Small and wild

Little country...big rugby players ;-)

You've gotta watch this video.  It's the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team doing a pre-game, scare-the-crap-out-of-the-other-guys Maori Haka war dance.  It is so awesome!

Watching this, you might think Maori are the native people of New Zealand.   Not so. 

Think back to 950 AD.

The ancient city of Petra (now in Jordan) had been standing for 7000 years!  The city of Cordoba in Spain held 1,000 mosques and a library with 400,000 to 1,000,000 volumes.  There were already 101 million people in China, where paper money was in use, and much of the Great Wall had been built.  Elsewhere, Vikings were running roughshod over Europe and may have even paid a visit to Mexico.  In Mexico, the Toltec city of Chichen Itza with its pyramids had been up and running for 100 years.  Across the globe civilization was in full swing...

But not in New Zealand.

In New Zealand there were only birds.  Funny looking birds.  But that's about it.  A thousand years ago no human had ever set foot on New Zealand.

Then, the Maori showed up by way of Polynesia and Indonesia and China, among other places.  The first Maori explorer, Chief Kupe, arrived around 950 AD, but there wasn't a substantial migration until about 1300.  (Europeans didn't show up en masse until the 19th century.)  So really, it was just birds and plants until about 700 years ago.  That's like...yesterday in world time!

So that wildness one feels watching the Haka is not about some primitive people springing from the New Zealand soil.  If anything, it comes from the toughness of a people who came across the ocean in canoes and settled a totally virgin land.  

Perhaps you are wondering how tough one really has to be to conquer a land filled with flightless birds...  Well, it's not the wildlife in New Zealand that's so impressively wild.  It's the land itself.

Try this: stop what you're doing and imagine yourself standing on the epicenter of a 7.8 earthquake.  What's that feel like?  The people on this site describe it as feeling as if you were in a building hit by a big truck.  Wham!  Imagine that sensation and repeat it for 90 seconds.  Then take a breath and imagine 60 more seconds of impact.  That's what the 1931 Hawkes Bay earthquake was like.

The Hawkes Bay quake was the biggest natural disaster NZ has experienced.  It killed 256 people, more than the recent, devastating Christchurch quake, which killed 185.   During the Hawkes Bay quake the landscape was radically resculptured.  In those few minutes the coastline physically lifted up two meters and 40 sq km of seabed became dry land.  That's insane!

Ok, that's just the earth Kiwis walk on.  Let's talk about the wind...

This is a Dallach Evolution ultralight plane, cruising speed 270 kph (168 mph).  Can you imagine it moving along?  Ok, now imagine everything around you that's not tied down moving at the same speed.  Whoosh!  During the Wahine Storm of 1968, winds of 145 knots (167 mph) were recorded in Cook Strait, according to a sign on Mt. Victoria in Wellington.  What's that feel like?  Well, a category five hurricane has wind speeds of 137 knots (158 mph).  The winds in this storm were stronger than that!

Pity the poor people who were on the Wahine Ferry during that storm!  Remember that movie The Perfect Storm, based on the real 1991 storm off the coast of Massachusetts?  Well, wind speeds during that storm reached 80 mph.  There were still 610 people on the Wahine Ferry as it dragged its anchors across the harbor in 90+ mph gusts.  When it began to sink, passengers had to get off the big ferry and into little life boats!  Fifty one of them died.  You can see the terror in the body language of the people arriving in this life boat...

Ok, back to the Haka for a second.  Apparently, when the Maori first showed up in New Zealand from Polynesia, they were pretty peaceful folks.  After some time in this land of big earthquakes and crazy wind, they got a lot wilder.  They fought a lot -- their war canoes carried 100 men -- and they even ate their captors.  Maori famously killed and ate 66 Europeans in 1809 when they believed that the son of a Maori chief employed on the Boyd had been whipped and starved. 

The point of all of this is to say...the Haka is not an empty promise.

We didn't know any of this yet as we were walking along Oriental Parade in Wellington, marveling at the turquoise water and black-green trees...when a pack of 11-year-old girls nearly ran us over in two-seater bicycle cars.  Their hair was blowing in the wind and they were yelling at each other as they careened over the walkway.  They were having so much fun, being wild, and no one was stopping them.  That made me so happy.  I think it's good for children to feel powerful and wild sometimes. 

