Monthly Archives: April 2015

Tasmania II

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Long time no post………      Lots of blank space where blog posts should be. 

Apologies if you were hanging on in eager anticipation of another post, and major apologies (and awed congratulations) if you have been holding your breath, but I have simply been woefully tardy – so, in order to catch up with where we are now, I’ll add some catch-up  snippets – otherwise I’ll just fall further and further behind.
Think of it as a smorgasbord, or at least a snack buffet. 
Hope there’s something you like and that it’s not all tomato and celery (foods of the evil one) 
There will probably be three or four posts put on together rather than one hoolying great big long one.
Tasmania II
So, we were in Tasmania. And we were realising that a lot of Australia is stolen. Certainly a lot of the place names are swiped from the UK, maybe out of some strange sense of nostalgia for the country which banished them forever to the other side of the world. We stayed a week not far from Derby and St Helens, neither of which look much like their UK namesakes. The Sheffield in Tasmania has palm trees – and when we stayed the night in Swansea (tiny coastal town – all the restaurants close at 8pm and the town’s free wifi gets switched on and off by the lady in the local Information Office each day “in case the internet gets used up”!) we noticed a large sign proudly celebrating that it won the title of “Australia’s Tidiest Town, 2007”! There, Welsh Swansea, beat that!
I like it that Australia has a tidiest town competition. Brits have “Village in Bloom” and “City of Culture” whereas the Australians are happy so long as it’s tidy. 
Quite a few of the towns in Tasmania seem to have a particular “specialism”. There’s Railton, which is known as Topiary town on account of its many sculptured hedges: there’s Sheffield, the “Town of murals” and the awesome “Town of the painted poles” (Lilydale). You have got to wonder what kind of town meeting they had that ended up deciding that this would be the best thing they could become famous for.
“OK everybody, we all know people are flocking to Railton to see their fancy-dancy topiary, and the murals are all well and good for “Look at us, we paint on walls” Sheffield, I’ve seen scarecrows appearing in the gardens of some of the towns – so we need to get creative – we need an edge – something that sets us apart. Think, everybody think harder than you’ve ever thought before. We need something that will catapult us to the top of the “reasons to visit a small town that’s not necessarily on the way to anywhere we were actually going to” list.
(Sound of the occasional chair scraping and people heavy thinking) 

(Finally…..) “Well, I’ve got three bits of fence post I could paint.”

“Ooooohhhh” “like it!” “Yes!” “We could use different colours” “Brilliant – let’s do it people!”

We drove through Lilydale, town of the painted posts – but we didn’t see any. Come on Lilydaleites, get your poles out.
There is also a tiny village called “Nowhere Else”. What an awesome name.
Not sure, when you think about it, why they didn’t just call it “Here”.
Finally, the famous (around these parts) Doo Town in which most of the houses are named with “Doo” names. In the 1930s someone started the trend when they called their house “Doo I” and then a neighbour changed their house to be called “Doo We” and, perhaps because there is not much to do in the evenings, others followed suit so today there are “Doo” names for most houses. “Doo Little” “Gonna Doo” Doodle Doo” “Love me Doo” and many more adorn the gate posts. (One killjoy has called theirs “Medhurst” but I don’t think they get invited to many parties.)
We didn’t get across to Doo Town, but we did see a duck billed platypus in the wild in a pond, which was nice. 
We spent a few nights in Hobart (second deepest natural harbour in the world, if you’re interested) and while there we managed to drive up the wrong mountain while trying to find the awesome viewpoint which looks down over the city and surrounds. The proper view point is on Mount Wellington, but the mountains weren’t labeled and we headed off, under my skilful navigating, to find it. We drove out of the city and saw a sign for a lookout post and followed the road up and round and up and up and at many of the corners we caught glimpses of another mountain which Ella kept on saying looked higher than the one we were driving up. I am male and therefore my sense of direction and correctness is unerring so I confirmed that we had agreed that whoever was driving had to listen to the navigator and we ploughed on. 
We got to the top of Mount Nelson and couldn’t see much – mainly trees and, if we turned round, a massive mountain towering behind us. So Ella turned the car round and we eventually found the road which led up Mount Wellington. from the top the view was stunning.  
When we flew back from Tasmania to Melbourne it was via JetStar: Jetstar is what the ugly love child would look like if Easyjet and Ryanair had an affair. 

