Zealantics picture spectacular!!

Kia Ora and Hello!

Well, the time in New Zealand is winding down, as you might have guessed if you've been following the frequency of the posts.  In fact, there is only one more post to write...but that post is not this post.  This post is dedicated to showing some of my favourite pictures I've captured this year; the idea is to write a few words on each snap...but I might write a lot, or just a couple.  Inconsistency! 
And.....go!

This was the first picture I took upon arrival in New Zealand.  Looking at it brings me back to the strange mindset I was in at the time: no plans, nowhere to live, and no sleep for the last 30+ hours.

The first thing I did was charge off to the war memorial museum (much better than Te Papa in my opinion) to check out some Pasifika/Maori culture, which led me to this dimly-lit wooden house.  As we all padded around shoeless I remember thinking that they could carve BC's people under the table..but I guess it's just a stylistic difference.  The man meditating at the bottom of the pole seemed content.

Soon I was off to Paihia to see the storied Northland region, replete with tree ferns and mangrove swamps.  I made certain to hold the camera with two hands as I leaned off the boardwalk; it wouldn't have done to drop it less than two weeks into the trip.

Perhaps the most flattering picture of Upoko Manor that I ever took, taken from the time in which I didn't despise being there yet.  Much to the contrary: I was excited to be out of the transient lifestyle necessitated by hostel life.  Bedbugs, boxed wine, and precipitous weight loss were in the offing..the present was simple joy drawn from food stability and a room of my own to sleep in.

It seemed like this bush, directly outside my window at the Manor, never stopped flowering.  Despite this, I never really saw it being frequented by bees.  This was right before it got punishingly cold in 'the house that insulation forgot'.

This was the fun side of the great cold snap that came in not long after I moved into the Manor.  Apparently it was the first time it had snowed there in 40 years...note the still defiantly-flowering bush.

Wellington, on a good day, has a lot to recommend it.  It's when the wind became freshening, rather than unbearably grating.

Here we see a west coast Canadian and a Scot enjoying a sporting event in their natural habitat: the rain.  Canada was even in the lead for about 40 seconds in this game vs. the mighty All Blacks!

I tried on a number of occasions to capture Wellington's downtown at night from the top of Mt. Victoria...this was my favourite of those attempts.  The heads you see were there for the Guy Fawkes fireworks.

Here we see the home distillery set up by an American at Upoko Manor.  At that time there wasn't much to do if there wasn't a rugby game on to watch, so watching hooch get made passed for entertainment.  Well, unless Stenchomort showed up...then it was time to go hide.

I found myself walking down this road in blasting sunlight (with a 40+ pound bag!) while hitching to Nelson after first arriving on the south island.  It was the kind of day where the odd patch on the back of your hand that you didn't screen up would get an amusing sunburn.  It took a couple miles, but soon two English ladies spirited me to the next crossroads.

I think this is my favourite shot from my time on the Abel Tasman coast track.  This was taken a few hours into the walk, when the weather was unbelievable...at least compared to how it ended up - wind, rain, and incredulous looks from me at anyone who was starting the walk from the opposite direction.

I hitched down the entire west coast of the south island...and on review kind of liked this picture the most.  I mean glaciers, rivers, forests....we've all seen those.  But what the hell is going on in this sign? Beware of oddly square ruts if you're biking (it was in the middle of a flat parking lot)?  Watch out for flying mid-crash bikers?  The west coast could be mysterious.

This picture summed up the prevalent young male fashion in Alexandra, where I spent my Christmas having beers in a backyard pool and trying to get a mild sunburn for novelty's sake.  Suffice to say, I succeeded... unlike this guy's sartorial instincts when he went for this look.  Note the sheep shearing contest tanktop sponsored by one of the cheapo beer companies.

Not every snap was of happy-go-lucky material.  This is approximately what Christchurch looked like when I visited, a scant year or so AFTER the earthquake.  Maybe the Kiwis will break out some shovels or something one of these months...it was very weird.