I later learned from a Swiss expat that his 11-year-old daughter learned to do the Haka in school ;-)

Kiwi kids can run a little bit wild because (aside from us tourists), there's not much to run into.  E thought I was joking when I told him there are only four million people in New Zealand.  There's room to run.  This map from Wikipedia makes the point brilliantly.  All of the dark green represents places where there is fewer than 1 person per square kilometer.

We met some really nice people in Wellington through our common interest in Chris Martenson's Crash Course.  A, one of the people we met (a Kiwi herself) put it to us simply: "We're little."  That cracked me up.

One afternoon in Wellington, we got together with A and with an American couple, B & A (who were brilliant hosts -- thank you again!) to trade perspectives on how the global economy is changing and how it's affected our lives.  A told us how she and her husband had purchased a homestead with 17 acres in anticipation of big changes ahead...but were finding that maintaining it while she has small children and her husband has a full-time professional job was harder than they'd envisioned.  B & A, who moved to Wellington a year ago, were loving NZ, but missing summertime and feeling the 9000 miles that separated them from family.

We conceded that the shmorgasbord of "greener pastures" we've been visiting all over the world have turned out to be...greener pastures with the risk of taxi-kidnapping, greener pastures with $53 pot pies, greener pastures with intolerable food and inefficiency.  We've also found that we're not all that flexible ;-)

Each of us, in some part spurred by Chris Martenson's work, had taken action to move in a new direction -- to run a homestead, to live in another country, to go on a quest for greener pastures -- and were finding there was a lot more to these new directions than we'd expected.  Not good, not bad, just complex.  Which, on some level is the difference between imagination and reality.

But that's another topic.

Oh my Lord, how did I make it this far without filling the blog with beautiful photographs?  Quickly, quickly let me show you some of the beauty that fills all of that dark green on the map above...

Fishing boat in Wellington Harbor

Native plants growing in Days Bay

Novia Scotia-meets-Hawaii foliage en route to Mt. Victoria in Wellington

 














Delicious orange blooms in the Wellington Rose Garden

Blue sky above the Around the Bays 7-K fun run

Napier's strange black and blue shoreline

Bluer water than I've ever seen in my life (Ocean Beach in Hawkes Bay)

Stunning views from Te Mata peak in Hawkes Bay

Then we got to Waiheke Island...

And I didn't want to leave.

We, the warm-weather junkies, were psyched to have a wood stove!

Phenomenal views from pretty much everywhere...

And then we drove the 70 km loop around the unpopulated part of the island

And thought we'd died and gone to heaven.  Could it get any more beautiful than this?

What if you uh...still have some pizza in the car?  Goat cheese, fresh thyme, and carmelized onion pizza from Fenice, (a Mudbrick Vineyards spinoff). ;-)  Add one bench, and voila!  Even better. 

I wonder how Michelin would rate this restaurant ambience?

Foodwise, New Zealand came just in time for me.  Tough problem to have, but man, I was gonna scream if anyone tried to feed me more wasabi foam or watermelon carpaccio.  Most of the people who "cook" that crap couldn't make a decent meatloaf.  Well, anyway, cooking is kind of an afterthought in New Zealand because the raw ingredients are so good.  I have never ever had apples that crisp and sweet (not in Oregon or Western Mass, not even close).

Oh my lord, then there were those incredible plums we got at Bellatino's in Havelock North (run by an expat NYer, I think).  Red-fleshed intensely sweet and tart, they reminded me of Satsuma plums, but I think they're a new variety called "Freedom" plums.

We were gnoshing on plums and apricots in the car, whizzing by fields of sweet corn...at the tail end of February.  How strange is that?

And then there was the Pohutukawa honey that comes from trees with red flowers that looks like this.  It's sometimes called a New Zealand Christmas Tree.  We were eating the honey with a spoon, it was so good.  I hate to think about the calories!

There were also these brilliant clean-tasting, but rich, green-lipped mussels.  I don't like mussels, but after trying some of E's one night, I kept ordering them again and again.  My favorite preparation was at Swashbucklers in Auckland with coconut milk and white wine.  This is from another night we went out for mussels and Lefe Dark (yes, they have Belgian beer in NZ).