An Argument

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Ella met a lady in a cafe and, in the time it took me to stand dithering at the counter deciding what it might be that Australians call a normal filter coffee she had had a lovely conversation in which it transpired this lady had been on holiday with her husband for 2 weeks and was ready to kill him. At that precise moment he wasn’t there because she had sent him off to look round some gardens as she figured they needed a bit of breathing room. Hearing that we were 10 weeks in to a trip she wondered how on earth we were still talking. 

I guess you can never be fully sure how you are going to get along sharing the same space almost every second of the day for so long. We hit a bit of a barrier last week and had the closest we’ve come to an argument. Some couples argue a lot and shout and make up and get along that way. We tend not to. We don’t really argue. That’s not to say we always see eye to eye and always get on – we just don’t seem to have the necessary pieces to our personalities that would combust when brought together. Sometimes I’m sure that if we both flew off the handle about a particular thing, then made up, we’d end up resolving the matter far quicker than our normal method – our normal method is second guessing the other person. We were probably second, third and fourth guessing one another last week before I let slip with a comment that hadn’t been passed through my normal set of several filters first. So Ella went for a walk to figure what hadn’t been said. (Most people “say” stuff – we more often “don’t say” things which makes it much more tricky but allows for far more wiggle room.) When she came back and made sure I’d eaten – always wise – we figured we were going a little stir crazy and needed to stop trying to think what the other person wanted to do all the time and instead, when asked what I or she would want to do, to say what we actually want to do rather than what we think the other person wants us to say we want them to think we want to do.
It was good to get that cleared up. 
Two months in – one blip. Still learning after 29 years. 

Melbourne

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Melbourne

We flew from Tasmania to Melbourne for a week after which we feel we can scientifically compare the great rival cities of Melbourne and Sydney.
I thought people from Sydney were called Sheila and Wayne, but apparently they’re called Sydneysiders. And one thing that many of them do is to over-exaggeratedly swing their arms when they walk. It was one of those things that, when you point it out you then see all over the place. 
Melbourne had a very different feel. It doesn’t have the wow factor that Sydney has with the harbour, bridge, opera house (and people there keep their arms sensibly close to their bodies), but Melbourne feels much quirkier and characterful. Better cafés and better coffees. And there are free trams in the city centre! 
We went to the cathedral in Melbourne for a Good Friday service – Stainer’s Crucifixion was being sung, primarily by the choir but we were allowed to join in a few hymns. I read that Stainer himself didn’t think much of what he had written. Say what you want about him, he was a good judge.
Watching the news on Easter Day was a little odd compared to the UK as they had quite a long news report on church services and the meaning of Easter and they showed a fair number of interviews with people about why they were at church. It was all done in a relaxed and very natural way – it wouldn’t have been reported nearly so openly in Britain.
On Easter Monday I went to my first Aussie Rules Football game. It’s a sort of cross between rugby, soccer, basketball and a punch up outside a night club. 
I enjoyed it.
It was at the Melbourne Cricket Ground which housed the cricket World Cup final the week before in which Australia beat New Zealand to much antipodean joy and despair. It had been transformed from a cricket pitch to an Aussie Rules pitch by taking the stumps out, drawing a big square and two big semi circles and sticking quite a few goal posts here and there. It was the first game of the season for Hawthorne Hawks, last year’s league winners, against their arch rivals the Geelong Cats. Nearly 80,000 were watching and it seemed a pretty good, if massively one sided game with the Hawks whupping the Cats 123 to 61. 
Basic rules as far as I could make out: you have to try and kick the ball through the middle two of the four goal posts and if you do that you get 6 points but if you only manage to get it between one of the middle and outer posts instead then they give you a point for trying. That’s the encouraging Australian way.
There was a lot of dropping the ball and fumbling after it on the floor and people ran into one another fairly frequently and someone got a bit knocked out. It looked like a Scotland rugby training session. 
I was supporting the Hawks so I can hold my head high. “Go Hawks”.
Teams in various sports often take to the field to the sound of a particularly rousing and emotive song. “We are the champions” or “We will rock you” or something similarly inspiring… If you get the chance, please, please listen to the youtube clips of the anthems for the Hawthorn Hawks and the Geelong Cats. These were what the rough, tough, Aussie rules players came out to on Monday, I kid you not.
For the Hawthorns go to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfy4LFWn5Rg

