JUST CATCHIN' UP

Chris, Susie & Martty contemplating cliff diving on the West Coast

Well crap, the inevitable has happened. I drug my feet on writing new entries on this blog and before I knew it, more than a few months had passed. I’d been trying to keep it updated about once a month, but now it would take a major, novel-length entry to get caught up so what follows is my totally random, Cliff Notes take on our New Zealand experience the past few months. I'm also going to throw in some random photos for those who don't want to tax your brain cells.

Bought a couple couches to make our tiny house a bit more livable

I had hoped I wouldn’t get complacent about keeping this thing current, because if nothing else, when my mind is completely gone it will serve as a reminder of our experiences here. Of course, whether or not we or anyone else will ever go back and look at it is another matter. It may turn out to be the cyber-equivalent of a tree falling in the forest. When no one hears it, does it make a noise?

When our kids left after the Holidays, I drove them to Christchurch, about seven hours away, to catch their respective planes. I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is still the furthest either Chris or I had been from Takaka since we got here over a year ago. Therein lays one of the fantasies of living/ working in a foreign country. When we were making plans to move here, I for one thought that within a year or so I’d have checked out every little wide spot in the road and have become a virtual walking guidebook, but in fact, we saw about 10 times more of NZ in the 3 weeks we were here with Abby 4 years ago than we’ve seen in the 15 months we’ve been living here. We are getting pretty familiar with the Golden Bay area though. Go ahead, ask me anything.

New Zealand horses are also small. This one appeared to be looking for the toilet. We couldn't find it either.

And halle-friggen-lujah, we finally got sorta-high speed internet. We have a very small “data cap,” (3 lousy gigabytes per month) …a combination of the amount we upload and download…but at least we don’t have to take a beach walk while waiting for the next webpage to load. New Zealand will never win any prizes for their advanced technology. It would be a stretch to call New Zealand broadband “high speed,” and there’s no such thing as the unlimited usage common in most parts of the civilized world. I’d never encountered the term, “data cap,” but as with all the ISP’s here, you buy in at a certain level of usage. The biggest package available from our provider is 30 GB’s. I’ve heard some Americans are howling about Comcast and others proposing a minimum data cap of 50 GB’s…don’t come whining to me for sympathy.

Zing, our world music choir performs at the local Mardi Gras show. The crowd went nuts.

It’s funny how the internet has much the same addictive appeal as heroin….maybe that’s just for American’s, though. Kiwi’s just don’t seem to get too worked up about it; the internet (or much of anything else for that matter). Right now I’m online, streaming KBBI radio trying to get the latest on the fire out East End Road, very close to our Homer house. Fortunately, the wind seems to be blowing it away from our place.

Tom talks fishing with one of his few New Zealand friends

We’ve had a procession of visitors since early December. After our kids left in January, Martty and Susie were here from Washington for a couple weeks and a bit later Rusty and Dia, from California, spent a month here. With both groups, we spent a fair amount of time exploring the local scene and taking lots of walks. Weather was very good for those weeks. Chris’ brother Jim came for Easter weekend…a little tag-on to a business trip to Singapore. Rusty and I managed to get in some guitar playing time most days as I struggled to learn something other than the “cowboy chords” I typically stick with.

Martty & Susie bill to bill

Jim (Chris' little brother), Chris, me, Rusty, Dia

Formal shot at a cool rock formation about an hour from here

In case you don’t already know, the Holman’s, along with Paul Dungan and Jenny Carroll bought a small, camp-worthy van that they’ve left with us and are renting it out to any of our or their friends who come this way. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll hook you up. In the meanwhile, I get to not only drive it, but clean it, change the oil and replace broken fan and other belts. But whining aside, it has been nice to have a fossil-fuel powered vehicle to get around when Chris is off to work with our car.

Us with Martty & Susie. Because of the slope of the beach, Martty looks taller than he really is.

Probably our most significant pursuit other than Chris’ work, of course, has been our application to Immigration New Zealand to seek status as Permanent Residency. Right now, we’re in NZ on 3 year work visas, which would mean that if one of us weren’t working, we’d be booted out, post haste. Permanent Residency isn’t citizenship, but pretty close. With that status, we wouldn’t be tied to working and would be able to do pretty much anything as far as coming and going from the country and being eligible for all the bennies that a good socialist country offers; health care, retirement, voting rights and so on.

Found this baby fur seal on the beach. Made reallygood sandwiches.

If we were the spring chickens we once were…specifically, under age 56…immigration would be no problem. They rate all applicants for immigration on a point system with points given for each of the items on their 40 page form, among other things, having a job in NZ, having a college degree or other specific training, good English skills, good personal hygiene and so forth. So if it weren’t for this age thing, we’d be shoo-in’s. As it is, we have to request an exemption to the age-limit policy to the Minister of Immigration before we can even submit an application. I just hope the $20 I slipped in the envelope swings things our way.

