The trip to New Zealand all began when I returned to the United States at Christmas. I realized at that time that if I were to live abroad again, I would prefer to do so in an English speaking country. Although I love the idea of learning new languages and I relish the idea of being fluent in more than one language, I realized that to connect with people immediately, the language of the new country would have to be English. Therefore, I decided to concentrate on looking for jobs in New Zealand and Australia for about a week or so before turning my full attention to looking for jobs in the United States.
The search was done by looking for the acoustical society web site for these countries and then researching and contacting the member companies. I had heard of the New Zealand based Marshall Day Acoustics company while I was in Denmark and so I recognized the name when I saw it on the list of companies. I made contact with the company by using Google to find a list of names of people who worked at Marshall Day and their email addresses. I was lucky and contacted someone who passed my resume to the director of the Christchurch office. The director wrote an email to me to say that he had received my resume and that they were hiring, but that it would probably be a few weeks before I heard from him again. I wrote back to ask if he would be interested in meeting if I could get myself to New Zealand. He responded that he had thought about asking if I might be in New Zealand in the near future because he would have a difficult time in hiring someone he had not met. He told me that he did have an open position and he promised that if I could get to New Zealand, he would not hire anyone else until he had the opportunity to meet with me.
I thought about what to do and the expense of getting to New Zealand. Going to the other side of the earth is exciting but also a bit nerve-wracking. But I realized that the opportunity of interviewing with a company in Christchurch does not come along very often and that I would regret not going down to speak with people from the company. Maybe I would not regret it tomorrow, but perhaps in a few years I would wonder what would have happened. It was one of those times that you are presented with an opportunity that is crazy in nature, but that you simply have to grab onto. After all, what is the point of opportunities if you don't take them? So, I decided to go to New Zealand even though my chances of actually getting the job were slim. Besides, the worst-case scenario was that I had time to tour about New Zealand.
The emails with the company had occurred on Thursday and Friday, January 15 and 16. By Saturday, January 17 I had purchased my tickets and on Thursday, January 22 I started my trip to New Zealand, so this all went very quickly once the decision was made to go.
In order to make the trip affordable, I purchased the tickets in pieces rather than all from one place. The main ticket from Los Angeles to Auckland, New Zealand was purchased through Air New Zealand using an internet special. I used frequent flyer miles to purchase the ticket from Boston to Los Angeles and the Qantas (the Australian airline) web site to purchase a ticket from Auckland to Christchurch. The length of the trip would only be a little more than a week which was unfortunate, but the brevity was dictated by interviews with a company in the US, which was tentatively scheduled for early February.
Once the airline tickets were purchased, I spent several intense days with my guidebooks (Rough Guide and LP) trying to figure out where to go and what to see. There is so much to see in New Zealand that I wanted to try to see as much as possible in my short time. A person I met later in one of the hostels related how people go to Australia, see how big it is and ask how they can possible see anything. On the other hand, people go to New Zealand, see how small it is and ask how they can possibly see everything. Since the trip was so short, I wanted to make sure that all of my transportation and accommodation were booked so that I would not be stuck due to a full bus or walking all over town in search of a hostel with room. These fears were due to warnings in the guidebooks about full occupancies during the summer months (don't forget that summer in NZ is our winter), but it actually was not a problem. But, I could not know that before I got to NZ and so I booked everything online or by telephone including trains, busses, flights and hostels.
So, those are my reasons for going and some of the logistics of the trip. Now on to New Zealand!
This series of emails will be a bit different from the other emails which I have written about my travels. The emphasis of these emails will not be as much on what I did as much as the people that I met along the way. As a single traveler, one is far more apt to meet other travelers than if one is traveling with a companion. When you travel with someone else, you tend to spend most of your time with that person which is fantastic, but I think that other people may see it as an obstacle to engaging you in conversation. But, as a solo traveler, one is more apt to want to engage strangers in conversations and since other solo travelers may feel the same way, it makes it easier to meet people. Plus, I was staying in hostels and sleeping in shared rooms which means that I had several roommates to meet.
