Escape From Auckland

My money transfer came through, so I have hit the northern road. I have signed up with Stray Travel to take me around New Zealand. They are one of three or four touring companies that compete for the money of backpackers such as myself. Stray promoted themselves as being the travel company for people who want to have more of an adventurous, mind-broadening trip (translation: more hiking & rafting, less rich drunken European teenagers). Since I am here for a year, I signed up for their most generous package. It allows me to travel all over the country as many times as I want. I even get to hop off and hop on at any point, too. Pretty sweet. Their drivers all seem like cool people. There are still plenty of drunken Europeans, but they’re a little older and have less money than those whippersnappers on the Kiwi Experience busses.

As a bonus for buying their most expensive package, Stray has sent me on a sort of free trip to the Bay of Islands, where I have been since Thursday. It is pretty nice up here. I am staying at the Pipi Patch Lodge in the town of Paihia. Paihia is one of the first stops for Auckland escapees, so I have bumped into a lot of the same folks I saw in the city. There is a little road here with about five hostels on it, and the Pipi Patch is clearly the one where backpackers come to party. These people have amazing stamina. I mean, I love to knock a few back and jump around like the goofball that I am… but every night? I don’t know how their brain cells or wallets survive.

On Friday, my little group took a trip up to Cape Reinga at the northernmost tip of New Zealand. Along the way we stopped to see a Kauri forest. Kauris are great big trees that Europeans loved to cut down and turn into masts for their ships. I guess they were pretty big. Not Redwood or Sequoia big, though. The Good Old US of A still has the biggest damn trees in the world and no amount of Kiwi eco-progressive conservation effort is gonna change that!

We then drove on the flat sands of Ninety Mile Beach. It is really only sixty-four miles long, but whatever. Our supercool van drove up a river (!) where we encountered giant sand dunes. We climbed to the top and slid all the way down on boogie boards. I had never inhaled sand before. If you feel the need to climb to the top of a giant dune and slide down it, wait for a calm day.

Next was the road to the tip of Cape Reinga. It was cloudy, but still spectacular. From the lighthouse you can watch the Pacific Ocean colliding with the Tasman Sea. The water was a shade of blue I have never seen before. There were Portuguese Men-of-war all over the beach, and I almost stepped on several of them.

Surreal moment of the week: Saturday night at the Pipi Patch, they had a Love Boat theme party. Lots of people came dressed up as various characters from the show. I was tempted to mention that my first paid job in the movie business had me working with none other than Ship’s Surgeon Bernie Koppel, but I didn’t want to be too boastful. Now for the really weird part. To get the party started right, a bunch of guys, mostly gigantic Maori dudes, performed a Haka. A Haka is a Maori war chant and dance. They are loud, scary, and awesome and I was psyched to see my first one in person. It WAS awesome, but picture THIS being performed by guys dressed up like Isaac and Captain Stubing. Very weird.

Yesterday, a bunch of people from my Stray group went sailing on a great big yacht. I hadn’t been sailing for years, and it was great. We cruised around a bunch of islands and got to hop off on one of them. Lots of cool trees, jagged rocks and tidal pools. I was tempted to go swimming, but it is still a bit cold around here. There was a nice breeze, so we moved along at a good clip. Fun!

I am getting a bit sick of hearing criticisms about America. A few folks (mostly Europeans) feel the need to tell me how much they don’t like America’s policies and culture. Usually these are people who have never actually been to America and have little to no knowledge of how the government works. In light of the recent elections, I try to explain a bit about congress and what Democrats and Republicans (and others) stand for, but it does little good. To them, George W. Bush is America and vice versa.

I wish I could get it through to them that America is a huge, diverse and amazingly beautiful country, that we have more natural splendor than you could possibly digest in a lifetime, that despite the actions of certain politicians we still have hundreds of millions of intelligent and reasonable people, that we’ve exported technology, medicine, culture, music and freedom of speech all around the world and if people really didn’t want it, they wouldn’t buy it. Some people don’t want to hear that though, and no amount of politeness or rational explanation on my part will change their minds. I wish I had the balls to ask these cultural critics to name one country that has a perfect track record and no skeletons in its closet, but I don’t want to be rude. Kill ‘em with kindness, I say.

