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Date: February 20, 2004
New Zealand
Christchurch is designed to be a model English city. This raises several questions
for me: Why do English people visit English places? Or do places English people
visit turn English? I'm reminded of Oludeniz, Turkey where the restaurants served
steak and kidney pies, fish and chips, curry, sold several smutty, gossipy English
newspapers, all the footy games on the telly and, worse of all, the prices were
in English pounds. I also wonder: do stuffy people design prim and proper architecture
or does prim and proper architecture make stuffy people? Perhaps it is the weather.
I've had a couple frog soakers already. Ironically, I have bought a plane ticket
home including two weeks in England, as if I need to go to London to see English
people although it is a good place to meet Australians and New Zealanders: these
quasi-countries are still part of the English commonwealth.
I don't have much to report about New Zealand yet. I have been writing this
while waiting at a bus stop for 45 minutes. There is a bus schedule but it appears
to be running more on a Third World mentality: it will come when it comes if it
comes. I have noticed during my wait there are a lot of people with beards in
New Zealand and every other tourist is wearing a pendant carved out of bone in
symbolic shapes of the Maori people.
Rumor says that NZ is the best country in the world for bicycle touring. I've
already seen at least two dozen bicyclists. It makes me feel rather ordinary.
How will ever be happy going home? I won't! I solved this problem by extending
my trip to include Nairobi, Kenya to Cape Town, South Africa. I've felt guilty
about skipping the Middle East and most of China. That would have been a thorn
in my saddle sore arse for the rest of my life. I've decided to go for broke --
broken wallet and broken knees. I hear knee replacements are quite good these
days: a new set of knees, an intestine (large and small), some skin, a hair transplant,
liposuction (do you believe I still have a gut?) and I should be as good as new.
Once my future book makes the NY Times bestseller list and I win a Pulitzer prize,
I will buy a loft apartment in San Francisco, fill it with a gigantic entertainment
center with the current movies beamed directly to me by satellite, a giant cushy
chair with a beer fridge hidden in the armrest and a toilet under the seat cushion.
In the meantime, I have a few goals: Externally, I'd like to investigate the
people and culture of New Zealand. I am tired of just passing through places.
One of the solutions is to do volunteer work on local farms in trade for room
and board. The other solution is not to tell anyone what I am doing: as soon as
I do, it is a never-ending interrogation. I want to focus on other people. Internally,
I'd like to get rid of my pessimism: I think and, even, dream of everything that
is wrong with the world. I want to bicycle on the sunnyside of the street. My
current crisis comes, ironically, from having answered life's big questions and
realizing that I am still stuck with myself. In the immortal words of Popeye the
Sailor Man, "I am what I am." This sounds obvious but there is a popular
misconception among travelers: that traveling will make you a different person,
that the longer, harder your travels the more different you will become. I think
it is the opposite: we become who we are.
If this sounds like the same ol' same ol' story for me it is because one of
the truisms of life is that if you don't learn your lesson, life
keeps drilling you.
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