Nov. 15, Monday.
I jumped back into the train, shivering in the chilly wind and cursing at the endless delay. A tree fell on the tracks some distance ahead of us, and we were stuck at this desolate small town's station. "I will let you know, when they tell me, when we'll restart the train," said the old conductor on the microphone with glee in his voice. I had to struggle to understand his Kiwi accent, but more aggrevating was his cheerful attitude and the lack of any anxiety or apology in his expression.
The first day in New Zealand got off on the wrong foot. After spending 24 hours either on a plane or in an airport, I had a brief lapse of judgment and caved in to Kate's insistence that we immediately take the train from Auckland down to Wellington. We had already spent 36 hours on the road! Just the thought made me itch all over. Kate decided to come along when I told her of my plan to travel in New Zealand. She had that tendency to jump at opportunities on an impulse. I, on the other hand, had planned this trip for more than two years.
Now I'm not sure what I had got myself into. The journey so far had been far from the scenic train ride touted by the ads and travel guide books. Outside the window we saw wave and wave of rolling hills dotted with dirty-white sheep. Trees occasionally passed by, in addition to pervasive ugly bushes (later I learned that they were tussocks and flax). It rained off and on across the entire North Island. Kate was complaining of false advertisement. I grudgingly chewed on a piece of disgusting, overpriced grilled-cheese sandwhich. I was lucky, the food in the dining carriage soon ran out as idle passengers waited patiently for the train to move.
The town looked like it came straight out of a cheap American western movie. Shabby little houses, dusty streets, hand-written store signs, and a dead silence at six o'clock in the afternoon. Where was everyone? Huddling in front of the fire in their houses?
We got to Wellington at almost midnight, picked up the key to our room at the YHA, and climbed into the upper beds in a six-person dorm. I was too tired to reflect on our ordeals.
Nov. 16, Tuesday.
It was so nice to finally see the sun! Our mood lifted a bit when the morning lit up this strange city. We were starving. The staff behind the counter recommended a cafe two blocks away. I still felt like in a haze, but we miraculously found our way through the strong wind blowing through the empty streets. (First I thought the wind was merely a result of clashing cold and warm air that brought rain yesterday, then I was told that Wellington was known as the windy city!)
The coffee was expensive, but the pastry on display were dazzling! Ah, the first positive sign. Too many choices took away my ability to make even one, so the girl behind the counter recommended a bread imbedded with raisins and, get this, fresh grapes! Kate does like coffee, so she bought hot chocolate and a muffin. I bit into the warm bread: Not as sweet as American pastry, but indescribably rich. Then the coffee came. In a cute brown porcelain cup on a saucer, white foam rose above the rim, and a swirl of coffee decorated the milk foam. Fancy stuff.
The Botanic Garden
Things were definitely looking up as we walked through the bustling streets of downtown and got on a tram that pulled up this side of a hill and took us directly into the botanic garden. We picked up a map and started walking downhill. We walked and walked and walked. The tiny paths led us into patches and patches of natural-looking but strategically planted species. My botany is always terrible, and the latin names were, well, latin to me. All around us were endless trees (I only recongized pine) on the hills. The place was vast, so vast that I almost forgot I was in a park.
It was still quite chilly. I was glad that we finally arrived in their greenhouse. It was a stunning place. Just a week before I had seen the orchid collection at Washington DC's National Botanic Garden. Wellington's orchids put it to shame. So many, oh so many exotic, almost bizarre looking orchids of blue, purple, white, pale yellow, golden, crimson, and countless colors and sizes and shapes. I was speechless.
Coming out of the greenhouse, we were dazzled by the rose garden. It was arranged in the typical English manner -- orderly pattern in a large, round yard surrounded by terraces with rambling roses climbing up and down the walls and pillars. But the roses themselves were anything but the demure, polite, modest English type. They were blooming monsterously, mad and huge, bursting life and glory. The brochure said there were over 100 types on display. The fragrance was intoxicating. Around the garden were trails on which fit-looking young men were jogging. Behind us was the green hills that separated this side of the city and the other side with the pulled tram car. Far away we could see the blue bays (yes, Wellington sits on several bays) of the sea.
Kate went nuts about the garden. I had to beg, bribe, threaten, and finally drag her away. She decided to come back the next evening to attend a lecture at the astronomic observatory and learn to identify the Southern Cross.