Compare and contrast the smoking ruins of Christchurch with the ultra-opulent neighbourhood I moved into after a slight homeless departure back up in Auckland.  I think this was my favourite of all of the gates.

I spent an afternoon on the banks of the Turangi river waiting for a school group to raft their way down to where I was, and passed the time by making weird little rock towers with my one functional arm (my other arm being in a sling and necessitating nausea-inducing painkillers at the time).

I enlarged this photo so that you can see what I regarded as the height of a weird culture amongst Maori/Pasifika guys in New Zealand: wearing completely arbitrary NHL/NBA team gear.  Many were the Vancouver Grizzlies hats worn by guys with names like Mahi, Loketi, and Matasulueva...but this custom sleeveless jeanjacket with a huge Anaheim Ducks logo sewed onto the back was easily the best I saw.

I'll close with one of the last photos taken, while seeing the Flight of the Conchords at Auckland Town Hall.  The way the light was hitting his shiny square box hat..breathtaking.

Only one more entry to go, and then it's off to the airport for me.  Bigger and better things await!  Exotic adventures!  Less poverty!

Of trips, traipsing, and yet more trips

Time has a way of accelerating when uncertainties shrink into the background noise of your life: once a bearable job is acquired and you have enough pairs of socks/underwear, it’s pretty easy to let autopilot take over.  So it was for some time in my Auckland existence.  There were the usual kinds of ups and downs that everyone traffics in, regardless of how mindlessly chipper they manage to appear when you bump into them at the grocery store, but my life had acquired a new buffer force (a solid job).  As a result the lowest I got during this time was around the time my hockey team made an inglorious exit from the playoffs…I shrugged, had an imitation Heineken beer (the highest profile NZ beers are invariably Heineken knockoffs), and got on with my life.

 When an opportunity to get out of town while simultaneously still getting paid arose, therefore, you can imagine my enthusiasm in taking it.  When the schoolboys are in 4th form (grade 9) they are given the chance to go down for a weeklong stay at the school’s private ski lodge in order to hike the Tongariro crossing (arguably the most famous day-hike in the world), spelunk some nearby limestone-y depths, and white-water raft to their hearts’ content.  Each trip has space to two staff members to go along (at slightly more than their usual wage), and essentially perform a bit of crowd control while getting to lounge in the lodge spa/be catered to/do all the activities noted above for free.  Fantastic, I thought.

 So it was I found myself on a bus full of excited punk kids winding through the hill country on the west side of lake Taupo en route to the hamlet of Ohakune, where the lodge is located and (perhaps more famously) the carrot capital of New Zealand – which in true NZ style is celebrated with a 30 foot high metal carrot on the outskirts of town.  After a few hours of hill and curve-induced nausea due to NZ’s reliance on building up old country roads rather than making nice straight highways, we spilled out of the bus to unpack and meet the lodge’s outdoor instructors.  They were both young guys equally nice, in an inane kind of way, who immediately set the boys doing a series of near-impossible tasks involving ropes/wood/swearing as a way to suss out who should be group leaders while standing inside a heated porch.  As our charges went through their paces in the surprisingly cold alpine air (I had thoroughly adapted to the sub-tropical Auckland climate by this time), they wistfully informed us that the camp’s caving quotient had to be regrettably canceled due to flooding in the cave area.  It was a slight disappointment, but nothing to sink my spirits; I was happy to have gotten out of Auckland, regardless of activity, and would be happy enough with the epic hike and rafting expeditions to come.

