Four Reasons To Love New Zealand

I can stroll on the beach at Pauanui, on the east coast about 2 hours from Auckland

or take the half hour ferry ride from downtown Auckland to Waiheke Island and enjoy the section of Palm Beach for the fully clothed (the clothing optional area is discreetly screened by walls of rock)

or head south on Waiheke to Rocky Bay

or have a picnic breakfast on the beach in St. Heliers, an Auckland suburb. 

 

My list of things necessary to include in the architecture of bliss include the sound of water lapping, the aerial ballet of clouds, and the possibility of a water view around every curve. New Zealand ticks all those boxes on my list. Autumn has started here and yet still the golden weather shines on. Today I head south, which means it's time to pack my woolie socks and leave my short sleeves behind; in this hemisphere heading south means chilly weather and crisp days.

hot cross carbs

There are several things about being in New Zealand at Easter time that interest me, quite apart from the dizzying sensation of celebrating a holiday of rebirth in autumn when the light is leaving and leaves are falling.  Take, for example, the cult of the hot cross bun, which used to be available  for a short time each year close to the Easter holidays. People would greet their appearance with the same inexplicable delight they display for Christmas fruitcake. 

As the Kiwis have become more American in their capitalism, with shops staying open in the evenings and on the weekends  they've also learned how to market the heck out of their holiday specialties. Just like in America, where candy companies start to sell us Halloween candy in September, you can now get hot cross buns weeks before Easter here. Unlike in the US, where we fool ourselves into believing that we will store that bag o' Snickers in the pantry for a month and half until the little monsters come calling, you really can't tell yourself  that the hot cross buns you buy at the beginning of March are going to be greeting the Easter Bunny on the holiday table.

Another Easter tradition here is the closure of schools, government services, and many businesses on Good Friday. When NZ was a British colony and mostly C of E, Good Friday being a national holiday made sense in a religious way. But NZ stopped being a homogenous land of immigrants from the UK years ago, and is now home to large numbers of residents who came not from England or Scotland or Ireland, not from Europe even, but from Africa and Asia and the wide Polynesian seas. The growing diversity of its population hasn't affected the nation's tradition of closing down shop on Good Friday. And those closures are repeated on something called Easter Monday, whose religious significance none of my friends here could explain. Schools put the cross on the bun, so to speak, by extending the closure through Tuesday, because, really, one might as well. 

If having the day off thanks to someone else's religion wasn't a good enough reason to look forward to Good Friday, I could learn to love celebrating the day if I could get invited to my friend Louise's every year, where her  scones topped with jam and whipped cream appear on the table next to a tower of her daughter's hot cross buns. Carbohydrates, fat, and sugar. Now that's the way to celebrate a holiday, even if no one can really explain why. 

And just when I was recovering from my second helping of whipped cream and scones, it was time to set another table for Easter at my friend Yoke's. So if you're wondering how you improve on scones and cream (and hot cross buns, if that's your passion)...just add cheese, salami, ham, and chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate, as if the Easter Bunny suddenly decided he was done with this house-to-house delivery nonsense,  dropped his whole chocolate inventory into Yoke's kitchen, and hopped away to rest up for whatever the heck happens on Easter Monday.  Perhaps the purpose of Easter Monday is to flagellate ourselves with carrot sticks to atone for our festive dining sins. 

Seasons, Shortages, and Aisle Seats

In New Zealand, we turned the clocks back this weekend -- it seems like a sort of April Fool’s joke that seasons officially change here on the first days of months rather than according to the earth’s tilt relation to the sun. The observable effect is the same: the days are shortening and the air is no longer filled with the scent of bloom and growth.  My short-sleeved tops were thrown back in the suitcase a few weeks ago, and the weather is becoming, as they charmingly say here, unsettled. The wind and rain that flooded Fiji last week is heading to New Zealand, and let’s face it, I can have wind and rain at home, where I can also hug Bill, pet my cats, and camp out in my studio.

