Adios Kiwis

    My New Zealand adventure is just about an end; the plane for Sydney and the first leg of our long journey back to Spain leaves in just a few hours and we've just finished packing and cleaning the house in Lower Hutt we've been living in for the past couple of months.
    It's been quite an adventure: Earthquakes (three of them), whales, geysers, big cities and one small town that refuses to roll over and die have all been part of the journey. We survived the worst storm to hit New Zealand in 37 years, eaten more than our fair share of fish and chips, baked bread and cupcakes more or less successfully and had a pretty darn good time throughout the trip. All that's left to do now is stop at La Bella Italia in Petone for one last time so we can eat some of the fabulous pizza they make there one last time.
    Just a few last photos before we head out:

Statues at the museum on Rotorua representing both Maori and European influences on the New Zealand culture.

Maori figure at the museum.

Cliffs at Rotorua.

Auckland when we first arrived in the morning.

Auckland a few hours later when the fog lifted.

   

Tamaki

    I admit that the idea of going to a recreated Maori village near Rotorua didn't thrill me at first. "Cultural experiences" such as that have, in my experience, been disappointing so when Elena said she had booked a night visit to Tamaki, which is just outside Rotorua, I sighed and told myself that I could get through it with a minimum of agita no matter how bad it was.

    Actually, it was great.

    The Maori culture is fascinating: Its art is distinctive, its language musical and its reverence for the land and for the history of the people who set sale across the Pacific so many generations ago is unusual in a world in which so many people know so very little about their ancestors. (Don't believe me? Ask a few friends what their great-grandfathers did for a living. A Maori can tell you while most Americans can't even name their great-grandfathers. Still don't believe me? Ask a few friends to name six of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. A Maori can, for example, tell you the names of the 13 great female chiefs who signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, which brought to an end a bloody war between them and the British but most Americans can't tell you who signed that famous declaration.)

    I'm not trying to lionize the Maori or their culture for, in truth, there are some unsavory episodes in their history, including the fact that they practiced cannibalism. Instead, I'm simply trying to point out that it is a distinctive culture, one that many Europeans and Americans would have a difficult time understanding. Spending one night at Tamaki certainly doesn't give you entry into that culture, but it does underline how Maori see the world and how very different that view is than mine.

    The Maori staff at Tamaki invited us to take part in the demonstrations. Josep's cousin Elena, for example, learned to do a dance in which women twirl balls at the end of long sticks and several men learned how to do the haka, the traditional Maori war dance. (If you've ever watched the All Blacks play rugby you will have seen the haka. They do it before every game as a means of intimidating the other team.)

    Later there was food - great food - cooked in the ground in the traditional Maori way and a lot of singing and more dancing.

    It was, much to my surprise - and delight- a night to remember.

Maori warrior issuing a challenge to the arriving guests: Do you come to make war or in peace?

The village chief welcoming guests for the night.

Two Maori women explaining how to do a dance using balls attached by cords to sticks.

Elenita and other  female guests doing the dance.

A Maori warrior explaining the use of various weapons.

There was a lot of singing and dancing throughout the night.

    

Hot stuff

    New Zealand is composed of volcanic islands... some of them haven't erupted in thousands of years and some have blown their tops within the past 200.
    The result is some of the world's most spectacular scenery and places like the Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Park, which is not far from Rotorua. It's a huge place filled with bubbling (literally) springs, streams that you can boil an egg in and some amazingly beautiful colors caused by mineral deposits that are forced to the surface by the heat below.
    We stopped there for a morning on our 5-day road trip to Auckland and back and wandered through the park, pausing long enough to watch a small geyser erupt before continuing our trek through a landscape that is almost too fantastic to describe.
    You can't go into the water at the park - it's hot enough to scald you - but a couple of kilometers away there is a small area where you can jump in. It has no facilities so you have to find a convenient tree to change from street clothes into a bathing suit and you need to pack a lunch if you plan to stay for awhile. There is a stream running through the area, complete with a couple of small waterfalls that empty into pools that are about six feet deep where you can soak to your heart's content. Josep's cousin Elena met up with a couple of friends from Spain who have been traveling in Australia and New Zealand for more than a year now, trading their skills as engineers for room and board. After trekking through the park with us, they took us to this area where they and the two Elenas spent about an hour in the water. (I didn't get in because, while it would have been nice, the banks are too steep for me to climb up these days. Josep didn't get in because, well, he's 13 and didn't see much value in the whole thing...)
   

A small geyser at the Wai-O-Tapu Thermal Park just starting to bubble as the pressure builds up.

... and thar she blows.

The park has dozens of these multi-colored sinkholes, some with hot water in them, some that are dry.