Most of the travelers who actually HAVE made it to the states have lots of good things to say. They love our cities, our landscapes, our people, our movies, and especially our music. I hope all those critics will eventually jump across the pond and see what they are missing. Until then, I’ll just try to hang out with the cool people from all nations who are here to see THIS amazing country and leave preconceived notions behind.


Oh yeah, here's me with a Kiwi bird. Happy, Comerford?

First Photos

Here are 10 pics of my first days in Auckland. The nature-y ones were taken on Rangitoto Island, a dormant volcano in Auckland Harbour. These photos do no justice to the view from the summit. It was amazing.

Here I am, quite sweaty, at the top of the volcano on Rangitoto Island. Behind me is Auckland.

Your typical hostel room.

Lame ass Queen Street. Note the Dunkin Donuts.

The Auckland Sky Tower. Yes, that is a person sliding down two wires.

Amazing view from Rangitoto Summit #1.

Amazing view from Rangitoto Summit #2.

Amazing view from Rangitoto Summit #3.

Volcano and lava rocks.

Cool rocks!

NZ1 - New Zealand's "Big Boat" challenger to the 1988 America's Cup. Friggin' huge!

The best-named restaurant in the world.

Roam If You Want To

Kia ora! Welcome to the first Moranadu entry from the Southern Hemisphere. I have been in New Zealand for six days now. It feels like much longer.

The flights weren’t nearly as bad as I had feared. I flew from Boston to Washington/Dulles to LAX to Auckland. Apparently, the whole of the United States and the most of the South Pacific decided to be cloudy just to make the views from my window as boring as possible. The only cool things I saw in the USA were LA at night (been there, seen that) and Catalina Island lit up by moonlight. I managed to sleep most of the way from LA to Auckland. Tylenol PM, how do I love thee? The sun came up just as we passed the International Date Line. The first land I spotted was a bunch of huge rocks, followed by rolling green hills and valleys filled with fog. Very pretty.

I made it through customs with little fuss, and it was on to Auckland. Ah, Auckland! Unremarkable Auckland! Actually, Queen Street! Unremarkable Queen Street! Queen Street is the main drag of Auckland that rolls quite steeply down a large hill to the harbor. It could be the main drag of any large western city. American businesses are everywhere – even Dunkin Donuts! How is it that New England’s great institution of fried, sugary pastries and addictive coffee found a market in the most isolated nation on Earth yet was nowhere to be found in Los Angeles? The Kiwi accents were the only indicators that I had left North America. Queen Street sucks.

I decided to caffeinate myself through my first day, thus making jet lag My Bitch. Soon I discovered that with an 18-hour time difference, jet lag is no one’s Bitch - least of all mine. Delirium set in around 11AM during my orientation at the International Exchange Program’s headquarters. They were giving us the rundown on New Zealand’s varied regions and job opportunities when speech became slurry and hands unsteady. I went through three copies of a bank account application before I spelled my name correctly. Still, I fought off sleep through the afternoon and collapsed at around 9PM.

Hostelling is a new experience for me. The one I am currently staying at is basically a 7-floor dormitory populated by transients ranging in age from 18 to 75 from all corners of the globe, but mostly Germany. My room has four beds, and people are constantly coming in and out. So far, I have shared the room with a couple of Americans, a Brit, a Canadian, a German, and a very smelly 40-something Australian bloke who I call Stinky Dundee. Great Christ, does that man smell bad! I have noticed that the older hostel dwellers have a more difficult time masking their Backpacker Stench than do the younger ones. There is a room down the hall from me where the BO is so bad that it actually creeps out from behind a closed door. Gross. There are lots of cute girls running around, but also a lot of not-so-cute girls with facial piercings and blond dreadlocks. The hostel has showers on every floor, ladies. Take heed.

