Australia

Australia

First, let me say that excessive travel is hard on the digestive tract.

I may have (and those of you who have lived or traveled with me will know this) a bladder that is roughly the size and shape of a small whale, but apparently my intestines are neither so gracious, nor amenable, so on the plane there were three difficult things other travelers had to deal with: the loud engines, the three squalling children, and my intestines. I only had the kale and strawberries and grits from the farmers market in L.A, I really haven’t been eating much at all in oh, say, three weeks, but it all came back to roost in the fourteen hour flight trans-pacific.

                                                                                                                                                               

           

People of note:

       The man who was wearing a dollar bill tie, with a suit that looked like it had been painted like a wall—you know, sponge brushed. 

       I also sat next to, in the airport, another man who let out a “hum-uh-na-hum-ah” on every third breath in a high pitched exhalation. Not quite a cough, not quite a wheeze, not quite a gurgle.  

                                                                                                                                                        

                 

          I actually slept on the plane, despite the aforementioned three problems (engines, children, intestines). I bought noise cancelling earphones for two out of three problems, and the last problem—well, nothing to be done about that one, really.

          So I think I slept probably about eight or nine hours, actually. I don’t know why I think that, except that I did math in my head at the time and that was the conclusion I came to. We’ll have to trust it.  (Don’t trust it, but that’s ok.)

And then Australia! I cleared customs no problem because I was only going to be there for a day (and yes, I now have a “Welcome to Australia” customs stamp on my passport!) and headed into the main harbor to see the opera house and an area called “The Rocks” which I’d heard had museums and shops and things.

Sydney's Harbor--I tried not to take a picture of the giant cruise ship.

please note the trees in full leaf just above the British Christmas Decorations.

        Oh, but I’d forgotten that Sydney is a city, and so places with museums and shops and things are going to also be expensive. I was also lugging around my giant backpack with several changes of clothes, my laptop, all my medications, my small bag of toiletries, all my necessary electronic items, etc, and doing it all on very little energy.  So I found the Opera House (not hard to find, really) and I found several Ships St. Mary’s Style, and I found lots of people willing to take my money, and I found myself exhausted and dragging from one place to the next with not a lot of inclination to actually look for anything more.  I kept having to remind myself that it was ok not to push, that it was ok to just do what I could do and not drive myself crazy. Looking back on it I wish I had actually gone up and touched the Opera house. You can see a picture of it any time, from far away, but to touch it is something you can’t always do.

               

This is the Opera House. 

         The way that America has Native American art and tourist items is the same way that Australia has Aboriginal art and tourist items. I straight away found a gallery of Aboriginal art which was definitely a higher quality than the stuff I’d ever seen before, but still probably wasn’t “real” in whatever sense you want to define “real.” Or—it was clearly made for the tourist market, and who knows where it came from or who benefited from it. But in any case, it was beautiful, and I like to think that after growing up with my mother, and after going around the Met several years in a row with Susie McTigue, and after living and being friends with Megan White, who talks about things like triangulation, I have picked up some things.

                But it quickly became clear that the gallery I wandered into was the higher end, and there were many many items on the cheaper and less classy end I could have found if I had gone left instead of right. Keychains, plates, coasters—you name it, all in that same style of aboriginal art. Here is an example of aboriginal Art with my favorite featured example: the platypus.

                There weren’t that many people in the part of the city I was in—a group of school children, various business people who looked like they worked in the offices nearby, but it was largely empty, which was bizarre because I’m used to D.C where the tourist centers are never empty. But it’s a little harder to get to Sydney than it is to D.C, although I guess it depends on where you’re coming from.

                I left Sydney’s center early in the afternoon because I was tired. I found a bookstore on my way out and purchased Gould’s Book of Fish, by Richard Flanagan, about a convict sent to a harsh penal colony in Australia who falls in love with a black woman and something something something drastic and horrible—he also paints a book of fish. I haven’t gotten to the love story yet.  

I got my plane to New Zealand at seven PM. I waited at the gate for about an hour, waiting, and they had a news station playing on repeat the whole time. A couple of the news stories were about Sydney news—an industrial fire set off by a car fire, and the local subsequent air reports (all clear); a boy was the victim of a hit and run (very sad, bad time of year)—but other news stories were about the Obamas lighting the white house Christmas tree, which I thought was bizarre because who would care, in Australia, about the Obama’s and their Christmas tree? I mean, maybe they would care about Obama’s opinion on Palestine’s nationhood or something, but their Christmas tree? And maybe it was my own desires, too, showing through. I came to the southern hemisphere partly to escape America, but America is still here, America is everywhere.   

