New Zealand lies in the southern Pacific Ocean, 1600 km (995 miles) east of Australia. It has a North and South Island and several smaller islands, with a total area of 268 000 sq km (104,454 sq miles).
Abel Janzoon Tasman was the first European explorer to see New Zealand in 1642, but it was Captain James Cook who first set foot on New Zealand soil in 1769.
The first permanent settlers didn't arrive until the 1830s. The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, giving sovereignty of New Zealand to Britain. The Maori nation ceded vast tracts of land for token payments, but soon the Maori realized they had been swindled and rose up against the British settlements repeatedly.
Today New Zealand is a peaceful country and the people are extra-ordinarily friendly and outgoing. One quarter of New Zealand is protected wilderness and much of the country is pollution free.
New Zealand is not a small country but a large village.
Peter Jackson
New Zealand diary
The north island
Auckland 11.11.05
Evening view of Auckland skyline from Devonport ferry dock
G'day: Kiwis (the local residents, not the birds) come out of the woodwork with helpful tips and suggestions for visitors. Little wonder tourism is the country's biggest natural resource. Kiwis (the birds, not the local residents) are small nocturnal creatures that never come out of the woods.
Helpful blokes at the Loaded Hog
Watering hole: The Loaded Hog, harborside downtown, has sturdy food and a good view from its patio. Speight's, a south island beer not unlike Boddingtons, rises above interisland rivalries to be admired by the populace in general.
Hitting the heights: The Auckland Harbor ferry takes visitors to Devonport, where a tramp (New Zealand's term for hiking) up Mount Victoria, one of dozens of dormant volcanoes dotting the Auckland area, is a good chance for some exercise. Locals gather on the hilltop in the evening to fly model airplanes, practice karate and slide down the grassy hillsides on cardboard boxes.
Leftists: Driving on the left side of the road is not difficult. The trick is to stay on the left side of the road and watch out for everything on the right side, especially when turning right. The odd aspect of the process is not driving while seated in the right seat of the car but rather remembering that the windshield wiper control is on the left side of the steering column and the turning signals are on the right.
Auckland harbor from Mount Victoria at about 8 p.m.
Seeing the light: Being well south of the equator and late springtime, New Zealand stays light til nearly 9 p.m.
New Zealand north island, Paihia 11.13.05
Bay of Islands sunset from Russell, looking toward Paihia
Flaying possum: Possums are to New Zealand what the cane toad is to Australia. Some say there are 80 million of the furry varmints that nibble up tons of the landscape nightly. Electricity poles nationwide have metal bands around them supposedly to keep possums from climbing up them and eating the power lines.
Billiards table at the Duke of Marlborough Hotel in Russell, game at the
Top of the Dome cafe south of Whangerai
Roadside attractions: Top of the Dome cafe off the main highway heading north, The Beachcomber Restaurant in Whangerai and La Scala in Paihia are sturdy cafes worthy of a cross-country stop. Tui, the Coors of Kiwi beers, is named after a bewitching bird of the same name, the mockingbird of New Zealand's aviary population.
Seen from the top of the dome, gigantic, prehistoric looking ferns grow
everywhere in the country, a Maori in traditional garb in Paihia.
Northern exposures: A fern-lined hike to an overlook called Top of the Dome affords an impressive view of the north island's northern forests. It's touristy, but try the traditional Maori canoe ride in Paihia. For the adventurous, a must-do is cold-water scuba diving on the wreck of the Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace's flagship sunk by French saboteurs, repaired and refloated by the Kiwis and then scuttled offshore to form a marine habitat and dive site.
Baylys Beach , New Zealand 11.16.05
Baylys Beach, where the road ends and the Tasman Sea begins.
Stumbled upon: After wandering aimlessly around the northwest corner of New Zealand all day with only bland and working-class Dargaville ahead (high point of the town - a mysteriously shuttered building with a sign on the front proclaiming "Area 51," the same name given to a top-secret military installation in the deserts of Nevada), the road sign pointed to something called Baylys Beach, which turned out to be one of those unexpected delights of undirected travel - an out-of-the-way place full of odd vistas and quirky people.
Pine trees are methodically planted and harvested throughout the islands.
