New Zealand. Whoa.

As advertised, New Zealand is amazing. It is more than amazing. Consider this: the water runs all the time, there are always lights and plugs, hot water comes from the tap(!), almost all of the roads are paved, there are refrigerators around like there was a nation-wide clearance sale on them, and there exists the notion of customer service. These are all pretty much absent in Fiji and their presence alone would have made this a great trip. But, New Zealand really is an amazing place.

So, here is what is has looked like so far. We got here on Sunday night and spent a day in Auckland between our flight from Fiji and our domestic flight to the south island. Auckland was cool. We ate veggie wraps and had our first dark beer in about 2 years. It was like heaven. I’m not kidding. Monteith’s Black Beer is a wonderful, wonderful creation.

The wrap was good too. Anyway, we had just a few hours to walk around a western city, marvel at the cleanliness, the traffic signal where the green guy signaling to walk actually walks too. He moves and looks like he is doing a little dance. Anyway, that night we flew to Christchurch and stayed at a backpackers called Kiwi Basecamp.

Here we are marveling at the wonderful treats the New Zealand has to offer.  Sally also like me.

In the morning, we picked up our car. It started a little inauspiciously as the car didn’t work. A little backstory here: I have been scouring the web for cheap car rental places in NZ and this was the cheapest advertising old, but reliable, cars for discounted rates. Well, they got the old part right. The good news was that it never left the lot and we got a little upgrade. We are traveling around in a little Mazda 4-door hatchback thing. It works. As for the driving, remember that I have not driven in 4 years and I haven’t driven on the left hand side of the road in almost 10 (Australia). Did I mention that it is a manual and that you have to shift with your left hand? The first few days were a harrowing experience for all but after a few narrow misses, it is old hat. I even parallel parked that thing yesterday with little fanfare.

From Christchurch we headed south towards Dunedin, stopping along the way at craft distiller in Oamaru to try some whiskey. They had a tasting room like wine. Good stuff. Unfortunately, the whiskey maker went belly up and they aren’t making it anymore. We got to try the tail end. We didn’t buy any; I can make better. (Before I forget, there is a barrel of whiskey aging in my basement as we speak that I made before leaving for Fiji. You are all invited to the uncorking to give it a try when I get back.)

That tasting necessitated eating lunch and walking around to avoid driving under the influence on the left hand side in a manual, but Oamaru is a really neat place. The waterfront is all old warehouses that once served to supply the world’s wool. There is still a bunch of wool packing done there but the majority of the spaces were being turned into shops and alehouses and places to try whiskey.

After sobriety, we continued south to the town of Dunedin and then out to the Otago Peninsula, where we stayed in a little hamlet called Portobello for a couple of nights. The draw here was for me: birds. Specifically, penguins and albatross! We stayed at a really small place called Bus Stop Backpackers, which stopped operating 3 days after we left. The owners retired. So, I would really recommend it only, you can’t go there. Sorry. I spent my mornings running around going crazy about new birds and Sally spent them trying to get warm. I am sure that it is not particularly cold here but after a few years in Fiji, it feels pretty cold to us here.

The highlight for me was the night that we watched the little Blue penguins (smallest in the world) come ashore in groups of 25 and waddle to their nests. As long as you keep still they just walk right by you and a couple came as close as 10 feet, milling around, trying to remember where they left their babies. Super cute. We also did some good hiking and got to see my first albatross. There is a point on the peninsula where they nest and so were flying all around. These were Royal albatross and until you’ve seen one, it is impossible to explain just how big they are. With a wingspan of 9 feet, they can just glide like it’s nothing—so amazing.

We went on a few hikes as well, mostly along ridiculous beaches where the waves crash on-shore like in California and Oregon. I forgot how much I missed that. In Fiji, there aren’t any waves at the beach because they all get knocked down at the fringing reef. The beaches in Fiji are quiet, docile affairs. Beaches in New Zealand are chaotic and loud, and thanks to my heritage, I prefer the latter. Then again, I didn’t swim in these waters (cold!). On the beaches, we got to see fur seals and sea lions and lots of more birds.

