The Upside (of) Down Under

Remember me? I blog here. Yes, it’s been a minute since I last posted. That’s a long, busy, mostly happy story. But I’m back and checking in from New Zealand. 

Here’s the deal on our latest venture. Mark and I squirreled away United Airlines points for a decade or so in anticipation of this trip. A few months ago, we spent most of them for two round trip Business Class seats/lie flat beds, teed up three weeks in NZ and three in Australia, and packed our bags. We left Austin last Sunday for San Francisco and thence to Auckland, toasting our 1.2 million miles with the preflight champagne offered in Business Class before takeoff.

So here we are, having pretty much skipped Monday (not necessarily a bad thing) on our way over the Pacific and landed in God only knows what time zone we’re in. 

And now we’re down under, having visited friends of ours in Whangārei and friends of a friend in Nelson. (In the Māori language, Nelson is called Whakatu. Since “wh” is pronounced as our “f” in Māori, I’ll leave it to you to figure out why this is funny in English.) We also took a gorgeous cruise in Abel Tasman National Park yesterday, viewing jaw-dropping scenery, admiring ferns as tall as trees, oohing and ahhing over sleeping seals, and cramming the rails to watch dolphins frolic near our boat. One dolphin, obviously a teenage male, was following the boat way too closely and breaching spectacularly high alongside. My theory is that the dolphin didn’t care squat for our opinions but was trying hard to impress a nearby girl dolphin.

As fun as this trip is, it’s been a bit disorienting. Of course, all travel disorients you somewhat – gender may be a construct, but jet lag is real. And don’t get me started on trying to remember where the bathroom is in your third hotel room in as many nights (although let me hasten to add that I’ve always found it in time). The worst, though, is how different showers can be. Some, of course, are the easy peasy pull the handle and water comes out kind. There’s no problem there. But then there are the ones that should come with instruction books the size of the ones in your rental car. We had on in Reykjavik that I never did figure out. I’d just pull, push, and turn things until water came out. It’s like Heraclitus said: I never stepped in the same shower twice.

New Zealand, though, presents me with a whole new level of brain Whakatus. First of all, I’ve shared the driving with Mark – on THE LEFT SIDE OF THE ROAD. I’ve been a passenger like this before, but never a driver. Rationally, I know that I’m fine if I just keep my car in its lane and trust that all the other drivers will do the same. That’s my hominid brain’s position on the undertaking. Meanwhile, my fear-driven primitive brain is screaming “YOU’RE IN THE WRONG LANE AND YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!” at all times. That’s disconcerting, to say the least, and quite wearing as well. No wonder I’ve taken so many naps here.

Likewise, I’m a bit startled by various things for sale here. I shouldn’t be; I’ve been to markets in Asia and Latin America, for heaven’s sake. But when we strolled through a food and crafts market in Nelson – I bought really cute earrings made from NZ postage stamps – we came upon a vendor selling, of all things, dried goat tracheas. That was a cause for pause. And it’s very common to find knitwear shops selling garments made of possum fur. Possums are invasive predators here, so I guess it’s good to use up the animals people kill. However, we passed on the possum and went for more familiar merino wool socks.

The most existentially mind-bending thing for me, though, has been the whole question of what continent we’re on. I’d always assumed that (a) every piece of land was assigned to a continent, like all students were assigned to a home room in high school, and (b) New Zealand was assigned to Australia. (Sorry, Kiwi friends!) That would be a big fat noperino on both scores. Some places aren’t on continents, which simultaneously makes geographical sense and offends my sense of orderliness. To make matters worse, New Zealand is ascribed by most geologists these days to a 94% submerged continent called Zealandia. But there’s a big debate about: whether you can call a mostly-submerged landmass a continent, and, if you can, how many continents there are – seven, eight, and nine are the numbers being bandied about. Dammit. I distinctly recall making a 100 on my “Name the Seven Continents” quiz in third grade geography. How hollow that victory rings now. And I was just beginning to get used to Pluto not being a planet. 

So the bottom line is that you definitely should see New Zealand if you can, but you can expect to be surprised when you do. But then travel always does that, doesn’t it? It makes us see that the world is different than we thought and that maybe you shouldn’t be quite so wedded to what you think you know. So bring on the broader horizons, you lovely Kiwis, and continue to show me the Upside of Down Under.