Kate and I dropped our bags at our hostel—-a place that looked alarmingly similar to a swept-out crack house—-wrung out our clothes and set out on the town, initially determined to find some authentic Kiwi cuisine. Naturally, we had no idea what this might consist of—-our hosteler had mentioned something about a blowtorch and a possum, but I thought he was joking (it turns out the dish is quite popular)—-and so we walked down the main street of Auckland in search of food and with no real destination in mind.
As we marched down Queen Street we passed underneath the ornate metal awnings that are so prominent in New Zealand and Australia and took our first gander at Auckland. It was a large city, and we were in the heart of it surrounded by large and grey concrete skyscrapers stretching out in every direction. Off to our right was a green hill called Arthur’s Park where the University of Auckland sits, and in every other direction sprawled the Central Business District of the city. Apart from Arthur’s Park (it’s actually not on a hill but an extinct volcano), Auckland looked as most cities do when it is cold and raining: rather uninviting. The buildings looked like business, the weather discouraged exploration, and Auckland is large enough that it’s tough to wander more than its city center without some form of transportation. Right now we only had our two feet. The natural cure to this was a bar or pub where we hoped to find some local company, if not a beer or two. Never mind that it was seven in the morning, blame jetlag if you’d like, but a warm meal and a good drink sounded like the trick.
Unfortunately, Auckland and I were working off of separate clocks, and our options for food extended no further than McDonalds, Burger King, Subway, a Dunkin’ Donuts, numerous kebab shops, and a series of threatening looking Korean places. Kebabs, it seemed, were about as ethnic as Auckland seemed to get, and bars didn’t open for some time.
So, it seemed, kebabs were it.
Fortunately, this bade well for my affinity toward any food that is easily eaten by hand, filled with slices of meat, and a leading cause of heart disease. But even I have limits. In the block where our hostel was located there were four separate kebab shops which most people (including myself) would consider overkill. The reason for this is traced back to New Zealand’s age old stereotype of being a land of sheep, not men. And, with sheep outnumbering humans ten to one (that’s 40 million sheep), it’s no wonder that farmers are trying to offload their lamb meat in any way they can, kebabs included.
As we ate we pulled out the few pieces of information we could gather on Auckland and decided what to see. Each website and tour book we sorted through mentioned the following at least once: that Auckland is known as the City of Sails (Aucklanders own more boats per capita than anyone in the world), that Auckland has the highest concentration of Polynesians in the world (also true), that Auckland has a nice bridge, two harbors, lots of volcanoes, and one bonafied Sky Tower, a fact that was mentioned more than anything else in our pamphlets.
Don’t worry, either. If you come to Auckland, you won’t have much of a choice to see the bridge, harbors, volcanoes, or Sky Tower. You’ll undoubtedly cross the bridge, the city rests on harbors, and volcanoes are generally pretty tough to miss. As for the Sky Tower, well, it’s about as easy to miss as, say, a bullet in the chest. Auckland’s Sky Tower punctures the city skyline like a giant, unsightly dart. Certainly it is the city’s pride and joy, much like the Epcot Center is to Orlando or, more appropriately, the Space Needle is to Seattle. That is to say that most Aucklanders probably think it’s ugly as sin, but tourists just eat it right up.
What puzzles me is the absolute popularity of Sky Towers.* Calgary has one. Moscow has one (quite a big one at that). Sydney has one, too. And of course, my hometown Seattle has one and is, I can say rather proudly, the only one that doesn’t look like a skewered cupcake. Sky Towers, in case your hometown doesn’t have one yet (it’s only a matter of time) are large poles built high into the air and topped with a restaurant. Usually the gimmick is that the restaurant rotates, too, so that diners can see a 360° panorama of the city as they eat. Some also put shopping malls atop the poles, too; the one in Sydney has two restaurants and a cafe up top and costs AUS15 just for the elevator ride. Auckland’s Sky Tower houses a casino along with its restaurant and also happens to be the tallest tower in the Southern Hemisphere, coming in at 328m, or about 1,000 feet (for comparison, the Eiffel Tower is only 300m, and is, no doubt the most famous sky tower around). Of course, if you consider that about 300m of Auckland’s Sky Tower is just a series of elevator shafts and stairs, then the substantial portion of the structure (the actual building) is only about 28m high, making it one of the shortest buildings in the Southern Hemisphere. Calling itself the tallest tower is a bit like putting on a set of wooden stilts and calling yourself the world’s tallest human. Height aside though, the purpose of Sky Towers will forever remain a mystery to me and my guess is that most Sky Towers were built by short men who were trying to overcompensate. Either that or some people find the gimmick of spinning in circles at 1,000 feet while trying to eat irresistible. Of course, to save a few dollars you could just microwave a Hot Pocket and climb to the top of a very high telephone pole and get the same experience. Whatever the case, there is no more appropriate place than New Zealand for something as offbeat as an extreme dining experience such as this one.
