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Kiwis and Kangaroos

a travel blog by exumenius


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Nga Manu, Take Two - Night 72

Wellington, New Zealand


Trimming the Flax
Once again the old red van made its way up to Nga Manu. The sun was finally shining today, the first time in over a week, making the already scenic drive all that much more enjoyable. This morning we caught the feeding of the Kiwi birds. The emblematic, flightless bird feeds only at night so we were herded into a dark building to watch them eat behind the glass enclosure. Not exactly exciting. Kiwis, which once covered the islands, are also very rare now due to introduced predators.

We continued on were we left of yesterday


Nga Manu Jungle
and were finished around 2:30. After work we raced to the Keep New Zealand Beautiful (KNZB) head office in Waikanae to purchase some T-shirts. Last weekend both Kathi and I scoured downtown Wellington looking for the famous retro KNZB t-shirts that you see from time to time. Having no luck, we were resigned to buy them online until we found that the head office was located in Waikanae, just minutes from Nga Manu. We arrived at 2:50 and though they claim to be open until 3, the door was locked. After a bit of pounding, an old man emerged from the back and let us in, provided we would buy something. The old man was Barry, one of the executives of KNZB. Here was a man who could talk the ear off of a horse. We had to literally pry ourselves away from him once we wanted to leave. However, we made it worth his while to open up, purchasing nine shirts and signing GVN up as a sponsor organization.

Returning to town, we embarked on our Christmas grocery shopping tour. The girls have made elaborate plans for Christmas dinner, so the trip to Pak n’ Save took nearly two hours. Having no opinion over what flavor pudding or type of ham to make, I quickly hid myself in the alcoholic beverage section of the store. It is not that I don’t like holidays or special meals; it is just that I generally like any and all food and when given the preference will opt for the path of least resistance when cooking. I suppose one could say I’ve mastered the Tao of food.

What I Learned Today: Try as I might to be calm, there are times when gross inefficiency drives me completely insane.


permalink written by  exumenius on December 21, 2007 from Wellington, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Kiwis and Kangaroos
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Night on the Town - Night 73

Wellington, New Zealand

Like nearly all weekends here at Kowhai House, I began the day with a hike to Belmont Park. The sheer size of the park has allowed me the luxury of taking a different trail each and every time I have been there. I finished weeding the garden and took a well deserved nap in the afternoon.

At 8:30 the entire house left for a night out in


Full Moon over the Harbour
Wellington. We met Ben and a number of his friends at Mac’s Brewery on the waterfront. Mac’s Sassy Red is my favorite Kiwi beer to date so heading to its very home was a pleasure for me. Upon arriving I see some guy wearing a Seahawks Jersey. It turns out Ken is from Federal Way and was at the bar because his friend, also from Seattle (Covington), was bartending. Unfortunately this wasn’t enough to get us any drink specials. Mac’s died around 10:30, with only a smattering of old people remaining. Near the 11 o’clock hour we headed to a karaoke place across the street. The music selections of these people was nearly as bad

In the Cab with the British Girls
as the singing itself and on top of it all, there wasn’t a decent looking girl in the entire joint. Ben and I coped with this disaster by hiding away in the billiards room. Another one of those “What the fuck am I doing here?” moments. Surprising they all seem to happen in shitty karaoke bars.


At the Karaoke Bar

What I Learned Today: In English rules pool, a scratch allows the opponents two free shots.


permalink written by  exumenius on December 22, 2007 from Wellington, New Zealand
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South Island Planning - Night 74

Wellington, New Zealand

Not much of any significance occurred today. After a quick run to town to pick up some vitals, I spent most of the afternoon trying to plan my month on the south island. Most of the multi-day hikes on the south island require booking campsites or huts along the way. Since January is the busiest month, this is often nothing short of a monumental task getting all the huts on the right nights, etc. My plans for the Queen Charlotte hike have been squashed as both places to stay on night 2 are booked solid. Either I must buy a tent and related equipment or change plans to another hike. This is the one thing I was worried about…the sheer number of people on the island in January.

What I Learned Today: Putting salsa and mushrooms in a grilled cheese sandwich is delicious.


The Lower Hutt Jungle

permalink written by  exumenius on December 23, 2007 from Wellington, New Zealand
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Will the Real Cape Palliser Please Stand Up - Night 75

Wellington, New Zealand

The windy, rainy weather doomed our sailing

A Wary Seal
plans for the day. To compensate for our cancelled plans, we drove the two hours out to Cape Palliser to perform another seal count. At this point, I must confess to you, dear reader, that I have lied. Last week I errantly stated that we had done a seal count at Cape Palliser when in fact it was a much lesser known cape that we were on. The real Cape Palliser is a much longer drive through windy mountain roads and is also quite a bit more spectacular as far as scenery is concerned. I doubt this is not the first factual error I have made and likely will not be the last.


