Back to Waiheke

My academic semester officially ended on Monday, when I took my last final exam. Hoping for the best on that one. In any case, most of the other international kids have now left. It was a bit weird, seeing everyone off. Everyone went out on Monday night and people were getting all emotional... it's not that I won't miss some people, but it didn't really affect me in the same way I guess. There are several people who I'll absolutely attempt to stay in touch with and see again, and I'm fully confident that this won't be too difficult in the age of facebook, skype, and relatively cheap airfare. And out of the three kids I did most of my traveling with, two also go to Georgetown, and one lives across the Potomac in Vienna, VA, so I can probably expect to see them around. For some of the other kids who've now left, I hope they go on to have nice lives.

But the long and the short is that several people who I saw as recently as Monday night are now back in America. Not me. When I booked my flight to NZ last spring, I planned to leave myself a few weeks at the end, and now I'm milling around New Zealand on my own for a bit. I've got a friend from my old school coming in from Australia in about 10 days, and we're going to travel around the South Island again during my last week here -- looking forward to that one. In the meantime, however, I had to find myself something to do, and today I finished my third day of work here on beautiful Waiheke Island.

Aerial photo of Waiheke Island, seen from the northeast

Waiheke is about an hour's ferry ride from Auckland, and is a popular tourist destination. At the beginning of the semester, I spent a day out here tasting wine and causing trouble. At the time it was actually my first trip outside of Auckland... amazing how things come full circle in that way. Anyway, about three weeks ago a friend loaned me her World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) guide for New Zealand. The way WWOOF works, essentially, is that people with some sort of credibility as organic farmers or gardeners list themselves in the guide, and then wayward travelers like me contact them. And in exchange for four hours of labor each day, "wwoofers" like myself get free housing and food. I figured Waiheke would be a nice place to spend a bit of time, so I sent out a few emails to people in the WWOOF guide, and was able to work out an arrangement to work for a retired couple with a beautiful plot of land overlooking some mountains and parts of the surrounding ocean.

Another guy came out here the same day as me, and the two landowners have mostly got us cutting up and splitting firewood for their wood-burning stove. The lady of the house, a native New Zealander, does most of the gardening, while the guy, an Australian import, generally works in the yard with us. At about 4 in the afternoon, they're currently sitting across from me playing scrabble, but each has now regaled me with stories of their multiple world travels. Actually, in a revelation that stands a good chance of winning the M.R.I.T.T.I.A.I.S. (Most Ridiculous Illustration That The World Is Actually Incredibly Small) designation for my time abroad, it turns out that the guy, Trevor, has visited my hometown of Poughkeepsie, NY, and spent some time in the 80s sailing on the Hudson River sloop Clearwater with legendary folk musician and activist Pete Seeger. For anyone reading who I didn't grow up with, I actually went to middle and high school with Pete's granddaughter, and I met Mr. Seeger on several occasions when he came in about once a year to play his music for us. The Clearwater boat belongs to the Clearwater organization, a local environmental advocacy group founded by Pete. It docks in Poughkeepsie and is basically a Hudson River institution, putting on many educational programs while the organization works on the river's behalf and puts on an annual music and environmental festival. Like many other local grade school children, I sailed on the boat myself with my fourth grade class.

So you can imagine my amazement when Trevor revealed that he, too, had sailed on the Clearwater before I was even born. I guess he met Pete while traveling on a cross-country march for global nuclear disarmament -- they spent nine months walking across the US, which is pretty remarkable on its own. Just before the march was over Pete invited "anyone who likes music, or boats" onto the Clearwater and Trevor in turn was introduced to life along the Hudson River. 23 years later and about 10,000 miles from home, I'm now cutting and splitting firewood for his stove.

We both know this guy

In doing so I've already become quite well-acquainted with the combination of chainsaw and axe, which is awesome. I'd used a power saw this past summer before coming out here, but there aren't many things more fun than starting a chainsaw. In turn, there are few things more satisfying than driving an axe through a large log. Talk about taking out aggression.

