They're off!

Yesterday was Melbourne Cup Day - the biggest horse race of the year in Australasia, like the Grand National in the UK (except that it's a flat race) in that everything stops when the gates open at 5pm our time. There are sweepstakes organised in workplaces everywhere and though the ones I've taken part in have always been in schools and consequently modest $5 affairs, in some companies it's a prize really worth winning.

NZ horses are always running, and have often won, so we have a particular interest, but mainly it's an excuse for a bit of fun. On this day last year I was working on a hideous story assignment on shopping in Auckland (I'm not a shopper) in pretty Parnell where in amongst the boutiques and galleries there are many restaurants and bars where young women in hats and high heels were entering into the spirit of the day - spirits were a big part of the celebrations, judging by the hooting and shrieking spilling out over the verandahs.

The year before that I was in Cairns, about to go on a safari to the northernmost tip of Australia, Cape York, where the crocodiles are huge and there's no swimming in the warm turquoise waters. The race was run while I was on the plane, but the captain announced the winner, and by the time I was walking around the town, much celebrating had already taken place, the hats were lopsided and it wasn't just the heels that had the women tottering. It's a public holiday in Melbourne, but a good number of shops in Cairns had 'Closed for the Cup' signs on the doors.

I went to watch the sunset down by the beach, where there's no swimming either because of crocs (and jellyfish) but there is lovely landscaped swimming pool just beside the sea. As dusk fell thousands of fruit bats streamed overhead from beyond the town, past the shops and hotels, right above the Esplanade lagoon and out across the bay to a distant headland where the mangoes were ripe. It was an astonishing sight.

East, West...

So, New Zealand is one of Lonely Planet's newly-announced Top 10 places to visit in 2010! It's a little disconcerting to find El Salvador in the list, along with Suriname, but that's probably more to do with my ignorance than LP's quirkiness: especially as the list compiler joked about our inclusion being so predictable.

It's ironic, of course, that I've written far more stories about Australia than I have about NZ - but you know how it is with your own back yard. At least I've seen most of it, unlike so many North Islanders, Aucklanders especially, who've been across the Tasman multiple times, but never Cook Strait. The LP report mentions Tongariro (tick), Queenstown (tick), Abel Tasman NP (tick), Fiordland (tick), Dunedin (query, but tick) and Otago (tick) - five of the six, note, in the South Island where I was born - and where, appallingly, many overseas visitors never allow time to get to. Shouldn't be allowed.

Up here there are great beaches, the thermal zone, volcanoes and the Bay of Islands - but in the south? Also beaches, plus fiords, the Sounds, proper mountains, the wild West Coast, Kaikoura, pretty Christchurch, sunny Nelson, fabulous lakes, gold rush country, unexplored bush...

Next month I'm going down south to walk the Milford Track (world famous in the world), a four-day tramp through stunning mountain scenery from Lake Te Anau to the coast, and it's going to be brilliant - even if the sandflies are as big as sparrows.

On forgetting Noam Chomsky

The weather is warming up, the sun is out, the beach is calling: it must be exam time. Today, for my younger daughter, it's linguistics, and she's produced a page and a half of super-condensed notes which mainly hinge on ghastly jargon. Nodal trees and transformational generative grammar - oh how well I remember it! Actually, that's all I remember well, just those two terms, which I've trotted out over the years whenever the subject's been mentioned. Everything else, including the meaning of the terms, is entirely lost - proof, if needed, of what a waste of time it all was, even for someone who's been an English teacher.

On the other hand, I have no trouble remembering the big ginkgo tree in the corner of the English-Classics quad, or that the tree on the left is a magnificent copper beech. I can even remember the clacking of my wooden clogs echoing off the walls as I trotted through here from the library to the StudAss building for a break. But allomorphs and deixis? Gone.

