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This is the view from our balcony this morning at our stopover on Hamilton Island, which we finally reached around 6:30 last night. We're off in a few minutes to the Paradise Bay Resort on Long Island in the Whitsundays. No TV, no Internet, very eco-conscious. The perfect place to celebrate our twentieth anniversary. (And my birthday.) See you next weekend!
Our Virgin Blue flight was nearly to Hamilton Island when the captain informed us that a "minor" mechanical problem would prevent us from landing there, and that we had to return to Brisbane. Which we did, landing with no problem. But it means that our planned afternoon on the island, en route to the Paradise Bay Resort on Long Island, has disappeared, and we're stuck inside the Virgin Lounge until 4:00 p.m. when an alternate plane arrives to take us there. We've had remarkably few travel problems on this trip, and on the scale of things this isn't a major one.
Had a very pleasant seafood lunch at riverside restaurant called Jellyfish yesterday, then took the City Cat ferry service on a sightseeing trip downriver to the University of Queensland and back. It's wintertime here, but we still feel like we're back in summer after our fall temperatures the past month in New Zealand - hit 25º C during the day, with a nice pleasant breeze on the water that only felt cool after it clouded over a bit just before sundown. Today we had to do some last minute shopping for essentials, including a cache of books before we head off to the Whitsundays on Sunday - the downtown arcades were jampacked, as lots of folks seem to have left work early in advance of the long weekend holiday - it's the Queen's Birthday Monday.
Eileen hates to have her picture taken, but I thought this was a good one, as we walked on the beach at Karikari an hour or so before sunset.
In our years living in California we've done a few long driving trips around the West, including a grand loop from San Francisco to San Diego to Phoenix and back to SF via the Grand Canyon and Zion National Parks, as well as ten days meandering up to Seattle and back, so the prospect of doing something similar here didn't faze us, especially as a change of pace from our uninterrupted month-long stay in Buenos Aires. And it's worked out great - we've gotten to see huge chunks of both islands, even without trying to see and do everything it's possible to do here.
To prove how far we've gone, the photo above is from Cape Reinga, at the very northern tip of the North Island and the northernmost point of the country. We visited there the other day after spending the night at, of all places, a golf resort on the Karikari Peninsula just to the south (owned by a guy repeatedly referred to as "reclusive American billionaire Paul Kelly" who turns out to be a Wharton grad and Penn trustee). This was the view from the heavily discounted villa where we spent the night:
Much like our drives around the American West, it's been an endless series of picture postcard views. Every hillcrest you cross is another spectacular sweeping view across the landscape to distant mountains or the distant sea or those amazing green hills dotted with livestock which you saw in all the Shire scenes of the Lord of the Riongs movies. "Scenic vista" long ago became our joking shorthand for "holy shit, that's one impressive view," one we would repeat to each other several times an hour on our drives up and down the equally spectacular Pacific Coast Highway. Well, we've reached overload on the use of the phrase in the past couple of weeks. Just the lighthouse and the seascape around Cape Reinga alone qualified:
Look at the wave action here - this is where the currents from the Tasman Sea to the West (coming from the left of the frame) cross the currents from the Pacific at nearly a perfect right angle (coming from the right) just below the lighthouse, crashing into each other with enormous power before devolving into rips and whirlpools that look like they could suck a supertanker under:
Just a couple kilometers south of here is the northern end of the west shore's 90 Mile Beach, and the massive sand dunes at Te Paki:
You can't see her, but Eileen's sitting in one of cars down there while I'm slogging up the dunes:
And a couple hours south of here were the towns of Opononi & Omapere, where we spent the following night. So these postcards were all in one day's drive. And I could have taken many more pictures than I did along the way:
Deconstructing the Maori-Pakeha relationship in New Zealand (Pakeha is the Maori word for foreigners) is a difficult one if you're a tourist, since you know you're never quite getting a representative experience in your brief exposure to it, and ours has definitely been brief. But one thing that emerges when you spend any time here, especially if you read a bit of the history, is that the Maori, compared to some of their peers among the conquered indigenous peoples of the New World, have managed to achieve a more prominent and honored standing in their country today than, say, the Aborigines in Australia, the Incas in Peru, or most of the American Indian tribes in the States. And they haven't relied on casinos to claim that standing, either.
