Of beds, bugs, and bad behaviour.

Sleep, and by which I mean deep and worry-free slumber, is obviously critical for one’s perfect physical and mental health. It’s rather like oxygen, or crucial transcripts you accidentally left on another continent: you only really realize when they are not there all of a sudden. When you are forced to get up early to shoot off to some job or class you really aren’t that interested in you feel the lack of perfect sleep in a visceral way, as the day crawls by your unimpressed visage only to repeat itself anew with the next ring of the alarm.

But what, then, if you have nothing to wake up for, but still are incapable of getting satisfying slumber? I found myself in this situation as I began my life in Wellington. My primary goal was a bit of menial job-hunting to help support my raging food addiction (if I don’t get something to eat at least once every day I stumble through life listless, pains shooting through my stomach) which, as you know, is one of the more depressing things an overqualified university graduate can do. Dauntless, I would hand out resumes and run errands in town every day. While it is true that I eventually found weekend work in a local Irish pub, the main effect of this long process was that I began to shrink.

Having to run up and down a hill taller by far than any of the town’s skyscrapers, as it turns out, is a calorie burner. Carrying every weighty morsel of sustenance needed to stop the hunger pangs (the first step is admitting you have a problem) up the slope becomes almost a zero-sum game, as you sweat into your t-shirt with aplomb. I could only assume at this point that my skin was irritated by all this exertion and unusual sweating, as I began to break out in odd places. Not one to be afraid of a zit, however, I simply doubled down on my soapy showers and continued on with my job-seeking life.

Life went on as the snows passed and I began to perfect the fine art of picking up empty beer glasses for negligible remuneration. I was still leaking money overall, but at least I had a job to do, and one that happily required me to wear a long-sleeved shirt. This was a semi-crucial detail, it turned out, as I was continuing to break out in sometimes spectacularly itchy fashion – even on non-traditional sweat areas like my forearms and, most annoyingly, between my fingers. By this point I had ruled out anything fungal or bacterial as I had been scrupulously cleaning both myself and the sheets/blankets, but had come upon a slightly more sinister possibility in my internet research. I resolved upon an experiment.

I’ve never been the kind of person who can fall asleep during a movie…in fact I’ve always privately marvelled as childhood friends/college roommates often actually put on something to fall asleep to. The low-rent lullaby effect has always been lost on me, as any stimulus stands a fair chance of drawing my ever-waking attention. Knowing this, I put on a lengthy comedic podcast (my other addiction), turned off the lights, and retired to bed around midnight – though not before rigging my light switch’s dimmer up with a string I kept near to hand.

I lay completely still for over an hour in the dark trying to focus only on aural stimuli, rather than physical, as the crucial part of the experiment. This is a difficult feat at any time for me, a naturally fidgety type, but I persevered in the name of dogged inquiry. As the show ended I sharply brought the dimmer up to blinding light level and, after a moment’s visual adjustment, took in my immediate surrounds.

Unlike the aforementioned Mick Jagger I did get some satisfaction, though in a way I never hope to again for the rest of my life. Happily sitting in the inside bend of my left elbow was an insect; well, sitting doesn’t quite describe what it was doing, fully. I was in the arresting process of being subtly consumed by the said insect, a process I’ll fully admit I reacted to with excessive force. Jumping up to the mirror in my room I found another engaged similarly just below my right ear, and after a frantic and unrepeatable dance of self-flagellation (he had another friend on my left shoulder blade) I let out a string of obscenities both lengthy and inventive. I tore the mattress off its frame/box spring combination unit and gave it a lengthy inspection, then began to repeat the process with the bed frame itself. This lamentable piece of furniture, I’ve since found out, was acquired on the cheap right before my arrival, as the room’s previous occupant had his own bed set. Alas.

I had found the source of my ‘skin condition’ in the form of a revolting multitudinous conglomeration within the strangely antiquated bed base which, after a few moments of frenzied activity, soon found itself flying off the back deck and crashing down three stories into the bushes below. My remarkable weight loss was further contextualized as I watched it arc down into the darkness, and after a thorough sweep of every crevice in my now maliciously-aspected room turned up a number more maleficent tenants (which I’ll admit met some cruel and unusual ends) I could finally sleep, though now with the certain knowledge of what hidden terrors awaited my inattention.

