Lake Waikaremoana

There is not much to say about Lake Waikaremoana, in the North Island of New Zealand. This is not because there is not much to the Lake. Rather, the place is so beautiful that it is hard to say anything that will succeed in being about the Lake, rather than about some lesser place.

How can one say, for example, how the hills rise up straight out of the lake and run away into the distance for miles and miles, and how they are all covered in thick bush? The guide-book says that the hills “roll north in a seemingly endless procession, mantled in a lush carpet of emerald-green foliage.” This author tries hard to say what the hills are like, but there is something missing, and it is not just that the physical reality of the hills are missing from a piece of writing. The picture they put in the reader’s mind is also inferior to the real thing.

And how can one give a good picture, an accurate picture, of how the lake looks in the early morning, just after the mist has lifted over the hills and disappeared, and the water is perfectly still? In a little estuary on the lake, the water is like a mirror. It is like a mirror, but of course it is not a mirror. A mirror does not ripple like that, a mirror is set into processed wood, not living trees and tangled foliage, and a mirror reflects people and hallways, not toi-toi and rimu.

Perhaps narrowing the simile down will make it more accurate: let’s say that the reflective qualities of the lake surface, and nothing else about the lake or its environment, are very similar to those of a mirror. But actually we do want to say something about the lake and its environment, so accuracy comes at a high price.

And perhaps accuracy does not even come at all: perhaps we are so used to seeing near-perfect reflection instantiated in a household mirror, that the quality of near-perfect reflection cannot be detached in our minds from the qualities of household mirrors. Perhaps, for this reason, the mirror on the lake surface will always be smudged by the household banalities it carries over from the usual dwelling-place of mirrors.

Perhaps we can improve things by describing how the lake is not a mirror. A mirror does not fail at its edges, and show what is inside it instead of what is outside. You cannot look into the shallow parts of a mirror and see blue-green logs and grasses. And only a liquid could change itself so easily to match the contours of the shore-line, all the little bays and coves and stumpy peninsulas, the streams and the jutting bushes. And the silence! The immense and fragile silence, which is so dense and which you can break with a movement of your foot.

But look at the angle of the struts of the bridge. Perhaps you could specify this angle, put it at, say, 37 degrees from the vertical. But even to a person whose head was full of struts of every different angle this would not be enough, because there is something about the shape of the struts, and the texture of the wood, and the slope of the branch in the foreground, that gives the angle a special quality.

Perhaps one could get closer to the real thing by specifying the relevant qualities of the wood and the branch and the shape of the struts. But noone has a head full of wood and branches and textures of all different kinds. So even if we knew just where the special quality came from we would not be able to get that quality into another person’s head.

And the colours of the sunset? Well, one could say that they are “soft” and “pink”, but just how soft are they, and what sort of pink? They are soft in the sense of being diffuse rather than concentrated, and they are the kind of pink that you never find on the dresses of little girls. But is that really much use? It is something, but it does not really capture the actual delicacy or grandeur of the colours of the sunset, or the peculiar shapes of the clouds.

And I despair of getting across to the reader the precise way in which the water at the lake’s edge creased into a wrinkle, and bent into a little “v”, when it snagged on a stick that was poking up out of the sand. And there was also the soft beating of the sea on the sand, as if of an immense but far-off heart, a beating that seemed to me to be too specific and too rare to be chased down by similes and adjectives.

The toi-toi stood in groups, and their heads were bowed and nodded in the wind. They were a bit like old men in conference, bowing and nodding like that, but they were so much unlike old men in conference, and the source of the unlikeness is so hard for me to grasp, that I can’t say I have really given you the right idea about those toi-tois.

There were many different ripples on the lake, and sheets and bands of water that were distinct from the rest but had no ripples at all. There are many different ways in which the water rearranges the sun. Here the sun is a white glitter on the lake, here it is a wide and glaring plain, here an intense wobbly mass.

Is it breath-taking, the hills and the lake and the sun? When you go along the track and come to a sudden gap in the bush, so that you can see the whole scene spread out, does Lake Waikaremoana take away your breath? No, it does not. I have tried it, and if anything it gave me back my breath, smoothed things up in my throat as if a knot had been untied somewhere in there. But this may have been because I had a rest after a bit of hard walking.

Is it spectacular? One might use that word to describe the lake, but that would place the lake on the same level as rugby tries and economic booms. It is certainly a spectacle, but it is not truly spectacular. It is too quiet, too still, lacks aggression. Is it superb, beautiful, sublime, unique, unparalleled? I do not want to say it is, because the first four of those terms are muddied by incautious usage, and would make the lake sound more ordinary than otherwise. And the fifth is false. The best I can say is that Lake Waikaremoana is worth seeing, and you won't really see it except by going there yourself.

Bell's Falls, Mt. Taranaki, New Zealand

On the morning of the day I came to a narrow place of rocks and water.

Water came over the rocks because the air was filled with water. Water came over the rocks because the stream was round and running. The water on the trees made the trees thick and green and the water on the rocks made the rocks full of shining.

I came to the narrow place. I felt the thickness of the trees, and the green was full of moss and thick as fallen snow. As I came to the narrow place, full of falling water, shining of the rocks and the water on the run, and the rocks were full of water and I slipped along the rocks with the water and the rain.

And I came to the narrow place, on the morning of the day.

I came upon the narrow place and saw the water falling, from a rock on the walls that were full of water streaming and the water turned to snow as it ran across the rocks and it fell down the wall to a green sea below, and across the sea a spray, a spray of sweaty ghosts came across the filling sea.

In the green sea the water widened. In the sea the waves were green and the peaks were full of snow. And I saw the water falling and the filling of the sea, and the ghosts and the snow and the running of the green. In the narrow place, I saw the rocks and water.

I saw the trees and water, on the morning of the day.

Wairoa Tearooms

Here are the Wairoa tearooms on a Sunday afternoon at the end of summer.

Beside the counter there is a board with a bright green background and bird-eye pictures of meals on it. The meals are yellow and brown and reliably greasy. Sellotaped to the counter, and wafting around in the wind, is a piece of white A4 with a list of drinks prices on it. The word “Drinks” is a standard piece of WordArt, the kind of thing filled with un-special effects that you see on mediocre science fair projects: letters warped into an arc, with a shadow dropped back, letters filled in with colour that grades from bright red to bright green.

The furnishings have a thrown-together look, as if they only just moved in and don’t expect to stay for long. The wallpaper looks like it has been done incrementally, each new owner adding another band of colour without much thought to what was already there. The top third of the walls is a faded bright green. The next third is a dull yellow, and the bottom third is an anonymous black-and-green dapple. There are square pillars protruding out of the walls at regular intervals, and on each of these pillars there is, inexplicably, a number. The numbers do not seem to correspond to the tables, and they are gold-coloured on little metal plates, like the numbers on letterboxes.

There has been some attempt to give the shop a theme, and the artwork on the walls is half-heartedly maritime. There are three framed paintings of ships in storms, very conventional paintings that are the ocean-going equivalent of those pastoral paintings of the Sussex Downs that you get on table mats. On the side walls there are three stylised drawings of fish in primary colours. On the front wall, above the entrance, there is a another fish painting, this time a giant painting that looks like it was done by a promising third-form student at the local school. In a recess above the entrance there is a tangle of fishing lines and cray-fish nets. All of these things are about the sea, but they are too widely spaced to really give the shop a theme. Trying to appreciate the theme is like trying to appreciate a melody wherein there is a long delay between each note. Above the entrance there is a green sign saying “Exit”. It is a large sign and it dominates the entrance, as if it is meant as an artistic centre-piece.

At one table, four elderly people sit around and talk about sandflies and the weather. “They’ll get you in the end if they want to, they will,” says one. “They’re right bastards, you’re not wrong there,” says another. One of them, a New Zealander, orders fish-and-chips. This amuses the English couple, who say “Fush and chups! Fush and chups! Are they like fash and chaps? Fush and chups!” They all laugh. The English couple leaves, the fish and chips arrive, and the NZ man tips salt on to his meal and absentmindedly goes through a few practice rounds: “fush end cheeps,” he says. “Fesh and chups. Fosh und chapes.”

