not really

The large, colorful sails dwarfed all the pleasure craft clustered on the edge of the race starting lane.
We watched from the top of a Wellington hill as the large, even majestic sailboats in the round-the-world Volvo Ocean Race left Wellington Sunday on their way to Brazil.
The course was kept clear until just after the start, when the mass of spectators in personal boats swarmed toward the racing sailboats. From our vantage point, it looked like a bunch of baby ducks desperately trying to keep up to a group of matriarchs (if baby ducks were generally drunk, hard-sided and propelled by motors).

watching cricket

A few weeks back, we finally had a chance to watch a cricket game at Basin Reserve, the old ground a block from my house.
It seems cricket is trying desperately to figure out ways to stay relevant. Most of those ways involve playing different, shorter versions of the game. This game was a 20/20 match (each team bats for just 20 overs). What this means is that the whole game lasts about three hours, but as few as two players on each team ever get to bat.
It's probably a good idea, especially since a full test lasts five days, and even the one-day version of the game is 50 overs each team, which can last eight hours or so. But the real attraction of the day was the old stadium.
Basin Reserve is one of the oldest grounds in New Zealand. I don't remember hearing just how old it is, but about 100 years is probably a good guess. There are a couple sets of stands, but most of the seating is on a grass berm that circles the ground.
On non-game days, the stadium is always open - the walkway around the playing field is used as an extension of the sidewalk. On game days it has a pleasant, picnic-type atmosphere, with a game going on in the middle of it all.

on the beach

Wellington natives are a little defensive about the weather in their city. It's easy to see why, since the town is known around New Zealand as "Windy Welly" and it lives up to the name. Even the city's official tourism brochure has a page devoted to the weather. Essentially, it says "The wind isn't really so bad. Oh, and we get sun here! As many sunny days as Auckland!" or some fact. What it doesn't mention is that it can be windy and sunny. For most of our time here, the sun has been a tease, mostly. After a week of gray, windy days, the sun would come out and the wind would cease. It felt like summer was coming, but the next day the wind and gray would be back.
Now that summer is here, the pattern hasn't entirely ended, but at least now there are two or three sunny days in between a day or two of crap weather. This gives us an opportunity to go to one of Wellington's beaches.
There aren't any huge, sweeping beaches around Wellington; most of the coastline is rocky cliffs. But there are a few natural sand beaches. There's also this one, Oriental Bay. It's the most popular city beach, since it's right off of downtown. It's not natural, though. The sand is shipped in from somewhere - I think Australia.
I'll tell you what, though. On a sunny day in January or February, it hardly matters if the sand is real. I'm just happy being on a beach at all.

falling water v2.0 (South Island remix)

the other big game

The Super Bowl wasn't the most important sporting event locally last weekend.
Not even close.
The most important even here was a sport you've never even heard of.
The Wellington Sevens - a two-day, international, seven-a-side rugby tournament - took top billing. It wasn't on the strength of the competition, although the game is fast enough for even
the most ADD-addled spectator.
Instead, the Sevens are a crazy social event, one of Wellington's biggest parties. People dress up to go to the games, they drink during the nine hours of play each day, then they go out on the town and drink some more. It's kind of a mini-Mardi Gras here, with all of the drunkenness but not nearly as much of the nudity.
When tickets to the Sevens went on sale before Christmas, the 30,000-seat stadium sold out in less than an hour. (This is not to say 30,000 seats were sold that fast - it was reported less than a third of the tickets were up for grabs by the general public, with the rest going to rugby officials, business partners, and the like.)
No one bought tickets to watch the games. I've never been to an sporting event where the game mattered less. The games go so fast, most of the time the majority of the stadium has no idea who's playing. Hell, most of the time the majority of the stadium has no view of the field - most fans are in the concourses waiting to buy beer, showing off their costume, or checking out others' costumes.
One fellow North American here asked if the experience was anything like tailgating.
No.
For one, this was all happening inside the stadium.
But the biggest difference is this: people come to the stadium for tailgate parties because they know a crowd is going to show up to watch football. People come to watch the Sevens because they know a crowd is going to show up to party. Tailgating sprung up around a popular sporting event; somehow, the party seems to have come first for the Sevens.
The sport itself seems tailor-made for the States (and there was a U.S.A. team here, which was the worst team in the tournament) so it's a too bad no one has ever heard if it over there. And they are playing this weekend in L.A., but I can't imagine more than a couple hundred people are watching.
It's played on a normal size rugby field, but with half the people (normal rugby is 15 a side). Games are split into two seven-minute halves, with a short halftime and break between each game. This, more than anything, is why it would be perfect for America, since it's already broken up into neat commercial breaks.
It's fast-paced and intense. And no one was watching.
Admittedly, I was only there on the first day, when the 16 teams were playing round-robin rounds in preparation for the Saturday's knock-out rounds. And admittedly, the late parts of the day are pretty hazy in my memory.
But I'm pretty sure I had fun.