After Otago, we hit the road inland to Te Anau where all of the New Zealand’s tourists end up. The town is amazingly beautiful and reminiscent of Lake Tahoe, with its town situated on a massive lake. We stayed at a gigantic holiday park that had fields of tents, rows and rows of campervans and mobile homes and cabins all over the place. I don’t recommend these. It was pretty cool to see how everyone travels but there were really a lot of people there. Te Anau on the other hand is worth the price of admission.

First of all, there were the glow worm caves. Whoa. The only way to see them is to take this tour but it is worth it. The cave is pretty standard. You walk in with a guide and she tells you all the cool stuff about caves and water and you look at crazy formations and underwater waterfalls and the like. But then you get into this little Gollum-esque boat and the turn off the lights and you paddle into this grotto which is totally black expect that these worms that live there glow on the wall. They are everywhere and they make constellations all over the walls and roof. It was amazing. Do this if you are in New Zealand. Sorry, no photos of this—not allowed as the wee beasties don’t like it.

Just outside of Te Anau, we took the road up to Milford Sound. First of all, this road is really beautiful and had we not taken a boat into the Sound (really a fjord, not a sound at all), the drive would have been worth it. I guess that I have not seen many glacial valleys in my life outside of Yosemite, but they are unbelievable. Crazy mountains, impossibly deep valleys, waterfalls everywhere, and lakes with water colored like it is straight out of a toxic waste dump. We went on a hike in those mountains following a part of the famous Routeburn track that people reserve months ahead of time to hike over 3-4 days. We just did a day hike there so we didn’t need to book it. Beautiful forest full of trees from some other planet, lots of birds. Then we got up above tree-line and impressive views of the surrounding mountains opened up. Cool.

Milford Sound is a bit of a tourist mecca, but worth it despite the crowds. The draw is the boats that tour the fjord and we hopped on one of those. We took an early morning boat to avoid the crowds (and because it was cheaper) and were happy we did. We spent a couple of hours cruising the fjord and just staring agape at the world around us: waterfalls, mountains, glaciers, birds, fur seals. It was great.

From here, we head off to the west coast. More to come!..

I Will No Longer Play

There are many games that one must play in Fiji. There is the “Try-To-Figure-Out-Who-You-Are-Talking-To-On-The-Phone Game”, the “Guess-When-The-Meeting–Will-Actually-Start Game,” and my personal favorite, “The Kerekere Game.” I hereby declare that I am done playing them.

The first game, “Try-To-Figure-Out-Who-You-Are-Talking-To-On-The-Phone” goes like this. When you call someone on the phone, never, ever identify yourself. First, repeat the greeting, “Bula” as many times as you can get away with. Then, if you are making the call, yell the person’s name you are calling in the receiver repeatedly until they guess who you are. Do not, under any circumstances give the receiver of the call an inclination as to who you are or what you want. If they ask your name, respond by yelling their name into the phone again. Continue this until the person guesses who you are correctly. It is the part of receiver that I will no longer be playing. I will now limit my participation in the game to a maximum of two “Bulas.” If a name as to who is calling is not immediately forthcoming, I hang up the phone. Let this be a lesson if you are calling internationally to not trifle with telephone sporting with me.

The “Guess-When-The-Meeting–Will-Actually-Start Game” is one that I am more willing to play. Meetings start when everyone is there and not before. So there is plenty of time spent waiting for everyone to get there. The thing is, you don’t want to sit there waiting for everyone else to get there. So what most people do is to try to time it so that they get there just as the last person arrives, making them, you guessed it, the last person there. You know that there is going to be a meeting because someone blows the conch shell (davui). You would have to be a straight idiot to go to the meeting the first time they blow the davui. I used to go after the second time, but I soon found out that going then also made me a straight idiot. You go after the third one, but even then you wait a bit. I try to not be the last one there, but someone towards the end of the line is ideal. Sally is really good at this. She will often walk in as the meeting is getting underway.

The third game, called the “The Kerekere Game” is a game that I thought I was up for but almost two years into Fjii, I quit. Here is how it works. If someone asks you for something, you give it to them. Likewise if someone has something that you want, you just ask them for it and they give it to you. Simple rules, no? Now, we know that we have come out on the losing end of this, but the built in insurance of always being able to bum flour or sugar or a cat when yours ran out or died was in its own way, worth it. So, we played…for a long time…longer than most. It started out simple enough—people asking for a little sugar because theirs ran out, or an egg, maybe a little flour or if they could use our knife. No problem. I guess the turning point was the guitar. My rule with the guitar had been, you can use it, but I am coming with it. I made the mistake ONE TIME of letting some folks use it without me. That has meant that whenever a group of trashed (on grog) men decide that they want a guitar, they come a-knocking.