Cape Palliser

Quite surprisingly, upon arrival the rain stopped and the sun came out. The wind, however, refused to abate. Cape Palliser is recognized as the main home for the seal colony in this part of New Zealand. Our count of 257 seals verified this. Huge males sunning themselves on rocks, smaller females watching the pups play in the water, seals were in abundance. The whole kilometer long stretch of rocks stank foully of seal urine.


Cape Palliser looking South
Most of the pups and females would hurry to water once we approached, but the larger males barely raised their heads to acknowledge our presence. Their fear of man has been minimalized.

Being Christmas Eve, we prepared a large traditional New Zealand meal of lamb chops, mashed potatoes with a shrimp cocktail appetizer and tiramisu dessert. A feast in all senses of the word. Drinking of red wine began at the meal and continued well into the night. Around 9pm we opened the gifts that Lauren, the house advisor, had given to us. Later in the evening we engaged in a few games of drunken Clue

What I Learned Today: The New Zealanders call their Clue game Cluedo.


permalink written by  exumenius on December 24, 2007 from Wellington, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Kiwis and Kangaroos
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Christmas in Kiwiland - Night 76

Wellington, New Zealand

Christmas morning brought an absolute downpour. After everyone awoke and shook off their hangovers, we continued to open the remaining presents. Our Christmas morning movie was The Shawshank Redemption, an interesting choice for the day. The rain continued unabated and threatened to cancel our Christmas Day barbecue. In a bit of swamp engineering, I threw a few piece of loose plywood over the open porch and created for us the perfect locale to grill. For such action I was anointed the grillmaster and gladly took the job. Our feast included burgers, brats, hot dogs, shrimp kabobs, veggie sausages and burgers, and potatoes in tin foil.

The sun finally cleared in the afternoon and


Christmas Eve Dinner
gave us a nice Christmas afternoon. Without the cold weather and snow it just doesn’t seem like Christmas.

What I Learned Today: When it comes to holidays there are two kinds of people; 1) those who are very steeped in tradition and must recreate the experiences they had as children and 2) those of us who are happy with just a meal and tree.


permalink written by  exumenius on December 25, 2007 from Wellington, New Zealand
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Boxing Day - Night 77

Wellington, New Zealand

Today was Boxing, a National Holiday, so once again we had the day off from volunteering. I spent the sunny morning hiking the Hutt River Trail, a flat walk along the levees. Around noon the weather turned sour again, to the point of even bringing a bit of hail in the afternoon. The remainder of the day was spent updating my journal and trying to upload photos to Flickr and Facebook. The internet here on the island is incredibly slow, especially when trying to move large photo files.

PS. As you can probably tell by the decreasing length of my journal entries that I have become a bit bored in the last week or so. My time here at the volunteer house has been great, however, we are stuck out in the suburbs with no easy transportation into the city, thus it isn’t hard to run out of things to do on free days. In the end, I think a month on any one volunteer project is probably about the proper amount of time to spend. It’ll be a change to go back to living out of a bag next Tuesday, but it should be a nice change from my current sedentary existence.

What I Learned Today: Boxing Day originated in Victorian England when the rich would box up their unwanted presents and give them to the poor on the day after Christmas.


permalink written by  exumenius on December 26, 2007 from Wellington, New Zealand
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Back to Work at Eastbourne - Night 78

Wellington, New Zealand

If, in a fit of literary flair, I were to assign some decidedly anthropomorphic qualities to the weather in Wellington, I would have to say she was a woman…and a difficult one at that. She changes moods so frequently here that between taking off and putting back on of coats, applying and reapplying sunscreen, and ducking out of the wind and scurrying to find sunshine, often little of the day is left for the task at hand. True, that last statement contained a certain degree of hyperbole, but the fact remains that Wellington in December is tricky place to plan a picnic.


Eastbourne Beach
We left the house amidst thick clouds around 9:30 -- sailing having been postponed again for another day -- and arrived at Eastbourne beach covered in sunlight and cooled with a light breeze. Almost immediately the clouds poured down from the range coating us with a brief downpour. The rain was whisked away by a fierce northwestern wind that blew across the harbor pelting us with cold, salty air. Through this ebb and flow of pleasureful sun and painful rain, we conducted a beach clean up operation. Armed with garbage bags, gloves, and steadfast miens, the GVN volunteers managed to comb over a mile of beachfront. The take of the day belonged to Ben, who found a nearly intact, two-foot tall Hindu statue of Lord Krishna and his sacred bovine. Among the other finds were an eclectic pair of pink sunglasses, 17 socks, a multitude of bottles and caps, a buried brick wall, Amatamilophin tablets and a dead sheep. Yes, I said a dead sheep. The best I could do was a half burned economics notebook and a Puff the Magic Dragon toy.

