Captain James Cook, considered

I am fascinated by Captain James Cook, and the footprints he's left on New Zealand history.

Cook was the first European to widely explore New Zealand, to reach eastern Australia, to enter the Antarctic and visit many of the South Pacific nations. His travels took him from the bottom of the world to nearly the top in Alaska. By any measurement, he was one of the greatest explorers of all time, adding detail to a globe that was largely blank.

Cook's traces are everywhere in New Zealand - he spent a lot of time here on his three global voyages, mapping more of the country than anyone before and engaging with the Maori people. Last weekend, we were up in the Bay of Islands on holiday, and I stood in Oneroa Bay looking at the spot where Cook weighed anchor in 1769. I don't imagine the view has changed much since. I've visited several other spots Cook once landed in New Zealand and it's always fascinating to put your mind into this vanished world. A few years ago I got to see a life-size working replica of his famous ship the Endeavour in Sydney, and it blew my mind to realise just how small and cramped the vessel really was.

Captain Cook's legacy is seen as mixed these days - while he was unquestionably one of the greatest explorers of all time, the European invasion also changed life for the worse in many of the Pacific Islands and countries he visited. Disease, guns, poverty, even genocide followed in a lot of the countries Cook visited, like a dismal trail of modernization. But can you really lay all the ills of western civilisation at the feet of Captain Cook?

I've read several books about Cook, who kind of like Lincoln or Churchill, has new facets seen in each retelling of his familiar story. One of my favorite "Cook books" is New Zealand historian Anne Salmond's "Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas," which attempts to equally give both the European and Pacific view of his travels. Salmond goes far deeper than the usual cliched "happy native" portrayal of islanders. She gives a deep and knowing look at their cultures and shows how places like Tahiti, with an entire society built upon the notion of free love, honour and lack of possessions clashed with the European culture. Salmond shows Cook's flaws, but also explains why things ended so badly for him in a compelling, original fashion.

Another book I highly recommend is Tony Horwitz's "Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before," which is steeped in fascination with Cook's legacy and deeds. Horwitz has a very fun approach with the subject, hopping about and interviewing modern-day New Zealanders and others about their feelings on Cook, travelling queasily in a replica of the Endeavour, and trying to repair the "Conqueror Cook" reputation that has become fashionable these days.

My own opinion is that Cook was a great figure of history - not a perfect one by any means. But he filled in the map for nearly half the globe in a way few can even fathom now. The sheer courage involved in sailing off the edge of the map again and again is unimaginable. I was pretty fascinated a few years ago to stand on the replica of the Endeavour in Sydney and imagine this small boat heaving through the oceans, not just to the South Pacific but as far as the frozen Antarctic and all the way up to the Bering Strait in Alaska.

He could've been another Pizarro, wiping out natives with impunity. But Cook often genuinely tried to understand the cultures he encountered and forbade his men from raping and pillaging. Sure, by our standards today he would still come off as rather biased and racist, but you cannot judge a man of 1770 by the perspective of 2012. Cook's own moderately enlightened views frayed with time - by his third voyage, a worn-out Cook began acting far more ruthlessly, took umbrage at repeated thefts by Hawaiian natives, and the conflicts ended in his brutal death.

It's perhaps faint praise to say Captain Cook was a bit more liberal when compared to many other explorers of his time. But the rest of the world would have discovered the South Pacific eventually even if Cook had sunk just outside British ports on his first voyage. For his sheer intrepid ambition, his tremendous sailing skills and his attempts, blinkered as they might have been, to learn about the places he visited, Cook is still very much worth remembering.

"Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go." - Captain James Cook

40.

…So long time, no post. As the last entry probably indicated, it’s been a rather rough year for us. We’re dealing with everything that’s happened and getting on with our lives, but admittedly, it’s a long haul for everyone, losing two parents from the family in less than 2 months. It's a cliche, but sometimes cliches are true: Everything has changed.

Somewhere in there, I turned 40. We buried my wife’s father on a Monday, and by that weekend, we were off to Sydney, Australia, for a long-planned holiday arranged well before all the funerals and such we’ve deal with this year.

I turned 40 and we spent the day in the sunshine at Manly Beach, on gold sand and warm water, and we went out for dinner at a fine little Italian restaurant where I ordered a proper steak for the first time in eons. Sydney is one of my favourite places, and it didn’t disappoint this time. All in all, it was a good way to get a year older – I thought I’d like to make the 40th something to remember, and it was.

And now 2011 is nearly over – I’m usually a fairly positive fella, but it’s been a year with a lot more bad in it than good. Good riddance to it, and hoping for a better 2012.

Under the sea, darling it's better down where it's wetter

One thing I never take for granted about New Zealand, after more than four years of living here, is how accessible the sea is. Most Americans have to make a bit of a trek to get to a beach -- and unless you live in a really temperate place like Florida chances are much of the year it's not a swimmable sea.

But Auckland, as I've written about before, has a million kinds of beaches all within a short drive from home. One that I haven't been to we finally visited yesterday, Goat Island Marine Reserve. It's a beautiful spot about 90 minutes north of town where like few other beaches in New Zealand, fish don't worry about being caught and their populations have exploded into life.

And the fish -- huge fish all so tame they'll swim right by you unafraid of being eaten. Blue maomao, gorgeous striped red moki, bulge-eyed cod, little bewhiskered goatfish feeding on the bottom of the sea, and giant snapper. The beach is studded with rock formations that make deep canyons when the tide comes in, and as you float on the sea looking down you feel like you're observing entire hidden cities. I only wish I'd had an underwater camera to capture the sights, but here's a few online pics of fish I spotted.

