Note To Future Self

It’s shaping up to be a rainy weekend here in Chch (yes, really, that’s how it’s abbreviated) and Anna has a date with destiny, er, I mean the local women’s soccer team, tomorrow morning, so we’re home-bound for the weekend.

Contrary to what you’re been reading in the supermarket tabloids, we are in fact living in our rental house right now, and as far as we know we’re past all of the painting, linoleum-laying and other disruption.

Tis a tidy, if wee little cottage. We even have furniture, at least enough to stop eating on the living room floor. Here Anna enjoys the lounge set in the living room:

Stylish as that couch may be, we didn’t pick it out. It came with the house.

You might notice that the decor is rather … neutral. Grey on grey on beige with a little light pink thrown in. Improvements will be made. Someday.

The kitchen is quite pleasant, though a bit lacking in counter space. Yes, the house is B.Y.O.Refrigerator.

One interesting factoid is that the vertical cabinets in the center of the second picture are actually vented directly to the outside through a hole in the side of the house. Not a totally daft idea for keeping your pantry cold, but not a good idea for those paranoid about little nibblers getting in and snacking on ones Oreos late at night.

The more serious problem, however, is that the other set of cabinets (the right of the stove in the first picture) contain the water heater. Where do you put your dishes once the cabinets under the sink are full? Stack them on the kitchen table, I guess.

As in most houses, the loo gets its own room. Brings all the charm of an outhouse indoors.

We also have a vast backyard, which got a little time and attention on this week thanks to Anzac day. Being self-centered I didn’t take any pictures of Anna’s vegetable plot. Instead, I took pictures of my compost bins:

Happy compost to everyone!

Stay tuned for next week’s entry: Aaron learns to not take heavily backlit photographs indoors.

More than a few of our faithful readers have let me know that they’re tired of the namby-pamby “oh look, we’re living in New Zealand” “we bought a car” “Anna and I are still talking to each other” posts. What they really want is near-real-time reports on my bike riding and the general awesomeness of the bike scene here in NZed. Happily, your day has arrived.

One of the key advantages to being a kept man and a house husband is that I’m finally free to squander by daylight hours in a manner of my choosing. Perfect for an aspiring lay-about and itinerant cyclist.

Since I had the foresight to bring a mountain bike, I’ve been focusing on the dirt side of the equation. Anna brought her road bike, and I have slick tires, so I can handle a little pavement, but it just doesn’t seem right to subject a mountain bike to that sort of public humiliation

The southern border of Christchurch is defined by the Port Hills, a rather imposing pile of former volcano, owned exclusively by the sheep of New Zealand, though they do seem to tolerate humans using it now and again. From Marburg world headquarters on the south side of the city it’s an easy 10 minute ride to the base of the hills.

Other than one main road up and over the hills (Dyers Pass Rd) and Summit Road along the spine, the Port Hills are almost all parklands, grassy swards and sheep paddocks. This makes them an idea urban playground because, heck, the sheep don’t mind you, and as long as you close the gate behind you, their owners don’t mind either.

The key disadvantage, naturally is that they’re the Port Hills. Before you can go down you have to go up. There are a number of well kept 4×4 tracks which ascend the hills with varying degrees of inclination (see earlier notes on Kiwi trailbuilding), mostly dirt and gravel and not particularly technical, but every ride begins with a brief reconsideration of the whether you should have had that second lamb and kumara pie last night.

Having achieved the summit, the hills are open to you thanks to Summit Road (that’s it above in the first picture) and a network of singletrack which mostly parallels the road and connects all the other good bits. The only downside, of course, is that the good bits tend to involve either very up, very down or a healthy combination of the two.

Despite that the singletrack is excellent and generally suits my fast-and-rolling preferences. The occasional rocky section provides a little interest. Thanks to the thousands of wooly lawnmowers working their way over the hills, the riding tends to be in the open, though there is some forest making a comeback. It’s been overcast (almost foggy at the top) this week, the hills could be a real scorcher in the middle of summer.

(looking down from the summit towards Christchurch — and the ocean in the distance)

The final challenge comes when its time to call it a day You can’t just follow any path back down the hill. Some trails lead to nice graveled 4×4 tracks back down to the base. Others lead to near-vertical double-black-diamond downhill racing tracks (yesterday, I saw a sign warning “Caution: 40 foot jump ahead” I didn’t investigate). With a little caution, the descent can be made safely.

