The Road Less Traveled

Max’s writeup on his trip to Japan has been added to Max’s landmark month, and his photos are on Flickr here.

Also, I added several special categories to my photos on Flickr, for those who don’t want to slog through all the sets:
> Family, which has photos with us in them that family and friends might like to see.
> Favorites, which are some of my personal favorites from the sets.
> Architecture, which has some interesting architecture or architectural details. (Sorry, I get it from my father and grandfather!)

Today is ANZAC day, which is New Zealand’s Memorial Day, originally honouring the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought and died during World War I landing at Gallipoli on the Turkish Aegean coast in 1915. The Auckland Museum has a very fine War Memorial, covering New Zealand’s involvement in various conflicts and peace keeping ventures, and honouring those who died in the service.

April has been a landmark month for Max!

First was his 17th birthday, which we celebrated doing a couple of our favorite things - going out to eat and watching a movie! We took Max out to a Japanese restaurant, where he got to practice a little bit before his trip to Japan, and then went and saw Sione’s Wedding. And a few gifts of course! When Sarah saw his birthday pictures, she summed it up by saying how grown-up Max was looking. And indeed, he’s matured in many ways over the past year. We are very proud of him!

Then, despite the challenges of moving to a new country and new school, Max got straight A’s in his first term at Westlake Boys High School and glowing feedback from all of his teachers. And this is doing the Cambridge (i.e., Honors) track! I continue to be very proud of the fact that both of my children are smarter than I am!

To cap off the month, Max had the opportunity to go on a two-week exchange program to Japan during Fall break (yes, it’s our Fall break), which he has just returned from. There was a group of 16 boys from school, along with two teachers. They travelled to Ichinomiya, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Nara, Tokyo, and Isesaki. They visited the Toyota car factory and museum, Hiroshima Peace Park and musuem, temples in Kyoto and Nara, the Imperial Palace and shopping in Tokyo. They stayed with host families in Ichinomiya and Isesaki, visiting the local schools. During the welcoming ceremonies, the boys sang the New Zealand National Anthem, the Westlake school song, and performed the school Haka. Since Max was new to New Zealand and Westlake, he didn’t know any of these, but he did a great job of learning them before the trip.

Max’s pictures are on flickr here, and follows is his guest blog entry about the trip:

“Japan is a unique place, and twice I have had the pleasure of traveling there. I traveled with a group of students from my school down here in New Zealand along with one of the Japanese teachers, Mr. Renau, and Mr. Rivers, the deputy headmaster. We had a long trip onboard a 747 equipped with on-demand entertainment systems. I watched movies such as Aeon Flux, As Rumor Has It, and Finding Nemo. After taking a second three-hour flight from Tokyo to Narita we met the families who would be hosting us for the next four days. They made me feel really comfortable, they even left a cooler of water in my room. They enjoyed the gifts I gave them, and they served a really delicious cherry blossom cake that night.
The next day I went to a neat art museum for the pieces of Setsuko Migishi. She had painted many beautiful suggestive paintings of Europe. Later that day my host family took me shopping at a large shopping center called Jusco. They bought me three really nice ties along with a cute totoro doll. I felt a little bad because they had spent a little more money than I had, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Later we saw a movie called Firewall. It wasn’t a bad movie, and the fact that it was in English made it quite a bit more enjoyable for me. That evening, we watched Howl’s Moving Castle in Japanese. I really enjoyed it, but understood fairly little.

The next day I got back together with the group and we went to the Toyota car factory. It was really neat to see how the cars were assembled, but my favorite part was the machine room. Here, close to fifty robotic arms would all come down at once on a small line of cars causing sparks to fly everywhere. However the Toyota exhibition hall was awesome, there were many really neat futuristic vehicles. Some of the one-person vehicles could easily make segways a thing of the past. That night my host family set up a hot plate and we had various sautéed dishes including yakitori.

