You haven’t seen or heard much from us lately. I think there’s been a convergence of post-holiday doldrums, isolation, grey skies, and bad news about pets that have taken some of the wind from our sails. That reminds me, lack of sailing is another issue.
There’s a lot of stuff going on back home. My uncle Bob is fighting a losing battle with Alzheimer’s. While Bob is often in my thoughts, it’s concern about my aunt Nancy and the turmoil she faces on a day to day basis that hurts the most. Even if we were in NC I don’t know what we’d do, but being this far away adds to the sense of helplessness.
On the pet front, our dog Tracy was diagnosed with aggressive cancer and our cat Tiger, who had attacked everyone in our cul de sac before we left, has continued his bipolar rampages at the expense of Yanru, originally our house sitter but now considered a member of the extended family. As Karen noted below, we found Tracy on our honeymoon so I guess our marriage is 84 years old in dog years. Not being there when Tracy was sick and then needed to be put down has been a tough on everyone, especially Yanru.
Having a cat that you know isn’t suited to being a pet doesn’t bode well for future decisions we’ll be faced with. On the pet front, I’m partial to dogs. This is probably due to my somewhat utilitarian view of pets, where blind loyalty and barking at strangers takes you further than purring with random psychotic attacks. I consider myself flexible and it only took me a week or two to come around to the idea of paying for kitty prozac to help Tiger with his “problem”. For a guy that grew up in rural south Georgia, this takes some work. This utilitarian view has put me on the dark side of family discussions about what to do about our pet problems. I honestly don’t think I care for the animals less, but I don’t seem to have as much of an issue getting rid of them when things go bad.
Karen and I, like everyone else I guess, are most prone to arguments when there is some kind of underlying tension. We used to have lots of underlying tension but with the help of our counselor Judy arguments are pretty rare. Judy is apparently pretty famous. We’ve seen several people wearing her What Would Judy Do (WWJD) training bracelets. If you see someone wearing one of these bracelets it probably means they are having marital problems. When arguments do happen we get over them quickly which is another skill we had to learn. One thing we’ve learned from Judy is the importance of AFGOs. AFGOs are those little or sometimes big things that you dread but ultimately have to deal with. Rather than treat these as negatives, we now treat them as “Another F****** Growth Opportunity” or AFGO. We’ve had a string of AFGOs here lately and frankly we don’t need any more growth opportunities. The only argument that I recall that we’ve had in New Zealand started with the innocent comment from Karen that “I think we should have two cats and no dogs”. If only I had waited a few minutes and realized she was handing me an AFGO on a silver platter.
Next week we’re going sailing in Marlborough Sound, wish us fairer winds and fewer AFGOs. Cheers - Bob
Friday, January 25, 2008
Tracy, the lucky dog
A week and a half ago, our little girl dog was diagnosed with aggressive cancer, and we decided to put her down on Wednesday. She was a wonderful pet, and we will miss her.
She joined our family when Bob and I were on our honeymoon trip across the country. She had been abandoned in a campground at Natchez Trace State Park. She took one look at us, barked out “Suckers” and stuck to us like glue. She was a lucky dog, because we took her with us even though she got car sick, had a licking fetish, annoyed our other (old) dog and was incredibly furry. She was about 6 months old.
She stayed lucky through the rest of her life, having a happy and illness free life. Well, except for the time she got bit by a snake. It’s hard to explain to a dog that if you keep putting your barking nose right up to a copperhead, you will probably get bitten.
Even in the last three months of her life, while we have been in New Zealand, she was still a lucky dog, because she made a new friend of our house sitter, Yanru. Yanru took care of Tracy, giving her canned food because Tracy liked it, and petting her, and enjoying her wagging tail. Yanru stayed with Tracy through the euthanasia, and I will be forever grateful to Yanru for loving my dog.
New Zealand's Left Coast
Last weekend was a typical Bob-and-Karen adventure—a good idea, but implementation was less than perfect.
To get from coast to coast, we had to drive up and over the Southern Alps. We took the Arthur’s Pass road, which we had seen in the first weeks of our trip. The fields we passed were no longer green, but brown and weedy. And the multitudes of sheep and lambs we had seen frolicking in November had been moved elsewhere.
