Manifest Destiny 2:

February 25, 2010

Yesterday I left the relative luxury of Mt. Maunganui for the leaking skies of Auckland. What started as a misty drizzle is a full fledged tropical downpour. I’m in a community library in one of the south suburbs and the rain pounding on the corrugated metal roof creates a dull roar like there’s a busy freeway overhead. It’s almost enough to down out story time in the far corner of the room. Almost.

I am back in Auckland to take care of a lot of business. International banking is a pain. On either side it is fine but getting the two sides together is not easy. I also have to buy a car. The thought of driving on the left side of the road is freaking me out. I’m thinking of renting a car for a day so when it comes time to test drive something, I can focus on the car and less on traffic rules. It is also time to start putting my CV (resume) out there. I have been sending it out to recruiting firms so I can get a feeling for what is available and what I need to do to ready myself for a job. Not that I plan on having one for at least 2 months…

Before I bounce on to my errands, I want to offer the most sincere Thank You to Bobbi, Ben and Buddy for taking me into their home for almost a week. They were incredibly generous and the hospitality was so appreciated.

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February 20, 2010 Continued

Becs and Caleb post-engagement bbq

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February 20, 2010

Mt. Maunganui has been my home since Friday. I don’t really want to leave. It is perfect—all of the small town charm of a central California beach town with the weather and “island time” attitude of Hawaii. On a map it looks tiny but walking times are twice what you would expect. In town the shops bustle but three blocks away neighborhood streets sit silently. Supposedly the population doubles for the month surrounding Christmas but I am having a hard time identifying tourists anyway since everyone sports a harsh red sunburn. Early morning, you can find half the town hiking the Mount or in the water. The beaches stretch forever in long sweeping brush strokes of paradise white and what-day-is-it blue. Random small islands sit offshore like a cosmic game of Battleship.

In my last entry I had arrived, taken refuge with Ben and Bobbi, surfed and BBQ’d with their friends. Saturday morning started much the same. Sally—the girl from the bus—and I surfed for a few hours in the morning, changed clothes, ate lunch and went for a hike. The Mount was the obvious choice. Rising above the relatively flat costal planes and the sand spit that makes the platform for town is the Mount. The lower half looks like it was trimmed of trees and replaced with grasses. Sheep(!) dot the hill, grazing in such a lazy and slow manner that they almost blend into the surroundings. I tried to go pet one but they are really skittish. The rumors about Kiwi men must be true, or at least word has spread through the sheep community. The hike up the Mount is a well worn dirt path spiraling around the hill for the complete panoramic view—a spectacular view to say the least. The west side of the Mount is likely the weather side as the vegetation grows over the path to form a canopy and ferns and snaking vines replace the waxy leafed, woody trees on the rest of the hill. At the top there are several plateau clearings with benches. On the ocean facing end paragliders dance back and forth in the updraft just out of reach of the trees.

After hiking the Mount, Sally and I walked over to Leisure Island. It’s a small, rocky island that’s close enough to shore that there is easy beach access. As we got closer to the point, we ran into a wet and flustered Jen and Kip. They told us they had just jumped off the rocks by the blowhole and then took off. At the time, I just figured Kip didn’t like me and didn’t want to hang out and talk. He’s English and an engineer and his manner the night before was stoic, polite and reserved where the rest of the group was more jovial and relaxed.

Later that night we found out the reason for the hasty passing. Caleb, with help from his roommates Kip and Shane, created an Amazing Race type adventure for the girls in the group. The scavenger hunt/race took all day and concluded at the top of the Mount where Caleb proposed to Becs. To celebrate, Caleb hosted everyone for a bbq.

I still can’t tell if Kip thinks I’m a tool.

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February 19, 2010

“8 is great! Making friends!” – Jack Rajcic

The hostel I was staying at in Auckland—City Garden Hostel—was clean, spacious, safe, well staffed and clean. It had access to the central locations. The downside was that it was really quiet and filled with couples. No one wants to go out for meals, exploring or drinking. This forced me to be even more socially adventurous than normal but the Kiwis responded in spades. Wednesday morning I was on the bus into town when I asked the lady sitting in front of me if we were getting close to the stop I needed. The lady, Karla—a lithe woman in her late 30s--asked if I was Canadian. Despite this offensive gesture we struck up a conversation. She gave me her business card and offered to help me network to find an engineering job. I emailed her later to thank her and she asked me if I wanted to meet for dinner. After a great meal and some fun conversation she has invited me to join her and her young son on a bus trip to Mt. Maunganui near Tauranga. It was Wednesday and they were leaving Friday morning and although the idea of living so spontaneously was uncomfortable I agreed to join them. As a man with no ties, I can do things like that. It also helped that Mt. Maunganui/Tauranga is an area I’m considering as a place to settle down and one of my NZ “friends” Bobbi lives there (Thanks Ben!). A key footnote to this story is that I am apprehensive to ask people if I can stay with them. Apparently it is a natural question for backpackers to ask and unobtrusive (and complimentary) for Kiwis to receive but it still makes me uncomfortable. Well, I never really clarified my sleeping arrangements with Karla…

