To justify my lack of posting amid the chaos and St. Patrick’s-ness of the last few days, I told myself that I would have time to write one final update before leaving Auckland.
I was kind of wrong. Sorry about that.
But the road calls. My stuff (along with my laptop) is going in storage in, oh, about fifteen minutes, and then it’s just me and my backpack for the next few weeks. I catch the bus to Hahei tomorrow at 8AM, and in case you either missed it or aren’t on Facebook, the itinerary is looking something like: Auckland –> Coromandel –> Raglan –> Waitomo –> Rotorua –> Hicks Bay –> Tatapouri –> Taupo –> Tongariro Crossing/Mt. Ruapehu –> Ohakune. Then swinging back to Auckland, and then the red-eye cheap as shit $10 bus ride from Auckland to Wellington (I arrive at 6:50AM after having spent the entire night on the bus, so that, if nothing else, should provide for an amusing update once I’m there).
It feels too surreal to be leaving Auckland for me to really be able to describe how it feels, so I won’t. Maybe in a few weeks when I’ve got some perspective on the whole thing. In the meantime, I will be sure to drink as many beers and have as many death-defying experiences as humanly possible. I’ve been looking forward to this trip basically since I came to New Zealand and I cannot fucking believe it’s actually here! Woo! So, yes. Time to hit the road. See you all when I’m back in civilization!
Today is a fairly exciting Tuesday, as far as Tuesdays go: I have exactly one week left until I leave my job in Auckland and set off into the wilds of Aotearoa with a backpack on my back and a song in my heart - or, rather, with the Rebel Sports Super 14 jingle stuck in my head (isn’t it catchy though? I sing along every time it comes on!…because I am a dork, and have no dignity). Tomorrow also marks a fairly momentous anniversary, in that I will have been in New Zealand exactly six months. Being utterly incapable of conceptualizing what that means, I have chosen not to think about it for the moment (has it really been that long?? seriously?!) and am instead looking forward to my jaunt across the North Island - to surfing in Raglan, skydiving in Taupo, hiking the Tongariro Crossing (something I have wanted to do for YEARS - since learning that New Zealand existed, really) and horseback riding on a farm in the Bay of Plenty. Basically, life for the next month is going to fucking rock - I can’t think of a better way to celebrate my half-year anniversary as an honorary Kiwi.
As a sidenote, I celebrated the start of my extended farewell to Auckland by - what else? - flinging myself off the Harbour Bridge again this weekend, but this time I did it strapped to my roommate (for some reason we both figured this would be a great idea) since we could think of no better way to celebrate the bond between roommates than a tandem bungy jump. For any of you who may be planning a first-time bungy jump, I offer the following recommendations: don’t do it tethered to another person. As a result of Saturday’s plunge - probably due to our slightly unequal heights and the fact that we both “bounced” at different points - I ended up with some spectacularly violent bruising around my neck that has caused several of my coworkers to inquire whether I have recently been strangled by a psychopath or an abusive boyfriend. But hey, at least I had a good time before the whiplash set in!
In the time that I have spent in New Zealand so far - partially thanks to my nascent attempts at navigating the dating scene and its myriad of social conventions - I have learned that Kiwis seem to prefer texting over calling when it comes to their mobile phones. Whether this is simply preference or the result of expensive mobile-to-mobile charges, I haven’t got a clue, but it did initially send me for a loop.
But after reading this Herald article, it seems as though this strategy serves another practical purpose other than just avoiding a hefty Vodafone bill. In regions where there is spotty wireless service, text messages may manage to reach their destination even while the signal is too weak to place actual calls. This phenomenon happened to be a lifesaver for a 16-year-old Ruatoki girl, whose car crashed along the side of Taneatua Road, near Whakatane, and came to rest on its roof halfway down a riverbank, only meters from the water. Upside-down and terrified of moving lest the car shift and fall into the river, the teenager tried to call 111 (the New Zealand emergency services number) but was unable to get a signal. She then texted a friend:
i d0nt have enuf service 2 cal 111 cud u plz. my ka has flipd 0n st highway 2 inbetw tane nd twn. i cant b seen by the r0ad
*gcgirl*
I’m not entirely sure what’s more startling about this story…that the girl survived, or that her friend was able to decipher the message in between all the “plz”s and “enuf”s. Okay okay, I’m just kidding - I know this is the way “the kids” talk these days. And I suppose when you’re hanging from your seatbelt in an inverted car on the verge of death, proper spelling isn’t your first priority. (Oh, and just in case you were wondering, the girl was rescued about an hour later and suffered only minor injuries. I’m betting her dad’s happy he bought her that ultra-expensive Razr after all.)
