Wellington in February (1)

“What have you got in your bag?” the man asks.

“Nothing that would interest you,” I reply innocently with a smile. On either side of me bags have been opened and people are pouring water from their plastic bottles into containers placed there for the purpose.

He gives me a half-smile back and I walk through, one hand reassuringly pressing my shoulder bag with a bottle of spring water and other sustenance, into my side.

That you are not allowed to take alcohol into the ‘Cake Tin’, as Wellington’s 34,000-seat rugby stadium, also used for concerts and one-day cricket internationals, is popularly known, I was well aware of from past experience. Commercial food isn’t allowed either — in neither case out of consideration for the comfort and well-being of patrons, but solely to ensure they consume nothing but the beer and the junk food on sale inside. But water!!

I suppose those who won’t accept such gangster-like demands, or won’t put up with the disco music played at every opportunity, or the rising level of inebriation among many, mainly young males, in the crowd, vote with their feet and stay away. The New Zealand ‘Black Caps’ were playing England in the first ODI of five, but the ground was far from full.

Anyone who thinks all New Zealanders are cast in the quiet-spoken, modest, unassuming Hillary mould should be in the world’s most southerly capital in February. It starts with the two-day International Rugby Sevens tournament, which is turned into a raucous, fancy-dress, beer-swilling, disco, carnival party, with not too much attention paidto what is going on on the field of play.

People come from far and wide to join in, so there are no unsold tickets for this event, yet the stadium may look half or more empty at times. Play may be in progress, but in town you can see little knots of multi-coloured pirates, mini-skirted policewomen, cudgel-carrying Flintstones, escaped prisoners, overgrown babies, suspiciously masculine women and female-like men, dubious-looking clergy, representatives of unknown religious orders, a band of Polynesian Islander ‘doctors’, or Doctours, and many other outlandish figures in the streets and pubs. It’s almost a relief to note there are also normally-dressed people going about their normal business.

The stadium regulations were tightened this year. Dress standards were introduced: no bare bums, minimalist male Boran costumes, fig leaves or potentially harmful accoutrements, although most inflatable swords and the like seem to have made it inside.

The final consumption tally was impressive: 30,000 litres of monopoly-sales beer, 20,000 stadium hot dogs, 21,500 pies and 10,000 hamburgers. Nobody has kept count of what was consumed at the bars, pubs and fast food outlets in town, but it could hardly have been less.

When it was all over there were congratulations all round on the success of the event. Naturally, the organisers were happy, but the police also expressed satisfaction with crowd behaviour. Only 30 people were arrested inside the stadium during the two long days, a further 76 ejected. The party doesn’t stop when play ends, however, and another 32 were taken into custody in town by seven o’clock the next morning, mostly for being drunk and disorderly.

The prelude is a parade through town the day before the real business starts, with teams from all the competing nations on floats, flags flying, bands playing, drums beating, people lining the street and office balconies, hanging out of windows, waving, clapping, cheering, and ending with presentations of each team in a crowded Civic Square.

The cricket is a pale imitation. There’s no trouble at all getting tickets, much less fancy dress, but lots of bottled ale and a growing volume of noise as the day wears on. One young man, standing a little unsteadily in the aisle just below me tries to coach a group of his companions in the kind of protracted, rising call to make as the bowler runs up to bowl. A greatly overweight young gentleman, briefly absent on urgent business, brushes past him with a fresh supply of bottled beer peering from his pockets.

“Give us a smile Ryder,” one wag booms at a New Zealand boundary fielder, who turns and obliges. Jubilation. (A newcomer to the team, he is later to put his international career on the line as a result of his own drunken antics.) Meanwhile, the England players perform as though in a collective stupor, giving the home crowd even more to hoot and howl about.

There are fewer Mexican Waves than I have seen here in the past, less assorted rubbish thrown into the air as the wave goes round. But I leave the Cake Tin with one thought uppermost in my mind: if it’s the cricket or sevens you’re really interested in — watch it on the box.

Taupo

"Come on in," a white-clad figure with broad-brimmed hat calls out. He has seen me with my camera looking on from outside the low fence.

Imagine a giant billiard table 37 or 38 metres square, at ground level and in the open air. Replace the green cloth with equally green, incredibly fine, close-clipped grass and you have the setting for lawn bowls.

The Taupo Lawn Bowling Club has three such greens. Only one is in use, but there is a row of men and women at either end of it, mostly of mature years and all dressed in spotless white. I enter and am beckoned closer.