On the culinary front, one of the big pluses for me about being in New Zealand was Turkish food.  Huh?  Yes, there is lots of good Turkish food, not just in Aukland and Wellington, but everywhere.  Even in little Napier.  Here's a big, beautiful plate from Kilim Cafe.

And actually, it wasn't sophisticated, but I really liked the food at Abrakebabra in Wellington.  Again, I am always a sucker for big beautiful breads like these.  When we express our enthusiasm, the owner of the restaurant brought us more for free.

This was a day after the guy at the kebab and burger shop across the street gave us SIM cards because he had extras and we were asking where to buy them.  I went back to Burger Fresh and the owner made me a decadent grilled chicken burger with jalapeno relish and apricot chutney!

This was overwhelmingly our experience across New Zealand...almost everybody we met was an immigrant and everyone was incredibly nice.  We met people from...

• Turkey
• Ireland
• England
• Czech Republic
• Russia
• China
• Japan
• Korea
• Thailand
• ...maybe even Lebanon, Vietnam, and Mexico

And nobody hated us for being American.  They were really just excited to tell us, directly and efficiently with humor, what the little country they'd grown to love was like.

Which is another thing I love about New Zealand.  There are official signs that say things like "Merge like a zip" or "Clean up your dog's poop" (I mean, why not?).  And A, of B & A, told us how, when they were moving into their house, two carpenters came over to do some finish work and discovered a dead electrical plug.  "Better call Sparky," they said.  "Who's Sparky?" she wondered.  The electrician, of course.  So what do you call a carpenter?  Chippy :-)  Which, clearly is a great set up for a whole lot of jokes ;-)

Good as gold...but worth the price?

After Chiang Mai, Melbourne was a breath of fresh air.

Yes, that's a cliche, and yes, it's literally very true.

A month of inhaling exhaust fumes and zip, through the magic of more fossil fuels and Thai Airways, I found myself cheerfully bouncing down the lovely long running track by the Yarra River.  Alongside me long-limbed men and women cruised slowly on bicycles shouting through megaphones complicated vowels at rowers skimming by on the river.  Here we are in Australia! 

Actually, the Yarra River came one week later.  When we first arrived in Melbourne, our aviator-glasses-wearing, Arab-speaking taxi driver speeded us over the smooth pavement, past the tall gum trees, under the cloudless blue sky to the seaside suburb of St. Kilda.  I felt like we'd landed in a movie where it was summer.  The beach was mobbed and it was hot, really hot -- like 34 C hot.  I was so happy! 

And E was happy too because all that heat meant heirloom tomatoes were making star appearances on every menu across town.  Heirloom tomatoes are kind of like E's kryptonite, but in a good way ;-)  When the all-pro waiters at Cicciolina in St. Kilda set this beautiful dish in front of us, it erased all of his frustration about the Internet and left only cheerfulness in its wake.  The artisan-made whatever-kind-of-cheese-this-was was pretty incredible too. 

Actually, E is walking by right now and he says it was the heirloom tomato salad at Cumulus -- the second time, not the first time -- that he liked the best.  That big green slice of tomato was absolutely delicious...

And as I was pawing through the mound of photos we've accumulated from The Trip, I came across two more stellar tomato performances in Melbourne.  The first was at Huxtable, a hipster-y joint run by Kiwis, and the second was at Noir, run by a husband-wife team, where they peeled the exquisite tomatoes and served them with smoked trout (my salad, not E's).

As you can see, the quality of the food in Melbourne was truly a cut above (and sorry for the quality of some of these photos).  As each dish arrived in front of me, I felt as though it was a precious offering.  There were two dimensions to this: the quality of the raw food stuff and the quality of the cooking.

Australia, like California, hit the jackpot when it comes to food production.  They have fantastic meat of all kinds, excellent dairy, fruit and veg, and wine, among other things.  They also have a fantastic smorgasbord of immigrant cultures: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Greek, Turkish, Lebanese...  Interestingly, the population of Australia is about 60% that of California.  About 23 million people live in Australia , while 38 million live in California.  (Since we've been traveling I've started saying I'm from California, not the US.)