I left on Thursday, January 22 for LA where I would catch my flight to New Zealand the next day. Logistically, I could have flown to LA on the same day of my flight to New Zealand, but I would have been pushing it and risking missing my flight if the LA bound flight had been late. My friends Renee, Mark and Luke who live in Long Beach were nice enough to take me in for the night and to make sure that I caught my flight in the morning. I know Renee from my time at Washington University in St. Louis and the Catholic Student Center there. Renee is one of the people who have had a profound effect on my life and so it was really good to see her, her husband Mark who has been a tremendous help in the past in trying to find funding for my studies and their new son, Luke. Renee had two friends at Wash U who married two of Mark’s friends at his alma mater, Purdue. The mix of Wash U women with Purdue men seems to be a potent one. Thankfully the two universities are far enough apart geographically that the mixing of coeds does not happen too often or no one at either school would get any class work done. I also got to meet their friend, Ruth who has been on this email list for some time, but who I have never met before.
On Friday, January 23 I boarded my flight bound for Auckland, New Zealand. I remember sitting in the airport prior to boarding and trying not to think about the fact that I was about to go to New Zealand. Plus I would be arriving in Auckland on Saturday at midnight and I would need to figure out how to get myself to where I was staying for the night. It was easier just to be present in the moment than to worry about all of that when I could not do anything about it at that time anyway.
You know it is a long flight when the in-flight entertainment includes four movies. The flight was scheduled to take 12 hours and 45 minutes. Fortunately, the Air New Zealand flight was very comfortable and I had two seats to myself so that I could spread out. Air New Zealand really plays up on the Lord of the Rings popularity and it calls itself "the airline to Middle Earth". Several of its planes have been named after characters from the books and decorated with pictures of the actors. Plus the in-flight entertainment included a piece about the filming of the movies with interviews with the actors and footage of the filming.
The time difference between Eastern Standard Time and New Zealand is only six hours (NZ is 18 hours ahead). The flight took so long because we crossed both the equator and the date line. This trip was the first time that I had been to the southern hemisphere and the first time I was in Australasia (the continent of Australia, New Zealand and Melanesia (the islands in the Pacific northeast of Australia and south of Micronesia including Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and the Fijis). I had never heard of this name before I started researching for this trip).
Geographically, New Zealand consists of two main islands: South Island and North Island (I imagine that people spent weeks if not months coming up with those names) as well as a collection of smaller islands, some hundreds of kilometers away. The country is 10,400 km southwest of the US and 2250 km east of Australia. At 268000 square km in area, New Zealand is a little larger than the UK and about two-thirds the size of California. The country is inhabited by about 4 million people, 1 million of who live in the city of Auckland.
Both the North and the South Islands have mountains which were formed by different geological processes. In the North Island, the main process is volcanic and there is a rough line of volcanoes along the island, some of which are still active. In fact, the city of Auckland there are over 50 volcanic cones which rise up from the plains. New Zealand's largest lake, Lake Taupo was formed by a volcanic explosion in 186 AD and still has thermal areas nearby. In the South Island, two tectonic plates are smashing into each other, giving rise to the Alps which extend along the length of the island. The Alps continue to grow at a rate of 10mm per year. The islands receive a prodigious amount of rainfall, resulting in a great number of rivers and lakes.
New Zealand is rather young for a country, officially becoming a self-governing British colony in 1856 and a dominion in 1907. However, it was not a fully independent country until 1947. That is not to say that people did not inhabit the islands before settlers from Europe arrived. It is believed that the first Polynesian people who were the ancestors of the Maori arrived between 1000 and 1100 AD. The Maori are the native people of the land who would later struggle with the European settlers for land and rights. It is a struggle which continues to this day.
It was actually a Dutchman by the name of Abel Tasman who first set eyes on the South Island in 1642. Tasmans expedition was intercepted by a Maori war canoe and four of the Dutch sailors were killed before Tasman left the harbor. It was not until 1769 that a European returned in the form of James Cook who landed on the east side of the South Island. He made contact with the Maori who he described as a sophisticated people with a highly formalized social structure and impressive skills despite the lack of metal tools. Cook claimed the land in the name of Britain without consulting the Maori and much to the annoyance of the Crown which was spread a bit thin at that time with so many territories to govern. Unknown to Cook, the French were also landing on New Zealand at this time, but it was the British who would later sigh the Treaty of Waitangi with the Maori and therefore gain possession of the islands.
Whalers, sealers and escaped convicts from Australia began to arrive and to create a lawless frontier which Charles Darwin described as the "very refuse of Society". The Maori found themselves fighting intertribal wars and losing their identity with the influx of new people. The New Zealand War broke out on the North Island in 1860 between factions of the Maori and the colonists over the land and the Maori were defeated. The defeat resulted in the confiscation of land and the purchase of land from the Maori.