I realized that I've never really properly snorkeled before. I've worn one but never in a place where the water is clear as glass and so many tame fish come up within inches of you -- one gigantic snapper who seemed to be the size of my torso scared the hell out of us all. Water magnifies, of course, so each of these great mouthed fish seemed like a dinosaur, hugely confident in their environment.

The snorkel takes away one of the big hard parts of swimming, the whole having to breathe thing. With a snorkel I could float, like a spaceman, above the undersea world. It's very peaceful and calming, visiting this other world in the ocean like that.

And so I float.

I left my heart in San Francisco

...Yeah man, I'm back down under, after several groovy weeks in California. It was my second trip back for a visit since we emigrated in 2006, and it is always a bit strange trying to cram so much into two or three weeks. Not to mention rather exhausting being the single-dad with the 6-year-old boy while Mom stays in New Zealand. There's the meet-ups with old friends, wedged into everyone's busy schedules, where you get an hour or two to play speed catch-up of the last four (or even 20) years of your lives. There's trying to show your son all around the area you grew up in, trying to ensure quality time with the grandparents and the uncle, and trying to get some American-style shopping in there. Somewhere you also attempt to "relax" on this "vacation" some.

Highlights of this year's journey --
• The places that are etched in my mind from childhood and onwards, all wonderful to see again -- the high, dry foothills of the Sierra Nevada where I grew up; the sweeping lonely casino-filled vistas of Reno and Western Nevada, both tacky and epic western at the same time. The sweeping blue expanse of Lake Tahoe, where I spent much of the late 1990s, the grand granite-lined canyons of the Yuba River, the finest place in the world to while away a hot summer's day. And of course sweet San Francisco, which still has the same kinetic effect on me it did the first time I saw it back in the 1970s -- Coit Tower, North Beach, Chinatown, the giant Sutro Tower (the "monster tower" of my childhood), the candy-box spectacle of the houses stippled up and down the hills, the sweeping Golden Gate Bridge, foreboding Alcatraz hunched in the harbour -- I do love that place.

• The climate really knocked me for a loop, though. I'd forgotten that late September is peak allergy/pollen season and that, combined with the staggering dryness of the climate after being so used to humid New Zealand, left my sinuses feeling like a barometer the entire time. It's a shame I love an area yet hate the atmosphere.

• One thing that struck me is how battered and cynical the American "mood" seemed. A liberal like me thinks it's the hangover from 8 years of colossal failure by Bush and the impossible expectations laid on his successor. Far as I can figure the Tea Party folks are against nearly everything being done these days but I have yet to really figure out what they'd do about it or why they didn't speak out during the wild government expansion of the Bush years. It's nearly Election Day in the US and while I hope people aren't dense enough to give the party that screwed everything up for 8 years ANOTHER chance at the House or Senate, my feelings are that the American people just love being fooled by big promises and vague platitudes, from either side of the aisle. The failure of the two-party system -- if we don't like the guy in the White House, we'll just vote against EVERYTHING he proposes -- is manifest. While NZ politics are far from perfect, the minor parties here have a much stronger chance of actually getting their views shown and making a difference through coalition governments. In general politics here seem a bit less shrill, less polarized. I really am starting to fear the American system is terminally broken, no matter who's President.

• The recession that hadn't quite happened last time I visited in summer 2008 was in clear evidence -- vacant shops from Sacramento to Reno, several friends who've lost jobs/money in the past two years. The newspapers I once read have all shrunk into near-nothingness -- thanks to narrower "web widths" (reducing print costs) and staff cutbacks. I remember when the San Francisco Bay Guardian, say, was a thick monster of a free weekly tabloid you could kill a cat with, whereas the one I picked up last week was a wee thin thing. I know my industry is changing and it has to change, but it is a shame to see the newspaper so withered in size and influence.

• As always the sheer SCALE of everything in America dazzles after a few years away in a small, small country. Mega-malls the size of small New Zealand towns, spreading silently over the countryside that once contained nothing but fields; more big box stores than you ever imagined existed; giant cars everywhere. Theme restaurants that serve more food on a plate than one man can decently eat; a "large" cup of coffee that is at least twice the size of one you'd find down under. All of this exists in some form or another in NZ, of course, but just "less" of it.

* On the flip side of course is how cheap anything and everything seems in America compared to NZ -- as usual I stuffed my suitcases to the brim with things like books, CDs, toys, over-the-counter medicines and blue jeans, all far more costly down here. Found several wonderful things to jam in the bags such as the "Nuggets II" CD box set, a great "Art of Brian Bolland" coffee-table book I didn't even know existed, lots of awesome Beat literature at the wonderful City Lights Books in SF, and much, much more. It's a good thing we only get back to the US every couple of years as my wallet and bookshelves really couldn't handle more often.

Winding our way to Wellington

So last week was school holidays and we packed up for a quick jaunt down to Wellington, New Zealand's illustrious capital city. I hadn't been there in 10 years, since my very first trip to NZ. It was good to get on an old-fashioned road trip, too. Geography here kind of means you can't drive most directions without hitting the sea before too long, but the 8-hour drive south to Wellington is one of the longest treks you can take on one island. And sometimes, this American just misses the lure of the open road.

Of all the NZ cities I've been to Wellington reminds me the most of my beloved San Francisco -- jammed into a tight bay, hilly, perched over the tempestous ocean, with lots of nifty architecture, narrow, charming timber structures wedged onto vertical spaces. And Wellington is WINDY. Not just mildly breezy but incredibly windy, with winds pouring into the U-shaped harbour at varying degrees of severity. It wasn't even particularly gusty while we were there but after a couple of days of it I thought yeah, this could be tiresome.

