Struggling

Peninsulas can be confusing for the geographically-challenged. Here I am tonight on the Karikari Peninsula up on the east coast of Northland, in a very pleasant villa at Carrington Resort looking out over the golf course to the sand dunes and sea - and what's just happened? This. Sunset. And not in a "not by westward windows only, when light fades, fades out the light" sort of way (to wreck poor old Clough's lovely poem) - no, actual sun dropping down. So we're looking west, not east, which is completely back-to-front and just like at Exmouth, WA, recently, and Town of 1770 in Queensland last year. Does my head in, it does.

Anyway, red sky at night, in a modest sort of way - let's hope it's true, because today it's rained and rained and rained, and all the lovely landscape was wasted. At Kerikeri I went (again) to the Stone Store, NZ's oldest stone building dated 1836, which I've made fun of before because our cottage in England pre-dated 1725 - and today I discovered another reason to mock it: it's built from Australian limestone and roofed with Australian shingles (currently being renewed from the same source). But it's still ours, and rather sweet in a four-square, stolid sort of way - and inside there's a very classy presentation of the local history that really impressed me and kept me quiet for well over an hour. It's been a busy place and there's a lot of interest crammed into its (short) life. Good place to buy pitchforks, by the way, and musket flints.

I was just sorry I couldn't look over the last of my Mission house set, Kemp House next door (which is actually the oldest wooden house in both NZ and Australia, so there) because it too is being repaired. I guess I shall just have to come here again. Tch.

Oh, and here's something of ours that the Aussies do claim is theirs - completely erroneously:

On a Mission

Today had a theme: missions. I started before dawn driving literally across the country to Mangungu to a little wooden Wesleyan missionary’s house (the house little and wooden, not the John Hobbs the missionary, who was rather good-looking in a remarkably modern way, and very clever with his hands) on the Hokianga Harbour. Small and sleepy, but it’s seen some excitement in its day: NZ’s first honey bees, first Post Office, first execution, first pub…

Then to Waimate North, which was the only bit of NZ that Charles Darwin liked – and who wouldn’t, the church and mission house there are so very pretty, and the surrounding countryside just like England, even with hedges.

And then over to Russell on the ferry, to Pompallier House to get the Catholic side of the story, and surprised to find not another house with beds and dining tables, but a working factory – a tanner’s and bookbindery, where 65,000 religious texts were printed for free distribution by three hard-working Marist brothers who not only did all the hot sweaty work (it takes some effort to print a page on that literally medieval machine, I found) but also wrote them first - by translating Church Latin into Maori. Impressive stuff.

And of course, being the daughter of a printer and having been so very recently in Mainz looking at Gutenberg’s magnificent work – and so knowing all about dog-skin inkers and upper and lower case (actual cases), I felt I made some great connections today.

Plague of possums

I'm in the land of the (frequently) tacky souvenir: pottery kiwis, pohutukawa-decorated dishes, greenstone pendants and possum fur nipple-warmers. Yes, it's Paihia in the Bay of Islands where, the last time I was here, I photographed, with satisfaction if not actual glee, a dead possum on the bridge across to Waitangi, where I'm staying tonight.

And on the front page of the Wellington paper that I bought today for my Tasmania story about wildlife-spotting was a report about an inquiry into the use of aerial drops of 1080 poison here to kill possums. Use more, was the surprising conclusion.
Unfortunately it's a trade-off because it also kills many of the native creatures that we're wanting to protect, so there are a lot of angry people today, saying the cost is too high.

1080 is a naturally-occurring poison in Australia, so it's used to great effect there to wipe out foxes and feral cats, the natives having developed a tolerance for it. But our possums are Australian, yet they're killed by 1080. I need someone to sort this for me.

I bet the brilliantly entertaining and knowledgeable Gary Muir who presents the WOW cruise in Walpole, WA would know.

Queen's weather - not

Happy Birthday, Your Majesty, and thanks for the day off. Except it's not, for me, despite the unseasonably mild and sunny weather this weekend (it's winter and I have daffodils in my garden! What's going on?) which you wouldn't expect either, Ma'am, since it rains wherever you go.

No, today I have to do my tax return. It's going to be the very next thing that I do. I will be going through my shoebox of fading thermal receipts, the file of household bills, the notebook of expenses that I forgot about keeping by last June, all my travel 3B1s with their final page recording expenditure on trips - when I remembered to write it down. And then, maths not being my thing, I'm going to bundle it all up and pass it on to the accountant who will work his magic and persuade the IRD to give me back some of my money.

It's become a bit of a mission for me to spend as little as possible while away. The (very) nice thing about being a travel writer is that accommodation, transport and activity fees are taken care of, and usually most food too, so with some dedicated chowing down at the breakfast buffet plus carefully-judged sleight of hand with toast and paper serviettes to take care of lunch, there's no need to buy anything during the day (no souvenirs, natch).

My record so far is $19 for 10 days in the Northern Territory in '06 - even better would have been last year's trip there when I spent the grand sum of $5, but then I splurged $65 on a second massage by the fabulous Julienne at the Red Ochre Spa at Alice Springs. She was so good - a proper masseuse, rather than someone delivering little more than a scented moisturising session - and just what I needed, days after having fallen off the roof back home: so it was medical really, and not discretional spending at all.

Even so, it's hard to make much of a living from travel writing: here in NZ we're lucky these days to get even the 40c per word that's been standard for about the last 25 years. More and more editors just pay round-sum amounts for a word and photo package - if they pay anything at all, that is. Totting it all up takes every bit of fun out of preparing the tax return, I can tell you.

