2012 WRAP-UP: JANUARY to APRIL (for May and June, see separate entries! The next 6 months to follow!)
Another Christmas has come and gone. This time it was a
little bit different. I have just experienced my first Kiwi Christmas. My
intrepid long-lost Kiwi cousin L and her partner W hosted the mother of all
ultra-blended family Christmases. I mean, I haven’t seen that many sets of
relations since my best friend’s wedding when, during the reception line, I
began to question reality after meeting the sixth set of grandparents on her
mother’s side! It could have been absolute chaos were it not for Kiwi ingenuity
and heaps of alcohol … sorry I was talking about the contents of the WORLD’S
MOST EXPENSIVE TRIFLE. Simply because the only Madeira I could find was
Blandy’s Duke of Clarence Rich Madeira, which is good. But because I’m in New
Zealand, I had to buy it for $50. Had I bought it online, rather than in a
wineshop in West Lynn, it would have cost me $40. Were I simply to move back to
Canada, it would cost me like, $20. Bah humbug. Northern hemispheric Christmas
perfectionism and gluttony have their price of distinction, yo!
Kinipela models the trifle triumph! |
Christmas trifle ... sponsored by Blandy's Duke of Clarence Rich Madeira. |
Anyway, it was a fun day, and it was wonderful to be a part
of it. One of the highlights was when my dad was able to meet, via Skype, his
long-lost Kiwi relations who have been putting up with me for all this time … voluntarily. Skype featured in my
Christmas morning celebrations and I was able to open up wrapped presents sent
by my folks from Canada … with them live! It made the distance seem a little
less, and gave them an opportunity to check out Xmas a day -- and a few seasons -- ahead of schedule.
Not so much a dewey, glowing complexion as a combination of the meat-sweats and high humidity. |
Without further ado, here's my 2012 WRAP-UP by month. Read at your leisure and hopefully your pleasure. Be aware that JR Kinipela does not necessarily endorse nor agree with anything or everything that is here said. Good luck! MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY NEW YEAR 2013!
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AROHA, KINIPELA ... across the miles! |
JANUARY 2012
Mostly spent panicking about not having finished my book yet
and the imminent departure to NZ. Lots of time fossicking in storage units
chucking all remnants of my former life. Not enough snow to make winter worth
it. Stressed to the max. Bring on NZ!
FEBRUARY 2012
Arrived in NZ on 21st. A more than 20 degree jump in temperature and
radical change of season gives me and the other NZ flight 007 girls from the
MidWest USA the total sweats. A group of us can be found in the toilets at the
Auckland airport ransacking our bags for the quick change into summer. I settle
in with L and W at Muriwai. Buy my first car, a $3000 NZD former luxury vehicle
known as the 2002 Toyota Camry “Allie Q 22”.
The deal is made on the main
street in Onehunga. I hand over a plastic bag filled with cash to the dealer.
The dealer hands me the keys. I feel weird. He’s wearing white pointy shoes,
and complaining about multiculturalism and how it’s ruining New Zealand.
My TradeMe ad: "Once was luxury, now doubles as chickenfeed". |
MARCH 2012
I now have my own surfboard, a 6’4” fish by Oxbow. The
middle fin rips off on the maiden voyage. Gets fixed by a guy whom I later
discover was on the run from the tax man or was it the bailiff and is known all
up and down the North Island as a loose cannon coke-head. I choose to ignore
such rumours. I finish my book. The excitement lasted about 10 minutes. It was
more or less that feeling of having done the crime, and consequently done the
time. I resolve to never talk about anything medieval ever again. I’m over it. I take off on a 6 week surf
trip around Northland, now that the worst summer ever has moved towards a decent
autumn, and the flooding has subsided. I become acquainted with the phenomenon
of “nek minnit”, and it provides hours of idle hilarity, especially when I make
wrong turns and “nek minnit”, end up in some random town headed in the same
direction from which I have just come.