In the end I was left to sleep on the floor, with occasional red-marked visits, for some time until a new bed frame arrived to elevate me. After the simple application (taken from an internet message board concerning night time scorpions in west Texas) of water-filled metal cans to the bottoms of the bed legs I was finally able to slumber and wake up more full of vim and vigour than I left the last day with. It is, after all, remarkable what solid and worry-free sleep will do for your physical and mental health: as surely as an oxygen-deprived pearl diver returning to the surface, I began to feel better immediately. I recommend blissful sleep to any who haven’t yet tried it.

Of Wellington, winter, and Whanau.

I had it firmly in mind that I was due some party time on this trip by the time I had reached Wellington. After all, the journey thusfar had been an exercise in sightseeing and responsible budgeted trips to the supermarket, and little else: Wellington was to be ennui’s Waterloo. Imagine, if you will, my disappointment when my German germs refused to vacate for days. I booked into the giant mega-chain party hostel in fine spirits, if poor health, and proceeded to do very little for days apart from listening to the ever-present Germans prattle on about Anschluss and Lebensraum (one assumes) and blowing my nose.

The trouble was that despite my still present desire to see as many sights as possible, I was almost completely bereft of energy. After two days I had decided that Wellington would be a nice city to at least stop over in while I did the laborious accreditation process involved with teaching in New Zealand – which indeed was my plan to avoid starvation and homelessness – and to experience some more settled social time; after two nights I had decided that any more time spent in hostels was likely to grind my health down to a pitiable stump.

So it was that I began to enquire after rooms advertised in various formats throughout the city, with an initial remarkable lack of success: when I at last got in to be shown a place it was the most dismal cinderblock student housing imaginable. Eschewing that abode for ‘the field’ I returned to my street beat, eventually finding purchase with an old lady who, after an odd public interview process, brought me up to her rental abode. It was ugly, boxy, incredibly dated in terms of décor, and newly carpeted: I of course took the room at once.

At last I had a mailing address, and a place to base my further explorations of the Wellington area. I also had a host of attendant in-house problems, most pressing at the time seeming to be my lack of clothing: I had put the vast majority of my accoutrements into storage in Auckland in a well-meaning but short-sighted effort to ease my travel around the country. Lamenting this decision somewhat I quickly jetted back to Auckland, soon to experience something entirely different.

The crux of the problem that soon arose was my optimism soon after my initial NZ arrival. One of my first planned expenses was some camping gear, to be used on the ill-fated Northland venture; part of this purchase was a canister of fuel for my stove, which of course I never got to use. After realizing that I would never be able to fly back to Wellington with what amounts to a pressurized bomb in my baggage, I convinced myself by a combined assault of economics (I was unemployed) and mathematics (flying is more expensive than public transport) that taking the bus back to Wellington was a good idea. I certainly didn’t want to throw away my wonderful unused fuel, or pay for the extra baggage I would have flying back for that matter, and thought I would be able to see lots of the country on the slow road back. In a way, I was right on the last count, but not how I had anticipated.

I made my way to the back of the bus (which as you’ll remember is where all cool kids must sit), and settled in for the ride. While it is true that I saw more sheep fields and rolling hills than is strictly necessary for one lifetime, what I saw inside the bus was more illuminating. As people got on and off during the 11 (ELEVEN) hour ride back to Wellington, it became more and more obvious that I was something of an anomaly as a white person sitting at the back of the bus amongst what I quickly realized were all of the Maori in the coach. Once I realized what kind of quiet racism was occurring I decided to be an inverse Rosa Parks, and returned to the back after every rest stop; after all when had I had the chance to hear spoken colloquial Maori amongst families before?

I know I was something of a curiosity to the kids around me with my fresh fruit and 800+ page novel: healthy eating and voluminous reading apparently marked me out as “fancy” to one boy, who joyfully informed me of this fact. All in all it was a fascinatingly different bus riding experience, listening to the voices - most notably one rotund woman’s, who sounded eerily like Jabba the Hutt with emphysema as she worked through the dominantly consonant language alongside her pack of cigarettes – and looking out over the plateau south of Lake Taupo as the sun set. Alas that the last 5 hours of the ride was in featureless and interminable darkness; suffice to say Wellington was a welcome arrival.

