Month: January 2011

This blog is live, online, on a ferry boat, in the Cook Straight, New Zealand. And there's a cricket match on the television. I'm going from Wellington, at the bottom end of the North Island, to Picton, at the top of the South Island. I'd provide a picture, but bandwidth is limited.

I stayed in Palmerston North, last night. That's an oddly named town – I mean… where's Palmerston South? I can't find one. The town reminds me of Eureka, California. Or Temuco, Chile. A small town but too big to be a small town in its region, maybe. And the city geography is relatively flat and the streets are a dull, treeless grid. Wellington, on the other hand, is a beautiful city. It's one of those cities, like Duluth or Nagasaki, that I knew I would love before ever visiting there. Just that I have a sort of instinct for what places I will like, based on looking at things like maps and encyclopedias.

I landed in Auckland at 12:20 AM.  I went to get my rental car, but they didn't have my reservation.  Fortunately, there was a guy there to rent me a car, who was very friendly and gave me the rate and car I would have had if my reservation hadn't failed to be entered into their system.  Something about the fact that I tried to do it online from Australia.  Oh well.  It all worked out fine.  And so then, with hardly a plan to my name, I began to drive south on the expressway out of Auckland.

Light drizzle, 2 AM.  I stopped at a service plaza.  There's a McDonalds, open 24 hours.  Now… as some of you may know, I have a certain strange tradition.  I'm very proud of having completely kicked my junk-food habits, years ago, but I still have this tradition of ordering a Big Mac each time I visit a new country.  And although it's 2 AM, this McDonalds has free wifi, too.  So… I ordered a Big Mac.  That's country number… um, around 25, I think.  There's a few countries where I never got a Big Mac:  Cuba, Morocco and Belize spring to mind.  But all the rest, yes.  I'm loyal to that weird tradition.

And I logged onto the free wifi and here's my first blog post from New Zealand.  I have no plan.  This is Jared-style free-form road-tripping at it's absolute best.  I guess I'll find a hotel or motel or pub somewhere to crash, or maybe just drive south  - I don't feel that tired.   It's only 7 hours to Wellington, if that's where I intend to go.  Holy crap:  we think of New Zealand as a small country, but the North Island is bigger than South Korea!  So… more later.  

First impressions:  New Zealand at the international airport at 2 AM isn't that different from Long Beach, CA.  That sounds funny – but I'm just going with what I know.   The fact is, Long Beach has one of the highest concentrations of Pacific Islander people in the continental US – and obviously, being on a Pacific Island, Auckland is … similar.  Ha.  And the freeways and industrial architecture and the vegetation, too.  But then, it's really dark outside.  So hard to judge, really.

Highway service plazas are the same everywhere.  More or less.

More later.

I took my mother's Toyota and drove on my own into town today – this is the first time I've come to Australia where I haven't rented a car, but since my mom doesn't go places much, I have the freedom to use hers.   I've probably logged well over 5000 miles in my various visits to Australia, with my worst incident having been a speeding ticket in Melbourne some years ago. 

But driving on the "wrong side" is always a bit challenging.  The hardest single thing is actually the turn signals – they're positioned on the right side of the steering column instead of on the left, and so every time I need to signal a turn, I turn on my windshield wipers.  Turning right isn't hard – you pull into the right-turn lane and wait, as one would a left hand turn in the US or Korea.  There are lines on the pavement that prevent one from making a mistake.  I actually find left turns more difficult, especially where there are no lines or traffic in the street or road being turned in to – it's so easy to just allow oneself to drift over to the right as one completes the turn.  The worst I did, with that, was a time in 2008 when I was here, when I was in Cairns and turned left and put myself on the right side of a median strip.  I realized my mistake immediately (the truck coming head on at me was a good hint), and pulled into a parking lot and got myself turned around.  All of which is to say, it really isn't that much of a problem, but it's mentally intense during the "adaptation" phase. 

I drove into Atherton, which is about 50 km north of my mom's house.  They have a "Woolies" in Atherton – a sort of full-scale grocery store rather than the small-town grocery or convenience store in Ravenshoe.    I bought a guide book for New Zealand (since I'm going there next week for a few days and I have absolutely no plan as to what to do).  And I got some high-speed internet (though I'm not going to upload any photos because I haven't been taking many – I'll try to take more). 

Driving around the "tableland" – as this part of Far North Queensland is called – always reminds me, scenically, of the Tehuantepec area of southern Mexico – the point where Veracruz and Tabasco and northern Chiapas and Oaxaca all join together.  It's highland, but verdant and green with rolling hills and intermittent rain-forest in the gullies on the windward side of mountains.  There are cows standing around in fields, and palm trees in people's yards.  Tropical savannah farmland, it might be termed.  It's quite beautiful, I will concede, but I'm not sure I could ever live in place such as this – it's quite isolated, with Cairns, 2 hours away, being the only "big city" but still having well less than 100,000 residents.  The closest metropolis, Brisbane, is nearly 1000 km away.  And that's not much of a metropolis, to be frank.

I will maybe try to post one other thing, unrelated to my current traveling, while here at the high-speed internet spot – might as well get my money's worth, right?

[broken link! FIXME] Today is Australia Day, which celebrates the "founding of Australia" at Port Jackson (Sydney) in 1788.  It's not dissimilar to the Fourth of July in the US.  I'm celebrating it with my mother, a naturalised Australian, by postponing our trip into Atherton, the nearest big town, until tomorrow – since everything would be closed today.  Isn't that a great way to celebrate?  

The aboriginal people of Australia call it "Invasion Day," according to the wikithing.  

So my vacation, since arriving here at Ravenshoe, has consisted mostly of reading books and having long conversations with my mom.  It's pretty relaxing.  

It's very summery here, with temperatures over 30 C during the day, but the nights are quite cool, because her house here is up in the mountains.  They were recovering from a lot of rain just as I arrived, but the days and nights have been stunningly clear since.  Last night, looking up at the sky, the stars were so vivid I felt like I was in outer space.  

There are many birds, wallabies and geckos about.  My mother often yells at them.  I think it's a fairly good-natured coexistence, though.

I’m sydneyed.  Sitting downtown, being my typical, cafe-sitting self.   I so much prefer just being places, to trying to be a tourist.  Tourism, per se, is not actually something I enjoy.  But I love sitting and existing in new or different places.
The bus from the airport was free of charge, because the authorities were feeling guilty the airport train was shut down for maintenance, I guess.  A cheap Sunday morning holiday in Syd.  30 degrees C warmer than Seoul.  Awkward climate transitions.  Australians are so casual.  They tell jokes and give sarcastic answers to strangers.
But the place I’m sitting, I’m overhearing two different conversations in Korean.  And one in, maybe, Chinese.  Sydney is global.
I had a weird insight, last night, sitting in the airport at Incheon.  Korea fascinates me because although it is stunningly post-modern, it manages to be post-modern in a deeply earnest, largely unreflective, and completely unironic way.  And that’s just plain weird, because for the Western sensibility, the post-modern position is definitionally ironic.

I think I'll go to Australia now.  Sitting, waiting for the airplane. 

I will have a 10 hour flight to Sydney – almost straight  South! – where I have to wait 10 hours to connect to a 3 hour flight to Cairns, whence a 2 hour drive to my mother's house. 

Maybe 10 hours is enough to do something vaguely touristic in Sydney – there's an airport train there that connects to downtown, but according to the website, it will be closed for "track maintenance" tomorrow.  I guess there might be buses.  I'll definitely have to try something – 10 hours is too long to spend in an airport. 

Anyway, I'll update from Sydney, somewhere.