APRIL
Here is an excerpt from my personal diary from this month:
Oh the joy of no footnotes. No more academics and their
shitty social skills and worse insecurities … and terrible managerial
philosophies. Oh the joy of surfing and reading schlocky novels! Oh the wine! Oh
freedom! Oh Whittaker’s chocolate! Oh the white sand beaches! And secret
late-night falling into the abyss of panic over what I will do for the REST OF
MY LIFE. Oh. My. God. Dwindling savings. Visions of living in a cardboard box
stealing peanut butter and cans of tuna from the grocery store. Decide it’s not worth
worrying about. I'm in New Zealand. Screw it. Fate will find me.
I
discover the Hokianga. Now that is magnificence. I stumble across a place
called Kohukohu, which means “misty misty”. And oh, it was. One morning I woke
up and you could not see more than an inch in front of your nose. Yet the ferry
continued to ply the harbour between Rawene and Kohukohu.
Play Misty for me ... |
Ooh! The glare! |
The ferry to Kohukohu is somewhere in the fog ... |
“Took the ferry from Rawene to
Kohukohu on spur of the moment. Found out about a mythical beach on the other
side. Figured I’d walk there. Got talking to the deck hand, recognized his
Welsh accent, and then we were away chatting, and I was invited up to the
bridge where I met L, a gigantic Maori skipper who was fun and jolly and
laughed like Santa Claus. From there absolutely stunning views of Hokianga
harbour and all was fun and stories.
P
– I knew his name by then and had been invited round to his for a drink later,
arranged for me to get a lift for the 4 kms into Kohukohu, this upon
evaporation of the mythical beachwalk plan. (What beach?) I was recommended a
café and an art gallery, and my suspicious side began to wonder whether I was
part of an elaborately predictable tourist scam, like an Irish bus tour. Well
we’re not in Auckland any more, and so travelling to KK with M – big, pocked,
bear of a man with exceedingly long, strong fingernails and likely stifling in
his black suit – who explained his need to go into Rawene for diesel due to an
upcoming trip to the dread AKL. The dodgy gas metre … and the suit? A tangi (Maori funeral) of a mate who
dropped dead rather suddenly. He was not actually a lawyer, har har har!
Anyhow, M parked the ute at the KK Tavern, said “welcome” to me, and
disappeared into its great, darkened hull.
The stunning view from my cabin in Rawene. |
At
the café made fatal error of a flat white (it wasn’t even very good) and
eavesdropped. What I got was real, small-town reality: the girl who “comes
home” for the tangi and she may have escaped but she is made of the Hokianga
and the Hokianga is made of her. Auckland fashions (such as they are) but a
gorgeous, voluptuous face and she will soon be beaming at aunties and uncles
down the road at the marae. The whole region, it seemed, was camped out on
either side of the road, a motley collection of NZ cars and utes, a long line
to enter into the hall beside the marae’s main building.
I
ambled then into the art gallery. I had the distinct feeling, in my brief
walkabout, of an eerie sense of desertion, and was hyper-aware of my own total
disorientation, how ridiculous I must have looked in my Lululemon fitness
get-up and Asics running shoes (I didn’t know what to wear for the unpredictable
weather, luon seemed the ticket) and
how I really just felt aware of myself, as though a huge overstated and
unnecessary finger were pointing down accusatorily from the sky marking out
most emphatically: STRANGER. MISFIT. CLUELESS.
A view of the Hokianga Harbour near Opononi. |
Stepping
into the art gallery was like regaining my equilibrium, after standing on a
pier flanked by a stone archway recalling all who died from Hokiana in the
World Wars (including Vietnam). There I stood, and as a small outboard fishing
boat made its way underneath and I shared a smile with the lone fisherman, I
realised he and I were communicating from separate universes. He may as well
have been the man in the moon in oilskins and a t-shirt, with outsized hands
built-to-purpose for catching, gutting and carving. And me with my mild eczema
brought on by worry in front of a flickering computer. How absurd. Two
feelings: humility and an extreme distaste for vegans in that moment.
Having
somehow regained the earth I looked in at the gallery. It was like stepping
back into my own world: packaged for consumption, abstracted, narrative,
conclusive. Outside was chaos. Inside was meaning for my PhD.