So the thing to do when you visit Melbourne, is to head to Victoria Market to witness this glorious agricultural  and cultural abundance on display.  Strangely enough, I expected to be bowled over, but wasn't.  Maybe some people besides tourists really shop there, but it didn't feel like a living market.  South Melbourne Market was a different story entirely...

There was handmade dim sum to take home and steam.  Yay!

 Lovely Turkish breads and pastries...

Gorgeous poultry, "free to roam in large barns"...

Feisty-looking greens...

A luscious array of fruits like rock melons, kiwis, and mangos...

Fresh flowers at reasonable prices (I've got more to say about prices!)...

And besides all these nice gastronomic building blocks, there was pretty much everything else under the sun.  Imagine the retail spectrum of a Wal-Mart, all supplied by small, independent producers.  From fabric stores to cell phone repair to custom jewelry.  Pretty darn cool.  Some of my favorite stalls:

Hipster sneakers,
 

Bicyles,

Vacuums, even!  Can you imagine buying a vacuum anyplace other than a big box store? 

But anyway, back to the food...it isn't just what goes into the kitchens that makes Melbourne special.  There is a seriousness about cooking and food production that doesn't exist in any US cities, with the exception perhaps of NYC.  And I have to take San Francisco to task here a bit because, on the whole, people there can't cook there...not like they can in Asia and not like they can in Melbourne.  Sorry, but it's true.

On some level, the coffee culture in Melbourne shows you the essence of seriousness about food prep.  Check out this coffee-maker at Naked Espresso in the CBD:

Solid gold, baby!  And you should see the barrista in action.  People laugh at the title "barrista" in the US.  In Australia, there is much respect.  A young German expat I met told me with great seriousness how he'd studied philosophy in university and was now learning to be a barrista in Australia.  Ay yi yi! But anyway, you order and then you wait for the rock star behind the counter to deliver the long black, flat white, or whatever for a mere AUD 4-5.  Yes, that's right.  Boutique coffee $5.  Cheap coffee $3.80.  But I'm getting to that...

We'd heard so much about the fabulousness of Melbourne's restaurants that we arrived in the city with a whole sheaf of recommendations and many bookings at fancy pants joints.  The most over-the-top point in our trip came when we rented a car and drove two hours north of Melbourne to Drysdale to eat at the intriguing (and pretentious) restaurant LOAM.

Frankly, it was a long boring drive out there with a long gravel road at the end.  The hostess, who was working a carefully stylized wholesome look, greeted us by name, "You must be Mr. X."  E wasn't buying.  His BS-sensors were buzzing like crazy.  We sat down in a large room with a big plate glass window looking out at hills and olive trees.  Elegant wood tables and chairs, a little pile of stones at the edge of our table in lieu of flowers, everything naturalistic in a painfully artificial way.  I started with a glass of Over The Shoulder pinot grigio and the waiter congratulated me "winery of the year" or some such.  I looked over at E -- buzz, buzz, buzz. 

Then came the menu: a card with a list of local food stuff -- stuff like fennel pollen and chickweed.  You were supposed to tell them if there was anything you didn't like and leave the rest up to the chef.

From there on out followed a string of dishes that were alternately bizarre and sublime.  Notable among them:

 
House-made butter with intensely smoked...boy, can't remember...maybe seaweed?  It was awful.  Unpleasant in that way where you keep trying it to convince yourself it could really be that unpleasant.

But then, a delectable piece of salmon jerky with creme fraiche, dill, and probably pernod (?).  Amazing flavor combination, exquisite assembly.  Wow.

Then came an amazing dish: pan-fried baby snapper with basil seeds (those things that look like fish eggs) and some sort of salty lemon cream on top.  It was, frankly, phenomenal.  And beautiful.

And then there was "dessert."  The waiter announced it with some trepidation..."Our chef likes to play with savory and sweet."  Clearly, he'd had some reactions that were less than...enthusiastic.  If this dish were intended as a message, one could only interpret it as F*** Y***.

That mound of fluff on top?  Potato.  Unsweetened.  The green dust?  Parsley.  Underneath is a pile of barely cooked, very tart apple slices filled with rose petal vinegar jelly.  Not making it up.  I tried, I really did.  I didn't get it.  It wasn't interesting except for the fact that it seemed so aggressively unpleasant.  I asked the waiter for a hint, "I don't get it -- what is this about?"  He blushed and said, "It's just to enjoy.  I find myself missing the pork..."  Eh?  Serve me the fixings for rack of lamb and call it dessert.  I am a very open-minded diner, but this was...retarded.