So it was that I climbed the mountain – as atop a mountain my abode abided – back to my place of rest with 50lb suitcase unhappily held abreast, dodging descending mountain bikers and an urge to simply perish on the spot. I started my accreditation process, filled my pantry, and huddled by my burnt hair-smelling space heater as the cold weather buffeted the house. The view through the single pane windows (and sound through the insulation-less walls) of the most significant and lengthy winter storm system to hit town in over forty years was magnificent in some ways, and incredibly demoralising in others. The reality of my having moved to New Zealand in the middle of the winter began to set in, as my down-comforted bed became a warm refuge. At least I had the ability to make more ‘real’ food, catch up on correspondence, and have a room entirely to myself so that I might sleep peacefully. As Mick Jagger once said, however, you can’t always get what you want; a completely unexpected need was about to present itself.

Of drops, disease, and domesticity.

There are times in life when one begins to truly regret avoiding all the fatal accidents that could have happened up to that point in one’s career. As I pushed through the fronds back towards the feeble path that had led me to the Paihia summit this thought struck me, and I was forced to debate whether my current situation was one of those times. The rain was falling like the backdrop to a Vietnam war movie, and would have obscured vision even if I hadn’t been wearing my glasses. As it was the path itself quickly became obscured first by the droplets loitering a half inch in front of my eyes, and subsequently by the small creek that it became as the rainwater found its path of least resistance.

I stood, a touch forlornly, under the meager foliage of a Kauri tree just off the path and considered my options. Following the path would mean a quick-ish escape from the increasingly dangerous rainforest (from time to time a miscellaneous branch would be knocked off a tree by the force of the rain) but would semi-irretrievably soak my hiking boots, which in a hostel-living situation is basically a Gordian knot. I chose instead to do a little amateur orienteering and strike across a more hilly and direct region back to the school road trailhead, which was probably the better choice in the end as I saved my boots – if at some personal expense.

I arrived back at the hostel ‘wet as’, as the Kiwis would say, and immediately put on a strip show in my room for the sympathetic German roommates en route to blanketing my body heat back up to acceptable levels. Thus began my great traveling sickness for this trip, as my immuno-depressed corpse sucked up all their delightful Deutschland antigens with delight. I extended my stay and concentrated on futile recovery efforts while the crazy storms continued apace outside my slightly leaky window; eventually I judged that the storms had abated (they hadn’t) and that I was on the mend (I wasn’t), and once more hefted my sizable backpack for a good old fashioned hitchhiking experience.

Rounding the southbound crest heading out of town and reaching a beachside stretch of the highway just as the monsoon revisited, I put out my thumb. I did this with some mild trepidation, being a solo traveller, but with the secure knowledge that I was essentially a plague bearer at this point and that any motorway murderer would at least be hit by Dougezuma’s revenge. In the event the longest I stood forced-grinning beside the highway that day was about 15 minutes, as a succession of displaced Australians cheerfully brought me all the way to my intended destination: the city of Whangarei. I had previously visited this city on the bus north just long enough to begin my annoyed relationship with globetrotting Germans, so another visit was clearly in order to flesh out my opinion of the town.

If only I could flush away my entire experience instead. My destination was a hostel outside of town whose claim to fame was proximity to a series of caves in which you can see various species of glow worms; I simply underestimated how far out of town it truly was. Well, the last part is untrue: I knew I would have to walk for about an hour and a half to get there, but not what the mental effects of doing that journey in a monsoon would be. I arrived drenched as could be expected of anyone stupid enough to be out and about, to the great humour of the affable hostel manager. He outfitted me with caving gear much as one might give board games to kamikaze pilots, and watched my departure and almost instant return with a certain grim amusement. The cave mouths, you see, had all essentially become rivers completely unnavigable by anyone with any degree of sense. Thus it was that I abandoned the reason I had endured the grimmest walk in recent memory, and retired to my Balinesian-furnished room to dry clothes and count regrets.

Finding myself at leisure the next day while waiting for the bus, I toured Whangarei in a kind of listless, influenza-influenced haze. It has a certain joyless, utilitarian character (at least in the middle of winter), shaken up only by the ever present signs in restaurant/pub fronts declaring their establishments to be gang-free zones. Suddenly the odd proliferation of neck tattoos amongst the young male population began to make more and more sense, though thankfully my resemblance to Typhoid Mary’s grizzled brother kept them at bay. I was going back to Auckland (making a mental note to avoid Whangarei in the future at all costs) to rest, recuperate, and inundate myself with delicious foods in order to combat the rain-fed illness given me by my futile Northland quest.

