THE SYDNEY SCENE

Holly and John with their new friend

THE SYDNEY SCENE

Okay, so we have not met blogging requirements for actually blogging as you go along.

But we have taken old-fashioned notes in a moleskin notebook (they claim Hemingway used to use such books for his short stories) and it slips in your back pocket so you can easily update whatever jottings fit the moment.  I’ve got 135 pages of notes, some of which only I could possibly read.

We are in Botany the night before our travel back east across the Tasman Sea en route to the International Date Line to San Fran and Dulles and back to work in Virginia.

We are at the Captain Cook Hotel and, as I entered on Sunday evening, I noted that the adjoining bar has topless waitresses, and asked Holly if she’d considered this fact when she booked this hotel; she said, “You know they don’t work Sunday night.”   True enough.

By way of summary, Sydney is a happening place, just exploding, original architecture, imaginative events, revived old neighborhoods, and the harbor captures the curious child in the most hard-nosed travelers.

We changed our lodging four times since we disembarked the Sea Princess on Monday at the Sydney Port. 

It may not sound like fun but it was searching for lodging in between doing other things in what is the spring-summer high season in Australia.  It made you feel that you were part of the back-packing community, nodding to passersbye on the street, weighted down with their “stuff,” looking for their next night’s home, although we stayed in doubles with tv, wifi, etc., and that’s not where most of the backpackers find themselves. 

When I ran in the morning, I’d take my papers (passport, credit card and map) and drop in if the places I saw looked interesting.  We got to see several great neighborhoods this way. 

Holly and I each had a big bag and two carry-ons with whatever else we needed.  So we made the move once we had a place pretty efficiently.  The only place that was set somewhat before we arrived was our last night with the modestly dressed waitresses at the adjoining restaurant.  Holly confessed she had not known that fact, the topless aspect, when she booked.

We could only get a taste of Sydney much less Australia in the brief interval we allowed ourselves.  We still planned three out of the City adventures and others in and close to the City.  We thought shoe leather and using it was the best tact to see as much as possible.

FEATHERDALE

On our Tuesday here, on 12/4/12, we left the City for nearby Blackton, a 40 minute ride from the Central Train Station, just blocks from where we were staying, traveling west of the city to visit the Featherdale Wildlife Park.

Again, it was how to see something we might not otherwise see and that would be near Sydney.

We’ve all seen Koalas at a distance – in pictures or videos – but not up close and personal.  Since we don’t have the time to consider whether we’d swim off the barrier reef up north, we thought we’d hug – if we could – a Koala instead.  Thus, the choice of Featherdale.

(Plainly, we didn’t get enough bush and wild animals in New Zealand – though I expect these Koalas will be quite used to people – and more accessible to touch at least.)

By the by, while I’m sitting waiting for our train, I noted a lot more tattoos, all about, can’t help but notice them, and quite elaborate drawings, brilliant colors, and large, on the arms, back of the neck, chest, shoulders, legs, ankles, wrists, feet, and I guess more places than I’ve been able to see.

But I’m most impressed, as I’m waiting, with this fellow with one of those underwear shoulder shirts, exposing an overarching cross at the top of his bare shoulder radiating broad emanations of light (lines) down his wide right arm, showering illumination upon an upwardly looking loving Jesus, seemingly pained by his fated destiny, reflected in his crown of thorns. 

(Imagine the ongoing meditation, in the seconds, minutes, perhaps even hours, as those images were inflicted with inky needles into his skin, and the physical inconvenience and pained commitment to have this “artful” memorial done to one’s flesh.  Did he consider having God or the Holy Spirit instead?    Why Jesus?  Does he subscribe to a Trinity (three manifestations of God in one), and, if not, and Jesus is not divine (as was the view of Thomas Jefferson), did this fellow navigate some spiritual acrobatics to make sense of it?  Of course, it’s as likely he just did it, on an impulse, got the tat, and has had not a single thought of its significance, religious or any other way, but that it looks “cool.”  And plainly modern religion, in its emphasis on Jesus, finds comfort and understanding with the conception of a God made flesh, you know, like us.)

Time to board. 

Featherdale was once a poultry farm and a private wildlife park since 1972, after fighting back developers who had other ideas how to use the land.

I mentioned Koalas but we also wanted to find another charismatic creature, Big Foot.

No, I’m serious.  Roos bear the latin name, “macropods,” and that means “Big Feet.”  Their tail is balance for hopping and fighting, and serves like a fifth leg when they are grazing.  Sure enough, when we arrived, and walked into the first enclosure, we met pointy nosed roos, wallabys.  We posed with them as they were walking and hopping all around us.  One female had a “joey” in her pouch, sucking at one of her four teats, in his home for the next 9-12 months, having crawled up mom’s stomach.

We then took off to hang out with the Koalas, another marsupial, seen on most ads and many postcards having to do with Australia.  They eat the leaves of my favorite wood tree, the rainbow trunked Eucalyptus, sleep 18 hours a day so we found several sleepy ones.  Like the roos, after 30 days of gestation, their young spend 7 months in the Koala’s pouch.  The Southern Koala is larger, with thicker fur, and the Northern smaller with paler grey and shorter fur.  They appear quite friendly and we patted several but were warned they could bite and have claws you have to respect.  Still we found them cuddly  We have other pix than above when we patted, petted and got closer to these adorable creatures..