one in a billion

About five minutes into the broadcast of the Super Bowl Monday afternoon, it dawned on us.
There would be no Commercials.
The game was televised live in New Zealand, no problem. Apparently the game is televised live everywhere, because I heard about the "billion" people who were watching. I was one of them, watching with a small group of displaced Americans and New Zealanders.
On south Pacific ESPN the Super Bowl has a few differences. It's not easy to tell exactly what they are at first, other than the game kicking off around noon Monday (which conveniently happened to be a national holiday here). But after a while, it begins to dawn on you.
Watching on the International feed, the Super Bowl is just a game of American football.
I didn't watch the same Super Bowl you did. I saw the same action, saw the same camera angles, saw the same graphics, saw the same close ups of Bill Cowher.
I didn't, however, hear the same announcers. I don't know who you heard, but I listed to Dick Stockton and Daryl Johnston. As they called the game, they were mindful of viewers who might not know the intricacies of the sport. I was told at least 15 times the yellow, computer-generated first-down line was "not official."
Both men tended to stop and interrupt themselves to explain the game and terms they used in the commentary. I can only imagine there was someone on the crew whose job it was to yell into Stockton and Johnson's ear every time they mentioned any football-exclusive term.
(Actually, this might not be a bad idea for the U.S. broadcast. There's probably just as many non-football fans watching there as anywhere else).
I didn't see the same commercials, the backbone of any Super Bowl viewing experience. I don't think I saw any commercials. Advertising breaks were filled by promos for other events carried by New Zealand's ESPN feed - apparently they think the World Baseball Classic will be a big deal. At other times, ESPN filled space with short commentary on the other football.
While you were watching the newest Budweiser commercials, I was watching an old bald guy with a Scottish accent sit in a studio in Bristol, Conn., answering e-mails from viewers in Australia asking about English soccer.
(I think when ESPN was looking for a soccer commentator, they started with a picture of Dick Vitale, and ended up with an old bald guy. It appears when the guy didn't talk with the energy and enthusiasm of Vitale, they just turned his hearing aid off so at least he'd talk as loud.)
I didn't see five hours of pre-game shows talking about the Super Bowl and showing all the ancillary events from the week in Detroit. I certainly didn't see or hear the weeks worth of pre-game analysis and feature stories leading up to the game.
And without all that, I didn't really see the Super Bowl, not as I would have seen it back home. I noticed the absence of all the hype and glitz, and I'm not sure if I missed it or not.
The Super Bowl as a game may be confusing to the International crowd, but it translates fine. The Super Bowl as An Event doesn't translate at all. That might be for the best.

or one in 93 million

I heard the New Zealand newscasters repeat the old line about "a billion" people watching the Super Bowl, and perhaps for the first time, thought about what that meant. I knew basically no one in New Zealand, including a good portion of the Americans, cared one way or the other and were unlikely to watch. I didn't figure most other countries were any different.
Then I found an article that spelled out the problems with this whole idea much better than I can.

on the weekend

All of a sudden, summer weather is here and the city has decided to
throw a party every weekend.
Two weeks ago, Wellington hosted the X-Air fest, a free outdoor
extreme sports festival. Temporary indoor and outdoor bicycle,
motorcycle and skateboard ramps and courses were set up, along with a
stage for the free bands and tents for the not-so-free merchandise.
I hadn't seen a crowd like that since coming to New Zealand. The
sidewalks and space between venues was packed, the lines for the
indoor venues stretched a few blocks. The events spread out over a
couple blocks and everything was happening at once, but it was
impossible to actually move from one place to another to actually see
what was going on. Still, we managed to take in a little something
from most of it.
By the end of the day, most of the events had wrapped up and the
crowd packed in even more along the waterfront, where a 40-foot ramp
was set up over the water. Bikers, skaters, rollerbladers took turns
getting airborne and making a splash. I missed the final trick of the
day, when one of the crowd members tried to replicate the feat off a
pedestrian bridge, and instead face planted into the sidewalk.
This past weekend I took my sunburn back out into brilliant sunshine
and another crowd. The Wellington Cup horse races are kind of a
1/10-scale model of what I assume the Kentucky Derby experience to be.
About 30,000 people were out at the course, most of the female
species dolled up in formal dress. (The side fashion show got nearly
as much coverage in the local paper as the race).
We had a bit of luck for my first horse race - one of the locals I've
met here works for the New Zealand Thoroughbred Board and got us comp
entrance to the course and the VIP areas. Mostly it felt a little
like the sports festival - there were a lot of different places to go
and things to see, but too much of a crowd to move about easily.
No luck betting, although we did back one horse late in the day that
nearly brought the final tally to even. Another horse that Kirsten
nearly backed ended up winning, paying out $125 per $1 bet - next
time I'll be throwing down a few bucks on some long-shot hunches.

As long as the sun holds, the next month and a half should be fun.
Every weekend until the end of March has some festival or free show
on. And if not, there's always the beach.
Enjoy your winter, all you up there. I'll bask in the summer here in
the Bizarro Hemisphere.

fake meat

I don't know why, but New Zealand loves really bad junk food in
meat-like flavors.
One of the first days after I arrived in this country, I just had to
try a product on the convenience store shelves, next to the potato
chips and Cheeto-like products. In one of the many mass-produced
bags, as advertised in giant orange letters, were "Burger Rings."
The product is vile. Think cheetos shaped like a circle, with a bit
of beef extract caked on.
But it's nothing compared to my next foray into the meat-flavored
snack genre. After trying to eat some chicken flavored chips, I
turned the bag over to read the ingredients.
The relevant entries: Artificial flavors (622, 624, 626) and Chicken Fat.
At least it's not all artificial.

Not quite home again

This isn't quite where I grew up. In fact, it's on the other side of the world from where I grew up. It does, however, have the same name.
If you are one of the billions of people who are not from Geraldine, Montana, or Geraldine, New Zealand, you may not be interested. Even if you are, you may not be interested. Either way, I feel the need to post this picture.
(For those trying to follow along: I grew up in Geraldine, Montana, population a little less than 300. I drove through Geraldine, New Zealand, population about 2,500, and took a picture).

a new creation myth

The Maori have a myth about the creation of New Zealand that involves
an ancestor catching a giant fish, which then turns into the North
Island (to paraphrase the whole thing and butcher their cultural heritage).
On Sunday, four of us took a trip a few hours east of Wellington,
along the North Island's southern coast. The drive took us from
Wellington, across a heavily-ferned mountain pass, through green
sheep farming country. Nearer the coast, the landscape turned brown
and dry, with long grasses. As we drove along the coast, at times the
road was boardered by white cliffs. Other times, by black rocks
poking through the ocean. And these are just a few of the different scenes you can find in this
country.
My roommate Steph said she had a theory about the landscape changes:
She said when God was creating the world, as he sculpted the land of
each country, there was a small bit left over. When he finished with
all the world's regions - desert, mountains, rainforest, grasslands,
beaches, the whole bit - he took all those small leftover parts,
wadded them together, and threw them away. The clump of extra parts
landed in the ocean and broke into two pieces - New Zealand.
As we drive around this country, it's easy to believe this is the case.

(NOTE: the first paragraph has been reworded so I am no longer implying that the fish butchered the Maori's cultural heritage)

Dec. 27

Surat Bay to Invercargill

More stops at the end of graveled roads. We walked across sheep pastures situated right off a beach, ending up at a hole in the earth with sea water crashing below. We walked on a boardwalk into marshland, and estuary deserted except for one shorebird picking his way along the mud.

We finally arrive in Invercargill, the southern-most city in New Zealand (with a population of about 50,000; city being a relative term).
Invercargill is the least-attractive city I've seen in New Zealand, and if it wasn't for the proximity to the Catlins and the further south Stewart Island, I'd advise avoiding it at all costs.
It reminds me more of the American midwest than anywhere else in NZ, an industrial town on a flat plain. Wide, empty streets lined with businesses that long ago lost any veneer of newness. Lonely litter blowing in the wind. It could just as easily been in central Kansas or Nebraska as in New Zealand.
We met a pair of college-age locals, back in town on holiday break. We talked about the state of their town, and one of them offered, "It used to be worse."
I decided that should be up on billboards as people drive into town.
Invercargill. It used to be worse.

