Trying to Cook in NZ

Auckland:
It was very strange leaving LAX on the evening of the 13th, flying all night, and waking up at dawn in Fiji on the 15th. That Wednesday never happened. I hope we get it back when we fly back to the states. We stepped off the plane in Fiji at around 5:30 in the morning and it was already warm and very humid. They turned on the AC in the airport around 7, so it wasn’t too unbearable to wait for our flight to NZ.

We landed in New Zealand around noon that day and proceeded directly to customs. The customs terminal was empty, it was a little strange, there were groups of officials milling around talking to each other and waiting for a very big airplane to land I guess. We went up to the window a little afraid. You see, in LA, the lady at the ticket counter had a problem with Nina’s visa application having a different passport number than her new passport. She couldn’t believe that someone would get a new passport after applying for a visa in a foreign country. She was very upset that she had to go back and make some phone calls; I think it ruined her day. She told us that we could get on the plane, but she didn’t make any promises that we could stay in New Zealand once we got there. Amazingly, when we got here there was no problem at all. The agent we spoke to called her boss, who was very gracious, and he took it to the office in the back. We waited 10 minutes and another man came out and explained that it was no problem at all and welcomed us to the country.

We took a shuttle into Auckland and to our hostel which was huge right in the center of the Central Business District (CBD). From there we started our New Zealand adventure. Our plan was to get the maximum amount of cash from ATMs every day until we had enough to buy a car and get out of town. In the mean time we had some time to kill. Our first full day in Auckland, we decided to check out some of the backpacker car markets out, so we set out on foot. The first we went to was down a side street, a little alley and in a kind of car park under a building. It had dim overhead fluorescent lights and the cars were packed in. It was kind of a middleman between sellers and buyers. That’s where we got our first look at what kind of selection and prices we could expect. We decided on a budget of $4000 NZ or about $3000 US. We also wanted something on the large side like a station wagon so we could store all our stuff in it. We were planning on doing some camping on our drive south. There were a few cars there in our price range that looked pretty good with around 200,000 km on them. That worried me a little. Our next stop was an outdoor market down by the wharf. We wandered around that neighborhood for 15 minutes and didn’t find anything at all, so we gave up. We walked along the waterfront looking at some amazing sailboats and yachts. Auckland has a beautiful waterfront. We headed across the CBD and up to the Parnell neighborhood. It is an area of town that is near the university and had many highly regarded restaurants. We sat and had a beer in an Irish bar and watched some of the Netball World Cup. Don’t even ask what kind of sport that is. As near as we can tell, it is basketball for women, there is no backboard and if you have the ball, you can’t move. There are a lot more rules, but we couldn’t figure them out. It seemed to be a slightly big thing here. The Silver Ferns (NZ national team) lost to the Aussies in the finals. We then hit the streets again and walked to the Auckland Domain. It is a huge park with the Auckland museum and gardens. We stopped at the winter garden, it is a huge greenhouse divided into hot house, cold house and fernery. That was very cool and we went back a few days later. After an hour or so of that we stumbled back to the hostel and passed out.

Knowing we still had a few days until we had enough money to buy a car, we spent the next few days waiting around and exploring the city. We went back to the outdoor car market which only was held on Saturdays, went back to the winter garden and domain and spent a day walking around the Ponosby neighborhood.

Ponosby is centered on a street that runs along one of the many ridgelines in Auckland. We didn’t know this before we got there, but Auckland is built on over 60 volcanic cones. A parking garage near the hostel was built directly on a lava flow that oozed out of Victoria park 60,000 years ago but more on NZ’s eminent volcanic doom later. When we stopped for a sandwich for lunch a very nice lady behind the counter asked if we were going to the festival. Of course we didn’t really know what she was talking about, but we followed her directions down a hill to a park filled with people. There were tree stages, food vendors, arts and crafts vendors and thousands of people sitting on picnic blankets and drinking beer. It was great. We wandered around looking at everything and then sat down under a tree and watched the world go by. Ponosby was the location of our most expensive beer in NZ. We went to a place that served beers from Belgium, a Stella Artios place and bought two beers for $24.50. With that we learned to stay away from corporate looking places and only order the local brew. It was a very enjoyable day. That night we went to the best restaurant in Auckland.

