Wednesday, 26 December 2012

KINIPELA'S 2012 WRAP-UP! Part 1


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!
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”.
My TradeMe ad: "Once was luxury, now doubles as chickenfeed".
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.


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

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 ...
 Here is an excerpt from my personal diary from this month:

“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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