Arthur’s Pass is a small village with a motel, a backpackers and two restaurants. To a Kiwi, this is a tourist town. (A backpacker hotel is a hostel-like place which has budget accommodations in dorms ($20-25 per bed) or double rooms ($50-60 per room)). The road down to the Tasman Sea is incredibly steep, reaching 16% in the Otira Gorge. This particular stretch of road also includes a tunnel so the rock slides go over the road rather than onto the cars, and a chute over the road for a waterfall. It was here that we last saw the sun.
Lunch was at the Otira Hotel and Bar. We ate alone in the dining room with its 1960s plastic furniture, 12 foot ceilings and huge fireplace. The bar was pretty busy for 1130 am on a Saturday. We have discovered that the lunch hour doesn’t really start here until 12:30, which might explain the empty dining room, but I don’t know how to explain the bar.
In the States, I would never have stopped at a place that looked like the Otira Hotel, not trusting the clientele, the management or the food. Here, however, this is just a regular café, bar and hotel in a small, rural town on a major highway (more on this later). We had to go searching for the proprietor to order our lunch, but the sandwiches were great.
It is hard to tell the major rural highways here from the regular 2 lane paved roads. This is likely because the major highways ARE regular 2 lane paved roads. State Highway 1, which is the main north-south route through the country, is actually twistier, more scenic and has fewer guard rails than your average 2 lane back road in North Carolina. The major east-west route from Christchurch to Greymouth, and one of only four highways that cross the Southern Alps, is twisty, scenic, dangerous AND mountainous.
Adding to the adventure is the use of one-lane bridges. If you are on the give-way direction, you drive up to the bridge at full speed (100 km/hr), ostensibly to see if anyone is coming from the right-of-way direction, but really to try and beat the right-of-way cars in a game of chicken. Sometimes it works, too. And sometimes you can’t see the other end of the bridge no matter how slow you go, so you just charge out there and use the passing bay if you meet someone.
As we drove into Greymouth, we couldn’t help looking for the now infamous memorial pillars. They were lying, broken, on a small patch of grass at a corner, surrounded by flowers and signs that read “we will never forget” and “lest we forget”. Early on Sunday morning, two weeks ago, the landowner had removed the pillars from an old school site they were planning to turn into a shopping center. Apparently the pillars were going to be up for historic preservation status, so the developer did a preemptive move. Unfortunately, the pillars are important to the community, and are the start of the each year’s ANZAC day parade. Even worse, the pillars mostly represent the Pakeha (white) community’s participation in the Great War, while the land is owned by a Maori (native) corporation.
For the Maori, being able to develop this land, a right they were denied for over 100 years, was significant. For the Pakeha, World War I and the ANZAC forces in particular, are still traumatic memories. From Wikipedia “Forty-two percent of men of military age served in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. 16,697 New Zealanders were killed and 41,317 were wounded during the war - a 58 percent casualty rate." Most towns have markers to the dead, which constituted nearly 1/3 of the male population at the time.
Anyway, the Pakeha mayor staged a dawn raid of his own (with the Maori corporation’s knowledge) to get the pillars back and now they are awaiting a new home.
After the pillars, I wanted to see the pancake rocks and blow holes at Punakaiki; walk through some of the rainforest, and if time allowed, visit the seal colony at Cape Foulwind, so named not because the seals stink, although they do, but because the winds were in the wrong direction for Captain Cook to sail away. Bob and Abby were just along for the ride.
We headed north on the coast highway along the Tasman Sea, passing limestone cliffs and tree ferns other exotic rainforesty-looking vegetation, but missed the blow hole excitement by being about 45 minutes late for high tide. When the tide is coming in, it pushes sea water into the holes in the bottom of the coastal rocks which then explodes out of the holes in the top of the rocks, creating a geyser of sorts. Interestingly, they call pancakes ‘pikelets’ here, so I don’t know why these aren’t the pikelet rocks.
