Aotearoa...Land of the Long White Cloud

    On Sunday we left Bryn Tirion (the name of the farm) to drive into Auckland, to the Auckland museum - quite early, to get the "early bird special" in the parking garage. There, we spent many hours absorbing Maori culture from the 1800's to the point of overload. 

    A map of the districts of Auckland is littered almost entirely with Maori names. Auckland is the city with the largest Polynesian population in the world. We soaked up Melanesian, Micronesian and Polynesian culture until our eyeballs bulged, and I tried to get a handle on the language, so I'd at least have some sort of clue, but failed - I might be able to tell you what two or three root words are, like "one-" as a prefix for different types of stone, but that's about it. It does seem a little like Japanese, though.

    One exhibit celebrated the Maori contribution to the "All Blacks", who shook up the rugby world with their speed, flow and innovative play. It was an inspiring exhibit. Cathy's been teaching me what she remembers of the 1981 troubles - she lived a block away from Eden Park, where there were riot police to keep the spectators and demonstrators apart. The All Blacks (who were named for their black uniform, not for their Maori component, who comprised only about ten percent of the team) dominated the world of rugby, but became mired in a political tempest with South Africa, who had what was considered the apex team in the world at the time. 

    The details are hard to remember, but it seems that when New Zealand was to tour South Africa, S. Africa wouldn't give visas to the Maori players, so the New Zealand gov't withdrew their funding for the amateur sport tour. A group of rebel white players, the Cavaliers, accepted pay to go and play against the Springboks. When the Springboks came to New Zealand, New Zealanders demanded that visas be withheld from the white players in retaliation (and I think the Springboks had also imposed an inflammatory condition that no "coloureds" could be permitted to play on the All Blacks team). The New Zealand prime minister considered whether to cancel the tour, but allowed it to go ahead, and that decision tore New Zealand apart. There were riots in the streets and international condemnation. That one sports issue probably did as much as any of the other sanctions and bad press to break the back of apartheid in South Africa, but it badly damaged the culture and popularity of rugby in New Zealand.

    One of the more interesting exhibits was about Volcanoes, since Auckland is built on a volcanic hot spot, and there are several grass-covered domes in the city which are left over from volcanic plumes. There were lots of lovely stories about the different ways you can die in a volcanic event, and about vulcanologists like the one who said "I've seen so many eruptions in my lifetime that I don't care if I die tomorrow", and he did.

    One of the highlights was a room made up like a typical modest living room, with a news announcer on a flat screen TV describing an impending eruption, beginning with steam rising between the sailboats on the harbour and culminating in a pyroclastic flow of steam, ash and poisonous gases engulfing the city - a terrifying black cloud that travels toward you at 150 km/hr. One wall of the living room looked like a picture window but was actually a screen on which you could see the event actually happening as the announcer described it. The electricity went out (except for the movie screen), and the living room was hammered by a loud snap and jolt like a ship in a collision, and then shook and rumbled. This gave Deborah the worry-wart a delightful scare, and she did another double-take when she walked out of the mini-theatre to see a display on the wall that asked her, "Do you feel lucky?" Between major earthquakes in Christchurch two years in a row (and Napier, eighty years ago) and volcanoes in Auckland, one might wonder why anyone would risk more than a visit of seven weeks.

    When we left the museum we hiked up Mount Eden for an amazing 360° view of the city and the harbours that surround it. I got a few photos, including a photo of the crater, which looks like a gigantic cone made by an ant lion - one could easily imagine an enormous ant lion down at the bottom, waiting for tourists to slip and slide down the sides into its waiting jaws. You can see the tourists on the far walkway, which will give you a sense of the size of the crater.

    On the way home we skipped the only toll road in New Zealand and drove up the "Hibiscus Highway", which has lovely scenery: beautiful pocket beaches on the Pacific, and storybook valleys.

    On Monday morning we got a good hard rain - long awaited by the farmers, who've been hoping to keep the grass growing so that their cattle can graze a little longer and put on more weight before marketing. We've had a few days of "long white cloud" with no rain (you might have noticed the photos aren't bathed in sunshine), but this was a solid downpour.

    We went to a Bohemian settlers' village museum in Puhoi, and had a Monteith's Black Beer, which was very nice, at the famous Puhoi pub. We sampled cheese at a cheese maker's, and various kinds of honey at the Honey Centre, and watched the bees in a hive with a glass front. The beekeepers are very unhappy about the long cool spring they've had. We had a disappointing wine-tasting, visited SheepWorld, and snapped photos of some red hot pokers, indigenous to South Africa (as is the Bird of Paradise, very popular here), on the way home.

    I've turned Deborah onto a very funny book about New Zealand called "The Smell of an Oily Rag" - well worth your time if you can pick it up from the library. She had several loud belly-laughs just reading the first five pages of the preface.

     Next post: Eutopia

An aside:

    I'm going to relate our Ransom Wines story here, just for the sake of our diary. We'd had a nice red wine from the supermarket the day before; cost $7. There are lots of supermarket wines between $7 and $10 in New Zealand, and we know from studies that customers in blind taste tests often can't tell the difference between a $7 and a $30 wine, so I suspect that low prices are often the result of oversupply rather than inferior quality; I've even tasted what we call "two buck chuck" in California and found that if you pick the right variety it can often go quite well with a meal.

    Anyway, Ransom Wines was the most highly recommended winery for the area - and apparently the most advertised and best marketed - so we drove in to have a tasting. They wanted $5, which they'd take off the price of a bottle if you bought one. There were 8 wines to try, they'd pour you a 1/2 oz of each at the most, so you might get the equivalent of a 4 oz glass of wine for $5. I decided it'd be interesting, we might learn something, and perhaps come away with a superior wine - although they started at about four times the price of the one we'd had the day before, I figured that had to mean they'd be really excellent wines. If I enjoyed any enough, I'd buy them, just as I've done at wineries Ontario, British Columbia and California.

    I prefer reds, and Deb can only drink whites, so I told the taste-master to give my three whites to her and I'd just have a tiny sip from her glass to see what I was missing. He began by pouring my reds, in sequence. The first one nearly knocked me over with oak, and I said so. The second was very heavy with tannin, puckered me right up. The third was very tart, acidic - "oh, it's still young", he said. But the fourth was just as bad, and his excuse was "oh, that must be "bottle shock" - we just bottled that one recently." I'd never heard such nonsense, and couldn't fathom why he was making me taste wines that weren't yet at their best...did he expect that I'd want to put them down in my own cellar to age? And at the price he wanted for them, I should take the chance myself that they'd age well?

    The last red was a fortified wine - sweet, not absolutely horrible, but way too expensive; and I don't buy fortified wines, which are essentially just doctored up and made stronger, a ridiculous concept. I can buy a cheap wine and fortify it myself. Deb had her three whites, and I tasted a little of each but wasn't much more impressed; and then the taste-master added supreme insult to injury by charging us $10 based on the fact that we had "both tasted" his wines!

    What a bunch of poppycock the whole charade was. I was offended, refused to convert my $10 toward the price of a bottle (which would have been to throw good money after bad), and didn't drive into one more winery in our entire seven week tour of New Zealand! (And let that be a lesson to the industry!)  "Ransom" Wines turned out to be well-named.