At another table there is a young male in his late teens, a Maori-looking lad with a tight t-shirt whose hem is clasped around his upper arm like a bracelet. He eats a packet of fish and chips on his own. He has fat white shoes and his left foot jigs rapidly up and down, as if he needs to go to the toilet.

A little Maori child runs in the shop and hops and waddles around the tables, completely naked. “You’re mum’s out the back, boy,” says the girl at the counter, and the child runs out the back with her fingers all tangled up behind her back.

I have come here to recharge my phone in the wall-socket, and I feel obliged to buy something while I am there. I choose a can of Orange and Lime fizzy drink. The can proudly announces that it’s contents is “5% Real Fruit.” When I’ve finished the can, overwhelmed by real fruityness, I watch a group of young girls arrive at the tearooms. One of them goes to buy a coke. The others sit down on a bench. Someone hands out straws, and they sit there bristling with straws, straws in the mouth, straws in the hand, straws as chopsticks, straws as smokes, straws as drumsticks, as backrubbers. Outside, the sun makes ballbearings of light on a green bike rack, on the frame of a bike, on the grille of a car. A Radiohead song comes on the radio. The girl returns with the coke and her friends pass it around, drinking through their straws like beaks. The finish the bottle and sit around doing little. This, I suppose, is what people do when they “hang out.” I know it is deeply uncool to put “hanging out” in quote-marks, almost as uncool as putting “cool” in quote marks, but I’ve never quite understood the appeal of just hanging out. I wonder if I am hanging out when I sit at a table and watch people move around. I decide that I’m not really hanging out, since I do actually have a practical purpose in coming here. I check my cellphone to prove that I’m not really hanging out.

There are three bars on my phone. While the next bar is under construction I watch a fly do mysterious, random circuits of a chair. It lands on the top of the chair and does its scuttling, hesitant fly-walk, darting along on whirring legs for a few moments and then stopping and scuttling on the spot, getting its bearings, then moving on again and going through the same routine. After a while it goes away, and so do the girls.

The sweaty smell of fish and chips comes from behind the counter and stiffens the air around the tables. A speaker squeezes out “Crazy,” the inescapable song by someoneorother, and competes with the rough hum of a generator, and the sounds of cutlery in the hands of busy people.


Beside the counter there is a board with a bright green background and bird-eye pictures of meals on it. The meals are yellow and brown and reliably greasy. Sellotaped to the counter, and wafting around in the wind, is a piece of white A4 with a list of drinks prices on it. The word “Drinks” is a standard piece of WordArt, the kind of thing filled with un-special effects that you see on mediocre science fair projects: letters warped into an arc, with a shadow dropped back, letters filled in with colour that grades from bright red to bright green.

The furnishings have a thrown-together look, as if they only just moved in and don’t expect to stay for long. The wallpaper looks like it has been done incrementally, each new owner adding another band of colour without much thought to what was already there. The top third of the walls is a faded bright green. The next third is a dull yellow, and the bottom third is an anonymous black-and-green dapple. There are square pillars protruding out of the walls at regular intervals, and on each of these pillars there is, inexplicably, a number. The numbers do not seem to correspond to the tables, and they are gold-coloured on little metal plates, like the numbers on letterboxes.

There has been some attempt to give the shop a theme, and the artwork on the walls is half-heartedly maritime. There are three framed paintings of ships in storms, very conventional paintings that are the ocean-going equivalent of those pastoral paintings of the Sussex Downs that you get on table mats. On the side walls there are three stylised drawings of fish in primary colours. On the front wall, above the entrance, there is a another fish painting, this time a giant painting that looks like it was done by a promising third-form student at the local school. In a recess above the entrance there is a tangle of fishing lines and cray-fish nets. All of these things are about the sea, but they are too widely spaced to really give the shop a theme. Trying to appreciate the theme is like trying to appreciate a melody wherein there is a long delay between each note. Above the entrance there is a green sign saying “Exit”. It is a large sign and it dominates the entrance, as if it is meant as an artistic centre-piece.

At one table, four elderly people sit around and talk about sandflies and the weather. “They’ll get you in the end if they want to, they will,” says one. “They’re right bastards, you’re not wrong there,” says another. One of them, a New Zealander, orders fish-and-chips. This amuses the English couple, who say “Fush and chups! Fush and chups! Are they like fash and chaps? Fush and chups!” They all laugh. The English couple leaves, the fish and chips arrive, and the NZ man tips salt on to his meal and absentmindedly goes through a few practice rounds: “fush end cheeps,” he says. “Fesh and chups. Fosh und chapes.”

At another table there is a young male in his late teens, a Maori-looking lad with a tight t-shirt whose hem is clasped around his upper arm like a bracelet. He eats a packet of fish and chips on his own. He has fat white shoes and his left foot jigs rapidly up and down, as if he needs to go to the toilet.

A little Maori child runs in the shop and hops and waddles around the tables, completely naked. “You’re mum’s out the back, boy,” says the girl at the counter, and the child runs out the back with her fingers all tangled up behind her back.

I have come here to recharge my phone in the wall-socket, and I feel obliged to buy something while I am there. I choose a can of Orange and Lime fizzy drink. The can proudly announces that it’s contents is “5% Real Fruit.” When I’ve finished the can, overwhelmed by real fruityness, I watch a group of young girls arrive at the tearooms. One of them goes to buy a coke. The others sit down on a bench. Someone hands out straws, and they sit there bristling with straws, straws in the mouth, straws in the hand, straws as chopsticks, straws as smokes, straws as drumsticks, as backrubbers. Outside, the sun makes ballbearings of light on a green bike rack, on the frame of a bike, on the grille of a car. A Radiohead song comes on the radio. The girl returns with the coke and her friends pass it around, drinking through their straws like beaks. The finish the bottle and sit around doing little. This, I suppose, is what people do when they “hang out.” I know it is deeply uncool to put “hanging out” in quote-marks, almost as uncool as putting “cool” in quote marks, but I’ve never quite understood the appeal of just hanging out. I wonder if I am hanging out when I sit at a table and watch people move around. I decide that I’m not really hanging out, since I do actually have a practical purpose in coming here. I check my cellphone to prove that I’m not really hanging out.

There are three bars on my phone. While the next bar is under construction I watch a fly do mysterious, random circuits of a chair. It lands on the top of the chair and does its scuttling, hesitant fly-walk, darting along on whirring legs for a few moments and then stopping and scuttling on the spot, getting its bearings, then moving on again and going through the same routine. After a while it goes away, and so do the girls.

The sweaty smell of fish and chips comes from behind the counter and stiffens the air around the tables. A speaker squeezes out “Crazy,” the inescapable song by someoneorother, and competes with the rough hum of a generator, and the sounds of cutlery in the hands of busy people.

Applied Anthropology

If you are a prospective employer who has come across this blog while looking for proof of my credibility, please do not read the following. Otherwise, let me explain.

The following is a work of anthropology, not of smut. Recently, for ten days, I entered a new and interesting cultural environment, and set about trying to absorb and understand and like it. And you can get a good lot of understanding, you see, through participation. So when I was kindly given the short piece of creative prose shown below, I was obliged by the forces of scholarship to reply with something of my own; and if my reply is as unsavoury as the authentic example of the local culture reproduced below, then so much the better for scholarship.



Woodpecker Wood

I stuck my finger in
A woodpeckers hole
The woodpecker cried
God bless my soul.
Stick it in stick it in
Remove it.


Tuatara Lust

Once upon a time
On an island by the sea
I was puffing from a climb
I was holding to a tree

When I saw a lusty lizard
From the corner of my eye
And she hit me like a blizzard
Made me wobble made me sigh

“Come with me” said the lizard
With a tuatara blush
And I’ll flip you like a wizard
In my hole inside the bush

So I came upon her hole
Yes I came to her all right
I got muddy in her hole
And I beat her bush all night.

And she told me she was greedy
And I told her I was too
When we finished I was bleeding
I was tender I was bruised.

Oh I was puffing all the time
I was holding to my tree
Once upon a time
On an island by the sea.

