Kiwi Whirlwind

So we got picked up by a cheerful Jane Butterworth on from the Attic Backpackers Hostel on Thursday morning.

I had not intended to go to New Zealand, but of course, there are no direct flights from Easter Island to Cambodia, and we needed to have a layover in Auckland. “And it won’t cost you anything additional if you would like to spend a few days in New Zealand…” said Aurelie, the AirTreks agent.

When we arrived at the Attic Backpackers at 10:30 PM, the two young people at reception looked quizzically at Declan. “Ah…we can’t accept…you know…underage…”

I hadn’t read anything on the website about children not being accepted at the hostel. Declan and I had booked a private room, so I didn’t understand the problem. Maybe a child would kill the hipster hostel vibe? “It’s just that we are really not set up for kids,” Jonathan apologized. “We have a kitchen, and the stove does have an open flame…”

I thought to myself that many children survive successfully in homes where the kitchens feature open flames, but I said nothing, wanting to smile and be cheery and not have to look for another place to stay late at night. Jonathan and Anoushka cleared it with their manager, and we were able to spend the night.

Jane Butterworth picked us up at 9:15 and started us on us on our whirlwind Kiwi tour. Because we were just going to be three whole days in New Zealand, I thought I would book a private tour so that we could see as much as possible. It was totally great, but a bit exhausting! On the last day, when Declan and I were just walking around Auckland by ourselves with no particular schedule, he told me, “I like this kind of traveling much better.”

Jane is very pretty 52-year-old farmer/surfer/traveler/mom who started her own personalized travel service in New Zealand. With Jane, we drove first to the Ruakuri Caves, to see the glow worms. The cave itself is pretty impressive, but the glow worms are super-cool. “Cannibalistic maggots with shiny poop,” said the guide, “but we’d never get you down here if we called them that, so we call them glow worms.” Their poop is the bioluminescent part, but it is really cool to have complete darkness in the cave and see the glow worms all around, like starlight.

We walked out of the cave and on to an ATV, touring Waitomo Farms with a man named Allan and his Maori/Swedish wife Jan. Both of them were extraordinarily cheerful; Allan looked just like Alec Guinness and Jan treated us to beautiful Maori love son, which she sang to us as we drove up the rolling hills, and looked at the cows and the old Maori fortifications. New Zealand has been at the forefront of various dairy innovations, apparently: some A2 milk that people with lactose intolerance can drink, a grass mixture that allows the cows to produce less methane. Methane traps heat 28x more than carbon dioxide!

There used to be 3 million people in New Zealand and 75 million sheep; now there are about 5 million people and something like 40 million sheep. Cows and llamas and horses have diversified the animal mix a bit, but five million people is really not a lot for such a large and diverse country! We saw lots of forests, which seem at first to be like North American forests, until you notice the giant ferns. The silver fern is the symbol of New Zealand. The underside of the fern glows in the dark; historically, the Maori used the nighttime glow of the silver fern to guide them as they walked in the dark; it is a national symbol for New Zealand.

The next morning, we visited the Te Puai Maori cultural center. Apparently, at some point in the ’50s or ’60s, the New Zealand government took stock of where they were in terms of the Maori arts, and they realize d that they only had three or four master carvers left in the country. So they set up this school, to teach Maori wood carving, stone carving, bone carving, and weaving. They did not accept any funding from the government because they didn’t want the government to have any say in how they structured things. It was fascinating to see the similarities among Maori, Hawaiian, and Rapanui cultures, all rooted in the Polynesian tradition. But New Zealand has so many more resources than poor Easter island!

Maori language and culture and language seem to be alive and well. The population of Rotorua is about 30% Maori! t was just such a contrast to the situation with Native Americans in our country. Isolated in reservations, not well-integrated into the rest of society, languages dying. The Treaty of Waitangi was signed (in English and in Maori) in 1840. Tak described it to me as “New Zealand’s Declaration of Independence.” It was signed by representatives of the British Crown and more than 500 Maori chiefs. Founded on “partnership, participation, and protectection“, it has helped structure the relationship between New Zealand’s government and the Maori to this day.

Maori women have that Polynesian tattoo on their chin, it was interesting to see some of the young people still getting traditional facial tattoos. Apparently, the tattooing died down for a while with the advent of Christianity and the way that Christianity frowns on altering our bodies. I remember when I got my tattoo in Tijuana, a little crescent moon behind my left ankle. I was teaching adult literacy at the time, and when I went to teach my class shortly after I got the tattoo, one of the women shook her head sadly. “You’re such a nice person, Julieta; and now with this tattoo, so sad to know that you are going directly to hell!”

Then there is the geothermal walk with a geyser and boiling mud and a glimpse of a real live Kiwi bird. Once numbers in the tens of millions, they are currently endangered. The Maori Cultural center breeds these long-billed, noctural, flightless birds who live in burrows and reintroduces them into their natural habitats, which include predators not native to New Zealand. We did a little bit of geocaching along one of Rotarua’s many beautiful lakes, had a walk in the redwood forest, and then a visit to OGO, some crazy ball that rolls down the hill.

We had pizza and drinks with Jane and her son Daniel; Declan really enjoyed hanging out with another kid. The next day we went to the Heritage Sheep farm; Declan got a kick out of seeing how the working dogs were able to herd large numbers of cattle, and how the sheep get shorn. The sheep-shearing men are in fabulous sheep; they grab the sheep and pinion them so that they are powerless to escape; once they are positioned properly, like someone in the hold of a professional wrestler, they seem to resign themselves to submission.

We drove back to Auckland and saw a bit of the beautiful suburb of Devonport, with quaint frame houses from the 1920’s. The houses are small and quaint, but apparently incredibly expensive. Auckland is one of the most unaffordable cities in the world; there is some kind of index to housing affordability: how many years of an average wage would it it take to purchase a home of the median price. That number used to be five years; now it’s twenty-one! We had Mexican food cooked by Chilean immigrants for dinner, art museum and boat tour the next day, and now off to Cambodia!