In God's Golden Bowl

A million years ago, before the last Ice Age, we visited Nelson. I do endeavor to provide timely accounts of Where We Went and What We Ate, but time is nothing if not elastic when you're traveling, and is probably not best spent in youth-hostel Internet caves, especially when you're in New Zealand.

To this preface, however, I will add its epilogue, the account of precisely how we made our way to Nelson, which is to say that we nearly did not. The night before our Monday-morning flight, we decided to program the alarm on my new watch, a reward for 10 years of service at the day job. It was titanium and Danish, so no complaints there, but we did discover at this late hour, after perusing the instruction booklet we had so thoughtfully packed, that its "crown" could not, indeed, be extended to the third position, let alone the second. I would need to acquire an alarm clock if were were to awake in time for the flight.

And so I ventured across the oceanic breadth of Wakefield Street to the New World, which by New Zealand standards is a pretty good-sized supermarket. That I did this without any navigational devices, and possessing scanty star lore, without being struck by an automobile was a significant accomplishment. In the end, however, it would take three such sojourns to acquire the sought-after device and the 1.5V aka AA battery that powers it.

The "Abstract Art Swivel Alarm Clock" is a masterwork of Chinese design. You can tell its worth right from the box alone, which features the following instructions in no less than eight (8) different languages:

1. Removing the Battery Cover.
2. Inserting the Battery.
3. Setting the Time.
4. Setting the Alarm Time.
5. Using the Gerund.

Step 2 was my particular favorite, as the battery found its final resting place not because the slot was consciously designed to house it, but by a considerable application of will on my part. I won, but this meant the onset of a peculiar "click-clack" that would haunt me the rest of the night. Despite my lack of faith, the instrument performed its function, and early the next morning we were on our way back to Nelson.

The flight from Wellington to Nelson, across the Cook Strait, comprises probably the best 25 minutes in the air you will find anywhere in the world. We were treated to a glowing sunrise over snow-capped mountains, oceans of cloud, and that distinctive gemlike water. We had traveled once the other direction, taking the ferry from Picton; this mode of travel is equally majestic if rougher on those who haven't yet gained their sea legs.

When you land in Nelson's little airport, you are greeted by a flat plain encompassed by a far, long ridge of mountains whose distant strength is hard to capture on film. Once in the town itself, you find yourself enclosed by steep, verdant hills, long intersecting triangles of folded green in dappled golden light. The land here is reassuring, and you feel you have a solid place on the earth, as if you are given definition by its otherness.

We met with Kimberly and Cathy at the former's retreat in the section of Nelson called the Maitai Valley. The meeting was to be a yoga workshop of sorts, a reunion of those Jenifer had taught two years ago, but it was the Queen's Birthday, after all, and short notice meant a more intimate gathering would be had. After lunch in town, at the Morrison Street Cafe, we returned to the valley, and I stepped out to take some photographs and take in the view. It seemed I had stepped onto the set of The Last Samurai, even if that film was shot on the North Island. Just behind the retreat center was a small, sloped pasture, and I counted myself lucky to meet the likes of Zoe the goat and two horses, one brown, one white. How could you not grow as wise as they, living on the side of such a mountain?

Not all talk was yoga-talk, however; Jenifer, Hawk, and I also spent our share of time enjoying the view from Kimberly's spectacular and surprising Art Deco house. From the so-called Centre of New Zealand, which we had hike to last time, the house appeared an orange rectangle lodged squarely in the middle of a mountain. Up close, its color was terra cotta, its design boldly and aerodynamically Art Deco. It fit its environment quite suitably, and though Kimberly and her husband, both Americans, couldn't be more grounded, such a dwelling might well be considered "flash" even in avant-garde Nelson, home of healers and seekers. The architecture of New Zealand offers up some surprising secrets about the culture; I'll try to comment on these next post.

Jenifer and I also connected with Elayne, a massage therapist, and her husband Mark, a woodworker who specializes in Native American flutes. We had gone to Elayne for treatments on the recommendation of a mutual friend, and, as so often seems to be the case here, soon found ourselves invited over for dinner.

The flight "home" to Wellington the next morning was just as terrific as its predecessor, and it seemed we even brought a bit of Nelson's golden weather back with us . . .

Sherpa and the Chairs of Chanticleer

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed and growing sweet —
all this universe, to the furthest stars
and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.*
— Rainer Maria Rilke

We are once again without our Sherpa. She left on Sunday on a bus to Massachusetts and her boyfriend, and we have resumed the usual routine. That’s not to say we’re unhappy, only that we miss our friend, again.

Sherpa is one of our New Zealand Friends, and the one who followed us from Nelson, where we first met, to Wellington before driving us through the North Island to Auckland. More commonly known as Diane, our Sherpa is capoeirista, yogini, surfer, clairvoyant, barista, and, even if she doesn’t yet know it, burgeoning life coach: She’ll Get You There™. She is a New Zealander by way of San Diego, having sailed in a small boat across the Pacific with the family of another NZF, Taya.

Our holiday began last Wednesday evening, when we drove to Baltimore to pick her up. There was something adventurous about the extravagant distance, and something right about picking her up a year to the day since we had returned from the Land of the Long White Cloud. Seeing her again reminded Jenifer and me that perhaps the greatest thing that came out of our trip to New Zealand, apart from the magnificent sense of freedom and possibility, was the friends we made. A reminder that the best of friends pick up whenever they meet as if no time has passed at all.

I recently joked with the very first of these friends, with whom my history goes back over 30 years, that most of our friends are over 50. He said that we need to get out more. I replied that we don’t like young people. He laughed. My statement was not a complaint but a recognition of the Venn diagram of circles we travel in locally through the yoga community, my local men’s group, and the cultural creatives of Phoenixville. And so it’s odd that we should slip so easily into a network of similarly aged new people so far away from home, and odder still that this should have happened in Nelson. It is a town that is surprising international in population and which serves the same function for New Zealanders as the Southwest does for Americans. People go there to escape, retreat, recover, retire.

We wanted to show Sherpa our place, of course, but also something beyond the usual routines and haunts. Sure, Sherpa accompanied Jenifer on her daily yoga rounds, and we visited Artisan’s (where in a fit of nostalgia I claimed the title of Mr. Americano, imbibing my favorite Kiwi coffee drink with not two but three shots of espresso — P-P-P-POW!) But we needed to do something special, only what?

Memory of a brief documentary surfaced (public television being our chief means of contact with the Outer World), an inkling blossomed into an impulse, and suddenly the answer was clear: we would visit Chanticleer Garden. We had been astounded to learn of this place nestled only a short drive away in the horse country of Wayne.

Chanticleer proved amazing from the very beginning. After a picnic lunch alongside a stream, we made our way through the vast lawns and intimate gardens, marveling at the variety of wildflowers and coziness of tree-sheltered hideaways. Sprinkled throughout the property at key viewing points was an assortment of Adirondack chairs, and we tried them all. Delightfully playful and many-colored, one set was even painted with giraffe spots. From the solid New Colonial architecture of the estate to the sculptural benches and footbridges, everything seemed integrated and chosen with care. A fraction of the size of the ever-popular Longwood Gardens, Chanticleer was more private and more immediate. It’s designed to be experienced, not consumed. Truly a pleasure garden.

The remainder of the week found us mostly lazing, in part because my foray into the Wild had brought about the worst episode of allergicality since the elms of Stockholm laid siege to my sinuses two summers ago. We attended a beautiful kirtan on Saturday night, but our thoughts kept returning to the garden of the rooster.

The funny thing about traveling is that you really do learn as much about yourself, your culture, as you do about the foreign destination. At Chanticleer we were traveling previously unknown pathways in our own land and finding ourselves somehow richer, freer. The day was an affirmation of what we already have: a secret world hidden in plain view. In Chanticleer we found a little piece of luck in our own backyard. It gave us the kind of experience we’ve been so fortunate in finding abroad. For all our yearning to be elsewhere at times, we have a pretty good life right here.


*From “Buddha in Glory” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell.

The Green Hills of Cape Farewell

Since I last wrote Jenifer and I have traded Nelson on the South Island for Wellington on the North, where we've stayed for the past week now. I'll regale you with accounts of our city exploits soon enough, but first I want to catch up on our last few days in the South Island.

Jenifer had a day off from teaching, so our friends Diane and Taya decided to take us to one of their favorite places. We set out at mid-morning for what was supposed to be a three-hour drive through the mountains, but we were escorting a pack of British kids Taya had picked up somewhere. The Brits all being 19 or thereabouts loitered and lingered and generally held up the works until, after several false starts, we were finally on the road, a caravan of two campervans and Diane's old Honda Civic. We drove through the lush wine country and then up through the mountains, pausing briefly for a picture of the view at Takaka Hill, which served as the outskirts of Hobbiton in The Fellowship of the Ring.

On the other side of the twisty, turning mountain roads we passed pasture after pasture of grazing sheep and cattle, until at last we reached our destination, Cape Farewell. The parking lot was situated by a large farm which, while green and expansive, gave no hint of the majesty to come. We mounted the round slope by the parking lot and took the narrow path along a winding ridge. At once we found ourselves hiking through an abundance of tumbling hills and strange trees--clusters of murky woods and also the occasional lonesome sapling--a technicolor golf course as designed by Dr. Seuss. We passed over hill and under hill, through sudden thickets of trees, following our grey and sandy trail, until between two faraway slopes a glistening wedge of water appeared, and we caught our first glimpse of the Tasman Sea.

We climbed the thick, sandy trail between two grassy knolls, and then suddenly the landscape opened up before us, and we were walking on the moon. The shore was a wide, grey plain reaching out nearly a mile to the sea, where two immense rocks guarded the flat coastline. This was Wharariki Beach and one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.

The Brits played "football" while Jenifer and Taya crossed the tide to one of the rocks, where a group of young seals was playing. The seals were curious and young enough not to be territorial, but nonetheless gave a good-natured chase and sent the explorers scurrying back through the rising water. Jenifer and Diane then created and walked a meditation mandala in the sand. I took pictures here and there, but it was enough to simply stand before the great rocks and take in sights and sounds and smells. The landscape, like much of New Zealand, was both familiar and otherwordly. It was good to feel so far away from everything.

The next day was taken up by planning and farewells, and then the day after that we left Nelson. We took the bus through logging and wine country to Picton, where we took the Interislander ferry to Wellington. The ship was huge, but both Jenifer and I managed to develop slight cases of seasickness. Several hours later, though, we were enjoying the elevated energy of Wellington. That night we saw Spider-Man 3, which was okay, but the real star was the venue, the Embassy Theatre. This was the site of the world premiere of The Return of the King and understandably so. It's a grand old place, richly appointed and as grand in scope as an opera house. As we sat through the closing credits, we discovered that we were sitting in Merry and Pippin's seats! Brass nameplates for Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd were fastened to the arms of our chairs. In a sudden burst of geekery, I dashed down the row and found Elijah Wood's seat. We later learned that Orlando Bloom's nameplate is stolen and replaced every three weeks or so. Neither Jenifer nor I had traveled to New Zealand to obsess over a certain trilogy of movies, but, being here, it's been hard not to get just a little excited. But more on that next time.

Hey, Mates!

Greetings from tomorrow and New Zealand. Here's the first of several planned entries from Kiwi Land. This week I'm in Nelson (as in the English admiral) as Jenifer completes her final week of teaching at Hot Yoga of New Zealand, and then we head to Wellington and the unknown. After three decent nights of sleep, I'm finally feeling human after having survived the Barthesian stresses of flight and waiting and not-doing. I left Philadelphia at 8 am last Friday, arrived in San Francisco six hours later, wandered the airport for 10 hours until my 13-hour flight to Auckland, waited another four hours, slept through most of the 75-minute flight to Nelson, and then arrived at an airport about the size of a pregnant Wawa, greeted by Jenifer and her Australian friend Kate. Somewhere in there I read The Children of Húrin and the screenplays for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Dances With Wolves, but mostly I sat and walked and waited and otherwise inhabited a no-man's land of time and contemplation. It was not altogether unpleasant. I wonder what space travel would feel like.

I haven't seen much of the country yet, but what I have seen is beautiful. Coming into Nelson by puddlejumper, you're struck by the purple clouds, the jade water, the merging of mountain and mist. Within minutes of landing I was standing on green sand and surveying the bowl of mountain that surrounds the the town. The streets and architecture feel like a somehow familiar mixture of Los Angeles, Seattle, and the suburbs of Hamburg, Germany: narrow, hilly streets; cute square houses nestled in the green trees everywhere.

Nelson is a smallish artists' community and surprisingly international; it's a place people choose to live. Jenifer commented a few weeks back that one of her classes featured more "foreigners" than New Zealanders. A number of our new friends hail from the U.S., and two of them, Tom and Heather, took us sailing yesterday. I practiced my casting but didn't catch anything. Tom, an organic farm magnate and bookseller, fared better, as did Kiwis Simon and Julia. Nonetheless, I was granted a fillet of Kahawai prepared by Grant, our Kiwi captain; I cooked it up last night and have never enjoyed fresher fish.

Jenifer and I were blessed to sail with such great company, and to taste a future we hadn't contemplated until now. I've never been one for stuff, but I wouldn't mind sailing a yacht now and again and chartering it in between. Tom and I discussed management, and I was particularly struck by his approach to gaining the allegiance of his employees: "Don't assume that everyone is intelligent. But allow them to succeed and to do so with dignity."

Today is pretty much an "off" day for me as Jenifer has a full load of classes. I hope to have a report of Golden Bay after the weekend--and then we're off to Wellington.

A parting note: these NZ posts will be updated with photos when I return to the States.