"I can explain the game," the man says, automatically assuming I know nothing about it. I stand separated from him and his opponent, a woman, by the shallow ‘ditch’ surrounding the green, which is divided into six strips, playing areas called ‘rinks’. Their partners are at the opposite end.

Six matches are in progress. This is a club tournament for pairs, I learn between bowls. Each team can consist of two men, two women, or one man and one woman. I am concerned that my presence may put my informant off his game, but when he explains the scoreboard to me I can see that he and his partner are far, far in the lead. His lady opponent remains silent.

On the way south to Wellington, I spent several days in Taupo on the volcanic central plateau of the North Island, by the shores of Australasia’s largest lake, of the same name. Look across the blue-green water on a clear summer day and standing out in the distance is the snow-capped peak of the island’s highest mountain, Ruapehu (which also has the best ski slopes), together with its slightly shorter and slimmer neighbour, Tongoriro. A third mount in the Tongoriro National Park, Ngauruhoe, shares with Ruapehu the distinction of being the only active volcanoes on the New Zealand mainland.

The lake covers several former craters. The country’s longest river, The Waikato, enters to the south and leaves from the opposite shore, flowing north-west to the Tasman Sea. There are several power stations along it and you can soon see why. Follow its winding course for some kilometres — and there’s a good, though undulating, walking track from the outskirts of town, past where the bungy jumpers plummet screaming from a height towards, or into, the water — and the river suddenly narrows very sharply. The water now froths and fumes as it is forced through the gorge at great speed until hurtling over the not-so-steep Huka Falls.

Back at the bowling club, other players say hello and offer snippets of information between spells of less hectic activity. The jack must be rolled at least 23 metres I’m told, and the bowls are not weighted as I had previously believed, but can be made to swing in from either direction solely because they are flattened on one side.

I am now sitting on a bench outside the large club house. The lady opponent of my original informant suddenly appears and offers me a cup of tea inside, where large windows reveal impressive views across the lake. "That’s very kind of you," I say. She stays only briefly, however, before returning to her game.

When I go back to check on its progress I see that she and her partner have made up their huge deficit and to judge by the way she is bowling, will soon be in the lead, while the gentleman beside her has clearly lost the sure touch he had earlier. I comment on the change of fortune.

"It’s because I was kind to you," she says. And smiles broadly.

Coromandel

Most of the last entry was written in Coromandel, the name of both the tiny township and the scenically attractive 110-kilometre-long peninsula on the other side of the Hauraki Gulf from Auckland. It was named after a British ship which visited the area in 1820, and thus only indirectly after the coastal plain in south-eastern India.

From Auckland you can get there by road, first travelling south to Thames, the gateway to the peninsula. But a fine alternative is to take the catamaran ferry across the island-studded Gulf (Hauraki = ‘north wind’), with only the last stretch of the two-hour journey over open water. In some small way it is reminiscent of the Stockholm archipelago, although the islands are fewer and the yellow rock or volcanic scoria which sometimes rises steeply from the sea, the vegetation, the grass burnt beige by the summer sun, the sparkling turquoise water and special light of the South Pacific, are all very different.

The first discovery of gold in New Zealand was made near the Coromandel township in 1852 by a saw-miller. He immediately claimed the £250 prize offered for discovering what was termed a ‘payable’ goldfield and which it was hoped would stop people from leaving for the diggings in Australia or California.

The heyday of the community, which grew to be several thousand strong, was in the 1870s, but the difficulty and expense of extraction meant this was not a site for the little man dreaming of great fortune. Instead, large companies were formed, making much money for a time, before operations cost more than they produced, declined greatly in the 1880s and ceased altogether in the 1930s. The population dwindled and there is little to remind you of the golden past except for the former School of Mines, now a museum, a few other buildings and some (rather dangerous) mine shafts.

The other major economic activity in post-European-settlement days was forestry. As in many other parts of the north, this was once a wooded area dominated by that magnificent member of the pine family, the kauri tree. Slow-growing, it can reach a height of up to 45 metres and be as much as seven metres in diameter. It was greatly prized by the Europeans — the Coromandel came here in 1820 to acquire kauri spars — and alas there are few of the trees left. Kauri gum, dug from the ground where they once grew, was also much sought after, the resin being used in varnish, lacquer and linoleum.

Today, the peninsula lives by the holiday trade and farming. I am told there is gold in the seabed, but too difficult to get at.

Australia, India and Sir Ed

Ask a Kiwi sports fan who he supports in international competition and a likely answer is "New Zealand and any team playing against Australia."

It’s rather like the Scottish football supporter faced with great difficulty in deciding what means more to him, Scotland winning or England losing (regardless of their opponents).