At the bus station on Friday morning, I noticed a cute brunette with a surfboard bag. Karla and her toddler son, Sean sat down behind the brunette on the bus so the opportunity was perfect to sit next to her. Sally the Surfing English Lass is from Leicester, England. For those not up on their UK geography, that’s very landlocked. On the 4 hour bus ride from Auckland south and east to Mt. Maunganui Sally explained that she took up surfing a few years back, was a member of the London Surf Club and her boyfriend (damn!) got her a custom board right as she was about to quit. Sally regaled me with stories of exotic surf trips—Hawaii, Bali, Costa Rica—while I peppered her with inane questions like the difference between British and English (never got a conclusive answer ok, I got the correct answer but it was delivered unconvincingly).

The drive itself wound through only a small corner of the country. South of Auckland we saw arid, open land with the occasional cornfield. As we got closer to the Coromandel Peninsula the valleys narrowed into steep and windy tracks with lush forests of brush, ferns and, strangely, pine trees. Because we were on a cheap bus there were numerous stops in tiny towns to pick up and drop people off. The towns were mostly farm towns—grapes, corn, sheep and cows as far as I could tell—and looked pretty similar to any middle-America farm community. Around the 3 hour mark we emerged from the hills to Bay of Plenty. The Bay is a long sweeping coastline pocked with waterways and islands in a picturesque blurring of land and sea. Expansive marshlands and shallow channels meander into narrow rivers and protected bays. Passing through Tauranga we arrived at our stop, Mt. Maunangui—a kilometer wide beach town punctuated by an extinct volcanic cone known as the Mount (“Mauao” in Maori). The Mount rises high above the relatively flat town like a giant green zit. Well, a zit covered with lush vegetation.

Getting off the bus, I exchanged phone numbers with Sally, grabbed my bags and turned to Karla. Karla, to my chagrin, gave me a big hug, promised me I would have a great time in the area, told me to call her when I was back in Auckland (to get all of the stuff I left in her office) and jumped in her friend’s car. Now, I don’t know if I offended her by sitting and talking with Sally for the whole ride, or if hadn’t really offered for me to stay with her at her friend’s place or if she thought I already had plans lined up, but lesson learned! From this point forward, I am going to be upfront in asking for a place to sleep.

Not all was lost as I knew the address of Bobbi’s boyfriend’s surf shop and started walking. When I got to the surf shop, Bobbi and Ben were hanging out waiting for 5pm so they could close up shop. We did quick introductions and I asked if I could stay with them for a few days. They were quick to offer me a place to sleep and could not have been more gracious. 30 minutes later we were in the water, surfing on one of Ben’s boards in absolute bliss. 2 hours after that we were bbq’ing at Ben and Bobbi’s house down the street with their friends Caleb, Becs, Jen, Kip and Shane. More on them soon.

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February 18, 2010 Continued 2

Even more pics from the hike:

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February 18, 2010 Continued

Here are some more pictures from the hike:

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February 18, 2010

Quickly, to clarify the photos from yesterday the first picture is of the Sky Tower from Parnell. The Sky Tower is in the heart of Auckland’s Central Business District (CBD) and at 328m (60,000 ft?—I’m still getting used to metric) it is the tallest structure in the Southern Hemisphere. The second photo is from dinner the first night. I was eating by myself at an Irish pub when Andrew and Vanessa, a young couple from Toronto who I met in the hostel, asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner. It was a nice cure for a spot of loneliness. The third picture is from the base of the Sky Tower. The three cables visible on the left are for people who bungee-repel off the tower. Kiwis think this is normal. I didn’t get any good shots of it but maybe another day. The last photo is of me in the CBD after lunch the second day. The smile shows you that I’m happy. The big hair is proof that it is me. I’m still experimenting with the camera software but I want to embed captions.