The colors are amazing...

... really, really amazing.

Small stream running through the park... the water temperature is too high for you to swim in it...

... but not far away is another stream, complete with a couple of waterfalls, that you can safely swim in...

... and so Josep's cousin Elena, two friends from Spain who have been traveling in Australia and New Zealand for more than a year and Elena did just that.

   

The town that just refuses to die...

    It's a long ways from Anywhere, about six kilometers from Nowhere, and by all rights it should be a ghost town.
    It may well be just that one day; it's already got one foot in the grave and the other is about to step on a banana peel but Mangaweka's few remaining citizens aren't ready to see their community drop into the abyss just yet. Maybe that's because they're too stubborn for their own good or maybe they don't realize that Mangaweka's time has passed; maybe they just don't want to leave.
   Or maybe they remember when Mangaweka was a thriving little community back in the days when the trains stopped there to let people off and let people on and believe that it can be once again.
   Whatever the reason, they're staying and in their effort to save the town they're coming up with some very interesting ideas for saving their community. They need good ideas because things are bad there these days. Just how bad things are can be summed up this way:

• The school once had 130 pupils; it has only 30 now.
• You can buy a block of four stores on the town's main street (and the property they sit on - which is pretty big) for $160,000 NZ.

    Maybe the biggest and best idea someone had was to haul an old DC-3 into town, put it above a restaurant and call it the Mangaweka International Airport, which - by the way - comes complete with a row of clocks on the wall telling you the time in places like Oslo, Los Angeles and other major destinations. Just FYI - it was 5:22 in Oslo when we stopped for lunch, but I didn't know if that was A.M. or P,M, on Thursday or Friday. (I always have trouble with that whole International Dateline thing.) When we stopped there for lunch - it was Friday afternoon here in New Zealand - on our way to Auckland (yeah, we're on the road... again) I asked the lady behind the counter just what made the airport "international."
    "The big plane outside?" she said and laughed.
    In fact, there is no airport of any kind in Mangaweka - at least none that we could see - but like the sign says as you drive into town on NZ 1: Hot Coffee. Cool Plane.
    There are some artists in town and they're leading the charge to revitalize the town. We spent an hour walking through what's left of Mangaweka before we hit the road again and saw that those artists have decorated some of the historic main street's buildings with murals. They've also put up some sculptures and they've opened a few small galleries. There's also an antique shop, a museum and a couple of small businesses that remain open. The idea, or so I'm told, is to make Mangaweka more than just a place to get a cup of coffee and a pretty good lunch.
    The idea is to make it a destination.
    That could happen. Mangaweka is, after all, on a major highway and that big airplane does definitely catch your eye. If a couple of investors saw the potential there and started fixing up the old main street buildings that started to decay when the jobs dried up and people began moving away so many years ago there's a good possibility that people might go there on a weekend jaunt just to wander around.
    And if those investments were combined with the right kind of advertising, maybe - just maybe - Mangaweka's time hasn't yet passed.
    Maybe - just maybe - it can once again be a thriving little community.

Mangaweka International Airport

Local artists have started decorating the town's historic main street with murals, sculptures and other artistic installations.

... and they want you to know about it.

It's a pretty place, especially now that the trees - tired of winter - are starting to blossom.

Another shot of the "airport."

Sculpture...

The center of town is pretty quiet these days but if the folks trying to revitalize it have anything to say about it, that's going to change.

Small art gallery in what used to be the town's business district.

Elenita even found someone who'd apparently been to Mexico once... we didn't expect to see any signs written in Spanish in this part of the world but it just goes to show that there's always another surprise just around the corner...

Endor

    New Zealand is known by many names.
    To the Maori who first discovered these islands, it will always be Aotearoa - which, when translated literally, means "long white cloud."
    Because earthquakes are not unknown here - we've gone through three so far and have only been here since mid-June - New Zealand is also known as "The Shaky Isles."
    It's sometimes referred to as "Middle Earth" by fans of "The Lord of the Rings."
    My favorite: "The Land Down Under and Over a Bit," which is how someone corrected me when I mistakenly referred to New Zealand as "The Land Down Under" back when I didn't know any better.
    There are times, however, when I'm standing in just the right spot on the porch in the early morning that I think of it as the forest moon of Endor. The mist obscures the town below; the trees are so thick you can't see your neighbors, the bird calls are otherworldly and I feel like that lone sentry standing guard in "The Return of the Jedi."
    It's on mornings such as these that I let my mind just run where it will for a while and, despite my advanced age, be a kid again ready to do battle against the forces of evil, save the world (whichever world I happen to be on in my imagination) and, depending on just how old I am at the time, get a kiss from the Princess Dejah Thoris.(Yeah, I was an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan as a kid and Dejah seemed to be the princess of just about every planet I was on...)
    I don't often get a chance to do that these days... there are always things that need doing, places that need to be gone to and people I need to see for one reason or another; all of which makes me thankful for mornings such as these in places such as this.
   