By calling Food Alley a restaurant I am being very generous. It is really a food court without a mall. As you walk in the aroma coming from 30 Asian food stalls washes over you. There were probably 5 Thai, 5 Indian, 4 Malaysian, 3 Vietnamese, Philippians, Indonesian, Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, Cambodian, Japanese and a place that only had Thai noodles. You just walked up to one, ordered, paid your $7-10 NZ, took a number to put on you table and waited. It was great, in a few minutes, they would make you food to order and bring it to your table. There were two stands selling nothing but beverages. These were also amazingly affordable $3.50 for a beer of $2 for a glass of wine. The first night I had a pretty good bowl of Pho and Nina got a plate full of fat Malaysian noodles with every kind of meat imaginable. We went back two nights later. That night, I had Thai noodle soup with bbq pork and wontons. Nina had a chicken lunch box from a Japanese place. It was amazing. I’ll get more into the food later.

Finally the day came when we decided to go check on the car market under the building again. That day they had a 1995 Subaru Legacy wagon with 141,000 km, a very good looking body and clean interior. They said that if we wanted to take any of them on a test drive just to holler, so we did. The guy managed to get the car unwedged form its parking place and we hopped in. Now I don’t know about you, but when I think of test drive, I actually imagine driving the car. We were terrified of the idea of taking a car on a test drive, turning down the wrong side of a street and getting into a wreck. Luckily, we didn’t actually get to drive the car on the ‘test drive.’ The guy took us around the block and back to the market. A little strange I thought, but the car seemed to run just fine. It wasn’t burning oil, the transmission seemed responsive and it sounded just fine. The next step was to get a legal check done on the car to make sure there were no outstanding tickets of debts owed on the car. That checked out just fine, so we had it checked out mechanically. That also went pretty well, just some old hoses and a small crack in the power steering rack (that one is not so good, but we aren’t too worried). The mechanic told us the cam belt may be getting worn and if that goes out, we are up the creek without a paddle. He offered to check it for us which entails pulling a bunch of crap out of the engine and visually inspecting it. Sounds expensive right? He said it would take 1 hour and $20. Shows what I know about cars. We had that done and it checked out. Mind you, we still don’t have enough money and they told us that they don’t hold cars because it is unfair to the seller. We had been stressed out over this whole process, dropped almost $200 on the car for the checks that may reveal a lemon and now we might not get to buy the car. Once the final check was done, we went to the market and told them that we are $500 short. They said “No problem, a $400 deposit will be just fine.” Well, no more worries. The next day, we packed up our stuff and waked up the long hill to the car market one more time. We bought the car, got 12 months of third party insurance and were off. We were both terrified of driving. New Zealand cars drive on the left side (wrong side) of the road and have all sorts of strange right of way laws. Nina decided that she would drive the car out of the city.

Our first stop was the hostel to pick up our stuff. It wasn’t that big a problem to get to the main road that the hostel was on, but keeping the car in the lane was. Here is something you don’t think about when you imagine driving on the wrong side of the road. As the driver, in America, you have a feeling of where your body should be in relation to the sidewalk, the center of the road and the car. The car becomes an extension of your body and you can tell where it is without thinking about it. When your flip everything around, your mind doesn’t really take the reversal into account. That means that while you are watching the center line on the road, your mind is saying this is not correct and you begin to drift toward the left and the curb. It is terrifying for the drive, but it seemed to be as terrifying for the passenger as well. I was sitting on the left side of the car and felt that I should be driving the car myself. I couldn’t look down at the map when we were moving. It was crazy. Now it is probably half a mile from the market to the hostel. As we were driving down Queen st., I noticed that we kept drifting to the left and parked cars. We came very close a couple of times and I was able to say “Closeclosecloseclose.” It was very scary. But when we came up to a delivery truck that was parked on the side of the road, but also a bit in our lane, I was sure I was dead. Well, not really dead, but if a lot of trouble. I couldn’t say anything, but I tensed up lifted my feet and leaned out of the way. BAM! I opened my eyes to a side view mirror completely shattered and hanging from the wires that heat it. When we got out to inspect the damage, there wasn’t any except of the mirror itself. What luck we thought. We had our only accident in New Zealand and it happened so soon. There was very minor damage and now we can look forward to a clean driving record the rest of the trip. We got to the hostel and Nina expertly circled the block while I ran in and got our bags. Off to the Interstate (not really an interstate since they don’t really have states, but it was a large divided highway for intercity travel) for us and all points south.

