March 20, 2008

March 19, 2009

Remuera, Auckland

Piha

With 2 days til I fly home, I was just about to sell Rose.......until the water pump blew going over the Piha Pass this morning(!) -- an NZ$450 repair on a car that I would sell for NZ$2000.  She's a tosser, now.  At first, I got bummed out about this stroke of apparent bad luck.  And then I realized that  Rose did everything she was supposed to do:  she got me safely around all of New Zealand in one piece.  In fact, she pretty much took me everywhere, and in great comfort.  What more could you ask?     Hats off to The Rose Coach!  I'll miss you, kiddo.

Anyway, while trying to sell Rose, I commuted to Piha, Auckland's primary surf spot, 1 hour west of town.  I was skeptical about any surf spot so close to a major metro area.  As it turns out, NZ pulled one last slapper on me:  Piha is really amazing:  great surf, super-beautiful, and some of the friendliest folks anywhere.   It's a lot like a Bolinas, without all the freaky assholes.  There's one little deli-restaurant that serves as the nexus of the community;  it's a good place to grab an espresso and panini and shoot the breeze with the locals.  Like West Marin, the road brings in droves of day trippers, but by 8 or 9, it's super-quiet and peaceful.  

Particularly charming was the "RSA", which is the NZ Officer's Club, and the only place in town to get dinner.  It was a stone's throw from the campground and just happened to have a deck overlooking the Piha Valley with a million-dollar view -- and great food.  At one point, they stopped dinner and said a "grace" and had a moment for all of the fallen soldiers. 

Next time I fly into Auckland Int'l, I'm bee-lining for Piha.   Auckland is not a bad City...but no tourist really wants to be here.  When you arrive, you're itching to see the country.  And when you are at the end of the trip -- like I am -- you're ready to go home.   Poor Auckland:  it'll never get a fair shake from the tourists...

Mar. 8, 2009 (out of order) -- Billabong Pro, Whangamata

Mar. 8, 2009
Billabong Pro, Whangamata


"Homeless" is a concept that doesn't exist in NZ; if you live out of your car, you (and 43,000 Germans) are "freedom camping." Or so I thought.

This morning I was excitedly packing in my tent and stuff and gearing up to surf Otu which was, as of one hour ago, 6 feet clean and fast. (=soopa!), and I was jawing it up with a local bloke, who all of a sudden asks, "so, are you living *rough*, then?"

I looked in the reflection of my car window: right side of my car is caked in goose shit and estuary muck that some kids threw on my car last night, ive got a toothbrush in my mouth and one jandal (flip-flop) on, the inside of my car looks like an REI exploded in the middle of the Sahara Desert (sand and camping gear everywhere), I'm wearing a pair of slacks that I cut into shorts after I lost my job and they are covered on one side in dried Sriracha chile sauce and candle wax(!)

"Yis, I reckon I am."

I am at the Billabong Pro in Whangamata, which is basically the Stinson Bch of Auckland, but as long a drive as Monterrey (Aucklanders will drive 3 hrs each way in one day just to surf; kiwis and Aussies are the biggest drives on the planet per capita). Most of the competitors are teens, and I am stoked to see these young athletes going for it. (It's pretty awesome to have kids around, in general. SF is sorely adult).

Yesterday was hilarious. There was wind swell, but it was kind of stacked and onshore. Then, around 5, the wind shifted offshore. All of a sudden all of the soccer dads at the surf comp told their wives, "eh, love, I'm gonna run up to the dairy and pick up some water and chips for the kids."

Picture like 25 Hovey Clarks parking the family wagon just far enough down the beach that the family can't see, and guilltily padddling out to snag a couple of barrels while their son or daughter is competing down the beach! Surfers will do anything for a moment in the green room. It was working!

Mar. 10 -- Avondale, Auckland

Hi, all:

Sorry I have been off-line. The power-cord on the Acer laptop that I use to process photos and write these blog entries died. I was down at the Billabong Pro surf competition in Whanghamata over the weekend, which was brilliant. I've got a zillion photos, which I will upload in a sec.

I am staying in Avondale at the only Motor Camp in urban Auckland. I got close to selling Rose today, but no dice. I got an offer of NZ$2200. I'd rather fill up a full tank of gas and push her off the cliffs out at Coromandel. Ha ha! If I can't get a fair price -- the market is really saturated -- then I will keep her here 'til next winter. My parents came to NZ last winter and had a horrible time (90% rain days); and I think the will need to give NZ a second chance. They'll be down in Aussie next winter at the same time I will be; The Rose Coach may once again be "the Coach with the Most."

I'm in SW Auckland, which is very much not white, and very interesting to check out. I'm meeting people from South Pacific Atolls, Tanzanians, Pakistanis...pretty interesting.

Tom

Mar.5 -- Happy Birthday, Eve!

The Other Auckland

Did you know that Auckland has the largest population of Pacific Islanders of any city in the world? When I arrived in Nov., I asked several white kiwis if I could find a kava bar. "maybe in South Auckland?" was always the response. South Auckland is also where the occasional violent crime is committed in this town (as reported on NZ National Radio and the newspaper).

I went and checked it out last night by going to (what else?) a shopping mall. Wow, hat an interesting mix of people! It was totally pan-Asian Pacific, with Fijians, Samoans, Tongans, New Caledonians, Indonesians, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Thai, Indian, Burmese, and a few farther-flung ethnicities, such as African and Turkish. And, of course, many Maori heads. It wasn't gangster'd out; seemed to me it was mostly lots of families, and lots of little kids.

