New Zealand impressions

Crosswalk signals. The crosswalk signals in Australia and New Zealand have huge buttons. When depressed, they activate the crosswalk signal which shows the red man stopped. There is an audible sound which is slow (beep-pause-beep) for the visually impaired, I presume. When the signal shows the green man walking, the sound becomes faster (beep! beep! beep!) which makes you want to rush across the street. What I like most about the signals is that if the red man is showing, then you know someone has activated the crosswalk signal, so you don't have to press it, as you see so many people do when they come to a crosswalk. Unless, you're not in the big city, in which case, the crosswalks aren't as fancy.

zed. In Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and apparently, Canada, they pronounce the letter "z" as"zed", as opposed to "zee". I do not know why this is.

walking on the left-hand side of the sidewalk. The cars drive on the left-hand side of the road. The driver sits in the right side of the car. The gear box is a mirror image of what we have in the States. Why are the gas pedal and brake not reversed as well? This I do not know. When walking on the sidewalk, people are used to walking on the left-hand side. Invariably, you will annoy on-coming pedestrian traffic by walking on the right-hand side. (I once found myself drooling outside a Ferrari showroom in Sydney, and I happened to comment aloud that the steering wheels were on the wrong side. Someone turned around and said, "Where are YOU from?!", and I commented, "Um, like the rest of the world, dude.") In three months of travel through Australia and New Zealand, I have become less fearful of crossing streets, but when I see cars turning right, I still get confused to which lane they will be turning, which means I inevitably scurry across the road.

hot /cold water switch. Is it that hostels are built in shabby buildings or is this part of British sensibility? Sometimes the cold and hot water faucets are reversed from what I expect as normal. Sometimes the hot water is the right-hand faucet and othertimes not. The showers suffer the same confusion, which means, sometimes you have to test the water for a bit to see which side is less freezing, or you just take a nice combat shower.

cooking for myself or no kebabs for me in NZ. Shifting gears from Australia to New Zealand was interesting. Before coming to this side of the world, I did not have any notion of the differences between Australia and New Zealand. Australia (at least the East Coast) was full of backpackers and revellers, sunshine and warm water, and crowded towns with late-nights in backpacker bars. Arrival to the South Island was a bit like going from Bourbon Street in New Orleans to the Yukon territory in Canada. This made my travels in New Zealand that much different from my weeks in Australia. For instance, I didn't go to bars nearly as often (three times in six weeks), and I didn't eat kebabs every night (only once on my second night in New Zealand). I ended up buying groceries on my second day here and have carried a small amount of cooking supplies everyday since. In six weeks I have gone through one bottle of Kikkoman's soy sauce, a bottle of sesame oil, a jar of Nutella, 1.5 kg of pasta, four boxes of Weet-bix, and 6 kg of rice. The Vegemite jar I have is still half full. (There is a virtual graveyard of half full Vegemite jars, salt and pepper shakers, soy sauce, and cooking oil in this hostel.) Dinnertime in the backpackers I've stayed in have been far better for meeting people than the bars. It seems that most backpackers in New Zealand cook their own food, because this ends up being cheaper than eating out; the towns are not as large as they were in Australia, and there are not many places to get cheap food (i.e. kebab houses).

small hostels. A nice realization happened about a couple weeks into my travels here. I finally figured out that I preferred the smaller hostels to the larger ones. The large hostels (80-500 beds) tended to be institutional and filled with tourbus-loads of backpackers looking for the party. The small hostels (10-30 beds) were usually converted homes that were clean, homely, laid back, and ended up being great places to meet other travellers, with the added bonus of being less likely to get your possessions nicked since you got to meet everyone. The Russian Roulette experience of choosing a good place to stayl dramatically improved when I started looking for the smallest hostels in a town. The two biggest factors in how much I enjoyed a place were the weather and the people I met along the way. I had no control over the weather, but I could decide where to stay, and with better chances of meeting folks that were interesting.

Antoine Spaghetti. Speaking of interesting people, while I was on Waiheke Island, I stayed at a cool hostel with a great vibe, pool & spa, Buddha wood carvings, and nice teak furniture on the deck. There were mostly backpackers there, but three young Kiwis on a tree-clearing job (they call them "arborists" here) were staying there for the week. They were two half-Maori and one Pakeha (European settler) fella that seemed really out of place amongst the rest of the backpackers. I ended up befriending them and they took me out on their last night on the island and introduced me to Antoine Spaghetti. This was the 18-year old Pakeha's alter-ego when he got drunk (which, apparently, was every night back on the mainland). Antoine had the tendency to nick things (that's stealing, to you and me) like the cappuccino cup at the bar when it was closing time or the two blocks of cheese (brie and camembert) and can of motor oil he found in his pockets one morning. Antoine had an accent that was hard to place. It was sort of a bad French accent with an hint of Ukrainian. We got Antoine to sing during kareoke night at the local pub (the only place open after 10 pm on an island with a population of 8,500). Antoine's number was Billy Ocean's "Carribbean Queen", which was a big hit back in the early 80's, before Antoine was even born. Antoine was a trooper and stumbled through it mumbling and saying, "Yeah!" every now and again. The rest of the night was pretty much the same in the sense of randomness and meeting wackos and doing illcit things. This is the first time that I have been called out of a bar, so I could help some guys out, in case there was going to be a "rumble". Yeah, like I would be giving anyone the deciding advantage.