It is hardly surprising therefore that there was little sympathy for Australia on this side of the Tasman in their cricketing conflict with India, resulting from incidents during the second Test match between the two sides. Antagonism between the two threatened to go well beyond the sporting sphere, involving charges of racism (by an Indian player), blackmail (by the Indian cricket authorities, who threatened to call off the tour if the charges weren’t dismissed and an umpire - who admittedly made two bad decisions that went against them, removed for the remaining games), and about deplorable behaviour by the Australians.

An Indian player may or may not have called the only coloured member of the Australian team ‘a monkey’, but comments such as those of the Australian coming on to bowl that, "I can’t wait to run through you bastards," are not primarily intended to promote cordial relations.

In New Zealand, the Australian cricket team are commonly described as ‘hunting like a pack of wolves’ who will stop at nothing to secure victory. ‘Sporting spirit’ is not considered a term that exists in their vocabulary. Interestingly, the clash with India also brought a lot of criticism about their behaviour from within Australia.

On the other hand, there has been little sympathy here for the Indians either. If the Aussies throw their weight around on the pitch, the Indians, who have the greatest financial clout in the game, have been throwing their weight around off it. For a time, the New Zealand media were full of it, and not just the sports pages and programmes, but news headlines, leader columns and letters to the editor.

At the moment, a truce has been called and the third Test begun with damage limitation exercises all round. But most of that was swept aside in this country by the death of (Sir) Edmund Hillary, for many years affectionately known here as ‘the greatest living Kiwi’.

Noone has anything but kind words to say about him. A humble beekeeper, his achievements in the Himalayas and the Antarctic brought him great fame, but he remained the archetypal, modest, unassuming outdoor-type New Zealander. He also did much to aid Nepal, helping to found schools, clinics and community projects. The fund he supported is continuing its work.

What bothers me is that he is constantly referred to as the first man to climb Mount Everest (occasionally with the addition of ‘and return’, for George Mallory may perhaps have reached the summit 27 years before him in 1926 — he was last seen a few hundred metres away, but never heard of again). It is almost as though Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who was with Hillary, and without whom the feat would not have been possible, didn’t exist.

Hillary himself always enjoyed very good relations with the Sherpas, by whom he is held in the highest regard. As the Auckland-based Herald On Sunday put it. He ‘clicked’ with them right from the start. ‘He thought they were like New Zealanders.’

Footnote: A letter to the editor of Wellington’s Dominion Post asks how long it will be before the Australians claim Hillary as their own?

New Year's news

Charlie, Nathan and George are out. Lucas, Hunter and Lachlan are in. But Jack is still alright — keeping his position as number one among the top thirty names given to New Zealand’s boy babies in 2007.

This is an election year, but in the summer holiday period there is little sign of it, except perhaps for some wrangling over who should or should not have been in the New Year’s Honours List. Instead, domestic news has been dominated by what is happening at the beaches, resorts and holiday camps, and by totting up what happened last year.

Among the boy babies, Jack is followed by a couple of other Js: James and Joshua, while Ella, Sophie and Olivia head the girls’ list, in that order. Helen doesn’t figure, so the PM (Helen Clark) clearly hasn’t served as inspiration for parents with ambitions for their new-born baby girls. But where are the Maori, Polynesian and Asian names? Substantial communities they may be, but their names are not in sight.

As for the beaches, which abound along the country’s coasts, not all the stories are of happy holiday-makers splashing in the sea. There have been some shark sightings, although the danger is not considered so great. More serious was the accident on New Year’s Eve when a 15-year-old boy, racing his motor bike on a beach without lights in the dark, ploughed into two young girls, killing one and seriously injuring the other.

In the eyes of New Zealand law, beaches are no different to roads! Unless there is an official local sign to the contrary, motorised vehicles can not only be driven on them, but are subject only to the open road speed limit of 100 kph! There have been other fatalities and serious incidents and now there is talk of introducing ‘restrictions’.

This is a country where 15-year-olds can be licensed to drive. Two or three years ago I met a man in the lower North Island who had learnt to fly a Tiger Moth at the age of 12. He was brought up on a large farm and flying on your own property was not covered by the regulations, which anyway seemed to be extremely lax. He later became a helicopter pilot, hunting deer in dangerous country, flying low in deep ravines. He called it ‘the wild west’. Farmers could fire shotguns at them and shatter the windscreen. They would shoot deer from the ‘chopper’, then lower a winch-man, who would gut the carcasses before getting them winched up. Neil said they lost two pilots and I think four other men during his time in this precarious occupation before he came a cropper himself. He survived, but years afterwards was still in pain.