So I’m heading to the airport today. Call me crazy (or, more precisely, a tad homesick) but I’m looking forward to sitting in my cattle class aisle seat and scrolling through the choice of movies that will divert me before the Ambien and the magic of chemistry allows me to wake in San Francisco. Whenever I’m faced with a long flight I think about how The Future we were promised as little baby boomettes never eventuated. How I’d like to say “Beam me up,” and arrive home in minutes, where an army of automated devices would free me for more leisure time to ride my jet pack. The future we got, the one with Skype and GPS and books being read to me on a device no larger than a pat of butter, is equally fantastic, of course, but there are moments when I still pine for my robot maid and paperless society (except for the paper of books, which I’m not yet ready to give up).

Back in the present here in the land that’s like home but not quite like home, what Kiwis are learning to live without for the foreseeable future is Marmite. Yes, almost as scary a prospect as the incoming blow from Fiji is the run on the salty, smelly, slightly sweet spread that Kiwis prefer on their morning toast.  The production glitch is yet another aftershock of Christchurch’s earthquakes, and it was reported as if the switch to Vegemite, which is produced in Australia, might result in a national identity crisis. So some things are indeed just like home, including the media which can manufacture high drama over the shortage of brown sludge. No Kiwi I talked to seems to be concerned with the empty spot on the grocery shelf where Marmite used to be, but the papers do seem concerned about that potential hole on page 2.

My bags are packed and I’m happy to head home, in small part because I have next year’s return to the Southern Hemisphere on my calendar and passion fruit preserves in my bag. But don’t blame me for the dearth of Marmite in NZ, because I promise you, there just wasn’t room for any of it in my suitcase.

Currencies and Conversations

David Unaipon, Aboriginal author, inventor and political leader.

When my taxi left the Melbourne airport and whisked me downtown, we rode on highways large enough to feel at home in Southern California to a city which recently rediscovered its waterfront, building tall new business headquarters while managing to preserve some heritage buildings and some green space. A city with pretty good public transportation, a growing bicycle presence, and a happy opinion of itself, which is shared by much of the rest of the nation. A place a lot like, say, Portland – and you think, this is a very American place.

But then you notice the British spelling of colour and centre, the teens in their anachronistic school uniforms more at home in mid-century Oxford, the Union Jack on the Southern-Cross festooned flag,  and Queenie on the five dollar bill and you think, oh, this is a very British sort of city.

The desire to file a new experience under something I already understand can be an impediment to learning very much about the new place I’m in. Australia is neither the US nor the UK, as a slightly more thoughtful look around the place reveals. My “look around the place” usually starts with its visual and literary arts, but when I really start paying attention, I notice clues in less obvious places. Take the Australian currency, for example. Old Queen Bess is indeed on the fiver, but the other denominations feature a socialist poet, the author of Waltzing Matilda, the founder of the flying doctors, a woman who arrived in Australia as a convict and went on to business success, an educator and an Aboriginal icon. A balance of women and men, and even a nod to the people who received none of this currency (or any preceding one) to pay for the land that used to be theirs. Writers and activists, populist songwriters, and not a politician among them. Does that give us a clue about the culture?

After a few days of wandering and mentally storing up cultural confusions, I am grateful to have a class full of smart women to bring my questions to. When I asked them for a list of Australian books and movies I shouldn’t miss, they provided not only their lists, but their reasons why the films and writings were important. Some of the women were weary of the stereotyped outback Ozzie in movies like Crocodile Dundee, one wanted the world to know that most Australians lived in urban environments and thought “the outback is as boring as batshit.” The books and films dealt with modern issues of immigration, the history of their native people, the skew-whiff Australian sense of humor, and the penchant for gritty true-crime dramas.

But here’s the interesting part of the conversation: after the women recovered from their surprise of having been asked, my questions made them think about their country in a way they hadn’t in a while, and their thoughtful answers expanded my understanding of their society. Books, films, art work, even currency are good paths into understanding, but conversations with intelligent women are high speed freeways.

