Home Base

The road has brought me back to Michigan once more, which means that it's time for a relax-and-reboot transition. I hope you'll stick with me as I soak up the last of my memories and prepare myself for the next leap forward. For now Mission Moving On is still a work in progress.

There and back again

With less than a week now to go before our flight back to the States, I'm starting to get asked: how does it feel to be leaving New Zealand? And let me tell you, no one is more interested in finding an answer to that question than I am. There are a lot of thoughts and feelings flying around right now, and not a lot of them are very articulate.

But here's the best analogy I've come up with so far: it feels like you're nearing the end of a truly delicious dessert. And even though you know you're not really hungry anymore, and so it's really the right time to run out, you still feel a little anxious about being finally, irrevocably out of mouthfuls. Because it's so incredibly scrumptious, and because you don't know when you'll get a chance to have it again, and so part of you still wants the dessert to go on forever. Or at least, if you have to be done eating it, you wish you could keep tasting it whenever you wanted to. You feel nervous that the memory of the taste just isn't going to be enough. And yet at the same time you know that in a while, after the "where did my pudding go?" sadness wears off a little, you'll be glad that you didn't overeat. You'll know that your portion was that "just right" amount that leads to maximum appreciation of your dessert experience.

So here we are, taking our last bites of New Zealand, trying to enjoy every one. And watching New Zealand like you watch loved ones, when you know you're going to be apart, and you want to memorize every little detail about them to keep with you while they're away. Here's some impressions of what our last road trip to the Coromandel had to offer.

Will Work for Beer

Tommy and I were quite keen to have one last WWOOFing experience before leaving New Zealand, so we'd been keeping our eye on the WWOOF "hotlist," which features last-minute requests for workers. And when we saw the listing for Mike's Organic Brewery, just outside beautiful Mount Taranaki, we knew we had found our place...

Good Beer

Good Views

Great People

WWOOFing is one of those exciting opportunities to work for something other than money. Not that the cash overfloweth at this stage of the trip, but our time is even shorter. And it seems to cut out the middle man somehow: instead of menial labor in exchange for petty cash that probably would have gone toward pasta and beer anyway, now we can go straight to the source. We can clean, rake, paint, and bottle and seconds later have a cold lager in our hands, great new friends all around, and the afternoon off to explore. It makes the work itself seem so much more intimately connected to all that goodness.

Neverland and camp sites at the end of the rainbow

There's more than a little magic in New Zealand, and sometimes you know for sure that it's gotten inside you. This is our cliff, at the northmost tip of New Zealand, where we napped and made up fairy tales.


And here's our campsite at the end of the rainbow. I know...it's a little gratuitous.


If there's one thing I really hope I can hang onto from this experience, it's the sensation of moving through mythic space. We weave ourselves into new stories every day, whether we write, speak, sing, or walk them, and here I know that being a storyteller is sort of like being a magician. Choose your own adventure. As Captain Planet would say, the power is yours.

Car meets curb and we meet friends

Once upon a time, Tommy and Lauren set out in their friend Kev's car to visit Northland. Several hours into the drive, that car met a curb, and jumped right over it in excitement. Which, as Lauren and Tommy now know, is not good for either tie rods or drive shafts. Things seemed likely to get a bit pathetic. But who should happen along at that moment but an ex-pat American couple with a swanky, Victorian-style B&B overlooking the sea. "Come stay with us," they said, "and we'll give you food and a room you could never in your life hope to afford in exchange for painting walls in our new house." And so Lauren and Tommy got to experience the flashest, most unexpected WWOOF stay imaginable while their car got a whole new set of parts.

There's another way to tell that story, which would involve some supernatural narrative structuring and the drawing of some divine-type conclusions. Our hosts put forward the idea that the whole ordeal was possibly "meant to be." And I can't deny that there is something that feels extra-coincidental about it all: the timing of it, our increased ability to accept and let go at this stage in the trip, our hosts' incredible generosity. But I also feel a sort of postcolonial, postmodern inhibition about implying that we were somehow singled out by the universe for special treatment. I feel nervous about making a religion out of being fortunate, overextrapolating from being incredibly lucky. In equal measure I desire and fear to construct universal principles from the experience of being taken care of. Is it possible to talk about blessings without talking about their opposite? Not curses, necessarily, but even the absence of good and comfort and care? Why me, yes, and also why not someone else?

And so, since that particular question seems unlikely to resolve itself anytime soon, having kept many quicker and wiser minds awake for centuries already, for now I'll stick with the more straightforward story and allow you to come to your own conclusions. We had an accident that could have been much worse. We were taken in by a lovely family and got to stay in this house...

in this room...

with this view...

and we were filled with gratitude and wonder.