It’s quite a privilege to be able to string together three-plus hour mountain bike rides out your backdoor. I suppose its more of privilege to be able to ride on a weekday.

[Here I am, playing catch-up already]

We spent our extended Easter weekend engaging in New Zealand’s other, other favorite outdoor pursuit (after rugby and cricket, of course), tramping. Or as we would say in the states, backpacking.

We elected to try our hands at the Casey-Binser trail, a popular two-day loop in the Southern Alps near Arthur’s Pass. Anna’s co-workers recommended it as “easy for those not used to NZ tramping.” We weren’t entirely sure what they meant, but we found out soon enough.

First thing was first, we took the opportunity to move our sorry selves out of the Ascot Vale motel and into … the garage of our new rental house. The house itself was still due to be painted, so most of our luggage and our bikes had ended up stacked in the garage. We offloaded our city slicker clothes into the garage and re-packed the car with the tramping gear we had rather fortuitously brought with us (fortuitous in that it enabled tramping and fortuitous in that it included a small cookset and silverware which we’re still using in our new house).

We rolled out of Christchurch midday on Friday and drove straight up to Arthur’s Pass. It’s rather amazing. The Canterbury plain is flat as the proverbial pancake, perfect for agriculture and sheep, when all of a sudden, not two hours of a Christchurch you’re driving up narrow twisting mountain roads. And negotiating one-lane bridges. On a major highway. Ha ha.

(Arthur’s Pass)

After a spot of lunch in Arthur’s Pass, we decided to warm up our tramping legs with a quick little walk up to Devil’s Punchbowl falls. This first off-road expedition brought home the stunning reality of New Zealand tramping.

1. All trail lengths are given in time, not distance. That’s a little strange, but hey, I’ve got a topo map, right?

2. New Zealanders tramp at near sonic speeds. Combine this with #1 above and a “30 min walk” can actually cross several time zones.

3. NZ trails give very little consideration to mere human frailty. When faced with a steep slope, an American trailbuilder may include steps, a switchback, or even a long gentle diversion to minimize erosion (and ease the way for us poor slobs). An NZ trailbuilder will simply bring the trail to the base of the slope, put a blaze (trail marker), then put another blaze at the top of the slope. Have fun!

NZ trails have a similar relationship with water. The mountains are riddled with streams and bogs, both large and small. When it’s time to cross, better be ready to get your feet wet. In fact, Anna’s work offers a course in stream crossing, just to make sure the researchers can get to their field sites.

With that in mind, we headed back east a few kms to the White Mountain Station road and give our little rental car a gravel bath as we off-roaded to Andrew’s shelter, the trailhead.

Our goals was pretty modest. We were going to start at Andrew’s shelter (“Shelter” at the end of Andrew’s Stream in the lower-left-center of the map), and hike up Andrew’s stream to Casey’s saddle, then down Casey stream to the “Hut”. Day two, we’d complete the loop, coming down the Poulter river (center of the map) and over Binser saddle. No problem. Two days, everyone said.

Of course, any moron (other than the two morons camping out at Andrew’s shelter preparing for a pleasant hike on the Casey-Binser loop) can see that the contours on the topo map are at 100 meter increments. And they’re really, really close together.

To spare everyone the step-by-spirit-crushing-step travelogue, we ended up having a great time. Our first day up the Andrews and along the Casey saddle was wet but not unpleasant. The upper Andrews is broad, grassy valley. Low clouds sealed the valley wall-to-wall giving it a otherworldly “Lost World” aspect. We cross the successfully, unaccosted by dinosaurs, and descended to the Casey Hut.

The other key difference between US backpacking and NZ tramping is that the Kiwis don’t actually sleep out all that much. Instead the country is riddled with government maintained huts (and more primitives bivouacs, as shown on the map). I’d like to think the 6 pounds of tent I was carrying made the difference between my glacial pace and the Kiwis bounding up the trail like wool-and-Goretex-clad gazelles ahead of us, but I doubt it.

Since it’s on a popular trail, the Casey Hut is a bit larger than average. It had bunks for about 15 people, a cooking area, fresh water, and a massive pot bellied stove. After a day hiking through the rain, seeing that stove stoked to “thermonuclear” more than made up for the dozen other occupants of the hut.