Katherine Mansfield House
One o'clock, we stuffed down a couple of muffins and set out for Katherine Mansfield's house on the other side of the town. A two-lane motorway was lined with Victorian style wooden houses in this quiet residential area, just like any other suburb without a shred of "historical" sense. Yet this is part of the city's so-called "Heritage trail." I was again reminded that NZ is a country even younger than the United States.
The house was modest but cozy. In some vague way it was almost identical to Karen Blixen's house outside of Copenhagen, but only smaller. On the photographs, a woman with penetrating eyes looked at me. The volunteer working at the house showed us a video, a documentary on Mansfield.
Moralists got it all wrong. The second half of the 20th century was not a period of moral decline. The level of moral decadence in the first half (or any other time in history) of century was hardly any higher. The difference was how widely such decadence was publicized and known. Look at the sex life of Marlene Detrich -- can any movie star get away with her kinds of orgies today?
Katherine Mansfield was not Detrich, but she was a pretty wild child herself. Running away from the provincial colony to immerse herself in the glamor of London at 19, she had affairs, got married in a rush, dropped the husband like a hot potato, got "disowned" by her parents, and shacked up with John Murray, who became her life-long companion and later husband. Yet it was obvious that Murray was the least important figure in her life among the three persons around her. The love of her life was Ida Baker, who she called "L.M." Her soul mate, on the other hand, was D.H. Lawrence.
I did not know much about Mansfield's life, but had heard of whispers of homosexuality. The biography confirmed the rumor. (Geez, who wasn't homosexual in the circle of English writers of that time?!) She liked women and probably had affairs with women in her younger years. Ida Baker, however, denied any physical intimacy between them, despite her life-long unconditional devotion to Mansfield. But Mansfield also desperately wanted a husband, a bunch of children, white picket fences, in a word, a picture-perfect family life that she remembered growing up in. She never attained it.
DHL understood her, deeply. Now I could see a little Mansfield in the characters in Rainbow and Women in Love. They admired and hated each other passionately. I suppose there is no love more pure and platonic than this between a gay man and a lesbian who found an intellectual and artistic equal in each other. Their relationship was stormy. Mansfield and Murray were invited to live with DHL and his wife Frieda (who he had stolen from his professor) for a while, but the M's ran away after a short period. Only God knows what went on in that household, considering that Murray was young and rather good-looking. I imagine even Alfred Kinsey would be interested in an interview with the foursome...
I chuckled at one of the books on display. It was written in English by a Chinese scholar and was essentially a compilation of famous Chinese literary critique of Mansfield. Included was Xu Zhimo's essay describing his visit to her home and hailing her beauty and elegance. Well, at least we know what company Xu was keeping in England.
The walk back into the city took us to Te Papa, the National Museum, which overlooks the clear blue bay. We had two hours before it closed.
Nov. 17, Wednesday.
We debated and debated, and finally accepted the YHA staff's recommendation to take a Wellington Rover tour for $35 that would drive us to the outskirt attractions of Wellington and drop us off at places if we wanted to linger. Early in the morning, a midsize van came to pick us up. The driver/guide was a tall young man with an open smile and a little crooked teeth. He introduced himself as Jason, and suggested a few stops where we could stay and walk for a couple of hours (!) and get picked up later.
Victoria Park
First we were taken to the Victoria Park and got off at the top of the hill. Kate tried to memorize the name of all the bays and mountains in sight. I was busy snapping my camera in the gusting wind. "Is it always this windy?" I asked Jason.
"Yes. The cold air from the south is channeled through the narrow bays and waterways and gets accelerated. We're known for being windy." He then pointed in a certain direction, "Cook Strait is out there, and beyond that is the South Island." He explained that when British settlers first came to Wellington, they docked their ships in the bays and cut down the trees to build houses. Wellington has not ballooned into a sprawl like Auckland thanks to the geography: the sea on one side and the mountains on the other. Dots of houses scattered the mountains and overlooked the sea. How lucky these people are, I thought, to have the ocean view.
But you don't have to be rich to own a piece of the ocean view. Almost everywhere in the city and suburbs, one can easily have it out of their window. Jason drove us through residential areas that were supposedly lower middle class, yet still surrounded by hills and trees and outlook to the sea.
