Kiwi Capital and Campervan Collaterol

TEA AND DEAD SHEEP

Apologies dear reader for the warp and weft of my narrative. We are all but poor loomsters in country cottages circa 1814.

As I type, I am living in a campervan. I spent a few days ensconced in a carpark in Nelson. Now, that might not sound like a New Zealand idyll, perched on a granite head with black waves pummelling the coast and slightly deformed people waddling around on stilts, but Nelson is a gorgeous sunsoaked place. I have left Nelson now in search of that monstrous idyll. After all, as the great Jonny Berliner once said:

There's nothing like stopping on a country lane simply to make a cup of tea and when your kitchen is your back seat there's no finer cuppa.

And he should know - he lived in a bus for much longer. Anyway to this end, I stopped at a viewpoint called Something Saddle. And there they were, the Southern Alps on the horizon, white caps sparkling in the sunlight. I drank tea and ate biscuits, and scowled, manfully. More on this later.

But now, I beg you to travel back with me but a menstrual period. You are standing on a pile of dead sheep in Auckland staring paranoiac upwards, when you see a tiny grey specklet berthed in the sky. But wait - it is growing! Could it be - one of those metal monsters that have conquered the clouds? And on it, obsessively reading My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, eating a gargantuan chocolate muffin and totally ignoring the view, is that.... Lemuel Gulliver? No, it's Yorick the pastor. No it's Amy Earhart. Oh, no, it's.. oh fuck it.


DORKLAND TO SMELLINGTON IN ONE EASY CHAPTER

I flew from Auckland to Wellington the next day.


FOR ANARCHISTS THEY'RE EXTREMELY WELL ORGANISED

Wellington is scattered over a series of bays, with a ridiculous system of gorgeous hills, a plentitude of sea everywhere, and brain-defying connections between the disparate suburbs. I didn't know there were still Anarchists but the movement is alive and Wellington. I went to an Anarchist stronghold for a free Spanish lesson from Jose. I made myself a cup of tea and deposited 40c in the food donation box. I'm not sure if the Spanish lesson was actually free or if I'd just failed to find the Spanish lesson donation box.

I read some leaflets about why your vote doesn't make a difference. I believe in their communal enterprise, and they were all very environmentally sound, but do we have to do away with Democracy? I find election campaigns so entertaining.

I was in good time for the New Zealand election. Lissa & Co. were extremely absorbed, and I couldn't help but be the same. I watched a leaders' debate. Owing to proportional representation, quite a few ridiculous parties get a look in. A short square odious guy called Rodney Hide leads the 'scrap all bureaucracy' party. Someone out of a 70s cop show spoke for the 'scrap all immigrants' party. The leader of the oppostion National Party was wormlike and chemistry teacheresque. He had an Anglo-American accent lilt rather like Lloyd Grossman. And imperious throughout was the matriarch Helen Clark.


WELLINGTON TIMES

Borrowed a lovely group of friends from Lissa. Lissa is in fantastic shape, and has a great new feller by the name of Russco. Won $40 at poker. Saw a great klezma band. Got drunk repeatedly at a place called Chow's with fantastic cocktails. Played a lot of Scrabble. Tried some NZ party pills (legal). I didn't think they'd had any effect on me then I realised with a start that I was standing on a balcony chewing my lip and babbling about Shakespeare to anyone who'd listen. Ate disgustingly good blueberry muffins in a cafe with a high opinion of itself. Spent a rustic weekend eating in Palmerston North with Bob & Helen Chong. Made some obscene cocktails with Lissa's blender and a variety of foodstuffs. Spilled a galaxy of red wine on her carpet. Played a ferocious game of ping pong with Russco.


MAKARACOSMIC

Drive but five minutes in any direction from Wellington and you will find a stunning bay. Makara, for example, is a particularly special beachy bay rocky headland place. It contains dinousaur egg rocks, an elephant's graveyard of driftwood, the sea swooshing on gravel, and, up extremely high, some gun battlements from the War that point far far out to the serene and endless blue of the sea. They were created with the aim of foiling an invasion. Apparently Hitler had intended at one point to invade New Zealand in order to tap its natural resources. But that doesn't limit the incongruity of those battlements so high and far from anything, in the middle of farmland and sheep atop a dizzying cliff. We played frisbee with a piece of a bread for a surprisingly long time.