This country is all about extreme, baby.
If eating and spinning at the same time doesn’t sound like enough of a rush for you, have no fear. You may now Sky Jump off the top of the Sky Tower down toward the street below for a nominal fee, a process in which you free fall for about 16 seconds before you are slowed to a stop by an attached wire. Only a few blocks away you can strap yourself in and walk down the side of a building like Spiderman. You can bungee jump off of the top of the Harbor bridge just north of the city, too. And there’s also abseiling (rappelling) down waterfalls, jet boating, aerobatics (where you fly your own WWII fighter plane), black water rafting (you put a tube around your midriff and float down a pitch black, eel-infested, underground river), the rather inventive “fly by wire” (imagine a jet traveling 106 mph and tethered to a string), river sledging (white water rafting without a raft), and, my personal favorite, something called Zorbing—-a process by which you climb into an air filled bubble and roll down cliffs and over water. Kiwis invented extreme sports, and everyday they come up with an entirely new and fun way to defy death. The genesis of all this was the bungee jump itself. New Zealand claims fame to creating the commercial success of the bungee jump as Kiwis have been paying good money to jump off bridges, buildings, and balloons since 1986 (A.J. Hackett being the first and most famous Kiwi of them all). The actual origin of the sport begins far earlier than this, and was not, I’m sad to report, the result of some sap hooking luggage straps together and jumping off a bridge, though that’s not far off. The real history is actually much more interesting.
The real fame goes to two separate groups: the natives of Pentecost Island (an island of Vanuatu), and the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club. As Pentecost Island is one of a series of islands north of New Zealand (an island chain where the Maori most likely came from) you could say it’s in native New Zealander’s blood to jump from high precipices. It is on this island that the locals were found jumping off of 35m wooden towers with vines attached to their feet. The story is that they do this for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it is a sort of rite of passage, a bit like a bar mitzvah except instead of yamikas they wear loin cloths, and instead of saying Mazel Tov I imagine the Vanuatu say “oh shit” as they plummet 100 feet straight down. The second reason is that somehow jumping off a platform—-“land diving” as it was originally called—-ensures a good yam harvest. Supposedly the ground is blessed when one’s shoulders touch the earth, which, let’s make this clear, would mean that your head would have to be well into the ground for it to work. This is done when the yams are ready to harvest and—-were it not the case the Vanuatu would be extinct long ago-—when the tree vines are at their strongest. The best origin story of all though, is that “land diving” can be traced back to a man named Tamalie who, as legend tells it, was in such hot pursuit of his unloving wife (insert hot Tamalie joke here) that when she climbed a tree, tied a vine to her legs and jumped off he followed suit with such vigor that he failed to attach vines to his own legs and plummeted to his death. To prove they’ve learned their lesson the men of Pentecost Island now land dive regularly.
In the 1950s a BBC crew documented this on film and brought their footage back to England where a man named David Kirke caught wind of the Pentecost Islander’s escapades. David Kirke also happened to be a member of a society called the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club (DSC) that, after hearing about it from Kirke, all thought this land diving business was a great idea. And so, on April 1st, 1978 David Kirke and four others jumped off of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, England, survived, and gave birth to a sport that has since swept the world. As an aside, this feat was relatively tame for the DSC, who has since done a variety of activities that are remarkably insane. David Kirke, for instance, went on to invent a device pointedly called the human catapult. Prior to closing shop, the DSC also pioneered street luging, and has since formed world organizations with fun names like the “British Elastic Ropes Sports Association”. Now an enterprise unto itself the DSC has reformed as the Oxford Stunt Factory (OSF), a group that has taken bungee jumping to an entirely new level by bunging jumping into a 2.5kg napalm explosion and bungee jumping whilst set on fire. They’ve also helped set the Guinness World Record for mass fire breathing, not something you would expect from the stiff-necked folks at Oxford University, but true no less. Odds are you’ve seen these men at work, too. Ever seen James Bond’s GoldenEye? That was an OSF jump off the dam at the beginning of the movie and was not, contrary to what the film might hint, organized by the British Secret Service.