Island Life

From one point of view, my time on Taranga Island was a tale of misery and degradation. I was woken at 6am by the guy in the next tent calling me a tosser. I was assailed by immature nicknames, and by a Red Hot Chilli Peppers song repeated endlessly for the sole purpose of irritating me. I was forced by peer pressure to down shot after shot of Johnny Walker whisky, drunken out of a shot-glass made up of the sawn-off top of a soft-drink bottle; and having done that I was forced by general merriment to suck up split wine from the lid of a food container that had been a playground for rat-shitting rats the night before. I was mocked for going down the hill too fast (“Can ya smell the lolly bin Mike?”). I was mocked for going down the hill too slowly (“Hurry the fuck up Grandad”). I held onto a cliff face by a slippery root and two flax leaves while my supervisor stood on a ledge above me and laughed and made jokes about risking my life seven times for the sake of three weeds. I tripped over on a root the first day. Immediately this appalling misdemeanor gave rise to huge false guffaws from my travelling companions, as it did for the next ten days. For 10 days I had no dry socks. For ten days I put on a wet shirt in the morning and took a wetter shirt off in the evening, and I came back to camp to wash out of a small blue tub of cold water, an activity that was partly a bath and partly a shower and combined the worst aspects of both. In the evenings I sat and watched people hunched wordlessly over something called the “Brick Game”, an appallingly addictive electronic device that emitted many piercing electronic noises, including a tinny rendition of the famous part of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. I was surrounded by puerility. After a few days my protective reserve had worn away and I cheerfully joined in with the puerility. I composed a “bestiality ballad”, seven verses about an erotic adventure with a tuatara. I noted a brand of chocolate called “Dark Ghana,” and observed that this was a neat little euphemism for excrement, and having made this discovery I took every chance to extend it and explore its many variations. When the sole female on the trip went behind a tarpaulin to shower, and her jerking, rubbing silhouette came through the other side of the tarpaulin, and the others put all sorts of merry construals on the shadowy and naked movements, I joined in. When I went to the long-drop at night I had to whack the sides with a stick to get rid of the rats. And so on.

From one point of view, then, all of these happenings made up a truly unpleasant period of work. From my point of view, however, they were all part of the fun.

Under The Weather

I am writing the following in the middle of a wet and energetic storm, on an island in the middle of a boiling sea that stretches to Whangerei on one side and to Chile on the other. My tent walls are flapping and heaving in the wind. My sleeping mat is damp at the edges. My toilet bag, the one pair of trousers I brought on this trip, my silk sleeping sheet, and the plastic supermarket bags in which I keep my clothes, are all soaked. Lying on my mat, both of my elbows are dewy with rain. The floor of the kitchen is churned up into a chocolate muddy ruin. Bits of wet dirt are smeared around the floor at the front entrance of my tent. The fly covers the tent imperfectly, leaving gaps at its base that are exposed to the weather, and from the inside of my tent I can see a band of dirty sequins around the base of my little room, where the rain has splattered mud over it. In numerous places the tent and the fly have made contact, so they’ve become stuck together by the wet, and you can see the cross-hatched thread of the fly through the tent walls, like wrinkles through a wet t-shirt.

When we arrived on the island there was a dry gully running up the side of the campsite on the true right. Now it is a brown, frothy torrent, and I can here it rushing away like a battery of waterfalls. The nikau palms are streaming with water. The palms have v-shaped spines that channel water toward the main trunk, whereupon it runs down the trunk in a transparent film. Touch the tree with your finger and you make a streaming parabola of froth.

This is great weather for sliding on tree roots and for leaving slick skid-marks and messy handprints in the mud. It’s good weather for athlete’s foot and for growing mushrooms between your toes and for relandscaping your hands, wrinkling up the skin into tiny pink ridges, and also for lying awake and listening to the sounds of water: water tapping on the roof; water punching on the roof, water pouring over the roof as if from a large bucket and seeping through the gaps, water strafing the corrugated plastic that sits between the food and the flood; the long wet rushing of a river, the thumping and grinding of surf, the tapping of water on leaves.

It’s great weather, too, for getting your jacket drenched on the way from the tent to the toilet, and your singlet drenched on the way back. Good for improvising jackets out of plastic rubbish bags, and for losing your beer down a river that comes up over night. The only dry things I have are my stationary, my sleeping bag, and the insides of my fingernails.

Camping tends to heighten the need for alertness, commonsense, time-saving improvisations. The rain exaggerates this tendency. Scroggin goes inside a plastic bag inside a plastic bag inside a pocket. Cellphones go inside a plastic bag inside a plastic bag inside a thick blue dry-bag that you close by rolling up the top third and securing a clip across the top, which goes inside the inner pocket of a pack. When going outside in the rain, roll up your trousers and the arms of your shirt so that they don’t get too wet. Your skin will get wet, but your skin dries quicker that cotton. Keep a towel (a pile of broad-leaves will do) at the tent door to leave the mud on when you get in. Do not put the head of your bed at the entrance-end of your tent – you want your dirty feet to be at the entrance, which is dirty already; and your want your face to be as far from the dirt as possible. Put your clothes in plastic bag and use those bags as barriers between yourself and the wet sides of your tent. Moving in and out of your tent is awkward, so you want to do these things as little as possible: before leaving, make extra sure you have everything you need for going outside; and do the same when you go back in.

Lichen, Moss, Shrubs, Trees

There is a place in New Zealand (never mind where) you can go up high and see the steam coming out of cracks in the earth. Go to that place, walk downhill for half an hour or so, then follow the track for two days. Do this and you come across a lot of natural stuff that is rich and varied and worth writing about.

High up there are great curving dunes of shingle, dotted with weird rocks and clumps of earth with moss and small bushes covering them. The rocks are gray, flat-faced; the moss is varied, and the small shrubs are low and stiff. There are one or two tussocks and one or two mountain daisies, little explosions of rigid leaves.

There is lichen up high, too. Go into the mountains and look around and you start to appreciate the hardiness but also the scaly beauty of these little spreading growths. They grow on the peaks of mountains, feeding on the rocks like rust and spreading about in dots and in patches. It grows in bright green beds, minutely mottled. It grows also in frosty white patches, and in little flaky black flowerings.


Here is moss. Here is a white growth, greenish at the edges, that spreads over the plain in soft, rounded cushions. It is white in the sun like lumps of spring snow. From a distance these lumps look smooth and homogenous, but up close you can see that they are made up of thousands of little starry heads, each one no wider than a sandfly and all massed together to make a soft smooth pin-cushion hump.

There are other small things close to the ground. Some are all starry like biddids. One is white and dense and clumped together in tight little constellations. Down here is something also made of tiny heads, but each head is less like a star and more like a little tussock, a finely furred little tuft.

The rocks are little forests of life. Lichen in layers, like the blemishes on elderly skin; velvety moss in dark crimson, almost black; small shrubs; tiny, delicate, bell-shaped flowers, with white petals minutely veined and centres yellow as buttercups.

Shrubs, shrubs, shrubs. Here is a shrub which, from afar, is a mass of up-going fingers, all densely fractalled so that you have fingers growing out of fingers growing out of fingers, and all as vertical as cacti. Up close you notice that each one of those fingers is decorated with minute, overlapping leaves, all tightly arranged to give the appearance of scales. The leaves are all neatly stacked so that all the way down each of those scaly fingers you get the same cross-section, a stubby, four-pointed star.

Over there is another shrub of the same form, only the fingers are thinner and the scales finer; perhaps it is a younger version of the other shrub, or a different shrub altogether. And over there is another plant, with tighter scales. Here the leaves are slightly opened, the tips displaced slightly from the stem, to make a cylindrical pinecone.

And next to it is something else, with the scales are almost fully open. Here the leaves are not flat and wide, as on the other plants, but thin and sharp, with a faint line down their centre like the slim grooved paddles on a racing kayak. And over there, on another mini forest of greenery, the scales are round, round as dinner plates but no bigger than your pupils, and they are fully opened now. The leaves are imperfectly aligned, so if you were very small those leaves would function as an staircase, and you could wind your way up the stem going from one leathery plate to the next in a green spiral.