That aside, though, Wellington is a fine place -- the city centre is compact and has that "government town" feeling most capitals do, with lots of folks in suits and ties. Compared to the 1.2 million or so people in the Auckland area, Wellington feels like a small town. You've got the Parliament (which I toured last time I was in town so we didn't go today), plus the huuuuuge national museum Te Papa, which we took the boy to. It's full of art, buttons to push, flashing lights, holographic maps and even a giant dead pickled colossal squid.

As I mentioned before, Wellington is VERY vertical (many houses have long steep steps going up to them, and some even have little motorized cable cars to carry them up). I love the steep scale of Wellington, with so much packed vertically into small space, it's got a cozy feeling. There's some excellent shopping -- big ups to Slowboat Records where I found a rare Alex Chilton CD I've been hunting, and the awesome Sweet Mother's Kitchen, a New Orleans-inspired restaurant where we ate twice in once day (and I had hush puppies for the first time in yeeeears). Another nifty spot to visit was Weta Studios' small museum/shop out in the burbs -- Weta is the special effects studio who work with Sir Peter Jackson on films such as "Lord of the Rings" and "King Kong" and they had tons of interesting props on show. We also drove along the Wellington peninsula which had marvelous views out into Cook Strait, and full of beautiful little isolated beach communities that don't feel like they're 10 minutes from downtown. You could even park at the edge of the airport and watch planes come down into the runway.

'Twas a swell trip down to NZ's second city, and I'm hoping it's not another 10 years before we make it down there again!

Dali, Jedi and hanged men in Melbourne

...So I'm back from my second trip across the ditch to Australia, a lovely 5 days or so in shiny Melbourne. We had a rather quick urban getaway, sticking right to the city itself so no Outback adventures for us, but it was a fine chance to get a look around Australia's second-largest city after our trip to Sydney a while back (with about 4 million people each town is the same size as the entire country over here). Melbourne is a fine place, filled with grand and intricate Victorian architecture and a thriving cultural scene. Going to Oz from NZ is an interesting experience -- both times now I've felt like I was visiting the bigger brother. Sydney and Melbourne are true thriving metropolises like New York or San Francisco, and make Auckland seem rather humble in comparision.

One of the big attractions of going to Melbourne right now for us was several great museum exhibitions. A big highlight for me was the National Gallery of Victoria's "Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire" show, which features 200 works from Dalí collections. Dalí is one of my favorite artists, and this show was a real treat -- besides the paintings, it also included a variety of sketches, videos and multimedia works. I've got a big Taschen monster book of Dali paintings but there's nothing compared to seeing his works in person – the colours really explode forth, particularly the vivid blues and the yellows of Dali's beloved Cadaqués beaches in Spain. I also had new appreciation for Dalí's underrated sheer skill as a draftsman -- the sketches and rough drafts on show display his tight grasp of anatomy and perspective. The exhibit even included Dalí's bizarre and beautiful animated film collaboration with Walt Disney, "Destino," which was only finished in 2003.

We also took the train out to West Melbourne and the ScienceWorks museum, where a display of great importance to all of us was on -- Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination, a super-cool show which has been traveling the globe that features dozens of costumes, props and models from all six "Star Wars" flicks, as well as a bunch of exhibits on how the science behind the movies really could work. On a 1 to 10 geek scale this show was an 11; balding 30-somethings like myself oohed and awed at the life-size props of FX-7 the medical droid and a Wampa as if we were at the Sistine Chapel. I mean, the actual model of the land speeder they used in "A New Hope"? Well, I dug it.

Another great place to visit was the evocative Old Melbourne Gaol, which housed thousands of criminals back in the bad old days up til the 1920s. It also saw more than 130 prisoners hanged, including the famed bushranger Ned Kelly.

Kind of an Australian Alcatraz,  they've turned what's left of the old structure into a very spooky place, with several dozen cells stretching down a long dark corridor. The cells are tight and crammed (I could just get my 6' 2" self through the tiny doorways) and it's not hard to visualize what it would've been like to be kept there; prisoners were tightly controlled and forbidden even to talk. Spookiest of all are the "death masks" taken of executed criminals, which are displayed almost like decaptiated heads throughout the prison, with short tales about the prisoner's grim lives. Ned Kelly's death mask holds a place of "honor" at the end of the hall, with a good display about his life. (We'd just watched the rather mediocre Heath Ledger movie version of Kelly's life the other day so it was particularly interesting to see Kelly's final domain.)

We had a hyperactive 5 1/2-year-old boy in tow, of course, so couldn't check out everything, but a very good public transport system meant we could see a lot in a few days. We also did a great deal of just wandering around Melbourne's busy streets and many parks and gardens, browsing record and comics stores (the fantastic Minotaur made my heart skip a beat), eating at the Victoria Market, visiting the excellent Melbourne Museum and its superb Aboriginal art display, drinking too much coffee and admiring the view from our hotel of the city sprawled out before the magnificent Yarra River.

Melbourne.

Words 'n stuff to follow shortly.

Gone walkabout, mate

...Hurrah, it's holiday time and we're off to the outback. Well, OK, actually to a city of 4 million people, not "Crocodile Dundee" territory by any means. But anyway, we'll be in Australia for a spell, report upon return!

The ground is thinner in Rotorua

When the winter chill descends upon Auckland in full, what better place to flee for a few days than New Zealand's hub of bubbling geo-thermal energy?