Anyway.
Considering that New Zealand culture is a hybrid between Polynesian and English culture, bungee jumping came quite naturally to the Kiwis and they have carried on the tradition of extreme sports ever since. While South Island is far more involved in high flying, super-fast, death defying stunts (Queenstown, specifically), Auckland is at least attempting to keep pace with a few bungee jump locales of its own and can even boast to be home to the world’s longest bungee jump from a building: a feat done by the man himself, Mr. A.J. Hackett, at none other than Auckland’s Sky Tower. The fall was 180.1m (about two football fields) and ended a brisk 12m above the concrete sidewalk below.
After discovering New Zealand’s flair for inventing new forms of suicide (sorry, sports), I began to wonder what else Kiwis had been up to. Consider that here, standing at the base of the Sky Tower two world records had been set: one for the tallest tower in the Southern Hemisphere and one for jumping off of it. Such a high concentration of world records was a bit abnormal to boot, and was a fine clue as to how nutty Kiwis really are. After all, I decided, it takes a psychotic mind to crawl into an air bubble and roll down a cliff, and perhaps an even crazier mind to hop on an inner tube and float down an eel-infested pitch black cave. Surely these people’s feats had been documented elsewhere. The question was where to look.
This is how I arrived at the Seattle Public Library tallying up New Zealand’s presence in the Guinness Book of World Records, or, if you prefer its lesser known title, A Catalog of Today’s Modern Freaks. I expected New Zealand to be in there a few times just like everyone else. I knew, for instance, that Sir Edmund Hillary would be listed as the first man to climb Mt. Everest (and you thought he was British) and that New Zealand was probably mentioned in regards to some sort of sheep record (they do hold the record for “Most Sheep Sheared in 24 hrs”, 2,220 of them), but I had no idea that Kiwis had been so bloody busy.
Apart from having dozens of records set on New Zealand soil—-most of them having to do with Cricket or Rugby, though an honorable mention should be made to Ashrita Furman, the American who, apart from holding the most Guinness Records in the world, set the underwater juggling record at 48 minutes in Auckland—-New Zealanders themselves boast a whopping 22 records of their own. Granted, some of these are owed to the land itself—-take the Largest Death Toll from a Geyser Eruption for instance (four), or the World’s Largest Squid, a 16 foot Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni (say that three times fast) caught in the waters between New Zealand and Antarctica—-but the majority are owed to the citizens themselves like Clint Hallam of Christchurch who holds the record for “Most Hand Amputations on One Arm”, or Maurice Bennett of Wellington, creator of the world’s largest toast mosaic.* Even New Zealand’s most famous fictional character, Gollum (from the Lord of the Rings) holds a record as the “Most Extensive Digital Character on Film”. Oh yes, I should also mention that it was a New Zealander, Ernest Rutherford, who first split the atom, fathered nuclear physics, and was referred to as “a second Newton” by Albert Einstein, but really, most hand amputations? Wow.
Not bad for a country with a population of barely four million. My home state of Washington (boasting a population of over five million) has only eight Guinness World Records to its name, none of which involve splitting the atom or summiting Mt. Everest (though we did make the world’s largest apple pie).
Kate and I were wondering if New Zealand also qualified as the windiest place on earth, too, as we stood staring over the Waitemata Harbor, a choppy white-capped body of water that looked nothing like the serene haven in the tourist pictures we had seen. We couldn’t figure out where all of Auckland’s countless boats had gone, and assumed they had been blown away sometime earlier. We leaned out over the rail of the dock, looking at the natural harbor we had come so far to see, the same body of water that in all the pictures looked a calm and inviting blue, and said the only thing that came to mind.
“Huh.”
The two of us were soaking wet, cold, suffering the indefatigable jetlag that comes with the journey to New Zealand and were still trying to wrestle with the fact that we were an entire world away from where we had been just twenty hours earlier--an effect of flying that I can never easily shake off. We were also waiting to be wooed by exotic New Zealand, but hadn’t yet discovered anything more striking than the difference between American and Kiwi Ketchup (theirs tastes like apple cinnamon). As we walked back up Queen Street surrounded by the buildings of Auckland I got scared that the rest of New Zealand might be just as cosmopolitan as its largest city. It wasn’t that Auckland was boring; it just didn’t feel distinctly Kiwi, and as I found out, it isn’t.
