Christmas away from home is always weird, I guess. Holidays (or birthdays, anniversaries, any of the things that normal people celebrate, really) aren't a big deal in my family, but Christmas has been the one day a year when I've always come home from wherever I was, and then, with my parents and at least one of my two brothers, went for dinner at my Aunt's place, where I saw her, her husband, my two cousins, and my grandfather. I don't see my immediate family that often, let alone my extended family, but I can't remember a year when I wasn't there for Christmas (there might have been one - I just can't remember it), so it is weird to be away, and so far away.
New Zealand has been beautiful - and fucking annoying. Part of this has to be our current state of mind as our trip draws to a close - it's like being stuck right in the middle between two worlds (home and halfway around the globe from home) and not being sure where we'd rather be, so we're not quite happy, no matter how we look at things. But it's also been annoying because, well, New Zealand is annoying. The weather has been annoying as fuck so far - it will be the most gorgeous blue-skied and sunny day one second; the next, you're caught under a thunderhead that's pissing down rain even as you can see those sunny blue skies right ahead taunting you. The driving has been annoying as fuck, too - whereas the roads are long, straight, and largely traffic-less in Australia (at least where we were), the roads in New Zealand are winding, narrow, occasionally unpaved, tipping over vertiginous cliffsides, and the native drivers are fucking maniacs - they drive retardedly fast even on the most serpentine strips, and because the roads are generally one-lane and full of blind bends, they end up tailgating you when they think you driving too slowly (i.e. not suicidally). The owner of our guesthouse in Rotorua explained that everyone in New Zealand starts driving at 15, and so there are a lot of inexperienced, hormonal drivers out there, and as a result a lot of bad driving, and a lot of accidents. Then there are the prices - like Australia, shit seems mad expensive. Of course, we're spoiled, having just come from Southeast Asia, but shit really is expensive. It's almost impossible to get dinner at a half-decent restuarant for less than $50 each; a music CD averages about $30; and most of the attractions charge, at least, $25 per person admission fees. We're fucking unemployed, so this shit is gonna break the bank quick.
Still, despite such obstacles, we managed to see some amazing shit. While staying in a beachfront hostel in Whitianga on the Coromandel Peninsula for a few days, we hiked through the bush, past rolling pastures...
...through tangled jungle, and by majestic coastline...
...to the world-famous Cathedral Cove.
Another day we went on a boat ride through the choppy surf (shit was like a rollercoaster) along the rugged, volcanic coastline, visiting small islands and strange crags rising from the ocean.
And in Rotorua (which is plagued by that aforementioned rotten-egg smell due to the town's biggest tourist draw: it's sulfurous geothermal activity ((geysers, bubbling mud pools, hot springs, volcanos, that sort of shit)), we walked through Wai-O-Tapu geothermal park, where we watched the Lady Knox Geyser erupt some 30 feet into the air...
...and walked among amazing formations like the Champagne Pool...
...and the Devil's Bath, all bubbling up from the earth's hot, acidic, mineral-pigmented core.
We also went to Mitai, a Maori village site where we ate traditional Maori food called hangi (meat and potatoes cooked on hot stones under the earth for 3 hours), watched a cultural show (not as cheesy as it sounds) complete with singing, dancing, a weapons demonstration, and the infamous Maori pre-battle pump-up ritual, Haka, which goes something like this:
After the show, our guide - this huge, intimidating, tattooed Maori woman - led us through the dark jungle to her tribe's sacred spring, which had massive eels swimming in it (she claimed that they had swum there over a period of 3 years from California and would likely swim back at some point to die), and had the clearest water Maya and I had ever seen. The spring also had glow worms gathered around its bank, creating eerie flourescent constellations over the water; our guide explained that the glow worms were actually not "worms" but the larvae of a particular type of fly - maggots, in other words - and that the glow was actually due to an enzyme in the larvae's feces. Basically, we were oohing and ahing over a bunch of maggots' glowing shit. Still, by the time we left Mitai around 10:30pm (we'd been there for nearly 4 hours), we felt like we'd learned a lot about the Maori traditions (including their insane facial tattoos), which was cool since the Maori are a much bigger minority in New Zealand than we had realized (everyone working at the Auckland airport, for instance, seemed to be Maori).
As for our New Zealand Christmas, it was a strange one indeed. We spent most of it hiking through the bush right around our rather remote moutainside/lakeside guesthouse just outside of Rotorua, a location we selected mostly to be away from that rotten-egg smell. True to the New Zealand weather pattern so far, it was raining for much of our hike, but it was still a pretty awesome time, something like walking through a prehistoric landscape of massive ferns and towering redwoods, everything covered with moss and strange fungi. We didn't see any dinosaurs, but the lake we were walking along - Tikitapu (Blue Lake) - is reputed to have its own lake monster, named Taniwha. While we didn't spot the beast, we did see lots of New Zealanders laying out "sunning" themselves and/or picnicing on the lake's sandy beach, and swimming, waterskiiing, and jetskiing on its waters, even though it was freezing cold and raining out. Those Kiwis are fucking crazy.
Drenched after our hike, and after some lunch, we drove into Rotorua, which was basically a ghost town and walked through the hot springs and bubbling mud pools in the free-access Kuirau Park. They were kind of underwhelming - but the playground in the park was awesome, all futuristic-looking and interactive, much cooler than any playground we'd ever seen in the States. We played on that for a while - two Maori kids stared at us the whole time like we were crazy - until the rain got too hard and we had to retreat to our car.
When we returned to the guesthouse, a huge French family has arrived for the night (which they would be spending in the room right next to ours), including mom, dad, two little girls (one 5; the other, 6), and a tiny baby, not even 6-months old yet. As we stepped into the main door, the baby was wailing its head off and burping - we were not happy. This whole trip, we'd been talking about how annoying all the Frnech tourists are, and how they all seem to bring their half-naked children along with them to the most ungodly regions of the world. "French babies" had become a common, half-joking pet peeve of ours - Conan O'Brien does a hilarious impression of a French baby sometimes, and I would do my (not-so-good) impression of his impression in dismay whenever we were confronted with some new Gallic brat. It seemed somehow fitting that the Christian God would have given us, the atheist and the Jew, our own French-baby roommate as gift on his son's birthday.
But as we cooked our rather bizarre Christmas dinner in the guesthouse's shared kitchen - a tomato, scallion, and feta cheese salad (Christmas colors, it turns out!); BBQ lamb chops; garlic and butter potatoes; and a horrible store-made apple pie that made me wish dearly for my Aunt Ellen's delicious homemade pie - the clearly very harried mom of this French family told us sympathetically that her baby was "not a screamer" and that we shouldn't have any problems sleeping. And as it turned out, the French baby made hardly a peep all night, and though I haven't gotten a solid night's rest since we arrived in New Zealand, Maya and I both slept better than we have in days. Our own Christmas miracle.
1 comment:
Christmas Barbeque! Awesome place, beautiful pics, and you narrowly avoided the earthquake! You did all the stuff my kiwi buddies told me I should have done.. if you have'nt found out already, the Kiwi Rugby team is called the "All Blacks" , and the attire would fit right in with your goth style. I passed on the "All Black Nation" shirt myself as I imagined it not going over well in Brooklyn. Can't wait to see you when you get back!
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