Auckland's major museum is the War Memorial Museum, a mausoleum-like building surrounded by cricket pitches. It's free for Kiwis and expensive for foreigners. Outside, it's a somber memorial. Inside, kids scream back and forth like bottle rockets, a group of Maori artists hammer away at a carving demonstration, and people queue up to use an interactive exhibit that consists of a hammer and a hunk of volcanic rock. Every now and then, somewhere, for some reason, a horn sounds.
It's a museum of everything. Upstairs, a V1, a Zero, a Spitfire, and a reproduction of a WWI trench system. Down the stairs, a lurid sign that says "Volcanoes!" lures kids into an exhibit on geology. The ground floor deals with Polynesian history and culture, stuffed elephants, and the history of childhood in New Zealand. There's one perfunctory gallery for the history of the world outside east Asia and Oceania: Shelves of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts, with a section smaller than an Ikea bookcase on all of precolumbian America. At the back sits the mummy of a young Egyptian woman whose interesting fate it was to be bartered to a New Zealand museum three millennia after her death in exchange for (the display says) "certain artifacts from New Guinea".
The other obvious island to visit was Waiheke. On the ferry, TV screens bring us up to date on recent cricket matches and animal friendships. Mixed in are short informercials for grills and blenders. The weird personal magnetism I have that causes families with small children to sit near me on public transport operates efficiently.
Waiheke is a former artist colony in a beautiful spot which, like all such places, is being gradually taken over by the wealthy. Buses run around a circuit of beaches, each of them with a little town above it. The towns have none of the seediness and tackiness of most of the world's beach towns. There's nowhere to get a silly t-shirt or a bad tattoo or buy tequila shots in bulk. Local artists show their cow paintings in little galleries, there are fish and chip shops and cafes and little grocery stores.
I've never completely understood what's so great about going to the beach. As far as I can tell, it's just sitting on sand. But the beaches on Waiheke are quiet and really pleasant. I took the rattly little bus to a random beach where a waist-high maze of volcanic rock rose out of the sand, took off my socks and shoes, and ran around the tidal pools like a toddler. Back at the hotel, I looked in the mirror and saw the holes in my sunscreen-application technique. In Canada, there's a certain casualness about sunscreen. In this part of the world, anything you miss will eventually melt off.
I left Auckland by train, taking the "Northern Explorer" to Ohakune. Britomart Station is nice and new. Several homeless gentlemen sleep upright in the chairs, which is a very difficult thing to do. It's not hard to spot my queue, which, with rare exceptions, is the one with excited retirees carrying a lot of luggage. The line for intrepid and fearless adventurers, basically.
NZ rail seated me on an aisle in the middle of a family of six: Three tiny children, their parents, and Grandma. Dripping scones are passed back and forth, the sharing of ham-and-cheese croissants is negotiated, disputes among the children are arbitrated. Paraphernalia of child-management are brought out and scattered around: Colouring books and pencil crayons and books of word searches. After intensive lobbying, half a chocolate cake in cling film is unwrapped and dropped on the table like a goat into a shark tank. For all that, the little children are mostly quiet and thoughtful, and say things like, "it's lovely out here, isn't it?", and the parents joke with them easily.
There are headphones for audio commentary. Mine is controlled by two pairs of touch buttons: One changes the language randomly, and the other makes the volume louder and louder, whatever you do. When I get tired of being shouted at in Mandarin about the history of railways in New Zealand I turn it off and just look.
The North Island is famous for being beautiful and varied, and it is. Uplifted ridges, volcanic hills, neat farms, patches of green forest, sheep crowded into the shade under trees or grazing on yellow hillsides. I'm not sure whether anyone has suggested this before, but it would be a nearly ideal place to film a series of fantasy movies.
The countryside is orderly and wholesome, like the England of Wordsworth or the Famous Five. It's a countryside without fields of wrecked cars or winter or abandoned washing machines or obvious poverty or OxyContin. It looks tranquil and unchanging, which is a strange illusion of scale: Moment to moment, nothing happens, but humans only got here a thousand years ago, and the historical and ecological changes since then have been vast. Even the geography is changing, with new islands popping up out of the sea.