In all of its urban glory, Auckland has detached from its heritage enough that New Zealanders consider the city the sort of red-headed step-child of their fair and rural country. Aucklanders don’t mind this one bit, either, as they consider the rest of New Zealand to be their dated Uncle who still believes in keeping the Sabbath holy and talks about life on the farm and the good old days when sheep were sheep and men were men.
To put it lightly, there is something of a growing rift between urban Auckland and the rest of New Zealand. Auckland, to the rest of the country, is dangerously progressive: people shop on Saturdays, bars are open past six o’clock, and citizens can drink on Sundays. The respective opinion is that Aucklanders are queer ultra-liberal city folk and everyone else is a redneck. This is nowhere clearer in the fact that The New Zealand Herald isn’t actually a national newspaper as the name might hint, but instead is written by Aucklanders, for Aucklanders. The city is a sort of Manhattan in that it has its own gravitational pull and could care less if the rest of the country went ka-blooey because, odds are, they wouldn’t even notice. And, in turn, other Kiwis don’t refer to the city dwellers as New Zealanders, Kiwis, or countrymen but as JAFAs, an affectionate nickname that means Just Another Fucking Aucklander.
Much of New Zealand is a far cry from its sheep herding past, but don’t worry, while you can jump, swim or Zorb all you like throughout much of the island country, the upper part of New Zealand’s North Island (inventively called Northland) has missed the adrenaline buzz altogether and remains as unchanged as the sheets at our hostel. And this is where Kate and I were headed.
* Sky Towers are so popular, in fact, that an organization exists in support of the structures so that Sky Tower aficionados can get together and chat. It’s called, rather boldly, the World Federation of Great Towers, a veritable “who’s who of international towers” according to the Sunday Star-Times. Boasting a membership of 23 “Great Towers” (not including the Eiffel Tower, though curiously enough a copy of the Eiffel Tower in Blackpool, England does boast a membership) the federation spans a whopping four continents.
* Clint Hallam may not actually be from Christchurch, but this is where he was serving a prison sentence for fraud when he lost his hand to a circular saw. Apart from serving time in New Zealand, he was also wanted for fraud in Australia, and even managed to steal about 10,000 dollars in France while he was in the hospital for his re-attachment surgery which leads me to the well-worn truth that when it comes to crime, yes, the one armed man is to blame.
As we marched down Queen Street we passed underneath the ornate metal awnings that are so prominent in New Zealand and Australia and took our first gander at Auckland. It was a large city, and we were in the heart of it surrounded by large and grey concrete skyscrapers stretching out in every direction. Off to our right was a green hill called Arthur’s Park where the University of Auckland sits, and in every other direction sprawled the Central Business District of the city. Apart from Arthur’s Park (it’s actually not on a hill but an extinct volcano), Auckland looked as most cities do when it is cold and raining: rather uninviting. The buildings looked like business, the weather discouraged exploration, and Auckland is large enough that it’s tough to wander more than its city center without some form of transportation. Right now we only had our two feet. The natural cure to this was a bar or pub where we hoped to find some local company, if not a beer or two. Never mind that it was seven in the morning, blame jetlag if you’d like, but a warm meal and a good drink sounded like the trick.
Unfortunately, Auckland and I were working off of separate clocks, and our options for food extended no further than McDonalds, Burger King, Subway, a Dunkin’ Donuts, numerous kebab shops, and a series of threatening looking Korean places. Kebabs, it seemed, were about as ethnic as Auckland seemed to get, and bars didn’t open for some time.
So, it seemed, kebabs were it.
Fortunately, this bade well for my affinity toward any food that is easily eaten by hand, filled with slices of meat, and a leading cause of heart disease. But even I have limits. In the block where our hostel was located there were four separate kebab shops which most people (including myself) would consider overkill. The reason for this is traced back to New Zealand’s age old stereotype of being a land of sheep, not men. And, with sheep outnumbering humans ten to one (that’s 40 million sheep), it’s no wonder that farmers are trying to offload their lamb meat in any way they can, kebabs included.
