I used to read the NY Times online but I haven’t really done that lately. For awhile I was living with families who were public radio junkies, but I haven’t done much of that recently, either. And yes, I am living on the beach, on an island, and the closest landmass is Australia but there are other people around here who do have half a clue about the world, so there really isn’t any excuse except the fact that i kind of enjoy living in my little south pacific bubble. Sometimes I think that the world could go kaput and most of New Zealand wouldn’t notice or care. Maybe there would be a collective heart attack in auckland, but it kind of seems like most people here would look up for a second and go ‘nuclear holocaust?’ and then go back to moving stock gates. The world news section here is thin, and reads more like perez hilton’s blog castoffs then actual news. I am not sure if one actually has to think about the rest of the world if one lives so far away from the rest of it.
One of the best things about living here is listening to the forecast on the radio. Watching it on the news is also acceptable, but the radio is better. They do the forecast for the entire country. It takes less than 5 minutes. They go from south to north and they cover the whole country, and then they throw in the chatham islands too, and you know the weather for the entire country. They go the same way every time, and its kind of nice to hear the lady on the radio pronounce Taupo and Whangarei and all of the other places that I’m only comfortable naming when I’ve been drinking.
Hearing people talk about the weather here is also a novelty. People here don’t say “oh, it’ll rain tomorrow” or “hey, looks like the sun is coming out”. They say things like “ah, that northwesterly’s moved in” or “looks like that low pressure system is stuck and that southwesterly’s passing through”. Systems, fronts, pressure systems. Its like everyone here took a class in meteorology. The radio forecast is a little more highbrow here, and they bang it out at least six times a day. People are obsessed with when it will stop being rainy, or windy, or cold– that time is generally right now. It lasts for month, and then they go back to 9 months of waiting for the 4pm or the 6pm or the 10pm weather to tell them that pretty soon that southerly low pressure is coming right through again.
In the past month, the weather has alternated between unrelenting getting-cancer-right-NOW sunshine and grey, humid, patchy rain. It rained hard for two days– I was hiking the Nydia Track as it poured and poured and poured. I had to be happy because everyone was in a drought and there’s a huge fire risk and they needed the rain, but I was hurling myself along the track in foggy, soaked glasses unable to see the sharp, slippery rocks in front of me. The two day hike wound through depressing heavily-logged areas and a cow pasture. My rain coat quit after a couple hours. I was soaked in sweat from going uphill, and soaked in rain from being an idiot who hikes in bad weather. After four hours I stopped to eat lunch in the rain. I sat under a palm tree with minimal shelter and shoved spoonfuls of wet peanut butter and crackers in my mouth. Rain ran down my face and into my mouth, tasting like sunblock (always the optimist) and sweat and mud, from having fallen down twice already. I ate half a whittaker’s dark block as i stood in the downpour, getting improbably wetter. I was wearing shorts, black socks, and trail running shoes that made sloshing noises as I walked.
The weather was better later in the week, but it took a little while for me to notice. After three days of walking in and out of saddles in wet boots, all I thought was ‘I hate this island i hate this island i hate this oh, look, its sunny. that’s pretty.’
I found myself on Maud Island for a week, which is a pretty improbable place to be, as far as places in new zealand go. The island is a protected, predator free reserve for a few fragile populations of birds, insects, and frogs. There is no landing permitted unless you go through the Dept Of Conservation (DoC), who occasionally arrange volunteer work trips. Through a funny chain of events I got on a trip and forgot all about my hiking disaster the minute we got on our private DoC water taxi to Maud. Funny how an hour of sunshine on a ferry through the sounds can make you forget three days of sheer hell. Boy I like boats.
The weather was not actually that much better on Maud– it rained for an entire afternoon and was often grey, but we stayed in a lodge on the island (with hot water! and pillows! and daytime tv!) and the rangers didn’t make us work in the rain. The other volunteers and I planted native trees– ngaio trees, which the ngaio weevil will eventually come and live in. We reset traplines, meaning we put new bait in traps that catch rats and stoats and wekas when they find their way onto the island. We went fishing. We went hiking. We went sea kayaking.
Maud is home to six breeding pairs of takehe. Takehe sort of look like they were invented for Sesame Street. They are large, docile, curious, funny colored, and if they are scared they waddle away and everyone laughs. They look like grossly overfed ducks, only they are blue, and they have red feet and red beaks. The beaks are pelican shaped. Docility and curiosity don’t really bode well for population growth, so there are very few left. Maud has no rats or stoats or wildlife snatchers so the birds are free to run around and be the idiosyncratic, gentle tubby things that they are.
One of the rangers had a homemade boat– a bathtub in a wooden frame buoyed by four pontoons. On our last afternoon together, the volunteers decided we needed to get the bathtub on the water. Enter aforementioned afternoon of rain. It took four of us to launch it and drag it out again, by which point a downpour had settled in on us. We paddled around the bay in the bathtub anyway, though paddle is a generous term. More like we sat in the bathtub and held paddles and we sort of moved. Standing on the top of the wooden frame, in my soaked teeshirt, shorts, and life jacket, completely wet and outside once again but enjoying myself far more and imitating a punter, I asked if anyone knew a good sea shanty. One volunteer, an Austrian woman, immediately broke out into ‘what would you do with a drunken sailor’. When we returned to the lodge we were frozen and soaked but pleased with our voyage, and one of the rangers lit a fire and baked us lemon scones. We made nachos for dinner and then everyone went on a night walk to look at giant weta and frogs.
The weather back in Paekak has been fine; I have been here for a week, with general intentions of being far away from the south island and close to people who like me. This weekend I am headed back very far north (seriously, i doubt anyone has undertaken a more epileptic tour of new zealand) to wwoof Great Barrier Island and possibly reunite with my epic german traveling partner in crime, and then maybe the south island and i will reconcile. If the weather settles.