Yesterday I attempted to hike from the Waitemata Harbor south to the Manukau Harbor in central Auckland. Billed as a 16km, 4 hour walk I thought they were severely overestimating the time required to go 16km (750ft?). A South African girl from the hostel was planning on doing the hike and invited me. She was a….plus size girl with a great personality and a wonderful sense of humor (read between the lines). Ok, she was fat. But her proper English-South African manners made her seem smart and interesting. She insisted that she was quite sporty and scoffed at the idea of the hike taking 4 hours. When we met at the trail head—a plaque outside the ferry wharf—she was wearing a summer mu-mu and slippers made from crocs material. I pretty much knew we would be taking lots of breaks. The trail was clever and subtle, winding up through the CBD concrete jungle, up through the Auckland university campus, up through the Auckland Domain Park, up to Mt. Eden, down through the Mt. Eden neighborhood, up One Tree Hill and finally down to Onehunga at the Manukau Harbor. If you were counting that was 5 ups and 2 downs. Somehow we started at sea level, ended at sea level but spent all day hiking up steep hills. The sun was blazing and it was incredibly humid, but the hike was pretty cool. The trail was marked by small yellow markers with black arrows for the southbound trail and blue markers with black arrows for the opposite direction. The path was often poorly marked, but in a fun way that made it feel like a scavenger hunt. Sometimes the markers were embedded in the sidewalk and other times they could be nailed to a tree or fastened to a street sign. It was an informal way to see the heart of Auckland.

On the way we stopped at the Auckland Museum to see the Pacific Islander and Maori exhibits. There were tons of cool artifacts and maps showing the path of the pacific islanders to New Zealand. The localized tribes ranged from peaceful and passive to savage cannibals. As European settlers made contact, moved in and conquered the Maori societies went through an array of iterations to end up in their current state of social integration. The timelines and modus operandi are not too different from American colonist so it was like looking at an alternate version of American History.

While walking through the domain we crossed several cricket pitches. So strange. It won’t be long until I have conquered the game. It looks so silly. One of my plans is to dominate the game in 3 days and then decide if there is enough money in it to turn pro. If there isn’t then I’ll just declare it a silly game publicly and ruin the game forever. India and Pakistan will have to settle their differences over something less ridiculous.

Mt Eden, the next attraction, is a volcanic crater rising high above the city. At the top there was a really cool plaque showing the latitude, longitude, elevation, an etched map of the city and the distance and direction to important world cities.

After Mt. Eden we wandered down through the town of Mt. Eden, another Auckland college and through some quiet neighborhoods. The lack of other hikers made me feel almost like I was trespassing. The next attraction was the famous One Tree Hill, which, as you can guess, is a hill. My travel companion was in no shape to tackle another hill, but to be honest I was sweaty and tired too. We bypassed the hill and started walking through the neighborhood of Epsom on out way to Onehunga and the Manukau Harbor. As we approached a fork in the road, I asked an elderly man for directions and he asked us where we were from. When my friend replied South Africa, he addressed her in Afrikaans. When I replied San Diego, he told me he had been there but it was too crowded for his liking. We chatted for a minute while we explained our bay to bay hike. He looked at us for a second and asked us if we wanted to walk home with him and have some coffee. This really is the mentality of the Kiwis. So hospitable. Maybe it’s the common bond of being on an isolated island or maybe it’s a remnant of Victorian ideals but whatever the reason, these people are excellent.

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February 17, 2010

"I’m gonna free fall out into nothing, I’m gonna leave this world for awhile” – Tom Petty

Two days in Auckland and I know nothing. Well, almost nothing. It’s humid, but everyone seems surprised by it. The sun has blazed overhead and minutes later been obscured behind shimmering silver clouds bringing torrential rain. Cicadas chip in chorus, projecting a wall of sound greater than any Phil Spector dream. What is evident is that the Kiwis are incredibly nice people--out of their way, genuinely polite with an air of unnecessary overcompensation. At the airport I got directions for the main shuttle to town. Once on the shuttle, the driver looked at my bags and asked for my final destination. He made sure to let me know which stop was mine and then got out of the bus to point out the correct bus schedule on the bus stop for my local bus. Later that day I was trying to buy the correct phone charger and was striking out. The phone, a 3 year old smart phone that Jack gave me before I left, used a plug size not found on any common New Zealand or Aussie phones. At the third shop I went to, the clerk cut open a dozen boxes trying to find a fit, then walked me across the street to a competitor’s shop to help sift through their inventory and finally went online to figure out how to order it. When all of those avenues were unsuccessful, she sold me a battery-powered charger for pennies on the dollar.

Speaking of dollars, everything here is expensive. It borders on prohibitively expensive. Internet charges by the megabyte. I have no idea how many emails are in a megabyte. Text messages are $0.20 each. My newly opened checking account has a monthly service charge. The equivalent of a 16 oz. drink at a convenience store is $3-4. At a camping store, they were selling tents at a reasonable $100 but Nalgene water bottles at $35. Granted, these are NZ dollar values which and you can multiply by 0.7 to get a rough US dollar equivalent but that’s still expensive. I haven’t figured out if it is a de facto Auckland surcharge or if it is this expensive everywhere.

