The final weeks in New Zealand have been spent catching up with myself, doing all of those things I said I would do earlier on but put off for various reasons. Also visiting the family members that, by lack of forward planning, I'd neglected to visit until after The Road Trip.
Having gotten me into surfing Richard took it upon himself to introduce me to winter sports (in which skiing is his thing, having zoomed over the snow since early childhood with side-parting and Aran knitted sweater) one day shortly after I returned. I'm clumsy, I know and acknowledge that fact, also my travel insurance covers me to go just about anywhere and do anything except NO WINTER SPORTS coverage under any circumstances, so I thought better of it and watched Richard do his thing.
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| Ascending Mt Ruapehu |
After dressing warmly we drove to Whakapapa and took the ski lifts up to the ski area, although the weather was bright and cloudless the wind while we were riding the chair lifts was surprisingly cold. Mt Ruapehu is a very active volcano and the lava flows were clearly visible on the way up from the vantage point of the chair lift, numb fingers and gritted teeth. I suppose that adds something (excitement?) to the experience, as in the volcano has erupted several times within living memory with skiers on the slopes being pursued downhill by the steaming sulphurous contents of the crater lake and a few thousand tons of ash and rock.
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| The view's not too bad... |
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| Spot the accident |
I sat in the cafe (yes, there's a cafe there too) for a while watching the skiers zipping here and there between collisions. Before long Richard popped in to see if I had seen him, I hadn't (all the people out there looked a lot like little black matchstick men) and offered to go around a few more times so I could watch him and take some pictures or film. A while later I watched as a tiny figure cut quickly across underneath the great volcanic pinnacles that loomed hundreds of feet above, went out of control and collided with a sign. Some other people in the cafe saw this too and gasped, some went to call for a a paramedic team to go up there and help the figure who was by now moving and later attempting to retrieve a ski that had come off and made its own way downhill. Later, Richard appeared ashen-faced and nursing his arm and we had to take an unplanned trip to the medical centre.
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| At least the nurses were pretty. |
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| No breaks thanks to some youthful bendy bones! |
Sometimes I catch myself playing the farmer, I was left to mind the farm for a few days when the family went to Jess' Inquest. Every day I would get Lass and Storm and go on a drive to check on the farm and maybe paint the odd thing. Now and again I'd be able to gather up some stray ewes on the lane and put them back in a paddock. It seemed so easy, except it wasn't. I left a very expensive bull in the cattle yards because I assumed the one I could see far away in the paddock was the one that had been delivered. I couldn't find the hole in the fence that all the sheep were getting through, two of the dogs fought and I couldn't get one of them back into his kennel for two nights. I held the fort, but it was pretty shoddy. No, I'm certainly not a 'natural' at farming.
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| Out pig hunting |
However, as I have said before; I love the tempo of life that working on the land brings and I cannot emphasise the way I feel about the life in retrospect even now weeks after I've left New Zealand I crave the peace to hear and feel the wind from the hills whistling through the bush and the long rough marsh grass on its way to my ears.
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| Heath takes a sleep |
One project I completed to moderate satisfaction was the construction of a cider press (in order to press the juice from crushed apples or any old fruit for that matter) as I completed it and it actually worked (for a change). It did produce a puny amount of juice on testing, however with more apples available at harvest time and more 'cheeses' of crushed apple I'm sure that it would prove useful if only on a hobbyist scale.
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| The artifact nears completion... |
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| Yes, it's basically a car jack in a wooden frame. Simple but quite effective. |
Goodbyes, I'm not good at them (I'm sure I've said this at some time before), I feel as if I have spent only a little time with my cousins but in my own way I've changed a lot in their company, or perhaps my attitude to change has. I'm not really sure right now but what matters is that I am eternally grateful for their openness and hospitality in taking in some random (Impostor?) from halfway around the world and taking the time to introduce him to themselves and to their lives. That's all I really wanted; to meet and forge bonds with this far flung branch of the family, to be a friend. In the end they gave me so much more. I can never thank them enough.
My dear father would like to see pictures of cousins etc etc so I undertook a few awkward (another common trait?) photo shoots before I left.