Part of why they've done that is because their first encounter with Europeans was that much more recent than anywhere else (although more or less contemporaneous with that of the Plains Indians in the U.S.) Part of it is that culturally they were much more organized as a society, at least compared to those Plains tribes, or the Australian Aborigines. Also, unlike the even-more organized Incas or Aztecs in Central and South America, it wasn't only timing (that couple of centuries difference before contact made for some slightly less aggressive European attitudes) but the fact that they had an advantage in being at least visibly resource poor, with no obvious surplus of a precious commodity like gold or silver for the Europeans who first showed up here to lust after. There wasn't a Sutter's Mill in Hawkes Bay, for example. The things they did offer, like flax, they were able to control and trade themselves in the early years. So the Maori didn't have to suffer through a conquistador period, at least on the scale of the Americas, although there was plenty of suffering for them from newly introduced diseases, as well as from the introduction of gunpowder into a society where revenge war was already prominent.
Continue reading "Bonnie Prince Charlie Meets Tahu Pōtiki" »
The Maori name for the North Island is Te Ika a Maui - "The Fish of Maui." In Maori mythology, Maui is a demigod responsible for all kinds of creative acts, and he plays a similar role in Hawaiian myths. Like that other island named by their Polynesian cousins in Hawai'i, this one has been producing rainbows like mad for us in recent days. We saw this one during an afternoon cruise yesterday through the Bay of Islands. A little cooler than the Hawaiian Maui, though!
Something you'll see few other places in the world: domesticated deer, in this case red deer originally imported from Europe for hunting (and like those stoats, now an incredible nuisance in the wild here). They're everywhere, especially on the South Island - not quite as widespread as sheep or cattle, but constantly visible as you drive the rural regions. Thus, venison is on many a restaurant menu. Amazingly, the industry has only existed since the 70s, and they claim it's the first successful domestication of a previously wild animal in 5000 years.
We've long been a fan of New Zealand wine, especially the Sauvignon Blanc - En Zed whites are mostly all we get in the States - but we've added some new favorites since we've arrived here, with our Marlborough trip helping to cement them. Besides the "Savvy," as the Kiwis call it, in the past we've also enjoyed drinking the unoaked Chardonnays that many wineries here produce (Kim Crawford is a major producer exporting to the U.S. who does one, if you're interested in seeing what we mean), since neither of us can stand the heavy oaking of California Chards. But our newest revelation is oaked Savvy, something that we haven't seen much at all in the States but which we tasted and enjoyed several times in Marlborough. A lot of the wineries that produce them don't export to the U.S., or at least not in any quantity, unfortunately, but one favorite you might look for is from Seresin Estate, whose logo you can see in the picture above.
Another revelation: NZ Rieslings. Neither of us had much of a Riesling palate before coming here - it's not produced that much in California, and we simply haven't tasted enough from Alsace or Germany to appreciate the grape - but we've become big fans of the dry versions produced in this country since we started tasting more. Tonight at dinner, for example, we had one from Te Whare Ra that we've enjoyed before and which was once again excellent.
Finally, we can say we've actually drunk and enjoyed Pinot Noir. I've had a few good Pinots from the States, but despite the incredible marketing effort of Paul Giamatti in Sideways, when sampling the best from Oregon and California there have been many more misses than hits, and Eileen's opinion of the U.S. Pinots is even lower than mine. Not true here. Maybe it's the climate, maybe it's that they're doing it in more of the French Burgundy style, but the Pinot Noirs here definitely have appealed to us more.
The South Island is the land of one-lane bridges, as we discovered during our drives:
A little blurry, but you get the idea:
They're so common that there are multiple traffic signs dealing with them: