Freezing in New Zealand

New Zealand in wintertime is cold, windy, dark and often thoroughly wet. Obviously I knew this before deciding to spend one week of my round-the-world trip there, but perhaps what I hadn't appreciated is how important acclimatisation, or the lack of it, is. One of my Scandinavian friends once told me that they cope with their winters because each day/week is only a little colder and darker than the one before over a period of several months, so they get used to it. The New Zealand climate is more British than Scandinavian, but the trouble was that it hadn't been long at all since my prolonged exposure to constant heat of anything between 30-odd and 44 degrees C in Asia. So it felt absolutely bloody freezing to me. And I think also that sudden loss of hours and intensity of daylight was also a shock to the system. I'm not saying I wish I hadn't gone to New Zealand, but to anyone else considering a round-the-world trip, the impact of travelling through wildly different climactic conditions is something to bear in mind!

I limited myself to the North Island, which earned me incredulous looks from a couple of other travellers on the grounds that South Island is supposed to be prettier. However it's also that much colder in winter, and would have left me spending too much of my week in transit given that my onward flight across the Pacific needed to be from Auckland, towards the north of North Island. So, I went to the two major cities of Wellington and Auckland, and in-between to Rotorua. Travelling between these places by bus was very scenic, albeit in a largely English-style way, definitely part of the experience.

Major world cities Wellington and Auckland are not; bear in mind that New Zealand has only just over 4 million inhabitants, and they're generally a pretty understated sort anyway. Around a quarter of them are in Auckland; Wellington is the capital however due to its more central location, but it has a population of barely 200,000. I only counted one tall tower block there. While Auckland does have the tallest building in the southern hemisphere, the Sky Tower (aptly described by Lonely Planet as looking like a giant hypodermic giving a fix to the heavens), it seems to have a reputation for having a largely dull and generic city centre. A few points of interest included a modest, modern square commemorating New Zealand being the first country in the world to enfranchise women, and the surprisingly bold 1926 Art Nouveau University Clock Tower; however overall I didn't see too much to disprove the reputation. What charm there is in Wellington city centre seems to come largely from the bohemian cafes and live music venues around Cuba Street - although the whole city only boasts one rather provincial, albeit reasonable, gay venue, Club Ivy. Wellington city's main architectural claim to fame, the modernist concrete government office building called the Beehive, is a bit of a monstrosity.

Wellington. Alas not my photos in this article or the next couple, for reasons explained a bit later on - and not quite the weather I experienced there either!

What both cities certainly do have however are impressive natural settings. Wellington Airport is right on the shoreline of the Cook Strait, the narrow stretch of water between North and South Islands - it looked like my plane from Melbourne was landing on water until dry land of the runway became visible at the very last moment (not entirely a great minute or two for this slightly nervous flyer!). Wellington is built on enough of a slope, with some reserves of forest still standing between the very modest buildings up the slopes, to make for a famous and very picturesque view from the waterfront. Auckland is built on a very narrow strip of land between the Tasman Sea on one side and Pacific Ocean on the other; it is called The City of Sails for the fairly staggering 135,000 pleasure boats that live in its waters. It's also built on an area of volcanic activity, and the Auckland Museum tells how an eruption is inevitable sooner or later - albeit there have only been 19 in the last 20,000 years.

Auckland, with the Sky Tower towards the right [picture pulled off Internet]

Unfortunately the weather was just too inhospitable in the very limited time I had available for extensive exploration of either city. The Auckland Museum, with social history and design galleries as well as Maori anthropology, is a good way to spend a wet afternoon. Also in Auckland I did enjoy an (admittedly rather overpriced) visit to Kelly Tarlton's Antartic Encounter and Underwater World - my first opportunity to see penguins! Attractive but strange creatures, they are well worth seeing. When I first saw some near the venue's entrance I thought for a good few seconds I was looking at plastic models, so rigid and statuesque are they when stood still. Then when they do walk, it is really rather comical - they are fairly rotund with their layer of blubber but their legs are virtually non-existent above their big orange webbed feet. They therefore look very much like they are waddling, but also like they are extremely unstable on their feet. However, when you are able to observe them swimming in the water, there is no doubt that they look efficient and extremely graceful.

The definite highlight however of my trip to New Zealand was Rotorua. It's a fairly small town (deader at night than almost anywhere I've seen in my whole life), but it is the country's number one tourist destination. The large, rather beautiful and serene Lake Rotorua, upon one side of which the town is built is a substantial attraction; however the main draw is that this is an area of geothermal activity.