Dec. 28-30

Invercargill to Stewart Island, and back

Invercargill did have two things going for it. One, the hostel was quite nice - a refurbished house, complete with two things I've rarely, if ever, seen anywhere else: free internet and a dishwasher.
Two, it was large enough to let us take the car in for a check while we prepared to head south to Stewart Island.

Stewart Island is the "third island" of New Zealand, but on the map is just a small chunk of land hanging just below the South Island.
The human population of the island is even smaller. There is one town, Oban, of about 300 people. There are no roads outside of the small town, and most of the island is a National Park.
What Stewart Island does have is a ton of birds and plants rarely found anywhere else. Although there are some introduced predators on Stewart Island, tiny islands just off shore have been cleared of the non-native mammals and are now bird sanctuaries.
We arrived late Wednesday after the one-hour ferry ride from Bluff (there is no regular car ferry, so I never learned exactly how the streets of Oban came to be full of parked cars). A few short walks on the outskirts of town and a stop at the town pub filled the rest of the evening.

Thursday brought a water taxi ride and walk around Ulva Island, one of the main bird sanctuaries. The birds here were not shy, especially the flightless Weka, which gave the impression of small, brown and streamlined chickens. There were sightings of parrots, parakeets, and a multitude of songbirds in the five hours or so we walked about.

We had to wake early on Friday in order to get back to Invercargill in time to pick up our car, now with new front brake rotors and pads. Then came a long and nearly fruitless (but very necessary) search for a laundromat.

Dec. 31, 2005 - Jan. 1, 2006

Invercargill to Queenstown to Te Anau

My first thoughts of the New Year were: 2006's weather is crap.

One day, 2005 is ending in beautiful fashion. The weather was outstanding as we made our way north and into the mountains to Queenstown, the tourist capital of New Zealand.
The townhugs the shores of Lake Wakatipu underneath the vertical rock walls of the Remarkables mountain chain. Like mountain resort towns everywhere, Queenstown is not a place for people to live. It is a place for people to spend money. The outer-most areas of town consist of ostentatious homes or huge-windowed condos. Slightly closer to the center are luxury hotels, which give way to trendy shops, restaurants, bars and clubs. In the midst of it all are advertisements and booking desks for just about any adventure activity you'd care to spend money on - skydiving, jet-boating, parasailing, bungy jumping, bungy jumping from much higher up, fly-by-wire, luging, plane tours, plane flying, whatever.
On New Year's Eve, also in the midst of it all were about 10,000 tourists booking out almost all the accommodation. However, the town or the local rugby club or someone graciously allows people to set up a tent on the local rugby field for a price. We had a tent, we had a place to stay. We walked around in brilliant sunshine, took a gondola to an peak above town, watched some cricket, and then settled in for midnight fireworks.

Waking up on New Year's Day, the sunshine was gone, replaced by grey clouds and drizzling rain. We packed up and headed west, bound for Fiordland.

Jan. 2

Te Anau to Milford Sound, and back

More rain, but it's hard to complain - parts of the area average more than an inch of rain a day.
The 75-mile drive to Milford Sound is billed as one of the most scenic in the world, and it certainly has a lot to look out - following a mountain valley up until finally reaching the head of the valley, then driving through about a mile-long tunnel to get to the other side and a swift drop down to Milford Sound, one of several glacier-carved sea inlets, lined on all sides with sheer vertical natural walls.
The end of the road, Milford Sound's visitor centre, is one of the major tourist destinations of New Zealand, but it's somewhat of a letdown. Unless you're planning on taking one of the many cruises through the sound, it's the drive and the many walks along the way that make the journey memorable.
Everywhere you look in Fiordland there's a waterfall, especially if you're there when it's raining, as we are. We walked to several waterfalls, and lakes, and other points of interest - it took us nearly six hours to go from Te Anau to Milford Sound, and an hour and a half to get back.