Our discussions made me think about how my travel is changing as I age: no more backpackers digs for me, and no more shared loos at the end of the hall. And it isn’t just how I travel that has changed;  why I travel has changed as well. I used to travel to see a work of art, a view from the sea, a building that had witnessed huge historical shifts. It’s the people who fascinate me the most now -- the conversations they include me in and the cultures they create. It does help, I admit, if the cultures they’ve created yielded interesting art work and chose to locate near an ocean view. Throw in the ability to make a good decaf trim flat white and I’ll be happy to book a ticket.

Waiheke Island

Or 72,800 seconds 

Uber--precise sign seen today at the Waiheke Island ferry terminal.

My classes are over, so I took advantage of a blue sky day to sail to Waiheke Island. Wouldn't you?

Mussels and kumara chips at the imaginatively titled Beach Front Cafe on Onetangi Beach

We Officially Welcome You To Australia, Sort Of

The Official Seal of Australia

What do you do to make your home secure, but still welcoming to guests? I had almost two hours to ponder this question as I waited in the “Other Visitors” Customs queue at the Melbourne airport. When my Kiwi friend Ailie and I rolled off the plane and saw a line snaking up almost to the end of our terminal, we wondered what kind of huge tour group had just disembarked from what giant aircraft. I rolled my bag of quilts through the terminal, up through the ubiquitous Duty-Free shops, chatting with Ailie and glancing at the line, trying to figure out what kind of tour group would appeal to 50 Japanese teenage boys, a group of Muslim women, and a patchwork of Asians, Europeans and North Americans of all ages and colors. Then I looked up to the signs instructing Ailie to head to the left, to the short line for Australian and New Zealand passport holders, and me to the right, being one of the “Other Visitors.” I looked to the right, and the light dawned. Yes, I would have to head to the right, but I’d also have to head back down into the terminal, past the group of Japanese teens, past the polyglot crowd who had not in fact signed up for a multicultural tour of Oz, to the end of the now even longer line in the Customs Twilight Zone.

      

 

Killing and stuffing the animals honored on your nation's official seal to create a life-size diorama of it is the definition of either irony or cluelessness.

Two hours in a queue without access to a book or other amusement gave me lots of time to watch people perseverate over Angry Birds or ignore the prominently displayed no cell phone placards to call friends who apparently needed a description of the length of the line in which they were standing (advice to cell phone users: being bored in a purgatorial line does not give you license to call someone to describe your boredom). It also gave me time to compare my various experiences in Customs. The first few times we arrived in NZ, back in the 90’s, the Auckland terminal was small and funky and manned by volunteers offering you travel info and a cuppa while you waited for your passport to be stamped and your luggage to be sniffed. The Customs agent in Amsterdam joked with me about why I was attempting to show him my passport when he was simply waving me through. Post 9-11, I had been so schooled about the perils of joking with uniformed officials in airports that it was a few beats before I realized he was waiting for a laugh rather than an explanation. Then there was the mobile Customs agent on the bus into Switzerland from Lake Como who disappointed me by not stamping my passport at all. Here’s just another experience, I told myself as the minutes slogged by in the under lit, barely air conditioned Melbourne queue. I began to hope for a bit of excitement, perhaps an appearance of the security force the placards threatened would come and fine anyone using a cell phone – especially since the fines could easily have bankrolled the salary of a few more Customs agents to move us through at a less deathly pace.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the Tourism Boards who spend a mint enticing visitors to enter the country could work hand in hand with the government employees who comprise the first impression of your visit? It’s a bit like extending increasingly plaintive invitations to a friend to visit, then going off for a bit of a ramble, leaving your socially awkward third cousin at home and not telling him to expect a guest.

While morphing the seal to provide instructions on the use of a hand dryer might be the definition of the Australian sense of humor.

The Purpose-Filled Life

Every week there’s a new report on the latest shiniest research on living longer. The Mediterrean Diet. Acai berries. Pilates. But those who have studied populations boasting a high percentage of centenarians claim that is isn’t the latest hard-to-pronounce dietary supplement that ensures longevity, although eating well is part of the answer. Factors that long-lived populations had in common were a strong sense of community, moderate exercise, a life goal or purpose, and a plant-based diet

So what better use of my time while in Australia and New Zealand than to develop a purpose, in the company of friends? The icing on the cake, or in this case, the topping on the ice cream, is that the goal involved eating as much of a certain plant-based food as possible.

