I’ve been busy! The summer (winter… whatever that thing was that’s over now… you know, before I went to school, back when I did lots of laundry) was really lazy, but the past few months have been one thing after another. We ended up in New Zealand last month, and in a couple of weeks we’ll be heading to Singapore and Vietnam (T’s job is travel-intensive and I tag along when possible).
New Zealand was fun. It rained the five days we were there, except for the last day, when it only rained sometimes. But everything was extremely green, which was nice.
Auckland is pretty charming and stuff. It’s a small city, with painful to no public transportation, but if it wasn’t for those two things I think I would be pretty much smitten. When the plane landed, we came down out of the fog to see a bunch of cows munching on grass like that up there in the picture. It’s a very spread out city, much like Sydney, and it has a bunch of weird little grassy hills sticking up everywhere, which are dead volcanoes. The houses had clapboard siding and looked all 19th century and that sort of made me feel a little bit at home.
That picture up there and this next one are both of the crater at the top of Mount Eden, one of the more famous dead volcanoes. We walked up it one night after T got off work. Look at it! It looks like a unicorn is going to come floating up that hill. No wonder they shot Lord of the Rings in New Zealand.
I guess that muddy bit at the bottom is where the lava comes out.
They have a really great museum in Auckland, called the Auckland Museum. If you like museums as much as I do and you find yourself in Auckland, you should check it out. They have all kinds of stuff: natural history, Pacific islands cultural stuff, New Zealand design, history, and an interesting part about the wars that New Zealand has participated in. They also have a floor for kids that would be really awesome if you were a kid. I used the restroom on that floor and it was a train or airplane-style restroom, one stall with a sliding door to outside, and I got sort of worried that we were all going somewhere.
(You think the cars ruin the picture, but they don’t, because they left them there for all the pictures that became postcards. I think they just really love cars in Auckland.)
On Saturday, we had one day together to do something, because T didn’t have to work anymore and we had paid for an extra night in the hotel so that we could see something together. We rented a car and drove down to Rotorua, which is a tourist trap town about three hours south of Auckland. It’s a tourist trap because they are famous for having steam pools and geysers, and bubbling mud spring stuff. There are lots of things you can pay to do in Rotorua, and I kind of wanted to have a mud massage or go see the buried Maori village (a Maori village got destroyed by a volcano there in the 19th century) but in the end we spent all day walking around the town park, which is free and which has lots and lots of little steam holes and mud pools where water is boiling in the ground. It was really cool.
Most of the irregularities had fences around them, so you couldn’t fall in and scald yourself, but T’s favorite one did not. It was boiling so violently that we wondered whether we should tell someone.
There were some that boiled mud. Those ones smelled like bacon. Actually, T thought they smelled more like the steam from a hot dog cart, but we both had similar thoughts independently.
Yeah. Yeah I do think it looks alien.
They also have a couple of lakes of steam, with dead trees along the sides:
And basically there are little clumps of bushes all over the park with steam rising up out of them, so you can just walk around and find the steam clumps and see weird things. And hope that you don’t fall into a developing one, because apparently they just open up like that.
The town park also had some gorgeous flowers, and tons of giant bees that T kept trying to get a photo of. The nature we saw in New Zealand was cartoonishly pretty.
Flowers on a bridge
New Zealand - fun and pretty.
We got back last week from a two-week trip back to the US to visit my family. It was such a great idea - someone said “This trip will help you realize this didn’t all disappear” and I don’t know if that was it, but it definitely helped me feel like family/home/the US is still accessible. It was also very refreshing just to see the landscape in Maine and New York - the greenness and fullness of the grass and trees that I grew up with and the pretty old two-story clapboard, stone, etc. houses that I’m used to. And I loved hanging out on the lake in Maine and going to the Adirondacks - those lakes and tall pine trees are so peaceful and familiar! I also enjoyed stepping out of Penn Station when we got to NYC for our flight and being back in the busyness of it - it was jarring after the quiet of Sydney, but I do miss that big city. And obviously the best part was seeing family and friends and just hanging out.
Anyway, it definitely recharged my batteries and made me feel much happier when we got back to Sydney. Now T and I are both in full swing of our classes at TAFE (which we missed the beginning of over in New York) and are also starting our search for a new apartment now that our six-month lease is up (we’ve been here six months!) so we’re going to be doing a bit of running around. Well, before we got here, T warned me that the first six months would be the hardest, so maybe this was a perfect time to take that trip and recharge.
We went for a long drive to visit T’s relatives in a town called Griffith, about an eight hour drive into the interior of NSW. I felt like it was weirdly exciting to go for a drive in such a remote place. Being really far away from everything, in a way that’s not possible to do on the East Coast of the US, felt sort of exotic. And just slightly scary, as we drove past scraggly handpainted signs saying things like “Dead Creek Farms” and I was convinced the guy from Wolf Creek was going to jump out from behind a sheep and start eating my organs.
As we were driving through one town, we took a look at the gas meter and decided we still had more than half a tank, which should get us the rest of the way with no problem. It also, stupidly, didn’t occur to us that there would be no more gas stations for the next four hours. Well, as soon as the meter got past half a tank, it started dropping pretty quickly, and we decided to fill up at the next town. When we got there, around 9pm, all the gas stations in town were closed. I am not that big of a driver and I guess I always figured that gas stations are just always open 24hrs, but apparently that is not the case, at least not once you get past a certain point into the countryside of Australia. Gah. We pulled into a Woolworth’s grocery store and found a security guard standing outside, and asked him where we could get gas. He pointed over our heads and said “Wagga’s about 80 kilometers that way.”
So we went back through the town and stopped at one of the “driver reviver” stations where they have a couple of guys sitting in a trailer handing out coffee and snacks, to see if they had any better ideas. I certainly felt like a foolish city slicker, pulling in in our marked Sydney rental car to ask a question that was beginning to seem sort of ridiculous. Thankfully, they pointed us back to one of the gas stations that had an (artfully hidden) 24hr card reader, and the day was saved.
On another note, T had been promising unending boring desert vistas on the drive, which I was sort of excited about because I wanted to see a desert, but it turned out not to be desert so much as unending flat treeless farm vistas. Extremely flat. We also saw lots of these signs:
"DISPOSE OF FRUIT NOW"
Hmm, why do the inhabitants of this area hate fruit so much? Maybe they are taking the Australian love of meat to the nth degree? No, T explained that in fact there are lots of fruit farms around, and they don’t want anyone carrying fruit flies in with their outsider fruit. Which also explains the graphic. Still, I enjoyed reading all the signs:
Why tomatoes and capsicums specifically? And who decided that $10,000 was not quite harsh enough?
This one made me sad.
We caught this friendly reminder as we were leaving.
We fell into their fruit-monopolizing trap and brought home some delicious local oranges. Those wily fruit farmers.
