davethegrinch.net

Dave Says:

It’s been too long since my fingers put those two words and one punctuation character together. This is a macro blog of a micro trip. But we are back. Back on the road, back in hostels and back in New Zealand. Things are different. Not NZ, that appears to be pretty much intact. But we’re different – circumstances are different. For the record, for posterity and to clear the air of any pretense, I’m here in NZ sucking on the teat of corporate America; sent down under (almost) to sell my company’s wares to corporate New Zealand. In return for the subsidized pleasures of an industrialized road warrior, I/we get a subsidized vacation back to a country we love. I refuse to bore you with the economics of this trip – suffice to say that it actually saved us no money at all but rather financed a luxury beyond a point we would have spent anyway. A last minute plane ticket for Sarah equals the price of two reasonably advanced bookings and three nights of expense account excesses in a major metropolitan city would have been beyond the depth of my wallet or indeed, the willingness of my thrifty fingers to delve in anywhere near to it. To atone for these sins, I sit writing this in our sparse, non-en-suite room in the Raglan Backpacker’s Hostel (albeit on a rather nice MacBook Pro).

Back to business. And business it was. Our potential customer was nice enough. Business like, formal, professional and quite insistent their million or so dollars be well spent. I reciprocated with being equally as business like (I did not put my feet upon the conference room table as I am want to do at home), formal (I wore a suit and tie when nobody else did), professional (I resisted the urge to be 100% honest 100% of the time) whilst gamely trying to convince them I was the kind of guy you would want to give a million or so dollars to. As a sidebar, it’s not actually my job to do the aforementioned as I live behind the perma-shield of being a technician – eccentric semi-genius and utterly incapable of understanding the value of dollar. However, I am but a man. By 2pm on the final day of meetings I started to watch the clock. Talk about SLA’s, PDA’s and TLA’s irritated my ear drums and my eyes stung from excessive dry marker usage in the desperate attempts to characterize technically complex concepts with irregularly drawn red boxes connected via wobbly green lines. It was time to go.

We rented a car. It was cheap – It is crap. Last time here we did the same thing. We’ve grown up and so has our cheapy rental. It has electric windows and a/c. Both appear to be working. It drifts to the left on roads. This could be because it’s old and has done many tired budget miles or it could also do it because it knows I don’t drive on the left as often I used to. Actually, the rental company probably alters the vehicle to drift left especially for their American customers. I paid an extra $10 a day for CDW – I’m getting old and worrisome.

We’re in Raglan – I mentioned that before I know but Raglan is a small surfing town that attracts the kind of backpacker that come for a weekend and stay all summer. We are not kids anymore, neither are we backpackers. This is a vacation away from what we are as much as what we do. They are young and I have grey hair. They are noisy in their bravado and surf bragging and I hope they will calm down before bedtime. I used to be them – I miss it sometimes. I thank them for letting me stay at their hostel for a few nights.

Although we may not necessarily belong here, we do belong everywhere. We both love the road, it doesn’t matter the budget especially when we are safe in knowledge that all hardships are temporary. Bourgeois backpackers – that’s us. I don’t care – I’ve been to more places than most and I’ve been doing this since I was 18 years old. I don’t have a lot to prove anymore except to myself. My inability to sit still whilst buying an expensive and somewhat stationary house proves I obviously am not at peace with my wanderlust. I am terrible at being honest with myself. I don’t even think that statement was necessarily true, that’s how bad I am at it.

A girl checked into the hostel after us yesterday. She was concerned about the $3 discrepancy between her Lonely Planet write-up and the actual cost of a bed in a shared room. We spent $30 on pizza last night. We are both in agreement that traveling with some money is better. Having said all that, just being with fellow travelers is rejuvenating even if we have little in common being both old and on regular vacation. I can’t be bothered to offer my bona-fides: “Yeah, we did 57,000 miles over ’07 and ‘08” sounds so pretentious.

New Zealand is beautiful. Astoundingly so. Still.

I don’t like to backtrack. I refuse to visit somewhere more than once because the world is big and our time on it is very small. The world is small and our impact on it is very big. Think about that too. Go book a plane ticket to somewhere strange but don’t forget to offset your carbon footprint.  I’m very happy to be back here. Nostalgia is a feeling I don’t have much time for in my grinchy heart but I am nostalgic for NZ. We were such greenbacks even though we had more miles under our belt then than most (there I go again with the pretention). India really is the traveler’s fulcrum point – nothing is the same after that. Travelling usually involves a constant level of stress. Even in the most westernized of places, busses must be caught, hostel rooms booked and possessions safeguarded. My lack of that feeling is a little strange to me and probably means the car will breakdown or somebody will steal my yuppie MacBook.

