Sunday, December 13, 2009

New Zealand take 2

Every good sequel needs something. Whether it be a new character (Lando Calrissian) or a new take on an already established character (Robert Di Nero as Vito Corleone), there has to be something in a sequel to make it interesting enough for people to tune in to the same old scene. Well fear not, this particular sequel has both! Not only to you get the same main character in a different time (6 months older and wiser), but a new character as well. Everyone, I would like you to meet Tracy.

Tracy and I met over the summer in Oregon. I was working in a wine bar at the time and she was in town exploring the possibility of a harvest in Oregon. Thanks in no small part to the Newberg Taco Truck, we hit it off. She ended up working a harvest in Oregon at Torii Mor (while I was working once again at Cristom), and after harvest ended we both landed a spring vintage in Margaret River (her at Vasse Felix, me at Cape Mentelle). Needing something constructive (and ideally financially beneficial) to do in the meantime, we decided to head to New Zealand to do a bit of viticultural work at Felton Road in Central Otago. Turns out they didn't really need us until after Christmas, so we decided to head down a bit earlier and do a bit of vacationing before the work began. So we did.

I met Tracy and her mom Sue in LAX, having left Chicago that morning after spending Thanksgiving with my family in Geneva. Wanting to ensure that this bit of travelling would be as much of a marathon as the last go around, I was booked on the early flight out of Chicago (8am), meaning by the time I hooked up with Tracy and Sue in LA I had already been on the road some 8 hours (thanks to a stop-over in Tuscan). Mercifully we elected not to hang around the airport, heading for a nice early dinner in Santa Monica (after a brief detour through Inglewood). Given that both Tracy and I are vertically unchallenged, upon checking in we decided to try and snag an exit row for the flight over. As it turns out we were in luck. There would be no cramped middle seat with awkward chair leg placement for us. Not only were we in the exit row, we were on the upper level. A free upgrade to business class! Not only that, but the flight was undersold, meaning we had an entire row of business class seating to ourselves. Sipping on a complementary glass of red wine after a rub down with a hot towel, we both slipped off quite easily into the soundest sleep possible on a 777.

The Fiji airport was about as exciting as I remembered it (I forgot to mention we fly Air Pacific yet again, it really is the cheapest means to get to NZ), although this time around I knew that all the shops took American currency, something that would have made my last go-round far more interesting. Another few hours on a slightly smaller plane and we had arrived in Auckland, exactly 15 hours and two days after leaving the states.

I didn't really see much of Auckland the last time I was in NZ, electing instead to head to Australia immediately and drink some damn fine pinots at a wine festival. I had also largely bypassed the north island entirely in favor of exploring the more scenic and less populated south. Our mission was much the same this time around (find some damn fine wine and explore the south island), but we had decided to pick up some wheels for the journey and Auckland was the best place to do that.

I've heard that Auckland has about three quarters of the population of NZ within the city and the surrounding area, meaning it would be about 3 million people or so. A fair amount of concentration in a country the size of Colorado. We had booked three nights in a cheap backpackers/hotel (it really was a cross of both), which we hoped would give us enough time to track down a car and do a bit of sightseeing. Fighting off the jet lag, we wandered the city a bit that afternoon, having dinner at a small cafe in an area of downtown which resembled a European city more than anything else. We discovered exactly two things about Auckland immediately. It is a rather expensive place (especially for NZ), and it is full of Asian people. There were far more Asians than kiwis, or Maoris, or even tourists. The Sky Tower (Auckland's central landmark) was literally overrun with them.

Our second day in Auckland poured down rain, but we were so excited about being in a new place that we didn't care. We walked everywhere, exploring the artistic section, wandering malls and wine shops and cheese shops and bakeries and even a funny hat store. All told, we probably walked 15 miles before 3pm, before finally calling it quits in favor of over-priced beers and people watching. The night ended early, as we wanted to be up fairly early the next morning for the Auckland city car fair, where we hoped our chariot awaited.

Buying a car in New Zealand is rather different than buying a car in most other places. For starters, New Zealand gets lots of quality imports from Korea and Japan, both new and used, so most of the cars on the road are fairly reliable. The government also requires every car on the road to be completely checked over every 6 months to ensure it is in proper working condition. Plus, with the amount of backpackers and tourists that circle the country every year, the used car market is especially robust and cars tend to have a high turnover rate. In short, we were pretty confident that we could find a reliable set of wheels on the cheap that we could turn around and resell to other backpackers on our way out of the country. The best place to do so, according to several sources, was the Auckland city car fair.

We were not disappointed.

It was the first car in the row, a well loved spray paint silver 1986 Mitsubishi Mirage 2dr hatchback. It may have been held together in certain areas with electrical tape, it may have had brakes that squealed like a banshee at every intersection, but it had a phil collins tape in the glove box and a red chili pepper hanging from the mirror. And it had that certain indefinable quality, like fate had brought us to this particular moment for a reason. Maybe it was love. Maybe it was the moldy smell. But we knew we had to have it. We talked its current owner (a British backpacker nursing a nasty hangover) down from $1400 to $800 and an hour later we were proud parents. Its previous owner had named it Micky. We christened it Moldy Milo.

Having sorted out the car in the morning, we still had the rest of the day free to do a little exploring. Tracy had read that one of the nearby islands had a budding wine region, so we booked tickets on a ferry that afternoon. After provisioning ourselves at a farmer's market near the harbor, we set out for Waiheke island.

There are about 30 wineries on Waiheke, making primarily Bordeaux varietals with a dash of syrah here and there for fun. We were a bit dissapointed with the majority of the wines, finding them rather overpriced and uninteresting, but the island itself was quite beautiful, sort of a mixture between South America and Scotland. We did find a beautiful lunch spot and ate quesidillas with a fine rose, and spent most of the afternoon hiking alternatively between vineyards and nature preserves. A ferry ride back at sunset brought Orca whales breeching in the harbor, leaving little doubt that this was a blessed day indeed.

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