Tag: South Pacific

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Breath Test FAIL!

Auckland, New Zealand

Since the topic of drinking came up a few times over the past few entries let’s let Greg share with you a little story about something that happened to us in New Zealand and an important lesson he learned from it:

Greg: Remember how we got this amazing invite to have Christmas with a Kiwi MasterChef contestant and his family?

So yeah, duh, we did that.  This dinner lasts several hours.  Several.  As we’ve said, Kiwis are really nice people and if you befriend a really nice person and they invite you over for a feast…well you should expect to be there a while.  At the very beginning of the afternoon I had 2 glasses of wine with everyone.  After that, I called it quits because I was the one who was going to drive us home that evening and you know, better safe than sorry right?  Besides, they had Coke Zero so it’s not like I was deprived or anything.

20101224-NZ-road-trip-w-Ronni-4 Christmas treeLike I said, we were at this dinner party for a long time.  We had hors d’oeuvres, we had dinner, we had dessert, we talked, we mingled, it was great.  Everything you could possibly want as a traveler invited into the home of a local for Christmas.  Hours flew by.  Tiffany even made key lime pie from scratch, or perhaps I should say from crumbs, as you previously saw I was involved in that.

So it’s pushing midnight before we’re ready to leave.  My mother, who has joined us for the holidays, asked if I’m Ok to drive.  It wasn’t a reflection on how I’m was acting or anything, it’s just my mom.  She asks.  She’s proactively safe and good like that.

“Yeah mom, I’m fine, I haven’t had a drink since before we had food and only 2 glasses then.”

Continue reading “Breath Test FAIL!”

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Looking for a Good Time

Auckland, New Zealand

So when you’re done eating ridiculously good food and celebrating the holidays by watching explosives detonate over the main business district for New Years or just strolling around and being overtly assaulted by the beautiful scenery and cornucopia of pleasant scents …what do you do for fun in Auckland?  What would an Aucklander do if they were bored and looking for something to do on, oh say, a given Thursday evening?

Continue reading “Looking for a Good Time”

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First! FIRST!!

Auckland, New Zealand

Come on, how often do you get to call first on New Years? Well, if you’re a Kiwi probably about once a year but still, we’re American so it’s cool!

Sydney claims first and the world gives it to them but that’s hogwash. Auckland is closer to the dateline, so they have lawful first claim.

Also, Sydney has fireworks off a bridge over water (weak) while Auckland launches explosives off the Sky Tower which is right over their main city buildings…way more dangerous…which means way more cool!

Continue reading “First! FIRST!!”

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It’s the smell!

Auckland, New Zealand

Auckland just smells good.

Being people who grew up in cities, we got used to the smells that are a normal part of urban life: car exhaust, cleaning chemicals, in San Francisco the smell of cable car brakes is fairly common. Millions upon millions of people living closely together are going to generate smells. Most of them are not overly pleasant.

Auckland hasn’t yet hit that people to landmass ratio and there is an abundance of vegetation throughout the city. So as we walked around it was not unusual to stop suddenly, look at each other while sniffing the air and say, “wow, that smells amazing!”

Like we said, it was early spring when we arrived and while it was way too cold for Tiffany to think anything it its right mind would grow, apparently no one had told the Kiwi plants that.

Continue reading “It’s the smell!”

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Eating Kiwi Style

Auckland, New Zealand

With a population of about 1.3 million, the city of Auckland is the major city of New Zealand. It’s considered so truly massive that recent legislation has consolidated all the suburbs under one city government which is referred to as the “super-city.”

To give you some perspective on this Auckland is the largest city, by far, that we have encountered in the South Pacific. It makes the major French Polynesian city of Papeete look tiny (to be fair, that would be because it is by our standards). Even for Kiwis, Auckland is huge. As many people live in the city as live on the entire bottom, larger, island of the nation. The Auckland area contains a full quarter of the national population of New Zealand, a nation that by islander standards completely dwarfs everyone else out here. Heck, the number of people in this city alone dwarfs many of the countries we’ve visited. Remember how Niue has a national population of 1300? There are more Niueans in Auckland than in their entire home country! So by islander standards, this place is huge.