The next day we were supposed to go to an amusement park, but because of the rain, we went instead to an aquarium. One of the coolest fish there wasn’t even real. In a really dark part of the aquarium there was a projection of a deep-sea fish in a fake tank. It looked really cool, and it took me a few moments before I reached into the hollow in the wall discovering the illusion. That night the Ichinomiya high school gave us a welcome ceremony, including koto playing (a Japanese harp), geisha dancing, several forms of martial arts, and taiko drumming. I really enjoyed the taiko drumming, someday I want to go back to Japan and study it. We also performed our school Haka, and luckily, we did it pretty well. Afterwards I went home with my host family, and we watched one of my favorite movies, Laputa.

My final full day in Ichinomiya got off to an interesting start. This day we were supposed to teach students our Haka, originally we would be teaching this during a class, but when we arrived at the school we found out that we would only have about fifteen minutes. Then, once we had introduced ourselves to the students, we discovered that we would be teaching them right there in the gym, and that we would only have about ten minutes. We did our best, but the girls kept giggling. Afterwards we played a few English games with a class and ate lunch with them. My host family ordered Lunch boxes for dinner, I didn’t care much for the desert, but it was very good over all. By the time I went to bed that night, my host family had given me an umbrella, Twilight Samurai the movie, an Iaido book (Japanese sword), and the three ties and totoro doll they had bought me at Jusco. By the time I got on the train the next day with yet more gifts in my bag, I was feeling really bad for having gotten them so little (little did I know that the day I returned from Japan, a package would arrive from them containing an origami book and paper along with some totoro napkins). My host mother cried as I waved goodbye from the departing shinkansen. The first part of my trip to Japan had come to an emotional end.

After checking into a capsule hotel in Hiroshima (they were actual quite comfortable) we visited the Hiroshima peace park. Being the only person in my group from America, I felt really self-conscious. By the time we left I was feeling pretty depressed, though it seemed that I was the only one. We went shopping later that day, I found a nice wax stamp (for letters) and another student on the trip bought a digital camera. That night I discovered that I had put my notes on the presentation I was supposed to do the next day in a bag that I had sent ahead to Isesaki. Luckily, I was able to recall most of it and felt reasonably prepared for the following morning. The next day we took the train to Himeji and at Himeji Castle I gave my little speech. It was a really beautiful castle, and I was ecstatic that the cherry blossoms, which normally fell a week earlier, had hung around. This gave me a wonderful chance to take pictures of Himeji framed in beautiful cherry trees.

We left Himeji after a brief lunch destined for Kyoto. After checking into a nice Ryokan, we took a bus to Ginkakuji (the silver temple). The sand formations there were incredible; there was a cone of sand as tall as a person! Unfortunately the temple was closing and we didn’t have much time there. We took a bus to Kiyomizudera, a huge temple in Kyoto to watch the sunset, however, due to the overcast sky, we instead occupied ourselves enjoying the fine architecture the buildings. It was here that another student on the trip spent five thousand yen on a fake katana. The next day, we visited Kinkakuji (the golden temple), which was similar to the silver temple, but brighter (except for the fact that it was raining that day). Afterwards we took a quick train to Nara and saw the imperial palace. This was absolutely gigantic, a huge structure beyond the scale of any other wooden building. Even the wooden statues inside were beyond anything I had ever imagined. We returned to Kyoto and spent the night in the ryokan.

After that we went to Tokyo and visited the fashion districts. This was interesting, but not my sort of thing. Then we did some shopping in places like Akihabara and many people were going to buy i-pods and PSPs because they had been told that they could bargain, decided against it when they found vendors solidly against bargaining. We were going to see sumo wrestling, but they finished before we got to the ring and so we just got to watch them sweeping up afterwards. While in Tokyo we went to a really cool amusement park and I rode this huge rollercoaster. We also explored Tokyo harbor and saw this neat building constructed around a large multi-storey sphere in the middle. Then we went to Isesaki and met our second host families. We spent two days going to lessons, which turned out being really boring, largely because I understood almost none of it. We also went to a doll making factory and glass making factory one day. It was really cool to visit these places, and I bought a neat glass horse with flakes of silver. While on this expedition, we also got a chance to make soba, since we had to eat this in addition to our packed lunches, I had trouble stomaching it all and ended up feeling a little sick that evening. The next day we spent a day on a bus bound for Tokyo and then finally caught a plane back home.”