I hadn't been to Rotorua in nearly a decade, even though it's just 3 hours from the big city. But it was Queen's Birthday holiday weekend (although curiously enough, it's not her birthday, which is in April) and I actually had a few days off work in a row, so we spontaneously set forth. Rotorua (also known to some, quite bizarrely I think, as "Roto Vegas") is a tourist landmark and has lots to do from the tacky to the sublime. The downtown itself isn't much to write home about, really, but the surroundings are fantastic.

Rotorua is full of thermal activity -- the whole place is basically the crater of an ancient volcano -- and is a little like New Zealand's version of Yellowstone National Park, albeit smaller. The whole town smells strongly of the rotten egg tang of sulfur, which takes getting used to, and you'll find steamy vents and bubbling hot mud pools in the earth all around. Hot mineral baths and pools have been a part of the city's charm for decades, and with the temperature nudging 0C we immediately went to the Polynesian Spas to bathe in waters as hot as 40C. Quite a rush to sit in steaming alkaline water in the exposed freezing open air, and Peter enjoyed going down a water slide approximately 700 times.

We bundled up and also walked along the shores of Lake Rotorua, which boasts several steaming scorched geothermal features, and then visited the most excellent Rotorua Museum. Back in the 1920s or so, this huge, gorgeous Edwardian building was home to the Rotorua Baths, where folks came from far and wide to "take the cure" of the hot waters. Today the museum has very good exhibits on local volcanic history, the extraordinarily brave 28th Maori Battalion of World War II, and its own bath house history.

I found it rather fascinating in a "Road to Wellville" type way to see the old abandoned baths and equipment (which included such attractions as the "douche massage rooms!" and the "cleansing apparatus"). You could even visit the creepy basements which once housed mud baths, and climb up to the roofs to get a great view of the entire area and the dazzling architecture of the Museum's rooftop gables and towers.

Toss in some Thai food, new "Doctor Who" on the telly and a trek in a nifty redwood forest that reminded me of home, and you had the makings of a groovy long weekend. Best of all, our hotel on the lakeshore was terrifically warm (the radiators take advantage of the plentiful natural heat) -- you can't beat spending some of the coldest days of the year in a place warmer than our own chilly house!

Ten days zipping around South Island

....And we're back from the South Island. It was an excellent trek, our longest family holiday in a couple years (since the wife didn't come with the boy and I to California last summer/winter).

Yeah, trekking with a five-year-old is often an exercise in patience (When do we get to our hotel? How long is half an hour? What is thirty minutes? Can I have ice cream for breakfast? Repeat until sanity snaps with a faint crackling noise) but generally it was very good to get back to the hinterlands of the Zealands.

It was the first time I'd been to South Island since my very first visit to New Zealand nine (!!!) years ago now. The South Island is where the landscape is but the people aren't -- less than a million people there compared to the North Island's 3+ million.

We basically did a big loop of the top half of the South Island, from Christchurch over to to the west coast, around through Nelson and back again. It was a good time to go, mid-autumn with cool days but blessedly little rain for us, and the trees full of fine colours we don't see up north. On the other hand, while I love the South Island it is mostly composed of narrow, winding roads and lots of insanely scary one-lane bridges. (Any Kiwis want to explain what is it with the one-lane bridges? It's very 1950s.) Seen from the air, the South is like a crumpled mound of snow-covered blankets. On the ground, timid drivers beware.

We spent a lot of time in Christchurch, which I'd only passed through on a previous visit. The South Island's largest city, it's a decent place, much flatter than Auckland. I think Auckland's got a prettier environment, but Christchurch actually has a nicer architectural sense than Auckland's jumbled mix of ugly high-rises and boxes. Downtown Christchurch is particularly nice, with Cathedral Square dominating the scene. I'm not real religious but I do love a good cathedral and this one has a fantastic timber ceiling. Christchurch also has some swell Botanic Gardens, a nifty Gondola ride where you can see the entire city laid out before you, and a bunch of good used bookstores I raided.

From Christchurch, we went over Arthur's Pass towards the west coast. The Southern Alps run down the spine of the island, and it was a good ride up into the heights. While the scale doesn't quite compare to Colorado's Rocky Mountains, it's still a mighty fine ride.

Castle Hill was a really cool place full of big limestone outcrops that made you feel like a midget and look like something out of a "Lord of the Rings" set. It's still mid-autumn here so there wasn't a ton of snow on the peaks yet.

We swept on up along the grey and wet West Coast back up to Tasman Bay, the South Island's northernmost point. We stayed here in the Motueka and Nelson areas for several days exploring the first part of NZ Europeans saw -- the namesake Dutch sailor Abel Tasman spotted land here back in 1642 (of course, he thought it was part of South America, but hey, nobody's perfect). It's really nice territory, full of sweeping orange-gold sand beaches, steep plunging hillsides and more sunshine than a lot of NZ usually gets.

We explored up along Golden Bay and Farewell Spit, swerving along some of the most dizzying curves of our trip to see sights like Waikoropupu, the largest freshwater springs in the land, and a group of friendly fur seal pups playing on a beach just a few feet away from us. We also took a nifty boat tour up along the coast of Abel Tasman National Park, then swung over to Nelson to visit Avril's cousin briefly.

Finally, we wound our way back down the East Coast through Picton, Blenheim and Kaikoura to spend another couple days in Christchurch before flying our way back to the Northland! I think I've rediscovered that New Zealand is actually a very big small country, full of hidden places well worth seeking out.

Going down south where the wind does blow

It's school holidays and time for a much-needed family getaway to the remote frozen wastelands of the South Island where the hobbits run free and wild. See you in a couple weeks!

A very merry kauri Christmas

Well, that was a whirlwind Christmas trip -- less than 48 hours out of Auckland -- but we had to negotiate work schedules and so forth and were pleased with what we got. We drove on up to Opononi, a flyspeck hamlet perched on the shore of the Hokianga Harbour about three hours north of Auckland. It's a place I last passed through in 2003 on our trip to Cape Reinga, and we'd been wanting to see more of.

The big attraction in this part of NZ is the kauri forest, the remnants of trees that once spanned most of the country (little-known fact: the lovely green rolling hills most people think of when they think New Zealand are actually the legacy of clear-cutting by man). Kauri are basically the redwood trees of New Zealand, and among the biggest trees on earth. As I've said before, I love redwoods and I quite like kauri too. They don't quite reach the heights of redwoods -- 160 feet or so max as opposed to nearly 400 feet for reddies, but they do have an astounding girth -- the biggest is 50 feet around. Running across some of the few remaining giant kauri is a bit like coming across a solid wood wall in the middle of the forest. The pictures don't quite do them justice in terms of scale.

This time we stopped at the most excellent Kauri Museum in Matakohe along the way. Despite being in the middle of nowhere, it's one of the better museums I've seen in NZ, with a look at kauri logging and its role in the pioneer settlements, in Maori legend, and its ecology. It's a huge sprawling place with a replica of a working sawmill and tons of big machines which Peter loved.

Also featured is a display of all kinds of kauri gum, which is a gorgeous glowing golden amber and was a prized resource. The museum had nifty displays of gum, included some carved into strange shapes (the kauri gum carved into the shapes of Christian Bibles is a nice statement of the 19th-century mindset).

Of course, despite it being summer in New Zealand, we had a mostly rainy getaway to Opononi, but it was still nice. The damp lends an evocative atmosphere to the kauri bush anyway, which is full of kiwis and such. (Not that we saw one -- actually, has anyone reading outside of biologists actually seen a kiwi in the wild? They're very stealthy.) We wandered on the great beaches of Hokianga Harbour, ate too much fish, chips and chocolate for our own good, opened Christmas prezzies and then came back to Auckland and opened still more! My kind of holiday, mate!

The return: What I missed (and didn't) about the US of A

...Whew, I just flew 10,000 kilometers and man are my arms tired. The boy and I had an excellent 2 1/2 weeks in sunny California, visiting family and friends and enjoying the blast furnace of 38C/100F heat after a very wet and chilly New Zealand winter so far. It was strange coming back to my homeland after nearly two years away, and seeing what had changed and what hadn't. It's not like I was gone long enough for huge differences, but I did have certain things hit me with more force than others.

Things I missed about the US (besides the obvious family/friends/hometown stuff, that is):
• Huge sprawling consumer society, the cheap goods. New Zealand is a little more expensive place to live. Certain things are more pricey than others – books, as I've said many a time before, come to mind. But geez, just about everything seems dirt-cheap in the US after a few years away – I picked up a bevy of new shirts/shorts/jeans for the wardrobe for less than $100. Admittedly I'm not a flashy fashionista and Target stores are high-end to me, but still, not bad!

• Friendly faces. Now, New Zealanders aren't rude by any means, but they are a bit more reserved than Americans as a rule, I find. Sure, it's a cliche, but if I'm walking by myself on a big empty sidewalk and pass someone, I find it's nice to at least say "Hello" or smile a bit, acknowledge the other person's existence for a millisecond. But when I do that in New Zealand, it usually is ignored. In the US, unless you're a really surly teenager, it's just kind of expected (unless you're in New York City I guess). Ditto with the behind-the-counter retail drones, who in America get the idea of "customer service" hammered into their heads and usually greet you with a bit of warmth, which sometimes is nowhere to be found in NZ retail. Is it sincere? Probably not, but heck, I still don't mind it.

• Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Sure, terrible for you, but come on -- peanut butter + chocolate. Yumm.

* New Zealand is beautiful, true, but so is California. The dry parched yellow hills of the Sacramento valley aren't much to look at, I admit, but the lovely foothills where I grew up, the infinite blue of Lake Tahoe, the granite epic scale of the Sierra Nevada and Donner Summit, the twisty, crowded charm of San Francisco – well, I love these places and always will.

• Breakfast cereal. They have it here, of course, but it's rather absurdly expensive to buy a box of American-style cereal so we gave it up in favor of oatmeal and Weet-Bix. But I do love a fine bowl of Crispix or Special K now and again.

• The San Francisco Chronicle. I always liked that paper. Jon Carroll rules!

• The Yuba River, quite possibly the best place on earth to while away August days with your boy, basking in ice-cold mountain water with big old granite boulders everywhere. And at one awesome pool a friend and I hiked to, we had foot-long trout zipping around utterly fearless mere inches from our swimming selves. Ahhh.

• Jason's Restaurant right on the shore at Lake Tahoe. Man do they do a good burger and fries.

• American microbrew beers, mostly impossible to find down here. NZ/Aussie ones are good too, but ahh, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale!

