Postcards from New Zealand: Day Thirty-Five

Today, to make up for yesterday, we were ultra civilized, and went to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth before the long drive back to Auckland. The gallery was showing some rather jejune textual work by Kiwi artist John Reynolds, but the museum staff was so attentive and engaging that we managed to have some fun nevertheless; playing, at their insistence, with the word-block paintings of Hells Bells. Aldo made a tower; I made a poem. The museum's Information Officer, Leannah, took a photo of us with our work and emailed it to us. Imagine this happening in a New York museum.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Thirty-Four

Today, about three-quarters of the way to the top of Mt. Taranaki (elevation at the peak: 2518 meters), I had a panic attack. We had been climbing steadily for three or four hours (I had no watch), and it had been hard—over big piles of stone, up a never-ending, 50° concrete ramp aptly called The Puffer, up and up rock-strewn wooden stairs that some poor soul kindly built—but I had been doing better than expected, and thought I might just make it to the top.

But then we hit the scree; the orange posts marking the trail disappeared, and I faced a vast expanse of volcanic pebbles, devoid of any firm foothold, devoid of any plant to grab at. As I felt the ground give way beneath each step, I leaned further and further down, until I was grabbing at the rocks with my fingers too, clawing for a grip. I scrambled up up up, almost running to pull my lagging feet away from the sliding rocks, and stopping to catch my breath whenever I found a trench firm enough to support me for a minute. I scrambled up about two-thirds of the way to the final push, where the scree gives way to sheer rock; I could see the snaggle-toothed peak right up above me, but right here was a tiny triangular perch, a 15-inch island in a tilted sea of scree. I sat there and cried. The wind whipped all around me; I saw the stone give way, below, to verdant clefts, to forest, to farm. I could see the roof of our camphouse glinting in the sun far below. Far below.

I couldn't go up. I couldn't go down. I cried. I cried hard, for a long time. I was dizzy. I was breathing fast. I thought I would die. I couldn't move from my perch. I thought they would need to send a helicopter. I couldn't get up. Aldo was speaking to me; he had stayed with me the whole way, was waiting with me, came and held me; he told me to get up, and gave me his hand, but I couldn't move. I cried.

Then I decided that I had to get down, off that mountain, immediately. Still, I couldn't stand, so I stayed sitting. Still sniffing, still breathing heavy, I scooted down off my perch into the scree, and with one leg stretched in front to break, and the other leg tucked in to push, pushing off with my hands as well, I slid down the mountain on my bottom, refusing to stand up again until the rocks were again the size of fists, and the incline too shallow for gravity's forward effect.

I will photograph my ruined dungarees for you before I wash them.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Thirty-Three

Tonight, we are sleeping in a camphouse part-ways up Mt. Taranaki, so that in the morning, we can start our hike right from our bedside. The building's walls are corrugated metal, and it's been here since 1905. Even 100 years ago, people were crazy enough to come out here and climb to the top of this mountain. What is it that makes a person want to work so hard to get to the top of something when there isn't anything there, but a long way back down?

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Thirty-Two

Tonight, we went back to the musical chairs Malaysian restaurant for dinner. This time, I interrogated the waiter about the menu while Aldo was outside making a phone call. After getting the down-low on the preparation of Chicken Rendang versus KK Special Chicken, I chose Mummy Chicken. The waiter said, "You want Mummy Spare Ribs instead? Ribs come in today, so very fresh. The chicken. . . maybe two, three days. . . not so much." I ordered ribs.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Thirty-One

Today, I learned to ride a bicycle. Or, at least, I learned to sit on a bicycle and pedal, pedal, pedal, and wrestle the handlebars, and not fall down. Our hostess lent us her bike and we took it to the park, where I turned crazy loops around a lumpy practice field. By the end of my lesson, I could stay up on my own, though I could not control more than 50% of the bicycle's direction. This is rather odd, since unlike, say, a horse, a bicycle should not have its own volition.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Thirty

Today, we went to hire boots (i.e., rent them), because I am supposedly climbing Mt. Taranaki this weekend. I've rented bowling shoes and ice skates in the past, but never imagined that anyone would want to rent hiking boots. I can't say that I much like them; they are very heavy and make me look like a construction worker. But Graham assures me that they are very nice boots and that, once on the mountain, I will be happy to have them. Hiring these boots for the weekend costs $30 NZ. Later, we found that we had a parking ticket, because we'd left the car in a four hour zone all day long. The fine was $15 NZ, half the cost of renting boots for the weekend. This is a good illustration of Kiwi priorities.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Nine

Today, we went to the drugstore, because I have been having a lot of snot. Strangely, as soon as we walked in, a man in a white lab coat asked whether he could help us. We told him that I was suffering from allergies and he suggested a number of different products. Aldo (who is studying to be a doctor) began asking him technical questions about the medicines' contents, and he responded intelligently to all of them. Can you imagine walking into a Rite-Aid in New York, and encountering a knowledgeable person who wants to help you? We were astounded. Also, about fifteen minutes after I used the nasal spray he suggested, I had no more snot.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Eight

Today, we went tramping, which is Kiwi for hiking, along the West Coast's Hillary Trail, stretching from the ridges behind Bethells/Te Henga to Muriwai. After two hours of hard climbing, two hours from sun down, longing for a dip in the Tasman, and knowing that Muriwai was another hour ahead, Graham decided that it would be best to just stop at the beach below for a swim. The drop down was steep and slippery, but climbers past had left a rope, so we lowered ourselves down, one by one. Once on the shore, Graham boiled water for tea, for what civilized tramping expedition goes sliding down ropes to the sea without stopping afterward for tea? No matter that my shins were covered with mud, or that I had to crawl back up the cliff on all fours afterward. Even quadrupeds are civilized if they stop for tea.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Seven

Today was serene and beautiful, but we were stuck indoors for most of it, so, at five o'clock, we decided to take a walk to an outdoor cafe in the neighborhood. When we got there, they'd closed at four. The cafe is next door to a winery's bar and restaurant, but they had closed at four too. This is on one summer's last Saturday afternoons, with the sun shining sweetly for another few hours. New Zealand, why do you close so early?

Music: Talib Kweli and Jean Grae at the Powerhouse

It seems that my time in New Zealand, when not spent chasing chickens out of the house, is dedicated to hearing live performances of musicians with whom I'm not all that familiar. Looking for tracks produced by the 9th Wonder, I'd come to know a few of Jean Grae's tracks well, but I don't have any of her albums, or any of headlining Kweli's.

Hip-hop in Auckland seems a little out of place (Jean, Talib, and their back-up singer are perhaps the eighth, ninth, and tenth black people I've seen in this country—no exaggeration—and I've been here a month). That said, Jean was in high spirits, literally and figuratively, drinking Gray Goose straight from the bottle, and exhorting the audience to step up their game. She was particularly hard on the front row, stopping between songs to instruct a lardy blonde in hip-hop show etiquette: "Get your titties up off the motherfucking rail."

Sugar-coated belligerence aside, the girl can rap. No matter how drunk she got, she didn't miss one word; her delivery was crisp and clean, and her flow rhythmic and playful. Kweli, contrastingly, was loud but indistinct, hard and repetitive, like a jackhammer that paused every few minutes to exhort its own utility. While Jean and her back-up singer were making math jokes, Kweli was name-checking himself every few lines; while Jean told us to tip our bartenders, Kweli told us to buy his t-shirts. Not knowing his work well, but having always considered him a thinking-man's rapper, I have to admit that I was disappointed. If I'd never heard of either of them, and didn't know that hip-hop is, for the most part, a man's world, I'd have been surprised that Jean opened for Kweli and not the other way around.