New Zealand marks a transition in my trip. Of countries, companions, and intention. Up until this point my journey felt more like a long vacation. Three, even four weeks into Chile and I could still imagine it being an awesome trip that I was about to return from any day now. I had researched and planned it all out ahead of time, I had a friend along to share in the fun and help figure out the tiniest logistics.
But I was boarding the plane to New Zealand without Chantal, I was flying around the world, and I was headed into my 5th week of traveling, definitely not a vacation. For the first time in 28 days, I was alone. And boy was I not ready for that transition. As soon as I got through the bustle of the airport and sat down at my gate to wait a huge wave of loneliness washed over me. No, that’s not quite the way to describe it. I didn’t feel as if a wave was coming in, I felt as if a wave was going out, I was being drained of energy and my sense of adventure. New Zealand seemed like an endless string of days with no one to talk to, would I even enjoy it alone? I had this overwhelming need to fill the void, to talk to my parents, my best friends, to text the travel friends I had just left, all to assuage the acute feeling of emptiness. I did some of that, some randomly tearing up in the airport, and some catching up on the Bachelor episodes I had missed. Apparently that combination is a cure for loneliness. More likely the feeling just passed, I was moving from a state of constant companionship to my more normal state of independence and it required an internal re-calibration. But it also meant I wasn’t on vacation anymore, I was a backpacker, wandering foreign lands trying to… find myself? If not that, then what am I doing?
13 hours later (still not found), I landed in Auckland, having miraculously been able to sleep eight hours of the flight. It was 5am local time and I didn’t think wandering around in the dark that early in the morning was an awesome idea so instead I hung out in the airport for two hours and waited for the sun to come up. And suddenly the most amazing thing happened. People began speaking to me and I could actually understand ALL of the words. Hello English! I didn’t realize how much I missed you. The girl I ordered a cappuccino from asked me if I wanted Cinnamon or Chocolate sprinkled on top (they do that in New Zealand! Also their coffee is fantastic) and I understood exactly what she was saying. The guy who sold me a bus ticket to the city was able to explain to me which stop to get off of the bus and I knew what he said ON THE FIRST TRY. The breadth of my vocabulary expanded from being able to ask ‘left or right’, ‘first or second’, ‘cerveza o vino’ to anything I wanted to. After a month of communicating in my broken Spanish this seemed like a minor miracle.
Now it wasn’t a coincidence that I chose New Zealand to travel alone in. English was a big factor, as was the reputation for how nice the people were (think Canadians on steroids), plus it’s been at the top of my list of places to go for at least three years. I’m here for two weeks and it truly is not enough time. The two islands that make up this country have so much natural beauty you could easily spend a few months here and not see it all. One of the mantras of my trip is to do fewer, better. This has kept me sane, because it’s just not possible to do everything and go everywhere. In New Zealand I decided to spend two days in Auckland to allow time to adjust to jet lag before heading to Nelson for five days and then Queenstown for nine. I chose just what I wanted to do most and edited out the rest.
Four stops and thirty minutes after I got on the bus from the airport I got off in Auckland. It’s a the largest city in New Zealand, home to nearly 1/3rd of the population (1.6 million people out of a total of 5.5 million). It was clean, cute, and approachable. The only thing on my agenda that day was going to the doctor… glamourous. I’d had a pain in my side before I went on my trip. I went to a doctor at home and was told that I had a slight kidney infection but that it wasn’t the cause of my pain (because that’s not where my kidney is). The pain went away for a week, came back in the desert once, went away for three weeks, and then came back a few days after I got off the trail in Patagonia. By the time I got on the plane it was painful to breath and I knew I had to get it checked out. Luckily the girl checking me in at the hostel had a doctor recommendation who took out of town patients. I have to say, one of the things I’ve learned on this trip, is how helpful it is to talk to people and not Google. It turns out doctors are consistent. New Zealand doctor (who was speaking to me in ENGLISH) thought it sounded like I pulled a back muscle. She nicely reminded me that muscle pain begins after you stop using the muscle… so probably my 8 day hike caused the pain and I was just feeling it now. Regardless, she said she’d test me for kidney infection just in case. Turns out I was still infected, so she wrote me a prescription for antibiotics to clear it up. This was the best doctor’s experience I’ve ever had. I came in as a walk in, waited less than half an hour, saw the doctor and walked out with all tests completed and a prescription which I filled next door. It cost me $35 to see the doctor and $15 for the antibiotics. AND I felt 100% relieved to know that I was not dying of kidney failure.
