Postcards from New Zealand

witianga is a fun little tourist town on the beach. our hotel was only a block from the beach so we went down there and had a swim. it was at this time that mom lamented my sadly deficient childhood. splashing around in the water, i had a pretty hard time feeling sorry for myself.

the next day we headed for rotorua. our first stop was at a tourist attraction masquerading as a nature preserve, called "rainbow springs." they had gardens with native and non-native trees with interpretive signs, a stream stocked with rainbow trout (non-native species) and information about the lifecycle of the trout, and aviaries with a number of native species on display. these last were the main reason for our visit, since i had expressed an interest in seeing a Real Live Kiwi.

we were in luck. one of the springs' kiwis was up for giving a show that day. about the size of a chicken, the kiwi poked around in the dirt eating bugs, walked up and back, opened and closed its beak. my inner child was well satisfied. we stood and watched it in the darkened 'night building' (kiwis are nocturnal) for a good long time.

from the springs (and after an appropriate consumption period in the giftshop), we went on to the rotorua mud pools, an area of thermal geyser activity.

we would probably have appreciated it more if it hadn't been pissing down rain, but even still we appreciated it a lot. looking out over the path through the geysers, laced with jungle growth, it was all very primeval. with the rain, the stench of sulfur, and the steam rising off the pools, it wasn't hard to imagine a dinosaur raising its head from the leaves.

the first thing europeans did upon arriving on new zealand was to shave the entire island bald. thousand year old trees, lush rain forests, everything went.

i'm not passing judgement here, i'm just stating a fact.

nat's family has been on this particular piece of land for 5 generations. there are a handful of families that have been here that long, you see their names all over. torkington, matheson, smith, wyatt. pretty much anyone in any of these families is also a member of the others. theirs is a rich and beautiful history, and thanks to alvin smith (torkington matheson wyatt), a well-documented one.

the weather has been rainy the past couple of days, so we've turned our attention to indoor pursuits. add to this barry's recent purchase of a top-notch hp scanner. we spent one day driving to alvin's house in aukland, then to some matheson-torkington-wyatt rellies, collecting photographs and bringing them back to ti point for cataloguing, labeling, and scanning.

and this is where we get back to the deforestation of new zealand. the very old photos of ti point show houses erected in vast, empty fields. the difference with what ti point looks like today is shocking, alarming. sometime after people really got settled in they realized that a land without trees kind of sucked, and a lot of native and non-native bush has returned.

pohutukara, macracarpa, ti tree. they're huge, and they're everywhere. at night, you can hear the calls of kiwi and morporks from the trees. it is a beautiful lesson in the land's ability to heal, to return.

it was during our Family Vacation, and we were driving from one town to the other when nat says to me, "i hope you enjoyed dinner last night because it was your anniversary dinner."

"doh! i completely forgot."

"so did i until just now."

"oh well, i guess that's ok then."

two things have been occupying momma's mind a great deal since we arrived in new zealand: the first is the pronunciation of maori words, and the second is tortillas, or the lack thereof.

one of the primary difficulties momma had with maori to begin with was the combination "wh" which, in pronounced as a very soft "f." bree lives in whangarai, pronounced "fong-a-ray'." once you've got that you can deal with all the other subtleties of maori words. it doesn't get easier any time soon.

there are no tortillas in new zealand. and what pass for tortilla chips are kind of sad. momma and i figure we could introduce proper flour tortillas to the islands and make a killing. this has been met by the family (whanau in maori) with disbelief, suspicion and outright derision because they think that "tortilla" means "painfully spicy food that can only be eaten by dark-skinned natives of south and central america."

tonight we set out to prove them wrong. i made the tortillas from scratch, we served them with white rice, chopped steak (unseasoned), lettuce, tomato, cheese, sour cream, red bell pepper, and avocado.

it was an almost completely tasteless meal and the tortillas were perfect. they loved it. they now agree that with just a little marketing and a lot of flour, i COULD become Juanita the Whajita Wahine.

Goat Island was the first marine preserve in New Zealand. It is just a short distance from Leigh. In the afternoon the maomao (bright blue fish) come to get goodies from the tourists. It is hard to comprehend the numbers of tourists that come to Goat Island ever day. The beach is very small, and on a busy weekend, it is blanket-to-blanket across the whole thing. Amazing.

Momma standing on top of a volcano in front of the Aukland skyline. Yeah, not only does Aukland have no electricity, but it's built on and around a ring of active volcanoes. CHOICE BUILDING SITE, MATE.

thursday morning.

gnat and i went on a death march today. all the way up i was thinking of YOU. and when i say YOU, what i really mean is kate mcdonnell, but i also mean the rest of you, my darling little death marchers.

there's a nature reserve just south of warkworth which looks beautiful from the road, all fern trees and totoras. a big sign proclaims, "moir's hill walkway," and i've been jonesing to hike it since last year. finally we've gone.

the day was really warm and humid, even as early as we'd left. we were just a little dismayed to find half the trail was closed off because of logging operations on private property just next to the reserve. lovely. that meant we didn't get to do the full 7 hour death march to the top of moir's hill, just the smaller 2 hour loop. dang.

the trail was wet and slippery, the ground being mostly clay. it's a well maintained trail with nice wooden bridges across probably a dozen stream crossings. but they can be slippery where the chicken wire mess is torn or missing, as i found out.

a couple of times.

so it was a bit of a slog, but the magnificent trees and the weather more than made up for it. at the top of the loop were three picnic benches where we stopped and ate our sandwiches, and completed our transition to mud-covered monsters (upon arriving back home, momma asks, "what HAPPENED to you?" to which i answer simply, "death march.") before heading back down.

j.j in the deep bush.

j.j on a picnic bench at the top.

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Copyright: Almost everything in here is © Jenine Abarbanel(1997) unless attributed to someone else or inadvertantly stolen from someone else, in which case, it's their copyright. Don't be a jerk.