(Looking across the Poulter river valley)

Day two dawned cloudy but cleared as we walked the flat margins of the Poulter river down towards the Binser saddle. After a late lunch, we started the ascent to the saddle (just to refresh your memory, look to the east/right of the Binser saddle on the topo map. Count them contours. Dang!). We started squabbling about halfway up and by the time we made the saddle proper we just lay down on the grass and cried. Actually, we decided to camp at the saddle rather than hurry the descent just to get back to … the carpark.

It’s just as well. The descent on the third day was steep and foggy.

(Coming down off the Binser saddle)

Hope we get more tramping in before winter. But I’ll admit I was a bit glad to get back to the car.

Those who know me well enough know I’m a car hater living a secret life as a car enthusiast wrapped in the shell of a car agnostic. Which why I’m proud/embarassed/indifferent that we’ve finally purchased our own little piece of the right-hand-driving dream:

One fine teal 98 Mazda Familia (known as the Protege5 in the US), fresh off the boat from Japan. Matches our luggage and meets our basic criteria: big enough to haul four people comfortably and/or bikes and/or gear, small enough to not be a total American F-350-drivin embarassment.

All three parts of me are glad to be done car shopping, in any case.

OK, so maybe it doesn’t affect your life in any way, but it should enable some fine gettin-out-of-town action for us.

First stop: trailer hitch!

NZ may have three TV channels (last year’s Fear Factor and Survivor anyone?) and two radio stations, but they are still on the forefront of world culture. Why? We have these:

Cordless electric kettles.

Yes, cordless.

This bad boy can boil two liters of water in femtoseconds. You can almost feel space-time bending around the kettle due to the energies being pumped into the water.

When your sole joy in life is drinking Niagran (dare I say, Britainic?) quantities of strong black tea with milk, the electric kettle is critical. These kettles are the real cornerstone of the NZ culture.

Hi everyone. Yes, it’s been a while, and it’s been driven almost exclusively by our access (or lack thereof) to the internet (not my general sloth, oh no). It didn’t seem like a luxury at first, but our hotel did have wireless. Since then, we’ve been in the stone ages.

For now, a quick recap, hopefully followed up by more insightful, illustrative (and illustrated) posts once our home broadband is all set up and I’m sitting around the house all day, counting the ceiling tiles.

‘Round these parts (the “civilized world” as one person has so kindly referred to it), the Good Friday/Easter hoilday is a four-day weekend. We spent it participating in NZ’s favorite non-sheep-related pastime, tramping. That is, backpacking. There are some critical differences, but it looks a lot like backpacking. In this case we took our lovely little rental car (perhaps the smallest Toyota Corolla hatchback ever made) up to Arthur’s Pass, the East-West route through the mountains nearest Christchurch. We hiked a little loop known as the “Binser-Casey” loop, for it traverses the Binser and Casey saddles. We spent two nights in the bush, and one at the staging area, for a completely enjoyable (if somewhat exhausting) weekend. So that’s one future post I owe you.

Coming down off the mountain, we moved in with Chris and Kathy, two of Anna’s coworkers, who own a very nice “lifestyle block” (hobby farm?) out on the back side of beyond (between Irwill Crossing and Doyleston, technically). We had a thoroughly wonderful time, I got lots of quality time with their dog, horses, and the neighbor’s sheep and we had a wonderful first hand view at the rural living arrangements which people enjoy around here. Sadly, the isolation made it hard for me to do the things I should be doing (look for a job, shop for a car, write blog posts). I did have time to finish several novels, though.

On Friday night we moved into our new rental house, and we spent the weekend getting use to its idosyncracies. For example, we determined experimentally that the spare fridge in the lundry room is in fact a freezer. Our milk-berg will thaw out one of these days.

So far we’re quite happy, though it does look a bit sparse. We’ve purchased a rather large lot of furniture (fridge, bed, dining room table) from a local moving out of country, which we’re bound to pick up tonight. We expect it to make quite a difference in our lifestyle, though we’ll still be cooking and eating from our little camp cookset. Maybe someday when we’ve really made it we can have more than two forks.

Unfortunately, this coming week, our house is set for new carpet, so we won’t be able to get more settled (aforementioned large lot of furniture is going in the garage). Having a permanent place to sleep and let our luggage explode into little piles all over the place has been quite a relief, even if the little piles have all been swept into the closets to clear the carpeted areas.

So that’s the short story, at least short enough for me to write while I use the library’s computers. Apartment? Check, though not really moved in. Car? Nope. Fun? Yep. Biking? Yep, a little. Fridge? Thankfully, yes.

