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new zealand

Birdies (New Zealand, pt. 16)

[kaka eating]The care & feeding of kaka

A steady rain drums against the window. It encourages us to roll over and go back to sleep – one of the lesser-known benefits of vacation rain – refreshing our tired and weta-troubled minds. Eventually, Ernie comes downstairs to do some laundry, and we emerge from hiding just in time to greet some new visitors.

On the patio, perched first on a chair and later on the end of a nearby picnic table, are a quartet of inquisitive kaka; big, brown and a little bit shiny, with colorful streaks visible each time they spread their wings.. They’re clearly no strangers to our lodge, and Ernie encourages us to offer them some food. Their fierce-looking, sharply curved beaks give pause, but as I hold out a morsel of bread, I realize there’s little cause to worry; the boldest of the four sidles towards me and gently plucks the food from my fingers with the most painstaking delicacy. He then grabs the bread with one claw, nibbling in approval.

We retreat to the kitchen and return with more options. An apple proves unpopular, and a bit of garlic- and rosemary-infused ciabatta leads to one bird taking an exploratory nibble, dropping the rest on the ground, and noisily squawking about the insufficiency of our cuisine. Eventually, however, the food leads to inter-avian squabbling, and we retreat inside while the now-angry birds chase each other around the surrounding trees.

Bivalves and beer

We waste a bit more time, waiting for the rain to let up (which it eventually does), then stroll back into town for lunch at one of the two Stewart Island establishments that could legitimately be called restaurants. The South Sea Hotel, however, is not just a restaurant and lodging, but also a (or rather, the) pub, an all-encompassing booking agency for many of the island’s activities, and an oft-identified meeting place for those activities. In our three days, we’ll see most of the island’s inhabitants here again and again, enjoying a brew and bantering in a vaguely Scottish-influenced patois that’s virtually indecipherable to outsiders.

Service in the hotel’s casual dining room, separated from the occasionally noisy bar by a series of open and swinging doorways, is rushed and casual, but the food is as good as it is simple; no pretense, no adornment, just (mostly) local ingredients and a few basic techniques. A bowl of seafood chowder is rich with mussels and fragrant lemongrass, while a plate of terrific fries accompany some Stewart Island oysters…a bit out of season, but worth the experience nonetheless: light, creamy, and more texturally akin to oyster-flavored marshmallows than to any other oyster within my experience. The wine list is OK, but the only by-the-glass options are from the lower end of the Montana stable, and so I ask our harried waitress to choose a beer for me. She returns with a pint of Tui, a North Island brew that is unquestionably the darkest IPA I’ve ever seen (they do know what “pale” means, right?), with an apple-y, almost sweet taste. It’s good, despite a slightly thin finish, but there’s an illicit cider pregnancy somewhere in its ancestry.

Mail-only golf

If the South Sea Hotel is a multi-service establishment, the Stewart Island Post Office is practically a self-contained town. It’s got mail, a check-in desk for the island’s remote airport (a shuttle runs between the two) that recycles a scale they’d otherwise use for packages, a storage area for backpackers, a miniature book store, a few shelves of local food products, and the facility in which we’re interested: greens fee collection and club/ball rental for the local golf course. We stuff a few choices from a rather motley and battered selection of clubs into some rather tattered and moldy bags, and begin our hike.

(Continued here…)

Murder, mayhem, pigeons & cod (New Zealand, pt. 15)

[New Zealand pigeon]Murder in the night

Somewhere around midnight, I feel the bed shake.

In a half-conscious state, abruptly yanked from REM sleep but with my eyes still closed, I attempt to make sense of the situation. Theresa’s moving around, somewhat jerkily. I appear to have an upset stomach, and a bit of a headache as well. Maybe a bad mussel, maybe a chill from yesterday’s rain-enhanced cold, maybe just crankiness from being woken up. I choose to ignore the shaking, and go back to sleep.

Somewhere around one a.m., I feel the bed shake.