Things I didn't miss:
• Huge sprawling consumer society, the down side – too much of everything, really. Yeah, when I first got to New Zealand the smaller scale of shopping took getting used to, but now I generally don't mind it (except for the costs of certain items). But the sheer sprawling over-abundance in America of the shopping culture is just amazing. While it has its plusses, it also frequently surges into just "too much" of everything. The area around Sacramento has exploded in the last 20 years or so, particularly around Roseville, with city-sized shopping plazas and malls that are just kind of staggering in their scale, chewing away the landscape. Is it all really necessary, I kept wondering. I went into a Rite-Aid drug store and looked for some Tylenol to stock up on and stared in awe at the endless display of a good 100 varieties and brands of painkillers (compared to 20 or so in NZ). An entire aisle was taken up for Tylenol/Advil/Aspirin and all their varieties. Including flavored ones. Vanilla Tylenol they have now. Not chewable pills, mind you, but ones you just swallow. Repeat: Vanilla. Flavored. Tylenol. Really, do you wonder why other countries sometimes make fun of the US?

• Hot is nice when you've been cold, but 100-degree F days in the Sacramento valley, really, are a bit much. I do have to admit New Zealand, where it rarely gets above about 85F, is a little more my speed in summertime.

• America's health care "system." After two years of NZ's relatively smooth "socialist medicine," the utterly broken nature of American health care seems even more backward. Peter had a nasty runny nose for the first week of the visit, the kind of thing I wouldn't have thought twice about taking him to a doctor in New Zealand about. But in the US, uninsured (although we had travel insurance), a quick clinic visit would've run at least $150-$200 (vs. about $20 total in NZ). Fortunately Peter's nose cleared and we didn't have to think about it again, but man, what a reminder of how insane it is to have to constantly consider cost vs. medical needs in America. And I doubt it'll be fixed anytime soon.

• Gigantic gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks. Ye gods, they're huge. (And note to Americans: Complaining a lot about gas prices of $4/gallon when other countries, er, like New Zealand, pay about $8 a gallon just comes off as whiny.)

• American money. Man, it's just so boring looking. And get rid of the pennies already!

• Drivers who have no idea what a turn signal is. Funny thing I noted about New Zealand (which has about the same proportion of bad/good drivers as most places), even the really awful drivers use turn signals to indicate they're cutting you off. Seeing someone NOT use one is rather a shock, but it happens all the time in the U.S.

• Fat people. I know it's a cliche, but yep, an awful lot of Americans are quite grossly obese, and I kept seeing their bouncy flesh at county fairs, swimming holes, etc. There are overweight people in NZ too, but pound for pound (har har) they seem to be much more common back home still.

• American TV . New Zealanders generally only have 7-8 TV channels (unless they get costly satellite TV) which is just shockingly deprived to most Americans when they hear about it. There's no "cable" here. But after browsing Mom and Dad's 200-channels setup I remembered quickly how little there actually is worth watching on television. Sure, I liked that the kid-cartoon channels allowed me to get a Peter break at any time of day, and I loved watching "The Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" again, but really, it's still 200 channels and just not much on to me. ("The Daily Show" does air here but past my bedtime usually.) All I really need my TV for is "Doctor Who," "30 Rock" and "Lost," anyway.

More on the trek soon, and regular content to recommence as well!

"From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters"

...And so we're off, leaving this interminable Auckland rain behind! I plan on taking an actual vacation while we're back in the USA which probably includes no blog posting, so see you in a few weeks!

So what do you think?

As the boy and I get ready to leave for California, our first trip back to the "mainland" in nearly two years, I'm already bracing myself for being asked by pretty much every old friend and acquaintance "what I think of New Zealand." And I'm still trying to figure out the best possible answer. People don't really want to hear a lengthy essay when they ask these things, after all, but I kind of want to just avoid saying, "um, it's great!" Or maybe I could just go for the joke, y'know, "full of hobbits" or somesuch. Whatever I've learned in my time in New Zealand can't really be summed up in a quote or two, I guess. I do miss a lot about America and am really eager to catch up, but I also quite like it here, too.

The funny thing about living in a foreign country is how normal it all seems after a while. (This is probably a lot more true for a country like this that also mostly speaks English, though.) Life in its mundane rhythms is pretty much life wherever you are and everything seems normal enough eventually. Doesn't every place have people speaking Maori on the television and Vegemite on the store shelves? Flax bushes and torrential fast-moving weather systems and rugby are all everyday things, right?

Anyway – it has been a generally very good two years here, although, as I've whinged (another Kiwism) on the blog before, it's also been rather tough going sometimes – as it is for anyone 6,000 miles away from all they've known, as it was for my wife when she moved to a foreign country a decade ago.

The place you live is where you live and some days I actually forget entirely for hours at a time I'm not in Oregon anymore. You get good days when the sun shines over Auckland's volcanic cones and the beaches are shining with new sand and surf, you also get bad days where it's wet and grey and wet and drafty and wet (which has been most of July, unfortunately). I wish we had explored New Zealand itself more the last couple years, but the whole raising a preschool kid/getting jobs/buying a house has kept us pretty close to Auckland (which, as any Kiwi worth their salt will tell you, is really not "New Zealand" precisely).

But if you're one of the lucky few who sees me on our trip, don't expect sound bites – I'm still working it all out myself, mate! (And yes, I'm more likely to call you "mate" than "dude" – I just like the sound of it better, really.)

Countdown to vacation - one month

Great galloping galaxies, it's July 3 -- which means it's exactly one month till the boy and I fly the friendly skies the lonnnnnnng way back to California for my first visit to the States since we moved down under in 2006. I'm quite looking forward to time off work and away from the various household headaches we were slammed with in June. Back when I bought tickets it seemed ages away, but now it's nearly here. I'm eager to see the family and embrace the wide-open Americana after two years down here, and will be interested to see if it or I have notably changed all that much.

