I come to you know, at the turning of the tide. Drunk. Pretending to be Gandalf.
Oh, cheap wine, how I do love do thee.
I was in Auckland recently - can you believe it? The other end of the bleedin' planet, over in New Zealand, of all places. Amazing. I stop paying attention for two minutes and before I know it I'm 14,000 miles from home in a land full of kiwi fruits, or something. Remarkable.
I sat down and calculated (I need to, to do maths) that by the time I returned on the 1st of April I had been away from Blighty, and proper baths, for 511 days.
Five hundred an' eleven whole entire complete and unabridged days, each one to the order of 1,440 minutes long, although I certainly wasn't conscious for more than a third of them. I have been absent from duty as a resident of the British isles that I'm hardly even a limey mongrel pommie bastard anymore, although most Australians would disagree.
I am slightly smug that, now I check it with a calculator and a calendar, I actually got that little sum right out in my head. 10 points to Gryffindor - though have I been away from the UK so long that joke is no longer funny? Perhaps it never was.
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Now, Auckland. That's why we're here. It's actually a bit of a bugger, as a certain nun used to say, because I wasn't at the time and still I am not sure the city deserves its self-declared status - but then calling itself `New Zealand's Greatest City` in large letters on billboards, in guidebooks and in every tourist office South of Bali it does rather leave the way open for some sniping.
I didn't really have the grand old time I expected (“Nay, deserved!” I hear you cry 
) when held in comparison to other cities, such as Melbourne, just as an example, where I happen to be sitting right now awaiting the third flight of four in the international effort to get rid of me from the Southern Hemisphere.
*Of course I am not sitting there now. That would be a somewhat lax enforcement of security over at MEL*
Sydney and Nelson also stick out as good Australasian examples of more immediately and lastingly captivating places, and I'm left thinking a bit less of New Zealand as a whole having seen its `greatest city` and been less impressed than I was with, say, Birmingham the last time I visited.
Then again I have a lot to say for Birmingham, and if the old jokes are still being run then the joke's on whoever tells them; the city centre and canalside developments there are frankly stunning. Unless the whole thing has burned down in the last 17 months or something and it’s all back to slums and concrete hell.
Auckland is still an undeniably cosmopolitan centre of fashion, culture and commerce, is set in a pretty incredible location for trade and one finds oneself poised to try any number of world-class activities and locations simply by arriving there (though having a suitcase full of money helps), yet from street level and at least to the, ooh, the 8th floor up, it just seems to lack that indefinable vibrancy or concentration of genuine culture, and by genuine I also of course mean cheap - preferably free.
Never let it be said I don't investigate these things fully though, because I cobbled together enough places for a perpetual tightwad like me to see and do, almost enough to fill a whole week, and from various scribbles on SubWay serviettes, beer mats and notebooks It looks quite like I actually did things, and didn't just slouch around in bars cultivating an interesting new variety of cirrhosis.
And so this is what actually happened:
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Arriving on a Saturday I felt obliged to throw myself straight into the club/pub culture of the city and get convincingly drunk. As a visiting Englishman it is only appropriate, after all. We gave these proud Pacific nations all bits of paper from the Queen/King, the right to go and get killed in any fights we started, their own flags or, at least, gave each of 'em three-quarters of their own flag and carefully passed on a very Anglo-Saxon predilection for getting thoroughly smashed.
As usual I convinced myself the following day that I had drunk a truly heroic amount of liquor, in all likelihood shaming the entire non-Russian-speaking world, but checking back on my bank account online (I absolutely cannot be trusted with cash on the first night in a new town, another vital lesson I have learned) it seems I was nowhere near as hardcore as I’d let myself believe - 6 Jagermeister-Redbulls on top of a couple of jugs of cheapo beer do not the stuff of legends make, even if those jugs are worth a couple of pints and more apiece.
I recall - of course I recall, that's what hangovers are for - taking to the stage and gyrating like a gorilla on bad acid, as I have so often been likened to, to the general horror of other patrons. Sponsored by far too much Redbull I managed this for some considerable minutes, possibly until kind people led me away, and under the posthumous command of Jagermeister and beer I engaged the next morning in a hangover where everything nasty out of the bible seemingly happened to me, from the after-after-afterparty at Sodom and Gomorrah to that bit where they nail the Hebrew fella to a couple of sticks.
Day Two: It was a Sunday, apparently.
Aimlessly plodding the city I went (despite the spirit of Roman soldiers hammering nails through important bits of me) to look at a few public parks and green spaces that were, according to my map, within staggering distance of my lodgings, which was this time a Nomads Fusion brand of hostel located handily in the red light district on Fort street. This was not a factor in my choice, whether you believe me or not, and as it happens Fort street is really the upper class red light district as it abuts the biggest street in the city at its most opulent and metropolitan (and well lit ) end.