It’s Theresa again…or at least it appears to be…as she makes what, in my sleepy state, seem like unconscionably violent movements. I’m getting crankier, and wonder if this is going to go on all night. Finally she stands up, heading for the bathroom. I turn around, attempting to go back to sleep.

At two a.m., I snap awake. Again in the middle of REM, but something’s different this time. I actually open my eyes. Theresa is sitting up in bed, twitching her head around like an agitated bird.

“Are you OK?,” I mumble, still sleepy. I figure she’s had a bad dream of some sort.

“There’s a big bug in here.”

(We’ve been down this road before. Theresa hollers from the kitchen, “there’s a huge bug in here!” I stop what I’m doing, enter the kitchen, and find some tiny crawling thing, or a completely average-sized spider, and sometimes an ant. I kill it…danger averted…and go back to work.)

“Probably one of those sand flies.”

“No, I’m serious. There’s something really big in here. It keeps landing on me.”

“Uh-huh.”

But…I’ve been married long enough to know that going back to sleep isn’t going to satisfy anyone. So I get up, turn on the bedside lamp, and gaze blearily around the room. Theresa slips from the bed and tiptoes across the room, sees some fleeting shadow (probably me in the way of the lamp), and lets out a yelp. She is seriously freaked out. Really, though, how big could this thing be? I feel ridiculous, standing here in my boxers and still half-asleep, looking for some no-doubt tiny phantom menace that’s haunting Theresa’s dreams. If it’s not a fly, it’s probably drifting lint or something.

I see nothing. “What bug?”

“I thought I felt a bug on me earlier tonight, and I just brushed it off. Then I felt it again. It felt…it felt like it was covering the entire right side of my face. I could feel it touching my neck, and at the same time my cheek right below my eye.” She demonstrates with her hand, fingers on each named location. OK, that would be a big bug. But there’s no way there’s something like that in here. We’re not in the Amazon rainforest. “The last time I felt it, I brushed it away, and I heard a ‘thump’ as it hit the floor.”

“Sure you did,” I think to myself, looking around again.

Something catches my eye. I stop, retreat, look at the curtain that covers the window nearest her side of the bed. I pause.

“Oh. That bug.”

(Continued here…)

To the ends of the earth (New Zealand, pt. 14)

[Nugget Point rocks]Signs, signs, everywhere a sign

It would be a peaceful, remote beach lapped by cold southern waters, its beauty preserved by its very remoteness. It would, but it’s not, because the town and its beach are littered with agitation. “No reserve!” is the slogan repeated on signs, placards, graffiti on dozens of walls and houses…we’ve waded into some sort of simmering anger, but we’re completely oblivious as to the cause. Yet here in Port Molyneux, they’re certainly exercised about something.

We’d arisen early enough, but last-minute packing, cleaning, and more lengthy reminiscence and chit-chat from host Bill led us to depart from the Otago Peninsula little later than we’d intended. Today’s voyage is one of the chanciest of the entire vacation, because its success or failure depends largely on the quality of Southland’s highly unpredictable weather. Plus, time is also a looming concern. If it rains, it’s a quick but disappointing trip to our next bed. If it doesn’t, we’ve got to pick and choose from among far too many enticing options, lest we miss dinner at the other end. But a passage of the ultra-remote Catlins, unquestionably one of those paths less-trodden (which, for an already remote area, is saying something) by tourists, is something we must at least attempt.

Much is made, by Kiwis, of the potential dangers of the road. Twisty and often unpopulated by cars, it is unsealed for a few dozen kilometers (though the government is in the process of rectifying this), but I grew up on gravel roads and am not much intimidated by rocks under my wheels. And, truth be told, one can easily proceed through the Catlins without ever really experiencing true remoteness and anything wilder than the road; towns, at least on the eastern half of the drive, are pretty common and easily accessed, services are abundant, and there’s no real lack of infrastructure. But traveling the Catlins that way would be a mistake, one we’re determined to avoid. As long as the weather cooperates.