It is probably well that I took the days I did to heal, because by the time I decided to further indulge my wanderlust I felt…exactly the same. One can only assume how much worse I might have been, given another couple of days dodging catfish as they swam across the roads. Having vacated Auckland only some 5 nights previous, however, I had little interest in further wasting time there… no, I was bound for the capital city of Wellington – very much the Victoria to Vancouver for those who know British Columbia – to further continue my quest for a place to plant roots in Aotearoa’s fertile volcanic soil. A cheap domestic flight later (a single hour with free nonstop in-flight serenade by the 2 year old seated behind me – at no extra cost!) I stepped first out of the airport door, and second with some rapidity in the direction my toque had suddenly decided to fly. It seems that some stereotypes are there for a very good reason; thus was my entrance into ‘Windy Welly’.

Of perception, perseverance, and precipitation.

It is a dusty, surreal feeling to arrive at a long-awaited airport. Regardless of your reason for travelling it is the last, and perhaps most crucial, step in your journey, as you must do a series of official and decidedly correct actions lest you find yourself sequestered behind closed doors with a set of unfriendly latex gloves…or so the modern cosmopolitan horror story goes. In truth clearing New Zealand customs must be a simply task, as I (being almost 34 hours into a wakeful state streak) was able to navigate the many legal lines and the biohazard department, to boot. Or, more accurately, because of my boots, which had more of a Canadian dirt patina than is generally acceptable.

I handed my boots over – with a share of sympathy as I had been wearing them for over a day at this point and they weren’t hyacinths to begin with – with some trepidation as to whether I would ever see them again; the same trepidation, in fact, that had me nervously reporting the over-the-counter antihistamines I had in my first aid kit duly to the customs officer. Happily the response was the same in both cases: a cheery Kiwi said “ok mate, glad you told us” and didn’t come down on me with authoritative weight. In the case of the boots the man promptly came back, having washed them for the convenience of all involved; clearly this was a more laid-back process than I had come to dread. A short wait while concerned persons unpacked/inspected and returned my tent to me later, I was on my own in the vastly distant country I had yearned for while watching snow fall onto the well-dressed dogs of my erstwhile abode.

What a panoply of possibilities! All of which felt distinctly beyond my abilities as I cheerlessly paid 16$ (all prices in NZ dollars unless specified) for a bus into town, and discovered the downside to my having left most day-to-day planning to be dealt with on a day-by-day basis. The first non-official interaction I had with a New Zealander was a somewhat harrowing one, because I had almost no idea what was being said for the first few attempts at communication. You see, I had encountered the other part of the Kiwi accent experience: the people who do not in fact sound at all like anything you’ve ever heard. The driver was, I later deduced, a Maori man who in all likelihood didn’t start with English, and thus had an inimitable and baffling cadence and inflection to his speech. After being waved abruptly towards the interior of the bus (with a significantly less impressive looking bankroll), I sat in a state of mild defeat: wasn’t this to be effortless touring? Shouldn’t I have lasted all the way into my first hour of habitation without feeling stupid? I reluctantly tumbled from the bus at the stop I had guessed closest to my chosen destination, a hostel in the shadow of Auckland’s Mt. Eden.

After a few miles’ walk toting 70+lbs spread between a backpack and a suitcase, pausing ineffectually at every intersection to ensure the counter-intuitive traffic wasn’t about to pre-empt my New Zealand experience, I found myself paying double for my own hermitage so that I might collapse unmolested by nasty tourists. I had resolved to avoid the worst of the jetlag by remaining awake until it at least became dark outside, and set acquiring groceries as an achievable, feel-good goal for my first ‘day’.

I set off feeling exhausted and simultaneously refreshed, as I was deliriously fatigued but nonetheless doing my first job after my “go to New Zealand” directive: getting ready to feed my face. A short walk later I was in a Kiwi grocery store, replete with novel brands (‘Gaytime’ ice cream sugar cones and ‘Fagg’ coffee leap to mind), products, and a large variety of potent potables – which I could feel calling to me from the future. As it was I toured the entire store at length only to buy peanut butter, bananas and bread, which was to comprise the best part of my diet for quite some time. A stagger back through a rain squall later, I was dead to the world.