We visited the endangered large eared nocturnal bilbees, Bondi coots, that look like mice and burrow.

There was also echidnas who remind you of porcupines with long snouts that make you think of platypus (-pi?).

We spent extra time watching the bonehead crushing  Tasmanian devils, a ferocious looking creature to behold.

We didn’t know there were albino Kangaroos, or that Dingoes appear to be as friendly as German Shepherds but we didn’t these this questionable premise.

A strange looking creature is the Wombat, a stubby square nosed furry gray creature that appears quite formidable and that we touched most gingerly.

Another longevity contender was a massive saltwater crocodile named Ngukurr, after the aborigine tribe where he was found on the Roper River in the Northern Territory.  As for evolution, crocodiles, we were told, haven’t changed in 200 million years.

THE SYDNEY OPERA

That evening, when we made our way back to Sydney, we went to the Sydney Opera.  You’ve seen it at a distance and Australia refers to it as a Sydney icon. 

It appears dramatically different and imposing when you get up close, when you approach the multi-sailed building, set off from the land by hidden walkways and shops and long extended ascending stairways that, at a distance, appear like sloping hills to the building. 

Holly reclined on the stairs at our approach to one of the sail shaped components of the Opera, and it was as if Holly was leaning back on a hillside, even a sand dune, part way up to the crest.

The categories of architectural and design surprises are the high ceilings, almost entirely glass walls, somewhat concealed stairways between levels, the play of light and shadow, with striking wall hangings, and sculptures.  The views from within and without are mesmerizing of the port, other parts of the building, the people gathering, talking, sitting, standing and walking. 

The food and drink vendors inside are in the round and elaborate and enticing with lots of crystal, lights, as well as well placed tables and benches nearby. 

The lights are arranged inside and out to show the architecture to dramatic effect.  

On some level, it made me think more of Lincoln Center than the Kennedy Center but both feel two dimensional by comparison.

You had somewhat of a sensory overload walking around the place, as there were creative and innovative choices almost everywhere. 

Even in the rest rooms, when you wash your hands, the water pours over your hands, and falls on this bright bronze colored metal that is shaped in waves and bends in such a way as to allow the water to wash over its contours channeled into an unseen drain, more like a river bed. 

Many were there for a ballet. 

We could have watched Swan Lake but we chose instead an Australian drama. 

The play, Signs of Life, is a continuation of the lives of characters from the world-renowned fiction writer, after Tim Winton’s  “Dirt Music” and the characters from that work, Luther Fox (Lu) and Georgie Jutland (Georgie).

The author, Winton, said in an interview, "Over the years, I've got used to the fact that characters from one book tend to pop up in later books at different times."

“Signs of Life” is set in the Moore River district, south of New Norcia, round Mogumber, Gin Gin, Moora.

It begins with a dark stage, only the sound of birds, wind, a windmill just chunking over; and the sound of an approaching car in the dark. 

Strangers who need petrol have come to call but we don’t find that out right away..

You can’t see Georgie, who runs an olive farm, but we don’t know that either, and she’s in the dark and gradually her outline becomes visible until she is seen in the dim light.

The play is set in the future after five years of drought and, at the outset, Georgie is suffering a drought herself.

Lu and his sister are aborigine and thus the contrast with Georgie, a white lady. 

Winton created, what he called, “the ultimate awkward social moment for her and for them."  She has lost her husband, a widow, buried him herself, unlawfully, and is lost without him.  They are looking for a farm and water to work an elusive farm.  They are lost.

There is strong, almost impossible, isolation, for each of the three characters and little to bind them at the outset.  It’s all very uncomfortable.

Lu and his sister are going to stay the night and then leave … but, as the play develops, they don’t.

The question everyone in the theater was silently screaming was, "Where's this going to go?"

The visitors, Lu and his sister, Winton says, are “inheritors of the stolen generation. They don't have any traditional links to country. They're coming back for family reasons that Georgie in the house doesn't know about."

There is also a spirit that speaks to Georgie of her husband and her loss and reveals how she might revive her will to live.

The contrasts work against each other until the barriers fall and each becomes compatible with each other, resolving a mutually agreeable companionship.

It was smart, fresh dialogue from an outstanding writer, striking notes we can all appreciate but set against an Australian backdrop with its cultural inflection.

THE BOTANICAL GARDEN

We let our travels unfold the next day and made for the Botanical gardens where they advise, “Please walk on the grass.”  We did past yellow cane and Eucalyptus stands, bronze statues, every kind of flora, past fountains and ponds.  I’m a big fan of the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, and This rivaled that collection.  I climbed a broad limbed tree but was summoned to cease and desist and “come down now.”  It was quite polite.  Holly got some pix of the endeavor.  The park officer explained that these older trees can be harmed – so it was a precaution. 

We took a sunset cocktail cruise in the evening through the harbor.

THE BLUE MOUNTAINS

Any one you meet says you should visit the Blue Mountains.  This was a two hour train ride, and then a get on and off, at your discretion, bus ride to take trails through the forest to study sheer long dropping waterfalls and rolling intersecting mountain ranges, native parrots, and smoothly pock marked outcroppings that must have been shaped by glaciers and/or the sea, like an Atlantis that has re-emerged.

Oh yeah, Holly had a roo steak with an over-helping of vegetables.  I had a ¾ foot veggie berger that challenged my jaw’s ability to expand to bite the damn thing.

No matter the beauty or the value of this fragile environment, we still found carved initials in trees and nearby signs, on tables, signifying it’s not by accident that what’s beautiful and natural is at risk in this world.  Those who live in the moment, only to sate their own impulsive and destructive appetites, and there are many among this number, compromise us all.

KANGARIFFIC

We found a tour, Kangarific, run by Sam, to see more wildlife, eat Australian chocolate, cheeses and locally made wine.  We think that wine tasting is similar to wine drinking, just slower and more gradual in its salutary effect.  So we enlisted and met Sam and 9 others at the Y near the Central Train Station.

After our bus ride, we had a chance to hang out with more Roos and Koalas, a python, and assorted other animals we handled and touched and managed to get caught on camera.

We had chocolate and cheese tastings and wine of course, lots of wine, whites and reds, dry and sweet.

GOING HOME

Our only regret is that we saw so little.  On the other hand, you are welcome to use our experience as a starting point for your own traveling checklist -- should you take the leap and travel down under yourself.

While I haven’t discussed it here, I found reading the papers, watching local tv, and talking to the citizens of the New Zealand islands and of Australia quite fascinating.

If we didn’t think we were so great, so full of ourselves as Americans, and looked beyond our own borders to study what others were doing, we could make America more like the perfect society we always presume it is.

It is striking how much more Australians know about us than we know about them.  Their news discusses us a fair amount.  But we don’t really consider what they are doing.  Anyhow, we had the time we needed to get us out of our routine so that when we return we can do some of the same things we chose to do and must get done but approach them differently.

A WALK BOUT SYDNEY, MATE!

 Holly in Sydney's Queen Victoria Building - contemplating shopping

A WALK BOUT SYDNEY, MATE

We found a hotel on line before slipping off the ship, caught a cab to China Town, to the Central Station Hotel, and are ensconced here for two days, then we’re spending two days elsewhere, not far away, and then, well, we’ll see – you can plan too far in advance you know.  We arrived yesterday, Monday, and it’s Tuesday here today – I think.

We may do an overnight out of town for our final stay but we have to convene a tribal council – the two of us – if we’re going to do that. 

We did this in pieces, two days at a time, because we wanted to be “flexible” – and, I suppose, anxious.

To demonstrate that we do plan, we made theater reservations for this Tuesday evening at 8 pm at the famed Sydney Opera House – the sea bird edifice that marks the Sydney harbor (pictured here on our blog) – and we’re looking forward to seeing that building from within and experiencing its fabled theater acoustics.

We took our own walk a bout in the City yesterday, Monday, because a double decker bus seemed like a too wet viewing mistake when it was raining – even if ever so lightly. 

Holly had those plastic see-through pull overs that keep you dry and that did us just fine and, in addition, so many of the buildings have overhangs and various kind of in the building walkways it wasn’t much of a problem – although the terrific map I was carrying did kind of merge into a lumpy sticky paper mass, with the drip drop rain drops constantly striking it, so that it refused to unfurl completely or rightly by the end of our tour.  This state was achieved about the time the sun came out in full force and we could get out of our plastic rain proof containers.

We made our way to the Central Train Station not too far away past abundant back packer hotels that I believe we could recommend. 

We did look at the YMCA – and it’s a far sight more upscale than I would have guessed.  Even the price.  AU$ 160 a night during the week; think a price even more from Friday to Sunday.  Not the youth hostel prices that I knew as a young European wanderer.

On our walk about, we found the 1888 hotel restaurant that we reserved for our second two days ($120 a night), so that’s Wednesday and Thursday, leaving us Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  But we got a place for Sunday, so that only leaves Friday and Saturday.  And for those days maybe we flee the city for the nearby mountains and the sites there. 

All our walking ways during the day, there were the wonderful scents of hot foods even at the Central Train Station, more like an orderly bazaar, and it made me think of New York’s Grand Central Station underground at 42^nd Street.  Of course, I’m talking about the bustle and the vendors. And I suppose less about the food.

We walked down George Street toward the harbor, a true city skyline, unimaginably expensive everything (but not quite Fifth Avenue), visited the Queen Victoria Building (the Queen outside and shops of every kind and cost within), gated Parliament (from outside), St. Mary’s Cathedral, historic bronze statues (mostly by fountains), caught a cappuccino and latte (de rigeur), visited the “Occupy Sydney” encampment at Mark Street, walked through the Hyde Park gardens, studied the Ibis – a bird that’s taken up a home in the city because the wet lands have been compromised, but the high point was the Australian Museum.   

