Home :: Journey with Gina
:: Crossing Kiwiland
June 25, 2000
Crossing Kiwiland
The North Island, New Zealand
White puffs mask the peaks of the blue-black Tagatimu Mountains. Green shrubs protrude through a quilt of snow. Looming pines with bare lower branches, line the road. And a golden-haired boy carrying a backpack, mittens and a red sled, steps down from a school bus.
It's winter in New Zealand.
My sojourn across this two-island country whose natives refer to themselves as Kiwis after the indigenous endangered bird, began in Auckland on the North Island.
Vegetarian paradise sums up my impression of New Zealand's largest city and former capital until 1865. Auckland's surprising variety of vegetarian fare is largely due to the voluminous Asian, veggie-friendly restaurants that crowd its streets: Indian, Thai, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. What a relief. I thought I'd be doomed to pick garnish off of the meat pies, sausage savories and venison steaks.
The availability of vegetarian cuisine is consistent countrywide. Even the rural stops along the Intercity bus route were vegan-friendly as New Zealand hosts a large volume of Asian visitors.
From Auckland, en route to Rotorua, the center of the North Island and home to bubbling mud pools and steaming sulfur springs, I headed two hours south to my first stop, the Waitomo Caves. First explored in 1887, these caves were formed when earth movement four million years ago caused limestone to surface from the ocean. The natural decoration of stalactites and stalagmites sculptures formed as a result of water dripping from the roof of the cave or flowing over exposed limestone walls. Since it takes a pokey 300 years for 'tites and 'mites to grow one cubic meter, these formations have developed over thousands of years.
The cave highlight is the Glow Worm Grotto. The New Zealand glowworm is the larval stage of a small fungus gnat, which emits a bright light to attract food. It builds a nest of mucous and silk in the shape of a hollow tube, which is attached to the cave roof by a series of fine threads. About twenty to thirty threads, called fishing lines, each coated with a sticky mucous, are hung from the tube. Flying insects are attracted to the light where the sticky lines trapped them for the glowworm's consumption.
As we sailed down the cave river I craned my neck back to take in the densely-populated mystical "night sky" created by this living light colony.
Once at Rotorua we made our way to the Te Whakarewarewa Thermal Reserve at the New Zealand Maori Arts and Crafts Institute. Before learning about the indigenous Maori culture that predates European arrival by thousands of years, Institute employees greeted us with a buoyant Kia Ora! - "Welcome" in Maori - and a Hongi, the traditional greeting of shaking hands while touching noses twice.
On my Rotorua tour I met an Auckland-based couple from the Ukraine. After royally hosting me at the Polynesian spa where we stood neck deep in hot mineral pools, they insisted I attend the Maori Hangi or dinner at Temaki Village. Openly skeptical about the usually stale and inauthentic tourist cultural shows, I promised to keep an open mind.
The next night at Temaki I was literally transported to an ancient Maori world twenty-five kilometers outside of Rotorua. By the firelight I strolled through the Maori village of Te Tawa Ngahere Pa, and experienced some of the ancestral customs. After participating in a highly structured and formal welcome called the Pohiri, all guests were lead into the Marae or tribal meeting house. Our male hosts delivered Whaikorero or speeches of welcome and intertribal history. The Whaikorero are usually dramatic performances including the fearsome Haka or war chant. Waiata, songs led by the women that complement the content of the Whaikorero, follows each speech. Afterward all were invited to dinner and to join in on group songs.
The next morning I continued to the southern tip of the North Island to the capital city of Wellington.
As I traveled from Auckland to the capital, the Olympic torch crossed New Zealand in the opposite direction. Olympic officials had flown it into Wellington from Queenstown the morning I arrived and the torch would wend its way northeast to Christchurch.
What are the chances of the Olympic flame, lit in Athens and destined for Sydney, serendipitously running right past an American visiting New Zealand? Pretty high if that American's city tour makes its last stop at noon on Mount Victoria for a panoramic view of Wellington.
As my tiny van pulled up to the vista, groups of school children, TV camera crews and relay officials lined the road to welcome the men, women and children torchbearers donning the blue and white uniform of honor. Moments later, I enjoyed a close up of the flame that would initiate the 2000 games.
Soon the torch and I would be crossing new land and water again. After Auckland, the Olympic icon would fly west across the Tasman Sea to Ayers Rock in Australia's Northern Territory and I would Ferry across Cook's Strait to Picton, New Zealand to begin my journey of the South Island.
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