So is Canterbury University - from here, at least. I was lucky to be in the last generation of students to complete a degree on Townsite, before everything moved out to the spacious but soulless Ilam campus. The mock-Gothic buildings are now craft workshops and a weekly market, ballet schools, a theatre, galleries - all very appropriate, and it's still a lovely place. It really comes to life in January when the Christchurch Buskers' Festival takes place, now internationally famous and enormous fun.

I passed through ChCh on my way to Kaikoura in autumn: a glorious drive to a spectacular setting for a town, tucked between the snow-capped Seaward Kaikoura mountains and the sea where a deep trench of very cold water is alive with fish and home to a permanent population of sperm whales. There are seals and dolphins too, and famously crayfish - infinitely tastier than the lobsters they're so proud of in Boston, and which you can buy from caravans beside the road - no longer still warm from the pot, wrapped in newspaper and only $15, alas, but still worth a spin up this beautiful coast.

This blue planet should be greener

There's nothing like a neatly-raked, freshly-planted vegetable garden for promoting smuggery: the hard digging done, the plants full of promise, the whole Good Life self-sufficiency scenario. Plus, the eco-halo from the recycling involved: the home-made compost from household scraps and the free-range hens' manure; the plastic pots filched from the return bin at the garden centre, bottoms cut off and then screwed into the soil around each tender little tomato plant, ready to contain the water when they've got big and thirsty. And the re-used bamboo canes topped with drilled champagne corks so I don't put my eye out when bending down to pick myself a sun-warmed cherry tomato.

But the old canes are fragile and likely to snap, so I've invested in steel-cored plastic-coated ones that should last much longer. They're made in China, and I hope the plastic is recycled - who knows, possibly from our own milk bottles and hummus containers that, outrageously, are sent all the way to China to be processed.

Clean, green New Zealand - yeah, right. The 100% Pure image that the tourist people are so pleased with (and that makes their Aussie equivalents so, er, green with envy) is not as accurate as it should be: quite apart from pockets of pollution from industrial processes around the country, it's a scandal that we send our used plastic halfway around the world for recycling because despite the cost, both financial and carbon, of sending it so far, the Chinese can still do it more cheaply than we can here.

It's also kind of ironic that China imports waste plastic when they have so much of their own, blowing about the streets and flapping from the branches of trees. Despite armies of people like this man? woman? here - one of the better-equipped of the cleaners we saw, compared with the guy sweeping up McDonalds wrappers with a bamboo besom - there's still a lot of litter around the cities, which is grieving to see. In Santiago I watched in horror as a street vendor threw a carton of plastic waste over the railing into the river running through the city - a tumbling, rocky mountain river straight out of the Andes, edged with plastic detritus. In the Yasawa Islands of Fiji, the warm water of the South Pacific is so clear you can see through it to the tin cans and bottles wedged into the sand on the bottom. On top of Mt Snowdon in Wales, ramblers who had spent three hours climbing up through dramatic scenery of sheep-nibbled hillsides, distant lakes and rocky summits thought nothing of dropping banana peel and drink bottles.

And my English in-laws, who live just outside a rubbish-recycling zone (although within SUV-range of bottle-banks, etc) blithely throw plastic, wine bottles and paper into the same bag as their food scraps, without a second thought - although when I recoiled in shock, some residual guilt led to a sudden spat of blame-throwing between them. It didn't, alas, lead to a change in behaviour.

The more I travel around it, the more aware I am of how lucky we are to live on such a beautiful planet. I wish everyone would try harder to keep it clean and tidy.

Halloween denier

The trouble with having my daughter turn 20 today - quite apart from that making me feel so very old, of course - is that she's now past the home-party stage of guests, games, cake and balloons, so we no longer have that excuse to put up curmudgeonly notices at the gate deterring would-be Trick or Treaters. Except that we are still old-school curmudgeons, anti this American import that has been so enthusiastically promoted by manufacturers of environmentally-insensitive tat and tooth-rotting lollies, and seized upon with incredulous joy by greedy kids; and now we have to escape to an early-evening movie session in order to avoid the hordes of GKs swarming through the village in bright sunshine decked out as creatures of the night - or not, depending on their level of commitment vs degree of greed.

