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 ;-)