There are other shrubs too, ones with tiny tiny spikes for leaves, and little green bracken-like things with tidy no-nonsense leaves in a tidy no-nonsense green, and with the tidy fronds overlapping in different directions to make a tidy green thatched canopy two inches off the ground. Daisies with stiff green leaves aggressively spiked and a yellow-green flame at each base. Tussock stems elegantly bowed, bending under the weight of the white pointy leaves at their tips.

And the colours? Christmas-tree green, olive, yellow-green, orange-green, red-green. Pale green seasoned with yellow. Traffic-light green tinged with orange. Green stems tipped with white, so that a tree of these stems looks like a tree on a frosty morning in winter. Green-yellow stems tipped with a brighter green-yellow, so that even at midday a tree of these stems looks as if it is catching the evening sun. Overall, the colour very blended and varied, mixed and layered and dappled, with no smooth gradings and no sharp edges. Complex, richly patterned, life-like.

After the tussock and the low stiff shrubs there is the beech forest. Beech leaves are small and round, no larger than your little fingernail. They grow in numbers in horizontal sheets on the many-fingered branches that extend horizontally out from the trunks, giving the forest its distinctive tiered look. When you look up to the canopy and see the sun or the sky coming through, the sun or the sky appears in a million layered circles and semi-circles and thwarted arcs, all winking and shifting like city lights in the evening.

Every tree, even the small ones, are striped and dappled by lichen. It is luxuriously textured stuff. Here it is stuck fast to the tree like a patch of dry skin; on the tree just there, leaning over slightly, it is blistered and peeling like hot paint; in this trunk, a dead trunk with wrinkles under its limbs as under an armpit, the lichen has a tubular structure, like coral. Sometimes the tubes open outwards in little round crates with white rims.

Through it all is a white, loosely bunched thing that consists in tiny filaments branching off eachother and branching again and again. It gets thinner at each branch, like the network of veins and capillaries that you see in diagrams of the human lungs. This veinous white stuff, tinged with pale green, is in the tangled hair of the trees, on the trunks, and on the top of the wooden poles that mark the track on the walk.

When I walked through all this flora, the small shrubs in the open area and the dark green and mottled beech forest, it was wet and raining slightly. Little globes of rain bowed the tussocks into semi-circles, and spider-webs into drooping hammocks. In one place the web was so fine that all you knew of it was the collection of tiny but precisely reflective drops that threaded themselves onto its invisible wires, and the drops were suspended in the air like a system of glass planets. The rain made the green of the leaves a richer and deeper green, and the trees were stained black.

Rocks, Tongariro Crossing, Rocks

The other day I did the Tongariro Crossing, and because of the fine blue weather I could well see that it is a rock-filled place up there, a crumbling Stonehenge of a place. There are rocks like teeth, all kinds of teeth. There are bared teeth, dull white with gums of moss and black lines marking the gaps between the long white slabs. There are broken teeth, chipped and rotted with moss and gnashing upwards from the sides of hills. There are breathing mouths, mouths with no teeth but great steamy breaths instead, curling over the edges of cliffs and dissolving round the woollen socks of walkers; and there is a pair of open jaws as well, black inside and black teeth sticking down from a black cavern splattered with white as if with blood and yawning out of the crater-wall at the top of Ngaurohoe.Rocks like truffles on the flats, deep black and multifariously lumped. Rocks like coal, flat-faced, many-faced, sharp-edged, dully shining, and black too, the kind of black that looks as if it will make a charcoal mess on your hands if you so much as breath on it. Great heaps of truffles and coal gather on the hillsides like moss and gathering moss on their dark faces themselves. Rocks coloured like chalk, a rich colour as if the pigment goes all the way down, and arranged in mosaics on the sides of mountains, unmoving mandalas laid down so carelessly by the chemical rain of volcanos. A mosaic of red rocks, rusty on the mountain side like a great lichen dappling on the surface of the mountainside. Rocks with lichen dappling on their surface. Ordinary rocks. Ordinary, dusty-dirty rocks, cut-your-bare-feet toe-stubbers, slightly orange slightly yellow and good for crushing into shingle and holding down tents in the wind and not much else I should think. Rocks sliced in two, one slice missing and the other slice with a sharp-edged crater like half of a split marble. Rocks red as a red desert. Rocks white as bird-shit, black as flies, and the red-desert rock stains a rock-face with a bashed gramophone horn of smoke, with a layer of black-fly rock above it in the same shape, only more bashed, and bird-shit rock splattering the face under the red-desert gramophone as if the bottom line of the gramophone were leaking, with a line of white on the lower edge. From far away the whole thing, smoky bashed old desert, with a big tube in the hillside opened up like a windpipe with a gray crust on the outside and the red dust dripping round the inside and some stones falling out the lower edge, from far away the whole thing like an open wound, bright and free and weeping in the high air, and a crust of skin on either side untouching. On a plane as flat as a lake, rocks. Big rocks widely spaced, preoccupied as a herd of cows. Rocks like human faeces, elongated, rudely clumped, messy as a skinned sausage. Rocks like rabbit faeces, light brown in neat circles. Rocks like cattle faeces even, great cow-pats of lava folding down the slopes in great cow-pat layers, not so fresh as once before and cracking at the edges, cracking and splitting at the edges into little fiords. Layered rocks. Layers you can touch from the track, long and narrow and round at the edges like a pile of surfboards. Layers sweeping up in proud angles up on top of hills, prows and visors, and layers making terraces on the sides of other hills, greenish on the top faces and long low cliffs where one terrace drops down to the next. Layers in the rocks with orange lines in between, orange lines like cobwebs on the rock-face. Rivers of rocks. Thin creeks, widely spaced, fiddling down in clay lines from the tops of long ridges to the bottom where they disappear. Wide rivers of rock, orange rock and rock ground to black sand, sweeping down the hills in great highways of rock, widening quickly from a point like a highway seen from a low angle, and also stringy, tangled rivers of rock and mud, tangled hairs of light rock and gray rock running across the plane in dry rivers. Rocks like cemeteries. Black rocks the size of golfballs. White rocks the size of golfballs, seasoning the plain. Black rocks on the hills in shingle clusters. Rocks like wrecked cars up close, and shrinking to full-stops from a distance. Rocks really pebbles that line the green lakes, chemical-green lakes, with the rocks around the edges making a minute frill around the edges and the rocks in the border shallows showing up yellow-green and the shores of gray rocks on the beach like the dull crust around a precious stone you’ve found inside a dull rock and split the rock into ringed steaks. Large rocks on a hill like an old old building, a temple or fort that’s crumbled down now and left its founding stones broken on the top and the crumbs all scattered down the slopes, smaller the further down you go. Black rocks like an old old battleground, all charred limbs and heads and spotted with mossy blood and dripping too. Rocks light as wood, black volcano rocks that file down your boots and rasp away your shins. Rocks that stab your heel on their wheeling way down the mountain, a high mountain and conical and slightly concave and high, high so that from the top everything else looks flat, even the stretch we climbed up earlier and tore our lungs on the steep rocks there. Rocks that fill your pack so that you have a hard time sitting down and a harder time getting up, and rocks that push your pack into your head into the rock on the ground when you’re on a steep bit on all fours. Rocks that make their way into your knees and clash at awkward angles, grinding away down there and jolting out your legs at strange angles every now and then. Rocks from the sun that fall down in rays and deliver headaches from on high. Rocks in your legs and chest, so when you stop and undo your chest-strap there is a great release, an expansion and relaxation, as if you’ve undone your chest altogether and all your sweaty innards have slid out, relieved. Rocks in your pack so that when you take it off you are much too light, and your walk feels strangely out of time, too easy like peddling with the chain off. Rocks that fill your head with rocks. Rocks, rocks, rocks. I went and did the Crossing the other day, and it’s a rock-filled place up there, a crumbling Stonehenge of a place.