So, meanwhile in NYC…
Some disproportionately large balls.
This serves mainly to remind myself of two things:
A) That there is still snow in New York, which still tickles my reverse-season-shock funnybone.
B) That New York is still full of dumbasses, and no matter how badly I want to go home some days, those dumbasses will still be there when I get back. Way to hold down the fort, guys!
Okay, so I was perhaps a little heavy on the New Zealand-snark in my last post - sorry guys! - so here’s a story that shows that Kiwis have definitely got their heads on straight: the local business organization in Parnell (a swanky Auckland suburb, for my non-NZ readers) has begun offering free wi-fi Internet service along Parnell Road, accessible to anyone with a wireless-enabled laptop or PDA. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that this is a brilliant idea - perhaps even moreso considering the otherwise terrible state of high-speed Internet access in New Zealand - but mainly because I’ve seen how successful it’s been in New York: you walk along any busy street in Manhattan or Brooklyn and look for the most crowded coffee shops - and chances are, they’re the ones who offer free wi-fi. (Even the Ruling Monarchy of the coffee world, Starbucks, has gotten onboard by offering free wireless routers to New Yorkers living above or next to Starbucks franchises; participants can earn $1 for every user that logs on, and the user only pays $2 to access the service - hey, a 50% profit isn’t bad at all!)
There’ve been a few similar attempts to offer free wi-fi access in New Zealand - back in 2003, a small business development team at Massey University devised the delightfully-named KiWiFi service, which mainly provides portable wi-fi access to events but whose managers continue to advocate free wireless Internet service, as it makes more financial sense than a “pay-as-you-go business model.”
As I have mentioned before, New Zealand is a fairly small, low-population country off in the middle of virtually nowhere, and as a result, very few people bother us. Consequently, very few major news stories ever grace our front pages - so those of us in the media industry must make do with what we have.
Which, in this instance, amounts to this HEART-POUNDING lead paragraph on Stuff: “Six potentially disease-carrying mosquitoes swarmed through the cockpit of a Christchurch-bound plane on Sunday, biting an Australian pilot before being destroyed.”
Holy bejeebus! These mosquitos were so vicious they couldn’t merely be swatted like any ordinary insect - they had to be DESTROYED. Thankfully our brave authorities (the ones evidently in charge of maurauding mosquitos) have assured us that “invading insects were intercepted so posed no risk to the public.” Whew!
…Okay so, there’s got to be something a little more interesting than that going on, right? Let’s see.
“Schoolboy gains easy access to TVNZ site.” Ooh, shocker! This one features such scandalous allegations as “While on the site Kyle downloaded two episodes of Shortland Street for free”…you mean kind of like recording them on a VCR or Tivo like any other normal person can do? - and what the hell was he doing watching Shortland Street anyway? Um, yeah, so maybe not. Although it probably wins some sort of award for “Most hideous accompanying photograph ever.”
And then there’s this little juicy entertainment tidbit from the BBC, which announces that the network’s new season of “Castaway” will maroon its thirteen contestants on Great Barrier Island, off the eastern portion of Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf. So…basically, what is happening here is that the network looked for the most lonely, isolated, out-of-the-way hunk of land they could find…and arrived at New Zealand.
Of course.
I’ve always been a sucker for skylines, and as far as those things go, Auckland’s got a pretty spectacular one: the emblematic tower, the harbor with its sailboats, One Tree Hill rising in the distance. The weather this weekend was what my Irish cousins would deem “a scorcher” and the dry heat had left the sky eye-wateringly blue and absent of clouds, the way you see it on postcards. So driving back to the city yesterday, approaching the Harbour Bridge with the urban panorama to the left, should have seemed beautiful.
