share breakfast with tutors from Ireland, England, New York, and Florida as well as far flung Australian states like Western Australia and Tasmania -- and from the wonderfully named town of Bundadoon. And breakfast is always muesli and fruit. Unless I want Vegemite and toast.

I watch students and teachers playing petanque while the roos watch from the neighboring cricket pitch.

I answer, "She'll be right, mate," when a friend worries about how we'll get to class without access to a car. And I believe it. And it's true.

Food Choice/Choice Food

The first time we came to New Zealand the standard choices for nibbles in cafes included Anzac biscuits and canned asparagus rolled into sliced of buttered white bread. I remember writing home and saying that I loved New Zealand but needed to come home because I was hankering after a decent cup of coffee.

Cafe food has come a long way from those days of tasteless cookies and cuisine designed for people who believe mushy peas are a treat. These days I return to NZ not just to see my friends but because I have a yen for a decaf trim flat white, which is like a latte but better, for savoury muffins and scones filled with feta and pumpkin and bacon, to sample dragonfruit (hot pink inside and out) for cheap mangoes and passionfruit available by the kilo.

 

But discovering Little and Friday's, a cafe attached to a fabric store in a backstreet of Auckland's Newmarket, gave me fresh reasons to return. It was hard to choose just one shot of the amazing sugary treats on offer. Yes, you can also get salads and sandwiches, but really, why would you?