The Nomads brand of hostelries are much like the Base brand, both seen in every major Aussie and Kiwi city and there are even a few in Fiji; they are generally clean and very busy, usually excellently located for the pub and club scene, and are where all the cool young things tend to stay.
I do not have the space here for either the vitriol or praise due to the various hostels in Australasia, nor likewise for the people who tend to frequent them so I will just let you know that the differences in both can be enormous, and in a wide variety of directions.
The map only lied a little. Nothing so flagrant as the dishonest offerings of the Lonely Planet so quite tolerable really, even while being metaphorically crucified about the cerebrum by the analogy of heathen legionnaires.
I was of course tramping my way around roadways and up and down urban hills in the hope of sweating out a special hangover mix of randomised fear, nausea and soul crushing guilt we all know and love. And guess whether it worked? Did it hell. No-one to blame but myself of course.
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Now Auckland is a big old city, around 1.3 million people make their lives there and of course it includes the usual mix of classy bits, sleazy bits, and middley-classy bits; from distinctly upper class regions where plots are practically counted in integers of longitude and latitude, all the way through to utterly destitute quarters where a patch of soil larger than your footprint counts as a garden and if you can stretch in bed without legally trespassing you virtually have your own condo.
All of which combines, somehow, to make a city that is perhaps more sure of itself than it deserves. People of this city are utterly self-confident and visibly bristling in their day-to-day dealings, homeless folks notwithstanding, yet despite my eager attitude and will to see and do whatever I could within the short time (and cruelly shortened budget) I had left, I found myself spending more than one day with nothing of interest to do but walk the streets (no, not like that 
) just to see where people lived and worked, rather than become engorged with culture and jaw-dropping scenery.
And that much one reasonably could have expected, given the way the rest of the country presents itself - doubly so when taking this city's continual boasts into account.
Not that it isn't a lovely place and, for example, somewhere I would far rather live, work and relax when compared to my closest cathedral-blessed conurbation, which happens to be Southampton in Hampshire. I mean we launched the Titanic there, for heaven's sakes.
That's about as well as you can expect most things in Southampton to finish up 
Back on the byways of a hung-over Sunday, the second day at large in Auckland, I dedicated myself to not passing a drop of booze between my lips and did my tourist thing; a-stumbling the highways of the city attempting a passing resemblance of someone capable. Victoria park, the first and closest of my targets proved to be a flat, tree-edged recreation area of maybe ten acres, that served as communal cricket ground as much as it did mass transit engineering site: a motorway bridge runs directly across the centre of this green space, elevated 50 feet into the air by concrete and steel but relegated to as many millimetres from the nadir of urban planning by some foolish sods who approved the thing.
With dozens of groups practising batting, bowling and standing-around-smoking (formally an official position on the crease) the gargantuan cement pile seemed at odds with the perceived image of the city, which according to the local tourist authority presents visitors with breathtaking scenery, beautiful beaches, invigorating walks...
Strangely, no mention of the marvels of highway construction inside the city’s parks and gardens.
Second on my list and a rather wonderful surprise after Victoria, Albert Park was stunning in layout, charm and location. Huge ancient trees cast enormous boughs across nearby pathways in firm defiance of gravity, shadowing vast patches of ground from the midday sun and providing habitat for the furrier locals and a seriously nice lunch spot for the more bipedally inclined. A fountain there, in the centre of a small formal garden, is a glory of classically styled cast-iron and views of nearby skyscrapers through the trees bring about a new appreciation for those glass & steel masterpieces.
Sat on an inner-city volcanic hill Albert Park is peaceful and entrancing, and precisely what I needed at the time.
Bizarrely a couple of French blokes turned up in one corner near the fountain, seated themselves, lit cigarettes and between them began taking a series of thin tubes from a duffel bag and started screwing them together. At first I thought they were jugglers or spinners putting spinning staffs together, as seen in many English parks, but after turning to leave I heard the ominous strains of bagpipes and this it was that they had put together. Bagpipers. French guys. The bagpipers were French. Perhaps this is inevitable?
After all, the definition of a gentleman is a chap who can play the bagpipes and doesn’t.
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Much walking later, including a trip across a gigantic urban motorway and I enter The Domain. Sounds scary huh?
To be fair it is the site of an ancient volcano, scarier still its last eruption wasn’t all that ancient at just a couple of hundred years ago, though in reality it is a giant city park with an awful lot of hills and highways running through it.
Also in the Domain is the Auckland war museum which was deeply excellent and somewhat poorly titled; more natural history and Maori/settler heritage exhibits than anything, they kept all the war upstairs almost tucked out of the way.
That said, the whole edifice and cenotaph outside is a monument to New Zealanders who fought and died in the two world wars, and of various other conflicts since, and four long corridors flank the long sides of the building on the uppermost levels, the walls on both sides displaying the individual names of every man and woman who died, carved in marble tablets 12 feet high. That’s an awful lot of names. That part of the place, as ever, was a little too moving for me fragile little me and after feeling suitably humbled I shuffled off into the lower levels again.