The Maori and Pakeha. There are 4.2 million New Zealanders and about 1.7 of them claim to be Maori (and about 40% can speak Maori). Many of them have one Pakeha parent and one Maori parent, but the Maori culture remains quite strong. Maori and English are both official languages of New Zealand, and government buildings and signs have their Maori translation next to the English ones. In the North Island, there is a much stronger Maori presence with "marae" or community houses in many places. I have been fascinated by the social dynamics between these two different cultures. Anthropologists believe that New Zealand was the last site of Polynesian migration (about 500-800 years ago) that started 8000 BC from southeastern China, beginning with the Aboriginal tribes in Taiwan to all of the Polynesian islands including Hawaii and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). New Zealand was also one the last places to be colonized by Europeans (about 200 years ago). From the point of view of the Pakeha, their history with the Maori and their continued relations bear under greater scrutiny than the Native Americans benefit in the States. Part of this is from the greater proportion of the population that is Maori, and part of this is from the emerging social awareness and cultural maturity that the European world was gaining at the time of their arrival. The settlers were far more conscious of the impact of colonists on an indigenous population. As a result, the Pakeha tries to make reparations for the grievances their foreparents made against the Maori. Likewise, the New Zealand land was dramatically changed by the introduction of the Maori a few hundred years ago (I have already mentioned the extinct moa, the flightless bird that grew up to 9 feet tall). The Maori came from small Polynesian islands where food was scarce to a land untouched by land-based mammals. Imagine that! The only mammal was a flying-fox, or a bat, as we know them. The moa, large as it was, had no predators, and could easily be slain by the Maori. Imagine walking up to a 9-foot tall bird and knocking it down! The Maori communities did not have to compete for natural resources early on because the land was so plentiful, but as the ecology was changed with the killing off of animals and changing of their habitats, food became more scarce and the iwi's (tribes) had to compete and build pa's (fortresses). When the Pakeha came, they introduced a wide range of animals and plants, but many of these have turned into scourges as these foreign flora and fauna have had no competitors or predators in the New Zealand ecosystem. So, modern New Zealand is very conscious and aware of the balance of the world and the impact they have had on their home.

travelling. Four months on the road, and I have finally settled in. Early on I worried about the day I would return to a job-based world. I worried about the difficulties I would have returning everyday. Even when I was in New Zealand, I worried about it, but sometime in the past few weeks I stopped fretting. I still think about it, but I don't worry. I would rather be doing this (travelling) alone, right now, than pretty much anything else. This is my job now. It's not a "job", like it's a hassle, and I can't wait for my next day off. It's my job, as in, "the thing I do". I remember when I had done some travelling before, how I marvelled at people who had one or two months off. Well, now those people marvel at me, because at the end of their two-month trip, they have to go home wanting more time off, and my trip is just beginning. I have met a lot of folks who have done more travelling than I have, but no one who has travelled the route I intend to take. There have been moments when I have been alone at a vista, after a hard hike to a peak, and I think, "This is what it's all about." New Zealand has been great for moments like that. I was a 100-meters underground, neck-deep in an river, pulling myself along, feeling the walls, and laughing in the amazement of being there, surrounded by a galaxy of glowworms. This world is so big. It's easy to forget how big it is when "Brad and Jen: the Break-up" makes the headlines.

the search of something or the search for nothing? "I hope you find what you're looking for." That's something I heard a few times from people before I took off. After four months, I can say I'm not looking for anything. It's an experience like going to school, working a job, getting married, or having kids. It's an experience that may or may not change me. I'm not looking for enlightenment. I'm not looking for the truth. I'm just doing this because it's something I enjoy, and I've wanted to do it for a long time (as opposed to getting married or having kids). Plus, there's the thrill and risk of a little danger and disembowelment, haha, although you could get that from marriage, I suppose. As for being alone, I have met a lot of solo travellers, and some of them can hack it, and some of them can't. Some of them are lonely and some of them struggle. I have yet to experience loneliness on the road, but it might happen. Often, I have found, I'm hardly alone because there's always someone to talk to. Travelling in Australia and New Zealand has been a great way to see a culture that is familiar to Americans, but a little different. Sometimes you see something and think it's a bit wierd or pig-headed, then you compare it to the analogy of what we have in the States, and you realize what we do in the States is sometimes a little wierd and pig-headed, and you open your mind to the strange being a little less strange, and the familiar, being a little strange.