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.