Instead, in quite uncharacteristic fashion, I wanted to scream, and then turn the car around and flee as quickly as possible back the way we came. From this, I can conclude that either I’ve fallen in love with the Bay of Islands and never want to leave - or that I’m completely sick of Auckland. I suppose both are sort of true.
The previous morning, around 10AM, I find myself gripping a thin braided rope in one hand while hanging on to the steadying weight of an oxygen tank with the other as our catamaran hurtles across Maturi Bay at roughly the speed of sound, flying over swells, crashing back down with a torrent of saltwater over the bow, perched precariously along the side of the boat with the rest of the divers, leaning into the wind and having the time of my motherfucking life. The sun is relentless and the water is the kind of blue you associate with tropical islands like Phuket and Tahiti, and the salt is stinging my eyes and my ass hurts from the constant jolting as we slash through the wake of other boats into the wider currents of the ocean, and holy hell, this is great. In fact, I cannot think of a single thing right now that would be better than this. This…this is just perfect. And crazy. But perfect.
So, to recap:
About a fifty-minute drive from Paihia (provided you drive like our divemaster, which essentially means you ignore your brakes, and all other oncoming traffic), Maturi Bay is the resting place of the infamous Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace ship that was bombed in Auckland’s harbor by two French SAS agents in 1985. If you A) don’t remember, or B) weren’t alive in 1985, here’s the whole story. Pretty shockingly outrageous eh? Even for the Frenchies. Ha ha. Anyway, when the ship couldn’t be repaired, it was towed up to the Bay of Islands and purposefully sunk off the Northland coast, where it would become one of the world’s most popular wreck dives (as well as a reminder of how utterly ridiculous the human race is sometimes).
Scuba diving is another one of those things, like bungy jumping, that I have always wanted to try mainly for the opportunity it offers to defy one of nature’s basic principles - in this case, Thou Shalt Not Breathe Underwater. Having spent my entire life on the east coast of North America, however…which is not exactly a mecca for divers, although I will note that the most advanced diver in our group was from New Jersey (I asked him what sorts of things he saw off the Jersey shore, and he replied “Oh, mainly U-boats” - I wasn’t entirely sure whether he was joking, and didn’t ask)…I never in my life thought I would actually strap on an oxygen tank and, you know, do it.
But then there I was, suiting up at the Paihia dive shop at 8:15AM, which of course means that I was essentially stripping down to my bikini in the chilly morning air in front of two of (literally) the hottest guys I have ever seen in my entire life. These, of course, were going to be our diving instructors. Naturally. I mean, the scene would not be complete without this moment of irony. I was then expertly outfitted from head to toe in boots, full wetsuit, neoprene hood, mask, fins, and a massive inflatable vest (known as a BCD or buoyancy compensation device) attached to about a thousand tubes (affectionately known as the “octopus”). Combined with a weight belt - to compensate for the positive buoyancy of the wetsuit - and the oxygen tank, I now weighed approximately twice my body mass. I was an ungainly, rubbery zombie, with tubes coming out of my back. Once out on the boat, however, I was mildly reassured by the fact that even the two inhumanly hot diving instructors looked equally ridiculous when fully geared up.
Scuba diving, I soon learned, is a sport that involves very little modesty or dignity, and will probably not appeal to anyone who values either one of these things. When you are crammed on a twenty-foot boat with ten other people and two tons of equipment, you quickly become accustomed to inadvertently touching, bumping or groping others in ways that would rise to the level of sexual harrassment in any other situation. Putting on my weight belt was perhaps the singular defining moment of this whole experience: a maneuver that required me to bend over at the waist while one of the instructors strapped the thing around my torso from behind, assuring me all the while that “This is not as indecent as it looks, I promise.” Sure. After our expedition had left the rest of the divers off to frolic in the underwater wreck, I was taken to a shallow area a few hundred meters away to practice some basic skills under the careful guidance of the older divemaster - since I am not PADI-certified he did all the buoyancy work for me, which was a little disappointing, since I would have liked to have had a bit of a more active role in the whole thing. That is, until I found myself twelve feet underwater…at which point I was more than happy to let the divemaster do everything in his power to keep me from drowning.