Anyway, before I leave Waiheke I'll be working here for another week or so. They've got a couple of unused mountain bikes, so I've been doing a bit of that in my spare time. The house is about a 25 minute walk from the beach -- thats also been a nice means of unwinding once the workday is over. At some point in the next week, a couple Irish guys I hung out with over the course of the semester will be coming out here as well, which should be fun.

****


It's no secret that people loosen up around alcohol -- that's why President Obama tried to tamp down the recent racial controversy between the white cop and the black Harvard professor by inviting the two for a White House "beer summit." And for better or worse, it seems that there's a lot of cultural exchange associated with drinking. Whether sitting around shooting the breeze or sharing one another's varied drinking games, for college kids from different countries this seems to be especially true. Some of the other American guys and I hung out a bunch the past few months with a group of freshmen New Zealanders, and we each did our best to further this tradition in the waning weeks of the semester.

In the Kiwis' case, it became a lot easier for us Americans to explain the game of baseball once we introduced to them via the drinking game of the same name. This game, as opposed to the actual sport, is modeled after beer pong and involves an arrangement of four red cups in a line on either side of the table. Like in beer pong, players split into two teams, with the team that is "up to bat" taking turns shooting at the cups. Front cup means a single, second one back is a double, third a triple, fourth a home run. For each cup back that is made, the other team has to drink the total sum (i.e. the full four for a home run). While this is going on one player from that other team stands behind the cups that are being shot at -- if the ball hits the rim of the cups and is then caught by the opposing player, it's an out. If the player shooting misses the cups altogether, it's a strike. Three strikes is an out; three outs and the other team bats, just like in real baseball. The score is also kept the same way, and if a player hits a cup and gets on base they can advance as many bases as the next batter who hits a cup. If you've got time, lots of beer, and you're feeling really adventurous you can play nine innings, but frequently the game doesn't quite last that long.

In any event, the New Zealanders could not get enough of this game. At every turn after we introduced it, it was all they wanted to play. When I ran into one of the kids at Burger King late last Saturday night, he told me that they'd even played it on their own that night. But this banner example of the sharing and adoption of different cultural traditions wasn't just a one-way street.

A few nights before, one of the Kiwi kids had mentioned off-handedly that we should all play possum before everyone went home. Curious, my friend Joe asked what differentiated the apparent game of possum from the animal that hangs from trees and is hated throughout New Zealand for decimating the local plant life as an introduced species.

Turns out it's a favorite pastime of some New Zealanders to climb trees. Me too. I'd never thought, however, to include drinking in the equation -- if anything that seemed sort of dangerous. But as New Zealand is blessed with many large trees with thick, low-hanging branches, the Kiwi kids explained to us that in possum, the entire group of participants climbs a tree, and no one is allowed to get down until they have consumed a personal case of beer. If you have to use the bathroom, you'd better find a stable branch. First one out of the tree wins.

Upon hearing of it, Joe and I made it a priority to find some time to play this interesting game. We did end up playing possum last Friday night -- Joe, me, and three of the New Zealanders. In practice, the game wasn't all that much of a game. We basically all just found comfortable spots, played some music from a portable radio, and sat around talking and drinking. It wasn't really all that different from sitting around drinking beer in somebody's living room, except for the fact that we were all sitting in a tree. When all the beer was gone, we climbed down, safely for the most part, although Joe took a bit of a spill. I can't remember who "won" -- to be honest I'm not sure we were even keeping score at that point.

Anyway, that's possum. Between that and baseball, it was easy this past week to feel a bit like a trader from a bygone era, exchanging ideas and traditions with people from far-away places. A couple Saturdays ago we got three Americans, an Irish guy, and six New Zealanders together and played a game of American football, followed my first ever game of touch rugby. Rugby was cool -- it's New Zealand's national sport, and after watching it all semester I finally got to play it for the first time. The Kiwis liked football. I'm used to playing pick-up games in the US, where there's an intense power grab on almost every play for who gets to be the quarterback. But I soon realized that one way to get around that is to play with a bunch of kids who can't throw a spiral. We taught the Kiwis the rules, but we made sure not to teach them too much...