Despite my appreciation of all that has gone before I still have a childish affection for all kinds of sharp pointy things, boomsticks of mass destruction and all other kinds of armaments. The war museum in Auckland contains an amazing collection of weapons worth spending a few minutes of perusal, for nerds like me as much for the design of the artefacts present but also the variety, and for some extremely rare pieces, the details of which I shall not bore you with.
Again in The Domain I saw more evidence of that strange Auckland obsession with the motorcar and all its prolific outcrop of playgrounds; `roads` I believe you call them; as even though the Domain is vast and green and the central point of loveliness in the city it is still criss-crossed by some 15 kilometres of roads, and it is possible to reach any of the two-dozen or more attractions within the park without having the bother of manipulating your feet across all that bothersome grass.
At various points inside the Domain there are great formal gardens, Edwardian greenhouses full of orchids and subtropical plants, huge wrought iron bandstands and a variety of fountains, themed gardens, hills and hillocks of varying sizes, most of which are set alongside or amongst precipitous lawns on the steeper slopes of this volcanic mound.
Strange that all this historic wonder and lush display of nature should be interwoven with tarmac umbilical cords linking drivers with their petrol powered comfort blankies, even in a country like New Zealand: especially in a country like New Zealand in fact.
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Wandering back that presented day no problems, but for the
budgetary concerns that started to become an obsession. I had an amount of money left that would leave a church mouse hunting for spare change, and worked out that, after outlays on a hostel bed, three SubWay `Sub of the Day` sandwiches and a drink (just one drink) I had around $15 left per day. I cried for a bit and carried on back to the hostel.
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Monday, day Three: From Flora to Fauna.
I took a trip to the zoo. Whether you personally have moral objections to caged animals and their parading about for public entertainment, or you value the conservation work achieved through them, or even if you just don't care and never think about it, I am quite confident you would think Auckland zoo to be a fine institution, and an all-round bloody good day out.
It is much like Singapore Zoo; very well presented, designed by Daedalus just before he went on holiday to Crete, and absolutely chock-full of well-contented animals of a thousand flavours. That the beasts of the fields and birds of the air are happy with their lot in there is easy to divine from quick observation of, say, the three or four white rhinos or half-dozen African lions, both of whom in neighbouring enclosures spent much of the time I was there beating seven shades of shit out of one another. As in: Lions were beating on lions and rhinos on rhinos. Quite dreadful to imagine the other, shame on you
The rhinos squared off and had a pretty decent scuffle over something or other while I was distracted by the lions (a kind of United-Animals-of-Africa Treaty was, I believe, worked out between them sometime before in order to confound tourists) so by the time I got my camera switched to movie mode and focused on the them the Rhino In Charge had established as much, and a throaty roar from back across the path told me the rhinos had upheld their end of the pact and created the diversion needed for one of the male lions to try a bit of a half-hearted shag with one of his compatriots, whom I can only hope wasn't his sister.
With three males in the same enclosure I concluded they must be siblings, and hoped this kind of thing hadn't been allowed to go too far.
Still, they made a lovely couple, and if the cubs have nine toes then, well, so be it.
Getting to the zoo, incidentally, I found another great thing about that country, in that bus drivers do not behave, as in England, as if you are the sole source of all that is wrong with their lives and that they have definitive proof you ran over their mother and shagged their sister.
I refer of course to the indigenous British species Omnibus Operatus Relucto, or "that miserable sod who is lucky enough to have a steady job, who you must manoeuvre past crossing their palm with silver for the privilege of being rattled into early Parkinson’s by their chaotic driving." I believe that's the Merriam-Webster definition, anyway.
Over in New Zealand they are, almost without fail, helpfulness itself and will tell you everything you need to know and more, and actually have to be sort-of forced to shut up as their bestowing of information gets to silly proportions and there is a whole bus there, bro, that's just not getting driven.
Really, you ask if they're going your way and if not you get the full skinny on which bus to get instead, the time interval of departures at nearby stops, the time of the last one on the return journey and how long it takes to get where you originally wanted. All the awesome ones will let you know where to go if, say, you are going near to Auckland Zoo and have asked as much, you will receive directions down the road to the zoo, and even the time (accurate, too) it takes to get there. All with smiles galore, and fantastic Kiwi chirpiness.
I say the awesome ones because I dealt with three in my time in Auckland and Wellington that were grumpy miserable shits - and you know what? The miserable lot were all pakeha; white European-descended guys; and all the rest I ever met, the majority I'm glad to say and including one I had a laugh and a chat for at least half an hour with after asking him in passing about another bus, were predominantly Maori*. Funny, that, I thought.
