Go North, middle aged man

February 18, 2007

From Christchurch on New Zealand’s South Island, I flew to Wellington on the more populous North Island. As a city, Wellington is kind of like me – cosmopolitan, cultured, sophisticated, fairly tidy, and only occasionally gridlocked. It is situated on a broad natural harbor and the waterfront has been redeveloped with bars and restaurants and a theater and museum complex (excuse me, “a theatre and musemu complxe”). I saw a nice performance of an American play called “Doubt”. As the capital there are also governmental offices, the parliament, state libraries and the like, and some pretty good shopping opportunities.

I took a guided tour of the city. But no buses for your intrepid Walkabout; as part of my commitment to remain on the cutting edge of societal evolution I Segwayed. You remember the Segway -- that miraculous new personal transportation device introduced to much mystery and hype a few years back. Then we didn’t hear anything more about it, except when Bush fell off one. Well they are still around and turn out to be a nifty way to do a city tour, at least for a compact place like Wellington with good sidewalks and parks. Fifteen minutes of instruction had me up and running, if that is the word, and I don’t see how it could be. You move forward and backward by shifting your weight; the more you lean the faster you travel. A rotating handgrip lets you turn left and right. The only tricky part is getting the correct lean in the turns so that centrifugal forces don’t chuck you off – kind of like in skiing. It quickly became intuitive and I was zipping around town at 12 kilometers per hour, up and down steep slopes. I can’t recall anything we saw on the tour, but it was great fun playing with the device. I know many of you are starting to put together your gift lists for my birthday, Hanukah, Christmas, or Walkabout Appreciation Day, so I’ll just mention in passing that I don’t currently own a Segway.

Before I segue from the Segway though, I will say that I’m not sure it works yet as a mobility device for the elderly. It is a little tricky at higher speeds and not the sort of thing you would put a frail and brittle-boned aunt on. You also need to stand up, which is a tiring for extended periods. I expect there’s further work to be done on that front. At present, other than as a toy better uses would be for police patrolling in urban environments or for commutes between home and local mass transit stations.

Wellington also has a really top notch national history and culture museum called Te Papa, which means something or other in Maori. The Kiwis are good about using the Maori language alongside English – fair compensation, I suppose, for stealing their country. I spent the better part of a day wandering the museum learning fun facts to know and tell about New Zealand. To confirm your worst fears, I intend to share them with you now. The museum is one of these new style interactive ones with lots of buttons to push and panels to slide, perfect for people like me with limited attention spans. I appreciate that you don’t have the benefits of audio visual aids so to liven this up I recommend the following: put a bottle of wine, beer or other age appropriate beverage in front of you while reading these fun facts. Each time a fact surprises you and you think, “How fascinating! I’ll have to remember that!” pour yourself a refreshing glass. Alternatively, each time you think “Why is Walkabout telling me all this drivel? I wonder what’s on the telly?” hit yourself over the head with the bottle.

New Zealand is the remotest significantly inhabited spot on earth. Once there, a four hour plane flight is needed to get you to the second most remote, Australia. The museum illustrated this with a nifty New Zealand-centric map. Aside from Australia and Antarctica, you can go 6,000 or 8,000 miles in any direction and find only water. Perhaps in consequence, New Zealand is also the most recently inhabited significant piece of real estate. It was settled by the Polynesian ancestors of today’s Maori about 1,000 years ago. The Maori had no written language prior to the arrival of whites in the early 1800s, but kept elaborate records of ancestry through wooden carvings and oral tradition. Remarkably, individual Maori can trace their lineage back to one of nine long boats that reached the islands a millennium ago. This had been dismissed as legend, but recent genealogical studies confirm that all Maori come from only 90 female lines and each boat would have carried 10 women. The navigational skill of the first settlers was remarkable. At a time when European sailors were hugging the Mediterranean coasts, the Polynesians were regularly crossing thousands of miles of open Pacific to precise locations. It is thought that they had located the “Land of the Long White Cloud” on previous expeditions and the first nine long boats expected to find it just where they did. Take a moment to consider how incredible that was! When you are done, move on the next paragraph.

The natural history of New Zealand is similarly surprising. It broke away some 80 million years ago from the super-continent of Gondwanaland. Current thinking is that this happened on a Tuesday. It has been isolated ever since so it retained a primitive flora and fauna with virtually no mammals. On other significant land masses (Australia excepted) we mammals were fabulously successful, taking over from the dinosaurs as herbivores and carnivores of all shapes and sizes. Take a moment to consider how cool we mammals are and how great it is to be a mammal! OK, now take another moment to consider how stupid that thought was.

As we saw in the Galapagos, without mammals filling their customary niches other species evolved in unique ways. Without grazing mammals, numerous species of flightless birds evolved – including the colossal Moa which reached 12 feet in height and weighed up to 550 pounds, a sort of bird giraffe. Without tigers or wolves the giant Haast eagle with a 10 foot wingspan evolved to be a terrifying predator. And the Kiwi itself, the symbol of New Zealand and New Zealanders, evolved as a cute little furry bird running about on the ground. Without predators it had no use for wings.

The original natural world of New Zealand must have been quite something, but it was irreparably changed by the coming of man. Some species, such as the Moa, were hunted to extinction by Maori. Others were lost to environmental changes –Maori burned huge areas of forest, partly in an effort to flush out the Moa as they became increasingly rare. Perhaps the most significant impact came from introduction of new species. Rats may have reached the islands even before the Maori settlement, carried by early Polynesian explorers who relied on them as a food source. Numerous native species or their eggs would have been defenseless against them. The loss of any one species set off ripple effects on others that relied on them. Without Moa to prey on, the Haast eagles died off. (An alternative theory I find plausible is that they were hunted down by Maori who got testy when the eagles carried their children away.)

All these effects accelerated by orders of magnitude once the Europeans arrived. They intentionally introduced numerous new plant and animal species and engaged in wholesale burning in an effort to turn New Zealand into a sort of antipodal England. In a sense they were remarkably successful. There are beautiful grassy hills and fields divided by hedgerows, grazing with sheep and cows. Apart from the more dramatic volcanic contours of the land you might think yourself in England. If you recall what the Hobbit lands in the Lord of the Rings trilogy looked like, that was filmed on the North Island and is not atypical.

But if you look more closely at the landscapes of New Zealand you realize this transformation doesn’t quite work; there is a kind of sterility to it. While the landscape is beautiful it is incomplete and a little sad. Even to my untrained eye it is apparent that much of the richness of a true natural landscape isn’t there. It isn’t an English field or hedgerow; half the cast of Wind in the Willows just isn’t there. Of course they can’t introduce Mr. Hedgehog or Mr. Badger, since they would happily eat Mr. Kiwi who is hanging on by a thread as it is. They are good environmentalist and know enough harm has been done already. The border controls to prevent introduction of new species or pests are tougher than anything I’ve ever seen to stop terrorists. And they are doing good things to preserve and restore some of the species that are threatened, but they can never get the lost ones back. Looking across the dramatic rivers, fields and mountains of New Zealand you realize that you are meant to see herds of huge Moa grazing with Haast Eagles stalking them from the sky. But that will never be seen again.

Your faithful correspondent,

Walkabout Dave