They have a collection of aboriginal artifacts, Australian bird studies, skeletons, dinosaur fossils, and a large exhibition on saving Australia from extinction.  They seemed surprised we would pass on their Alexander the Great Exhibit (no doubt as impressive) but we had a plan for this tour.  As I’ve stated, a theme of our vacation has been a consciousness about what’s extraordinary and, by the same token, what we’re losing that is extraordinary.  Limiting our observations to the aboriginal exhibit, you can’t help but see the parallels of conquering a people by declaring their lands unoccupied lawfully, nullius terra, and then taking it for your nation instead.  The British did this to the aborigines, we did this to the native Americans.  The exhibition is a study of the aborigine dreaming through all of this – as a matter of confirmed religious spirit.  But it struck me that this “dreaming” was a coping mechanism for all the indignities they suffered by the occupation by the British.  In recent years, the government has restored many rights.  For example, the High Privy Council (like our Supreme Court) did finally conclude that you couldn’t say this land was not lawfully occupied by the Aborigines – and so the international doctrine of nullius terra, by which the land was seized, was unlawful.  And there were severe efforts to eliminate or so dilute the aboriginal blood line that they would vanish like a dream.  The art the aborigines created for their tools, shields, weapons, baskets and various implements was striking and beautiful to behold.  They almost had to expel us from the Museum.  We stayed until you had to leave.

'In the evening, we were starving and fond our way back to that 1888 building where we expect to stay when we leave this hotel, and entered its huge open door bar filled with locals to try their much advertised and discounted spring ale and hard cider (cold and quicly consumed). 

Then we went to their restaurant upstairs to try their chips and mash – lots of taters in the diet at this venue – while watching cricket (and having no earthly understanding of what they were doing with those paddles but the stadium crowd was quite excited). 

Our Brazilian waitress who had studied American English – her description- had no idea what the cricket rules were but had asked her supervisor, she said, earlier that evening. 

This splendiferous evening out left us quite full and somewhat giddy.

So we made our way back to our China Town abode – and now we are gathering ourselves for another day in Sydney.

ONTO SYDNEY FROM NEW ZEALAND

 

John and Holly swimming with the Dolphins

AN ARRAY OF STARTLING DELIGHTS

Our theory of this vacation, after rest and recovery and exercise, and a healthy dollop of reading, has been to seek out what we might not otherwise do or see ordinarily or elsewhere on the planet.

As we get around to writing this, we are crossing the Tasman Sea from New Zealand to Sydney, crashing through waves that give a shudder to your step from time to time, so we’re on board catching up – and not just with this blog.

We think of our ship as a large seaworthy multi-colored Volkswagen bus, yeah with 60s peace signs on its flat front, transporting us through the waves of the wine dark seas, from exotic destination to even more exotic destination, up the east coast of the south and north islands that are New Zealand and now back west to Sydney.

Unlike an ordinary VW bus tour, however, we are quite a bit more comfortable in our on board quarters and don’t have to change at any venue, just disembark as we live on a substantial transport, that eclipses any imagined bus, and there is always food and drink and entertainment and fellow and gal travelers with whom we may compare and share our origins and our reactions and experiences. 

What’s unfortunate is we can hardly profile the wonderful people we’ve met from so many places, mostly from Australia including John the retired police officer (with tales aplenty) and Hank who was saved from death by a miracle ten years ago and treats every day as a gift from God above, and the 82-year old Joe who hurled himself off a sky tower in Auckland.  We’ve met folk from Great Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, India, South Africa and, of course, the United States including nearby Maui from whence Larry and Robin Burke hail.  We were most simpatico with the Burkes, found much in common, reserved theater seats, and talked into the evening about how we found ourselves together exploring New Zealand and Sydney.

By way of summary, squinting backwards at what we’ve seen and done, we’ve observed endangered native creatures, swam with dolphins, kayaked into a cave dark as a starless night illumined by moths (tricky little predators), walked through rain forests millions of years old (with cathedral high trees thousands of years old), dunked our sore muscles in soothing sulphurous native hot pools by an inland lake, watched several brave souls hurl themselves off a skyscraping tower, and visited with the native Maori descendants after I was selected (by default – pointed at by another passenger) as the “chief” of our “tribe” of 50 or more fellow travelers on a tour bus so that we could, as a dissociated “group” be treated as a “tribe,” and respond in kind to the welcoming Maori elders at their tribal “meeting house” where we rubbed noses, somewhat like the Alaskan natives did (do), before I was called upon to “respond” so that we might be “accepted” and feted as tribal members with local kiwi juices and native prayers.

(Incidentally, we have at least hundreds of pictures but the technology – the narrow bandwidth on board – and the time it takes to transmit (feels like 24kb) makes it difficult to post any of them – so we’ve reduced only a couple of our pix (from megabytes to kilobytes) to raise the digital pictoral flag and otherwise we’ve had to resort to word pictures as follows (apologies for this).

THE OVERRIDING STRAIN

We are all familiar with the notion of charismatic creatures that get all the attention – and the impetus to preserve and protect them – though it’s not clear that we are really saving as much as we are delaying extinction – because we don’t change enough, don’t care enough. 

Time and again we are reminded in New Zealand of how the “civilizing forces" have despoiled native culture and compromised or decimated plant life and a myriad of creatures. 

While many species of flora and fauna became extinct without the interference of man (mostly), since before the industrial age, as we explored new lands, we’ve made up for it by destroying so much of the ecosystem that we found all by ourselves – and we did this in record historic time.

