The Passion of the Fruit

Back in the land of cold wind and icy pavement, this morning I was thinking about the taste of summer. That is to say, passionfruit--split, scooped, and slurped in the early morning sun, while sprawled in a patch of velvety green grass. The empty, hollowed-out weight of the crimson fruit in your hand... the porous rind giving way to the thin flash of pocketknife blade, the precise tilt of the two halves so not a single seed slips out. The art of the meal. 

Still, I challenge you to not think of frog eggs as you scoop into the spongy cup. Because let's face it, in the world of fruit, these guys are a bunch of weirdos. Delicious weirdos, but still.

Last Dispatches from the Land of the Long White Cloud

His Name is Doom
Tongariro National Park is the oldest park in New Zealand and the fourth oldest in the world. It is also a World Heritage site noted for its spiritual significance to the Maori and its crazy, kickass volcanic features. It is also the home of Mt. Ngauruhoe, aka Mt. Doom from, yes, Lord of the Rings. And it is awesome.


The Tongariro Crossing is an extremely popular day-hike that winds up and up and over and around this rocky, alpine landscape. It is about twelve rugged miles, and most people book a ride on a shuttle and hike it one way. I am broke (and/or cheap, apparently) and hate hiking in cattle drives, so I decided I would rather avoid the crowd, start late, hike up to the top from one side, turn back, and then do the same thing the next day, from the other side. Twice the miles! Twice the elevation gain! None of the cost!


The trek starts off normal enough, winding uphill along a stream through open country, getting more and more apliney and rocky with the elevation. Lichen. Flowers. The big Doom himself looks harmless enough from the start, but looms bigger and more badass the closer you approach. Black pumice rocks litter the ground, a ragged foot's exfoliation fantasy. Then come the craters. The Mars-walk. The moonscape. Clouds of steaming sulphur, blood-red rocks, steep gravel climbs, views down to a chain of emerald alpine lakes. At some point near the top I started cussing because it was just that sweet and foreign and impressive. On the way down, late in the day, I pretty much had the place to myself. It was glorious.

The Great Teen Invasion

Evidence. You see how Big Agnes cringes?

I returned from the hike all dusty-footed and smiley. Then I pulled into the quiet and quaint little campsite where I had set up my tent earlier in the day, and it was as if someone had picked up said tent, and moved her into a circus ring. Infested with heavily-perfumed and popped-collar teenagers. Seriously, there were about 50 of them on a school trip. Those of us campers without membership cards to Teen Nation literally retreated to our cars for the evening. When I checked on Big Agnes, I was horrified to see that a gaggle of giggling girls put their tent up so close it was actually touching her. The nerve! This is extremely poor form in camping etiquette! I realize by now I must sound like a crotchety old lady, shaking my fist at the sky in vain... but seriously. Several other campers packed up their gear and bailed in a huff. I stuck it out, enduring all manner of outhouse-related screeching and teen talk late into the night. The next morning I heard they were staying another few nights, and although I was planning on staying a second night myself, I got the hell out of that hormone war zone while I still could.

The hike up from the other side was lovely, too. Through native forest at the start, then open bush. Over hot springs heavy with the smell of rotting eggs. The atmospheric action higher up kept the peaks veiled in a thick blanket of fog, making the whole landscape that much more eerie. I dunked my head in the cold creek on the way down, sat on a mossy rock eating mandarins, and stared at a waterfall for a good long while, knowing it would probably be one of my last hikes in the country. It was a good day.

Happy Doom's Day!

La Coromandel, in Pictures

A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure of spending several days in the Coromandel region in the northeastern part of the north island. It ended up being one of my favorite spots in New Zealand. . . seamlessly braiding the wild with the pastoral, set against the backdrop of the sea. This is one of the things I like best about this country--the land isn't so finitely divided and parceled off into "farmland" and "wildland" and "humanland"as it often is in the states--rather it is all sort of seamlessly woven together. Many of the tramps I've been on cross over private land. You'll be walking through a long stretch of native forest, then suddenly the sky opens up and you are in a field with cows or sheep warily regarding you. This is something I will really miss.

