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.