Mt. Taranaki Undresses

Mt. Taranaki is beautiful but coy. It is one of the worlds most well-formed cones, second only to Mt. Fuji for the shape and symmetry of its figure. And, as for a lot of mountains and as for other well-formed things, such as cats and horses, every pose that Mt. Taranaki strikes seems to be archetypal: every pose seems to be just the sort of pose that you would expect a mountain to strike. There is, for example, the pose that you see on a fine day if you drive up to New Plymouth from Harewa, cutting (roughly) down the diameter of the (roughly) circular abutment on the West Coast of the North Island of New Zealand, the West fin on Maui’s fish. If you do that you will see that shape and symmetry in full display, the small, tidy peak and the long slightly concave flanks running onto the plain in an immense ramp. Then there is the snow-capped pose, seen from the side, where the top quarter of the mountain is white as a night moon and shines wetly in the sun; the snow line is the same all the way round, but it is not a smooth line, and where the sides are too steep or too nicely aligned to the sun (or something) to carry snow, the mountain juts upwards in long peninsulas of rock. The same mountain, viewed from above, has a puddle of snow that fully covers the rock in the centre and then splashes outwards, like a many-fingered snow-flake.

There are a number of obscured poses as well, where the mountain is partly hidden. Hidden by a foreground hill, the mountain shows only its tidy peak and the curve of one slope, which is usually steeper than the slope of the hill and so curves elegantly out of sight. Hidden by a turban of cloud, only the long flanks show. In the morning or evening sun those flanks can be seen in clear relief, and they have a chiselled, muscular look, starting out very wide and tapering into thin ridges as they go higher. When the sun does not reach those flanks they are softer, not so aggressively three-dimensional, and you notice more the long, slow, curve of the outer slopes, dark against the cloud and smooth except for one or two tiny imperfections, little dents and gashes and wrinkles that show up against the light background.

Most of the time when I was in a position to view the mountain it assumed one or other of its hidden poses. Mostly it was obscured by cloud, thin and ghostly cloud that you can see moving along the ground in slow whorls, or thick grey cloud that makes everything go noticeably darker. Usually there is enough cloud to entice the viewer; too much to satisfy entirely. Standing on the neighbouring Pouakai range, we peered through the cloud and waited like boys peering through the steam at a naked woman in a sauna. Here the cloud whorls away slightly, only to replaced by another confounding whorl. Here it thins, and an outline can be made out in the haze, but it thickens again and the outline is smudged away. You wait an hour and all you get is a dim view of an upper flank, a hazy nipple, an outline of a leg but no detail, the suggestion of an eyebrow. It is not much, but it is enough to hold you there and leave you waiting for a bit longer, stubbornly optimistic.

When the mountain finally revealed herself to us it was late evening, dark and getting darker. On the coast the lights of New Plymouth blinked and jostled. There was a range of low peaks to the South West of us and it was black black black against the pale clear sky. The silhouettes were perfect: precise edges; flat, featureless bodies. It is plausible to describe these silhouettes as bits of black paper stuck onto the sky, but it is not entirely satisfactory, and doesn’t quite do them justice. To grasp their great blackness I find it better to invert the paper cut-out image and imagine that the sky has been cut away rather than added to, that a hill-shaped area of the pale blue sky has been sliced away, and what you see in that sliced-away area is the blackness of space, the blankness of space: a blackness with depth, blackness hiding blackness.

Since it was roughly to the East of where we were standing, Mt. Taranaki was not silhouetted in this way. It was hazy and pale, and we could only just make out the skirt of bush that spreads out from her waist and folds into pleats on the lower stretches, folds into great gullies where the water has worn through the soft volcanic rock, gullies we walked through sweatily the next day.

The moon was silver. Or rather, silver is the best approximation one can find to the colour that the moon was on that evening. For a long time people believed that the moon and everything above it were made of a higher substance, a substance that could not be compared to anything that you could find on earth. Looking at the moon on an evening like this you can see why people might believe such a thing. The strange thing is that, in a place like this, it is easy to imagine that it is not only the moon and the stars and planets that are made out of this lofty matter, the quintessence, but the hills and the mountains as well. Even the bushes and rocks that we sit on and brush against along the track: even these look uncanny, holy.

And the silence is another uncanny thing, another thing that causes a describer to reach for religious imagery in order to capture it properly. It is strange that a landscape as large and powerful as this can be so quiet as this, and so still. There is a short track that leads down to the Pouakai hut from the ridge, and I sit on this track as it gets dark and listen to the landscape. There is nothing to listen too out there, however, so I end up listening to myself listening to the landscape. When I blink my eyes they make a soft clicking sound, and this sound is far louder than anything around me. I feel the blood thumping in my fingertips.

I sit on the track to wait for my tramping companion, Sytze, to come down from the ridge. I expect him to be about five minutes, but he takes about twenty. “It is very touching,” he says when he arrives. Although there is noone around but us, he says it in a whisper, as if in a church. “It is so… perfect.” I don’t say anything, and we pick our way down to the hut in the light of my torch, tripping on roots because the torch is weak.

Death and Beauty in Otaki Gorge

The degree of settler progress into Otaki Gorge is marked, I suppose, by the landscape, the bush in particular. And, even if it is not so marked, this is an agreeable conceit, and one which lends itself to a jaunty and knowledgeable account of the different kinds of treelife that make their home on the outer slopes of this section of the Tararua Forest Park. Unfortunately I could only sound knowledgable if I lied, and so I’ll just aim for jaunty.

First there are the pines, angular and homogenous, with a serrated skyline and lego-tree neatness. I am sure that there are some places in the world where pines-in-bulk is an attractive landscaping feature, but I do not think NZ is the place. Pinues radiata was chosen as a prime crop, so I am told, because in colonial days a number of rich Europeans enjoyed themselves by competing for the most thorough and immaculate collection of pine trees. He who could grow all 73 varieties of pine in his backyard, and keep them in good condition, would stand to earn a small silver trophy, a certificate congratulating him on his hard-work and pomposity, and bitter neighbours. These competitions doubled, fortuitously but fortunately, as experiments in comparative arboreology (meaning the study of relative merits of tree species, if the reader has not heard this phrase before, or if indeed the phrase does not acutally exist); and these experiments led timber merchants to conclude that Pinus Radiata was the most fast-growing variety, and produced pretty good timber, so the merchants (or rather their moustache-wearing, meat-handed, hard-working labourers) proceeded to grow these trees, hack them down, strip them naked and turn them into houses. Pinus Radiata were introduced by new immigrants for economic reasons: when found in large quantities, these trees still have a look of foreignness and artificiality about them.

Further down the valley the bush is more native and natural in appearance, but it still shows the impact of a troubled past. It is green all right, and the hillsides are alive with nikau palms and tree ferns, but it is young bush, patchy and thin. On the river terraces it gives way completely to yellowish-white grasses, knee-high and dense as wheat. And occasionally these grasses themselves give way, to form the walking tracks that I’ve walked along twice a day for the last week, tracks that wind through paddocks of grass and stop at the river beds, like botched crop-circles.

The loggers troubled the bush, but the bush also troubled the loggers. The logging company whose artefacts I have come here (along with a dozen other volunteers) to recover, flourished in the 1930s, during the depression years. Deep poverty and unemployment during this time meant that people were happy enough to get work, without the work being the sort of work where one had a high chance of retiring with all body parts in tact. Men who worked on the railways, at the sawmill and at the logging face, were in danger of breaking limbs and faces and bodies, and they did. A hearty, knowledgeable bloke gave a talk on the history of bush tramways, and a prominent theme was the perilousness of the work, and the injuries that resulted from it. Floors were slippery, rails were steep, hours long and logs big. New technology sometimes eliminated the really dangerous jobs, but it usually created one or two new ones. When logs were hauled over the ground by rope, for example, one guy pushed his luck and scared his mother by working the rope that did the hauling. This rope was passed through pulleys, so that the logs could be passed around corners; unfortunaely, the log could not pass through the pulleys, so the rope-man had to unhitch the rope from the pulleys when the logs came past. The log was dragged p to the pulley, the rope unhitched, and the log jerked past. The thing that did the jerking was an astonishing machine called a log-hauler; the man who controlled the jerking stood at the log-hauler; and the man who told the log-hauler man when to do the jerking was the rope-man. Most of the time, the system worked: the log stopped and started when it was supposed to, the rope was properly unhitched, and the body of the rope-man was not burst under a log like a possum under a car. Other times, the system did not work.