For the Geelong song go to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukW4VVCV9LQ

Honest – these are what the crowds sing and the players get pumped up to – it was like some bizarre Monty Python sketch. Each of the main league teams have a song of the same ilk. Let the English Premier League take note!!
And, in passing, is it only in Australia that they get to rename the global phenomenon that is McDonald’s? Here, it’s called Macca’s. 

Gotta love Australia. 

 

Hitch Hiking

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Hitch Hiking.

Having flown from Melbourne to Auckland we stayed the night in the 38th different bed since leaving the Rectory in November! And in the morning we set off bright and early to start a three day trip down to the south of North Island. Looking to save money we decided to try our hand at hitch hiking. We had arranged people to stay with for the following two nights in a sort of zig-zag across the country we just needed to get to them using our thumbs.
A brief “How To” guide for getting lifts by standing at the side of the road in New Zealand.
How do you entice people to stop their comfortable cars while they’re driving along and invite two total strangers who might well, for all you know, have issues, fleas, weapons, really irritating laughs or possibly all of the above? Well, being two middle aged would-be hitch hikers (just typed that and the iPad rewrote it as kitsch hikers which is kind of sweet) we thought the best way of getting lifts would be to carry awesome signs.
We had all sorts of signs planned but the practicalities of having too much writing were difficult to overcome. “Sorry, all the young good looking ones have already gone – just us left now” or “So far today has gone without a hitch : (   would, I’m sure, have worked but we only had two small bits of card we managed to borrow from the people we were staying with in Auckland – so we made do with “South” on one and “Please” on the other. 
 

And by jingo they worked! Day one: Auckland to Tauranga which is across on the east coast.

Lift 1. We spent the first 6 minutes “debating” whether we were better off standing at the top of the slip road which had no real stopping place, or before the traffic lights on one of the two roads leading to the slip road. This had better stopping places, but only half the traffic. I was just telling Ella how misguided her views on the  matter were and how we should move to the other place when a van stopped and picked us up. The old Maori lady and her daughter
In the cobbled together camper van took us 10 kilometres, to just outside of Auckland and dropped us off. I think that was as far as they were going rather than that we had done something to offend them (I am sure it’s good Maori manners to rub noses….) but 10 km is all we got.

We were just getting into a discussion as to whether we would have been better off where we were in the first place as this slip road didn’t look like it would have much traffic on it when (3 minutes waiting time) a guy in a well named pick up truck stopped. He was going to Tauranga which was where we were hoping to stay that night, which was handy, but he was going via Hamilton where he had half an hour’s work to do in his office, but he could drop us off for a coffee while he went in to work and if we didn’t mind the wait he could then take us all the way.
En route he decided to take us to see Hobiton, the setting of Bilbo Baggins’ village in The Lord of the Rings and now a bit of a tourist attraction seeing as we were passing 5 km from it. As he got to the car park he announced: “Well, we can’t go in as it’s 75 dollars each and we haven’t got time, but anyway, it’s over that hill and looks pretty much like it did on the film so you get the picture”, and we turned round and drove off.
When we got to Hamilton we were left with an awkward choice. He dropped us off at a coffee shop and said he would see us in half an hour. We had been in the car with him for 90 minutes and he seemed like a really nice guy, and he had, to his credit, almost taken us to one of the main tourist attractions in the area. So, is it impolite to say that you will get your bags out of the back and sit with them while he goes off (subtext – cos we don’t trust you you Bilbo Baggins tease you). Being British this was tricky. We had passports, wallet and iPads on our persons, so we figured it was politer to leave the bags in the truck and he drove off. Just after he turned the first corner we wondered whether we should at least have taken a photo of the registration plate….
“Yes, that’s right officer, we did indeed just get out of the truck of a total stranger and deliberately leave our entire luggage in there and wave him off. What did the truck look like? Well, it was white. Any other distinguishing features? Umm, well, it’s got our bags in the back. What? Yes, we know – it was a bit, wasn’t it. Pardon? Oh no, don’t be silly; this wasn’t our first ever lift. No, no, no.
It was our second. Well, you see, he had taken us almost to Hobiton….”