 A couple days of preparatory dayhikes and telling the boys to be quiet/listen to the instructors later, the instructors had a bit of unwelcome news.  As the boys were off washing up/getting ready for dinner the other teacher from AGS and I discovered, to our mild annoyance, that despite the weather being glorious we weren’t going to be able to do the famed Tongariro crossing.  The group was, apparently, too large to walk along a well-defined path for 8 hours…but not to worry, as some other mountainous walk would be found.  My crest assumed its natural fallen position (my drawing card now essentially having vanished), though not in an outwardly-visible way so as not to tip the boys off.  There was about an hour before that night’s massive dinner – to carb the boys up for a walk they weren’t quite going to take – which meant it was time for the nightly touch rugby competition.
 One of the only things that people know about the Kiwi population is their love of rugby, which isn’t an exaggeration at all.  They all grow up playing it, in one format or another, and thus are all mostly quite awesome at it by the time they are 13/14 years old.  The boys badgered me into playing on one of the teams (the other teacher was a bit more older/fragile so it fell to me), which proceeded to unfold in predictable fashion: I kept getting thoroughly faked out/passed around by the stars of the opposing teams while barely keeping up my own part on offense when it came to distributing the ball.  My high moment came when I craftily used some low-hanging branches as a screen and ran, unopposed, into the undefined “end zone” area…and then apparently a bit further.  By the time I touched the ball down I was apparently past the end of the zone (helpfully unmarked by any line/laid down garment/etc), and thus not scoring a try.  “Ah well,” thought I, as my team rotated out to await our next turn.

 Dinner was about 15 minutes away by this point, which got me to thinking I could beg off in some faux-administrative capacity.  This, I was told by the boys, was unacceptable, and so I stayed on for one more round of play; truth be told I was starting to ‘get it’ a bit more, which was leading to better plays/defence and the occasional long run out the back of the end zone, so I only semi-reluctantly agreed to play one more cycle.  The boys were loving having a teacher in play at any rate, and that it was one you could outfox with even a modicum of rugby acumen was just that much better.
 They also had found a juicy target to aim kickoffs to, and kickoff they did time and again.  One such kick wobbled in a bit low as I moved forward to take it, hitting the ground right in front of my outstretched low hands.  I managed to bring it up but not my diving momentum, which sent me sprawling forwards as I do most things: awkwardly.  If there is nothing to run into this just means an embarrassing flop onto the grass and likely turnover, after which you dust yourself off and get back to your line; when there is, however, something to run into (in this case a Samoan teen), the standard move – which I performed beautifully – is to collide with an overdeveloped calf and break your collarbone.  I walked off the field in some duress to a waiting icepack, and proceeded to experience shock for the first time: I sweated, shivered, tingled, and felt nauseous while I reflected on my 28-year run of not breaking a major bone.

 The upshot of this was I didn’t have to go on the underwhelming nature hike the next day.  The downshot (if that’s a word) is that I was also never going to go white-water rafting on the way back to civilization during the camp’s last day.  I contented myself with studying Japanese while making the best rock stacks I could using my one fully functional arm, and piled the boys back onto the bus after their big splash with a tinge of regret and a fuzz of painkillers I’d garnered after a doctor had examined me for 45 seconds in order to confirm my asymmetrical clavicles.
 The boys unironically began to sing a complete round of ’99 bottles of beer on the wall’ as we left the rafting access road, a process only interrupted by loudly yelling “Baaaahtya!!!”, the name of one of the 7th form leadership boys that had come on the trip, like so many brainless gulls.  I exchanged a knowing nod with the other AGS staff member as we plugged into our ipods and endured a long-feeling ride back to Auckland.  On arrival I piled everything I had brought onto my right (uninjured) shoulder and made my way back across the street battered, broken, and a little bit defeated.  Ah well, nothing an imitation Heineken couldn’t halfway fix.