On the way out of Victoria Park, he stopped at the roadside and pointed to the woods and told us that this was where a scene in the first Lord of the Rings movie was shot, when Frodo and Sam were chased at night and hid under a huge old tree. The city insisted that the film crew not harm the trees and plants in the park, so Peter Jackson had his crew move a fake tree into the park, shot the scene, and took it away.
Red Rock Walk and Devil's Gate
At 12:15 pm, we asked to be dropped off at the Oriental Bay for the "Red Rock Walk," as they call it. The guide said it would take us 45 minutes to get to a seal colony, then we should return to our starting point and be picked up in two hours -- plenty of time.
He described the landscape as that of the moon -- rocky, barren, and deserted. We started out with some vegetation by the side of the trail, but soon understood what he meant. A dusty trail between the sea and rising hills extended into infinity. The sea was of an omnious dark color. The fat brown arms of seaweed floated with the breathing waves, like octapus. The sun was blazing, the wind blowing. There was no one in sight. A deafening silence surrounded us. I had a feeling that the all people in the world had disappeared and we were the last two left on earth.
We walked and walked. The shore rolled around hill after hill, bay after bay. I was getting tired. The road was sandy and rough. The trail seemed endless. One bottle of water was quickly consumed. The desolate scenery was both fascinating and a little scary. Where's the seal colony and the stony marker? If Kate were walking beside me, I would almost certainly have turned back.
Finally, we saw a beer-bellied middle-aged man getting off his pick-up truck by the road, right before an uphill climb where protruding rocks on both sides formed kind of a gate on the path. It looked intimidating. I remembered that Jason had mentioned something called "The Devil's Gate." I could not think of a more fitting name.
We stopped and asked whether we had reached the seal colony. He walked us up the road and crossed the Devil's Gate as we pretended to be brave and energetic, then pointed at the scattered rocks and dark waters beneath and said, "I saw three seals right there just a few days ago, but I guess they've all gone to the South now for mating." I stared at the angry crashing waves, desparately trying to spot seals, but there was none, of course. The man returned to his truck and pulled out a can of beer, just sat down to enjoy the eerily desolate scenery.
The walk back was more difficult, for the wind grew stronger. At one point, I could barely keep my eyes open. I was certain I would lose my footing and become a splat on the walls of the hills like a fly on a car's windshield.
It took us 2 hours and 15 minutes to complete the roundtrip. When we finally got picked up by Jason, I was hot and exhausted. "Now I know," I protested, "the time estimates are for you fit and athletic Kiwis, not us sendentary couch-potato Americans!" He just laughed.
Ataturk Memorial
As spent as we were, we decided to take yet another walk, the Eastern Walkway, because of Jason's strong recommendation for its scenery. "Three ups and three downs on the hills, then downhill all the way. An hour should be enough." I didn't quite believe him.
When he dropped us off at the foot of the hills, he said to me, "Up these stairs there is a memorial. I'd like to know what you think."
I was a little startled by the serious tone in his voice: "What is it for?"
He refused to answer directly, "Take a look for yourself. Let me know what you think about it."
My curiorisity was aroused.
Up the narrow wooden steps, in a cove on the hill that overlooks the blue sea, among the green trees and bushes, stood a modest white monument.
On the marble floor carved these words:
"Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehemets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears, your sons are now lying in our bosoms and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they become our sons as well."
From the explanations by the monument, I saw the word "Gallipoli." The little I knew about Gallipoli I learned from Peter Weir's movie "Gallipoli." In WW1, Australian and New Zealand young men were drafted into the army of the British Empire to fight for "King and glory." Gallipoli, Turkey, was where one of the bloodiest battle took place. Because of the incompetence and indifference of the British commanders, thousands of young men were fed into the flames of machine guns needlessly. I still remember the movie's last shot -- a kid so young, so full of life, who loves to run and is faster than the wind, funning to the hail of bullets.
What was this memorial intended for? An attempt to glorify war? I carried my question up and down the trail. The view was, to put it mildly, breath-taking. To our left was the green mountains, to our right was the sharp slopes leading straight into the sea and views of the bays, ports, and towns beneath. I saw two rabbits crossing my path and numerous exotic birds. Of course, the ups and downs far exceeded the number given by the guide, as I expected.