Getting yourself into the water is literally as easy as falling off the side of the boat - and when you are weighed down by about ten billion pounds of equipment, this is basically effortless. Many of the more experienced divers told me that they found the backwards roll one of the most disconcerting parts of the whole thing, and so when I sent myself falling tank-first into the ocean with absolutely zero fear, I thought I was doing well. Hand on mask and mouthpiece, and over the side you go. Easy!
Now that I was finally in the water, I began the long process of making friends - or enemies - with my regulator.
I had assumed that breathing from the oxygen tank would be essentially the same as breathing normally. Instead, I found it requires a fairly significant amount of lung power to draw a breath in and expel it out - a bit like sucking air through a straw at 12,000 feet above sea level. This is obviously something that becomes second-nature to experienced divers, but for a newbie - even one with about a decade of flute-playing expertise and in fairly good shape - it is acutely disconcerting. It became easier once I began descending and the surface pressure on my chest (from the weight belt and tank) lessened. I followed my instructor down, pulling myself hand-over-hand along the anchor line, into forests of undulating seaweed and shoals of silvery mackerel.
I spent the first few minutes of my newfound underwater existence consciously reminding myself to breathe. It is something that, when you are fully submerged, is completely counterintuitive, and with every breath in I was utterly startled to not find myself choking on seawater. I sounded like Darth Vader with every exhalation. In the strong ocean current, I flailed and kicked to stay in line with my instructor. Having failed to properly equalize my Eustachian tubes, I was experiencing the painful “middle ear squeeze” and gestured frantically at my head, to which my instructor responded with the ridiculously calm clear your ears sign: pinched nose, and a quick head nod. EASY FOR YOU TO SAY, I wanted to scream. Instead I huffed on my regulator and thought constantly, This is so nuts, this is so nuts, what the fuck am I doing.
Once I stopped flailing, the instructor adjusted my BCD and descended with me to the ocean floor, where we knelt in the sand and practiced the basic safety maneuvers he had explained to me on the boat. It had all seemed remarkably silly to me at the time (as did the line on the safety waiver that stated “I will remember to keep breathing at all times,” which I thought was incredibly obvious, until I was actually in the water and having to remind myself CONSTANTLY to not hold my breath). Now, with several meters of ocean above my head, it was a bit like the moment before a skydive or a bungy jump: You want me to do WHAT??
The basic scuba safety lesson consists of two essential maneuvers: clearing your mask when it floods (which is often) and clearing your regulator of water if it falls out of your mouth. I stare at my instructor through the stream of bubbles, willing myself not to panic. He holds up his hand - points to me, then two fingers at his eyes, then points to himself. You watch me. He lifts the corner of the mask until water fills to below his eyelid. Tilts his head back and blows. Gives the OK sign: thumb and forefinger in a circle. Then points at me. Now you. I instruct myself to not flail around. I am not drowning, I tell myself, I am not drowning, I am not drowning. Okay. I tentatively peel away the corner of my mask. Salty, cold seawater floods into my eyes and I blink furiously. Now I cannot see a damn thing and I am still convinced I am about to die. I tilt my head back and blow as hard as I can through my nose. The water magically disappears in a haze of bubbles. I blink some more, and my instructor nods vigorously and then shakes my hand. This would be funny, if my eyes weren’t burning from the salt and I wasn’t scared out of my fucking mind.
The exaggerated underwater pantomime continues. Points to me, then to himself. Takes his regulator out of his mouth to let it fill with water. Puts it back, and blows. The OK sign, and Now you. I am horrified at the mere idea of removing my source of air, but quickly take the mouthpiece away and allow my mouth to fill with the ocean. I quickly shove it back and blow hard enough to burst a lung. Miraculously, my mouth clears and I find I am still breathing. Vigorous nodding and a handshake. Then, You watch me. Takes the reg out again, puts it back in and presses the front. Now you. I do the same thing, jamming my tongue into the hole and clearing the air manually. Vigorous nodding and a handshake. I feel like a first grader who’s just correctly completed a math problem.