In America, however, it's a delight to see, and in Massachusetts we were charmed by the pumpkins on porches and the front-yard displays of imaginative and amusing ghouls and skeletons. It all fits so well with the autumn foliage, the early dusk, the edge of chill: like Christmas, Halloween is a cold-weather, short-day festival,and it loses much of its charm when transplanted into a southern hemisphere summer.

The pumpkins that are such a feature of Halloween are the link with the equally enthusiastic decorations for Thanksgiving, when they're joined by potted chrysanthemums on the steps and porches of the pretty wooden houses tucked under the trees. Autumn is a lovely time to go to the States - in New England particularly, where the leaves put on such a dazzling display. Once is not enough.
>>> ...When you nearly don’t notice a row of bright red and yellow tractors and harvesters because of the brilliance of the autumn foliage behind them, you realise that nothing you’ve heard about New England in the fall is exaggerated. If you come from Arrowtown, Christchurch or Cambridge, you may think you do a good leaf display at home, but in this case at least, it’s true that things are bigger and better in America.

On a day’s drive along Interstate 90, the Massachusetts Turnpike, from the Atlantic coast up into the Berkshire Hills in the west, it was woodland nearly all the way: chestnut, oak, ash, birch, beech, hickory and maple set off by the deep green of scattered firs. The orange, red and yellow of the deciduous trees became more intense as we climbed higher, like someone turning up the colour saturation on the television: if it hadn’t been real, we would have protested, ‘Too bright!’ Even when we strayed off the main road and into the pretty little towns, the trees were still everywhere, giving a warm cast to the light that fell on the painted clapboard houses tucked underneath them and that seemed concentrated in the cartoon-bright pumpkins that, this being October, decorated every porch.

Mostly, the Halloween decorations were restrained and elegant – a small round pumpkin on each step up to the verandah, a pot of russet chrysanthemums by the door or a bunch of mottled Indian corn cobs hanging from the knob – but some people clearly felt excess suited the spirit better, with ghosts, witches and bats in abundance. The prize for best effort had to go to the house featuring a CSI mock-up with multiple corpses on one side of the garden, a cluster of assorted life-sized ghouls and skeletons performing in an other-worldly band by the front steps, and a tableful of gruesome drinkers waving tankards as a vampire in cloak and Pilgrim hat leaned over a petrified woman...

[Pub. New Idea 31/3/07]

Two wheels bad

I spoke too soon about the boy next door: vrrrm, vrrrm, it's the throaty roar of his motorbike again, the sound bouncing off the wall of his house straight at our living room windows, just a few metres away. I'm hoping that he'll soon decide that he's fixed whatever he thought the problem was, and turn it off - although I suspect he really just wants to rattle his teeth with the noise, and that could take much longer.

I spent many years of my youth clattering around Christchurch on a Vespa 90, then on the back of a rattly Triumph 500, and then whining around Gloucester on a Honda 50, so I'm not totally anti-bike - although my experience in Bangkok earlier this year did leave me feeling a little jaundiced.

>>> ...Although the SkyTrain on its elevated track snakes efficiently through the city’s CBD in a futuristic, streamlined world far removed from the snarl of traffic below, no visit to Bangkok is complete without a hands-on tuk-tuk experience. The hard-edged clatter of so many two-stroke engines is cheerfully familiar, recalling the heady days of my newly-independent teens when I buzzed around Christchurch on an elegant Vespa 90; but the machines that duck and dive along these clogged city streets are no-nonsense work-horses compared to that show pony. With three wheels, a roofed cab and seating for three slim passengers — or, obviously, just one of me — it’s only the scooter handlebars, the unmistakeable noise and the cloud of blue smoke trailing behind that give away the tuk-tuk’s origins.