Growth industry: New Zealand is at the end of the world and short of manpower (Auckland, although the largest city in the country and larger geographically than Los Angeles, has only 1.7 million residents). There must be at least 100 sheep and cows for every person living in the country. Kiwis make the most of their varied resources. They have learned how to domesticate deer, and venison is common on menus. Pine trees are planted, nurtured and harvested with great discipline and shipped to Asian countries in need of wood and paper such as Japan, China, Korea and Malaysia. This gives their forests a very orderly and manicured look. Clear cutting leaves huge ugly scars on the otherwise lush landscape. The monotony of endless green pine forests is broken up by the proliferation of Scotch broom, a tenacious weed noteworthy for its mustard-yellow flowers that is found throughout New Zealand in the springtime.
Counter culture: The Funky Fish in Baylys Beach, a hippie haven on a hill above the sea, is a collecting point for the colorful locals. A hard-drinking patron claimed to be an American Indian ex-patriot who said he had lost touch his father in Arizona many years ago. Perhaps he wondered if I had seen him.
Abel but not willing: Poor Abel Tasman, the 15th-century explorer who was commissioned to sail south from the spice islands and discover the long-theorized but never discovered southern continent. He was a good sailor, but he somehow managed to miss Australia and found the island southeast of it instead, promptly calling it Tasmania. Then he sailed east across what would become the Tasman Sea and stumbled in the 1660s upon the west coast of New Zealand's south island. While putting ashore to replenish the ship's water supplies, four of his crewman were killed by the Maoris, so Tasman sailed away without landing, heading north until he found Fiji. Two centuries would pass before English settlers discovered large quantities of gold on the south island's west coast, just south of what is today Abel Tasman National Park.
Rotorua, New Zealand 11.18.05
Bubbly: Most of the country sits atop a seething cauldron of volcanic activity. Huge dormant volcanoes dominate the islands' landscape from southwest to northeast, ending in one 30 miles offshore that has continually erupted for decades, relieving the pressure under the rest of them. New Zealand has 11,000 small earthquakes a year and occasionaly very big ones (the last, 1968), and the pressures of colliding tectonic plates underneath push the southern alps up about one inch a year. This vulcanism is most apparent around Rotorua, where steam boils out of the ground everywhere. Mount Waratera, above, famously exploded in 1886, wiping out all the old famous tourists sights and creating a whole new batch. Everyone says stay tuned, it's only a matter of time.
Conned: The guaranteed crowd pleaser at Wai-o-tapu geothermal park, the biggest tourist draw in the Rotorua area, is the geyser that performs promptly at 10:15 every morning for the assembled hordes. It's a fraud, of course, having been first engineered by convicts from a nearby prison who were allowed to wash their clothes on Sunday mornings at the turn of the last century in the hot water bubbling out of the ground. One careless con spilled soap into a crevice and promptly triggered a frightening foamy eruption. By piling rocks around the crevice, they found they could channel the eruption into a geyser rising up to 50 feet into the air. Soap has been dutifully spilled into the hole ever since for gaping tourists.
Ferns grow to huge proportions in the humidity and heat, a sign points out the sights, geometric patterns in a limestone deposit.
Dining du jour : The Fat Dog, a hippie breakfast joint in Rotorua, has killer pancakes. McLardy's Irish Bar is where the rugby faithful gather at dawn to cheer on the All Blacks when they play in the British Isles.
The rowdy Lava Club is where thirsty Aussies on holiday test the limits of their credit cards and the patience of Kiwi girls weary of their advances.
Delicate floral displays are interspersed with hellish volcanic fumeroles in the Whangenui valley, which affords a terrific and strange day hike.
Cultural oddity: Rotorua inexplicably embraces the American Old West. No one seems to know why. I stayed at Cactus Jack's, a cheapy hotel festooned with cacti, pictures of gun slingers and generally decorated in a tacky frontier motif. A prominent bar in town is called Outlaws with a Wild West theme, and the latest disco has walls plastered with a bizarre array of photos and paintings of American Indians.
Bubbles on a hot pool, hot-water
loving algae in a stream, maori totems.
More bubbly: Golf at Rikikapakapa, which is probably Maori for "silly game," better known to the patrons as Rotorua Golf Club. It is a golf course noteworthy mainly for its steaming, gas belching water hazards. A ball hit into any of them would probably dissolve, I suspect. I didn't try to find out.
Preparing to face the fiery lake, which my shot luckily carried.
Copyright Gary Olson 2010
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