****


I'll probably try to write at least one more post in my last few weeks here, but this one's long enough already. To whoever may be reading back home, have a safe and happy Thanksgiving. If there's one holiday I'm extremely bummed about missing, that would have to be it. Next year I'm eating twice as much turkey.

I'll leave you with a collection of miscellaneous photos I've put together from various recent outings:

Random Auckland Pictures (facebook)

All the best!

Cheers,

Matt

Game Six of the World Series

I sat here watching Game 6 of the worst World Series ever the other night, with a couple of Yankee fans and kids from New Zealand that kept asking questions about how baseball works. I hadn't thought much about it, but as a Mets fan I'm actually quite lucky to be so well-distanced from everything going on in the baseball world right now. The only team I hate more than the New York Yankees are the division rival Philadelphia Phillies... needless to say, it's been a tough week, as I spent most of the World Series saying things that I would ordinarily have considered quite blasphemous, like: "I don't hate the Yankees as much as I used to," or, "this is as hard as I've ever rooted for the Yankees. Go New York." And yet as tough as this World Series was to swallow across the world, I'm sure it would have been even more difficult surrounded by a high number of both Yankees and Phillies fans at school. The internet has kept me minimally engaged, but fortunately last night's game was the first game of the 2009 postseason that I actually watched in full.



Yes, it's a depressing time to root for the Mets, and this World Series hasn't made it any easier. Perhaps the biggest driver of my grudging respect for the Yankees this year and through the playoffs has been the fact that, no matter what you want to say about the Yanks buying a championship, they invested in the right players. If you want to prove that money isn't everything in baseball, look no further than the Mets, who with the second-highest payroll in baseball could manage nothing more than a pathetic 70-92 finish this season.

Besides, Mets fans will never be able to stand up to the Yankees in terms of success on the baseball field. We just won't -- the score is now 27-2 in terms of World Series championships... 8-2 since the Mets entered the league in 1962. If you really want to hit a Yankee fan where it hurts, remind them about how their greedy owners tore down an 85-year old piece of baseball history (the real Yankee stadium), in order to build an ugly, tacky replica with nothing additional to offer except more luxury boxes and some nice sushi restaurants for rich people with $300 box seats. I kept reminding both Yankee fans next to me how much better this World Series would have been had it been played in the old stadium.

But apart from the six little pieces of me that died inside this past week, one for each agonizing game of this World Series from hell, Game 6 was actually somewhat enjoyable to watch. As much as I normally root for the collective agony of Yankees fans everywhere, I actually felt good for my two friends -- far from bandwagoners, these kids are legitimate lifelong fans -- who were watching next to me and got to see their team win. Much better than Phillies fans, anyway, who would have been even more insufferable after winning a second straight title. Beyond that, it was kind of fun sitting around explaining baseball to a couple of kids who got the main idea but are far more used to watching cricket, even if it's a bit of a shame that their first introduction was a Yankees World Series victory. I even learned a few things about cricket in the process, as we compared the various similarities and differences between the two distant cousins throughout the game.

In any case, I'm glad this whole World Series thing is over. In a baseball season that started with some reservations on my part that I might be out of the country for that relished Mets championship run, I was disabused of any such notions by June, and in the end my location in far-away New Zealand became a very fortunate means for maintaining my sanity while my two most hated teams battled it out. With little pain, I even got my preferred outcome. Congratulations to the 2009 New York Yankees.

Perhaps, given my distance from it all, the 2009 baseball season can be written off as nothing more than a bad dream, a nightmare that served as a disturbing but fortunately minor blight on an otherwise great trip to a beautiful part of the world. This one should be a little easier to erase from my memory.