(Continued here…)

Birds, not of a feather (New Zealand, pt. 13)

[Sandfly Bay from Sandymount]A man’s home…

Of all the things and places toured by visitors to New Zealand, a castle is one of the most unlikely. This is a country of natural wonders, of breathtaking scenery, of environments so unique they can never be truly captured by word or image. Castles…well, Europe is stuffed to the gills with ’em, and some pretty damned impressive ones as well. What could this far-flung corner of a far-flung country possibly offer in comparison?

A long, tragic, and occasionally scandalous history, for one thing…which is appropriate enough. Larnach Castle isn’t going to make anyone forget, say, Warwick, but it’s a pleasant enough diversion for a morning’s visit. The rooms are nicely restored, showing a level of historic extravagance that seems even more out of place (given its remote location, far from what would have passed for “civilization” in those days) than does the castle itself, and there are some entertaining decorative details: “sans peur (without fear),” the original owner’s family motto, is paired on an elaborate stained glass window with…those with an affection for puns can see it coming…several cats. Lodging and meals are available, though one has to book far in advance.

However, it’s the grounds that are the real draw here. Not only is the castle itself situated in a high point of the Otago Peninsula, providing (especially from its upper turret) wonderful panoramic views of the peninsula’s hills and harbor, but careful work has been done to make the grounds a showpiece for local plants and flowers. Neither Theresa nor myself have ever been particularly moved by matters botanical, but between yesterday’s hike and this morning’s excursion, we’re developing more interest than we’d ever imagined. In one especially artful corner of the grounds, with sheep covering the far-below valley floor like little maggots or grains of wiggling rice, a massive stump has sprouted a cleverly-carved door; something straight out of (or to) Narnia. (Unfortunately, the magical aura is a bit dampened when one peers behind the door; it turns out that it’s just a storage closet for gardening supplies. Mr. Tumnus is nowhere to be found.)

[Sandfly Bay from Sandymount]…is around his neck

We partake of a latish lunch, feasting from yesterday’s leftovers, including the Kennedy Point 2004 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough), which is greener and leaner than it was the day before, showing more lemongrass, lime, and lemon thyme than the tropical notes it had sported previously. It’s still quite fun, though.

Driving east along the harbor, we pass an abandoned whaling station, a series of picturesque huts on elevated piers, and the rather depressed Maori settlement of Otakau (after which the peninsula is named), before climbing up the steep promontory at the end of the peninsula to Taiaroa Head. Far below us, waves thunder against ocean-etched cliff walls, with tangled colonies of bull kelp oscillating in the water’s relentless approach and retreat. A lonely lighthouse dots the tip of the peninsula, but what we’re here for is just a little bit inland.

On the rocky shore known as Pilots Beach, people congregate around a wretched stench. Blending into the rock are several dozen sea lions…many behind a protective fence, but some unconcernedly napping just a few feet from a curious public. They’re adorable, but wow does their waste smell horrible. And all around them, no doubt adding to the stench, are the crushed and rotted carcasses of unwary seagulls. We do spend some close-up time with these blubbery snoozers, but eventually the stench overwhelms us, and we scale a long path to a rather crowded car park. Anyway, it’s time.

(Continued here…)

Bovine beach blues (New Zealand, pt. 12)

[net on Okia Beach]The road not taken

Commitments are a strange thing. “Next time we’re in New Zealand, we’re going to do some hikes,” we’d agreed in the rosy afterglow of our 2002 trip, and at the time we’d fervently meant it. New Zealand’s incomparable natural beauty is, despite a general lack of roads, surprisingly accessible…but then there’s much more that’s not, unless one is willing to get out of the car, train, boat or tour bus and walk a bit. It was, at the time, a firm commitment to an ideal.