RAIN

Quintessential Kiwi film, a touch sepia sentimental but highly well acted and atmospheric. Apparently sums up the collective Kiwi childhood holiday experience. But why kill the kid?


TALES FROM THE OPEN ROAD

Arrived in Wanaka under a canopy of misty rain. Last night I parked at the bottom of the enormous glacial Haast valley with snowy mountains standing guard. The radio doesn't work so I talk to myself and sing incessantly. I think I might be too far gone to host passengers now even if I found some.

I met a Dutchie driving round the South island sleeping in the back of his car. He prefers to park up in country lanes, eschewing cities. Whereas I love 'em. My favourite place is right in the seedy middle of a town, round the back of a restaurant in a residentially deserted carpark. This is the real me, I feel. I have resorted to licking cutlery clean - is this a backward step?

When I'm stumbling around these human settlements people peer at me as if to say 'What a solipsist!'. I just calmly say to them 'I might be a solipsist but at least I exist.' But at this point they have vanished, or never were there, at least at that time, in this place, in that form.


And yes, what if I did play in an Irish band with a mean fiddler and a barnstorming banjo (not to mention the frollicking flautist and beneficent bodhran)? No-one was fooled into thinking I was Irish, even when I started bragging loudly about my staying power. But I chimed in all the same on my guitar, though why it was making a chiming sound is beyond me. Whiskey in the Jar, Danny Boy, D A G D A G D A A G went the chords for every song but FUCK! was it exhilarating, especially when ol' Fran or Jesse on the fiddle led up the tempo and the whole pub was stamping and singing. Some of my contributions were I Will Survive and By the Rivers of Babylon, which were played with degrees of accompaniment. I figured Irish pub songs and Gospel are both indicative of hope in the face of cultural hegemony, no?


The West Coast is sheer drama. Black crags, a monstrous sea, terrifying cliffs and pancake rocks. Sorry, what? Did you say Pancake Rocks? Yes, they were a part of the early Imperial Government's attempts to 'breakfast this shitty little island up, what!' (Colonel Arthur Dagenham IV, Redbridge Balloon Corps). These limestonically layered piles of pancakes are riven by whamples of hard grey water into a multilevelled system of coarse tunnels through which the water surges to -POP!- up out of blowholes. Geologists don't know quite how the pancake stacks were formed, but for me the real mystery is how the Maori name for the area Panakaiki (meaning 'springs in the rock' and referring to the blowholes) sounds so bloody similar to 'pancake'? Only time will tell.


Abel Tasman was okay but once you've seen one dazzlingly gorgeous untrammelled beach in a cove with blue green water delicately playing among the silt you've seen them all.


I ran over a couple of hobbits today. They're quite difficult to see. First I knew was when I heard someone screaming 'Fek!' in an unconvincing Irish accent and then - bdm! bdm!. Though apparently they're a pest for the farmers.

Speaking of roadkill - if I collected all the dead possums (possa?) I have seen and stitched them together I could carpet Greenland.


For the past 2 days I have seen a glacier a day. I am hoping to maintain this excellent record. I saw the Fox Glacier (mint flavoured) and the Franz Josef Glacier which is similar to Franz Ferdinand only less rock-based. I saw quite a few tourists with bad cases of terminal face. Not a pretty sight. Foolishly I walked to Franz Josef in only a fluffy bra and lacey panties. My heels were a nightmare on those large chunks of rock.

But my favourite place so far has been the enchanted forest just next to Fox Glacier. I had never believed in fairies until one nicked my wallet. But the leaning trees carpeted with moss and the little murmuring creeks were enough to soothe my loss.