Despite my abject terror through the whole thing, I found myself more confident after these brief exercises and (ignoring the ear squeeze) was able to start actually enjoying the vast underwater scenery without constantly worrying about my imminent demise. It was like swimming in a SeaWorld aquarium; you never really realize how spectacular, complex and chaotic the bottom of the ocean is until you see it face to face. Fish, resplendant in all their goofy fishlike expressions and exotic, almost outrageous colors, drifted by in solitary bunches and vast schools. I paddled my way through slick kelp, poking gleefully at all things bright, shiny, scaly, slimy, and basically anything that did not seem poisonous or sharp, looking up occasionally at the bubbles from my regulator drifting towards the surface while the sunlight filtered through the water in cathedral-like shafts.
Eventually my instructor motioned back to the anchor line and I kicked furiously against the ocean current before finally grabbing ahold of the rope and slowly pulling myself up. At this point my ears REALLY started protesting (think ascending in an airplane to 32,000 feet with a sinus infection) and only afterwards did I realize that it was because I had completely forgotten to equalize on the way up, but that first gasp of fresh air after I broke the surface and spat out my mouthpiece was worth it. Can anything be more glorious than unpressurized oxygen and a blond, tan, hot diving instructor grinning down at you from the boat? I think not.
Getting out of the water after a dive is infinitely more complicated and difficult than getting in. The weight belt comes off first, followed by the BCD, which you must roll out of arm-by-arm (it was at this point that I discovered myself floating completely without any aid except that of my hyper-buoyant wetsuit and realized why the weight belt was necessary). Then the blond, tan, hot diving instructor reached down, grabbed me by the arms and proceeded to haul me inch by inch out of the water as I kicked and thrashed like a beluga whale trying to un-beach itself. About ten minutes later I finally dragged myself aboard and collapsed into an ungraceful heap on the floor of the boat. Success!
Thoroughly winded, I perched contentedly on the bow of the boat at the encouragement of the dive instructor, and relaxed in the sun while we zoomed back to pick up the rest of the dive group. When I noticed Tim (one half of the Unbearably Hot Duo) looking at me funny, I thought that I had done something wrong underwater and immediately felt like an idiot. Turned out he had been talking to me for almost a minute and I hadn’t heard a damn thing he’d said. Oops. “How are your ears?” he asked me when he’d gotten my attention, squinting at me.
“Fine,” I responded, but from the look on his face I could tell that I’d spoken in the too-loud voice of a person who can’t hear themselves. Come to think of it, I thought, I did think the engine sounded quieter than usual…
“Any crackly-poppy stuff going on in there?”
“Um…a bit crackly-poppy, maybe. Am I going to go deaf?”
“Probably not,” he told me with a grin that basically would have struck me dead if I hadn’t been so patently thrilled to be alive at that point. “You might just feel like you’ve got cotton stuffed in your ears for a day or two.”
“Ah, I think I’ll survive.” I put on my best Badass Brave Sarah smile and concentrated on not falling off the side of the boat as we went over another wave.
Generally, a lapse in recent posts on my blog can indicate one of two things: 1) I’ve been suffering from a serious of increasingly severe hangovers, or 2) there simply hasn’t been anything interesting going on in my life or in the New Zealand headlines that’s worth posting about. In this case, there certainly has been no lack of blog-worthy stories as of late (see: Boobs on Bikes in Christchurch) but unfortunately I have lacked the time to write properly about them. You see…
…My parents are in town.
For those not in the know, I’m one of those biological freaks of nature known as an only child. So, taking that into account, it’s automatically a two-against-one battle whenever they’re involved. Also taking into account the fact that my parents are both senior citizens (they got into the whole babymaking thing a little late in the game) and it’s like all the expectations of parents plus all the caretaking duties required by grandparents…all rolled up into one! (Or two.) That is not to say, of course, that I don’t love my parents - I do. But christ almighty they can be an exhausting undertaking.