With not much else to do we had our coffee. We waited. An hour passed and we began to get just a teensy bit concerned. Another half hour passed and we thought things were getting worryingly suspicious so we had some cake. Just under the two hour mark (which we had agreed would be the police calling point) he returned.
OK, chalk one up to experience – we wouldn’t make that mistake again. (At least, not until about 20 hours later…..)
Still, we got all the way to where we were headed and had a good evening nattering to our hosts, who the folk at the River Monastery had put us in touch with.
Next morning we were heading down to Turangi, a few hundred kilometres south west. So our “south” and “please” signs were still good. And so were our finely honed thumbs. Before our hosts had even turned the car round having taken us to the main road out of town a car had stopped. It took us a few km more to a main road and this led to an entire two minute wait for the next lift. (This hitch hiking lark is a piece of cake.) The lady (Greeta) took us a good chunk of the way and turned out to be fascinating company. She is the widow of the only New Zealand Formula 1 world champion, Denny Hulme and was full of wonderful stories of life on the motor racing circuit back in the ’60s and ”70s. She threw in a guided tour of her home town of Rotorua and even took us to lunch! (It was here that we got out of the car and left her to find a parking space, leaving our bags in the boot….. But we totally haven’t done that again since.) We then got a lift from two American students, one of whom lives in Boston and the other in New York, two of the cities we’ll be going to when we’re in the U.S, and who invited us to stay with them when we get there. They dropped us off at Lake Taupo where we grabbed a coffee, wrote a new sign for Turangi which was still 30 km away and had literally only just got to the side of the road when the first car passing stopped and asked where we were going. Not being sure how to pronounce it I looked at the sign and said “This place” and the driver asked who we were staying with there. We told her and she said “That’s Uncle Sam: jump in!” and took us to his door. I may never get another coach or train again!
The people we were stopping the night with, Sam and Thelma, live with 4 generations of their family in a former hospital. It’s a warren of corridors and rooms all on one level, stretching hither, thither and over yonder. Sam is well known in New Zealand for his work over many years with the Mongrel Mob, a hard as nails group whose gang members make up over 10% of the entire New Zealand prison population at the moment. Sam works with groups of gang members who want to get back on the straight and narrow often having been through rehab and has an amazing attitude to life and to restoration and to working with people who have been cast out from society and looked on with equal measures of fear and loathing.

(One of the members of the Mongrel mob)

Sam and Thelma have, for decades now, run an open door policy and welcomed in all sorts. Living with them, befriending them – seeing lives turned around and others wandering off in a destructive direction. Knowing jubilation and heartbreak – seeing hospitality and trust at times ripped up and crushed and yet offering more with an open hand and open heart. We spent the evening talking with Sam about his whole philosophy of how he sees his Christian mission. It is very hard to fault what he does and why he does it – and it is immensely challenging.

He and Thelma stand where most people would be far too concerned for their own comfort to stand. They offer a listening voice, practical help, acceptance, time and have gone without much while reaching out to thieves, addicts and murderers. He has a bunch of the Mongrel Mob living next door to him in a house he secured for that very purpose. Christ can be seen in people of many different shapes and sizes: he can definitely be seen in a certain big 20+ stone Maori called Sam.
The final leg of our three day hitch-hike came in the rain the next morning when a half hour (much of which was spent singing and dancing to songs with rain in them) wait led to someone taking pity on us and taking us a few hundred km closer to our goal. from there it was but a two minute wait for the final lift right down to Waikanae, the closest town to the “in the middle of nowhere” community in which we’ll be staying for 4 weeks.
Zig zagging from Auckland to just north of Wellington over three days, 8 lifts and an average wait time of under 9 minutes per lift. Lots of interesting people and stories. Hitching is the way to travel in N Z.