Let’s talk about knocking protocol for a minute. I bet that you didn’t even think that something like how you knock on someone’s door changes culturally. In the US, you knock a few times, wait about 30 seconds, and knock again. If you are familiar with the dweller, you may shout a name. If there is no answer after that, you leave figuring that they are either away or don’t want you. In Fiji, there is either time to kill or a very indomitable spirit. You go to your neighbors and repeat this pattern: Knock, knock, knock “Name.” Knock, knock, knock “Name.” This is repeated until someone comes to the door. Volume is not raised and the pattern is not changed. There is also no end. The knock is fairly quiet so that if you are sleeping, it may take a while to hear. And you may not ignore it. One time, someone came over to my neighbor’s house, the pastor (Talatala), before his house washed away in the flood of course, for something. I knew that Talatala had gone to town that day and wasn’t at home. The knocker did not. I kid you not, the knocker repeated, knock, knock, knock, “Talatala” for upwards of a half an hour with no interruption, no raise in volume or frequency, nothing. Like a machine. It sort of faded into the background for me and I decided that I wanted to see how long this would continue. So I didn’t tell him. 30 minutes, nonstop.

Anyway, back to the guitar. So there a group of grog-doped guys who want a guitar. They decide that someone should go kerekere mine. They had asked multiple times throughout the course of the day and I told them that if I go and drink grog, I will bring it but I won’t be giving it to anyone. (Lest you think that I am a selfish monster, Fijians are notorious for not giving a damn about material things and things just aren’t taken care of like you or I would.) I go to bed at 10:00pm usually when the generator goes off. There are no lights on and the doors are closed—both pretty clear to signs to me that sleeping is happening at this house. It doesn’t matter. Knock, knock, knock “Brian” starts. The first time it happened, I thought that I would pretend like I was sleeping until they went away. They never went away. 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes: knock, knock, knock, “Brian.” Then it stopped. He had gone away. Then from my bedroom window: knock, knock, knock, “Brian.” That is when Sally lost her cool and yelled at him something along the lines of having intercourse with himself. He left. I went to sleep.

20 minutes later it started again: knock, knock, knock, “Brian.” It woke me up eventually and I let it go for a bit before I finally got up and went and yelled at him for waking me up since with the doors closed and the lights off, I was obviously sleeping. He replied, “Sorry, but can I have the guitar?” I said no, emphatically. 20 minutes later, again: knock, knock, knock, “Brian.” This time I got up immediately and chewed out whomever it was as best as my Fijian would allow. Unfortunately, my Fijian is all pretty polite so I wasn’t able to fully express my emotion. That third one was the last that night…that night. It has happened since.

But the guitar is not where it has stopped. The kerekere has expanded from the simple food items to school fees for kids, my shoes, clothes, and worst of all, money. The money one we had run into before but for some reason, it has gotten more pronounced lately. One day I was working in the garden and I guy I sort of knew came up to me. The conversation went like this:

Him: Wow, those tomatoes look great.

Me: Thanks, I can give you some starts if you want to plant your own.

Him: Oh, that would be great. What plant is that right there?

Me: That is a broccoli. It’s in the same family as cabbage and you eat the flower!

Him: The flower! Wow, that’s interesting. Kerekere, can I have $300?

Me: No.

Him: OK, it looks like it will be hot today.

Me: Yeah, looks like it.

Him: OK, I am going over here now. Bye.

Me: Bye.

Just like that. That was the most money that we have been asked for, but we are now getting daily requests for $2, $5, $10. I learned that lesson right away not to give or loan (same thing) money to Fijians. The problem isn’t the amount; it is that they will blab about it and then everyone and their uncle wants their $2 too. And worse is that recently, friends have started asking for just about everything. In a shared culture, if you have it, you share. That is no problem for most people because they don’t have anything. It is easy to share nothing. However, we have things partly because we just plan ahead. We think, hey if I am going to use this much flour this month, I am going to buy this much flour. Fijians don’t think that way. You use your flour and when you are out, you just go kerekere. That means that Fijians are always out of everything and we always have it.