With that said…you do have to give them credit for flying LITERALLY to the ends of the earth to see their only daughter. So, I’m off to accompany them up north for the weekend (to play tour guide, but also so I can escape to do some scuba diving and enjoy the Waitangi Treaty Grounds while NOT in the midst of catastrophic, world-ending rain).
So, I shall return on Monday evening. Until then!
Never let it be said that New Zealanders shy away from controversy. Hell Pizza, the company that made a name for itself by distributing free condoms as part of an advertising campaign, among many other irreverant gimmicks, has once again come under fire for a billboard featuring a picture of President George W. Bush next to the text “HELL: Too Good For Some Evil Bastards.”
I direct you, gleefully, to the delicious visual evidence.
This may come across as somewhat mean-spirited, but…
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA!
The mere thought of what sort of public reaction this billboard would elicit in a place like…oh, say, Alabama…is side-splittingly hilarious in and of itself. Sure, it’s not like the sentiment is original - but ON THE SIDE OF STATE HIGHWAY 1? That is classic, my friends. Did I mention I fucking love this country?
But even better, in terms of its sheer amusement potential, is the public fallout after complainants took the pizza joint’s advertising agency, Cinderella, to court. As with several other Hell campaigns, concerned citizens cited the company’s “offensive” and “socially irresponsible” tactics - but this time the rhetoric got REALLY juicy: one furious resident stated, “Mr Bush is a GOD-fearing upright man who (I would say) will never be seen in Hell. It is a terrible and vicious smear campaign against a person who is openly a Christian.”
God-fearing indeed. Actually, they’re right - if I were Bush, I WOULD be fearing God right about now, because I’ve got a feeling He wouldn’t be particularly happy with the way our Fearless Leader’s been conducting himself. But that’s all rather beside the point.
Hell’s agency shot back with an equally laughable defense - among the retorts, that the term bastard can actually be construed as a “compliment” in New Zealand (snicker!) and that its use was based on the complex and highly intellectual studies (snicker!) of one Barry Crump (chortle!) and his apparently definitive research compendium entitled Bastards I Have Met:
We would point the board to the seminal work…Bastards I Have Met was a wide-ranging almost academic study of the different types of bastard that one could encounter throughout New Zealand. Of course George Bush had not yet come to prominence when Crump was writing, but had he been in office at the time, and if Barry had met him, I feel sure he would have qualified for his own chapter, headed ‘Evil Bastard.’
…Excuse me while I die laughing.
Auckland and Welly refuse to make nice
5 Comments | Published February 23, 2007 in Kiwi Observations.Like any good neighbors, Aucklanders and Wellingtonians have always seemed to foster a healthy sort of competitiveness - whose harbour offers the best views, whose flat whites are better, whose cricket team kicks more arse, whose public transit system sucks worse. Being in such close proximity to one another, the sprawling business hub to the north versus the smaller but politically powerful capital to the south, makes for some great urban rivalry.
But at a certain point…doesn’t it just become a tad silly? When the 4.5-mangnitude earthquake rocked Auckland on Wednesday night, city residents jammed phone lines and flooded the reader forum on the Herald website, describing frightening tales of “swinging chandeliers” and wondering fearfully if Rangitoto was about to blow its top. Predictably, our Wellington counterparts - who, as a natural consequence of living atop a particularly active fault line, consider earthquakes to be a matter of daily routine - responded with a flurry of derision and scorn. “The Great Auckland Earthquake of 2007 is now folklore and on Ponsonby Rd survivors are telling their horror stories over lattes and chardonnays,” ran the headline of an article on Stuff, an online news portal with ties to the Wellington-based Dominion Post, entitled rather scathingly “How To Rattle A Box Of Jaffas.”
Across the internet, the Great Auckland Earthquake produced a dramatic fault line: the rest of the country laughing at the city while Aucklanders tried karmic breathing to settle.
Richard Edwards of Wellington wrote: “I think Aucklanders should just harden up.”
Meanwhile, on the Auckland-based Herald site, one miffed reader described their initial impressions of the quake: “Was kinda hoping it was Wellington slipping into the ocean. Sad to say its still there.”
Oh come on guys! Can’t we all just get along??