And here's another thing: waiting on Mount Victoria, the best lookout site over Wellington when I was there a week later, a driver had a wait of about 30 minutes before he was scheduled to leave. Standing around outside chatting to me a girl came down from the lookout point and asked him where he was going - nowhere near his routes for that day - but because he was on his break and didn't have to leave for 25 minutes he asked if I wanted to go on a ride too; and he bloody well drove that girl across the city to the bloody road she lived on and dropped her off specially, to get back 3 minutes before he was set to leave Mt. Victoria - just because he could help her out.
I bloody love New Zealand, and I bloody love New Zealanders I really do. I really wish we had more people like that in this country.
I must say I was enjoying myself immensely in the fifty or so acres of Auckland zoo, not all of them accessible on that day as the aquarium, a polar exhibit and several small enclosures were either empty of closed for repair or total renovation. I remember walking past the third or fourth of these and thinking in dismay how much I was missing, but then I managed to get a bead on the Byzantine arrangement of it all and found what I was really after, the Rainforest Walk.
I have a slight obsession with rainforests and the key thing - the big, main, central thing that I wanted to do on this trip - was get as far into the Amazon basin as physics and geography allowed, and so you may imagine why I am a little sore at having to come back so early.
Nonetheless I have seen the jungles of Borneo (and got satisfactorily rained upon) and been in near-rainforest territory in India, Cambodia and Fiji, so it has not been a complete failure. I still get a thrill from thinking of losing myself in one though, even an entirely synthetic walkway just a few yards long over suspiciously machine-made timbers, but still I think even a few seconds suspension of disbelief here is worth the admission price alone.
It did not disappoint, and led into an incredible spider monkey enclosure where the whole environment is open at one end, all that is stopping the cheeky simians from invading central Auckland is an nine-foot-wide perimeter moat crusted in jungle-strength algae, and since spider monkeys harbour a powerful natural fear of water this seemingly naive measure actually keeps them all perfectly contained.
Were they to escape they would be far less of a problem than, say, the hippo that escaped in 1976 (floods changed the terrain so much that one of these famously tetchy African water horses swum over its barricades to freedom) or the Leopard that they managed to mislay in 1925 (it turned up having a relaxed bath 13km away over in Mission Bay) though, and frankly I would welcome one into my house with open arms, an handful of small plastic bags and a dustpan and brush.
Back at the lions some time later, I managed to convince myself we would all be in trouble when I saw the whole gang at one side of their enclosure, the big males having a fairly serious go at what I must assume to be the door to their feeding station, into a large and, I must say, reassuring concrete building, for the terrifying pussycats were laying into the thing with some gusto.
Clearly pissed off with humans who should have fed them by now, two of them were up on hind legs pulling at a large bar laid across the portal, and watching their huge meat-stuffed muscles ripple under their skin as they gave it some welly was a little worrying, because nothing but a single sheet of glass separated us. Plus I was all alone in a barren corner, which is as nice a place to shit your pants with worry as anywhere, rather better than most in fact, and being less than fifteen feet from angry, hungry lions kind of cemented the deal.
Safety glass notwithstanding - really notwithstanding: the thing about glass, you see, is you can't see it all that well - when one of them padded up to the barrier and eyeballed me, not six feet away now and unnervingly tall considering he was low down using four legs to my deliciously fresh and fully upright two, I admit a little trickle of sweat cascaded down both front and back and later gave people the impression I actually did exercise.
Wonderful creatures though of course, and just because any one of them could reduce me to about eight kilos of of kitty poop in less than a day, and to a dead sack of bloody bones and offal in about two seconds flat, there's no reason to lose sight of that.
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I was really enjoying myself of course, pretending to have close encounters with scary creatures does wonders for your self-esteem, so didn't in the slightest mind the usual zoo ground plan whereby you tread the same sections a hundred times trying to follow signs placed at calculatedly misleading angles so you can never be sure, from less than one turning away, how to actually reach any exhibit. The technique is one of highly selective dissemination of information, otherwise known as giving only half the story in deliberately awkward places. It keeps you guessing though, and certainly never feels like a linear experience which is what a zoo should be all about.
A big thing I wanted to see in New Zealand was, of course, the eponymous kiwi.
The little blighters are nocturnal though, and terrified of everything up to and including their own shadow (perhaps this is the reason why they are nocturnal) which is unusual for NZ fauna as most of it was so charmingly curious and unafraid upon sighting humankind that Maori arrived and clubbed the shit out of everything, even the huge and rather lethal Moa birds that ate everything else in the whole country; Probably even for fun. There were, and still are in comparative global terms, no significant mammals in New Zealand, and no mammalian predators existed at all until we came along.
When we did just about everything fell victim to Maori attacks. Mind you, theirs is a deeply physical culture and frankly if dragons, basilisks and 80-foot tentacled demons had been here it would still have ended in a draw.