THE KIWI

The Kiwi is the national bird of New Zealand.  The fruit is named Kiwi – brown and gold versions.  The people refer to themselves as Kiwis.  But this honored nocturnal bird is endangered and it’s quite challenging to have a sighting of the national bird.

We set our sights on trying to see at least one Kiwi at a preserve or zoo before we sailed away to Sydney.

DUNEDIN

In Dunedin, on 11/24, we went on a four wheel cloud of sandy dust, on a hardy heigh ho bumpy ride, cameras clicking away, jostled against each other, in pursuit of a view of fur seals and the rare yellow eyed penguins. 

The fur seals had traveled from the North Arctic coast to New Zealand and found refuge along a rough shore line of waving grasses and elevated rock cliffs perched on boulders near expanses of kelp swaying to and fro with the waves and shifting tide. 

We saw adult fur seals and newborns but they are endangered and you couldn’t help but wonder if you were seeing what might soon be extinct. 

In a similar category, we found the yellow eyed penguins hiding in the brush by the sea, in our case a long white beach like you imagine, not a soul or human print on the beach, watched from an overhanging cliff where, with binoculars we sighted the yellow eyed penguin. 

One penguin showed himself half way up the bluff – under binocular magnification - only partly sheltered by the bush. 

They are in a preserve that keeps away the predators that see these creatures as dinner not natural treasures.

The conservators of this sight have constructed a wooden tunnel alongside the cliff that permits one to walk along quietly to a point where through a small break in this wooden structure you can see this rare flightless bird and its young only 2 feet from where you stand hidden – if silent (as we were).

AKAROA

The next day, we couldn’t dock at Akaroa, so we took a tender from the ship to port to swim with another endangered species, the four foot Hector Dolphins. 

We had traveled further up the coast from Dunedin. 

Yes, the water was ice cold – as you might expect though this region is going from spring to summer – and so we got suited up in wet suits and boots made of the same insulating material. 

If you’ve never done this, pulling yourself into this rubbery garment, zipped up the back, can be a challenge. 

I was in a changing room with two other men, talking over the wooden wall, to their wives, giggling in the adjoining space, and one was, shall we say, enduring some resistance to his husky size.  I may have delayed pulling on my own suit because I was distracted watching his somewhat clumsy dance, jumping and pushing and struggling to pull the rubber garment over his discovered obstructing forms.  It was like a reverse Houdini.  As it turned out, he was a star once in the water, and quite generous, but so like a fish out of water beforehand. 

I bought an underwater camera and then realized the water was milky – and might not be much use. 

We took our launch out to a pod of dolphins, about 4 to 5.  We had to find them and there was some anticipation whether we would.  Another group that day saw nothing.

The dolphins swam near our boat but the question was would they swim off when we slipped into the water. 

Our host warned us to make ourselves interesting to the dolphins if we wanted them to hang around, and, once we were in the water, I was singing, somewhat like a kazoo, under the water (the Fordham college fight song) and clicking my ring against my mask and snorkel equipment. 

When I backed off the boat, the water was so cold it took your breath away, my chest was seized with a chill, and I waited for the water between my chest and the suit to warm – and it did (as expected). 

My hands were pretty cold though. 

Also, the water was so salty, we were extra buoyant, and the suit itself was like a floating device. 

As a result, if you didn’t stand upright vertical in the water, treading but more like you were riding a bicycle, your feet would pop up behind or in front of you like one of those slippery inflated and outrageously colored beach balls.

Almost immediately, dolphin swam between us and then around us, within inches.  It was fun and did prompt some small amount of apprehension – as they seemed so familiar – unlike what we expected.

They swam right on the surface and a half foot to several feet below the surface.  

I took some pictures as I could see them under the milky waters but I won’t see the film until we’re back in the states to know if I really got anything. 

I caught pictures of Holly smiling ear to ear as they kept coming and going – I had to climb back on our launch to take those shots. 

When “our” dolphins spotted a nearby school of fish, they took off in a flash, swam by us at about 60 miles an hour, and leaped into the air. 

Our guide said the nature spectacle we experienced was quite unusual – for them as well - so many dolphins staying so long, returning to us, and mingling so close.

When returning to port, we learned that they lost 28 of these dolphins last year as they get caught in nets.   

Another local cognoscenti said that there was a virus that also compromised them. 

We agreed to forward postcards to the Parliament asking them to save these dolphins and the Maui dolphins from extinction by curtailing the use of nets that are killing these dolphins. 

Once again, still another creature at risk that may be lost. 

I suspect that we could repeat this exercise in every nation-state on every continent and island on this planet.

Those who read the Bible literally long believed no creature on earth could become extinct.  Prominent historical figures including Thomas Jefferson believed just that.

WELLINGTON

Wellington is the capital of New Zealand on the North Island and it’s a grand and windy port – windy because the strait acts as a funnel. 

The inventory of cut pine tree timber ready and arrayed for export overruns almost every square inch in and around the ships.  There is no question it is a principal export of New Zealand.

We soon took to the hills to New Zealandia, another nature preserve.

The harbor we left behind was originally found by a Polynesian explorer named Kupe around 950 AD.  Captain Cook didn’t show up until 1773.  British pioneers named it Wellington in 1840.