Hovering hesitantly on the footpath, I’m daunted by the prospect of hailing one from the horde barrelling past, but another Thai characteristic comes to my rescue. Friendliness is endemic, even in the big city, and a smiling lady stops to ask what I want, beckons a tuk-tuk out of the throng, bargains with the driver for a fare to my destination, and sees me settled on the slippery plastic seat before waving me on my way. Hardly have we gone a hundred metres, however, before it all goes horribly wrong: tilting to one side, we lurch drunkenly off the road, where the driver sighs and tuts over his flat tyre and I guiltily remember all those marathon dinners I’ve eaten, the extravagant breakfasts, the sweet, gaudy cocktails and the glasses of Singha beer. Popping a button after over-eating is one thing: bursting a tyre is in another category altogether...

Pub. Press 13 July 2009

Bon anniversaire!

C'est aujourd'hui mon anniversaire and I was called in to school for a day of relieving French. Dommage! Particularly as it was such a lovely day but there you go: c'est la vie.

French in NZ schools is as much palm trees as the Eiffel Tower: New Caledonia and Tahiti are the closest French-speaking countries, and lots of students go there on school trips. Lucky them. I was at university before I got to go to New Caledonia and see real people - even little kids! - speaking French as though it was normal.

There are some lovely bits to la Nouvelle-Caledonie, but my money (and you need plenty of that) is on Tahiti for the best French South Pacific experience. Tahiti et Ses Isles, as they say there, and it's the Isles that you want: Tahiti itself is, around the edges anyway, rather messy and unappealing, although the middle is spectacular, with lots of tall green pointy bits.

But it's the outer islands of French Polynesia that I like best, and Fakarava, as well as being mildly titillating to say, is a good 'un: huge lagoon in the Tuamoto Archipeligo surrounded by a white foaming reef, an island with classic beachside resorts and lots of little motu, or islets, like this one.

It's like a cartoon desert island: tiny, round and empty apart from the tracks of seabirds. The sand really is pink - crushed shell and coral - as well as fine and soft. We got there by buzzing along the lagoon in a flying fish boat, the breeze warm in our faces, past pearl farms where Tahiti's signature green-black pearls are seeded into oysters in little stilted huts over the water. Ah, the water! Such a quandary for the travel writer, tropical lagoons: how to avoid the dread word 'azure'? Turquoise, Nile green, aquamarine, cobalt? They all sound like cliches, because they are, because cliches by definition hit the nail right on the head. So to speak.

I sat under a palm tree eating coconut tuna salad, crusty French bread and soft Camembert, with wine and afterwards papaya, tree-ripened bananas and starfruit, and didn't think about the matter at all. But later, on a trip to fabulous Aitutaki in the Cook Islands, I tried a different tack -

>>> ...I have colour on my mind this morning. I am going on a lagoon cruise and there will be shimmering water in too many shades of blue and green for my vocabulary to cope with, so I have brought reference. I pull the paint charts from my suitcase and stow them in my day bag: the scorned word ‘azure’ will not pass my lips today.

The Titi ai Tonga is a traditional-looking boat with carved double prows and a thatched roof, crewed by three young men with a lively line of patter and musical talents too. Captain/Cook steers the boat with his knees and sings as his big fingers pluck the strings of his tiny ukulele; when we reach our lunch-stop he deftly slices up the albacore tuna and bananas, sizzling them on the barbecue as we snorkel gently over the coral.

After lunch we cruise on to One Foot Island, named for its shape, where many happy people have stood in pairs on the white sand: it's one of the Cook Islands’ favourite sites for weddings, one for each of the young coconut palms planted on the beach. I watch the other passengers peel off in twos, hand in hand, then I stump off on my own to the other side of the island where I look out at a classic tropical island scene and decide that the colour of the water is Mint Tulip deepening into Riptide with a band of Curious Blue under an Oxymoron sky. It’s beautiful, but there’s only a couple of white terns to share it with plus a rooster on island time lustily crowing somewhere in the bush behind me...


[Pub. Destinations Spring 2008]