Despite the kiwi's retiring tendencies the zoo has worked out a way for visitors to spy the kiwi doing its thing, although only just. Inside a darkened - extremely darkened - corridor one of the three species (plus one sub-species on the South Island) of kiwis available for our zoological contemplation could be seen, again, only just. Out of the red-tinted darkness I made out two of the birds, which were I believe lesser spotted kiwi, poking into the humus and leaf matter with their sword-like beaks, moving with a gait I can only call a... a gait, of some sort, some...some kind of type of manner of...thing.
Lame I know, but if you see them move you will understand. There is no word for the way a Kiwi bird moves, other than `cute`, although `adorable` works well, as does `endearing`. I will allow `loveable` also. It is not a waddle, not a stalk, not a trundle, a picking or poking step, or any kind of bounce. It is, and I believe it should be called this, a `kiwi`, for nothing else on Earth moves as they do.
I'll try and find a video at some point.
As you will hopefully see for yourselves at some point a kiwi bird is hopelessly adorable, and sadly quite hopelessly hopeless at staying alive in the modern New Zealand full of humans, cars, possums, cats, dogs, stoats, weasels and just about everything else with more cells to its names than an amoeba.
Bereft of forelimbs that are any use whatsoever, it has the appearance and manner of a bipedal egg with head and neck stuck on as an afterthought by a distracted Creator, and a beak that would be a bloody handy weapon if only the creature behind it had malice or bloodthirstiness enough to use it, which it very much doesn't. A kiwi would ask for the vegetarian option at a tofu banquet. It is possibly the nicest, most placid creature of its size ever known, at least to anything except another kiwi, which it will of course attempt to viciously murder if territories encroach on one another. Even the Easter Bunny goes postal if you squat his burrow.
So the kiwi has the world's cutest walk, and the real-life capacity for sense and overall durability of a chocolate teapot. 95% of all kiwis are fated to die in the wild, 70% of these, as immature chicks, will be eaten by stoats alone. Ranked among other predators lethal to the kiwi are cats, dogs, and possums, and frankly anything that can fall prey to a possum through predation (rather than TB, or any of the other dozens of communicable ills the things carry) needs all the help it can get. A possum is a kind of miniscule joke panda, an animal itself so useless it can only hunt bamboo.
Cute, but not really a competitive organism in terms of, say, not-going-extinct-'coz-you-spent-20,000-years-on-your-arse-in-the-forest-backing-yourself-and-your-kids-into-a-ludicrously-specialised-ecological-niche.
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It was at about this time I started recalculating my budget every day. This was because I both thought of new things I couldn't get away with not paying for (airport departure tax, final night's accommodation, food to survive 35 hours of airports and airplane fuselages while crossing half the planet) and because I generally stopped off for a swift half in the afternoon after achieving things which quickly became three pints and a net loss of about twenty dollars.
Although I had little things like bus fares of $8 to irk me, and even with an entry fee to the zoo that day of $21 (plus of course essentials like afternoon beers) I still managed to hang onto the dancing thread of my finances enough to eat more or less regularly, which was largely due to the Subway chain of eateries and their daily offer of a pretty good-sized sandwich for less than $4.
More than once that week I made them breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's healthy! You know I actually stuck to wheat or white bread and had only the thin, gruel-like sauces that promised not to make customers explode in-store with cholesterol pouring from every vein and artery. That's got to make it healthy, right? I mean, Jared wouldn't lie to us would he..
I justify myself partly because Auckland has fifty-seven branches of Subway (I checked. Of course I checked.) many of which I personally tested, some of which are in somewhat intriguing places.
On Queen Street, the main drag with the main stores and malls, running from the quayside through the CBD and down to K' road (the scummy low-rent bit that still just about qualifies as central city shopping) I found, at the back of a small convenience store, operating at the end of the aisles between housekeeping magazines and a typically poor selection of canned goods, the smallest Subway known to mankind.
It was really just a counter about 8 feet long. Packed in (although it did require a kitchen that executed a full hairpin- bend) were bread ovens and prep areas and freezers and all the usual metallic cubes of humming cateringness that I hope never to understand properly, plus all the fillings and veggies and sauces you find everywhere else on counters four times the size. It looked and felt like Subway-4-Kids, or Yo! JAPANiSUB!, or something, but it worked.
Elsewhere, I loved this, there is a Subway branch installed in the ground floor of a building serving Auckland university as a halls of residence. Students do not even have to leave their HOUSE to obtain fast food. Thank God it's a Subway and not a McDonalds.
Elsewhere a former church has become a temple to the $3.90 Meatball Marinara, Sunday Sub Of The Day, my favourite day of the fast food week and all the more appropriate for that particular venue.
In New Zealand even SubWay is kinda cool!