1969 and all that

Another natural mystery to me is why the tide is so rarely in on this little beach that's on my daily walk route. I would have thought, with two high tides a day, and my passing by here at roughly the same time most days, it would be less of a novelty. As it is, I'm resigned to seeing the much less attractive muddy sand with its sprinkling of mangrove roots, and react to actual water with surprised delight like that character in Christopher Hampton's The Philanthropist: "Oh look! The tide's in!"

I'm horribly aware that there'll be a formula for it. I was last week thrust in front of a Year 10 maths class (fortunately of low ability) by a harried teacher who pushed a textbook at me saying, "Do this with them. It's just substitutions." I last did maths over 40 years ago, and even then didn't rub up against anything called substitutions - in netball, yes; maths, no - so it was a sweaty and confused lesson, where the girls and I puzzled over the method for working out an algebraic formula to predict sequences. I had nanomoments of clarity when I understood - and then it would be gone again, poof. That was the most welcome bell I've ever hung out for.

I actually scored better in School Certificate maths than I did in history which, again, I instantly dropped - but ironically now have much more interest in, and find myself learning about all the time. When you travel, you're always having history pushed in your face - whose statue that is, why that castle's a ruin, who wore that crown, why they speak French here, how old that cathedral is - and the more you find out, the more connections you make and the more interesting it all is. People who just lie on foreign beaches have no idea what they're missing.

Mind you, there's so much of it that it can be a bit daunting at times. Having so little basic knowledge, I was scrabbling in Germany to keep up with the references to French invasions of Prussia - and a bit surprised, to tell the truth. France invading Germany: who knew?

Ringing bells

The OH knows he’ll be in big trouble if he ever buys me my favourite perfume. For years now I’ve been training myself to associate the scent of Lancome’s Miracle with setting off on a plane trip; so as soon as I’m airside, I swing by the duty-free shop for a squirt from their tester bottle. Already, if I catch a lingering whiff on my watch-strap when I’m back home, I can instantly visualise the airport, the passport and boarding pass in my hand, the planes outside — and feel the excitement. The idea is that when I’m a shrivelled old lady and stuck in a chair, I can sniff the bottle and get instantly high: say, 30,000 feet.

When we travel, we take photos and buy souvenirs, but all too often ignore the other senses, which can be much more effective in summoning vivid memories. Smell seems to be a particularly direct route back to the past, although it’s not always possible to reproduce once back home. This is certainly a good thing in the case of the stinking durian, even if it does evoke tropical markets with all their colour and buzz. But vanilla will take me back to Reunion Island, where it’s grown and processed; 4711 cologne to the elegant shop in Cologne where a perfumed fountain tinkling in the corner scents the air; frangipani to Tahiti; cloves to Indonesia.

Taste always works well, although foods that are still limited to their places of origin by definition won’t work as memory aids: you’re not going to find roasted guinea pig, casseroled fruit bat or coconut crab on any menu here. But something you taste for the first time on holiday is good, so for me Parmesan cheese means Sydney, parsnips are England, quinoa is Peru, chowder means Vancouver.

Though crowing roosters bring back Bali for me, sirens and whistles evoke New York, and cawing crows epitomise Australia, music is the best audio trigger. I first came across the quirky compositions of the Penguin Café Orchestra thanks to the driver of my car in Mauritius; an M2M hit sweetly sung to us by our guide at the end of a tour always reminds me of China; and Kelly Clarkson got me dancing on Reunion Island (possibly also the rum). Hear the music, and I’m there: so in Tasmania I used repeat plays of my latest favourite song to fix the association. Now just the first few notes take me back to the Bay of Fires, the spinifex seeds tumbling over the hard sand, the sun on the rocks, the turquoise sea.

This value-adding holiday tip is brought to you by P. Wade: that’s P as in Pavlov.

Slash and burn

I hesitate to use the word 'feast', still struggling as I am with the aftermath of all that fine dining aboard Avalon's Panorama a fortnight ago (plus some remarkably good food on Qantas's business class) - but it's promising to be another of those weeks again, after a long spell of what would have been famine if I didn't, fortunately, have other sources of income (thanks, OH and WGHS).

Yesterday the latest Let's Travel magazine published a story I wrote about Thursday Island, which is in the Torres Strait to the north of Cape York, itself the northernmost point of the Australian mainland. It's a sleepy sort of place these days, though it's had some lively history, mostly in the pearl-fishing days - which is to say, mother-of-pearl fishing, since it was the shells they were after, for buttons mainly (an industry that died instantly with the invention of plastic buttons in the 1960s). Though it looks pretty - palms, turquoise sea, bright flowers - everybody apart from tourists seems to live indoors with the aircon on because it's so very hot; it's the kind of place where people go quietly peculiar, or pickled (the clock behind the bar at the Top Pub has no hands).

Then there was meant to be a Tasmania story in the DomPost today, but it hasn't appeared so clearly the editor saw something shinier when he was putting the issue together. I'm beginning to think that's how editors work: not governed by space and advertising at all, but simple whim. They're flighty creatures with the attention span of a gnat - how else to explain the one who bought a story (for once, thank goodness, coughing up payment on acceptance instead of publication) and then sat on it for two years, claiming she just couldn't fit it in? 

Eventually I asked if I could send it elsewhere, and at least she let me, so now it's coming out in the Listener this week - except they like their stories 900 words and their editor grizzled that it was only 800. And then she cut it to 690! So though I'm looking forward to seeing my work in the Listener again (first time for ages) I'm going to be opening the magazine with trepidation, to see how my poor little story about the Amazon jungle has survived: was it a scalpel she used, or a machete?

Update: Scalpel. Phew!