At least I'll keep telling myself that.


****

There's nothing to take your mind off a terrible World Series like a trip to the beach, and one way I was able to avoid following Games 4 and 5 was by traveling up north again to the Bay of Islands for an "overnight cruise" aboard New Zealand's finest oceanic hostel, The Rock. A converted houseboat, the Rock has been transformed by a husband and wife into the floating headquarters for a 22-hour trip in which you basically do as many things as you can that involve the ocean.

The Rock is quite spacious, actually -- the top level has sleeping space with capacity for around 40, including crew. The bottom level features a bar, a small dinner and lounging area, space for kayaks, fishing poles, and other supplies, and even a pool table at the front. Pool is not necessarily the best game for a boat, but the water was fairly calm and the balls stayed in place quite well despite the occasional swell which made for a few interesting shots, and a new wild card for any balls lingering too close to the pockets. We cruised out to our mooring, fishing in the process but not catching anything. Once we were anchored we fished for another couple hours... a few people caught small fish, but nothing significant. The idea was to catch some red snapper, apparently fairly abundant in the Bay of Islands, to then eat for dinner. Some guy lured a small shark, but we couldn't really eat that either, so the crew went to the backup plan and put some steaks on the grill for everyone.

We got into some kayaks after dinner and paddled around for a bit. It was a cloudy night, but the water was about as calm as the ocean gets and gradually the moon, full if not close to it, rose high enough to escape the low cloud cover. After a bit of kayaking and some after-dinner drinks, we all turned into our small bunks pretty early, falling asleep to the gentle movement of boat on water. Apparently it can get pretty rowdy aboard the Rock, but we went on a Monday night and the majority of the other passengers were either couples or older, more middle-aged folks, so things remained calm like the ocean that night and we went with it.

Sunrise

If you've never seen a sunrise at sea, I'd highly recommend it. When I awoke at about 6:30 Tuesday morning and walked out onto the deck, it was actually the second time I'd seen the sun rise over the ocean since coming to New Zealand. It had been overcast the first time, and there were a few clouds out Tuesday morning as well, but the sun eventually filled the sky and the water's reflection with a brilliant shade of orange as the day began. We put a few more fishing lures in the water, commencing what may have been the most peaceful morning of my life. Rod in hand, casting off the back of the boat with a cup of tea and the sun steadily emerging in the sky, I stood there quietly and took in the sights and sounds of a new day. Seeing the world in such a state of profound peace was an inspiring reminder that even with my two least favorite teams battling out to be the World Champion of my favorite sport, things are never as bad as they may sometimes seem.

I didn't catch any fish that morning either, but that wasn't really the point. We ate breakfast shortly after sunrise and the boat left its overnight spot, taking us to the small rock where we were to go snorkeling and diving for mussels. The water was a little rough, and apparently there's also a bit of an algae problem in the Bay of Islands, so you couldn't really see much in the way of fish or other cool marine life. It was also freezing. I grew up taking family vacations to Maine, where the ocean in the summer might hit 70 degrees on a good day. They also gave us wetsuits. But it was still freezing.

Still, diving for mussels was probably one of the most satisfying things I've done recently. I normally don't have much patience for any sort of diving -- I've got poor breath control, and I'm not a very good swimmer. But you can often find mussels attached to rocks just below the ocean's surface, and as I braced myself against the large snorkeling rock with one hand, I atoned for my failures as a fisherman by pulling off mussel after mussel with the other. Mussel "diving" included very little actual diving, which suited me nicely. By the time I was done I alone had probably pulled off close to a dozen mussels... clearly I was quite proud of myself.

Around 1 o'clock we anchored at our next spot, a short kayak's paddle away from a large uninhabited island with a couple of hiking trails. Though it's now uninhabited, supposedly this island was actually the sight in the early 1800s of a series of events that ultimately led to New Zealand's first official public execution.

When the British first came to New Zealand, the Bay of Islands was an important point of interaction between Europeans and Maori. The legend in this case goes that there was a British fisherman who brought his family out to this small, isolated island and built them a house. When the fisherman was tragically lost at sea, his family was left without a provider, or anyone else to do the tough tasks necessary to survive in such isolation. Eventually, the man's wife was assisted by two men, one British and one Maori, who fished for food and helped the family in their daily living while she cared for the children. The arrangement worked out well for a time, but eventually the Englishman, a gruff seafarer type with a lust for women and alcohol, began bullying the Maori man and pushing him around. The Maori man apparently couldn't take it anymore one day and drove an axe into the back of the Englishman's head. From there he essentially went crazy, burning down the British family's house with the mother and children inside after she objected to the axe he put in the back of the Englishman's head. When one of the children escaped, he chased the boy, killed him with another axe to the head, and threw him off the highest point of the island.

Here's where the public execution part comes in: at this point the Maori man may have felt he was in the clear, but many other local chiefs had seen the smoke rising from the island as the house burned, and upon paddling their canoes to the island to investigate, soon found out what had happened. Fearing that the situation could be damaging to the cooperative relationship British and Maori had cultivated in the Bay of Islands during that time, the chiefs decided to turn the Maori man into the authorities, which resulted in his ultimate hanging some number of weeks later in the fledging city of Auckland.

This story may or may not be true, but it certainly came from somewhere, and it made for some good entertainment as one of the crew members shared it with us while we stood at the top of the island's highest hill, from which the Maori man is alleged to have thrown the British boy. The site where the family's house supposedly stood is now a flat grassy area that certainly looks like it could have once had a structure on it.

Lookout point (click to enlarge)

In any event, the lookout at the top of the island was absolutely magnificent. You could see straight out the mouth of the bay... if you follow that course long enough, you'll find yourself somewhere on the far northeast coast of Russia.

We came down from the lookout, got back in the kayaks, and returned to the Rock. From there it was time to cruise back to shore in Paihia, but on the way back the crew cooked up all the mussels we had caught earlier in the day, and I learned that sea urchins are in fact edible. The process of eating a sea urchin might seem a bit grotesque, if it involved a species that most people know is alive -- sea urchins are those ovular things that are covered in hedgehog-like spikes... you've probably seen one if you've ever been to a rocky beach. After catching a sea urchin, which continues to move its spiky legs even after being removed from the water, one proceeds by driving a knife into the hole at the top (its mouth), tearing the shell apart, and eating the eggs on the inside. It sounds disgusting, but they're actually quite good.

At any rate, we got back to the wharf at Paihia after a little over the promised 22 hours, and drove back to Auckland with a car full of satisfied, World Series-escaping customers. Game 5 was being played as we drove back -- had the Yankees won that game, I would have missed the end of the series altogether, which would have been the best possible scenario. As fate would have it, however, the Phils extended the Fall Classic for one more game, and I ended up sitting in my room on Thursday night here, watching Game 6 on an mlb.com live webcast. With a couple of Yankee fan friends, it was like being forced to watch a car wreck in slow motion, in that I probably wouldn't have put myself through the agony ordinarily.

Perhaps it was good that I got away for a night and day, in order to prepare myself for the trauma of watching these events unfold. As I've mentioned, with this stinker of a baseball season, I'm lucky to have been so far from the action in the first place. I've now survived, though, and I can talk all about my baseball-related feelings. Maybe the Mets will be good next year. Right now, however, if you haven't seen them yet, I've got some pictures of another beautiful place in New Zealand that helped me get through the end of this one:

The Rock overnight cruise (facebook)


It was a great time, and I'd highly recommend it if anyone ever finds themselves out around these parts. Random, I know, but I'm continually surprised how many people in my life are connected somehow to this crazy country, so it's not completely unrealistic that that situation could present itself.

Anyway, to everyone reading, I hope all is well --

Cheers,

Matt


World Series logo image courtesy midwestdiamondreport.com