Suddenly
swept up in a hub of conversation. Met the gallery volunteer H, who told me
about himself and the area, he being Maori, and we talked
about everything under the sun. He seemed to connect with my “Celtic Studies”
schtick, and from this little base was formed a whole series of connections, as
in came the owner of the gallery, JW, and Marg Morrow, the photographer whose
work I had been admiring. [… skip a few steps in the narrative …] It was all
coming fast and furious. After connections made and all these social triumphs I
decided it was time to skip town while under the influence of such joy. I did not
want to “outstay”. Anyhow, the Lululemon came in handy as I ended up running
the last km to the ferry as it was there and I had the panic of not missing it.
The Hokianga Heads, near Opononi. |
A
new crew was on duty. A Belgian, D, with only the slightest Flemish accent, and T
the Skipper, and a brute of a fisherman with forearms like Popeye after spinach
but a gentle soul. With this crew I caught sight of the resident dolphin. And
so for two bucks, I saw what people spend hundreds to do in the Bay of Islands,
all in the humble majesty of the Hokianga.
D
and T had a few laughs at the expense of the travellers aboard, and who could
blame them? The J.A.F.A.s were in full representation (Just Another Fucking Aucklander). And one of them just had to be
sure:
JAFA
Lady: ‘Is this the ferry to Rawene?’
One
can see the dock at Rawene from Kohukohu.
There
are no other docks in sight. Anywhere.
D
shouts to T: ‘Hey, mate, is this the ferry to Rawene?’
T:
‘Oh I dunno, I think so!’
Brute
of a Fisherman: ‘What time does the two o’clock ferry leave?’
JAFA Man gets out
of mini-van. ‘Seriously, I don’t know these people. Anyway, she’s a lawyer’.
In NZ as elsewhere, the lawyer has a
bad name. Such is their reputation in New Zealand that a grasping, clutching,
leeching sub-tropical rainforest vine that takes over everything in sight is
called the bush lawyer.”
My
commentary for this month starts to get a little critical. I am actively trying
to resist Auckland in all its forms, because, basically, nobody outside of
Auckland genuinely likes Auckland. And trust me, the rest of the country –
outside of Auckland but yet including Auckland – is falling apart at the seams.
Reeling from the history I’d been picking up in my Northland travels, and myown observations thus far, I had this to say in my personal diary:
“The
New Zealand response to the introduction of the tractor was to hitch the cart
of selfish individualism to the drug of increased horsepower. The tractor,
thus, ran amok. Rails or ‘tramways’ were soon abandoned and forestry gave way
to farmland and stations. The effects of the drunkenness brought on by the
extension of individual fortunes by the ‘CAT’ are bringing about New Zealand’s
rapid demise. Addicted to cars and impossible – not to say wholly impassable –
roads, the New Zealander is quite happy to encase himself in flimsy steel and
race around his country drinking lattes, with all roads leading to Auckland.
The countryside is left to mind itself, Northland is left to rot or go up in
smoke, and the entitled yet quickly subsiding white, middle-class, ‘urban’ Kiwi
is scrambling to claim his own little patch of Godzone within a 1.5 hour drive
of Auckland. The government has virtually cancelled and dismantled all logical
infrastructure for the transport of goods and people and the proper management
of North Island territory by quashing rail and ports (the natural medium of
communication for Auckland being the Hauraki Gulf). What the settlers began in
the 19th century has been taken apart bolt by bolt, until New
Zealanders have been reduced to toy trucks carrying pitifully small loads along
inadequate roads with all the efficiency of a third-world postal service. And
yet there is ‘nothing’ outside of Auckland, regardless.
What
country can do without proper ‘logistics’? Topography, in 2012, is hardly an
excuse. But it can't be dealt with via nineteenth-century mores. What is New Zealand waiting for? The next load of impoverished
German tourists in Juicy campervans to make the move … with sand shovels?
Viable ports and their infrastructures have been stopped up timidity and a
national obsession with creating new Auckland suburbs and a generation of
entitled, insular incompetents who talk big but have no idea what they’re
doing.”
Ouch! The scales are falling off
somebody’s eyes! Stand back … !
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