We departed.

E, who had patiently endured, made a pit stop at Hungry Jack.  It wasn't the last on our trip.  But, to be fair, that's a good looking burger, don't you think?

If I could pinpoint it, this is probably when we started hitting the restaurant wall in Melbourne.  But most certainly the second point of contact was the AUD 53 chicken pie and AUD 27 side salad at Donovans in St. Kilda.  A few more nights of AUD 150/two person dinners at casual-elegant types of places and we just caved.  When we considered our dinner options -- and looked at pictures online of the very exotic construction-on-a-plate made out of precious food stuff -- we looked at each other and said, is it worth another AUD 150 for this?  Do you want to eat that?  Not really.  Do I want to?  No.  Then why the hell are we going?

So we cancelled the reservations at Attica and Cutler & Co and a bunch of other much lauded joints and spent the rest of our time in pubs, pizza joints, noodle shops, and Mediterranean bakeries.  Melbourne's pubs, by the way, are nothing to sneeze at.  The food is just...simpler, but no less gourmet in sensibility.  Many places offered vegan dishes too, like this Moroccan tagine at Palookaville:

Oh, and there was that really yummy red onion chili pizza at I Carusi II:

Oh, and there was the day I bought four desserts at International Cakes because I couldn't decide between pistachio baklava, a yo-yo, a macadamia tart, or a rum ball.  I mean, could you?

Oh shoot, and I forgot to mention the wonderful sour plum cake at Babka...exactly my favorite sort of sweet:

And E says not to forget about the tapas at Movida, which were really yum, especially the balsamic mushrooms...wow, such intense and grilly flavor.  Delish! (Photos didn't come out because they were pitch-black.)

There's something about the seriousness with which Melburnians undertake food preparation that seems fundamentally Australian to me.  And it's an Australian-ness that you're probably not familiar with if you've never been to the country.  Because most Americans (or "yanks" as they call us) have a Crocodile Dundee-based idea of Aussies as wild men from the bush, anarchistic Mad Max warriors.  They're really not like that.  One Australian told me that saying something "wasn't Australian" was roughly equivalent to saying it lacked integrity.

In general, my observation was that Australians do stuff properly and on time.  Every time.  Not unlike the Swiss.  For example, do you see the workers in this photo?  They are hauling butt on a Saturday to completely strip down the tram lines that run through the central artery of the CBD, relay the tracks -- electrical work and all -- and be finished with the entire job by 5 am Monday.  Ze-trams-run-on-time in Australia -- and they did.  I don't think anything like this has ever happened in the US. 

It was nice to be back in a country where things are so solid.  There are good systems here, and people follow the rules and things work...except that we kept getting honked and beeped at, and eyebrows-raised-at as we jay-walked and cue-hopped our way through the month.  Holy cow, I didn't realize what a renegade I've become.  Maybe it's E's influence, or the after-effects of two months in Thailand, but these days I'm in the habit of only following rules that make sense to me.  What am I, Italian?

Sorry, that's in poor taste.  For those of you who didn't hear, the Costa Concordia was a cruise ship that sank near the island of Giglio, Italy, this January, because the captain decided (on a whim?) to divert from the regular charted course, as a kind of tribute to one of the crew members who was from the island.

I really don't think that would have happened in Australia.  If you're Australian and reading this, tell me if I'm wrong...

After a week or so, we started settling into a cozy sense of security -- as if there were a great Australian mum in the sky looking down on us, making sure everything was ok.  But then, I walked out of the front of our building one morning and found myself face-to-face with this...

Good Lord, what happened? A hook turn gone bad?

Then a day or two later, riding the tram, I heard angry muttering and then a weird crunching sound.  A disenfranchised-looking man a few seats down got so miffed he'd boarded the wrong tram that he kicked in both of the door panels with his boots.

Not a happy camper.  As the man was leaving the tram, four young men rushed up from another car -- all excited by the action -- looked around at the rest of us and asked if they should go get him.  Huh?  What was up with the vigilante attitude?  