This past weekend was a long weekend here (holidays for both Good Friday and Easter on Monday), so Cindy and I decided to do a road trip and explore Northland. (Max is off to Japan on a two-week school exchange trip.) Photos from the trip are here.

We left Friday morning heading North. We decided to do the loop clockwise, ending up in the most popular spot, the Bay of Islands, at the end of the holiday weekend when the crowds would be heading back to Auckland.

First stop was the wonderful Kauri Museum in Matakohe - rather than a short stop, we ended up spending several hours wandering through all the rooms, and the magnificent displays about the kauri, the logging history, the kauri gum industry, logging tools and machinery, many beautiful items made from kauri, and a full-size slice of a kauri tree dominating the main hall.

After the museum, we headed on to Dargaville, and out to Baylys Beach for a late afternoon walk (dodging the cars and dirt bikes allowed on the beach there), then back to Dargaville to spend the night.

Saturday we went up and had our breakfast on the lawn of the Dargaville Museum, with a beautiful view overlooking the town and Wairoa river valley. The masts of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior are also here as a memorial. (The French blew it up in Auckland Harbor in 1985, to prevent it from protesting French nuclear testing in the Pacific, killing one crewmember in the process.)

Then we drove up what is known as The Kauri Coast, driving through the Waipoua Forest, stopping to see the two largest living kauri trees, “Father of the Forest” Te Matua Ngahere and “Lord of the Forest” Tane Mahuta. Truly magnificent trees - they remind me of the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse tree, which was big enough to have a spiral stair up inside the trunk! It was great to walk through some remaining kauri forest, to see these trees “in the wild”.

Lunch was overlooking Hokianga Harbour, with giant sand dunes at the harbour entrance. Then a ferry from Rawene, and on to Ahipara. We stayed right on the water, and had a wonderful sunset walk on the beach.

Sunday we did a bus tour of the Aupouri Peninsula to Cape Reinga as a way to travel along the Ninety Mile Beach highway (not recommended for personal autos, or covered by insurance). It turned out to be a fantastic choice, as we had a wonderful driver, went to some places we otherwise wouldn’t have, and I got to relax and enjoy the ride rather than driving. We went with Sand Safaris out of Kaitaia. Our driver Senny was great, saying he’d been out of work and at the pub all night, and this was his first day driving the bus (15 years actually), and that the roadkill along the way would be good for lunch! Being local Maori, he was able to give us lots of interesting information about the area, about Maori legends, and also sang Maori songs for us along the way.

We stopped by Ancient Kauri Kingdom, which carried lots of kauri products, and actually did have a spiral staircase inside a kauri log to their upstairs! (Kauri products are all made from swamp kauri - downed trees from ancient forests recovered from bogs and farmland - or from trees that have succumbed to lightning or disease.) Next was Gumdiggers Park - kauri gum had various uses, and was dug out from the same buried ancient forests. The park is an old gum field, that is riddled with the pits dug long ago, and re-created digger’s huts. Many of the diggers were immigrants from Dalmatia (part of modern-day Croatia), and to this day Dalmation is spoken in Northland along with Maori and English.

Then a brief stop at Rarawa Beach to see the incredibly pure white silica sand, which had been harvested to make glass until it was feared it would all disappear!

Then on to Cape Reinga (Te Rerenga Wairua) and its lighthouse, (almost) the furthest northern point of New Zealand, where the Tasman and Pacific come together. It was a beautiful day, and the meeting of the seas was fairly calm, but can crash together with large waves. Next was a nice lunch stop at nearby Tapotupotu Bay, then out to the giant sand dunes and the beach. We stopped for a chance to toboggan down the giant dunes, then out to the top end of Ninety Mile Beach (Te Oneroa A Tohe) - actually more like 90-kilometre beach. We blasted down the beach, all the way back, with just a photo stop along the way!