Of course, the strange thing about commitments and ideals is how they crumble in the face of reality. Neither of us much likes camping (Theresa’s just not into the hassles, while any affection I once had was thoroughly destroyed by the Boy Scouts, especially our northern Minnesota winter excursions – 30ºF below zero, all day and night – and their mosquito-ridden summer equivalents), Theresa has a downhill ski racing-damaged ankle and two similarly-damaged knees that ache to the point of immobility on extended downslopes, and, to be honest, neither of us have entered this vacation in the best of shape. An exploratory early-evening stroll around our villa on Waiheke Island drove this point home with accompanying dismay, when after a mere fifteen minutes of low-impact and low-speed walking we were sweaty, tired, and eager to sit down for dinner.

Nonetheless, surrounded by the natural majesty of the Otago Peninsula, we’re determined to overcome our self-induced obstacles. Not being fools, we’ve chosen to start our walking adventures on a flat track and in the cool of the early morning. Bill, our host at the Fern Grove Garden, delivers our breakfast – enough for three starving lumberjacks: fresh fruit, organic eggs, milk, bread, butter, and a rather frightening quantity of muesli – and serves of a side of some experienced advice on which tracks might suit our needs.

Basalt, salt, and the roar of the lion

A short while later, we’re in a dusty car park (really just a flat circle of gravel) with a field full of placidly munching cows gazing lazily over a long wooden fence at these interesting new intruders. We can hear the gentle scrape of the ocean beyond the horizonless pasture, but much walking lies between us and it. To our left, gentle hills turn steeper, full of grassy and fern-covered tumult. We open a gate next to a sign that announces the beginning of our journey – the Okia Track – and start down a rutted tractor path.

Ten minutes later, we’re back at the gate. It turns out that we’re on the wrong side of a fence. The commitment is strong, perhaps, but the skill may be lacking.

(Continued here…)

Transitory traumas (New Zealand, pt. 11)

[plane]It’s the most stunning flight ever.

I’ve flown over the towering spires of the Alps. I’ve flown over deep blue equatorial ocean flecked with glinting white. I’ve flown over the jagged russet shading of the Grand Canyon. They’ve got nothing on this series of views: isolated, snow-capped Mt. Ruapehu rearing above a few drifting clouds, the girdled regularity of Mt. Egmont and its endless downflowing rivers, flowing white-capped turbulence on Cook Strait, the delicate golden tracery of Farewell Spit, and then the towering, rust-colored Kaikoura Range in disordered majesty, bordered by the relentless oscillation of the Pacific Ocean.

Theresa encourages me to get the camera and take a few pictures through the plane’s tiny window. But no, I don’t think I will. Some pictures are beyond the lens.

In Christchurch, arriving later than we’d anticipated thanks to a delayed Auckland departure, we engage in the most unsecure of transfers – through a door, around a corner, and into an already-queued line of passengers, with nary a security camera or officer in sight – to our next flight. A thirty-three seat, double-propped needle in Air New Zealand blue and white sits on the tarmac, and Theresa immediately gets nervous; she doesn’t like small planes, she hates turbulence, and this flight promises an abundance of both. Amid the clatter and chaos of the care and feeding of an airplane, carts and hoses and identically-suited men swarming like workers ‘round a queen bee, we board the plane, passing our luggage – currently sunning itself atop an overstuffed baggage cart – along the way. We’ve paid $100 in “overweight” charges to get this already-irritating collection of clothing and wine onto the Waiheke Island ferry, onto an Airbus shuttle (as always, incredibly delayed and highly unreliable), and onto a small domestic jet. It’s amazing what the addition of a single case of wine can do to otherwise hassle-free travel, and my back still hurts from lugging the box across a busy Quay Street in Auckland.

The southward flight from Christchurch is bumpy and far less scenic than its predecessor, with the buffeting waves of the Pacific coastline petering out against low, rocky cliffs that only slightly elevate the farmland to their west. It seems we’ve barely ascended to a level cruising altitude when we make a slow, sweeping turn to the right and begin the seemingly endless westward descent to Dunedin’s remote airport, the enveloping hills turning green and lush and overrunning the last traces of farmland. A tiny, somewhat ill-designed terminal is packed with students returning from holiday (Dunedin is a major university town), and one by one they pull battered knapsacks and trunks from the conveyor belt and depart for re-acquaintance with friends (and, no doubt, re-acquaintance with hefty quantities of Speights). Eventually, we’re left with a dozen other forlorn-looking tourists and students, luggage-less.

