Last Day of the Year

I spent the last hours of 2009 traveling from the green bushy mounds of the Coromandel (beach and back country)to the sulpherous expulsions of earth's hot, wet, gassy geothermal belly in Rotorua. Here I saw a slice of what remains of the Maori culture... The geothermal village these people live in (Whakerewarewa) is now a tourist tramping ground for those seeking one of the worlds natural wonders... hot geyesers, hot springs, and boiling mud. The smell was enough to make me nauseous at its memory for the next 24 hours, despite the healing qualities of the steam. The tribe living there put on a performance of one of the Maori's famous expression of identity: the Haka, an ancient war dance involving an intense bugging of the eyes and flicking of the tongue. Incredible. Unsettling, though, was the array of village children, swimming in the lake near village exit screaming for Paheka (white man) to throw down change as they dive for it. It resembled the koi fish and ducks at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, conditioned to gather below the bridge for food pellets during the summer season... Pocket change is fun for a kid, but it seemed a sad existence to make a living by begging. Back in the 12 passenger "Van of Serenity", we pass open fields that dry into a somber dessert frontier, guarded by a giant volcanoe mountain crater. We stop in the valley lake to gather pummus stones for a future foot massage, as the lava nature of our earth's core intended! Stacks of cooled lava line the road... cliffs on which life has struck again! These are the NZ army training areas... with a lone one lane road flowing down the middle. As we drive, so quickly the scenes change. A brilliant lush greenery, evocative of what I've seen as "prehistoric", is soon to appear again. We master windy roads atop brooks and creeks, to the liking of a romantic's poem or Anne of Green Gables. The din of a bickering, tired car load phases away on the peaks of mountain pastures. Looming on our horizon I see growth of windmills arming a wall of great hills. We wind around the cliffside of a great gorge, waterfalls exploding from holes in the rock, feeding the river that carves it. Out of the gorge-eous depths we emerge staring at the back of the tall, white, wind farm circling its face to the plains. This is the landscape of the North Island's main highway heading south... highway one, and its off shoots. We take it to Wellington. A multitude of sheep and cows dot the view in place of billboards. The small town-strips paint a memory of what the 1950's seems like in my mind in America. Baches (a popular ram-shackle interpretation of housing) line neighborhoods and ice cream trucks keep to thier routes through them. Despite it's major growing cities, there are many more barefoot kiwis jumping out of old VW vans fashioned into psycadelic mobile homes than shoe-shined feet clicking alongside matching briefcases. I eat a meat pie and sip and L&P along the way.