We got picked up later at a sleepy suburban area by the sea.
"What did you think of the memorial?" Jason asked me.
"I'm not familiar with the events in Gallipoli. What exactly happened? I know many Australian soldiers were killed there in WWI because of bad commanders, but I don't know the fall out."
"A lot of Kiwi soldiers died in Gallipoli too," he explained. "Later, people began to question the purpose of the whole thing -- the war, the deaths -- and they realized that it was a tragedy and a waste of lives. So we and Turkish people got together and built this memorial. The memorial is named after Ataturk, who was the general leading the Turkish army at Gallipoli and later became the first president of Turkey."
For a moment I thought I would embarrass myself by weeping in front of a stranger, but I kept my composure.
"How remarkable." I muttered. He didn't understand what I meant. I said, "How remarkable that something good came out of the horrible tragedy." But this was a lie. I meant to say how remarkable your people were. Such generosity and forgiveness I had never seen. I had never known humans were capable of such noble kindness toward their enemy.
So this is the story of the Ataturk Memorial. It was built there because of the the site's remarkable likeness to the landscape of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Turkey recipriated by naming a part in Gallipoli ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps). Every year, the Turkish ambassador would come and read these words:
"... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country...You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears, your sons are now lying in our bosoms and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they become our sons as well."
Chocolate Fish Cafe
"That was Peter Jackson's house."
"What? Where?!" I craned my neck, but only saw a blurry, nondescript pretty house like any other along the coastal highway.
"It looks just like his neighbors' houses." I complained.
The guide Jason said many Kiwi movie stars, like Naomi Watts, had bought million-dollar houses along this coast on the hills next to the road on which we were driving. It was certainly a beautiful place, but hardly so much more beautiful than any other spots in Wellington, nor was it particularly secluded from the public.
That's OK, Jason explained. Even with his international fame, Jackson could still walk down the street in his home town and not be mobbed by fans. Everyone except Liv Tyler preferred such laid back treatment by Kiwis (apparently she was disappointed by not getting mobbed by fans...). When Tom Cruise filmed "The Last Samourai" in NZ, he brought 11 bodyguards with him, but later he kept 3 and sent the rest home because there was simply no need for bodyguards in this country.
We stopped at a cute small cafe by the road side. Its walls were painted in white and powder blue and decorated with shiny shells and glittering stones. It looked like a little doll house. The waiters and waitresses cracked jokes with Jason and each other and laughed convulsively. The place was practically empty.
Although the real attraction was its ocean view and dining tables on the beach, the Chocolate Fish Cafe was now famous for being the unofficial headquaters of the LOTR crew and Peter Jackson's meetings. Being a semi native of Los Angeles, I thought surely once its reputation had spread, this place would have exploded with tourists and they would begin to charge ten bucks for a coffee or something. Such things do not happen in New Zealand, I was told. People simply don't think like that, nor do they flock to a cafe just to rub off a bit of celebrity. Jackson walked over from his house to the cafe for dinner merely two nights ago. He was shooting King Kong in Wellington at the moment.
A waiter who looked exactly like a cuddly teddy bear came over and gave Kate and I each a chocolate fish -- a popular candy bar made by Cadbury.
"Can I take a picture with you?" I asked. What I really wanted to do was squeeze him.
He smiled shyly. "I look horrible in pictures." I begged. He said yes, and grinned from ear to ear in the frame.
[I'll post the photo on Monday.]
Surely the purpose of taking us here was to boost business. I fully expected to be encouraged to buy a muffin or cookie and a few chocolate fish here. Instead, Jason dragged us away before I could even get coffee. "A bunch of comedians there," he chuckled.
The wind finally died down, and the afternoon sun softened its glare on the calm water. The van drove back into the city. Jason said with an unassuming, quiet pride, "I traveled overseas for a couple years after college, but now I'm happy at home. This is the best place in the world."
I was to hear the same thing again in Christchurch, Queenstown, and Dunedin. And I would come to learn that this was the truth.
[To be continued in "Postcards from the Edge (2. Christchurch)]
The movie starred Merryl Streep and Shirley McLain.
这间CAFE和其它地方墙上挂满明星照片的‘名’餐馆们真是好大的反差。