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| Richard and Brigette, for some reason I waited until it began to rain to ask for some pictures... |
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| Callum, Brigette and Richard. It's definitely raining now. |
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| Lass, no relation. |
On uploading these pictures it occurred to me that I haven't taken any of Hope and Eilish that would meet the dad seal of approval, there are a few of Dorrien in my first New Zealand post but none recently. Whoops.
I spent a few days down in New Plymouth Visiting John (the original) and his family and generally getting my act together for leaving the country in just over a week. John is NOT a farmer and in an interesting parallel has a long career as a high school teacher (that unsurprisingly he began because 'of the holidays').
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| Mayer, John and..John |
Somehow I managed to cut both Janis and Finlay out of the picture. However as we were eating one night Clive called on skype from Byron Bay in Australia (another coincidence as that's where I'm jabbing this down on my little traveling laptop) and we had a little Neeson conference (I guessed that this happened frequently due to the apparent ease of the situation) around the dinner table.
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| Finlay and Mayer paying attention to their uncle Clive. |
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| Janis, John and Clive on the screen. |
After NP I went back to the other side of the Whanganui river for the final week of my visit, again I waited far too long to take some photographs and pretty much took all of them of the final day (if I'd taken many earlier I would have taken endless portraits of poplar poles in various stages of planting).
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| Heath says 'VROOOM VROOOM!!!' |
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| Effie had grown a fair bit in the intervening two months |
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| Granny time with Lyn |
All too quickly it was time to leave the farm and to leave New Zealand, but not before more dad-friendly photography.
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| Like herding cats |
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| This sequence never fails to bring tears to my eyes; firstly the adults are distracted by the children... |
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| Then Heath gets the grumbles... |
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| ...Effie has her turn... |
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| Monique took this one, Heath picks up the baton again... |
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| The young family goes home on the quad, I like this picture. |
A literary cliche of an old man once said that one life was too long, that he was tired. As I get older (bah) I have come to believe one life is not enough, that to be fulfilled my soul whatever that means- needs to live a thousand lives in a thousand different places, some similar the the one that I've happened across and led me here to a shopping mall cafe in downtown Auckland (I've written this all over the place).
In quiet moments (and believe me, I have a lot of them) as I stare at the world, moving past as a moving window dream, I imagine these lives. How I'd commit to a path, work hard or sometimes not, be myself, be somebody different by recognisable. Ernest, focused, dedicated to each of their paths, or just perhaps if something had worked out differently.
I would dream of being a wine maker in a green valley, bending his back always to the cycles of the ancient craft, a scientist using the same skills of patience and attention to detail to perfect that one vaccine. A goat farmer in the Cretan mountains living simply in a rudely built house with the bleached wood and a wife with beautiful smiling eyes. A Bollywood filmstar struggling against prickly heat and to keep his heroic bouffant lustrous enough for the movie that will be his one big break in the face of male pattern balding. A fisherman who lives in a simple cottage (painted pastel blue) in a Cornish harbour village who goes out into the face of the angry blue ocean God in order to snatch a meager living from the salty cold. An apprentice brewer in Munich, learning a trade, dreaming of returning to his own country to establish his own brewery producing honest, pure, good German style beers. A carpenter who feels in the velvet softness of freshly sawn timber the purpose of his fingers to shape and to join and to create. A jet pilot flying low through the mountains, forests and rivers flashing past. A cruisey surf bum living in a van nowhere in particular, an ex-pat English teacher living and working in a insignificant but populous city in India. A travel writer who leaves a part of his happiness everywhere he goes replacing it with scribbled 2B pencil notes in battered notebooks, an amateurish singer-songwriter who writes deeply unpopular folk songs straight from the heart and stuck forever on the pub circuit but enjoying each day for what it brings.
What I've enjoyed most besides making friends with my Kiwi cousins is the chance to play dress-up with one of these other lives, to try it for size. Needless to say if I ever find myself in possession of a bit of money I'm buying a farm!
I will miss all the new friends I have made in New Zealand as well as all of the 'new' relations I've come to love. I can't help feeling like I'll see them all again one day. The same goes for the landscapes that I have walked/driven/chased sheep through in the past six months. New Zealand really is a magnificent land, it has left its mark on me and I will surely take these experiences with me wherever I go.
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| Goat |
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| Taranaki |
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| Ohura river |
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| Goodbye New Zealand! |