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A Tuesday (Day 4
came around and I tried to do nothing, which may be a mission statement in need of some work but still, I attempted a complete and thorough lack of attempting. Before this mighty feat I knew there was one real thing I had to do, and that was to book and pay for my flight home. A merry bloody chase that turned out to be.
I began negotiating two days before with the saintly family back home so that they might throw £400 at me for a ticket, and for some fantastic reason they gave me five. Gotta love those guys
I booked the only one I could afford with this, the payment was rejected online for `technical failures` unknown and unexplained, and the airlines automated systems promptly robbed me not only of the cost of one ticket, but also all the rest of the money in that bank account.
I had just paid for a ticket - with an instantly recognisable, internationally famous airline - and not just been refused but been utterly cleaned out. Robbed twice over. What should have been left in the account was completely unavailable to me so I could not book my next hostel, couldn't book another domestic flight I needed to get to the right airport for departing the country, nor pay for either of the two bus journeys I really did rather need to sort out. Fuck.
Not a good start to a day of intended relaxation, especially because I knew the spaces left on this trip were running out dangerously fast (I had harassed the poor folks back home to get cash into banks ASAP and right before most of them left on a little holiday themselves, because a panic isn't a proper panic unless everyone stands a chance to get fucked over Eeeeeeevvvil hippy....)
Anyway I wasn't having any of that so, what with it being St. Patrick's Day that Tuesday I went down to the first Irish pub I could find (and they are so easy to find, aren't they, everywhere? The Irish are incapable of going without Guinness for 24 hours it seems, and caches have to be left on every major street in every city on Earth lest one comes stumbling over the horizon gabbling desperately for "Like, a pint o' muddy water. No, muddier. And some weird fizzy white scum on top. Grand, givvit here..") and downed three pints of lightly fizzed mud with scum topping and went to work.
It had just cracked past 9am (gotta love St Paddy's day) and I was irritated at being robbed, irritated at having irritated everyone back home at such short notice, and downright furious that I had to get things sorted in order to be able to LEAVE New Zealand, pretty much the last thing I wanted to do in the first place (short of trepanning myself with blunt cutlery perhaps) yet was so cruelly manipulated into doing.
I kind of went a little over the top, threw a nice big status message up on Facebook about it (because, I don't know if you knew this but a lot of companies, and a great many employers will research names on social networking sites if, say, they are screening new employees or have a complaint issue with someone), emailed the airline, visited the airlines offices in the city, conveniently less than 300yds from my hostel's doorway, and the awesome, wonderful and hugely attractive people back home emailed them as well through another channel. I even emailed a few British tabloids with the general thrust of `Would you like to build something on the riff of "Foreign Airline Steals Last Of Brit Tourist's Cash"` in the hope that nothing interesting was going on in Britain and in the sure knowledge that some rabid scaremongering is always on the cards.
From that I'm sure you can guess which papers I contacted
My theory is make it loud, don't take any shit and make yourself very, very annoying, in every way possible. As I had lost access to my last, precious five hundred quid, which if never recovered I had no other bailouts, or if a bailout couldn't be arranged in time I would break the conditions of my visa and face costly deportation and criminal charges, I thought a little knee-jerking reactionary madness was justified.
It was something of a long shot that I'd actually overstay my visa, but had it happened in exactly the same way less than four months later then that's just what would have transpired.
This on my mind, it all seemed to work out satisfactorily within 48 hours although the explanation given was extremely lame, and even contradicted itself when what it said was impossible, happened after just a few further hours of harassment. Oh dear.
Now I am sure you are wondering which airline this is, and you will have to wonder evermore unless I'm not happy with my trip home. If they don't fuck up again then I shall not name names, if they do, I'll be complaining to those newspapers again and finding some others who have also been done over, and when I looked into it then I found PLENTY of people ready to make some noise about it.
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Day 5, I Think..:
A thing one can't help but notice in all the country is the number of Sushi bars, and having been a bit of a lame foodie in not really trying them before I steeled myself for the experience and what an odd experience it is at first; one of conveyor belts, little colour-coded and texture-coded plates, and almost unbearably polite Japanese hospitality.
Given the hoo-rah of the restaurant experience I'm actually amazed that there was better sushi available back in Nelson from a street stall, and one such cart which habitually sat not even forty feet from my front door!
The little stand across the junction from my flat was bloody superb, and nowhere else did a beef and ginger (not pickled ginger, cooked with root ginger) or even a tempura prawn even halfway as good.
That little stand was gold, and I seriously hope it's there when I go back!
Along with the sushi bars there is of course a large Japanese population, especially noticeable in Auckland where one whole part of Queen's road to the south, near where it joins Karangahape Road (K' road) where one side of the street shows apartment blocks in an unbroken line for half a kilometre, with no roads in between save for small access courts for residents, and the other side matches it with an unbroken line of sushi bars, bento box takeaways and Japanese restaurants, and mixed in with these I recognised a lot of written Korean as well. Good job I read that Bryson book about it (think it was a Bryson) or I'd be awfully confused. Well, more confused anyhow.