But back to the New Year. It is a time when many Kiwis evidently resolve to find romance for there is a sudden surge in on-line dating, with the typical person looking for a partner in cyberspace said to be 39 years-old and with some higher education.

An older romance that resulted in marriage twelve years ago was between a New Zealand woman and a retired English dentist. Having lived in England since their wedding, they are now on their way here by sea to start a new life. What is remarkable about that? Only that he is 102, his wife a mere 87. About to become the country’s oldest ever immigrant he says, “When I’m 105, I don’t want to be thinking: I wish I had moved to the other side of the world when I was 102.”

All those who think they are past it at forty or fifty, or even sixty or seventy, please note.

Now in New Zealand

Brief encounter

A large Polynesian lady with silvery hair sits next to me on the not-quite-full free bus at the start of its Auckland inner-city circuit. There are two empty seats opposite. Still jet-lagged and travel weary, I stare dully ahead.

“And how are you today?” she asks suddenly, turning towards me.

“Fine,” I manage to reply, trying to sound almost awake. “And how are you?”

“Good.”

Have I had a good Christmas? she asks, then whether I’ve ever been to ‘The Mission’. To judge from her gesture it is not far away along Queen Street, the city’s main commercial artery. At once I assume she has singled me out as being in need of religion. But then she tells me she hasn’t been there either, although she has seen it on TV — whether an ad, news item, or programme I don’t ask.

She tells me about Son Number One and Son Number Two, one of whom has done something she cannot forgive; exactly what, I’m not alert enough to catch. She has four sons, a daughter and three grandchildren, one of whom, a boy of eight, she and her husband are not allowed to see. I miss the bit about why. She says it is ‘hard’. But I do get the part about her husband working on the buses, which prevented them from going to one of the children, I’m not sure which, for Christmas.

All this and much else I learn between Lower Queen Street and the University, where I have to trouble her to let me out. We part with hearty goodbyes and mutual wishes for spending a very good day.

We have been travelling for perhaps five or six minutes.

The delights of long-haul travel

Murphy has a field day.

Much can go wrong on long-haul travel: flight delays, over-booking, missed connections, luggage lost, sent to the wrong destination, items stolen, etc, etc. On my travels again, something new has been added to the list. The SAS check-in computer at Arlanda refused to recognize my e-ticket and for a very long time it seemed I would never start my journey, let alone suffer the stress of other mishaps.

They were to come. The initial problem was solved when as a last resort the person checking me in crossed out the words ‘Paper ticket required’ and wrote ‘e-ticket OK’ on my boarding card for the flight to Chicago. A card for the connecting flight to San Francisco, couldn’t be issued — which was just as well as there was never any chance of catching it once the departure board showed the first plane would be four hours late leaving.

An urgent visit to the SAS information desk produced regrets and the information that onward flights could be re-booked only in Chicago. There was nothing they could do. I was given a food voucher for SEK 100, however, usable in any food outlet at the airport.

But Murphy was having none of that. Having planned when I would eat and retreated to an area well away from check-in counters and departure boards, by sheer chance I discovered departure had now been brought forward an hour, then another hour, leaving time only to get through security and go to the gate. Food? Forget it.

But would I make my connection? I might perhaps arrive a little before take-off time, but in the wrong terminal, with immigration, including finger-printing and being photographed, and baggage collection, customs etc. to negotiate it would be hyper-stressful even to try.

On the plane it was announced that passengers with connecting flights leaving up to three-quarters of an hour later than mine would be re-booked. All we had to do was report to the SAS desk at O’Hare. It was almost a relief. I could at least take it easy on the ground.

What a hope! At the SAS desk there was a seemingly endless, seldom-moving queue. Later, it also became clear that if anyone had been re-booked it certainly wasn’t me. I was finally put on a later plane and even given a phone card to make known the change and prevent anyone from meeting the wrong plane at SF.

But first I had to check in again, this time with United. I should have realised. I now had to join another queue, with a good chance of missing even the later flight. When I finally got to the gate, not having had time to make a phone call, there wasn’t a passenger there. A minute or two later and it would doubtless have been closed. As it was, I rushed up to the one official in sight, thrust my new boarding card into her hand and hurried on board.

At long, long last I could sit back and relax during the lengthy wing-dowsing de-icing or anti-freezing process — it was real winter in Chicago — until the captain announced that the temperature had fallen below the minimum allowed by safety regulations for take-off and we were returning to the terminal!

We eventually got away, but such can be the delights of long-haul travel. No wonder some people prefer to stay at home, expense and carbon footprint apart.