And this is a picture of chocolates in fun shapes! 

            

The last news segment also threw me for a loop—the Smithsonian (IN D.C) has the largest uncut piece of aquamarine in the world (or something).  It occurred to me that the Smithsonian is in my backyard. I can go there anytime, pretty much.  I thought that every country had a museum of that equivalent, but maybe it’s not true. France has the Louvre, England has the British Museum—countries have museums and places that are heralded, but the idea that there is no other Smithsonian is a new one. You will laugh, probably. Of course the Smithsonian is one of a kind, of course! But really, why should it be? Why shouldn’t everyone be doing that type of work as often as they can manage in as many places as they can? We should have Smithsonian’s in every country, at least! And the news item showed this old man’s hands and this brilliant piece of glowing aquamarine, a sort of pyramid shape going round and round, and I just thought, “I don’t remember that. I never saw anything like that. All I saw was dinosaur bones and stuffed tigers.”

I touched down in Christchurch, New Zealand, at 12:20 am. Somehow knowing it was midnight made me much more tired than I was already, and I sort of zombie walked my way up to customs. Jessica Russell had told me that customs in New Zealand would give you “Welcome to Middle Earth!” passport stamps, and that was what I was looking forward to.

                On the plane they had given us a little card to fill out for about all the things we were bringing into the country, and I was so tired that I answered everything truthfully. Yes, I am bringing in trailmix, honey, wood, and hiking boots that may or may not have been in the woods or a freshwater lake in the last thirty days. In fact, I myself may or may not have been in contact with the woods or a freshwater lake in the last thirty days (who can remember things like that? It seems possible).  And no, I don’t have the address of the place I’m staying, nor do I have a visa, and there’s this complicated thing that’s happening where I’m working but they’re not paying me but they are providing for me, so it’s sort of like they’re paying me, but they’re paying me in food, not money.  

                Well, the people at the desk were very nice, and they smiled a lot, but they beckoned me to, “step aside please, just grab your bag from the round about, yes, come this way.”

                I thought for sure that the airline would have lost my checked luggage (Minneapolis to LAX to Sydney to Christchurch over four days, when one of those days didn’t exist because of time difference seems like a good excuse for a bag to go missing) but there it was, right on time, wheeling around the turnstile.

                I grabbed it and was led over to a small area with a couple other visa/baggage rejects. There was one girl who had camping gear (do you have camping equipment? Have you been in contact with the woods or freshwater lakes in the past thirty days?); a man with a shaved head who—something about a stolen or lost visa? Something about Portugal versus Spain. He got cleared up right way—and then there was another woman with a bag from the old army/navy store, splitting at the seams, an alpaca poncho down to her knees, a ukulele that she was strumming, and a large, purple, green and silver hula hoop. She wasn't much older than thirty, with straight, clean brown hair down to her shoulders. Her skirt is browning at the bottom, but her hair is clean and I tried to hold on to that when it was midnight and I was in very close proximity to this person. 

                I opened my bag to find that one of the bowls I brought with me, made by my father as a hostess gift for my house parents, had broken in my bag, so this lady was strumming on her ukele, singing a maybe lullabye in a high pitched, slightly off key voice, and I was picking out bits of broken glass from my underwear and carrying them to a trashcan, hoping that immigration didn't come over and cite me for dangerous weapons or something.

                After a long time they led me away, opened my bag (sans glass bits, by this time) and took the honey that I’d purchased as a hostess gift for my house parents. They let me keep the beeswax candle that was part of the arrangement, but I couldn't keep the jar of honey. They checked my boots for dirt (there wasn't any); they didn’t care about the trailmix; The wood was an ornament and they said that’s fine; I looked clean enough. Really they were only concerned about the honey.

                They led me back to the reject pile and sat me back down to wait.