In Ohakune, I just barely get off the train in time, realizing at the last second that no one else is getting off and that the doors won't open on their own -- I stab a 'door open' button and jump out onto the gravel by the tracks and then run back to get my bag from the luggage car.
It's a museum of everything. Upstairs, a V1, a Zero, a Spitfire, and a reproduction of a WWI trench system. Down the stairs, a lurid sign that says "Volcanoes!" lures kids into an exhibit on geology. The ground floor deals with Polynesian history and culture, stuffed elephants, and the history of childhood in New Zealand. There's one perfunctory gallery for the history of the world outside east Asia and Oceania: Shelves of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts, with a section smaller than an Ikea bookcase on all of precolumbian America. At the back sits the mummy of a young Egyptian woman whose interesting fate it was to be bartered to a New Zealand museum three millennia after her death in exchange for (the display says) "certain artifacts from New Guinea".
The other obvious island to visit was Waiheke. On the ferry, TV screens bring us up to date on recent cricket matches and animal friendships. Mixed in are short informercials for grills and blenders. The weird personal magnetism I have that causes families with small children to sit near me on public transport operates efficiently.
Waiheke is a former artist colony in a beautiful spot which, like all such places, is being gradually taken over by the wealthy. Buses run around a circuit of beaches, each of them with a little town above it. The towns have none of the seediness and tackiness of most of the world's beach towns. There's nowhere to get a silly t-shirt or a bad tattoo or buy tequila shots in bulk. Local artists show their cow paintings in little galleries, there are fish and chip shops and cafes and little grocery stores.
I've never completely understood what's so great about going to the beach. As far as I can tell, it's just sitting on sand. But the beaches on Waiheke are quiet and really pleasant. I took the rattly little bus to a random beach where a waist-high maze of volcanic rock rose out of the sand, took off my socks and shoes, and ran around the tidal pools like a toddler. Back at the hotel, I looked in the mirror and saw the holes in my sunscreen-application technique. In Canada, there's a certain casualness about sunscreen. In this part of the world, anything you miss will eventually melt off.
I left Auckland by train, taking the "Northern Explorer" to Ohakune. Britomart Station is nice and new. Several homeless gentlemen sleep upright in the chairs, which is a very difficult thing to do. It's not hard to spot my queue, which, with rare exceptions, is the one with excited retirees carrying a lot of luggage. The line for intrepid and fearless adventurers, basically.
NZ rail seated me on an aisle in the middle of a family of six: Three tiny children, their parents, and Grandma. Dripping scones are passed back and forth, the sharing of ham-and-cheese croissants is negotiated, disputes among the children are arbitrated. Paraphernalia of child-management are brought out and scattered around: Colouring books and pencil crayons and books of word searches. After intensive lobbying, half a chocolate cake in cling film is unwrapped and dropped on the table like a goat into a shark tank. For all that, the little children are mostly quiet and thoughtful, and say things like, "it's lovely out here, isn't it?", and the parents joke with them easily.
There are headphones for audio commentary. Mine is controlled by two pairs of touch buttons: One changes the language randomly, and the other makes the volume louder and louder, whatever you do. When I get tired of being shouted at in Mandarin about the history of railways in New Zealand I turn it off and just look.
The North Island is famous for being beautiful and varied, and it is. Uplifted ridges, volcanic hills, neat farms, patches of green forest, sheep crowded into the shade under trees or grazing on yellow hillsides. I'm not sure whether anyone has suggested this before, but it would be a nearly ideal place to film a series of fantasy movies.
The countryside is orderly and wholesome, like the England of Wordsworth or the Famous Five. It's a countryside without fields of wrecked cars or winter or abandoned washing machines or obvious poverty or OxyContin. It looks tranquil and unchanging, which is a strange illusion of scale: Moment to moment, nothing happens, but humans only got here a thousand years ago, and the historical and ecological changes since then have been vast. Even the geography is changing, with new islands popping up out of the sea.
In Ohakune, I just barely get off the train in time, realizing at the last second that no one else is getting off and that the doors won't open on their own -- I stab a 'door open' button and jump out onto the gravel by the tracks and then run back to get my bag from the luggage car.