Because of the times when the system failed, and for reasons of speed and economy, a new system was created. Now the logs were swung above the terrain on a wire that was strung between tree-high poles, like a single telephone wire across telegraph poles. The rope-men swore at their bloody pulleys for the last time, got smashed at the pub, and moved on to a job less likely to kill them. All, that is, except those who became pole-men. The pole-men were charged with climbing the tree-high poles so that they could create and maintain the bits of machinery that supported the wire and the flying logs. Cranes and helicopters were in short supply in those days, and so the pole-man got to the top using ten planks of wood, one axe, and a lot of muscle. The axe made notches in the pole at about chest-height. The planks went in the notches. To make the first notch, the pole-man stood on the ground. To make the other notches, he stood on the planks. To get from one plank to another he used a lot of muscle. If the plank, stuck into the pole like a loose tooth, did not break or slip out of its little cavity, and if the pole-man, strung over the wooden tooth like a piece of last night’s roast, kept his grip and his nerve; then he would head pretty smartly onto the plank and move onto the next one. If not, he would head pretty smartly towards the ground and move onto the next world.

Anyway, back to the bush. At the place where the log-hauler hauled the logs and the rope-man tried not to die, the bush is similar in species to the bush further down the gorge. It differs from the other bush mainly in its thickness. It is dense and moist and green as moss: nikau palms and tree ferns lean out from the hillside and spread their palms benevolently over the vegetation beneath them, like motherly arms. Fern fronds are beautiful things. Tapered, green, fractalled, they splay about like peaceful spears, intricately carved. It is no surprise that the silver fern, with its surprising underside, is a national emblem. It features on one of the flag designs that has been proposed by forward-looking people to replace the British-looking thing that we have at the moment; you can see it on the helmets of NZ cricket players; and when All Blacks get sentimental they talk about “wearing the silver fern” on their jerseys. The Department of Conservation (the organisation that runs the volunteer week I have just completed, and many other things besides) also uses the fern as a logo, this time in its youthful, furled version, with one curling stalk, wound inwards like a seahorse tail; and with all the other curling parts that will eventually unfurl to produce the elegant pattern, hierarchically repeated, of the open frond. The stalks of the fern are brownish black and covered in dark hairs, like the legs of spiders.

Toitois hem the bush at the edge of the creek that runs through the gully. Toitois have straw-coloured stalks that lean out from the bush, a blast in stasis, and they curve slightly from the weight of the flower at the end, a drooping pennant of fluff. The stalks seem to be made up of concentric cylinders, and the outer layers dry up, stiffen and detach from the stalk. These discarded skins are crunchy underfoot, and they collect in and around the toitoi bushes, dry and curled like wood-shavings from a very long plank.

The creek chatters and tumbles in the way that streams do when they are shallow and stone-filled. The water is wonderfully clear. There is not much difference between viewing the stones directly, and viewing them through the water. The latter are darkened by moisture, browned by a layer of slime that makes river-crossing such a refreshing activity, and distorted by the swirling wrinkles that texture the surface of the water, squeezing the rocks into corresponding wrinkles and, on sunny days, casting a wobbly net of light onto the creek bottom. Otherwise, the water in this place is as transparent as the air, and on good days it looks as if the creek is empty except for a thin layer of molten glass sliding over the rocks on a river of air. In some places the illusion is broken by eddies and waterfalls. In one place, a pair of large rocks create a minor damn. They back the water up then spill it out, and at the foot of the rocks the water plunges down deep then bubbles up in a champagne froth, pale-green and ceaseless.

Paraparaumu Beach

One plausible guide to the current distribution of ethnic groups in NZ is the distribution of Maori place names in the country. This is a pretty rough guide, since those names were assigned quite some time ago, when populations may have been quite different from what they are now; and a large Maori or Pacific population does not always constitutute a powerful population, the kind of population that has the clout to decide the official names of town and cities. But general knowledge tells me that people of color are less well-represented in the South than in the North. And when I look down the map of the South Island I see names like Endeavour Inlet, Portage, Mt. Pleasant and Grovetown, with a smattering of names like Taumarina and Hapuku. When I look up the North Island I see names like Te Horo, Paekakariki, Paraparaumu, Waikanae, Waikawa Beach, full of warm vowels and heritage, with a smattering of names like Plimmerton and Gladstone.

Paraparaumo, where I stayed for two nights and a day, certainly has the warm vowels. I do not know about its heritage, but I do know about its beach, which is beautiful, popular and long. The lenght means that, despite the popularity, it is possible to enjoy the beach almost uninterrupted by the sounds of barbequeues and dogs and small children: on a recent sunny Sunday in February I stood on the beach and saw eight or nine seagulls in the vicinity, and they outnumbered the people. The beach has the feel of being hugged by two long arms of land. To the South, there are the hills around Wellington. To the North, there is Kapiti Island, an arm that is severed from the body of land just behind me, but which gives an impression of hugging nonetheless. Kapiti is long and hilly and covered in dark trees, like an enormous upturned canoe that has been left to rot and gather moss. During the day it is green and majestic; during the night it is black and mysterious.

I arrive on Paraparaumu beach on a perfect evening. There are enough clouds over the horizon to kindle the sun into a pink and orange fire; few enough to show the vast tarpaulin of the sky, with its graded, untextured purity and its gaseuous intermingling of blue and yellow, the latter rising up off the horizon in a golden steam. On the horizon there is a long, shallow cloud that looks like a distant mass of land, another New Zealand, and as the light goes it changes from the colour of sand, to wet sand, to charcoal, to black.

I have an evening swim in the Tasman sea. Perhaps because the beach is in the lee of Kapiti Island, or for some other reason, the waves do not rise up and pound into the sand: they move into the beach in layered sheets, and fold into themselves when they run out of steam. The look is that of a wide body in a perpetual state of dressing and undressing: the larger waves froth about like white tutus, the lesser ones have frilly hems and foamy lacework, and a film of translucent underwear slips out from under the skirts at the end of every dressing, preceded by a narrow but pretty hemline; and when this watery undergarment slips back down the beach the undressing has begun, with the skirts and pleats and jostling ribbons drawn back and tucked away, then ironed out and cleaned so they are ready to be donned and tossed about all over again. The underwear (the one with the narrow but pretty hem) leaves behind streaks of dampness in the sand, and along these streaks the sand is reflective, metallic-looking, like wet skin. When you step on these areas of wetness the disturbance spreads out in a disc of bruised sand, which collapses into a footprint when you lift your leg. The movement of water of the sand pushes the sand into corrugations, in much the same way, I suspect, that the wind in the Sahara drives the sand into long wrinkles. In some places the disturbed sand is less like a corrogation and more like a network of plaids, layered and criss-crossed and inter-threaded. When a film of sea comes over these plaided areas of sand, it looks as if the water is seething with eels.

I do not see any driftwood coming in on the waves, but I must have come at the wrong time, because the beach has piles of the stuff. It is smooth as paper and almost as white, and it makes good fires. It gathers at the top of the beach in a long band, white and bony like a ship-wrecked Noah’s Ark and the remains of its cargo.

I drink some bear and say one or two things to one or two people. Talking is not a high priority here, however. It is socially acceptable to stop mid-sentence and look out to the sea and the island and the sky, and those elements are of a kind and quality that usually causes people to fall silent.

Charming Centre, Crumbling Suburbs

I am no architect, and perhaps not an aesthete either, but the architecture of Wellington seems to me to be one of its most attractive features. The whole city, like the museum, is in a state of agreeable disorder. In the central city, architectural features fit together without fitting into any obvious pattern. Beside the Art Gallery in a square lined with steel palms there is a café. Next to the café is a glass wall with white bands between the panels. The bands are arranged diagonally, and at variable angles, so that each door is an irregular trapezium. This is all very nice, but the thing I want to note is that, although there is no wall made in the same style anywhere in the vicinity (at least, that I could see), or even anything approaching that style, the slanting wall seems to fit in very nicely, and not be awkward or pretentious. Go around the corner and there is something altogether different, a shady area filled with traditional-looking flower beds, neatly symmetric and made of red brick. Go around another corner, and in another bed there is a set of weird, modern-looking cairns, like enormous, tapering piles of stone pikelets. One of the piles is inverted, so that the smaller pikelets are on the bottom.