All that these settler did to this land and what they brought with them is why we had to go to a nature preserve to see what was.

New Zealandia is encircled by a high interwoven metal fence with an outwardly curving arc at the top facing toward the ground to prevent critters, weasels, possums, stoats, rats, mice, rabbits, deer, wild boars, foxes, and feral cats from climbing the fence and getting into the preserve.

Each and every one of these pests was introduced by one or other of the settlers, from the Maori to everyone afterwards, thus decimating the local fauna, as well as the original growth that covered these lands.

This conserve is struggling to save creatures the like of which you see in science fiction recreations of prehistoric times.

The leading candidate in the strange and interesting category is the Tuatara.  At birth it is a three-eyed reptile.  It has the ridged back of a dinosaur.  Fossils of this feature are said to go back 200 million years.  It is not a specialized reptile, and it is well adapted to cold, and even survived the mass extinction, a surviving member of sphenodontia. 

It is, however, no Spielberg dinosaur but rather a miniature likeness.  You observe, as we did, a foot or more of sun basking skin, and its dinosaur likeness, breathing every two minutes, held so still and camouflaged you have to look carefully to detect one, and it requires 9 months to lay eggs, and 12-14 months for the eggs to hatch, and extended period of fragile vulnerability. 

I mentioned it was a three-eyed reptile.  Thinking of the Indian tradition of the third eye, the inward eye of illumination, I asked our nature docent, Chris, if they came from India.  He said he thought not.  He said it hunted at night and scampered after small prey.  He thought the third eye, although it disappeared with age, was a way during the daytime when held so still, to sense flying predators above, and that it could see changes in light through its concealed eye. 

Unfortunately, the Tuatara babies have to be kept separate or the adults will destroy their own offspring by consuming them.

I don’t know if you have ever seen a black swan.  You may have read Nassim Taleb’s, the Black Swan.  Among other things, Taleb is discussing risk and what we take as unassailable beliefs including how extraordinary it would be to find a Black Swan instead of a White Swan. 

In fact, his point was that one might assume there was no such thing as a black swan because you’d never seen one.  Who had? 

We turned a corner under tree canopy in the preserve, and there in the river were several black swans swimming toward us, Chris called them, “Gray Warblers.” 

As it turns out, Black swans are found in Australia and New Zealand. 

Taleb’s point – as he knew this fact of nature – was how severely limited is our learning when it is based on observations and experience and how fragile is such experiental knowledge. 

Nassim said one single observation of the ugly black swan vitiates all the confirmed sightings of only white swans and the presumption that there are only white swans. 

If you remember your square of logic, Aristotle said a universal affirmative (all swans are white) is disputed by a particular negative (one black swan sighting).  That’s Nassim’s point.

In our own American history,Thomas Jefferson was quite a naturalist and he began with a belief that whatever God had wrought, in reliance on scripture, existed for all time and that’s why he believed the mastodon bones found in America must correspond to a creature still roaming the earth – somewhere and he could not believe they were extinct. 

He was not alone in this view, although there were fossil hunters who believed the evidence showed otherwise – that species had already become extinct.  These fossil hunters considered the evidence and questioned the “unassailable truth.”

The point that Nassim is making is that we close off our ability to accept black swans because our experience tells us they can’t exist. 

We deny events that have low predictability but high impact when they occur – like extinction.

We searched but couldn’t find a grass-eating chicken shaped Takahe that is bright blue and red and looks like something that John Lennon and his Liverpool gang contrived for one of their few cartoonish movies.  These were thought already to be extinct from Stoats eating them.  But they are fenced in even more carefully, an enclosure within the enclosure, so they have a chance of survival.

We tried to see the kakapo, an endangered flightless parrot-like creature, at great risk of extinction.  But we did see the Kaka, a similar but flightful parrot-like creature.

There are also the ghosts of Gondwana, those that are no more, including the Moa – an ostrich shaped creature but larger than any ostrich you ever saw.

NAPIER

When we arrived in Napier, continuing up the East Coast of New Zealand, we learned of the earth quake, registering 7.8, that destroyed the town and killed 100s of town folk in 1931.  The town was re-built in Art Deco – giving the feeling you were on a construct that was Hollywood – so uniform was the visual aspect. 

Indeed, the various guides we met were upset that some recent buildings deviated from the Art Deco style. 

We headed out of town again to a cliff where 6,500 Gannets (sea birds) maintained a colony.  Yes, these birds are also at risk.

We drove in a jeep through sheep laden fields, running up and down hills and behind bushes and across the dirt road at our approach, in rolling countryside that rolled in waves in the direction of sea cliffs and were amazed at the birds fluttering, necking, flying and landing, unperturbed that we walked right up to them.  No one can say why they located there or why they are so unconcerned about visits such as ours.

Captain Cook tried to stop here but the Maori kidnapped one of his men and they escaped to northerly exploration.

TAURANGA

Tauranga, our next stop, was found in the Bay of Plenty, an appellation that was courtesy of the everywhere present and always discovering something - Captain Cook. 

It was so named because the Maori greeted him in a friendly way thinking the white faces made them Gods as opposed to the Bay of Poverty where the Maori attacked Cook and his colleagues, and took one captive who escaped, because this Maori tribe identified their white faces as evil. 