My hostel is in a posh neighborhood called Parnell, situated on a steep hill, with the Kiwi version of fancy houses and eclectic fine dining. There are tons of Japanese, Thai, Indian restaurants and Irish pubs. So far I’ve been trying to eat as much traditional NZ fare as possible. The food is fresh and excellent, the beers are average and the wines are exceptional. Sauvignon blancs from Marlborough are the recommendation so far. Same with grilled Hapuka fish and roasted kumara.

As for my plans, after talking to a bunch of people they have only gotten bigger. I’m looking at buying a camper van and driving all over the country. The NZ Department of Conservation has set up tramping loops (hikes) that range from half day to multiple days with secured cabins along the way. This sounds nothing short of spectacular and I want to try it before summer flitters away. I haven’t really figured out everything I need to do to make this happen but that’s what makes it an adventure.

This hasn’t been the most insightful post but I guess they can’t all be winners. I just wanted to post and let everyone know I’m safe, sound and on the ground.

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February 8, 2010

February 8, 2010

“Cause I’m leaving on a Jet Plane, Don’t know when I’ll be back again” – John Denver

Barely a week until I embark on my great New Zealand adventure of growth and self discovery. This blog would serve as a chronicle of insightful and poignant aphorisms but my brother Chris bluntly pointed out no one cares about that crap. As he put it, stories of self discovery always sound trite. Damn. There go my aspirations for a book deal with movie options. Instead of getting rich quick (read: easily), I will keep a log of where I am, what’s going on and a few observations. At the least this will keep me from having to repeat myself in 40 emails and keep your inboxes from being flooded with lengthy one-sided conversations.

So what’s the plan? The plan is not to have a plan. It is my nature to plant roots, to be deliberate, careful and calculated. I am fighting this nature. I have no job lined up, no place to stay, and no destination in mind. What I do have lined up is a February 14^th flight into Auckland. I have a 12 month visa, some clothes, a laptop and a camera. I “know” a handful of people and by that I mean that I have exchanged an email or two with a handful of friends of friends. So far, they seem nice. Hopefully they will have a couch I can sleep on for a few nights.

Why would I let go of a good job, a cushy life on the beach and some great friends? Wanderlust has clouded the rational thought part of my brain. Up to this point my life has been a well defined path with measured steps and predictable obstacles. Robert Frost may have taken the road less traveled but I took the road with the best map. That’s not to say I don’t like where my life has gone—because I am very proud of who I am and what I have accomplished—but that I see where my life is going and it is not enough. I can’t explain why but I feel it. For the past 10 years I have been slowly acquiring things and symbols of my progress in life. In less than 10 days almost all of it will be gone. There is some Buddhist tenant hiding in the expulsion of my possessions and worldly means but I’m not a spiritual man. What I want is to see what I have not yet seen, to experience what I have not yet experienced. Damn, Chris was right—that does sound trite.

But how will I manage to leave the comforts of California? How will I survive without perpetual gridlock, crumbling infrastructure and an ineffectual government crippled with debt? Maybe it makes me a martyr but somehow, someway, by the strength of Zeus and the wisdom of Athena I will do my best to flourish in the rugged isolation of a first world country with top notch socialized healthcare, undeniable and pristine natural beauty, unquenchable thirst for physical outdoor activities and relatively short flights to tropical locales like Fiji and Tahiti. Shed no tears for my noble, noble sacrifice.

Quite relevant to this vision quest are my fears. I don’t really fear going broke since I’m not exactly going in with a fortune at my disposal and going broke seems inevitable. I don’t fear hating New Zealand since I can always move on to somewhere else or move back to San Diego. I don’t fear not finding an engineering job because I am damn genius. I don’t fear failure because it’s a nebulous concept and I can always reframe my time to sound like everything was in the plan. What I do fear is being lonely. In leaving I am giving up daily contact with wonderful friends and family. It puts a lump in my throat to even think about not seeing them regularly. Thankfully, technology gives us numerous ways to keep in touch. I welcome comments posted on this blog or my Facebook page or emails or skype calls. And I will be back. I don’t know with what regularity or for how long or when, but you will all see me again. Please do me a favor and group all weddings, birthdays, births, deaths, fantasy football drafts and sweet parties into a 2 week window so I can fully justify the 13 hour plane flight. Or, we can meet in Fiji if it’s convenient for you. I’m pretty sure it’s convenient for me.

Mom, this last statement is for you. From the inception of my plan you have been very supportive. That said, I know you will worry. You’re a mom. I have never known you not to worry. I can’t alleviate your concerns but I am giving you some very easy homework. The following is a list of books/movies that I am asking you not to read/watch:

1) Into the Wild

2) Taken

3) Hostel

4) Touristas

5) The Beach

6) Cast Away

I love you, mom. This is for your own good.

Bye for now but not forever,

Matt

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