It was raining as we started up our hike through the ferns, flax and cabbage trees. Following the guidebook, we started up the Pororari River into the Paparoa National Park from Punakaiki. These Maori names are so long, so similar, still so meaningless to us, and have so many syllables that we have taken to using ‘whatever’ as the third (and later) syllables, as in Papa-whatever, and Poro-whatever and Poona-whatever.
The guidebook said we should be walking through nikau palm forest for about 15 minutes when we would emerge from the forest to a pleasant beach, which was a good turning-around point for those with limited time.
After an hour we turned around, never finding the beach. While it is true that Kiwis often classify a scramble STRAIGHT up a hill as ‘easy’, we are usually traveling faster than the suggested hiking time. And about 45 minutes into our return trip, we came across a bench. Hmmmm…Could I have misread ‘bench’ as ‘beach”?
We decided that Cape Foulwind in the rain didn’t appeal to us. Further, it would break our string of “P” places.
Home for the night was to be a Standard Cabin at the Seaside Holiday Park. The park was indeed at the seaside, and the cabin was indeed your standard 8X8 room with 2 bunks, 2straight back chairs and one overhead fluorescent light fixture. There was a toilet and shower at the end of the building, and a communal kitchen one building over. There were no windows except the window in the door. Although I don’t know this from personal experience, it sure felt like a prison cell.
I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t stay there. In 3 ½ hours we could be home in our own beds, and we’d seen all we (OK, I) wanted to see of the west coast. It was easy to talk Abby and Bob into this plan. Even with the dismal weather, it was a beautiful place. Perhaps we will return when the weather forecast is sunny, and plan on staying just for the day.
To get from coast to coast, we had to drive up and over the Southern Alps. We took the Arthur’s Pass road, which we had seen in the first weeks of our trip. The fields we passed were no longer green, but brown and weedy. And the multitudes of sheep and lambs we had seen frolicking in November had been moved elsewhere.
Arthur’s Pass is a small village with a motel, a backpackers and two restaurants. To a Kiwi, this is a tourist town. (A backpacker hotel is a hostel-like place which has budget accommodations in dorms ($20-25 per bed) or double rooms ($50-60 per room)). The road down to the Tasman Sea is incredibly steep, reaching 16% in the Otira Gorge. This particular stretch of road also includes a tunnel so the rock slides go over the road rather than onto the cars, and a chute over the road for a waterfall. It was here that we last saw the sun.
Lunch was at the Otira Hotel and Bar. We ate alone in the dining room with its 1960s plastic furniture, 12 foot ceilings and huge fireplace. The bar was pretty busy for 1130 am on a Saturday. We have discovered that the lunch hour doesn’t really start here until 12:30, which might explain the empty dining room, but I don’t know how to explain the bar.
In the States, I would never have stopped at a place that looked like the Otira Hotel, not trusting the clientele, the management or the food. Here, however, this is just a regular café, bar and hotel in a small, rural town on a major highway (more on this later). We had to go searching for the proprietor to order our lunch, but the sandwiches were great.
It is hard to tell the major rural highways here from the regular 2 lane paved roads. This is likely because the major highways ARE regular 2 lane paved roads. State Highway 1, which is the main north-south route through the country, is actually twistier, more scenic and has fewer guard rails than your average 2 lane back road in North Carolina. The major east-west route from Christchurch to Greymouth, and one of only four highways that cross the Southern Alps, is twisty, scenic, dangerous AND mountainous.
Adding to the adventure is the use of one-lane bridges. If you are on the give-way direction, you drive up to the bridge at full speed (100 km/hr), ostensibly to see if anyone is coming from the right-of-way direction, but really to try and beat the right-of-way cars in a game of chicken. Sometimes it works, too. And sometimes you can’t see the other end of the bridge no matter how slow you go, so you just charge out there and use the passing bay if you meet someone.