On the other hand, in the US Auckland would come in as the 9th largest city in terms of population, somewhere between San Diego and Dallas.

… and we’re fairly certain that if we picked up the city of Auckland and just placed it into the San Francisco Bay area no would notice anything unusual. One because the city is not all that big compared to the rest of the Bay and two the city and its people would just fit in that well. Continue reading “Eating Kiwi Style”

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A Kiwi Christmas

Auckland, New Zealand

You’ll be happy (or envious, probably both 😉 to know that by the time December rolled around down here we managed to get full swing into summer.

And while it’s not exactly Florida temperatures, the added sunshine mixed with a stubborn defiance of the weather that the Kiwis must have inherited from their British ancestors makes for another warm-weather festive season.

Continue reading “A Kiwi Christmas”

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Kia Ora!

Auckland, New Zealand

Kia Ora means hello in Maori, the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand.

A plane flight brought us from Tonga to Auckland where we planned to spend a week or two with friends before returning to the US for a little while.

Right up front we want to make something clear about New Zealand. It’s not like we’ve ever claimed to be completely objective in reporting to you our findings during our wanderings of the world. Though we do our best to see things from different angles and explore the cultures that produce different ways of thought from our own we also understand that we are outsiders looking in and we may not grasp everything we see in all its minutia. We are human after all. Overall though we do our best to at least give you multiple points of view. This was very difficult for us to accomplish in New Zealand for one key reason:

New Zealand is about the most awesome country we’ve ever visited in our entire lives.

Continue reading “Kia Ora!”

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The Upside to Colonization

Tongatapu, Tonga

Downside to never being taken over by a western power: There’s a lot of poverty in Tonga.

 Hut village on the edge of the capital town

 

There’s a lot of wealth too, it’s just focused on the royal family and a very small percentage of ultra-rich.  Driving around Tonga, like in Mexico, it was not unusual to drive past a grand palatial estate that had hovels as immediate neighbors.

 

 

Due to religious dedication and cultural tradition, churches and graveyards were typically the nicest areas in the towns

 

So you’re saying “Ok so yeah guys hey you notice we’re kinda having the same thing here back home?  What, you been under a rock the past few months?”

On a boat, actually, rocks don’t float.  And this is different though the overarching issue is the same.  What is the guaranteed minimum quality of life we as Americans, or as people, should have?  Isn’t that one of the core issues that universal health care, minimum wages, taxation, all of it ultimately comes to?  Tiffany’s brother Chris and Greg spent a few hours talking about “the right of internet access.”  It all comes down to what is the minimum acceptable standard of living that we can reasonably expect.  Where that line should be drawn.

In Tonga, there is no minimum we’re aware of.

 

Continue reading “The Upside to Colonization”

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The many hazards of landlubbing

Tongatapu, Tonga

We ended up at this luau & Tongan food fest put on by a local entrepreneur in an Oceanside cave.  Just getting there reminded Greg of one of hazards of land bound life outside America…

Seriously, either there’s something in the North American water supply or all those growth hormones we keep feeding our cows and plants are rubbing off because back home Greg is able to pass though most passageways without being actively molested by the ceiling.  A feat he has a much more difficult time with everywhere else in the world.

Remember how in Vava’u we noticed that the men’s dances had a lot more movement than the women’s?  Yeah that’s because the men’s dances in Tonga were actually used for the teaching and practice of armed and unarmed combat.

 

Continue reading “The many hazards of landlubbing”

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Pirates!

Tongatapu, Tonga

The capital island is all-in-all not as cool as Vava’u.  But hey, it ain’t bad and they got the awesome fried rice we mentioned in our last post, not to mention the royal estate.

 

And goats!  Goats they’ve got.

 

Continue reading “Pirates!”

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