As Nancy commented our last week in California wasn’t all strapping tape and cardboard boxes. We did manage to escape down to Pinnacles National Monument for a day.

Sadly, we didn’t see any of the introduced California Condors on this trip, but we did get a nice hike in and saw the beginnings of spring: wildflowers, songbirds, hummingbirds and one rather obstinate wild turkey.

By way of contrast, here’s what we have to put up with now:

The distinctly un-Pinnacle-y river Avon just getting from Indian summer into fall.

I have to admit, one of the “cute New Zealand” factoids I was most curious about was the relative price of consumer goods. It probably reflects my true inner nature as a coupon-clipping house mum and invenerate shopaholic. Or perhaps I’m a closet international trade economist.

In any case, may I present our first cultural exchange dispatch from this crazy land.

The New Zealand currency is the New Zealand Dollar (NZD). Right now it trades around about 1NZD = 0.72USD. Apparently this is quite bad (the NZD is normally worth more per USD), as it makes NZ goods (apples and wool) more expensive in the (US) export market. They say the NZD is tied much more closely to the Yen than the dollar, and it’s the strength of the Yen that’s pulling the NZD up. Whew. That pretty much exhausts the closet economist.

In terms of browsing the supermarket aisles, the relative closeness of the currencies makes it feel like you’re living in a particularly expensive part of town. Prices seem plausible if a bit on the high end of what you’d expect ($7 for a box of cereal! what?!?) but once you’ve calmed down and done a little 3/4 math in your head, things typically work out for the best.

The New Zealand dollar breaks down into 100 cents. The 1c piece was put out of service in 1990 and the bank pulled the plug on the 5c piece just last year, leaving just 10, 20 and 50 cent pieces. There hasn’t been a push to abolish that second digit after the decimal. Instead cash transactions are simply rounded off, while card transactions occur for the full value.

[Incidental sidenote, the Wikipedia page on NZ currency is quite good. Apparently all of the sub-dollar coins are plated steel and minted in Canada. I had previously commented to Anna that many of the coins we'd received looks shiny and new, and it's because they're all the plated coins which are less than a year old]

There are also $1 and $2 coins, which are larger, golden and I must say are a truly civilized way to pay for a cup of tea.

It also means that pickle jar of change by the front door will buy a very nice bottle of scotch when it’s full.

All of the coins feature an image of the Queen on the back. No stinking presidents for us.

The bill are all a bit taller are narrower than US bills, brightly colored and made of plastic paper. Hooray for plastic paper. I’ve already found out they will survive a trip through the wash without complaint. A much cooler fact is that the bills have see-through portions (the fern on the left and the oval on the right in the bill below).

The bills come in the pedestrian amounts of 5,10,20,50 and 100 and they all feature characters from the “Lord of the Rings” movies on the fronts (as in “Gandalf the Chancellor of the Exchequer” above from the forthcoming fourth movie)

I’ve been a little surprised to find that those two financial stalwarts from our home country — credit cards and paper checks — have been supplanted here by their more genteel cousins: the debit card (in the local vernacular the EFTPOS, say “eft-pause”) and online payments. In fact all of the above-the-table landlords collect rent through an account-to-account transfer, which I can’t really imagine happening in the US. I certainly don’t know what the sweet young things down at the Pak N’ Save would do if I handed them a paper check.

Checks, er, cheques, are still used on occasion, of course, such as when filing your rental deposit to Tenancy and assorted other government fees.

Oh, prices. I really meant to natter on about prices. They’re the same. Or close enough after you’ve put a little fudge factor on the mental currency conversion. Housewares and electronics come from China and Japan anyway, so the prices is driven far more by exchange rates than by the market size. Food is a bit all over the place. Packaged foods are comparable. Red meats and most seafood are cheaper, poultry is more expensive. Fruit and veg tend to be ballpark the same, often cheaper on things that you know are grown in-country. I assume we’ll see more seasonal variation in both price and availability.