For lunch, Ray treated us to fish, chips, and


Kiwi Black Jack
a few games of cards at her witchlike castle on Eastbourne Bay (see Dec 10th for photo). In the afternoon we resumed our dune-weeding project from a few weeks ago. The drought conditions of November and early December had nearly pushed the spineflex to a breaking point, but with the last two weeks’ rain, much of it was coming back as strong as ever. Unfortunately, so were the weeds. Our local liaison, Marvin (or something like that) invited us back to his place for drinks after the work was done. His aged wife was shocked when I told her that I don’t ‘take’ tea or coffee. I’ve been in these ex-British colonies for nearly three months now and I am still amazed at the high regard with which the Queen’s loyal subjects hold their blessed tea times. It is as if they think the earth itself should stop rotating so they can sip a bit of scalding hot, poor tasting brown water every two to three hours.

What I Learned Today: All jokes and carrion aside, the sheer volume of plastic, in forms of straws, bottle caps and other unidentified pieces found lying on the beach is absolutely appalling. The worst part of it all is that, as Weisman points out in his book, The World Without Us, plastics don’t really decay as much as they break down into smaller and smaller pieces (as opposed to traditional chemical decay in which the molecules actually change composition), that are then consumed further on down the tropic cycle and thus contaminating all forms of life. It seems as if we are destined to poison ourselves to extinction, but instead of an instantaneous, massive nuclear holocaust, it’ll likely be through a small, elongated plasticized one.


permalink written by  exumenius on December 27, 2007 from Wellington, New Zealand
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All Hands on Deck - Night 79

Wellington, New Zealand

The inter holiday period is a tough time to arrange volunteer projects as most of the coordinators of the local projects are unavailable. As such, our calendar was again blank for this cold and windy Friday. Once the rain cleared, Terry took us out on the Sentinel for an afternoon sail around the Harbor. With only four of us along this time (five, counting Ray) we weren’t allowed the luxury of shift changes and it was literally ‘all hands on deck.’ Maneuvering south out of the Harbor wasn’t easy as we met with a stiff 18-22 knot headwind. Even with the engine on half throttle we were only hitting 4 knots an hour. As we approached the mouth of the Harbor the swells grew to 2-3 meters in size, tossing our small boat about. It was my first time on seas anything even remotely resembling rough. Terry explained that the ‘short swells’ as they are know (short for the wavelength, not the amplitude—the two of which maintain an inverse relationship) are caused by the sudden decrease in water depth in this part of the Harbor resulting in a set of ‘bunched up’ swells which are more dramatic than they should be. When we crashed down into the troughs or hit a swell wrong, water splashed up over the bow. Although a bit of a struggle to retain your balance it was very enjoyable as we were never really in any danger of capsizing. After making little progress on our SE bearing to the cape, we decided to turn back and cruise with the wind all the way back into Harbor.

Our days here at the Kowhai House are number, so meals have been consisting of cleaning out the freezer. Today this meant another barbecue of marinated Cajun chicken strips, Honey Soy lamb chops and steaks. I wish I could get paid to grill out.

What I Learned Today: Amidst all the thrashing and the swells my stomach remained strong, thus, I am happy to report that this is one landlubber who, apparently, does not suffer from sea sickness.


permalink written by  exumenius on December 28, 2007 from Wellington, New Zealand
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Winding Down - Night 80

Wellington, New Zealand

Tying up loose ends. That is how I would describe my day. Fighting to understand the receptionist at the Rutherford YHA ( I think I have two nights and transportation to and from the Nydia track booked), paying one last shopping visit to the Queensgate mall, cleaning my room, washing my clothes, reducing my domestic situation (setting aside unneeded items –work shirts -- for donation) and relaxing in the sun. It appears as if summer has finally started as the blue sky lasted all day and night.

Time is a strange thing. It seems like a long time ago and yet it also seems like just yesterday that I arrived in Wellington. Travel can upset your rhythms regarding the passage of time, for better or worse.

What I Learned Today: The damned British put sugar instead of salt on their popcorn….yes, it does taste as disgusting as it sounds.


permalink written by  exumenius on December 29, 2007 from Wellington, New Zealand
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Farewell to Belmont - Night 81

Wellington, New Zealand

The second nice day in a row. To celebrate I took my final hike to Belmont Park. I’ve been there so often it has begun to feel like my backyard, yet the place is so big I’ve never done the same hike twice. I will definitely miss the prickly gorse forests and dogging sheep shit with every step.

In the afternoon I lounged on our underused


All Packed and Ready to Go
deck and reread Tim Flannery’s opus on climate change, The Weathermakers. We all sat down to a good family dinner of Lasagna and played some cards in the evening. Just another day of hiking and reading.

What I Learned Today: The strange thing about all our supposed technological advances in the energy sector is that 90% or more of all our energy generated is done using 19th century technology, namely, boiling water to create steam to turn turbines. Coal, natural gas, and even nuclear plants still use this archaic and inefficient method of power generation….the second law of thermodynamics is a bitch.


permalink written by  exumenius on December 30, 2007 from Wellington, New Zealand
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