               

                Hula Hoop woman and I were the last of the rejects. After I did a bit of work to get the conversation going (I didn’t really want to know how to make a hula hoop but I got her to tell me anyway) she told me that there are layers to the experience of New Zealand, and that she’s of the “gypsy, caravaning layer,” and that at the very south, on Stewart Island (near where I’ll be, conveniently enough,) there’s going to be a whole festival of gypsies gathering soon. She said that in her community she’s known as the silent one, the quiet one, the one who doesn’t speak.

                That was hard to believe, as when I was taken off by a visa officer for some information she shouted, “She’s not getting paid for her work!” just in case I wasn’t smart enough to tell the visa lady that myself.  The visa lady took down my information and went away again.
                (Here I will note that though there were two rather attractive visa-men ambling about, the people in charge were clearly the visa-women. The visa men turn out to just be lackeys, told to "do this, do that, and come to us with any problems," and the "us" are the women of the joint.) 

                Hula Hoop woman also told me that she doesn’t like telling people where she’s from or what she’s done in the past because she tries to live in the moment, she tries to take each moment as it comes, tries to live each day to the fullest, not to be burdened by ego, etc etc. Maybe ten minutes later she asked me where I’m from, and then she proceeded to tell me that she hitchhiked all over America.

                “Do you know where Nova Scotia is?” she said.

                I raised my eyebrows a barely imperceptible amount and nodded.

                “I hitch hiked from there.” --Here I should note that her accent was light but probably australian. Her “there” was not British, not south African, not American, and since she was having trouble entering New Zealand, I’ll hazard a guess that she was not a native. So I’m guessing she was from Australia. --“I hitched from there to New York for the Occupy movement, and I hitched from California to Seattle;  and a couple years before I was with a caravan through Panama and Mexico. That was a lot of fun, yes. That was the same year I sailed across the Pacific. Slow way of travel. Only go 15 knots—takes six months to get across. We stopped a couple times, on the islands, to feel the culture, to be one with the people, you know, and then we moved on.”

                And I was thinking, how the hell are you financing any of this?

                Either the answer was illegal or legal. If it was illegal she’d want me to know, in which case I would be uncomfortable, and if the answer was legal or silly, like if her father was funding her, then she would assume I would think less of her, which was probably correct, and she wouldn’t want to tell me.

                So I didn’t ask.

                At some point in our conversation, somewhere between her telling me about how New Zealand’s earth will welcome me, and I should follow my heart if I don’t like the sheep farm and I should leave it, I should leave the sheep farm, do I hear her? I should leave the sheep farm, because the earth will welcome me, and the Maori word for earth is something, and the Maori word for sky is something else, and I was courageous to come all the way out here, etc etc, but really all I’m feeling right now is slightly ill, and tired, so tired, not courageous at all—somewhere in there, or after that, she fell asleep on the couch that she was stretched out on, while I was sitting on the floor, clutching my bags, which still had glass shards lurking in them.

                She fell asleep and I was led away by the woman who took down my information, who told me that normally things work a certain way, but because my case sort of slipped through the cracks in this and this and this way, she would let me do it the way I intended for it to be done originally—namely, I didn’t have to have an expensive work visa. I could just be a normal visitor and volunteer and not have any muss or fuss.
                 They stamped my passport with "New Zealand, 0298530"--no mention of Middle Earth at all--and sent me on my way.

                That night I slept in the airport because my bus from Christchurch left at 7:45 in the morning, and after I cleared customs it was 2:30 in the morning New Zealand time, 12:30AM Australia time, 6:30 PM Los Angeles time the day before, but really none of that mattered because the real problem was that I wouldn’t have enough time to get a hotel before my bus to Ivercargill the next morning. There were people (other backpackers) sleeping on top of chairs, under chairs, along the walls, in any nook they could find. I found a stretch of chairs that looked dark but also somehow ended up being right next to the outside door, and so got very drafty and cold.

                Around 4:30 in the morning all the backpackers got up at once for no reason. I woke up and saw several of them striding, with purpose, off into the depths of the airport. I had no explanation, except that it’s something like how monarch butterflies all know when and where to migrate all at once without training or explanation. So it is with backpackers; except I’m only half a backpacker, and had nowhere to go, so I commandeered the handicapped bathroom and took a spongey bath in the sink.  

                Then I figured out the bus schedule, made friends with an old woman also waiting for the bus, stepped out of the airport (dum dum dum!) and into New Zealand.

Next up, my day getting to Invercargill!