As we drove into Greymouth, we couldn’t help looking for the now infamous memorial pillars. They were lying, broken, on a small patch of grass at a corner, surrounded by flowers and signs that read “we will never forget” and “lest we forget”. Early on Sunday morning, two weeks ago, the landowner had removed the pillars from an old school site they were planning to turn into a shopping center. Apparently the pillars were going to be up for historic preservation status, so the developer did a preemptive move. Unfortunately, the pillars are important to the community, and are the start of the each year’s ANZAC day parade. Even worse, the pillars mostly represent the Pakeha (white) community’s participation in the Great War, while the land is owned by a Maori (native) corporation.
For the Maori, being able to develop this land, a right they were denied for over 100 years, was significant. For the Pakeha, World War I and the ANZAC forces in particular, are still traumatic memories. From Wikipedia “Forty-two percent of men of military age served in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. 16,697 New Zealanders were killed and 41,317 were wounded during the war - a 58 percent casualty rate." Most towns have markers to the dead, which constituted nearly 1/3 of the male population at the time.
Anyway, the Pakeha mayor staged a dawn raid of his own (with the Maori corporation’s knowledge) to get the pillars back and now they are awaiting a new home.
After the pillars, I wanted to see the pancake rocks and blow holes at Punakaiki; walk through some of the rainforest, and if time allowed, visit the seal colony at Cape Foulwind, so named not because the seals stink, although they do, but because the winds were in the wrong direction for Captain Cook to sail away. Bob and Abby were just along for the ride.
We headed north on the coast highway along the Tasman Sea, passing limestone cliffs and tree ferns other exotic rainforesty-looking vegetation, but missed the blow hole excitement by being about 45 minutes late for high tide. When the tide is coming in, it pushes sea water into the holes in the bottom of the coastal rocks which then explodes out of the holes in the top of the rocks, creating a geyser of sorts. Interestingly, they call pancakes ‘pikelets’ here, so I don’t know why these aren’t the pikelet rocks.
It was raining as we started up our hike through the ferns, flax and cabbage trees. Following the guidebook, we started up the Pororari River into the Paparoa National Park from Punakaiki. These Maori names are so long, so similar, still so meaningless to us, and have so many syllables that we have taken to using ‘whatever’ as the third (and later) syllables, as in Papa-whatever, and Poro-whatever and Poona-whatever.
The guidebook said we should be walking through nikau palm forest for about 15 minutes when we would emerge from the forest to a pleasant beach, which was a good turning-around point for those with limited time.
After an hour we turned around, never finding the beach. While it is true that Kiwis often classify a scramble STRAIGHT up a hill as ‘easy’, we are usually traveling faster than the suggested hiking time. And about 45 minutes into our return trip, we came across a bench. Hmmmm…Could I have misread ‘bench’ as ‘beach”?
We decided that Cape Foulwind in the rain didn’t appeal to us. Further, it would break our string of “P” places.
Home for the night was to be a Standard Cabin at the Seaside Holiday Park. The park was indeed at the seaside, and the cabin was indeed your standard 8X8 room with 2 bunks, 2straight back chairs and one overhead fluorescent light fixture. There was a toilet and shower at the end of the building, and a communal kitchen one building over. There were no windows except the window in the door. Although I don’t know this from personal experience, it sure felt like a prison cell.
I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t stay there. In 3 ½ hours we could be home in our own beds, and we’d seen all we (OK, I) wanted to see of the west coast. It was easy to talk Abby and Bob into this plan. Even with the dismal weather, it was a beautiful place. Perhaps we will return when the weather forecast is sunny, and plan on staying just for the day.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Heroes
I saw it on the internet this afternoon. Sir Ed had died. Edmund Hillary. Sir Edmund Hillary. There was some question about whether the man deserved a state funeral or not. For a country so young, with such a strong need for heroes and role-models, how could the answer be anything but yes? I feel privileged to have shared this planet with Edmund Hillary, to have shared this country with Edmund Hillary. May his accomplishments be remembered, as he will be remembered. He will always be one of my heroes.
Monday, January 7, 2008
Kiwi Kwote
" 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'."
New Zealand's oldest immigrant as he prepared to leave Britain for a 5-week cruise to his new home in New Zealand.
New Zealand's oldest immigrant as he prepared to leave Britain for a 5-week cruise to his new home in New Zealand.
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