I was joking around with some cute kid who's ethnicity was totally baffling to me. He had handsome, almost 'mestizo"/anglo features, with red-brown coloring and spoke a language I had never heard. I asked his dad where they were from: Tahiti. So cool. [Don't they speak French in Tahiti? The kid was speaking a tongue that sounded nothing I had ever heard.]

Most of NZ is still pretty darn white. But you see "pioneer" immigrants in all the little towns. I believe NZ has a pretty tough immigration policy. But it's only a matter of time before NZ diversifies, I think. It's gotta be one of the most attractive places to start a new life. Plus, kiwis are so inherently open-minded, I imagine that foreigners are treated with respect and embraced in these communities.

I tell ya, Australiasia is up-and-coming. (Don't forget that they got oil and gas up the kazoo down here.)

I should also add that Auck has the best Chinese food I've ever tasted.

Mar. 4 -- Uckland

Mar. 4, 2009
Auckland
Back in the sizzle, trying to sell my rizzle...like every one else. When I bought the car, the exchange was .68; today it is .48 -- i.e., I got hosed.

Oddly, I've been able to keep track of the US economy simply by looking at the exchange rate. When the US markets go down, the NZ dollar exchange rate improves. Thus, without looking at the news, I could tell that Monday was a bad day for the US markets b/c the exchange improved from .52 on Friday to .48 today. It has gottten ridiculously cheap here -- good meals for $5 or less, OTD (no tax or gratuity).

I take back any comments I may have made previously about girls in NZ. Now that its the end of the summer and it's hot out, Auckland seems to me -- having been in the stix for so long -- like a teeming beehive of pretty girls. My hormones, after months remission, went berserk today. Why don't the girls hang out at Cape Turnagain {sigh}?

As I walk the streets, I instinctively feel the loose smile of the past few months turn to a furrowed brow, my "mug on mean". I stand taller, move with determination, send out the vibe that I know exactly what I am doing and you probably don't want to fuck with me. Commerce, traffic, diversity, noise, sirens, girls, fashion, pageantry, eye hockey, suits, low-lifes, drunks, tourons. This is my native environment. It's like I'm already home.

Mar. 3 -- Hotwater Bch, Coromandel

Mar. 3, 2009
Hot Water Bch


Super-pretty Hot Water Bch has a thermal spot where, at low tide, you can dig holes in the sand and create your own little hot tub. I watched the sunset with people from all over the world. It was all-time.

Hot Water is also a serious surf spot. There were 2 pros out there, and dear God, they were RIPPING. I knew something was going on while I was walking down the beach to the spot and saw this one dude pull the most impossibly long, stalled-out floater I have ever seen. There was a photographer, too.

I paddled out and was like, "dude, you're KILLING it!" and he heard my accent and he asked where I was from. Turns out dude grew up on the North Shore. I told him I had just read about a pro from Hot Water Bch who competed in the Rip Curl Pro over the weekend at Raglan, and said when I saw him surfing, I thought that I was seeing that guy. Mr. North Shore could have said then, "No, but I'm also a pro." But he didn't even say that! He was super-friendly, grew up with Jack Johnson. We talked out there and he never once said that he was a pro.

I found out this morning from a photographer from San Clemente that he is a "non-competing pro." (I'm still not sure what this means.)

Anyway, Mr. North Shore pulled something I still can't get over. In skating, I think you call it a 50/50 when you go up to the coping, stall for a sec, and then come back around backside. (Or, on a snow pipe, when you hit the top frontside, and quickly flip 270 to your right and drop back in.)

I've seen surfers pull 360s where they hit the lip, then slide backward for a sec, and then pull the board around. But this dude stuck the lip and flipped around 360 in one rapid motion. It was so RAW I still can't get over it.

March 2 -- Opoutere

March 2, 2009
Otoupere - "Thanks, legend."


I was awakened by the sound of someone waxing up their board. Seeing as Taranaki had been blown out and unrideable for days, and I just had done a major cross-island drive the night before in hopes of getting waves, that was a good sound to wake up to.

I am back in Otoupere on the Coromandel Peninsula -- the first place I visited back in Nov. when I finally escaped from Auckland. After all the mind-blowingly beautiful places I've seen, one might think that Otoupere would not be as impressive. Not so: Otupere is like an old lover you see after several years, and they look hot. The place is spectacular.

What really makes it is that the parking lot is 1/4 mile from the beach. You walk through the most amazing, thick forest and think, "there's no way this leads to a beach." And then you get to the little opening onto the dunes, and this spectacular 2 mile-wide white sand beach opens up before you. Not a single sign of development, totally pristine. As the expression goes, "good roads bring bad people; bad roads bring good people." The trail acts as a filter -- you get a much cooler crowd when there's a walk involved: nudists, naturalists, backpackers, etc. No RVs and lager louts, thank you.

I met a cool shaper and his gf from Auckland, and was super-stoked when he saw me get slotted this morning. The water is still warm, and on a sunny morning with no wind, it's about as pleasant as you can imagine.

Some kiwi teens asked me for some "wix", and I was happy to provide. When one kid gave the bar back, he said, "thanks, legend."

Do I really look that old?!