It looks like I'll get to see several old friends of mine while I'm there, including a mini-reunion of high school chums, some of whom I haven't seen in nearly 20 (urk) years now. I'm also planning a major shopping spree for clothes, graphic novels, music et cetera as, I've loudly said a few times, them things are quite pricey down here in the antipodes. And I'm finally going to try and get the estimated 30 or 40 boxes of miscellaneous books, keepsakes and papers stored in my parents' garage down here somehow. I've got a shipping company picked out so hopefully it will work out (the problem with shipping internationally is that you can find endless horror stories online about it which puts the black fear into you about your belongings ending up in a deep-water trench or something).

I'm kind of dreading how the boy, age 4 1/2, will do without Mama for 2 1/2 weeks and how I will cope as sole parental figure, particularly in that 13-hour flight. He's at that awkward age in between cuddly toddler and rambunctious boy, so it'll be interesting. Hopefully we'll keep him too busy enjoying the delights of grandparents and Northern California in August to get too homesick.

Meanwhile, enjoy your Fourth of July, Americans, as I alternately am blown away by winds and drown in an Auckland winter!

Deep into the redwood canopy: Wild Trees

One of my favorite places in the world has always been California's most remote regions, far away from the crowds and traffic, the foggy Northwesternmost coast of Eureka and Arcata and Crescent City. Redwood country. It's a long ways from anywhere – 5,6 hours at least from San Francisco along some really windy roads. The chilly damp, grey-skied and very green forests aren't for everyone, but every time I've visited friends and vacationed there, I feel like I'm visiting somewhere I belong.

Part of that big appeal is the redwoods, utterly epic giants of trees that are so big they become your environment rather than just part of it. You can walk through a redwood forest and not even see the tops of most of the trees. It's a cool place, full of much mystery, and so Richard Preston's great book "The Wild Trees" is like a travelogue of another planet – the world that exists on top of the redwoods. A few years back Preston wrote a fascinating New Yorker article following those who explored the redwood canopy – 200, 300 feet above the ground, where unknown to science until only a few years ago, entire ecosystems had formed in the crowns of redwoods. There are epiphytes (plants growing on the redwoods), soil formed over decades, species of animals unknown to science, and much more. Preston later expanded that article into this deeply evocative book.

"The Wild Trees" is a must for anyone interested in how much we still don't know about the natural world. He digs into the stories of those spellbound by the redwoods, a handful of dreamers, botanists and adventurers who've been scaling the redwoods, searching for their secrets. Gradually folks like Humboldt University professor Stephen Sillett realize just how little anyone knows about the inaccesible peaks of tall trees, and that hidden in the foggy remote canyons of Northwestern Cailfornia are trees that are the tallest in the world.

Preston - who wrote "The Hot Zone" a few years back – balances history, ecological musings and his own growing fascination with redwood country. He puts you right there as his cast scale redwoods with impossible skill – relying on a single rope or two to hold their life dangling 300 feet in the air. I seriously doubt I'll ever climb one of the world's tallest trees, but Preston's tense, spare prose put me right there in the canopy. (And harrowingly brings home what it'd be like to fall in one terrifying scene.) A New York Times review puts it well – "Preston combines the thrill of exploration with the quirkiness of those who choose it as their lives’ work."

He's clearly awed by the redwoods, but avoids too much new-agey tree-hugging sentiment in favor of letting the facts speak for themselves: "Botanists think that the oldest redwoods may be somewhere between two thousand and three thousand years old. They seem to be roughly the age of the Parthenon." And estimates are that since people began buzzing around, about 95 percent of the coast redwoods are gone. "The Wild Trees" is an invitation to a world most of us will never see, a reminder that there's a heck of a lot more going on in this big blue marble than we can imagine.

A quick zip around volcanic fields

It was getting to feel weird that we've been living in New Zealand now over a year-and-a-half, but we'd barely been out of the Auckland vicinity. Work, buying house, et cetera... we did a lot of touring on previous trips, of course, but heck, there's still lots to see. So when we finally had some joint vacation time last week, it was off exploring areas of New Zealand I've never seen before, down in southwestern corner of North Island in the Taranaki and Wanganui areas, and visiting the fearsome Mount Ruapehu.

There are really two New Zealands, as most kiwis will tell you – Auckland and everywhere else. There's a lovely rural beauty to the Waikato region just south of Auckland stretching along the spine of the North island. It's full of farms, sheep and cows, endless agriculture and green hills. Lovely stuff, mind you, but a lot of New Zealand looks like that, and we wanted new – the Taranaki area is quite grand, a peninsula jutting out of southwestern North Island with the pointy majesty of dormant volcano Mount Egmont (or Taranaki, as it's usually called these days) plopped right in the middle. We spent several leisurely days camping our way around this peninsula (which is quite tiny by American geography standards -- only a couple hours to go round the whole thing, really). Desolate beauty, the often cloud-shrouded mountain looming in the distance, the rough waters of the sea bashing around all the surfers who love this area (I kept having "Point Break" flashbacks, myself).

Unfortunately our digital camera decided to temporarily spaz out and I have no pics to show of the Taranaki area, so I picked a nice wintry shot I found online to represent, at right. You're able to drive right up towards the lower/middle of the mountain, and we stopped at the grand Dawson Falls area where on a viewing platform I was able to see farmland going flat and the sea in one direction, the towering ruggedness of Taranaki on the other. Not too many mountains where you can see the sea, too.

We explored the nice small towns in the area (including Wanganui, which has the single coolest, biggest kids' playground I've ever seen) before working our way back North again on the final day, and stopping at Tongariro National Park for more volcano action. This cluster of volcanoes in the middle of North Island is anything but stagnant – the biggest, Ruapehu, just exploded a bit in September. You can also drive right up to the bottom of Ruapehu, which is a popular ski area. It's very "Lord of the Rings" territory, and lots of the Mordor/Mount Doom action was shot in the area. The ski area, dry of snow right now, fascinated me as it was sharp, nasty-looking piles of lava rock everywhere. Wouldn't much like to fall on that even with snow covering it.