By the end of the 19th century, the country had been unified by a series of roads and rails. Most of the land had been bought up from the Maori and New Zealand became an agricultural and pastoral society. Wool became one of the main exports, only to be overtaken by meat once refrigerated shipping became possible. In 1893, New Zealand became the first nation in the world to enact full female suffrage and an old age pension in 1898. The standard of living by this time was one of the highest in the world.
By 1907, New Zealand was a dominion which meant that it controlled its own foreign policy, but a sense of patriotism to the motherland led to involvement in World War I with a tenth of the population involved in the war effort. The 1920s brought the depression, but also the birth of the welfare state which was the first in the world and the most comprehensive and integrated. A national health service provided free health care and medicines. Maori welfare was also on the agenda.
World War II saw one-third of the male population involved in the war. But, the war made the distance from the UK and the sphere of influence of the US very clear and New Zealand became an independent country. New Zealand troops would also serve in Korea and New Zealand joined the Anzus defense pact with Australia and the US, pledging mutual aid in the event of an attack. By the end of World War II, New Zealand was the most prosperous country in the world with a high quality of life and the welfare state to fall on. Between 1947 and 1975, 77,000 people from Britain used the New Zealand government's assisted passage to move to New Zealand to fill job vacancies. However, the prosperity did not always extend to the Maori who were suffering from unemployment and social unrest.
The 1970s were not kind times to New Zealand which suffered from debt and a slip in the quality of life due to the energy crises and decreasing exports. Unemployment rose and people began to leave the country in search of better work. Race relations hit an all time low with the Maori pushing for their rights and immigrants from the south Pacific islands being harassed.
In order to solve these problems, one of the world's most regulated economies became one of the most deregulated in the early 1980s. Income tax was cut, state companies privatized and the dollar was devalued. Maori issues spurred the government to give the Maori language greater prominence in schools and the media and to legally ban discrimination. New Zealand refused to allow US warships to dock unless they declared they were nuclear free and the US withdrew support from the Anzus defense pact, leaving New Zealand to fend for itself. Tensions between the US and NZ would remain high until the Clinton years when the problems were smoothed over. New Zealand also took the lead in protesting the French nuclear testing in the Pacific leading to the sinking of the Greenpeace ship, The Rainbow Warrior in Auckland's harbor by French commandos in 1985. The stock market crash in the late 1980's affected New Zealand badly and resulted in dramatic economic reforms.
By the 1990's the government had introduced free market reforms and welfare programs were cut. New Zealand made efforts to diversify its economy and to extend its trade to Asia and the US. By the middle of the 1990's the economy had improved greatly, but the gap between the rich and the poor widened. The government agreed to pay out $1 billion to compensate the Maori for land which was confiscated as far back as the 19th century. Today signs are in both English and in Maori and there are genuine attempts to improve the race relationships. Tourism now accounts for the largest proportion of the GDP with farming now only accounting for about 10% of the GDP.
Of all of the countries where I have traveled, NZ is the most set up for backpackers. Hostels are plentiful and include kitchens, sometimes pools and often transfers from the bus and there are backpacker busses, tours and discounts. The passenger train service in NZ is defunct with limited lines still open and those are mostly for tourists. The primary means of transportation is by bus and there are two main bus companies in addition to the backpacker busses. Roads are windy and sometimes treacherous which makes travel between cities take much longer than you would expect just based on the distances. There are also several small, domestic airlines which make hops between cities to save time.
Unless you want to fly, the only way between the North and the South Islands is by ferry. The ferry is not cheap with tickets costing about $50 one way. The cost of bringing a car on the ferry can be as high as several hundred dollars, but discounts are given for booking far in advance and for bringing cars across as odd hours such as the 4 AM ferry. The least expensive ferry for a car is $150 and $80 for a motorcycle. There is a huge proliferation of used cars in NZ and so many backpackers choose to buy cars if they plan to stay in NZ for over a month. I saw lots of cars in used car lots for less than $5000 and there are special sales in the cities where backpackers meet to buy and sell cars from each other. Gasoline cost $1.17 per liter when I was there. (Note that all prices which are mentioned in these emails are in New Zealand Dollars which was $1.25 NZ = $1 US at the time I was in New Zealand).
Now that the background is out of the way, the adventure starts in Auckland with the next edition. The Lonely Planet New Zealand and the Rough Guide to New Zealand were referenced for this email.
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