It started in Australia, where Bill and I came upon a store that sold home-made ice cream and sorbets. When we saw that passion fruit was one of the choices, we were transported back to the summer and autumn we spent in Auckland 15 years ago when we switched houses with friends who needed our home as an outpost while on sabbatical from the University of Auckland. When we arrived at their house a few kms from downtown Auckland, passion fruit vines twined up to their backyard deck, and we watched the fruits grow from a flower that looked as if it had been drawn by a graphic designer to a fruit shaped like a jumbo egg the color of an aubergine. We waited till it began to shrivel a bit, as instructed, then sliced them open and scooped the pulp and seeds over everything we could think of – morning muesli, ice cream, and of course birthday pavlovas. Mostly unavailable in Portland (and when available, largely unaffordable), passion fruit became the madeleines of our sojourn in NZ. A whiff of passion fruit scent could transport us back to that year when we had two summers, when, because of the house switch, we had a fuzzy dog to walk and a live-in friend in the flat next door.

So we ordered the passion fruit ice cream in Port Fairy on the Great Ocean Road and decided, in the words of that famous New Yorker cartoon, that it was good, but not immortal. But with that first tart lick and that first whiff of the sorbet’s transportative scent, I decided I was on a mission. In the next two and a half months I would compare and contrast passion fruit gelato and sorbet in every town we stopped in that had home-made frozen delicacies on offer. It’s a tough job, forgoing the inventive chocolate gelato flavors on offer in favor of a fruit-based nosh, but membership in the Longevity Club might depend on fulfilling this goal.

When I got to New Zealand, I asked for help from my community of friends to continue the research project. Ailie pitched in by leading me to a small storefront in her Auckland neighborhood which served moan-inducing cones and by meeting me at a gelato café in Nelson (where we were so impressed by the other flavors that, after tasting the passion fruit and pronouncing it better than most, we proceeded to buy 18 scoops of various flavors to take back to our hosts and share after dinner). I tried another specimen to rate at a gelateria in Mt Eden, a fifteen minute walk from the house where we originally feasted from the long-gone passion fruit vines, and another while waiting for the ferry to Devonport to  attend a folk music concert held in a WW II bunker built into the side of a defunct volcano, but that’s a whole other story. And after completing my week’s teaching at the Remarkable Symposium (named after the hyperbolically-named mountains rising beside Lake Wakitipu, which made me wonder about the extreme modesty required to name a town Boring, Oregon) in Queenstown, I compared notes with fellow tutor Lisa Walton (Http://www.dyedheaven.com).

By this time, the clock was ticking and it was time to revisit what I suspected was the clear winner. Although the golden weather had reached its end by the time I had concluded my teaching on the North Island and headed back to Auckland, I didn’t let the need to don my polar fleece stand in the way of getting back to Ailie’s neighborhood in St. Heliers to test my initial reaction to the Village Co-op’s passion fruit sorbet. The return visit took on a festive air courtesy of the young women behind the counter, who had donned bridal veils in honor of the Royal Wedding scheduled for that evening.

And so it came to pass in a land far, far away that a left-wing Oregonian who doesn’t quite get humankind’s need for ritual sat eating passion fruit sorbet and watching The Royal Wedding with two Kiwis who couldn’t wait to see what the royal bride would be wearing. With each velvety spoonful of gelato we gawked at another example of Dr Seussian headwear spotted among the wedding guests. Was the wedding even broadcast in the US? In New Zealand, parties were being planned all over the nation, and friends were gathering, some wearing outfits befitting wedding attendees, some in jeans and tiaras. On the bus earlier that day, I had overheard a woman speaking at full volume, as people unfortunately do in public when using a cell phone, discussing with some urgency what Kate’s new title would be.

Wedding, schmedding. Over the burbling about the dress, the hats, the invitees, I declared the Village Co-Op the clear winner in this quest for the best passion fruit gelato or sorbet. But I intend to return in a year or two to determine if they’re able to hold the title. There, I have a new goal. Just added a couple of years to my life.