A couple of notable exceptions so far:

• Books. I won’t make a blanket statement, but I just went down to the Border’s at the mall (don’t fire up the hate mail, it was right next to the Starbuck’s … ha) and a typical sci-fi paperback was $26. $26! Even converted to US that’s something like two and a half times the normal price. I couldn’t really find another good comparison point, so I don’t know if its linear across the range of all books.
• Cars. Once we finally buy a car, I’ll have reason to expound on my great unifying theory of Kiwi motoring, but for now I’ll just say that used cars are quite inexpensive. As I’ve probably discussed with some of you, it’s apparently because NZ (and Australia) are the dumping grounds for cars which are no longer economical to keep in Japan (our left-side driving neighbor to the North). As such any sort of 3-10 year old Japanese car can be had for somewhere around 2/3 of US value. Cars older than 15 years old are pretty much just left on the corner for the next backpacker to borrow. New cars and particularly European luxury brands are anywhere from painfully to unbelievably expensive. On the plus side we have access to a much wider range of Euro brands (Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat, Alfa) that we can’t afford.

More on cars later, as we’re going car shopping tomorrow!

It’s Monday morning and Anna’s just headed off to her first day of work. Time for Aaron to starting eating bon-bons and sipping champagne in the bubble bath.

Here’s the brief recap:

Tuesday: A&A arrive, wait for world to stop spinning.
Wednesday: A little light sightseeing, getting to know the lay of the land. Landcare has very kindly put us up in a hotel which is on the main westerly (inland) drag out of town. It’s also quite close to one of the major malls and the University of Canterbury. At first blush these all seem like positive factors and we start looking for housing in this area (Riccarton). Anna becomes violently ill.
Thursday: After looking at a sequence of filthy student flops which we felt were “in our price range” we violently adjust our price range upwards and decide to look in the Southern suburbs instead.
Friday: Thoroughly demoralized by Thursday we drive out to Lincoln (site of Anna’s job) just to “check it out” and to get a little drive in the country. It’s barely 20 minutes from city center, and it looks quite cyclable. Lots of little farm roads though not much in the way of shoulders. The traffic volume is low enough that it may not be a problem but I still get a vaguely sinister air off the average NZ driver. I develop a fever.
Saturday: I spend the whole day in bed, while Anna checks out a series of “likelies” in the Southern suburbs. A few are close but nothing perfect. By the afternoon I have a fever of 40 (104), which prompts our first experience with NZ’s health care system (net result: rest and drink lots of fluids).
Sunday: I rally and we go on another round of apartment searches. In the afternoon we finally view a 2-bedroom nice house in our price range and decide to go for it. The landlord is amenable to a 6 month term which will give us time to answer the buy/keep renting question. The major downside is that it’s being repainted and won’t be available for 2-3 weeks. Well that’ll be enough time to find a fridge. For the truly obssessive, here’s the location in Google Maps

A few observations from the traveller’s notebook so far.

It’s stressful to show up in a new town and try to build up from scratch. We were quite lucky that Landcare put us up in a hotel for a week and provided a rental car, and at that we’re going to run out that week before we’re completely sorted. This probably comes as a surprise to noone but me.

It’s quite normal for NZ rentals to not come with a fridge. We asked our new landlord and he claimed that he’d never rented a flat with a fridge and he just carried his fridge around with him from apartment to apartment. I’m just envisioning all of the Uni students driving around on Moving day, with Frigidaires hanging out the back of their Honda Civics.

NZ drivers have a bad reputation, and I was initially really turned off by the driving situation (as a driver and as a pedestrian), but I’ve since tempered my view. For one thing, we’ve spent far too much time around our hotel or walking along major thoroughfares, so too much high-speed/high-density traffic. We’re also near the Uni which means a greater number of vehicles which have either been, ahem, enhanced with new mufflers, or should simply be taken out back and shot. And finally, the traffic laws conspire against peace and sanity. For one thing, there’s really only one in-town speed limit: 50km/h (30mph) which makes traffic on even residential streets annoying. There are virtually no stop signs, as when a side street joins a larger thoroughfare, only the ubiquitous “give way” which is an invitation to not stop but just roll on in. And there’s no yielding to pedestrians. Ever.

That should be enough grousing. Two happy thoughst:

The hotel has SkyTV (dish) which means rugby all the time. (NZ broadcast television is notoriously bad — our choices last night were Fear Factor, Survivor and one of their long-running soaps). So far we’ve enjoyed some Super 14 and something called IRB Sevens. I don’t understand most of it, I’m just glad I don’t have to play.

The average Kiwi takes a tea break every 7.5 minutes, where they drink a full liter of tea and have one or more sweet confections called “slices.” I approve of slices whole-heartedly. In fact, I think I’ve just earned a peanut-choco-caramel slice.