                                                    This picture makes me think of UTV

Of support, snacks, and snappy dressing

There is a distinct flavour to working in the field of learning support, which is a notion which was brought down to me as I listened to a remarkably incompatible piano solo. Duke (if I’m giving him a fake name, I’m giving him a cool one damnit) was in his form’s music class, all of whom were happily composing away using garage band on the fancy Macs in the (music department’s own) computer lab; their assignment was to create a standard 12 bar blues progression and use it as a base for a solo improvised section given a set of notes to use. Duke and I had taken what seemed like an inordinate amount of time selecting pleasing drum/guitar/bass loops, which had put him in a position to be both funky AND fresh. At this point I got him set up to record and set off to help his compatriot from learning support, King (why not?), who I could tell was getting a little frustrated with the user interface by the escalating inadvertent E.T. impression he was doing – which is one of the more endearing quirks of any of the department’s usual suspects, in all honesty. With King safely jamming away – having a string quintet launch into life with a midi keyboard-stroke is pretty impressive, after all – I came back to listen to what Duke had produced over the painstakingly produced Spector-esque wall of sound.

I knew something interesting was going on when I realised that Duke had played something at approximately 3 times the tempo of our blues jam arrangement. The end result of Duke’s keyboard throw-down was actually a jaunty classical-sounding piano tune (Allegra, it might be called? Something that brought allergy medicine to mind), which was played at lightning speed and keyboard-punishing strike-weight. There was something pleasingly surreal to the entire situation, and I found myself smiling and giggling a bit to myself as I listened to the last bit of the audio madness that had been crafted. When Duke saw this he too began to laugh, and soon King and the rest of the boys nearby were enjoying the kind of contagious laughter that only sugar-fueled young teens seem to produce. It only increased in volume when, mid-chortle, Duke took on a sudden serious expression and said that “you should get a mouth operation…NOW!!” before returning to the stepped-up merriment in the music class. Learning support is an interesting department.

The main problem, from a writer’s perspective, is that I can’t seem to describe it without extensive use of similes. Composition-wise, it is about as ethnically diverse as a South African yacht club – fresh from my recent stint in the land of the fiery sun (the south/being homeless), I was easily the darkest complexion at the coffee break table. Similarly it is about as youthful as those wraparound cataract sunglasses you often see at the cheaper malls – though at least they could be used to look at young women while you walk around town: there was to be no such luck for my day-to-day existence. The ladies (actually quite wonderful and nice one and all, I will emphatically say) I work with come from the time before you could name your child after a wind, emotion, or excerpt from a dyslexic spelling test….every day I happily sat down for coffee with some combination of Moira/Tracy/Janine/Janet/Deborah/Eunice with a dusting of Debbie/Geraldine and/or Phyllis, and was quite pleased to do so.

For a start it led me into conversations I never imagined I would be part of. On one memorable occasion a full 25-minute coffee break was taken up by an animated breakdown of stapler preferences in terms of weight, colour, durability, and capacity; my contribution – asking which of their favourite stapler models could shoot staples with the highest speed and accuracy – led to a good natured series of titters at my expense. It was, apparently, something that the ladies had never thought to include in their surprisingly technical breakdowns. I put my coffee mug into the dishwasher after carefully opening the spring-loaded door directly into my shin, and set off for class.

I hopped into my temperamental time machine and made my way to the end of the term, coasting to a temporal stop just in time to attend the much-ballyhooed ‘Headmaster’s shout’. This was a wondrous opportunity to eat as much ‘fuzh and chups’ and you responsibly could, all the while absorbing a perpetually-refreshing glass of many imported beer varieties, and it was fantastic. In fact, I was excited enough about this prospect that I had gone home for lunch hours before the party (as is my wont) and had adorned myself with a tie (as was my want) so that I would have something to loosen up. The vast majority of the largely 50 and up staff had never seen me due to my somewhat limited circle of movement (I don’t need to help the ‘A’ kids, you see), and so it was that I came to be speculatively eyed as I moved from fish to fish. Soon a stream of introductions began to seek me out – as a young fit new male teacher – with a series of requests to do clubs, trips, and (I suspect) one of those introducing himself. My protective cloud of Learning Support hens had flown the coop some hours previous, and I was suddenly free range and fair game – or so it would seem.