As we ate we pulled out the few pieces of information we could gather on Auckland and decided what to see. Each website and tour book we sorted through mentioned the following at least once: that Auckland is known as the City of Sails (Aucklanders own more boats per capita than anyone in the world), that Auckland has the highest concentration of Polynesians in the world (also true), that Auckland has a nice bridge, two harbors, lots of volcanoes, and one bonafied Sky Tower, a fact that was mentioned more than anything else in our pamphlets.
Don’t worry, either. If you come to Auckland, you won’t have much of a choice to see the bridge, harbors, volcanoes, or Sky Tower. You’ll undoubtedly cross the bridge, the city rests on harbors, and volcanoes are generally pretty tough to miss. As for the Sky Tower, well, it’s about as easy to miss as, say, a bullet in the chest. Auckland’s Sky Tower punctures the city skyline like a giant, unsightly dart. Certainly it is the city’s pride and joy, much like the Epcot Center is to Orlando or, more appropriately, the Space Needle is to Seattle. That is to say that most Aucklanders probably think it’s ugly as sin, but tourists just eat it right up.
What puzzles me is the absolute popularity of Sky Towers.* Calgary has one. Moscow has one (quite a big one at that). Sydney has one, too. And of course, my hometown Seattle has one and is, I can say rather proudly, the only one that doesn’t look like a skewered cupcake. Sky Towers, in case your hometown doesn’t have one yet (it’s only a matter of time) are large poles built high into the air and topped with a restaurant. Usually the gimmick is that the restaurant rotates, too, so that diners can see a 360° panorama of the city as they eat. Some also put shopping malls atop the poles, too; the one in Sydney has two restaurants and a cafe up top and costs AUS15 just for the elevator ride. Auckland’s Sky Tower houses a casino along with its restaurant and also happens to be the tallest tower in the Southern Hemisphere, coming in at 328m, or about 1,000 feet (for comparison, the Eiffel Tower is only 300m, and is, no doubt the most famous sky tower around). Of course, if you consider that about 300m of Auckland’s Sky Tower is just a series of elevator shafts and stairs, then the substantial portion of the structure (the actual building) is only about 28m high, making it one of the shortest buildings in the Southern Hemisphere. Calling itself the tallest tower is a bit like putting on a set of wooden stilts and calling yourself the world’s tallest human. Height aside though, the purpose of Sky Towers will forever remain a mystery to me and my guess is that most Sky Towers were built by short men who were trying to overcompensate. Either that or some people find the gimmick of spinning in circles at 1,000 feet while trying to eat irresistible. Of course, to save a few dollars you could just microwave a Hot Pocket and climb to the top of a very high telephone pole and get the same experience. Whatever the case, there is no more appropriate place than New Zealand for something as offbeat as an extreme dining experience such as this one.
This country is all about extreme, baby.
If eating and spinning at the same time doesn’t sound like enough of a rush for you, have no fear. You may now Sky Jump off the top of the Sky Tower down toward the street below for a nominal fee, a process in which you free fall for about 16 seconds before you are slowed to a stop by an attached wire. Only a few blocks away you can strap yourself in and walk down the side of a building like Spiderman. You can bungee jump off of the top of the Harbor bridge just north of the city, too. And there’s also abseiling (rappelling) down waterfalls, jet boating, aerobatics (where you fly your own WWII fighter plane), black water rafting (you put a tube around your midriff and float down a pitch black, eel-infested, underground river), the rather inventive “fly by wire” (imagine a jet traveling 106 mph and tethered to a string), river sledging (white water rafting without a raft), and, my personal favorite, something called Zorbing—-a process by which you climb into an air filled bubble and roll down cliffs and over water. Kiwis invented extreme sports, and everyday they come up with an entirely new and fun way to defy death. The genesis of all this was the bungee jump itself. New Zealand claims fame to creating the commercial success of the bungee jump as Kiwis have been paying good money to jump off bridges, buildings, and balloons since 1986 (A.J. Hackett being the first and most famous Kiwi of them all). The actual origin of the sport begins far earlier than this, and was not, I’m sad to report, the result of some sap hooking luggage straps together and jumping off a bridge, though that’s not far off. The real history is actually much more interesting.