So, I quit. I lose. You win. And I am done playing the kerekere game. We are actually going to have the chief tell the village at the next village meeting on Tuesday. Sally and Brian are no longer playing kerekere so please do not include them in any more of your matches. Speaking of matches, kerekere Brian, can you give me some?

Sorry Australia

Well, that cyclone that we made just to the north of us decided that it wants to eat Australia.  What happened is that after it turned west and left Fiji, the Tropical Depression TD09F up and turned itself into cyclone Yasi and decided that North Queensland had once slandered its mother.  It is now a Category 5, and lest you are wondering why I care enough to post this on my blog, North Queensland and I go way back to 2002 when I got my MS and James Cook University in Cairns. If that sounds familiar, its because you cheated and looked ahead to the map and thought to yourself, "I sure would hate to be in Cairns right now."  Well, that is probably what my friends there are thinking.  Let me take this moment to apologize for what Fiji accidentally generated in our waters.  And please be safe all in the way.

Here comes ‘nother one

Last week, it was announced by the usually trustworthy* Fiji Meteorological Service that there would be no tropical cyclones this season since half of it was gone and there hadn’t been one yet. Also, cyclones suck so everyone liked the announcement and thus liked the job that the Fiji Meteorological Service is doing in preventing muder-winds (the direct translation of cagilaba, the Fijian word for cyclone). Well, approximately three days after that announcement, cyclone Wilma got going. She missed us (sorry Tonga) so all was well until two days after that (now) a tropical depression developed just north of Fiji. Right now, it doesn’t look like it will amount to much. It has the illustrious name of TD09F; they don’t get real names until their winds get strong enough to earn it. Anyway, it is expected to turn into a cyclone tonight when it may hit the northern island of Fiji (Vanua Levu, where we are) or it may pass to the northwest (sorry Vanuatu). Either way, we will get plenty of wind and rain but even if we get hit, this will thankfully not be nearly as destructive as Tomasi last year. I don’t need to see another one of those. Here is the satellite image of TD09F. You can see what a sloppy, lazy tropical depression it is. Seriously, get yourself organized, TD09F!

Otherwise, Sally and I are doing well enough. December-January is a pretty slow time: school is out, the village is in holiday mode and it is hotter than all get-out (although this year has been much cooler than last year). So, there has been a lot of hanging out for us. This may sound well and good except that Fijians and Americans don’t hang out the same way and what should be relaxing is really just work, all the time. It is work just to have a conversation in Fijian, even a year and a half later. And invariably, what hanging out means is sitting around drinking a whole lot of kava. Weirdly, that also has not made its way to fun yet.

One way to solve this not relaxing when we are supposed to be relaxing is to take a vacation, and Sally and I are doing just that. First up, Peace Corps has asked Sally and me to help out with site preparation for the new batch of volunteers due in May. That means that this week, we are traveling around Vanua Levu (north island) to check potential new villages and to meet with community leaders of those villages. It isn’t exactly vacation, but it gets us out of the village, and that always sounds better than it ends up being. Anyway, February 12^th, we are heading to Suva for me to re-take the GREs, which I took in the early 00’s, but have long since expired. Then on February 13^th, Sally and I are boarding a plane headed for New Zealand, where we will open bottles of wine that have real corks, and eat cheese that is supposed to have blue (bleu?) things in it, and be cold, and see snow, and sleep in, and not be famous for the color of our skin. You get the idea. New Zealand has become this utopic vision for us so it had better live up to its bidding.

On the eve of this trip to developednationlandia, I have recently been thinking about some of the things that I haven’t done since I came to Fiji that seemed normal prior to my departure. It is funny to see them because some of them are things by which I once defined myself. It is sort of refreshing to see the artificial ways in which I delineated my life sort of fall apart. It turns out that I am just a person, not a collection of things that I do or do not do. So, here are some things that I did not do in 2010:

1. Drive a car
2. Eat a mushroom
3. Play the piano
4. Speak Spanish
5. Drink a good beer
6. Listen to FM radio
7. Watch a baseball game (on TV—obviously not live)
8. Play in a baseball game
9. Ride a bicycle
10. Kiss my wife in public
11. Eat a tator tot
12. Swim a lap in a pool
13. Play a game of ultimate Frisbee or kickball
14. Earn a dollar
15. Take a bath
16. See a lake
17. Ski (or even see snow)
18. See my sister or brother
19. Eat celery, broccoli, kale, or sweet corn
20. Drink orange juice
21. Eat a bagel or cream cheese
22. Travel outside of the country (of Fiji, that is, which is very small, mind you)
23. Eat a good slice of pizza

Now, as I was writing this list, I realized that when I return to the US, I will have an equally long list of things that I had in Fiji that I won’t have in the US and that I will miss. That being said, the grass is always greener and at the moment the grass here looks pretty brown. It certainly doesn’t look like an everything bagel, toasted with cream cheese. Not at all. Here is to 2011, the year when I get it all!

Oh, and I have to apologize for the recent lack of photos.  Our camera broke and we were without one for a bit.  Thanks to the help of Mary Moyce, we are back with camera in hand.

*Nope

Happy New Year

That’s me—this is how we celebrate New Year’s in Fiji!

Merry Christmas

It is just after midnight making it Christmas and since I can see the international dateline from my house, and since we even moved our clocks ahead an hour last month, I am pretty sure that I am one of the first people to see Christmas.  Plus, since the family of the deceased paid for the diesel to run the generator all night, we even have electricity!

That being said, here is a curveball that no one saw coming.  If you read my last blog about the great Christmas controversy, you know that we are having problems deciding whether Christmas is on Dec 25th or 27th this year.  The decision has been made.  We will celebrate Christmas on Sunday, Dec 26th.  That way, we make exactly no one happy.

Anyway, Merry Christmas whenever you celebrate it.  Next year in Israel!  (Wait, I think that is what Jews say at the end of Yom Kippur.  I’ll settle for California.)

The Great Christmas Day Question

We have had some trying times this year in Fiji: a devastating cyclone and a crippling drought, followed by an epic flood. But none of those calamities compares to what has befallen Fiji now. These natural disasters have been bad, terrible for those most affected, but as we know, Rome was destroyed not by disasters from without but by its own internal divisions.* What now threatens to undo the fabric of Fiji is this question: What day is Christmas?

Here is the problem. Christmas falls on a Saturday this year, and Boxing Day on a Sunday, both of which are National Holidays. But since those are days off anyway, the government gave Monday and Tuesday the 27^th and 28^th as paid holidays. A little back story here—there aren’t many employees at all in this country so most of the people who get an actual paycheck get it from Uncle Samu. The other issue is that when a military dictator tells you to jump, if you wait to ask how high, you will probably get arrested—at least they don’t do much in the way of shooting here. So, Christmas is on the 27^th…or is it?

The issue of on what day we celebrate Christmas was sort of an academic one in the village. There are no jobs so there are no paid vacations. One does what one likes, which means that no one does much of anything for the two weeks before and after Christmas anyway. Who cares what day you call Christmas? That was until someone died, and since funerals on usually on Saturday, it was scheduled for this Saturday—the day formerly known as Christmas Day. And that is where the debate started.

You see, if Christmas is on Saturday, you can’t have a funeral, but if Christmas is on Monday, Saturday is a perfect day for a funeral. The two sides lined up and the debate was on. At one point in the meeting, the pope was invoked as being in favor of Christmas on Monday the 27^th. Never mind the fact that these people are not Catholic and that I am pretty sure Benedict did not weigh in on the Fiji Christmas Question; evidently, the pope has changed Christmas to Monday. Cooler heads** spoke of the fact that everyone else in the world celebrates Christmas on the 25^th, regardless of the day of the week. That didn’t matter according to some since the government had decided the day. Ultimately, it was agreed that there would be both the celebration of the birth of the Lord and Savior and the burial of an old man on the same day (Christmas) and that the Minister would just have to be creative. Monday the 27^th will be devoted to drinking kava and thanking God that no one has a job from which to be taking a holiday.

Times like these make miss rampant materialism, gaudy, wasteful decorations, and the glorification of gluttony. Please, please give me back my American Christmas. And can it be on Saturday, December 25^th without a funeral?

_________________________

*Unless of course, it really was the result of lead-pipe induced insanity leading to an outbreak of homosexuality that invoked God’s wrathful dismantling of the Roman Empire. Seriously, that has been opined. I am pretty sure it was the two-party system and skyrocketing, war-induced debt.

**Me