E and I puzzled on this one for a while.  This whole scene made us nervous, all of it.  One of the things we talk about as we drift through all these cultures is, how would things change if the economy went south?  Would one be safer in a place like Australia, where the fabric of society seems orderly now; or would it be better to be in a place like Mexico with friends who know how to circumvent danger?  Are relationships more durable than systems?

Anyway, we're ones to talk about danger.  Some Australians we met had just gotten back from a trip to SF where they'd seen an actual dead body in the Tenderloin. We said, Oh, but that's the Tenderloin -- and it's not usually like that.

Interestingly, the National Gallery of Victoria was hosting an exhibition called The Mad Square, with art from Germany between 1910-1937.  A timeline in the exhibition showed the pace of coincident economic and political events:

1910 -- Berlin's population doubles to two million people
1912 -- Socialist Democratic Party is the largest party in the Reichstag
1914 -- World War I begins
1917 -- Lenin and Trotsky form the Soviet Republic after the Tzar is overthrown
1918
         -- Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates and flees to Holland
         -- World War I ends
         -- Socialist Democratic Party proclaims the Weimar Republic
         -- Revolutionary uprisings in Berlin and Munich
1919 -- Treaty of Versailles signed
1920
         -- Inflation begins in Germany
         -- Berlin is the world's third largest city after New York and London
         -- NSDAP founded
1922 -- Hyperinflation continues
1923
         -- Hitler sentenced to five years imprisonment for leading the Beer Hall Putsch
         -- Inflation decreases and a period of financial stability begins
1924 -- Hitler writes Mein Kampf in prison
1927
         -- Unemployment worsens
         -- Nazis hold their first Nuremburg Party rally
1929
         -- Stock market crashes on Wall Street, New York
         -- Street clashes between the Nazis and Communists in Berlin
1930
         -- Resignation of Chancellor Hermann Muller's cabinet, ending parliamentary rule
         -- Nazis win 18% of the vote and gain 95 seats in the national elections
         -- Minority government formed by Heinrich Bruning, leader of the Centre Party
1931 -- Unemployment reaches five million and a state of emergency declared in Germany
1932
         -- Nazis increase their representation in the Reichstag to 230 seats but are unable to form a majority coalition
1933
         -- Hitler creates a dictatorship under the Nazi regime
         -- Nazis organize book burnings in Berlin
         -- (Artists start fleeing Germany)
1934 -- Fifteen concentration camps exist in Germany
1935 -- The swastika becomes the flag of the Reich
1936
         -- Spanish civil war begins
         -- Olympic Games held in Garmisch and Berlin
         -- Germany violates the Treaty of Versailles
1937
         -- German bombing raids over Guernica in Spain in support of Franco
         -- (Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich attracts two million visitors)

What I saw in this timeline was how a sustained period of hardship (years of inflation and unemployment and population growth) preceded the rise of the radical politics of Naziism.  A poster by Cesar Klein from 1919 foresaw this link between unemployment and social decay (trans. Whoever Does Not Work is the Gravedigger for His Own Children).

Stepping back a sec, I realize it's only now that we've reached probably the most prosperous destination of our trip that I'm finally seeing some thought-provoking exhibitions. Also, I noticed that with the stress level of using another language and traveling in less developed places diminished...I had the ability to concentrate for longer periods of time.  So I went to see lots of art in Melbourne, including Pipilotti Rist's new video work I Packed My Postcard in My Suitcase, which practically moved me to tears because it was as if someone had perfectly captured my consciousness.  E thought it was...psychedelic ;-)

And also the Heide art center, where I saw some great Sidney Nolan paintings (he was openly the lover of Heide's patroness, Sunday Reed, who was married to John Reed).  Here is his Bathers painting from 1943.

However most of my time at Heide was spent outside.  Heide is the former home of Sunday and John Reed and covers six hectares of land outside of Melbourne.  It's now dotted with modern sculptures, but I found myself mesmerized by the beautiful, lush trees...many of them hundreds of years old.  I don't know why this makes me so happy, but it does!

So we left Melbourne unfinished...beautiful food, solid systems, lovely environment, wicked expensive, with simmering resentment to yanks under the surface.  This place is simply a question mark for us: probably the best quality of life on the planet right now, but is it worth the price -- whatever the price may be?