The real fame goes to two separate groups: the natives of Pentecost Island (an island of Vanuatu), and the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club. As Pentecost Island is one of a series of islands north of New Zealand (an island chain where the Maori most likely came from) you could say it’s in native New Zealander’s blood to jump from high precipices. It is on this island that the locals were found jumping off of 35m wooden towers with vines attached to their feet. The story is that they do this for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it is a sort of rite of passage, a bit like a bar mitzvah except instead of yamikas they wear loin cloths, and instead of saying Mazel Tov I imagine the Vanuatu say “oh shit” as they plummet 100 feet straight down. The second reason is that somehow jumping off a platform—-“land diving” as it was originally called—-ensures a good yam harvest. Supposedly the ground is blessed when one’s shoulders touch the earth, which, let’s make this clear, would mean that your head would have to be well into the ground for it to work. This is done when the yams are ready to harvest and—-were it not the case the Vanuatu would be extinct long ago-—when the tree vines are at their strongest. The best origin story of all though, is that “land diving” can be traced back to a man named Tamalie who, as legend tells it, was in such hot pursuit of his unloving wife (insert hot Tamalie joke here) that when she climbed a tree, tied a vine to her legs and jumped off he followed suit with such vigor that he failed to attach vines to his own legs and plummeted to his death. To prove they’ve learned their lesson the men of Pentecost Island now land dive regularly.
In the 1950s a BBC crew documented this on film and brought their footage back to England where a man named David Kirke caught wind of the Pentecost Islander’s escapades. David Kirke also happened to be a member of a society called the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club (DSC) that, after hearing about it from Kirke, all thought this land diving business was a great idea. And so, on April 1st, 1978 David Kirke and four others jumped off of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, England, survived, and gave birth to a sport that has since swept the world. As an aside, this feat was relatively tame for the DSC, who has since done a variety of activities that are remarkably insane. David Kirke, for instance, went on to invent a device pointedly called the human catapult. Prior to closing shop, the DSC also pioneered street luging, and has since formed world organizations with fun names like the “British Elastic Ropes Sports Association”. Now an enterprise unto itself the DSC has reformed as the Oxford Stunt Factory (OSF), a group that has taken bungee jumping to an entirely new level by bunging jumping into a 2.5kg napalm explosion and bungee jumping whilst set on fire. They’ve also helped set the Guinness World Record for mass fire breathing, not something you would expect from the stiff-necked folks at Oxford University, but true no less. Odds are you’ve seen these men at work, too. Ever seen James Bond’s GoldenEye? That was an OSF jump off the dam at the beginning of the movie and was not, contrary to what the film might hint, organized by the British Secret Service.
Anyway.
Considering that New Zealand culture is a hybrid between Polynesian and English culture, bungee jumping came quite naturally to the Kiwis and they have carried on the tradition of extreme sports ever since. While South Island is far more involved in high flying, super-fast, death defying stunts (Queenstown, specifically), Auckland is at least attempting to keep pace with a few bungee jump locales of its own and can even boast to be home to the world’s longest bungee jump from a building: a feat done by the man himself, Mr. A.J. Hackett, at none other than Auckland’s Sky Tower. The fall was 180.1m (about two football fields) and ended a brisk 12m above the concrete sidewalk below.
After discovering New Zealand’s flair for inventing new forms of suicide (sorry, sports), I began to wonder what else Kiwis had been up to. Consider that here, standing at the base of the Sky Tower two world records had been set: one for the tallest tower in the Southern Hemisphere and one for jumping off of it. Such a high concentration of world records was a bit abnormal to boot, and was a fine clue as to how nutty Kiwis really are. After all, I decided, it takes a psychotic mind to crawl into an air bubble and roll down a cliff, and perhaps an even crazier mind to hop on an inner tube and float down an eel-infested pitch black cave. Surely these people’s feats had been documented elsewhere. The question was where to look.
This is how I arrived at the Seattle Public Library tallying up New Zealand’s presence in the Guinness Book of World Records, or, if you prefer its lesser known title, A Catalog of Today’s Modern Freaks. I expected New Zealand to be in there a few times just like everyone else. I knew, for instance, that Sir Edmund Hillary would be listed as the first man to climb Mt. Everest (and you thought he was British) and that New Zealand was probably mentioned in regards to some sort of sheep record (they do hold the record for “Most Sheep Sheared in 24 hrs”, 2,220 of them), but I had no idea that Kiwis had been so bloody busy.