Architectural curiosities abound in the central city, and mostly they are charming and arty. (This state of affairs my be contrasted with Christchurch, where there are also a few architectural oddities. In the southern city these features aim for the same look as the Wellington ones, but in my experience and opinion they just end up being arty.) The steel nikaus, palms opening very beautifully into a ring of metal arcs, are distinctive and popular; and so is the silver hanging ball, suspended two stories up from invisible wires, hollow and enclosed by curving native leaves. You can look up through it and see blue sky through the gaps in the leaves, as through the gaps in a forest canopy. In Plimmers alley there is the bronze man with a bronze jumping dog stuck to his left knee. A miniature cable car, set upon a pole, points the way to the somewhat larger cable-car that runs up past a botanic gardens and a cricket field. There are the giant bowling balls, the pinpong ball lamps, the fabulous wooden sculpture on the bridge, runnelled and vigorously angular. In one entrance to Cuba Mall there is a colourful, insectile object on top of a pole. In another place there are two large flat rectangles of silver metal sticking out of the ground. They are interesting because they are covered in large metal hemispheres, and look like a model of a skin disease, or a giant piece of Braille.

And of course there is the bucket sculpture in Cuba Mall. This may not be a spectacular sculpture, but it is charming and it was there when I was young and so I am going to describe it in more detail. Imagine a giant pear, just like a normal pear except giant and hollow and made of metal. Paint it in a primary colour of your choice. Then cut it in half, so you have two primary-coloured things that can hold water. Get five pears of the same kind, paint them in other primary colors then cut them in half as well. Attach all of these primary-colored pear-buckets to a black metal structure, so that when any one bucket is filled up sufficiently with water, it tips over and dumps the water out the thin end, the stalk-end if we’re still thinking pears. Get some hoses put in at the top of the structure, so that water goes into the top bucket. Arrange things so that all the other buckets share around the water that is dumped from the top bucket, and so you get an odd, fascinating, arrhythmic cascade of water, with periods of calm build-up where no water changes bucket, periods of short splashes, and periods of splashing, dunking chaos where all the buckets flip and roll and groan on their axles and mesmerized tourists stand around getting wet. This is the bucket-fountain on Cuba Street. It may not be quite as spectacular as it sounds, but it is a good idea and it’s been there for a while.

After you’ve drenched yourself in Cuba Mall, go to the cable car and slide up a hill in a quaint red carriage. Get out at Kelburn and walk around. If you’re like me, you’ll start at one place, go in what appears to be the right direction, get lost, retrace your steps in the wrong direction, and generally go around in what appears to be a circle while arriving at a place three blocks from where you started. The confusion here is due partly to my own dodderiness. But I think I am justified in laying some of the blame on the suburban architecture of Wellington, which can in turn be blamed on the hills, great humps that twist streets and confound vehicles in a way that would have pleased MC Escher, and generally conduct a happy revolt against rectangular neatness. The suburbs of Wellington look as if they are being constantly tossed about, and it is a miracle that anything stays in the same place. This may be compared instructively to the suburbs of Christchurch, which look as if they are being constantly steamrolled, and it’s a miracle that anything changes place. Grass curbs are a microcosm of the greater differences between the cities. In Christchurch, curbs are easy to maintain, and usually they are maintained, often in immaculate condition. The typical kerb is homogenous and green and well-shorn, and dull as billiard cloth. In Wellington, in the hill suburbs, it is impossible to keep an immaculate curb. The roads are too narrow, and there are too many funny angles. Instead of the staid rectangles of grass that you might find in Fendalton or Burnside, in the hill suburbs of Wellington you find overgrown lozenges, banks made of concrete, banks made of some kind of shingly conglomerate, or banks made of earth too steep to cultivate and overrun by grasses, flax, forgetmetnots, ivy. Odd bits of brick poke out in various places; loose stones crumble away from footpaths; here is an old concrete wall embedded in clay, and there are two or three bricks, chipped and still hemmed by cement. Steps twist up between houses, with strips of white painted on their edges so that midnight drunks and bag-laden housewives can get to the front door without multiple fractures. Here is a driveway pushed into the hill at a dislocated angle, with cement lathered on like icing and with moss pushing up from underneath and making systems of cracks, little rivulets of green. There are one-lane streets where parked cars take up one lane and moving cars do what they can with the rest. There are houses from all perspectives: from above you can see barbequeues and swimmingpools, and potted cacti at the front doors; from below you see a lot less, a garage and a few steps and the red or green border of a corrugated roof. It is all quaint and pleasant and suburbian, filled with casual prosperity, ramshackle without being rundown.

I quite like Wellington.

Round the Bays for a Root

It is 2 o’clock in Wellington and windy. It is a generic sort of day in the capital city of New Zealand, too many clouds to be summery, too few to be wintery, and a morose, stippled ocean. Te Papa, the national museum, stands to my right, and it slopes to the sea in a way that may be an imitation of a whale, possible of a ship, perhaps of the warehouses and skyscrapers that fill the skyline with their clutter of vertices, perhaps of the bank of rocks that fill, with their gray sides and random edges, the gap between sea and promenade; or even the houses that jostle for position on the hills of Island Bay or Kelburn. It is hard to say: in Wellington, everything slopes towards the sea. I am most attracted, however, to the whale option: the museum, with its hooded green eye and broad flanks, squints out to sea like something you would find in Kaikoura.

To my left are street lamps made of giant ping-pong balls. These may be designed to match the giant silver bowling balls that sit in a row behind me, on the wooden planks of the wharf. Over the water towards Oriental Bay there is a nest of yachts, white and naked without their sails and squinting out to sea like Te Papa, their cabin windows catching the sun. To my left there are ships, cranes and containers, and a wharf jutting out into the harbour, its struts round and closely spaced, like the tops of sunken collonades. Loud music comes up from somewhere, and it give the place a communal feel, as if the whole waterfront is someone’s backyard during an afternoon party. A young man sits on the plank next to me and starts reading a book. After a while he goes away again. After another while I go away as well.

I go around the bays. Oriental, Evans, Kau, Mahanga, Karaka, Worser, Breaker, Lyall, Houghton, Island. The road wobbles around the coast, and cyclists wobble around the road. All around the coast, dark brown rocks crumble into the sea like bits of loose shingle. These rocks are and ribbed and pooled and pitted, and you won’t get across them very fast in bare feet. If you do get across them, you can see dark brown seaweed, the same colour as the rocks, swishing around in the surf and sliming up the rocks. In Oriental Bay, people with good bodies play volley-ball and sit in vans and generally don’t do a whole lot of swimming. In Worser Bay, people with less good bodies paddle in the opal sea and look out for jelly fish. The beaches are small and embraced by peninsulas of rock. There are one or two snorkelers, and one or two upturned dingies with white peeling paint and names with stories behind them: Martha, Slingshot, Seahorse.

One of these bays is home. It is strange to go home, like coming back from the dead. Everything is spectral and strange, not because it is ghostly but because I am. It is strange to see that everything has moved to 2007 in the same way that I have. I feel that if I just peeled back a layer or two of this place then I would find that really, under the present-day surface, it is just how it was when I was there, its true self. But I know that there would be nothing like that at all. It’s all been peeled away or forgotten or taken down, like the old wallpaper; or been taken somewhere else and changed in the normal way, like me. For example, everything is smaller than I remember it. When I was here last, the walnut tree was a great, tangled, swooping thing, something in which you could get lost and giddy. Now it is a modest sort of bush, not much taller than I am. It feels as if somewhere in the present, just behind the surface of the present world but present nonetheless, is a little boy climbing an enormous walnut tree. But the only place where that scene exists is in myself, and I am tall and the tree is not much taller. This is not an unhappy thing to know, just strange: I have come back from the dead to find that everything I knew is as dead as I am.

There are places, however, that are strange because of their familiarity. There is a park near the house. In the park there is a large pine tree with a root that curls out of a bank and makes a circle that is perfectly sized so that a boy can sit on the edge, wriggle down into it, sit there for a while with the root around his waist like a lifebuouy, and then find that he can’t get out. One day, I couldn’t get out, and I wet my pants. The circular root is still there. I visit this root, touch the bark on it for a bit, look around at the trees for a while, hum a tune, then walk away.