Jan. 3

Kayaking Doubtful Sound, then Te Anau to Queenstown

This is the real reason we're here - a chance to kayak the fiords.
The day starts early - 7:30 a.m. check in. We take a short van ride from the office to a lake, then a 45-minute boat ride to the end of the lake, where a bus waits. There's a gravel track across the mountain pass dividing lake and sound, put in to service a hydroelectric plant.
After the bus winds its way down to the Sound, we transfer to another boat. A short ride out, and we drop kayaks into the water and get out.
Again, the day is wet and cold and wet. The rain goes from light to heavy to light again, but it's always raining. We are provided with wet suits and three layers of rain gear for our exposed torsos, so the rain is easy enough to contend with once we are on the water.
Again, there are waterfalls everywhere you look. This water doesn't have a chance to wander to a stream bed to join with water from other areas. The water simply streams down off the cliffs, trying to get from summit to sea level as quickly as possible by falling down sheer rock.
The mountains get so much rain, trees grow on the bare rock, rooted in the thick carpet of ferns. As the trees grow, eventually they reach a weight which cannot be supported by the mat of vegetation, and they fall. Often, the fall creates an instability in the underlying mat which leads to surrounding trees losing their anchoring as well. An avalanche of vegetation results, creating bare paths along the green mountain side. Eventually, a few ferns attach themselves to the bare rock, and everything starts again.

More kayaking, then back on the boat, back on the bus, back to the lake and the next boat, back to the shuttle, back to the car. Wet day, but good day. Best scenery of a scenery-packed trip.

Jan. 4

Queenstown to Franz Josef Glacier village

A driving day. The route winds through mountain country before crossing the Southern Alps and suddenly finding the coast. Again, it's spectacular, but at this point we're a little bit desensitized to rock soaring upward. It is an amazing country, however, where you can be winding your way up along a mountain road, seeing nothing but up on one side and nothing but ocean on the other.

Jan. 5

Franz Josef Glacier to Greymouth, via Fox Glacier

On the other side of Mt. Cook and its posse of nearby peaks, snow piles and compresses into ice, which snakes down mountain valleys. Two of the glaciers, Franz Josef and Fox, are in valleys narrow enough the ice makes its way down to the flat land at the base of the mountains.
We don't spend the money to walk on the glacier or in the ice caves, or to fly over the ice and the Alps. We do take the walks to the ice face of both.
It is odd to think of a giant block of ice as a moving stream, and they say these glaciers are advancing at the rate of about a meter a week, and can move as fast as a meter a day.
It's also odd to see the ice face - the glaciers don't gradually give way to rock, they suddenly stop. Walking up to them, you follow a wide, rocky valley floor interrupted by streams of water. Suddenly, the rock gives way to an ice wall 20 or 30 feet high.
Both are impressive, but on this day Fox Glacier is the more interesting of the two. The approach to Fox is in a narrow valley, with ice-scraped rock walls on both sides, from the centuries before when the ice made a strong advance.
Then, there is an hour-long walk along the side of the valley to the ice. A rope is up about 100 feet from the ice, warning people of falling ice, but most visitors ignore the warnings and the rope and walk up to where a strong flow of water comes out from below the ice, carrying away blocks of ice and the water that has finally regained its liquid form.

We head north, and decide to stop in Greymouth. Another nondescript town, it is the second town on our trip for which a slogan immediately springs to mind.
"Greymouth. Better than Invercargill."

Jan. 6

Greymouth to Nelson, via Punakaiki

Continuing our rapid movement up the west coast, we (again) spent most of the day in the car, with a long stop at Punakaiki, home of the pancake rocks.
The rocks have, as the name implies, thin layers which look like they are stacked on top of each other. They have also been well-worn by the sea. In places, waves have carved out caverns at the bottom of the rocks, and eventually worn through the ceiling of the cavern as well, creating a spray up through the rock during high tide.

We drove further along the coast, stopping to see a seal colony, before heading back inland to get to Nelson. There we were meeting our former German roommates, who had just left Wellington (and our apartment) to start their own South Island trip.

Jan. 7-8

Nelson to Golden Bay to Nelson, then to Wellington

The four of us (Kirsten, me and the Germans) drove Northwest, toward Golden Bay. Most of the day was spent driving along another winding road over a mountain pass, along with a side trip down a long rough gravel road for a walk to the largest holes - dropping into a cave system - in New Zealand.
We couldn't actually get close enough to see much of the hole, but we could tell it was there.
Golden Bay we could see, and it was Golden - we picked up a pizza to eat on the beach at sunset. Essentially it was the end of the trip, and a good one.
However, Kirsten and I had to drive the two hours back to Nelson. On Sunday we woke up and drove another couple of hours to Picton, and rode back on the ferry.

We're back in Wellington for a few more months, although we're trying to squeeze in more long weekend trips. We're also trying to figure out our plan for the rest of our time here and possibly more global travel before returning to the States and trying to resurrect our careers.
I'll keep you posted.