Rotorua is a nearby resort that we headed to explore ourselves, a place that smells of brimstone because of the geothermal pools everywhere about and, according to one report, you may see steam rising from a crack in the ground as the springs run everywhere. 

Our driver asked us as we pulled away from the dock in his bus whether we were all a “box of fluffy bunnies.” 

This was Holly’s birthday = and we had a great run all day. 

We already described our kayake row to the cave with glowworm lights and the sulphur baths we took in mid-course about the lake – in an earlier posting on Holly’s birthday. 

This port’s principal export was timber, and is exported to Asia and the new markets in China, all days, all nights, wearing down the roads, and we saw these large timber trucks zoon past us all the day. 

It is also the Kiwi Fruit Capital.  They maintain huge hedgerows to protect the Kiwi trees from the wind that would blow down the fruit and spoil it.  They prefer workers short in stature because you have to reach up under the short trees to collect the fruit from above – as they haven’t figured any way to mechanize kiwi harvesting.  Taller workers get bad backs stooping to pick the fruit.

There are two kinds of kiwis, the fuzzy brown furred ones that are green on the inside that we usually see in the States and a gold kind (the “Haywood” variety) that has a smoother skin and sweeter taste and a golden color to the fruit inside.

The honey bee cross-pollinates from the male to the female plants so most kiwi fields have 4-5 hives. 

But the gold kiwis have been attacked by a PSA, an airborne bacterial disease, that has no saving remedy as yet.  Once a field has been affected, they have had to cut the trees at ground level and burn them.  Losing a crop is serious business as it takes 5-6 years for fruit to appear again. 

The Kiwis are transported and ripen after they are picked but, if refrigerated (and not frozen), they are preserved and the ripening is thereby arrested.

When the Maoris first arrived in New Zealand the islands were covered in tree ferns and they called it the bush.

There were no creatures to bite like snakes or alligators or pumas, lions or tigers.

The settlers introduced deer for meat and velvet, wild pigs escaped Captain Cook and thus earned the name, “Captain Cookers.” 

The settlers also brought skoats, ferrets, possums, rabbits.  They brought rabbits that multiplied in such numbers, in the absence of predators, that the rabbits compete with Sheep for the grass. 

Possums in New Zealand eat the tops of trees and stunt their growth.  (The only good thing about the possum is its fur combined with wool makes for soft and comfortable gloves and socks – you may buy at many shops – for a decent price.  And Holly found a couple of good bargains on her own retail discovery missions.)

AUCKLAND

Auckland, the “city of sails,” with a million residents, has more boats per capita than any other city in the world.  Auckland we’re told is the word for a European sea bird.  How apt.

Auckland was once the capital of New Zealand (from 1842 to 1865 when the city of Wellington took on the “honor”), and is a grand city, with an amazing harbor, a skyline like you’d expect from a major city, and quite spectacular with a famed Sky Tower at the center of the city (the CBD – Central Business District) from which you may hurl yourself attached to a wire and pulley system, in a colorful suited harness, down hundreds of meters toward the city streets below, for about NZ $ 250, while onlookers observe your courage (or insanity) safely behind large thick stress bearing glass/plastic windows.  

You know the story of how Manhattan was “reportedly” bought for $24 from the Native Americans.  The story is the 3,000 acres that are the city of Auckland and environs was bought for $110 from the Maoris.

We began this visit by driving out of the city up the foot hills to a rain forest preserve in the Waitakere Range.  The Pacific Ocean was to the east and the Tasman sea to the west on either side of this narrow isthmus.  Perhaps the Maori didn’t think they were giving up that much as there are 60 (extinct) volcanoes in the area.  But they are extinct.

En route we passed a bridge where a fellow named Hacket first staged a bungee jump and perfected it into a business.

It is no accident that civilization is found on the East Coast of the two islands as the west coast winds, on the side of the islands closest to Australia, wreck ships and challenge surfers.  Swimmers who enter calm waters find themselves pulled out by undertows never to be heard of again.

This is where we first studied the Kauri tree that bears both male pollinators and female cones.  These trees are sturdy and long living going back millions of years, living for thousands of years themselves.  We made our way into a rain forest of these trees soaking wet mists and rain showers that grew more insistent the longer we were there.  But the coup de grace was this cascading Kare Kare waterfall that dropped thousands of feet from a cliff in the midst of the forest.

When we made our way to the west coast Piha beach, the rain was in full force, and still they were surfing.  Profiled in the mist in the near distance, just behind the surfers, was a cliff shaped like a resting lion facing the treacherous Tasman sea – and over the horizon, out of sight, Australia. 

The beach sand was black with titanieferous ores meaning a mixture that was 80% pyrite (FE3O4), 15% titanium and the rest what we think of as sand.  That means several things.  For one thing, a magnet will pick up large clumps of the sand.  And we witnessed just that.  For another, local industry wants to mine the sand for titanium and the local green party is resisting the initative.  They don’t trust industry’s assurances that the environment won’t be disrupted.  We stopped at a nearby coffee cookie and surf shop and saw the local news stories posted on the wall of disasters at sea.  Our shop keeper told me of several stories of overmatched surfers and lax swimmers who lost their lives.