Fakatonga

One of the motivating factors for embarking on my New Zealand adventure this year was the Peace Corps placement of my friend Alicia in the tiny Pacific Island chain of Tonga. Only three hours from New Zealand, but isolated and tourist-free enough that I probably wouldn't have ever heard of it, much less visited, if not for Alicia. We had talked about crossing paths in the Pacific for at least a year, and then a few weeks ago I found a magically cheap flight and booked myself a ten-day holiday from my holiday.

The trip was incredibly rich and packed with new impressions and thoughts. I spent time with Peace Corps volunteers, crazy expats, Tongan families, as well as beautiful beaches and palm trees. Because Tonga receives few tourists, and because I was blessed by a friend who's now pretty much fluent in Tongan, I got to see a very varied slice of Pacific Island life and get some insight into the Peace Corps experience. I'll try to show you a bit of it via a (perhaps overly long) photo tour.

The domestic flight from the island of Tongatapu to the Ha'apai island chain. I flew over on a tiny six-seater plane, sitting next to the luggage, and gaping shamelessly at the islands and reefs and little waves that I pretended were dolphins. Those are colors I don't think I had ever seen before in nature.

I arrived in Ha'apai to a greeting party of Alicia, several curious Tongan children, and Mui Mui, Alicia's singularly adorable adopted dog. The pampered "palangi" (or white people's) dogs are a source of endless amusement to the Tongans, whose dogs - like the pigs and chickens - generally roam at will, feed where they can, and eventually are eaten by the family for a special treat. But don't worry...Mui Mui is off the menu now.

Most Tongans work at subsistence farming, and Alicia's neighbors kept us well provided with food from their bush plot. Like these "hopa" bananas, which we later fried for breakfast or made into countless loves of banana bread.

Sunsets in the Pacific seem invariably beautiful and are the Tongans' favorite time for a warm evening swim. Here's Alicia with the neighbor kids and Mui Mui, followed by the spectacular sunset on our night at Uoleva.

And here's Uoleva during the day. Thanks to Alicia's friendships with the residents of Ha'apai, we got to spend two gorgeous, practically free days on this uninhabited resort island, swimming and snorkeling on the reefs: a nice look at how the slightly less poverty-line tourists might see the Pacific.

We even got a free snorkeling trip on the way back.

We also got to spend a lot of time with Alicia's incredibly hospitable and generous neighbors. They invited me to spend a traditional Sunday with them, making lu in the umu (coconut oven, pictured above) and then dressing us up in Tongan mats to go to church (below...Alicia and Tupou) while our big meal cooked. The afternoon is then spent in a colossal nap.

And when I left, the family even presented me with some traditional Tongan gifts, including this gorgeous sea turtle shell, which the Tongans are allowed to harvest, but which U.S. Customs prohibits me from taking home. We called to ask and they basically laughed in our faces. Would you like some ivory and gorilla hands with that? Maybe a nice tiger-skin rug? O.K...point taken.

All in all, I had a wonderful stay, experienced incredible hospitality, and also got eaten alive by mosquitos, sunburnt, and stung by a tiny jellyfish. I grew quite attached, actually. I hope I get to cross paths with some of those beautiful people again soon.

Kiwi Hospitality

There's another horn that needs tooting, I've realized. The New Zealand countryside can't steal all the glory. Tribute must also be paid to my wonderful hosts, the Kiwi friends and friends-of-friends who have been taking me into their homes and and bringing me along on their holidays. In Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Tongariro, Akaroa, and Arthur's Pass, I've been fed and housed and driven about by the most wonderful people, and I'd like you to meet them too.

Me and Tommy with Beth, Laura, and Kev: youth workers and North Island hosts extraordinaires. They worked at a summer camp with our friend Luisa last year, and this year they have offered us their homes and cars whenever we needed to clean up, rest a bit, or stage some northern adventures. Pretty incredible for people who had never met us before January.

Tommy with Juliette, Jane, and Megan; Tommy with Richard. I met Juliette, Megan, and Richard in France (you may remember them from the photos of the castle holiday), and they've since introduced me to a whole network of fun-loving Kiwis and to a variety of typically Kiwi holiday destinations down south. You couldn't ask for more delightful, silly, and generous friends.

Giving and receiving hospitality is one of the most marvelous parts of travel for me. The "pay it forward" economy of helping someone along on a journey seems such a strong proof against the lie that humans are inherently selfish. It restores your faith in the potentially exponential effects of friendship. And I hope that someday, I'll be able to pass some of this good energy on to others. Negative emotions aren't the only ones that snowball and pick up speed when you roll them down a hill.