Since these kinds of exemptions to policy are so rare, the folks at the immigration office don’t really know what to tell us, so instead, they just make up whatever pops in their mind, which would be much less irritating if we were just asking their opinion on whether the Brumbies are a better rugby team than the Crusaders. So after several false leads from the people who should know better, we’ve submitted our best case “package” to the Minister and are anxiously watching the mail for a decision. If nothing else, we can fake being Kiwi’s since we both have NZ driver’s licenses now.

I suppose even if they turn us down cold it would make our planning for the future a bit easier…one less option to muddy the water. As if there weren’t enough factors out there to consider already. Do we (or at least Chris) keep working? Retire? Work part time? US or NZ? Sell the Homer house or keep it? Buy a house somewhere else? Move back to Homer? Anchorage? Oregon or somewhere else? Where will our kids end up? Will we ever have grandchildren? Will we ever score on the Lotto?

Stay tuned.

CARE FOR SOME MOA?

Summoning the moa spirits

If you’ve read any of these blog entries, you may remember that our kids were here over Christmas along with Abby’s partner, Paddy and his younger brother Matt. All of them tend toward the unconventional, so this particular day they were off on a hike at the top of the infamous “Takaka Hill,” a high ridge that divides GoldenBay from the rest of New Zealand. So in their not-so-conventional way, they took off cross-country on a basic adventure-exploration.

Most of the north end of the South Island is made up of limestone, and as such is pretty much honeycombed with caves, pits and labyrinths caused by water seeping, dissolving and re-forming in various ways. One common formation is called a sinkhole, which is just a vertical hole that can be anywhere from a few feet to over a 1000 feet deep. Often, caves open from, or lead to sinkholes.

Best way in and out of a sinkhole. Note special climbing footwear.

In their little hike, the group had been traipsing over a landscape that’s hard to describe. It’s basic limestone but has been eroded to create an incredibly rough, yet generally horizontal, surface where the highs and lows can vary a few feet over a very short distance. Definitely not ADA compliant. The highs are knife-edged shoe shredders and the lows are ankle breaking, foot wedgers so it was slow going, but they did happen on a few sinkholes. And, as with any troop of monkeys, they had to get down into them if possible. Since they hadn’t brought their climbing equipment, it was done without a net so to speak.

Apparently animals are curious (or clumsy or maybe stupid) because the main thing the similarly curious troop discovered was that all the bottoms of the sinkholes were littered with bones. It seems as though the local livestock and a few wild (introduced) mammals have been falling into these holes for years with little hope for escape seeing as how they are short on opposing thumbs. So after collecting a skull or two, and about the time the troop was about to head back to the road, they found another sinkhole that was narrow enough to get down without ropes so, of course, in they went.

Actual sinkhole where this particular moa had been lurking for a few hundred years

They tell me that once you’re in a sinkhole, you look for caves opening off the sides, so that was just what Ian was doing when he spotted a long bone, unlike what they’d found in the other holes. So without tools except fingernails, they commenced to dig through the mud at the bottom and came up with a good sack-full of bones. With Abby and Paddy having recently suffered through intensive anatomy courses, they realized that there was something unusual with the bones. There were three knobs (not a medical term) on the end of what were obviously leg bones as opposed to the two present on pretty much all mammals. And certain bones had a distinct yellowish color. So the crew packed up what they could find with the tools they had or in their case, didn’t have, and headed home.

A moa skeleton in a Christchurch museum; standard size in from, giant in rear

As with anyone of his generation, Ian headed straight for the computer. They had a hunch it could be a moa, but needed to know a little more, and who knows more than the internet? Indeed, this was a moa, or at least a boxful of moa bones, but not the whole bird.

Another view of a regular sized moa...about 6 1/2 feet tall

If you don’t know, a moa is an extinct, flightless bird related to the ostrich, emu, cassowary and even the kiwi. There was a giant version that stood about 12 feet with neck extended up, but the “standard” version is more like six and a half feet tall. Moas have been considered extinct for 400 to 800 hundred years, depending on who you believe, and were endemic to New Zealand. What our group found was a standard version…its legs were over 3 feet long.

Bones found on the 1st trip. A few more have been added, since.

So, not knowing if the find should be reported or if so, to whom, Ian made some calls and wrote some emails to various ministries…not preachers, but NZ governmental departments. He ended up with a letter from The Ministry of Culture and Heritage that would have allowed him to take the bones back to Alaska if he so chose, which he didn’t. Instead, he dumped them on his old man, hoping he’d go back up the hill and find the rest of the skeleton.

A month or so later, I, the old man in question, with a couple trusty helpers and the aid of a hand drawn treasure map, a climbing rope and miscellaneous gear, found the right hole and some more bones. The most exciting thing was finding most the claws, but much of the spine, some toes, most the ribs and the skull are still out there somewhere. Someday, I’ll have another go.