My next days were spent in a torrent of logistics, tourism, and precipitation and after I had taken in the Sky Tower and the excellent war memorial museum, my two main destinations, my thoughts began to turn towards escape. It was thus, on my 3rd morning, that I set off for the Northland of New Zealand, a photogenic place of sand and fun and one where I hoped to
craftily camp using my laboriously toted gear. Waving a fond farewell to the undead seeming manager at my hostel – both the first Canadian and genuinely unpleasant person I met in NZ – I set off to find a spot to hitch up the Northern motorway. I was quite excited by this prospect, as I had been hemorrhaging money at every turn to this point, and duly followed my map to the junction to find myself… 40 feet below where I needed to be (an overpass which, I discovered later, I couldn’t have hitched on if I wanted). Stinging from this inglorious start to my hitchhiking career I slumped to a new hostel. A Michael Caine doppelganger/manager scoffed lightly at my recounting of logistical failure, and pointed me towards the bus, quite rightly.

The next day I trundled for four hours through a succession of pastoral land and primeval looking tree-fern forests, with a brief stopover in the exceedingly grim Whangarei (where a German passenger took it upon himself to get briefly lost en route to the bathroom), to the northern resort town of Paihia. Now, Paihia is wonderfully scenically situated (the gateway to the gilded ‘Bay of Islands’ region), and a decent place for a series of daylong ambles, but it is not, apparently, a place one can camp in the winter. After a day’s adventure through a mangrove forest/water walk under temperate skies on the Paruru falls track, and accompanying horrible walk back to town along a highway, an amazing series of storms settled in to lash the coastline as if for some heinous misdeed. My magical idea of camping immediately went out the window, though explorations were still in order.

There is a path at the end of the road that the school is on (prosaically named school road) that leads up into the mountains behind Paihia for some distance: it is actually possible, if one is feeling particularly perky, to go onwards through bush to the next town over. This was clearly a walk for me, thought I, as I climbed slope after slope for a distance of some 4-5km back into what can only be described as ‘the bush’. Accompanied by the nodding tree-ferns and a bird that sounded unerringly like R2D2 of ‘Star Wars’ fame, I reached a final summit and was rewarded by an amazing vista of the Bay of Islands region. While chewing on my daily sandwich, however, I was somewhat perturbed to note that each time I looked back towards the northeast, there were less islands to be seen. After discounting the possibility of the islands going submarine in an overwrought attempt to fool me for inscrutable purposes, and watching a few closer islands blip into invisibility, I struck upon what was actually happening. I finished my lunch quickly as the rain began and pushed back into the forest, R2D2 chiding my lack of forethought.

Of motivation, mobilization, and self-immolation.

Being afflicted by a general malaise, admittedly somewhat of my own inadvertent devising, I resolved to do something different. It wasn’t as though I was particularly solvent financially, being in the pocket of the student loans folks for something on the order of a new low-end BMW, but rather that I thought I should take said fiscal irresponsibility on tour.

It seems to me that the time to go overseas is when you are either young, and unencumbered by legions of bastard children, or old and able to get off of work while your bastard children toil in adult-type ways. This labels me as a family man – which I’m quite happily not yet – but in reality is just my way of justifying the eminently unjustifiable. I resolved to go abroad before I go for a broad. I just didn’t know where to… though a series of destinations quickly came to the fore.

I first thought of Japan, to be accomplished in the role of an assistant language teacher for their famous JET program. Why not me, a language teacher, thought I as I posted my overly complicated application, replete with great letters of reference and a stylishly written statement of intent. As it turns out perhaps ‘why me’ would have been a better question, as the JET setters seemed to have scant interest in employing an actual teacher; I wish them joy of their philosophy graduates, incidentally. At any rate I was back to square one, with the added disadvantage in terms of morale of living in a disused family house in the wilds of the Comox valley. This is the fabled ‘no country for young men’, where the number of tracksuits to be seen was only to be surpassed by the number of ill-trained small dogs. Clearly I had to think of a new plan and fast, before I was irrevocably drawn in to the land of rain, latent racism, and geriatric socialites. It wasn’t long before I had come up with a destination to work out my wanderlust upon, coming in the form of a set of islands not dissimilar to those I was to leave.

New Zealand. Sheep, cricket, healthy distaste for Australia, and an obsessive preoccupation with rugby. The perfect blend of distance and familiarity for a lanky coastal boy with latent anglophile leanings; English-language tourism with the distinct omnipresent chance of being inundated by volcanic flow. Why not, then? Onto the plane I went, replete with my craftily-acquired extra legroom and a doubly hospitable tall gin and tonic. Surely comfort in transit was to be mine, I optimistically thought.