Hawro Darwin

THE KIWI: FLIGHTLESS, YET LAYER OF DISPROPORTIONATELY ENORMOUS EGG

Travelling is a metaphor for life, and that was a metaphor for travelling. What on earth have I been doing for the last four weeks? I have been in New Zealand though I have barely seen any of it, being camped out in Lissa's bunker-like lounge on a futon. It might be said I have ghost-written an informal fact book for boys for a leading New Zealand author under a pseudonym (his not mine). Though it might be said that I have merely collected facts into organic heaps and piled them up against his shed.

In Wellington, this overwhelmingly trendy city with cloistered and fecund music scene and proliferation of anarchists/barefoot types wandering the pavements, I received great respect from locals for getting a job in Tupelow, a bar so trendy you need a bloodhound and radar system to even find it. However they could only give me one shift every six months so I'm forced to pass them by.

But first I need to return to Australia.


TO BRISBANITY AND BEYOND

Ten minutes before the bus to Brisbane I realised with horror that the pouch with all my extremely important papery things was still behind the desk at the hostel.

I leapt into a taxi and barked at the driver.

'ALL RIGHT SOLDIER - WE GOT EIGHT GODDAMN MINUTES TO GET TO BEACHES AND BACK. IF WE MAKE IT, YOU'RE A HERO. IF WE DON'T, I'M GOING TO ADMINISTER YOU A SUPPOSITORY - WITH THE BARREL OF MY AK47!'

He gave me a firm salute, passion and provenance bursting through the veins of his neck. Seven and a half minutes later the cab screeched into the bus bay. I shot the driver in the back of the neck. Poor bastard knew too much.

Brisbanic contained chillified cocktails in funksome bar the Press Club, garnished by giant cogs and elaborate light fittings. Superclub FAMILY has four floors. It pumps some kind of house through the bottom three. The top level resembles a space pod with breaky tunes and a Tim Burton ice bar. We bonded with Justin and Whassername. Justin was convinced I was an undercover cop. Before long we were all gyrating on a podium amid diverging washing lines of laser light. Spent a while curled in a gazebo drinking gin and tonic. The song You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To is not addressed to 11 people with whom you are sharing a dorm.

There is something of London about Brisbane, and I don't just mean the concrete South Bank replete with art galley and theatre complex. Damn - I like it! Hannah bought a green hat. In the art gallery a film concerning the meticulous destruction of a supermarket warehouse was hypnotic. They were working intently, psychopathically. The camera's slow pan revealed at least three ways to destroy toilet paper, as well as some people diligently pulling down shelves and chipping away at the bricks beyond.


EVOLUTION AND OTHER FACTORS

A deadpan voice above a spiral beard belonging to Dwayne informed us that Elke's Backpackers had mislaid our room reservation. This was at 2am. Eventually we shacked up in the TV room, to be woken by a stream of people gawping through the french windows.

Darwin is small and hot, rednecked but charming. It was great to get back into the heat and all the lack of socks that entails. We feasted on steak. Darwin's nightlife consists of a fantastic market with every food on the planet. A stall called Roadkill served us skewers of crocodile, camel and kangaroo. I think the retching was due to the quality of the meat, not the incongruity of the animals. Aboriginal bands cavorted and belly dancers shook their collective booty. A stargazer sold constellations. On the beach the sun splashed the sky with unset raspberry jelly. Cheap flip flops gauged symmetrical chunks out of my feet.


PRACTICAL PARK PRATTLING

We cruised national parks Kakadu and Litchfield in a rental car with a rental tent. After setting fire to the car on its first journey (nothing permanent) we reached a campsite and realised our grave error. Entire civilisations of mosquitos were born and died on our non-repellented bodies. They love the fleshy bit at the back of the upper arm. My skin was carpeted with thick clusters of red welts. You could barely hear anything above the sound of buzzbombing. We walked five minutes to the toilet block to get water for pasta. While we were there some bastard completely rearranged the layout of the entire campsite. For over an hour we wandered through bracken holding a pan full of water. Our lantern sputtered out. Eventually a drunken Ozzie took pity on us and used Common Sense to find our site.

