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.