We also had grand luck with both mounts Taranaki and Ruapehu, where you're as likely to see nothing but cloud as anything. The skies parted nicely for both of them, and we had some gorgeous views up on Ruapehu, particularly. I would love to climb right up and hike around Ruapehu sometime when there's no 4-year-olds around. (But watch out the volcano doesn't blow up on you).

It's a nice reminder that New Zealand mostly isn't the traffic and typical urban annoyances you sometimes get sick of in Auckland. Now we just have to wait for our next vacation!

Notes from Sydney, Part 3

Ah well, a bit disappointed not to have more comments on my Sydney travelogue to date (I know, I'm an attention whore, but hey, aren't all bloggers? Validate me!), but here's the third and final installment for those who're interested…

We arrived back from our Blue Mountains train trip well and truly knackered, but there was still a fair amount of sightseeing to fit in during our final two days in Sydney. Saturday morning we were off early to the Sydney Aquarium, which Peter zipped merrily around for nearly two hours. Excellent displays of platypus, Australia's colorful fish (think Finding Nemo in live-action) and a harrowing shark tank you could walk through. Following that, the wife and I alternated some shopping trips and traded off minding the boy. Lots of folks from New Zealand actually go to Sydney specifically to shop, and things are definitely a good bit cheaper here – not quite U.S. Wal-Mart cheap, but there's an enormous selection, too. (If downtown Sydney really reminded me of anywhere in the U.S. I've been, it had to be New York City.) Loaded up on the books and CDs and clothes.

Saturday night, I ended up actually going to a show at the world-famous Sydney Opera House. While there on my tour Thursday, I'd found out that one of my favorite cartoonists, Seattle's Jim Woodring, was that weekend putting on a musical/animation and performance art showcase at one of the Opera House's smaller theaters, the Studio. I figured I couldn't pass up a chance to see something at the Opera House that wouldn't set me back a couple hundred bucks for a ticket. If you're not familiar with Woodring's art, it's like a surreal combination of Disney and Dali, dream-influenced, often pantomime imagery that is subtly creepy and often staggeringly beautiful. It's not for everyone, but his "The Frank Book" is a hefty gem of a book that shows off his truly unique style. At the Opera House, Woodring was launching an Australian tour with a show that combined Japanese-created animations of his art, slide shows and live music soundtracks, and his own performance art narration to his artwork – plus a Q&A. Quite a unique event, and dazzling to see some of his art come to life. Some of it veered a little too hard into experimental for me (particularly one guitar player whose "soundtrack" gave avant-garde a bad name; it sounded like he spent the entire time tuning up), but it was generally a terrific evening. And how queer it was for an American living in New Zealand to travel to Australia and see a cartoonist from Seattle?

On Sunday, our last day in Sydney, we had to get out on the gorgeous harbour and enjoy the scenery. (I think we saw perhaps two clouds during our entire time there, and the weather was a good 15-20 degrees warmer than Auckland has been.) We had the choice between Sydney's famous Bondi Beach or Manly Beach, but we picked Manly as you had to take the ferry to get there. The harbour is honestly one of the finest I've seen in the world – unlike, say, San Francisco, the ugly cranes and container ship traffic are nowhere to be seen (they're in Botany Bay further south), so it's all houses, skyscrapers and blue, blue water. Once we arrived in Manly, I felt like I'd ended up back in California – it looked just like Santa Monica, with a boardwalk, lots of shops and a huge, white-sand beach that gradually filled up with beach bunnies and surfers throughout the morning. Considering this was the seasonal equivalent of late November in the U.S., it still seemed like summertime – witness the bikini-clad volleyball players. We wished we'd brought our swimming togs as it was actually warm enough to take a dip. A fine place for a picnic Sunday lunch and people-watching. (Don't imagine moving there though – an article in the Sydney Herald pointed out the average house price there is AU$1.8 million!)

The ferry trip back to downtown Sydney was one of the more amazing sights we'd seen – that famous harbour view, Opera House, Harbour Bridge and all, was populated by literally hundreds of sailboats out enjoying the day. Remarkable, because at 9 a.m. or so when we went over to Manly the harbour was essentially empty. The ferry was practically threading its way through all the boats out on the harbour. Sigh. I wish I was a sailing man.

We finished off Sunday with some more shopping and bopping around, and I polished it all off with a visit to the excellent Australia Museum, which had some superb stuff – a massive, colorful mineral collection, and tremendous Aboriginal history displays (including one that had a fascinating look at the last tribe of Aborigines to be "discovered" by the white man – in 1984!). Lots of that strange, beautiful Aboriginal art, too, with its hallucinogenic images of the "Dreamtime."

I have to toss in a plug here for some of the excellent books I've read about Australia recently, including Jan Morris' opinionated and trivia-filled "Sydney," which I read while in town; Bill Bryson's hilarious "In A Sunburned Country," and another book by Tony Horwitz, the outback hitchhiking epic "One For The Road" – plus Robert Hughes' legendary look back at the nation's earliest convict history, "The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding."

Considering it's only a 3-4 hour flight away, I'm quite hoping we'll get to Australia again in another year or two for a visit – perhaps up to explore Brisbane and Queensland, perhaps, or over to Melbourne? After all, it's a big country, and there's a lot to see.