Go fly a kite...

    New Zealand is a windy place and so it occurred to Josep, his cousin Elena and I that we should take advantage of that and go fly a kite.
    Step One: Find a kite. When I was a kid we made kites out of newspapers that we covered in crayon (so they'd catch the wind better), string from around the house (there was always lots of string around houses in those long-ago days for reasons that I can no longer remember) and wood from the garage (and, yeah, there was always lots of that too for folks back then didn't throw anything away that might just, perhaps, possibly, maybe be useful some day.) This isn't 1956, however, and we're a long way from home so we opted to buy a kite - or three, actually, though we only tried to fly one. We stopped first at the Paper Plus bookstore in Lower Hutt to pick up the next-in-the-series Percy Jackson book for Josep and asked the lady behind the counter where we might buy a kite. (I've found that people who work in bookstores always seem to know the answers to questions like that.) She pointed across the street and said "maybe there, and if not, if you go three blocks down on the right..."
    We didn't have to go three blocks down on the right because, as she had rightly reckoned, the toy store across the street sold kites.
     Step Two: Find a place to fly a kite. That was pretty easy: The beach at Petone is wide, windy and there are no nearby power lines to fry the hair or otherwise do damage to the bodies of unwary kite fliers.
    Step Three: Assemble the kite. That was a little more difficult for a couple of reasons. First, because we elected to go to the beach and put it together there... of course, one of the reasons we went to the beach was that it's a windy place and so... The other difficulty: This kite was small and in the shape of a butterfly. My experience with kites is limited. I know how to put together kites that are in roughly the shape of a diamond and I know how to make a box kite. Butterflies, um, not so much. On top of that, the directions were in German, what I assumed was Chinese, French, Italian and maybe a Slavic language or two. Elena, however, figured it out eventually (with some help from Josep and absolutely no help from me.)
    Step Four: Fly the kite. That sounds easier than it actually was. The kite is probably well made but it seemed to us that it didn't catch and hold the wind very well. Maybe it was too small for the stiff breeze that comes in off the water at Petone or maybe we just didn't know what the hell we were doing but it took awhile to get the kite into the air... so long, in fact, that two ladies walking along the beach stopped to offer some friendly advice: "You've got to run with it," one said. "And hold it high in the air when you do," the other said.
    Josep ran.
    The kite hovered a few feet off the ground and then nosedived into the sand.
    Elena ran.
    The kite hovered a few feet off the ground and then nosedived into the sand.
    We finally did get the kite into the air but, since we'd purchased it at a toy store, it didn't come with a whole lot of string. The result: Once it was up in the air it couldn't go very high. Josep actually got pretty good at keeping it up in the air but since it could not climb high enough to catch a steady wind it eventually came spiraling down into the sand despite his best efforts.
    Elena took over at that point and ran down the beach, getting the kite as high into the air as it would go for a few minutes before it once again came crashing to the sand.
    "Are you doing a documentary on how not to fly a kite," one of the two ladies said as they came back from their long walk along the beach some 30 minutes later. "I see you have a camera."
    "Not on purpose," I said.
    They laughed.
    "Well, you know, keep trying," the other lady said and they headed for the parking lot.
    "And good luck," she called over her shoulder.
    We kept at it for another 20 minutes or so before the wind began to numb our fingers. It was at that point that I made a command decision: "Coffee and dessert," I said and we headed to La Bella Italia.
    Upon reflection, that was the best decision I'd made all day.

Elena and Josep assembling the kite.

They got it together and it was, allegedly, ready to fly.

Josep running in what was a vain effort to get the butterfly kite into the air.

Elena trying to get the kite to catch the wind while Josep played out the string.

Yeah! The kite actually got up into the air and stayed there... for awhile anyway.

Elena racing down the beach and finally getting the kite to fly for a second time.

Ho hum... another day, another earthquake...