I camped at the very top of the peninsula,
tucked between rolling pasture, native bush, and the ocean.

Walk this way.
Beginning of the Walkway Hike.

Nikau Palm's pale new buds.

Palm trunk rings look carved, not grown.

Cloudy day, typical view along the Walkway.

Not your typical bovine habitat.

Flax (Phormium) plants are all over New Zealand.
Not at all like northern hemisphere flax, although it is also used as a natural fibre.
Flax weaving (raranga) is a very important traditional Maori art form/utility.

Rocks! Water!

Fuzzy head, sleepy face.

The amazing pohutukawa (Metrosideros excelsa) tree,
all twisty and wizardish, they line the curvy gravel drive up the coast.

Checking out the blue view.

More rocks! More water!

Bent to the earth.

In repose.

One of many delicious swimming holes.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere There's Signs...

After so much tragedy, I bring you a little humor, to lighten the heart:

Part Two in awesome New Zealand signage...

Yeah, yeah, everyone loves bacon...

If anyone has any ideas why someone thought this was an appropriate
mural for a bathroom wall, I am all ears. The semi-automatic bayonet,
the muff top, the trio of growling, Cerebus-like yap dogs... fascinating.

More like Psycho-time Creeper Cones

If Tears for Fears did construction

How to make that exclamation point look like a club

Cookie Monster's lesser-known crackhead cousin, "Cokey"

And yet they keep trying

After the shocking failure of Norbit II, Eddie Murphy's career takes an even darker turn

Sometimes the value of punctuation is immeasurable

Woolcome!
(Sorry, I couldn't resist)

The opposite of encouragement

Quake

So I am sure that you have all heard by now, but Christchurch suffered a big earthquake (again) yesterday. I am safe on the north island, but still pretty spooked. My friend Shauna was down there for work, and just made it back to Wellington, safe, but rather shell-shocked. We tried to calm her down in the best way we could--with whiskey and guacamole. 
She works for the embassy, and things are truly a mess.


It is a sad and terrifying thing. These acts of Nature. It is hard to be so close to it and yet feel so helpless. I am hoping there will some chance to volunteer in some way from here. New Zealand is such a small and connected nation, the news footage is all-consuming, and it has been interesting to be here to watch it all live...the incredible rescues, the humanity of people working together... and then the sad stories of people missing, people dead. The damage is really intense, and it is surreal to remember walking around those neighborhoods not long ago. The iconic Cathedral in its namesake square crumbled. There are still unrecovered bodies under the rubble. When I saw it last it was just before Christmas, and packed full of people bringing their dogs, cats, hamsters, goats and sheep in for a Blessing of the Animals. I remember walking around, grinning, like everyone else.


The quake is truly a disaster for this country. My thoughts go out to everyone involved, near and far. The city won't ever be quite the same.

Big Trunk Square Pants

The other day I took a detour to see about a tree. I was driving down the Thames Coast from the Coromandel Peninsula, and on the map I saw a little star that said Square Kauri. I was intrigued, and any living being that is over 1200 years old deserves the homage of a long drive down a curvy gravel road. Followed by the climbing of several hundred steps. Which I decided to run up, because, I don't know, I felt like I should honor the old guy with my sweat and arrive winded or something.

Though not as old as Methuselah or Prometheus, Big Trunk Square Pants was something to behold. That tree has done a lot of living. It is the 12th oldest in the area.

Karui trees are members of the ancient Agathis genus. They are evergreens with enormous trunks that rise straight out of the earth and don't branch or curve or cha cha until their crown. Their bark is smooth and light gray, and flakes a bit, leaving a lovely subtle patina. They are beautiful. The big ones are rare now. It's that same old sad story of over-logging.

I couldn't get down and touch Square Pants like I wanted to, him being quarantined and all (kauri dieback is a potentially deadly plant pathogen that effects these trees and is transmitted through soil, among other things). But he certainly made an impression. I wondered how many hands it would take to reach around such a trunk. I wondered how many little human lives this tree has looked down upon.

Hoodoo Voodoo You Do

Do what? Remind me of the...