Kaikoura and Beyond

Kaikoura is a small town on the East Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, famous among tourists for its whales - great grey beasts, submarines with tails – and among UC Philosophy students for its lodge, which affords an excellent view of an ocean that ends in Chile, and an excellent chance to undertake philosophical activities such as drinking beer, which usually ends in sillygism. When I went through this town on my way up to Wellington for the GREs the hills rose out of a skirt of clouds, like dwarf Everests, and there was a patch of dirty foam stuck in one place, just offshore. At 9 0’clock in the morning the town has a general appearance of greyness. It also has the vacant, modest look of a place designed to admit outsiders rather than cultivate insiders, a place whose main visible occupants are tourists and seagulls. The seagulls have the alert, inquisitive look of beings who have just dropped in for a few minutes and intend to leave very soon. The tourists look much the same. The tourists look at the seagulls with cameras; seagulls look back through their orange rims. The sea drops heavily against the sand, but it has no effect on the dirty foam, which stays stuck.

The bus is large and white with black windows and a sleek, rectangular look about it, like a fridge wearing dark glasses. The driver also wears dark glasses, and he is also large, but he is certainly not sleek. His face has the crumpled, bulldog look that Maori faces often have when they are depicted in cartoons. In the cartoons they are often equipped with large bellies, and the driver has one of them as well. The guy in the bus mimics the cartoons, then; but a few seats from the front there is the guy who inspired them: small eyes, heavy drooping nose, skin like bark, thick neck, multiple pregnancy. There are metal bars on the seats that I believe are called armrests: the living caricature uses both of them as bumrests. He does have a kind of stern grace about him, like a whale’s grace, and he would be a fearsome sight paddling a waka, and a friendly, fatherly sight collecting pipis. Sitting on his armrests, however, in his tourist jeans and striped shirt and red golf visor, he is the satirists’ dream.

When the driver says “Kaikoura”, he pronounces the last two syllables with the deft accent that newsreaders try to imitate but which they usually turn into an awkward stab or a bloated collection of vowels.

There is not much to see or hear out of Kaikoura, unless you’re keen on wide, slapping oceans and shimmering wheatfields and paddocks full of grass and drooping cattle. I was probably keen on that sort of thing on the first five times I made this trip. This time I am entertained by the two young kids in the next seat and the fence posts blurring past the window on the right-hand side of the road. In front of the fenceposts there are metal road markers. At the base of one of them there is a piece of orange peel, looking very peeled and very orange. Halfway between two of those markers there is a fist-sized rock with a band of bright yellow paint on it. “The sea is a big puddle,” says one of the kids, a girl. She says it in the triumphant, uncompromising way that children sometimes have, as if they are telling someone off and enjoying it. “A big, big puddle.”

In one place the grass on the edge of the road has been peeled away like skin, and rolled up against the fenceposts. A yellow roller turns a pile of shingle into a cricket-pitch.

“I can’t see,” says the girl. “I can’t see anything.” She has the window-curtain wrapped around her face and is peering through it. The mother has to say something, and might as well make it educational. “Yes dear, it looks as if you can’t. Do you know why you can’t see anything?” The girl quibbles. “I can see some things. I just can’t see them very well.” There is a pattern that seems to be quite popular among manufacturers of bus seat covers. It is made up of think black lines and primary colors, with a grey background. It looks like a shattered stained-glass window, and it would be quite attractive it were not so intimately associated with boredom and mild nausea. If you look straight out of the window of a bus and keep your eyes fixed in place, you will see the fence posts as one long stutter of wood. However, if you flick your eyes from side to side in the right way you can see each post free of any blurring; except during the brief time it takes to flick your eyes away from the post that is disappearing out the back of your window, and towards the new posts that are emerging out of the front of the window. Just inside the shoulder of the road there is a smooth, shiny patch that looks like black ice but is not black ice. A red truck goes past.

“Are we nearly there yet?” This is the girl again. “Are we almost nearly there yet? Are we almost nearly almost there yet? Are we almost nearly, almost…” but she stops short, hooks a finger between her bottom gum and lip, and looks puzzled. The young woman sitting on the seat in front of mine has a barbed-wire tattoo on her upper arm. I can see this because there is a gap between the window and the seat. It just so happens that I can see the reflection of the driver’s head in the window ahead of me. I see him itch is ear once, then get tired of waiting for him to indiscreetly pick his nose. The kids start making noises. They are good at this. They make tiny booming noises, duck noises, nail-on-blackboard noises, high multi-tone rasps, electric-saw squeals. They play with their voices like drunken thespians. They are not imitating the noises of animals or machinery: they just make noises and come across the familiar ones by accident. Everyone in the bus listens to them. Three white cars go past. A tractor comes down the next hill with seven cars behind it, and it looks as if the tractor is towing all these cars along on its own steam. The kids make a noise that sounds like “buying” but which is not. They make it again, in a slightly different pitch and timbre. This game is fun, and they keep playing. I remember that I will need to courier something up to Wellington because I left it behind. A moment later I see a red courier van go past. Now the word is less like “buying” and more like “beating,” and with every repetition the “b” is sliding further into a “v.” The kids have an orange toy in the shape of a laptop, and when they press a certain key the laptop makes a noise that is cross between a siren and snorting elephant. I note that when this noise is repeated at the right frequency it sounds very much like the TARDIS when it takes off, at least when it takes off in the new TV series of Dr. Who.

We arrive in Picton and the little boy points his arm in that wobbly infant way, with the elbow and pointing finger imperfectly extended and the fist imperfectly closed, and makes a noise that could mean anything from “wader” to “beaver.” I get off and enjoy the view that visitors get when they arrive at the Picton waterfront on a fine day, a view that I am keen on despite frequent viewings. If you want to know what that view is like, you’ll have to go there yourself.

Apricots in Clyde

Like the sky, the surface of water changes constantly under the guidance of the sun, the rain and the wind. There are clouds in a lake, streaky thin clouds and pale dumps of fluff, and there are great areas of blankness and calm.

The water is in different states in different times and in different places. Here it is dark and lazy, like oil; there it is just liquid, clear and easy-moving. Now it is textured in the way paint is textured when it is layered up roughly; and now it is pure, unlined, a blue gas coming up out of nothing. There is electricity in the water, and when the sun is right and the waves are right you can see it flash across the surface in sheets of low lightening; and because there is lightening there must be stars as well, and you can see those stars if you look closely enough: the water glitters with them, at certain times and certain places, and looking down at the water is like looking down on a city during a night of fireworks.

Here on the rock the sun is hot and the water is deep, sore-feet hot and yellow-green deep. One or two tussocks spike out of the rocks. They are yellow and green and have one or two grey hairs. You can throw an apricot stone into the lake and watch it go down, twinkling like a flake of gold. After a while it breaks up into liquid blobs and then disappears altogether.

Everyone can see that the water is wavy on the surface, but you need to look carefully to see how many different waves there are, waves of different speeds and sizes and directions of travel. Often they are not really waves at all, but depressions in the water, smooth around the edges like dimples. A moderate wind turns them into wrinkles, where the rising peaks look to have too much water in them and not enough speed so they collapse as they go over like a piece of loose skin. A little more wind and they slap down with a little explosion of froth.

When the wind gets up a bit more the whole surface starts to heave, and a set of wide, low ripples moves the smaller ripples up and down, and it is like something has moved under the water and not just above it. There is a stick on the lake and this stick feels as you or I would feel if we discovered that the hill we were riding on was not a hill at all but a great beast who had just woken up. There are tiny waves as well, concentric threads of water that ripple outwards and ride the bigger waves. They are made by tiny stones and the wings of drowning flies.

All of this can be observed from the dam-end of Lake Clyde, in the South Island of New Zealand, where I went in January 2007. The township of Clyde is a pleasant enough place. It takes a while to get away from the generic suburban garageland, but it is worth it when you do, as the town centre (or what looked to be the centre; it is small enough to be a minor offshoot) is made up of old-seeming buildings, with early-settler facades. One of those facades has a plastic sign outside reading “Cybernet Central” in highlighter-green type. Two young children sold me 20 apricots for 3 dollars.