    I was down on Cuba Street in Wellington Friday afternoon for an appointment at the eye doctor's' (yeah, I need a new pair of glasses... sigh) when the building began moving.
    Someone yelled "Get away from the windows!" and the lady helping me choose a pair of frames for my new glasses gripped the edge of the small table we were sitting at.
    A few seconds later the building stopped shaking and she asked me if I was all right.
    "I'm fine," I said and we went back to choosing those frames.
    Earthquakes are news in New Zealand - at least on television - but most people on Cuba Street didn't seem to pay much attention to this one. In the bars and restaurants up and down the street people kept drinking beer or coffee - depending, I guess, on how difficult the day had been up to that point - and two guys sitting on a bench nearby passed a joint back and forth (apparently, on Cuba Street, smoking dope in public is not frowned upon the way it is in some places.)
    Bureaucrats, of course, took a slightly more heightened view of the 'quake. They shut down the railroads and the airport was closed for a bit. Hundreds of men and women in brightly colored vests and hardhats fanned out across the city checking for structural damage but no one seemed to be in a state of panic.
    Some people were seriously inconvenienced, however. All those commuters who had ridden the trains to get to their jobs in the city Friday morning were left stranded. So many of them called home at the same time to ask husbands, wives and domestic partners to come get them that the cell phone system became overloaded and - if I understand this technology, which I don't - apparently crashed for a little while.
    No worries, people just started texting... at least I think they did... a reporter on television said that's what she did... I spent a minute, maybe two, trying to figure out how if the cellphone system had crashed you could still text but then gave up because, as I said, I don't really understand that technology at all...
    Anyway, a lot of people did not call or text. Instead, they fashioned cardboard and paper signs with the names of the communities they were trying to get to printed on them and just stood on corners. In some parts of Miami or LA that could get you shot. In Wellington, people stopped and gave them a ride with no questions asked.
    Kinda amazing, when you think about it.
    For the record, Friday's earthquake was the strongest one to ever hit Wellington... the last one was 6.5 on the Richter scale and this one was 6.7. I don't know how much more serious that made it because, well, I don't understand earthquake technology either. They do seem to be getting more intense, however. The first one we went through was 5.6 on the scale.
    Just another day in The Land Down Under and Over a Bit...
   

Road Trip: New Plymouth

    We arrived in New Plymouth just before dusk and after a couple of circles through the holiday park where we'd booked a cabin for a couple of nights we actually found it.
    It was tiny, with bunk beds, but the view from the front porch was - I can't believe I'm going to use this word - awesome.
    The sun was just starting to set as we started unpacking the car and it was so magical that we stopped, dug out our cameras and started shooting pictures. An hour later we finally did get around to hauling our backpacks into the cabin and set about the business of trying to find space for everything... yeah, it was so small that we actually had to plan where to put things.
    Finally settled, we headed into the center of town for dinner. Meals are always a cause for debate because while the two Elenas and I are fairly easy when it comes to choosing a place to eat, Josep is not. He can eat vast quantities of food at a sitting but he doesn't have what you might call an adventurous pallet. He does like Japanese food, however, and so we wound up at a place called Sushi Ninja. I admit I was a little hesitant to enter - I mean, the name is just a little too hokey for my taste, frankly - but I needn't have worried: The food was wonderful. It was so good and we had such a good time that I really wanted to buy a t-shirt from the restaurant (I'm addicted to t-shirts) but they were out of them... sigh.
    We awoke early in the morning and the two Elenas went on an adventure: They climbed to the top of Paritutu, a giant sugar loaf rock near the New Plymouth harbor. It took them a couple of hours but they made it all the way to the top and from there they had a spectacular view of the city, the harbor and the Tasman Sea.
    I spent that time reading and drinking a couple of cups of coffee... my climbing days are pretty much over.
    After a visit to a small gallery - another on the New Plymouth "must do" list - we headed to Pukekura Park, part of the gigantic Brooklands park complex.
    Amazing place: There are sections in the park where you swear you're walking through a Jurassic forest, others where you think you might be in a Japanese garden and still other parts in which you half expect to see Victorian ladies and gentlemen strolling along lightly wooded, flower-laden paths. We spent a good share of the day there and enjoyed every minute of it. On the way back we stopped at the Puke Ariki Museum for an hour before it closed and the security guards gently ushered us out. Puke Ariki is the world's first fully integrated museum, library and information center - well the first that was built on purpose to be all those things - and it is full of interactive exhibits.
    Elena, Josep and Elena spent their time in the museum on the ground floor among the exhibits that tell the story of the earliest European settlers and their interactions with the Maori.
    I spent my time up on the second floor learning a lot about Mount Taranaki, whaling and the giant critters that once inhabited North Island.
    Pretty fascinating...
    Elenita has a friend in New Plymouth - a guy she met in London when they both worked there - so she went to dinner with him that night while Elena, Josep and I went to an Indian restaurant. Another good choice: More excellent food.
    We had good weather in the morning, for awhile. The Elenas went for a walk while I read a few more chapters in my book and had a couple more cups of coffee.
    Josep slept.
   We headed out on our way back to Lower Hutt just as the sky started to cloud up and before long we were in a driving rainstorm.
    That actually turned out to be a good thing because we got to see some truly beautiful rainbows over Mount Taranaki.
    We got home late, tired but happy.
    It was a great road trip and, unlike those I went on in my younger days, there were no hangovers in the aftermath, the police were not involved and I actually remembered everything I did.
    It really doesn't get much better than that...

