Richard_from_Long Beach
11th February 2006, 04:05 AM
Slate.com has been running a travel diary from NZ all this week. Today's entry could not have described NZ any better. Excerpt:
Sure, New Zealand has a big city, foreign trade, and lots of fiber-optic cable. But really I was in a far-away, windswept South Pacific idyll, where the headlines are as often as not about algae, troubled whales, and overturned sheep trucks. The news of the world resonates with a muffle. The country does have a few troops in Afghanistan, and Kiwi papers have reprinted the infamous Danish Mohammed cartoons. But it's almost as though the editors of Wellington's Dominion Post, Christchurch's Press, and the Nelson Mail were just hungry for a little excitement. (They succeeded in inspiring a protest march in Auckland and upsetting meat and dairy exporters, who fear losing Iranian business.) In Auckland, police evacuated 70 people from the building that houses the Danish trade commission when it received two packages with Iranian postal marks. They turned out to contain chewing gum.
New Zealand is just too small and far away for a radical to bother with. It's such a pain to get to, in fact, that 10 years ago, when I lived and worked in Auckland for six months, there were no apparent restrictions on immigration. To get a job, all I needed was a bank account, and to get a bank account, all I needed was a passport. Apparently, there's more paperwork now, but still, in 2006, I had the feeling I was in a refuge. The only threat-level indicators I saw were there to monitor the likelihood of forest fires. It's no wonder that up and down the country you meet recent escapees: from London hassle, Johannesburg crime, Dutch ethnic tension, or, in the case of 3,000 Tuvaluans, a country that is sinking into the Pacific.
They come to a place that has recently played Middle-earth, Narnia, and Skull Island in Hollywood films with good reason: It embodies a primitive collective fantasy of the lush natural world. Seen from the air, New Zealand looks green but relatively normal to the American or European eye. Close up, though, things get really weird. Next to a perfectly ordinary pine tree, you'll find a palm that looks like it escaped from the tropics, or an enormous fan of spikes from some Jurassic dream. And then there are the tree ferns, 30-foot pongas and 65-foot mamukas, arching over your head like something out of Dr. Seuss. Just as you start to accept these hallucinations as reality, you'll see something normal again, like an apple tree. It's disorienting.
Meanwhile, wildly different terrain crowds side by side. We hiked the Tongariro Crossing, a path that climbs over the saddle between Mount Tongariro and Mount Ngauruhoe. Starting out at about 3,600 feet, we climbed up a sloping valley floor formed by a lava flow, and then steeply up to 6,230 feet, where we perched on the rim of a still-active crater. Steam escaped from the ground and the air smelled like sulfur. Just over the summit, we passed a series of glowing-bright turquoise lakes. We descended through alpine grass and then finally ended up in a hardwood forest walking along a stream. Quite a lot of landscape for less than 11 miles.
Sure, New Zealand has a big city, foreign trade, and lots of fiber-optic cable. But really I was in a far-away, windswept South Pacific idyll, where the headlines are as often as not about algae, troubled whales, and overturned sheep trucks. The news of the world resonates with a muffle. The country does have a few troops in Afghanistan, and Kiwi papers have reprinted the infamous Danish Mohammed cartoons. But it's almost as though the editors of Wellington's Dominion Post, Christchurch's Press, and the Nelson Mail were just hungry for a little excitement. (They succeeded in inspiring a protest march in Auckland and upsetting meat and dairy exporters, who fear losing Iranian business.) In Auckland, police evacuated 70 people from the building that houses the Danish trade commission when it received two packages with Iranian postal marks. They turned out to contain chewing gum.
New Zealand is just too small and far away for a radical to bother with. It's such a pain to get to, in fact, that 10 years ago, when I lived and worked in Auckland for six months, there were no apparent restrictions on immigration. To get a job, all I needed was a bank account, and to get a bank account, all I needed was a passport. Apparently, there's more paperwork now, but still, in 2006, I had the feeling I was in a refuge. The only threat-level indicators I saw were there to monitor the likelihood of forest fires. It's no wonder that up and down the country you meet recent escapees: from London hassle, Johannesburg crime, Dutch ethnic tension, or, in the case of 3,000 Tuvaluans, a country that is sinking into the Pacific.
They come to a place that has recently played Middle-earth, Narnia, and Skull Island in Hollywood films with good reason: It embodies a primitive collective fantasy of the lush natural world. Seen from the air, New Zealand looks green but relatively normal to the American or European eye. Close up, though, things get really weird. Next to a perfectly ordinary pine tree, you'll find a palm that looks like it escaped from the tropics, or an enormous fan of spikes from some Jurassic dream. And then there are the tree ferns, 30-foot pongas and 65-foot mamukas, arching over your head like something out of Dr. Seuss. Just as you start to accept these hallucinations as reality, you'll see something normal again, like an apple tree. It's disorienting.
Meanwhile, wildly different terrain crowds side by side. We hiked the Tongariro Crossing, a path that climbs over the saddle between Mount Tongariro and Mount Ngauruhoe. Starting out at about 3,600 feet, we climbed up a sloping valley floor formed by a lava flow, and then steeply up to 6,230 feet, where we perched on the rim of a still-active crater. Steam escaped from the ground and the air smelled like sulfur. Just over the summit, we passed a series of glowing-bright turquoise lakes. We descended through alpine grass and then finally ended up in a hardwood forest walking along a stream. Quite a lot of landscape for less than 11 miles.