(Continued here…)

Mud and melancholy (New Zealand, pt. 10)

[Marty thieving wine samples]Light petting

“Which turn is it?”

Sue consults her notes. “The one to the petting zoo.”

I press the brakes, glance in my rear-view mirror. “What?”

“The petting zoo. Look, there,” she points, “up that road.”

“You know, I’ve driven this road a dozen times, and I’ve never noticed that.”

We turn. A few forlorn animals – mostly sheep, and where can one possibly find those in New Zealand? – stare balefully at us from behind a short fence. They don’t look particularly eager to be petted…but given a total absence of potential petters, there doesn’t seem to be much danger of that. Nor of ticket-taking, or indeed of any two-legged habitation whatsoever. So are these just a bunch of animals in a pen? “Hey, come pet them if you want!”

The sheep provide no answer, though they do continue to stare.

An end to summer

Most visitors to Waiheke Island’s Mudbrick will not set foot or wheel anywhere near a petting zoo. That’s because they’ll be at the winery’s eponymous restaurant, highly-regarded among Waiheke’s limited dining options, which is situated quite close to the Matiatia ferry wharf. Instead, we’re amongst tree-lined vineyards somewhere not too far from Stonyridge, still with Sue & Neil Courtney in tow, in a clean, functional winery completely removed from the touristed byways of the island. We’re joined by Nick Jones, co-owner of the property, and a youngish chap (yet another!) named Marty, who turns out to be the winemaker, and we’re here to taste some wine.

Nick wears a light blue “Playboy 50” t-shirt with studied insouciance, while Marty attends to the actual business of tasting. They’re relaxed, jovial, and inclined more towards humor than serious wine talk, which is just fine with us after a long day of wine visits. We thus skip the preliminaries and get right to tasting, with our quartet interjecting the occasional question into the casual levity.

(Continued here…)

A passage to insight (New Zealand, pt. 9)

[David Evans Gander]A wrinkle in vine

“How do you go back to the place where everything changed…?” I asked, once, and from that question a travelogue was born. The “place” I had in mind was Milford Sound, on which much more can and will be written many narratives hence, but certainly other interpretations are possible. Here’s one:

“Hello?”

David Evans Gander pokes his head around a doorway. He’s casual in working shorts and shirt, knee-deep in one of those endless tasks that consume every morning, afternoon, and night of a winemaker’s existence. “Just a moment.”

We wait. It’s dark and cool inside, strangely silent outside.

A half-dozen moments later, he re-emerges with bottles in hand, ducks behind the counter of the now-closed winery café (really more of a pizzeria, to the apparent delight of most visitors) to retrieve some glasses, and groups us around a picnic-like table.

“So…how was Stony Batter?”

Rock is their forté

My first day in New Zealand was a bit of a blur. Not so much from jet lag as travel lag, a sense-dulling miasma of displacement and the nasty, filmy feeling of twelve hours of recycled airplane air battling the onrush of a world of new experiences and sensations. Among those sensations was a marvelous little wine – just a glass – shared with Theresa and Sue Courtney at Nourish. I’d spent the morning at Goldwater and Stonyridge, tasting a lot of wines that were – whether better or worse than I’d expected – familiar. But here, at this terrific little bistro, was a glass of sun-filled viognier that rose above all my expectations, especially for this highly cranky grape. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Passage Rock 2001 Viognier (Waiheke Island) – One of the rarest of wine discoveries, a delicious viognier from somewhere other than Condrieu. Not that it tastes like Condrieu. There’s the requisite midpalate fatness, but it’s braced on both sides with excellent acidity and a lovely floral delicacy. Best of all, there’s no alcoholic heat.