Last week I went to the Putangirua Pinnacles.

Remember the scene in Lord of the Rings (please allow me to release my inner nerd for second here), when Gimli, Aragorn, and Legolas are walking through that spooky landscape with all the hoodoos and spires on the way to the Paths of the Dead? You know, with the army of green ghosts? Yeah, well that is this place.

And it is eerie. I hiked through there in the late afternoon, as the setting sun was unfurling long, shadowy curtains down the vertical rocks. The pinnacle formations are carved out, eroded, scraped, and sculpted as if by some giant, archaic utensil. To save time on the narrative here, I'll just flex the metaphor chops and say it reminded me of:

- a monochrome moonscape

- a Gothic wedding cake

- some prehistoric, minimalist sculpture garden

- ashy ruins, skulking towers, rusty gates

- like, when you make sand castles by, um, dripping wet sand through your fingers

In the end I was less spooked than I might have been. Until that night, when an intense and relentless electric wind battered my tent. All. Night. Long. Slowing only long enough to wind back and gather speed for another blasting. My anxious heartbeats seemed to match the patterns of those assaults. Big Agnes Malone held her ground, but I was a hot mess by the morning. 

So, if, as the song goes, She is indeed Like the Wind Through My Tree, then whoever she is, she is one aggressive and spooky bitch. 

And yes, I did just reference Patrick Swayze. R.I.P

Knowing This Exists Has Made My Day

If you can't quite tell what this is, allow me to educate you. That's right. This dazzling piece of coiffing technology is a coin-operated hair straightener/curler. What's that you say? Yes, yes it is bolted to a wall. In a bathroom. Of a bar. But no worries, as the sign says, sizzling your hair keeps everything nice and sterile. If I lived here and was on the run for a crime I didn't commit, I might slip into the bathroom to flatten my fro in disguise... if I didn't think that Herculean effort would take two hours and twenty dollars.

Well done, Wellington, well done.

The city is crazy this weekend as the annual Sevens Rugby Tournament is happening. This is basically like 60 percent halloween, 20 percent Mardi Gras, and 20 percent sporting event. Mostly it is a chance for people to dress up in matching costumes, get boozed up, and act insane. This means the people-watching is incredible.

Release the Kraken

I saw a Colossal Squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) today. 
She was dead and pickled, and about as pretty as you would expect a dead, mushy, and beige cephalopod to be, but still, she was really something.


Wellington's Te Papa Museum holds the only colossal squid specimen in all the world. Some New Zealand fishermen pulled her up from the deep off the coast of Antarctica in 2007. They were...pretty surprised. She was still alive, all bright-red caped and churning, feeding on the toothfish they had hooked, but these krakens can't survive in surface waters, their blood can't carry oxygen well up top, and they suffocate. She was fading. They hauled her in, put her on ice, and donated her to the museum. Eventually biologists found a creative way to thaw her (deciding that slow saltwater baths were better than big microwaves)...whence they had a few precious hours to do some poking and prodding before pumping her up with preservatives and transferring all nearly-1100 pounds of her into a watery, space-age, transparent coffin. Which is where I bumped into her...

     Co-los-sal: 1. extremely large. 2. of an exceptional or astonishing degree.

I figure that you'll want some Colossal Squid Trivia now, because, well, who wouldn't?

Notorious B.I.G

They are big. Really big. Biggest invertebrate in the world. This is based on the handful of immature specimens that have ever seen the light of day. The Te Papa squid is little, only about 14 feet after shrinkage. Current estimates of the big dogs puts them at 35-45 feet long.

The Squid and the Whale

They are badass predators, decked out with crazy rotating-hooked tentacles that could make a medieval weapons expert weep. And mess you up. Bad. They are the only animal in the world that has a shot at fighting a sperm whale (the world's largest predator, you know.) Even though the whales usually win (their stomachs jangle with many a hard squid beak), a big squid can leave them all cut and scarred.

Eyes of the World

They have the biggest eyes in the world. A foot or more in diameter. Looking at you. They also have eight arms. Two tentacles. One scary, black, parrot beak. And a lot of style.