I had to do all the driving (except for a few unnamed sections) but the car was automatic which gave me a feeling of great power. The roads were mostly deserted which meant we could travel at interstellar speeds. The landscape was reddish and desertesque with endless scrubby trees and terrifying rock behemoths propping up the sky. It was seriously hot. The fizzy jubes flowed freely through our systems manifested in a manic gleam of the eye. Cathedral termite mounds towered cathedral-like. The Moreno Wetlands were obscenely wet. Thousands of whistling ducks stood in groups as if at a community meeting to discuss how wet the wetlands were. They whistled and whooped, and the Aboriginals' favourite magpie geese honked. Jabaru cranes probed. I got the car stuck on a concrete breezeblock. As I edged back and forth to get it off, brain-crumbling scrapes made me fear for my deposit. At the campsite we kept the water boiling and the mosquitos melted away with only the psychotic braille on my arm to confound the blind. The intoxicated moonlight spilled into the tent like frozen vodka and milk.

To Blood on the Tracks we drove to Yellow Water Billabong at 5am. Dawn rusted the sky. Three boatloads of tourists had made it. A Kiwi woman spoke through a PA about crocodiles and birds. We saw plenty of both. Crocodiles are my favourite. Though preening eagles aren't bad. A guy in front had a camera like a rocket launcher, and kept demanding we go back to look at kingfishers. Not another bloody kingfisher. The sun rose and mist shagpiled the saturated plains. I wanted to see an archer fish spit at an insect but they were all off fighting in that senseless war against the shrews. I asked if anyone had a baby to throw to the crocodiles and received a stony silence.


OLD MEN FALL AND A BRECHTIAN FAREWELL

The main campsite of ghost town Pine Creek was locked up and deserted. A small chalk board bore the message 'Gone fishin. Back soon'. Perfect. Fortunately a small site next to the Shell petrol station was open, and crammed with old men positively ejaculating out of campervans. We drove into the corner next to the road and set up shop. We dined extravagantly on steak and mash with onion mushroom gravy and drank extravagantly on red wine. The old men peered at us from behind their fish.

Litchfield had stunning waterfalls in which to swim and frolic. A secret warm rockpool at Wangi Falls was particularly frolicsome. We camped within earshot of Wangi's roar. Our neighbours were long-term itinerants. So many Australians sell up house and board campervans to travel the country. Incomprehensible distances are part of the culture, and campervans a beautiful way to manage them. I would love to do that - outward on the great red roads, self-sufficient and able to eat at a moment's notice. I feel my great skills as mechanic would stand me in good stead.

Darwin Arts Festival was ON. The Threepenny Opera was packed out. The set was thrilling. The actors stood around barking their lines with several seconds delay between each. What is it about the Australian accent? Perhaps I'm slightly prejudiced but the sound of those nasal syllables embarrassing the stage makes me laugh out loud. Sorry. We were forced to escape early to eat pizza. Hannah flew off to the States via Fiji and Mexico, and I mournfully watched Aboriginal dance shows and drank vodka with Irish people.


9 INCHES OF DEMOLITION AND THE END OF AN ERA

Brendan and Gin were overexcited about the Nine Inch Nails concert. They donned a panorama of make-up and monochrome clothes. Fritzi took me to dine with a House of Germans. This reaffirmed my love for the Teutonic people, most of whom have by now infiltrated my family. A Demolition Party was rocking Tamarama.

So they tell me: these houses are/were the last vestige of the neighbourhood's former beatnik character, but finally the siege has been successful. They too will now meet the demolition ball, thus heralding Tamarama Beach's complete gentrification into Yuppie Parquet Floor & Slate Fireplace Land.

I celebrated this highly symbolic occasion by shamelessly booze-scavenging. I found a suspicious premixed caramelly drink in a fridge and guzzled it before delightedley securing a rogue bottle of white wine. I met several assorted beatniks and Teri, a documentary producer, who kindly gave me fruit salad.

Sunday's Opera House gleamed like enamel against polished blue tile. With Lissa's friends Paula and Caroline I quaffed wine and cheese like a newly released prisoner. At home Brendan and Gin were still relishing the 9 inches. I watched some grisly videos and chatted long with Brendo. Nice way to finale.