Passage Rock. Few wineries I’ve not visited hold a special place in my heart, and none whereat I’ve tasted only one wine. And yet, there was something about that deliciously brief taste of viognier…well, if I ever got back to Waiheke Island, I vowed to visit. To see what it was all about, to get at the heart of the matter…no, I must admit, my aim was more personal: to try to recapture and relive that memory.

Sue talks about our morning while Evans Gander pours the wine and I study our surroundings. Passage Rock would be, in the absence of Stony Batter, the most remote of Waiheke Island’s wineries, and the facilities obviously represent a sort of haphazard expansion; needs-based, rather than designed. And while the vines fanning out from the main buildings replicate a descent to the sea found at our morning visit, it’s a gentler, slower, shallower descent to a much more distant shore. Which only adds to the feeling of isolation.

Soon enough, however, the first wines are in front of us and we’ve work to do.

(Continued here…)

Sheep attack! (New Zealand, pt. 8)

[Stony Batter bottles]Flocking together

A large, flightless mass akin to a colorful heirloom chicken scuttles across the yard, pausing every few feet to investigate a potentially edible morsel. Cliff and I emerge from our apartments at the same time to watch, which only serves to increase the velocity of its scampering and nibbling.

“It’s a weka, I reckon,” opines Cliff.

…

Swans, geese, ducks and gulls congregate in multiracial harmony on a beach that adjoins the Matiatia ferry wharf. Neither begging food from passersby nor twitching in fear from same, they bask in the sun, preening and squalling as the ferry noisily chugs, groans, and squeaks into its berth. Our guests have arrived.

…

A not-so-stealthy and rather ridiculous-looking black, blue, and white bird with a vivid orange beak and grossly un-proportionate legs stumbles around the roadside, occasionally veering onto our already too-narrow road. Were there ever need for a visual link between the bird and the dinosaur, this sight would settle all doubts. We slow down, then swerve as best we can to miss it, but it seems not-at-all put out by the cloud of dust that now encompasses it. Neil Courtney, concise as ever, answers my unspoken query: “pukeko.”

New Zealand is for the birds

Stony dancer

It’s a sunny, hot day on Waiheke Island, though cooling ocean breezes keep the temperature just a shade short of uncomfortable. We’ve picked up Auckland-area wine writer Sue Courtney and her husband Neil for a day of wine tasting, a reversal of our usual arrangement (in which they cart us around mainland wine regions), and definitely some sort of payback for Sue’s guidance on our previous visit. That is, assuming the Americans’ driving on remote gravel roads through the wilds of Waiheke doesn’t give them both premature heart attacks. I do note that Sue’s breath seems a little quicker than usual, though Neil is his usual stoic self.

Sue’s arranged for us to start our day with a tour at the reclusive and remote Stony Batter winery, and it’s impossible to turn down the opportunity. Built on the massive expanse of an historic reserve better known for its old gun emplacements and tunnels, Stony Batter is less a winery than a all-encompassing agricultural project that covers a rather large percentage of the northeastern quadrant of the island, a project unlike any other on Waiheke. The owner, apparently an unimaginably wealthy gent, has an obvious desire for privacy (the entrance to the reserve is blocked by a forbidding gate, though through apparent negotiation hikers are once more allowed on the property as long as they don’t touch, look at, smell or otherwise offend the vines), but has equally obviously spared no expense in covering the area with a crazy-quilt of experimental vineyards.

(Continued here…)

Whites only (New Zealand, pt. 7)

Ask not what your winery can do for you…

The aquamarine rippling of the Hauraki Gulf throws shadows and highlights onto the trees below us. A breeze gently ruffles the leaves, then stills, freshening the quiet air but leaving nothing but memory in its wake. I hold up my glass of sauvignon blanc, which shines bright and clear in the sunlight, and take a deep, luxurious sniff. All is right with the world.

Though not quite as much is right with the wines.

We’re on the patio at Kennedy Point, looking down a rather precipitous cliff to the ocean, and working through a tasting conducted by a friendly young Californian. But after the sauvignon blanc, I’m afraid it’s all as downhill as the below-patio slope.

(Continued here…)