As it was fairly late afternoon, we just stayed in Kaitaia that evening. Monday morning we went out to the Karikari Peninsula to check out the beautiful double-bay beach at Matai Bay. We had a nice walk along the beach, getting caught in a rain shower just before returning to the car. Then through the little town of Whatuwhiwhi (that’s pronounced “fah-too-fee-fee”, by the way), and on to Mangonui, where we had lunch at the “World Famous” fish-n-chips shop there - and yes, it was very good!

We arrived in the Bay of Islands area, driving through Kerikeri on our way to Paihia, thinking we would go back there to find a place for the night. We toured the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed between the Maori chiefs and the Crown in 1840, which is New Zealand’s founding government document.

After the Treaty Grounds, we did a woods walk in the late afternoon, enjoying the varied calls of the tuis. By the time we got back, it was late enough so that we just found a place in Paihia, and enjoyed walking around the town that evening.

Paihia is a tourist town right on the water, with lots of motels, resturaunts, and shops, and is the hub of Bay of Island activities, including all kinds of water activities, tours of the islands in the bay, and ferries to the historic town of Russell. Luckily we came at the end of the holiday weekend, so the population had probably dropped by a factor of ten, but still plenty of people around. Unfortunately, it was absolutely pouring down rain, so our interest in doing any of these activities was, shall we say, dampened! Instead, we enjoyed lingering in a cafe, then going ahead and heading out of town, south back towards Auckland.

Along the way we stopped to see “Hundertwasser’s Loo” in Kawakawa, which are pretty cool public toilets in town designed by, you guessed it, Hundertwasser! Then on to Whangarei, where Cindy had a couple craft/hobby shops to check out. For some reason, the traffic in town here was terrible! I think with the school holiday, everyone in Northland had come to Whangarei to go shopping! We went out of town a little ways to check out Abbey Caves, but they were not walk-in caves - I’ll have to go back with a caving group sometime to check them out. Also in Whangarei was the Margie Maddren Fernery and Stanley John Snow Conservatory, which has a wonderful display of native ferns, along with a couple greenhouses, one with exotics and one with cacti.

Finally, a couple hours more, and we were back home! As always, nice to go, and nice to come home. This was like the “Europe in 2 weeks” type of trip, where now I know where I’d like to go back and spend more time.

Many thanks to Kim and Susan for the tips on places to go in Northland, and for the Northland map!

I forgot to write about our first visitors from the States! A number of people had said they’d have to come down and visit while we were here, but none of them have made it yet… (hint, hint) And then, out of the blue, Kim and Susan Bottles said they were coming down to tour New Zealand! I know Kim from the Bainbridge Island Amateur Radio Club, as well as buying stuff from each others garage sales(!). Anyway, they dropped by when they got back to Auckland after touring the South Island and up around the Northland. We had a wonderful dinner out with them and another local couple they know, Margaret and Bruce. We’re hoping to hook-up with Margaret and Bruce again now that we’ve met, and perhaps tempt Kim and Susan back down in the not-too-distant future. Anyone else coming for a visit?

We’re Antipodeans! There’s plenty of Kiwi slang terms (which I’ll have to write about soon), but Antipodean isn’t one of them!

After my last post on the Coastbusters Sea Kayaking Symposium, Kathryn wrote saying that it sounded like I was “having a really stimulating time down in NZ what with the kayaking and the caving”. Sounds like I’ve been out on an adventure every weekend, but really it’s only been one caving trip and one kayaking trip in the six months we’ve been here.

My reality isn’t really much different from most other people - work five days a week, balancing work time, family time, chores, and occasional personal time. It just so happens that I’ve only written about the good stuff so far!

Why, I’ve enjoyed spending the last couple weekends before Easter looking into the joys of US taxes - New for this year: moving expenses, foreign income, college expenses, rental income! Then I get to do it all again for New Zealand taxes!

And to add to the joy, in just a two day period I managed to kill the car battery by leaving the lights on, scrape the car backing into the garage, and smash my foot along the pavement.

See? It’s not all fun and games…