Amazing building art in New Plymouth.

Birds at the tea house in Pukekura Park are not shy. They come to the table and wait patiently to be fed some crumbs. Most people oblige.

There is a small zoo in Pukekura Park and among its inhabitants is this rare crane, which decided at the moment I took this photo to preen his feathers.

The park features this Japanese garden built into one of its hillsides.

The view from the front por h of our holiday cabin at low tide.

The harbor at New Plymouth at sundown.

Pukekura Park is a favorite spot for photographers, including those who are doing fashion shoots.

I love the contrast of this pink tree against the green of the forest.

The harbor at New Plymouth in the morning.

You can't see Mount Taranaki because of the clouds but this rainbow was about halfway up it.

The Poet Bridge at Pukekura Park. The bridge has nothing to do with poetry: The man who paid for its construction  did so after he won a lot of money at the racetrack one day when he bet on a horse called - you guessed it - The Port.

The view from the front porch of our holiday cabin at high tide.

Road Trip: Wanganui

    We spent the first night of our 4-day road trip in Wanganui at a great bed-and-breakfast place called Braemar House on Plymouth Street. I've stayed in a lot of B&Bs over the years and I have to say that none were as luxurious as this one. The house was built in the 1890s and is a classic Victorian building, kind of rambling in a charming way. It had fallen onto some hard times but starting in the 1990s it was restored into what is now a really beautiful place.
    Wanganui straddles the banks of the river of the same name and it is a haven for artists, especially those who work in glass. It's also pretty famous as a breeding ground for future rugby stars - a number of All Blacks players, both past and present, hail from there, in fact.
    We ate dinner at Angora, a Turkish-Mediterranean place in the heart of the city. Nice place, great food and an attentive staff. We followed that with a nice long walk through what is a very pretty small city.
    Breakfast the next morning was immense... when we arrived we were asked what we wanted for breakfast and Elena said "surprise us." What we got was a Kiwi-style English breakfast with way more food than I could finish. (Fortunately, Josep is still growing and, therefore, can consume mass quantities of calories on a daily basis without falling into a coma so none of it went to waste.)
    On the way out of town we stopped at a beach located at the mouth of the Wanganui River at the place where it empties into the Tasman Sea. The sand is black because the land was formed by volcanic eruptions and the beach is littered with driftwood that, according to locals, comes downstream when the river floods. It makes the whole beach pretty picturesque.
    Some time after leaving Wanganui we came to a large park with a great view of Mount Taranaki, the giant volcano that dominates the landscape for more than 50 miles in all directions. The volcano, according to folks at the Braemar House, shouldn't have snow because of the temperate climate in that part of the country and because it's so close to the sea, but it does. Apparently, there is some kind of temperature anomaly that keeps it snow covered year round. No matter what the reason, the snow helps to make the mountain - which Maori refer to as the "Father of the Land" - a pretty impressive sight even from a great distance.
    The park is also the home to Dawson's Falls. Elena, Josep and his cousin Elena wanted to see them and, somehow, convinced me that hiking through the woods was something I could do.
    I did it, but it took me a very long time on a pair of battered legs to make my way along the narrow footpaths, which included boulders and steep slopes that required me to be much more agile than I normally am these days. The falls were worth the trouble, though I wasn't so sure of that at the time.
    Back in the car, we set out for New Plymouth and a tiny "holiday cabin" that we hoped we'd all fit into without stepping on one another.
    We did, but that's a story for tomorrow...

The beach at Castlecliff just outside Wanganui.

This is a section of the path leading to Dawson's Falls... it only got worse from here...

It looks as though a child is playing near the water but it's only a piece of driftwood on Castlecliff Beach. Way in the background you can see Mount Taranaki from a distance of some 60 miles.

Braemar House in Wanganui. Great place to stay. You can check it out at www.braemarhouse.co.nz

Wanganui is an art hub and these giant pencils are one example of the sculptures you can find all around the city.

Dawson's Falls. This was as close as I could get. Josep and his cousin Elena went down to the base but that was more than I could handle.

Mount Taranaki from a distance of about 20 miles... it's so immense that this shot is of only half the mountain. The rest is covered in clouds.