Rounding off the day with an easy jug of cheapo beer in the hostel bar, and a fairly early sleep I was feeling like I'd accomplished something, not least being able to stop at one jug of beer.
Ah, no here it is; Wednesday, day Five:
In need of a bus to somewhere or other I found the oddest, most spaced out (literally) bus station I have ever seen.
It covers five or more streets, in and around the shops & crossings in-between, and is only very loosely hung together so the `station` part is a bit generous. It is more a large collection of urban bus stops, and though quite easily navigable it's still rather odd to have to walk a block and a half past a McDonalds and around a Starbucks to get from stand `C` to stand `D`, and I'm sure I'd not have been the first if I had missed an important connection around there.
As it was I didn't, possibly because I didn't truthfully have anywhere to go and didn't even need a bus. It's just that it was on my route- for almost two blocks it WAS my route - so I couldn't help but absorb a little of the weirdness.
This was a day for testing mottos, and Auckland calls itself the City of Sails, possibly because it was the clever bloke's day off. City Of Sails - it seems a bit of an odd one eh? Just about every harbour city and major port worldwide might also lay claim to the motto, if for some reason they wanted to. It's just not that evocative, at least not to this landlubber, and I wondered if perhaps something better might be needed as I made my way to the waterfront and eased my way along it like a laden tug (which I have come to resemble more and more lately) bumping the wharves on a leisurely scud into port.
Down the Western side of the CBD and sticking to the waterfront as much as possible, I wandered along docksides admiring super-elite yachts, around parts of the commercial docks where freight shipping goes off and around the cruise ship docks poking right up the line of the land almost into the CBD itself. All around there, more noticeable than in other, more focused residential or commercial areas there is a wide mix of architectural styles as of that visible in all relatively new cities. Unusually however Auckland has free public WiFi access along a section of marina apartments, right up against the waterfront people are encouraged to take their laptops and sit cruising TradeMe.com (the Kiwi version of eBay) and checking their spam mail for amusing grammatical errors.
Later that evening I found myself eating a mediocre meal, through no fault of my own I have to say but rather because the saucepans were rationed, and I didn't look starving enough, I suppose. The kitchen in that place was just maddening - with a capacity of nearly 350 guests, all supposedly self-catering, the Nomads Fusion hostel in Auckland has just one small kitchen of maybe 18ft wide by 35ft long - half of which given over to seating anyway.
With a mighty three hobs and two (count ‘em! Two!!) ovens - and only three sodding frying pans - for over three hundred people I think it's safe to say things are a little lacking. Are they sponsored by SubWay, perhaps? I begin to wonder.
Anyway my mediocre meal faded into the background up there sitting on the hostel roof, the chiming metallic sounds of construction clanking through the ether from two ponderously rising skyscrapers, all in the glorious sunshine surrounded by several dozen scavenging but ever-so-adorable wee sparrows. Rays glinted off the glass and steel of a very cosmopolitan set of surroundings, and I felt for the first time in that city a lively, invigorating feel in the air. Being surrounded by hyperactive 19-year olds having the time of their lives probably helped this along, but I like to think that Auckland had started to come into its own
Day 6: Suburban Splendour:
University buildings seem to swallow lots of the city up, as they cover a truly vast area where often there seems to be no other stuff in-between, but of course there must be. Even in this land of marvels and wonder would there be enough dedication among students of all people to occupy a dozen whole city blocks. Unless at least half the floor space was licensed, of course.
Go anywhere east of Fort Street and uni buildings crop up on all sides and totally dominate every area. Further east into Parnell, things feel and look very much like a seaside town though, and a small, unpolluted English town at that - probably even one that has a beach devoid of red flags and mortally grievous industrial waste.
Parnell as a district is deeply pretty and maintains an atmosphere of calm totally at odds with the hassle and hustle of Queen Street, yet is only 20 minutes walk away uphill, probably a driveable distance taking only 5 or 6 minutes.
Small shops and discreet little half-touristy business' can be seen huddled together on only one side of the road, the buildings often patched together or linked by cutesy little overheard walkways and Japanese-style arched bridgeways lined with jacaranda.
The other side of the main street there seemed to be a solid string of small parks and timber framed churches and lodging houses, facing the masses of boutique shops huddling together for sheer the cosiness of it all; cobbled streetlets, more miniature walkways overhead that must be totally impractical but are lovely to see; and the shops all seemed to actually have a little class and were not simply full of tat, although maybe the glorious sunshine was getting the better of me by that point.
Land also rolls away on both sides of Parnell Street, and it can be easily seen down any side road that the land for half a mile around slopes away and rises up again, another remnant of the volcanic past that made the city the way it is today.