Nina caught on to the whole drifting left thing very fast. By the time we hit the highway she was cruising along. Still a little worried of course, but she was doing an excellent job very quickly. That is more than I could say about myself. I still felt like I was in the driver’s seat. I couldn’t look down for more than a second which made my job as navigator very difficult. I couldn’t find where we were on the map in one second let alone where we had to be or turn. We wanted to see the Auckland Botanical gardens before leaving town, so we got off the highway and had a good time. It was nice to be out of the car. Nina was tense and we both needed a break. Our plan was to head along the coast to Napier and then on to Wellington where we would catch the ferry to the south island.

Coastal Drive:

By the time we were done in the gardens Nina was rearing to get back on the road and show it who’s boss. She did a great job driving out of town and to the coast. We met up with the Pacific Coast Tourist Route in Whitford and ended taking it all the way to Napier. It was gorgeous. New Zealand is the country of ferns. I have never seen a ‘fernery’ before, but here I have already seen two. I have probably missed a few on the way as well. The national plant is the Silver Fern, it is really more of a national mascot. More so than the Kiwi bird. There are tree ferns growing in the forests that makes them look very tropical. The hillsides are covered with a very varied forest canopy giving them an amazing variety of colors and textures. It is nothing like the forests of Oregon. They are truly amazing to look at. The plant life grows on incredibly steep hillsides and cliffs as well making it look as if everything is covered in tropical plant life. By the time we got to the Coromandel Peninsula, we decided to drive as much coast line as we could on our way to Wellington. The center of the island could wait for another time.

Our road map is a very good scale, and the mileages are in kilometers, so everything looks much further than it actually is, which makes for very nice driving. We could stop whenever and wherever we wanted since we didn’t have a timetable to keep. The trip was very enjoyable. The only problem we ran into was the roads. The coast road consisted of two lanes, 1 foot of shoulder on both sides and curve after curve after curve. It was a very picturesque drive since in the course of one minute you would be facing the ocean and the facing the forest four or five times. We stayed the first night near the end of the peninsula in Coromandel Town in a little hostel. We had some NZ Tui brand beer on the beach at sunset and enjoyed a good nights sleep on the road. The next day we woke up nice and early and headed further along the beautiful coast.

We drove by surfing beaches, fishing beaches, scuba beaches, rocky beaches and sandy beaches. Needless to say we stopped quite often to explore on foot. By the time we made it to the Bay of Plenty region, we were pretty excited about being in such a beautiful place. The Bay of Plenty was named by James Cook on his tour around the world because of the copious amounts of food and water and timber and supplies that could be found there. It is a very nice part of New Zealand. We stopped at a beach that is fairly typical of beaches here for a little walk about. The beach was made up of soft sand and dropped off steeply. There weren’t really any waves because the bottom dropped nearly straight down. We drove by many beaches with almost no surf. Some would have waves that grew and crested within ten feet of shore. Those waves would only be about two feet tall as well. It is kind of a strange thing to watch. But it also makes for very calm and inviting green, teal or blue crystal clear water just past the surf. The color of the water here is amazing and the clarity is almost unnatural looking coming from a kid from Oregon. We camped that night on the Bay of Plenty slightly up the East Cape near a town (if you could call it that) of Hawai. We couldn’t find the campground that was on the map, so we pitched our tent in a grassy area next to the road. I think it was a campsite, but we never really found out. It was free none the less and the road, even though it was the only road along the coast had very little traffic. The next day we headed around the East Cape.