On Tuesday, I took a free tour of the city courtesy of Stray Travel. It was led by a guy named Nate who is undoubtedly the greatest tour guide in the world. A half Welsh/half Maori, he showed us Auckland’s hot spots. There was hardly a sentence that didn’t include shit, fuck or an insult directed towards Australians (“The Convicts”). My favorite quote was his description of New Zealand’s winemaking industry: “A hundred years ago a bunch of dairy farmers got sick of milking cows and said ‘Fuck it, let’s make wine.’” He advised us to run over any possums we might encounter on the roads, as they are unwanted Australian pests that are destroying the local ecosystem. We saw some of the residential areas which could have been plucked right out of San Francisco or Los Angeles – small single story houses set about a foot apart from each other with little to no backyard. Then we saw the harbor, which is pretty amazing. I have never seen so many sailboats. Supposedly, dolphins and whales swim through the harbor all the time. I didn’t spot any.

Another stop was the Sky Tower, which is New Zealand’s answer to Toronto’s CN Tower and Seattle’s Space Needle, meaning that it is a very tall building whose height serves no practical purpose. This is New Zealand, however, and tall things must be jumped from. Three people from the tour took the elevator to the top and rode a vertical zip line down the entire length of the building. Take THAT, Toronto!

The bus then took us up to a gorgeous hill overlooking the harbor and surrounding areas. To our left was the Auckland skyline. To our right, distant hills and a giant bay filled with sails. Behind us, a sacred Maori meetinghouse. Before us, a dormant volcano. It was here that Nate made the sales pitch for his tour company, detailing all the amazing activities his company could provide us – swimming with dolphins, rafting on whitewater and in caves, thermal hot springs, skydiving, skiing, surfing, scuba diving, and many, many more things that I can scarcely describe for a relatively good price. SOLD!

After that, we headed over to the Auckland Harbour Bridge. The crew there harnessed us to a guardrail as we climbed up the catwalk under the bridge to the bungy jumping pod. I am guessing that we were 150 to 200 feet over the water, and a little Indonesian man won a free jump. His wife, in full Muslim headgear, photographed the whole thing. It was hilarious and awesome. Nate saw the big goofy smile on my face and surely knew that he would soon be enjoying a healthy commission from the deluxe travel pass I would be purchasing. He invited me and a few other prospective buyers out for a pint.

Which brings us to The Fat Camel. The Fat Camel is a hostel/bar near the waterfront where the Auckland backpacking crowd congregates. It is the closest thing I have ever seen in real life to the cantina in Star Wars. There people from America, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland, Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany (MANY from Germany), Australia, Fiji, Indonesia, Japan, Belgium, and of course New Zealand – both White & Maori. Several people asked me what I thought of Dubya. They all hate him, and were relieved when I told them that I didn’t vote for him either time. There was music, games of pool, cheap beer, cheaper food prepared by residents of the hostel, and maybe a dozen languages being spoken. People were negotiating road trips and house shares. Everyone was friendly and easy to talk to. It fucking rocked! Sadly, jet lag kicked in around 10PM, and I headed back to my lame ass hostel at the top of the hill… and Stinky Dundee.

The last few days have been less eventful. Bizarre rain and wind storms blow in and out with amazing speed and ferocity. There are still a couple of parks and museums I’d like to see in Auckland, but I really want to hit the road and I can’t do that until I clear up some legal details and get my stupid money transfer from home (Bank of America can bite my ass). I found a nice, cheap public pool and discovered how out of shape I am after ten feeble laps. Gotta get leaner & meaner. I have been unable to find a place to go online with my own computer. All the internet cafes have PCs and charge too much. No free wireless anywhere. Boo!

Elsewhere in the world the Democrats have taken control of Congress, Rummy resigned, Deval Patrick is Governor of Massachusetts, Saddam’s gonna hang, and Jack Palance is dead. Crazy. More to come.