The next morning I was up early, because it was Hobbit day! I had booked a tour to go see Hobbiton in the morning and a glow worm cave in the afternoon. If you are completely uninterested in the Lord of the Rings you should probably skip this section (I’m about to impart all of my random LOTR facts I’ve learned to you). From the big picture about 25% of the film was shot on the North Island (where Auckland and Hobbiton are) and 75% of the film was shot on the majestic South Island (this is also why I was only spending two days north and the next 12 days south). There is also a big studio in Wellington (the capital city, on the bottom of the North Island) where a lot of the close up shots were done and where the workshop that created the world of Tolkien resides. Finding Hobbiton was (clearly) a priority for the film to find. So Peter Jackson identified a general area that was known for having soft rolling hills and spent several days flying over them in a helicopter in order to select the perfect place. After three or four days of this he found a perfect spot a dell with several hills coming together, a few large trees interspersed, and even and idyllic lake. What else are you to do when you find the perfect spot but land your helicopter on a strangers property? As PJ was wandering around, exploring his new found set, the owner of the property came out to see what was going on. Apparently he liked the idea of being paid to have his land be used to film a movie and Hobbiton was born. Interestingly, Hobbiton was actually built twice in the exact same spot. For the first three movies it was constructed out of styrofoam and other non-permanent materials. They actually took it down completely after filming The Lord of the Rings. Then they decided to make The Hobbit trilogy and had to completely rebuild it. This time, the son of the land owner suggested they make it permanent and open it up as a tourist attraction. It took two years to build and was shown in The Hobbit trilogy for a total of 12 minutes. But thousands of tourists visit each year, so this son definitely earned his inheritance…
I loved Hobbiton, it’s just as cute as you would imagine it to be. Little Hobbit holes are nestled into soft hills. The detail is amazing, each house has a theme, the fisherman hobbit, the cheese maker hobbit, the artist hobbit. There is smoke coming up from little chimneys, there are tiny clothes hanging on the line to dry, and gated gardens overflowing with flowers. And, after all, the entire village was built to my scale. In order to play a hobbit in the movie you had to be under 5’4’’, I clearly would have qualified. In order to make the proportions of the movie look right they used two different sized doors, smaller ones to make Gandalf seem tall and bigger ones to make Hobbits seem small. The main houses, Bilbo’s and Sam’s are build large, some of the other minor doors are smaller. But my favorite fun movie making fact I learned is about the scene where Gandalf and Bilbo are having a conversation while watching the sunset on the evening of Bilbo’s 111th birthday. Apparently the sunset was a detail noted in the book by Tolkien, and the film making crew wanted to be as true to the book as they could be. There was one problem. In real life Hobbiton faces east, it would be impossible to film a real sunset for the movie. Instead of adding in a fake sunset in post production the team came up with a simple solution. On the appointed day, all of the actors showed up at 2am and they filmed Gandalf and Bilbo talking as the sun rose in the east. Hobbiton was as cute as I hoped it would be. Our tour ended in the Green Dragon over a mug of beer.
The second adventure of the day was an exploration of the mysterious glow worm caves of Waitomo. Here I would have my first introduction to the Maori culture. The Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand. They, along with all indigenous people, have had a complicated history at the hands of their colonizers. I didn’t know that the Waitomo caves would be an example of this complexity. Our guide for the tour was Maori, he explained to us that the Maori people consider most of the caves in this area sacred (90% of them remain closed off), they were places for religion and ritual. He explained that this particular cave was not used for ceremony, and that was why it came to be used as a tourist attraction. Way back in 1899 a British adventurer heard about the caves from locals and enlisted a Maori man to help him search for them. This was apparently supported by both cultures, but really, who knows. Together they descended into the earth and found a labyrinth of caves, filled with the tiny pin pricks of thousands of sparkling glow worms. Ever since the first exploration, the cave has been open to the public, giving tourists the opportunity to see the magic of the glow worms. Can you imagine, going on a tour of the caves back in the early 1900’s by lantern? Climbing over and around the pitch dark cave on order to go far enough into the darkness to find the glowing insects? And they are actually insects (not worms as they are inaccurately named). I was impressed by the evolutionary ability of the bugs. They live near entrances of caves, and light up in order to attract flies and other insects towards them. In order to capture these bugs they drip long strands of sticky saliva on which the bugs get caught (similar to a spider’s web) and then pull up their captive prey. As a species they only live in New Zealand, Australia, and (randomly) some caves in Alabama. As the tourist traffic has increased over the last 15 years the glow worm population has decreased. Adding to the challenge a flood of the cave in 2016 wiped out 1/3rd of the glow worm population that had previously resided there. I can only imagine what it looked like before because it was still stunning. We sat in a boat, in complete darkness, as we were rowed silently through the cave, looking up at the blue dots of light that spanned the ceiling. (We couldn't take pictures, because it disturbed them, so you'll have to google Waitomo caves to see it)
They are now considering shutting the cave for 10 years in order to allow the population to regrow without the interference of humans. The whole experience made me more reflective on our relationship with animals, nature, and indigenous people. It’s complicated isn’t it? To whom do these caves belong? The glow worms that were there long before people came to see them? The Maori people who found them centuries ago? The Western settlers who were the first to commercialized the experience? The tourists who want to explore this marvelous world?
Okay… now how do I bring this all around to a Mini Burrito? I don’t have a subtle transition, I’m just going to list some things I like so far about New Zealand. Hokey Pokey ice cream (it’s vanilla with honeycomb!), mincemeat pies, cheese scones, cappuccinos with chocolate, and mini burritos. Somehow that ended up all about food, I guess I was hungry after my eight days eating camp meals…
Commentaires