The East Cape is a very remote and sparsely populated area of New Zealand. When we stopped for gas (which is $1.77 per liter or about $5.04US per gallon) one day, the guy working there said he didn’t see many tourists come through. The land is mostly owned by Maori now and when they aren’t farming it they lease it to Pakeha (white people). There wasn’t much traffic on that road and it didn’t look like a lot of people came out that way. Our big stop for this day was to see the East Cape Lighthouse, the easternmost point on mainland New Zealand. It was down a 22km gravel road and then up on the top of a hill that he got to climb. Luckily they had put in stairs. It was quite a dusty, windy dry place. Just some sheep, cattle and horse ranches out there, but the views were great. Once back on the blacktop, we kept heading south on the road that was more inland than coastal for the rest of the afternoon. We decided to stop a little earlier this day and started searching for camp sites. This areas was pretty remote so the campsites looked a little odd and we didn’t really notice them for a while. The first town we stopped in had camping directly on the beach which was very appealing, but there was no water, and no place to get it in the town. So we kept going to the next town called Tokomaru Bay. It was a great little town right on the water that had a freezing plant in the 1860s to ship frozen goods back to Europe. New Zealand jumped on that technology very quickly since it too 6 months to sail there in the 1840s. Now the town is just a little surfing village out of the way from most everything. As we were driving along the bay we noticed a sign that said ‘camping permitted’ in a grassy stretch in between the road and the beach. That was amazing, so we sat and read on the beach all evening and woke up to the sun over the ocean. It was great. And it was free. We headed into Napier that morning.

Napier was one of the places I wanted to see on our tour of New Zealand. It was half destroyed by an earthquake in 1931 a few days later a fire took out the rest of the city. After that, the people of Napier wanted to rebuild in the most modern way they could. They wanted a brand new town, so call went out to all architects in NZ and they all came. The town was rebuilt in the Art Deco style, it now has the largest concentration of Art Deco architecture anywhere in the world. Along with the Art Deco there is also some Spanish Mission and a few Edwardian buildings that survived the quake and fire. I was looking forward to seeing the architecture, but was disappointed to find them all covered with signage for the businesses housed in them. Now I am not talking about a single sign for each business. I am talking about multiple signs stacked on top of one another. It looks like a tacky stip of businesses along any highway that goes through any small town in America, times ten. It is one thing that kind of bugs me about the towns here. Some of them could be slightly attractive if they just toned down their use of advertisement. A simple town ordinance banning excessive signs would go along way. While that took away some of the glory Napier had in its past, it was still very interesting to see a town that took its Art Deco history very seriously. I felt like I was in an episode of The Shadow. We stayed in a nice hostel overlooking the water that night and left the next afternoon for a short drive down the coast toward Wellington.

On our way out of Napier, we were following a divided type highway through the outskirts of town when Nina noticed she was being followed by a police car…with its lights on. She pulled over and so did it. The police officer got out and walked up to Nina’s side of the car while she was rolling down her window. I couldn’t see him, but he didn’t approach the car like an American cop. He didn’t have his hand on his gun, in fact, he just walked up, put his hands together and said “You were going to fast.” Nina then got to get out and see her speed in his car while he wrote her a ticket for going 66 kph in a 50 kph zone. Now, just to get this into perspective, Nina was going 41 mph in a 31 mph zone. We were on a divided highway with two lanes on each side and the speed limit was 31 mph. That is insane. To be going that slow on that type of road it completely insane. In fact, Nina was being passed constantly throughout the area. Maybe she sped up after a car turned off, but it is a 31 mpg zone. I can’t believe it. So, Nina got a ticket for speeding that is in the second tier of pricing meaning $120NZ. Hopefully it doesn’t show up on her American records. So, in just five days, Nina managed to get into her fist fender bender and get her first traffic ticket. I guess we now have both taken care of for the rest of the trip. Needless to say, Nina obeyed the posted speed limit to the T for the rest of the drive that day much to the distress of drivers following her. It was that drive when we discussed the relative driving etiquette and safety of NZ drivers. We camped that night at the ANZAC scenic reserve just north of Norsewood. New Zealand is full of ANZAC memorials, parks, reserves and monuments. It commemorates the Australian New Zealand Armed Corps, and usually has to do with the battle of Gallipoli. ANZAC day is held on the anniversary of the invasion or taking of Gallipoli. That is something I want to research more of. So, this campground was our third free one of the trip. It wasn’t so much a campground, but a roundish area of mowed grass surrounded by trees about 100 yards by 150 yards. It reminded me of the Oregon Country Fair area. When we got there, there was an older couple with a little camper staying and an even older man with a cool camper trailer. We each set up camp as far apart from each other as possible. The next morning, they both left by 7 am.