Plumes of hot steam rise up from drains and even solid ground fairly randomly all over the place. Notoriously, there is a pervasive odour of sulphur in the air throughout the area, although I found it faint enough to be just amusing rather than offensive, and it seemed to come and go (perhaps it is stronger in still summer weather than in breezy winter weather). There are bubbling pools of hot mud in various places - and the undisputed highlight, geysers which periodically shoot up torrents of boiling hot and steaming (98C) water many metres into the air. When in full flow it is rather like watching an upside-down waterfall, and with rough limestone rocks below the geysers the overall effect is disinctly unworldly, like you've stepped into some underworld or onto another planet. I strongly recommend seeing them or other major geysers (eg in Iceland or Yellowstone National Park, USA) if you get the chance as I found it a unique and memorable experience and so clearly did other visitors.

Welcome to Middle Earth... Or the geysers at Rotorua [picture pulled off Internet]

This natural endowment is also tapped by man. At my hostel in Rotorua I was initially fairly horrified that the front door into the lounge was propped wide open, allowing the chilly winter draft right in, while the heating was on high. I took an opportunity to gently point out to a member of staff how horrible this must be for the environment, who replied that all the heating was geothermal! Oops.

Rotorua also has the country's largest Maori population. The traditional Maori area of town Ohinemutu features some charming carved wooden Maori architcture, but the general impression was one of integration. A local guy Michael (brother of my work colleague Anna) I'd done lunch with in Wellington told me with some pride that there is much less of a legacy of injustice, tension and separateness for New Zealand's indigenous population compared to Australia's, and my limited observations seemed to bear that out. For example I was slightly surprised to find that the shoreline of Ohinemutu has a church which is unmistakeably Anglican, but with Maori art on the walls and Maori inscriptions on the stained glass windows - it seems that many Maoris, at least in Rotorua, converted to Christianity in the 19th Century pretty readily. This church also has a huge clear glass pane looking out onto Lake Rotorua - plain except for a carving of Jesus, who thus appears to be walking on the lake behind. It was touching, even to this committed atheist.

Ohinemutu [picture pulled off internet]

While at the park containing the geysers, the full Maori name of which is Te Whakarewaretanga o te ope taua a wahiao (The uprising of the warriors of Wahiao), I was also able to take in a traditional Maori concert. This involving a scantily clad troupe (I don't think they're particularly supposed to look sexy, but, erm, they kind of do) dancing and playing various traditional musical instruments, and sometimes sticking their tongues out while wide-eyed, which is one of their traditional ways of expressing hostility to outsiders. They gave us a run-through of the haka, the war dance made famous of course by the New Zealand rugby team, then pulled all the guys out of the audience to practise it ourselves! It was too rushed to really get the hang of it but I'm sure I must have looked all manly and terrifying to any would-be invaders, honest. ;-) Another one-off experience anyway and pretty good fun too.

Also at Te Whaka (as it's unsurprisingly shortened to) is an indoor sanctuary for Kiwi birds, the national emblem of New Zealand but sadly critically endangered; they had few predators until European colonisation in the mid-19th Century brought in new threats such as dogs, ever since when their numbers have been in catastrophic decline. They are flightless with curiously long feathers and exceptionally long bills - they're really quite endearing in a funny sort of way. They pair off for life, and females lay eggs which are quite exceptionally large for their size (getting all the women in my tour group wincing); they require an extended rest after laying one, meaning that it's up to the male to raise offspring. However, the females are so territorial that the father has to literally force the offspring off their patch, never to return, before the mother recuperates and gets back on her feet - at which point she would kill it as an invader. A good reminder that it takes all sorts to make the kingdom of nature!

I think I can now, with a little concentration, reliably distinguish an Australian accent from a New Zealand one. The Kiwi accent is just a little amusing at times to this Englishman - it is like somebody has taken a vowel pronunciation chart and totally jumbled it up. Their way of saying "fush and chups" is quite well known, but I also thought a local guy I met named Matt had said his name was Met, and that another was asking me if I had a pin (pen) to write with. This is surely also the only country qualified for the football World Cup which, a few days before it started, was still leading its sports bulletins instead with the build-up to a routine rugby international (against Ireland).

From the New Zealand winter it was on, with a certain amount of gratitude, to summer in California..