Would that it were: New Zealand, you see, is rather far away. It doesn’t really matter your point of origin: you will end up wishing you weren’t in your seat anymore. When I discovered that plugging in my headphones would summarily short out the high technology involved in my video screen, I’ll admit to breathing a sigh of enervated disbelief. It struck me at the time as being a rather useful feature of the audio/visual experience (that audio half) which it seemed, alas, was not to be mine this day. However, one must always be ready to make their own fun.

Look to your left, perhaps, and notice the vaguely Asian woman as she crosses herself thrice during a fit of take-off agitation. Note that her screen works just fine and that she is soon off to sleep with the help of the Justin Bieber movie, which gives you a genuinely new experience: jealously relating to being able to hear, and thus fully experience, Justin Bieber. Well, you weren’t about to get drawn into that adolescent love-fest anyway, were you? Cast eyes to the right, then, to an equally asleep Englishman, whose arms seem to spasm like an electroshock therapy patient’s from time to time; disappointment follows when after devising and carrying out a semi-extensive graphing project you discover that there is actually no discernable pattern to his individual turbulence. At least, you ruefully declare, that half an hour felt vaguely scientific.

I check back in, in the first-person sense, after some 4 hours and one cold dinner of indeterminate pasta… salad, I suppose it rightly should be called. The Justin Bieber movie was of course fine, albeit with (perhaps because of?) the lack of audio: his dancing and/or drumming skills certainly impress after 22 hours of gritty wakefulness. The other more dialogue or plot-ridden movies seem an impossibility, and are abandoned for podcasts and staring off into space. In essence I am a deaf person in a world of white noise and inadvertent/unpredictable left elbows to the short ribs. I was left with either re-reading the in-flight magazine’s article on Hawaiian cowboys and their professional roots (Mexicans, as it turns out), or pondering inventive ways to self-immolate without leaving my seat over the next six hours. The latter seemed the more inviting possibility for the next 400 minutes or so.

I managed to survive this flight despite my own best seat-bound efforts. Perhaps my biggest problem, when it comes time for a 39-hour travelling day, as indeed it was, is a remarkable inability to sleep on a long plane ride. The excitement of it all subverts even sleeping pills of dubious provenance, though they lend a surreal tinge to the cutaways of the Bieb’s silently shrieking/face-clawing fans, and keep me pondering an armrest-mate’s nervous private hayride into the wee hours. Eventually, and a touch impossibly-seeming during hours 6 and 7 of the admittedly long-range flight from Los Angeles (which, we must remember, replaces a multi-month passage in a ship), I arrived in Fiji, just before 5AM local time and two days after I had departed.

My limited experience with Fiji leads me to believe that it must be a very hot place: disembarking at 4:45AM into what I imagine the inside of a black cat’s lungs run temperature-wise on an average Canadian summer day will give one that impression. Additionally, English must be a widely-spoken language, I deduced from the erstwhile-grim paramilitary airport guard’s huge gap-toothed smile upon seeing my bewilderment and noiselessly mouthed mild obscenity. Beyond that, and the bleary observation that the quartet of guitarists who cheerily played us through the customs lines must have oddly skewed internal clocks, all I can truly remember is that “BULA!” must mean welcome, and that vacationing Australians are, by and large, large.

The Aussies must simply adore the USA, at least on some subconscious level. In so many ways they are the US to New Zealand’s Canada, but perhaps most so in terms of tourist size. I saw khaki shorts straining to contain steak-fed legs that usually, though not always, suggested athletic prowess of days gone by. If their prosperous obese differ in terms of route to their size 48 Dockers, however, they made up for it with an affinity for distinctly ‘American’ names: Montana’s taking of Carolina’s doll was a vociferous issue, and Dallas, bless him, seemed entirely uninterested in things other than smashing his rolling suitcase into younger Tallahassee’s. It’s possible that one of those names wasn’t actually overheard (sleep being in short supply), but a definite theme was omnipresent – along with a healthy decibel base. At any rate, let’s leave the Australian character assassination for another time: I wasn’t a scant 3 hours away from visiting their country, after all.

The Kiwis don’t seem much different at first glance. Their traveling representatives match the Aussies in brood size if not in waistband, and share an affinity for starting families at a younger age. Those I saw seemed to favour Socratic reasoning with their children rather than a more direct/smack-y approach, and to speak at a distinctly lower volume than their feistier neighbours. Noting this decibel deficit duly into my burgeoning accent interpretation program my brain was slowly developing, I boarded my final flight of the day in a strange fugue state. After 30+ hours of consecutive soul-sapping travel, I was finally ready to visit Aotearoa, the ‘land of the long white cloud’.