This next day was the day we were going to drive into Wellington. We had purchased a ticket on the Interislander ferry while staying in Napier and had a full day and a half in the city itself. Just south of our campground was the town of Norsewood. There was supposedly a Troll museum, and we had to check that out. As we pulled into the town, which was a bit off the highway, there were cars parked everywhere. We ended up parking on the school sports field which was turned into a makeshift parking lot and followed the small crowd to the main street. It was some sort of festival celebrating their Scandinavian heritage. It was kind of like a tiny tiny Scandinavian festival in Junction City, but there weren’t any abelskeevers or anything Norse at all. There was, however, a quite large bagpipe band. After, walking up the two block festival and back, we headed into Wellington. On our drive to the next stop we passed near the place with the longest name in the world, Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotameteaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatuau. Seriously, I am not making this up. It means ‘The Brow of a Hill Where Tamatea, the Man with the Big Knees, Who Slid, Climbed, and Swallowed Mountains, Known as Land Eater, Played his Flute to his Brother.’ It was a place where a man named Tamatea saw and played his flute to lament the death of his brother a famous Maori traveler of the North Island. From there, we went to the Kaitoke Regional Park. It is a great park with some very nice hiking interpretive trails through cool forests and a great stream to swim in. However, we went there to see where they filmed the Rivendel scenes from Lord of the Rings. It was great. From there it our last stop was the big city.

We drove up an insanely windy road up to the top of a mountain pass 550m tall and back down to get into the Hutt valley northeast of Wellington. Since all the roads in New Zealand are so windy, when there is a sign that says windy road 22km you know it means business. The road felt like a road on the French Riviera hugging the cliff face on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Only, we were driving through a lush jungle forest scene. We made it into Wellington on a Sunday afternoon. Being the capital of the country, there wasn’t much going on downtown. We walked to the parliament and saw the “Beehive,” the capital building, built out of concrete, that looks like it would fit in on the LCC campus. The are was deserted, the coffee shops and most of the restaurants that cater to the government employees were all closed. The more bohemian areas with restaurants were open, but it didn’t fell busy at all. It was a very relaxing CBD as opposed to central Auckland that felt very frenetic and chaotic. The waterfront area is dominated by a wide walkway along the harbor by the rowing club, Te Papa and populated by runners, walkers and even swimmers. We spent a very relaxing evening walking around, eating at a nice Indian place and having a Jug of beer at the bar next door. It seemed like a very clean and nice city that night. We retired that night to our hostel which was a women’s hostel during WWII, to get a good nights sleep before heading to Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand.

Knowing we couldn’t go to a museum that holds the historical and artistic treasures of the country on an empty stomach, we took a scenic morning drive along the harbor to Chocolate Fish Café. It is a little place right on a little bay where we sat 15 feet from the crystal clear water lapping up on a quiet beach. It was a favorite of the cast and crew of the Lord of the Rings, so we had to go. Te Papa which means ‘our place’ is a huge museum that towers over the waterfront and is completely free. It took five years to build and opened in 1998. It is full on interactive and multimedia exhibits that range from natural history to the Maori settlement and culture to the European settlement to the continuing culture of New Zealand. The Maori areas were particularly interesting. We learned a lot about Maori culture and religion. Since people didn’t get here until around 1200ad, it is a pretty new country and doesn’t have much of a history to it compared to American and especially Europe and Asia. The first Europeans came here in 1642 when two Dutch ships, led by Abel Tasman, sailed from Indonesia. Tasman left and the next European arrived 127 years later when James Cook, in 1769, arrived on the Endeavour. By the 1820s, religious missionaries and whaling and sealing parties began to create settlements all over the island. The most numerous of all nationalities to arrive was American when New England whalers came here and set up shop in a town now called Russell. IT was known to missionaries as ‘the hellhole of the Pacific.’ New Zealand became a British colony in 1840. There are all sorts of interesting stories in the very short history of this country that I may tell later. The only problem I had with the museum was that it was only open from 10am to 6pm. That isn’t nearly enough time to see everything. I am pretty sure I could go back a couple of more times and see things I missed. The next morning we woke up very early and caught the 8:30am ferry to Picton on the South Island. It was a beautiful ride through Wellington Harbor, across the Cook Straight and into Queen Charlotte Sound. It was a scenic cruise and a ferry all in one. And with that we ended our tour of the North Island. I hope our trip around the South is just as exciting, but has fewer run ins with the law…

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