Even stranger is my writing this blog. As you have no doubt realized, I don’t really have anything to say. Tales of our adventurous antics (we borrowed a couple of bikes today and cycled to the beach) sound positively mundane and keen observations of local customs (the shops close generally between 4.30pm and 5pm, although one or two will stay open as late as 6pm) are somewhat moribund. Christmas, however, is quite bizarre in the sun. It’s not very festive but then I’ve been hyper-commercialized by Thanksgiving appearing to start before Halloween and Christmas following a mere six hours after that. Perhaps this is how they do it in normal places around the world. I read the local Raglan newspaper today (published weekly, eight pages, large font).  In their op-ed feature, a local writer opined on the loss of niceness at Christmas by shop staff and shoppers alike. He proposes we call it Nicemas. He was entirely Grinch-like in his berating of this country’s commercial approach to Christmas. He was really quite scathing in tone and word and not at all the person I would elect to be the founder of Nicemas. In other news, eight middle aged couples learned to dance to rock’n’roll music, efficiently and enjoyably taught by a former resident who has just moved back after 20 years of being away (previous place of residence unlisted but the reader was left to assume it was a large city – perhaps Hamilton, 60km up the road).

I wish I could surf. It looks fun for all of 25 seconds. The rest of it seems like an aquatic nightmare. This town is big for surfing due to its, well, big surf. It was also featured in a seminal surf movie from the 1960’s called An Endless Summer. To Raglan’s credit, I haven’t seen one t-shirt emblazoned with the movie’s logo. In Urban Outfitters on Broadway in Seattle they recently received another large shipment of light blue T’s sporting such logo. That’s ironic. The ocean was cold today. That’s reason 23 why I won’t surf. I wish I could though but I’m just not that kind of guy. Even if I could physically do it, there’s something about the culture that I intrinsically wouldn’t be able to grasp. I would always be like the little guy on Fantasy Island, forever in the company of strapping, good looking perfect specimens of youth that say the right things and make the right moves. I have never been particularly cool and surfing would act as a constant reminder of my high school era insistence that Buddy Holly was the best music I ever heard whilst my schoolmates were listening to Duran Duran and INXS.

On a related note – I brought the all-plastic Diana camera with me again on these travels. It captures the world beautifully. It reminds me that my own observations are just as inaccurate, soft around the edges, light streaked and imperfect. I think I look cool using that camera but I probably look like Buddy Holly. Several people have stopped to ask me about it but my explanation falls on befuddled ears. We live in a digital age – analogue crappiness has been supplanted by the iPhone (which also produces crappy images but on a different level). I would love to post images and show you what I’ve been photographing but I have to wait until I get home, get down to the lab, have the film processed, scan the negative, crop, color correct, post-process and upload. By then you won’t care anymore – oh well.

New Zealand smells great. There’s humidity in the air that catches the miniscule smells emanating from the leaves of the sub-tropical fauna and is pushed along by an insistent salt-laden ocean breeze. It’s great for the sinuses. Fruit and vegetables also taste better and they appear to be cheaper. Makes you wonder how such a small country can produce so and the mighty America still pulls its chicken apart with machines. Dining out is EXPENSIVE with small portions yet high quality. That’s another blow to these here American psyches – we just don’t deal well with that concept. We should learn to. It would be better for all concerned. Restaurant service has generally not improved since our last trip. We have been the willing recipients of two separate rounds of free beers due to service inadequacies beyond our control. Perhaps I should start a restaurant exchange program like they have for school children – the Kiwi cooks could show the Americans how to produce perfectly balanced and portion controlled meals whilst the Americans could show the Kiwis how to take a simple fucking order. I joke. The expletive was uncalled for. I’m sorry for that but I respectfully refuse to use the backspace key.

I suppose that’s enough for now. I’m not sure why I’m writing this. My audience is long gone since our last world tour and I certainly don’t do this for any cathartic reasons. I’ll probably post this up on the blog, feel satisfied for five minutes and then casually but intentionally email my friends and family that it’s there. Or, I’ll probably have Sarah post it on her Facebook page. She has more friends than I do and they care about what she does. I could even tweet this monster but it would probably bring down the twittersphere with its girthy and gritty realism. However you have just digested this, please be kind and remember that I crave your attention and accolades.

Kia Ora,

Dave

(Kia Ora means hello – I’ve no idea what goodbye is)

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 11:36 am and is filed under New Zealand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.