On the nearest coastal side (because both sides one, Auckland being sited on an isthmus) the trees and houses atop these hills are highlighted against the sky, a dead giveaway that the edge of the land is right there, but still behind it more rolls of land and further suburban hills follow the dipping and rising land and it seems rather as if your are on coast - but Auckland IS on the coast; the illusion here is, oddly enough, that this is not a coastal city but another major inland metropolis, and Parnell is just a charming, wonderful surprise.
Bearing left at a large cathedral, I wandered into residential streets of a very English milieu, all lined with European trees of oak, silver birch, cherry and sycamore unlike the mad swathes of eucalypts and ferns seen everywhere else, although on the edge of this area pungas, the occasional palm tree and even banana plants can be found.
Within these streets everything could be as from the most warm and satisfyingly fond summer days in England, streets with names like `Canterbury` and `Gladstone` are home to detached houses never more than two storeys tall, that simply sprawl at that level if they feel like it.
Sadly I had to come back to Earth of course, though on the way I noticed - as I had done at the marina the day before alongside all the free public WiFi - yet more water fountains which, as in Australia, sprout from the ground at plenty of useful intervals around the cities and are to be found at most junctions of major residential roads and all along every shopping district outside of the CBD centre.
Strangely, also as in Aussie (as Aussie is equally bizarre in this regard) there are many pubs and bars in every Kiwi city which have full-blown bookkeepers and betting shops within them - a dangerous combination to my mind, and I'm usually all for this sort of stupidity.
Having a bookies counter and race screens right next to a bar seems like a disaster waiting to happen, and drunk betting, and the subsequent gambling problems do occur on a very frequent basis - out bar in Nelson had a steady supply of people losing hundreds after hundreds of dollars, none of whom looked as if they could really afford it.
Gambling is a seriously big part of life Down Under, for good or for bad but certainly for the long term.
They call them pokie rooms (and the machines `pokies`) and the innocuous name and often swish, fancy decor seems to lure a lot of people in. But they are always separate from the bar areas with doors or half doors, because gamblers are encouraged to focus on pushing their wages into the little flashing machines and all given preferential treatment by the venue, in the form of free food and soft drinks and, if you are particularly ruthless, free booze. I personally got them smashed on a regular basis as part of my evil and cunning plans, and usually it worked very well, although I did feel a great deal of sorrow and remorse for at least 15 seconds afterwards.
Friday, Day 7:
K road, short for Karangahape Road so you can see why, is home to lots of faded facades, `Op-Shops` (the kiwi version of charity shops), the odd poorly camouflaged strip joint and all the good speciality shops like a real butchers, vendors of legal, and not so legal highs, and all the city's authentically dirty tattoo parlours, plus places where for a trade-in of decor and ambient smell you can get the same CDs as on Queen street for 2/3rds of the price.
Basically it's where I would spend much of my life if I lived in Auckland, and certainly where most of my friends would be.
I achieved basically nothing that day (finally: success!!) but got my stuff together for the next stage and booked a bus to Napier, a hostel in Napier, sorted out maps of that town and got together a rough list of stuff to do in Wellington. There was just one more thing to do and I was until I got back, just book one final night in Welly on the 31st of March and be ready to face the Day of Return.
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I suppose one final thing to be said here is a further note on Maori culture, white (or Pakeha, according to Maori) culture and all the various nationalities and ethnic groups that have settle in New Zealand. In major cities and especially in Auckland almost all convenience stores - of which there are possibly thousands, seriously; they are on EVERY single street outside the suburbs, Kiwis being a very convenient sort of people - are staffed by Korean, Chinese, Phillipino or Japanese and the remaining few are where you can find an Indian lass or lad if ever you need one in a hurry.
They also all sell the same stuff, and in the case of Korean- Chinese- and Japanese-run stores you can always find at least thirty different types of instant noodles, so never let anyone tell you that Super Noodles aren't authentic food - more Asian people eat them (at least outside their home country) than they ever do rice or `proper` noodles.
With Maori and pakeha culture of course the rivalry over land and the various wars, either with each other or because of each other ensure that the situation really isn't simple, but generally the country is incredibly well organised into a genuine dual culture where both white and Maori politics, beliefs and history are accepted and well-known to everyone.
Of course old prejudices still exist, but in truth there are very few pure Maori left as the populations have been integrating and interbreeding for a good 150 years - though it is still bloody obvious who is who and roughly were they came from, biologically speaking.
Trouble still festers in places of course, and especially here in New Zealand's most populous, arguably greatest city there needs to be recognition from everyone of the differences, before similarities can be truly appreciated.
And on that note I shall pretend no longer to sound like I know what the hell I'm going on about, and leave you with this thought, again:
”A true gentleman is a man who can play the bagpipe and never, ever does.”
