Slightly puzzled but quite sure that none of the chaos could possibly have been us, we went into the kitchen to make some much-needed coffee. One of the other guests asked me if we found our keys last night. Not having any idea what he was talking about I said yes, since we must have had them to get into the room. A few minutes later the middle-aged guy we'd been speaking to early the previous evening came in and asked us if we had found our keys and not long afterwards one of the guys running the hostel asked the same question. At this point I had to admit that I had no idea what they were talking about and confess that I didn't clearly remember getting back to the hostel. He informed me that main reason for his interest was that he had lent us a spare set of keys, which he was keen to see returned, when we had been unable to locate ours in Joanne's bag. Someone had let us in at the main door, but we were stymied when it came to our own room. Very embarrassed, I rushed back to the room and found a set of keys sitting on the table next to the bed. Meanwhile Joanne found ours in her purse.

Having wasted most of the day by waking up so late, we wandered into the town centre to get a feel for the place. Considering it is the biggest town in New Zealand, Auckland is tiny but then with only 4.3 million inhabitants in the whole country, there are not many New Zealanders to go around. I kept being reminded of Glasgow but again I'm not sure why. Probably still just the cold and the rain. On the way back from town, inevitably, we passed the Irish barman who had so kindly locked us in and served us green chartreuse the previous night. I didn't feel like speaking to him; I must not drink green chartreuse again.

We behaved ourselves that night and the next day returned to town to meet Joanne's friends Sharon and Derek. They had kindly agreed to receive post for us, so they brought us our South America on a Budget and New Zealand Rough Guides; completely sick of the Lonely Planet after it was all that was available in Asia. They also brought us a DVD full of MP3s that Joanne's brother-in-law, Robert, had sent us to allow us to change some of the music on our MP3 players we had become completely bored of.

The Sky Tower - still obscured by rain

We left them and went to Auckland museum. It was really pissing down and we had to wring our clothes out in the toilets when we got there. I wasn't all that impressed with the museum, partly because the exhibits weren't in any kind of chronological order, which I found very confusing; they preferred to have a room of “Maori stuff” and another room of “Birds” and another room about “Scottish immigrants” which is all very well, but I would rather have seen how each area of interest impinged on the others and at what point in time they all intersected. It wasn't a well put together display at all.

There wasn't as much as I'd hoped about New Zealand before the Maoris arrived either. The Rough Guide had really piqued my interest when I read that Maoris probably did not arrive until the 13th Century. I had assumed that they had been there ages before the Europeans arrived but in fact they only just beat them by about four hundred years. Not that long ago a friend of mine – Gavin I think it was – had seen a promotional video by the New Zealand tourism board which had described New Zealand as “The newest country in the world” and we had both assumed that this was a piece of Euro-centric propaganda, since it was about the last place white men found, but in fact they knew what they were talking about and it was perfectly accurate. That somewhere on Earth was not inhabited by humans until so late in human history I find amazing.

What I did learn at the museum, though, I found very interesting: New Zealand split from Gondwanaland so early that it went down an entirely different evolutionary path from the rest of the world; even Australia with its weird marsupials and so on is a much more modern deviation than New Zealand. All the trees native to New Zealand are also endemic, which is further confirmation of the early isolation. Frogs native to New Zealand do not go through a tadpole phase, now generally considered de rigeur by other frogs; instead they are laid in yolky eggs, rather like reptiles, and born as froglets complete with little tails and legs. Oh yes, Creationists, you are so right: clearly Evolution is just a myth!

There were no ground-dwelling mammals on New Zealand until the Maoris arrived, bringing, apart from themselves, some kind of Polynesian rat as food, and dogs. The only mammals before were some bats, which presumably flew all the way from Australia or other Pacific islands. The explanation for the lack of mammals is that mammals had not yet evolved by the Gondwanaland separation. In turn, since New Zealand's dinosaurs suffered the same catastrophe as all the rest, this meant that there were no ground-dwelling predators and over time birds evolved to fill the niche that mammals occupy elsewhere. Unfortunately for these birds, that meant that they were flightless and defenceless against humans, dogs, and rats when they arrived.

Like many guilt-ridden Westerners, I assume, I am used to thinking of European man as the baddie who causes mass-extinctions and destruction of the ecosystem when they arrive in places previously occupied only by gentle natives in-tune with their environment. Of course this view is naïve nonsense and, like the Amerindians who were guilty of massive deforestation and the extinction of the giant sloth amongst other creatures, the Maoris' arrival caused huge upheaval in the environment and many of these flightless birds in particular were extinct not long after their arrival. I had read in the Rough Guide that Maoris occupied the North Island predominantly. What the museum added was that they had originally occupied the South Island where most of the tasty flightless Moas were to be found; this is what they lived on after the most of sub-tropical plants they had brought from Polynesia failed in the temperate climate. Then once they had eaten all of the Moas, they moved back to the North Island where these who had stayed behind were beginning to learn how to cultivate the land there. Sweet potatoes, or kumara, that's what they lived on after exterminating so much of the native fauna, the only imported crop to grow successfully in the new land. Of course the dogs and rats took their toll as well and it all added up to an ecological apocalypse.

However the Maoris' ecological damage was nothing compared to what happened when the Europeans did arrive, releasing pigs early on “so there would be something to eat” when they returned, then deer a bit later “so there would be something to hunt”; and this was before colonisation had even begun. Of course they also brought the more familiar ship stowaway rat from Europe. And cats. The remaining flightless birds were doomed: they had been hiding in the forest but, after the deforestation the Maoris had begun was brought up to an industrial pace, there was nowhere to hide from the new predators and their numbers plummeted further.

The archaeological, cultural, logistical, and linguistic evidence all points to the Maoris coming from Polynesia, probably via the Cook Islands and maybe further East before returning and heading South; legend tells of the people originating from far overseas in a place called Hawaiki. They weren't explicit in the Museum, and I'm no linguist but I assumed they were suggesting that Hawaii is where their journey began, although I didn't see that implied anywhere else.

Another source of disappointment in the museum for me, was that the Maori section said absolutely nothing about the moko, the traditional Maori facial tattoos. I had hoped to find more out about them. We had seen one woman in Auckland with her chin tattooed, but that was the extent of our moko experience thus far. The museum had lots of paintings by colonial artists, where the mokos were clearly the main subject, but the panels underneath didn't even mention them: they just told you all about the artist!

When we left the museum we were soaked again. Such Scottish weather – and we didn't have the clothes for it. We had clothes for a year-long summer. Back at the hostel even more people asked us if we had found our key; clearly the owners had been very amused and told everyone about it.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 14, 2009 from Auckland, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Very educational.

written by  Rosalyn Faulds on September 9, 2009

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