Our guide let us off at the Auckland Zoo as we found they had Kiwis there kept in an artificial environment that flipped their days around so that the day was their night.  We ran into an animal keeper who said the Kiwi are hard to find but we found this squat rounded long-snouted creature making his way in the dark bush and log environment that was its home.  No flash photography was allowed and we got the dimmest blurred image of one.  But our quest had been satisfied.  The larger issue persists, how such a treasured creature could be so endangered by its worshiping public.

We also found the Kea bird of interest, also endangered and kept in a private isolated cage.  We saw sweeping herons, and native eels and other natural treasures.

We made our way back by cab, about NZ $20, to the Sky Tower where we found Bob, 82, getting ready to leap off the Tower.  So we took his picture and gave him our email address.  When we made our way up we took pictures of him waiting.  Perhaps we projected an attitude but he strike me as anxious to hurl himself off the tower.  It wasn’t a bungee jump as they had a fly wheel and harness to control the rate of descent.  So this was not going to be a trip accelerated at the rate of 32 feet per second per second.  We watched Bob dropped from one floor to another.  He waved kind of nervously to everyone and then he descended, it seemed, to the street below, but he came to rest on a targeted platform directly beneath his departure point traveling in a straight line without any arc that might take him crashing into the tower walls.  We watched several others jump off and caught up with Bob who said that the experience wasn’t as exciting as the bungee jumps he’d done previously.  Go figure.

BAY OF ISLANDS

Our last stop on the east side of the North Island is the Bay of Islands.  It is here that the Maori made their pact with the British.  It’s called the Treaty of Waitangi.  We saw but did not visit the treaty house where there is an annual celebration but even today there are disputes about the treaty’s application and how much autonomy the tribes have.  As the treaty was constructed using missionaries as the translators for the Maori, it begs the question about the clarity of understanding when the treaty was signed in the first place.  This is my suspicion.  No one ventured this theory but our guide who is a descendant of the signing chieftains who speaks the native tongue, he says imperfectly, said there are ongoing issues about its application.

On the way, we stopped to walk through the Pukati rain forest and were quickly surrounded by a special silver fern, green on top and silver beneath, as well as the towering Kauri trees reaching up and up, reminding you of red woods.  Our guide spoke of how walking through this forest made one absorb what was the place that was Maori.  Sadly, he spoke of successful children who moved away and were indifferent to the tribal language and custom, saying, he said, they might learn the way when they were older.  The Maori are as endangered as the floral and fauna.  Not unlike the native Americans.  And what we’ve done to different species in our own country.

As I wrote at the outset, in summary of our New Zealand adventure, in order to meet the Maori tribal leaders at the meeting house, we needed a “Chief” to speak for us. 

There was silence on the bus when our Maori guide was recruiting “our” Chief, but one woman pointed at me and thus does one become a Chief (for a day).  I once asked a Chief in Peru how he became Chief and he said he knew how to make islands from reeds, taught by his father, and thus he was chosen.  I can’t say how my selection occurred. 

But it gave a focus to the ceremony. 

We were greeted by a woman, an elder, almost plaintively singing, welcoming us to walk across sacred ground to the meeting house.  She summoned us three times.  On behalf of past ancestors, the present warriors, and what was yet to come.  We removed our shoes before entering the house filled with an array of totems rich with symbols.  At the far end of the meeting house was a totem representing their descendants from first to last and we honored them in silence. 

We were greeted by those assembled with a ceremonial kiss, an inclined forehead touching noses one to the other. 

We then sat at one side of the room and in Maori and in English we were welcomed, told of their history, and their beliefs. 

Stretching above us from outside the meeting house through the front door at the crest of the roof running all the way to the totem of ancestors was a ship for the journey of the soul through this life and into the next one. 

I admit I was saddened that the missionaries introduced a Christian aspect and cross into the Maori symbol system and, when they spoke of their cosmology, it was confounded, in my mind, how one could harmonize these two very different belief systems. 

I thought of the violence with muskets obtained from the British and how the tribes waged war among themselves and how the peace was made.  And then I was supposed to speak. 

I said the word, Kiora, which in Maori I’d learned was a greeting and a blessing.  The Maori responded, all of them in a single voice, Kiora. 

I said we were grateful for their welcome and explaining their customs and belief and shared the respect for their ancestors.  I said we came all of us because we shared a respect and honor for their beliefs.  I remarked how the meeting house was itself a living meditation.  I said all of us had in the past and our own lives shared pain and dreams as did they.  I said we came on a ship, the modern equivalent of their long symbolic canoe that stood in the heights of their meeting house binding it together and them as well.  I said there is scripture that says, though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.  So I said we came in and with charity and were grateful for their welcome and their charity and cherished the opportunity to join them.  Then I concluded as I began and said, Kiora.

After that we were welcomed with music and Kiwi juices and prayers.

When driving back to the ship, our guide spoke about what he’d done to raise his children.  How successful they’d become because of his hard work and devotion.

But I thought, as proud as he was of what they were accomplishing in the modern world, he feared he’d lost them to carrying on the Maori tradition.

We returned to the ship and set forth for Sydney.