Apart from having dozens of records set on New Zealand soil—-most of them having to do with Cricket or Rugby, though an honorable mention should be made to Ashrita Furman, the American who, apart from holding the most Guinness Records in the world, set the underwater juggling record at 48 minutes in Auckland—-New Zealanders themselves boast a whopping 22 records of their own. Granted, some of these are owed to the land itself—-take the Largest Death Toll from a Geyser Eruption for instance (four), or the World’s Largest Squid, a 16 foot Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni (say that three times fast) caught in the waters between New Zealand and Antarctica—-but the majority are owed to the citizens themselves like Clint Hallam of Christchurch who holds the record for “Most Hand Amputations on One Arm”, or Maurice Bennett of Wellington, creator of the world’s largest toast mosaic.* Even New Zealand’s most famous fictional character, Gollum (from the Lord of the Rings) holds a record as the “Most Extensive Digital Character on Film”. Oh yes, I should also mention that it was a New Zealander, Ernest Rutherford, who first split the atom, fathered nuclear physics, and was referred to as “a second Newton” by Albert Einstein, but really, most hand amputations? Wow.
Not bad for a country with a population of barely four million. My home state of Washington (boasting a population of over five million) has only eight Guinness World Records to its name, none of which involve splitting the atom or summiting Mt. Everest (though we did make the world’s largest apple pie).
Kate and I were wondering if New Zealand also qualified as the windiest place on earth, too, as we stood staring over the Waitemata Harbor, a choppy white-capped body of water that looked nothing like the serene haven in the tourist pictures we had seen. We couldn’t figure out where all of Auckland’s countless boats had gone, and assumed they had been blown away sometime earlier. We leaned out over the rail of the dock, looking at the natural harbor we had come so far to see, the same body of water that in all the pictures looked a calm and inviting blue, and said the only thing that came to mind.
“Huh.”
The two of us were soaking wet, cold, suffering the indefatigable jetlag that comes with the journey to New Zealand and were still trying to wrestle with the fact that we were an entire world away from where we had been just twenty hours earlier--an effect of flying that I can never easily shake off. We were also waiting to be wooed by exotic New Zealand, but hadn’t yet discovered anything more striking than the difference between American and Kiwi Ketchup (theirs tastes like apple cinnamon). As we walked back up Queen Street surrounded by the buildings of Auckland I got scared that the rest of New Zealand might be just as cosmopolitan as its largest city. It wasn’t that Auckland was boring; it just didn’t feel distinctly Kiwi, and as I found out, it isn’t.
In all of its urban glory, Auckland has detached from its heritage enough that New Zealanders consider the city the sort of red-headed step-child of their fair and rural country. Aucklanders don’t mind this one bit, either, as they consider the rest of New Zealand to be their dated Uncle who still believes in keeping the Sabbath holy and talks about life on the farm and the good old days when sheep were sheep and men were men.
To put it lightly, there is something of a growing rift between urban Auckland and the rest of New Zealand. Auckland, to the rest of the country, is dangerously progressive: people shop on Saturdays, bars are open past six o’clock, and citizens can drink on Sundays. The respective opinion is that Aucklanders are queer ultra-liberal city folk and everyone else is a redneck. This is nowhere clearer in the fact that The New Zealand Herald isn’t actually a national newspaper as the name might hint, but instead is written by Aucklanders, for Aucklanders. The city is a sort of Manhattan in that it has its own gravitational pull and could care less if the rest of the country went ka-blooey because, odds are, they wouldn’t even notice. And, in turn, other Kiwis don’t refer to the city dwellers as New Zealanders, Kiwis, or countrymen but as JAFAs, an affectionate nickname that means Just Another Fucking Aucklander.
Much of New Zealand is a far cry from its sheep herding past, but don’t worry, while you can jump, swim or Zorb all you like throughout much of the island country, the upper part of New Zealand’s North Island (inventively called Northland) has missed the adrenaline buzz altogether and remains as unchanged as the sheets at our hostel. And this is where Kate and I were headed.
* Sky Towers are so popular, in fact, that an organization exists in support of the structures so that Sky Tower aficionados can get together and chat. It’s called, rather boldly, the World Federation of Great Towers, a veritable “who’s who of international towers” according to the Sunday Star-Times. Boasting a membership of 23 “Great Towers” (not including the Eiffel Tower, though curiously enough a copy of the Eiffel Tower in Blackpool, England does boast a membership) the federation spans a whopping four continents.
* Clint Hallam may not actually be from Christchurch, but this is where he was serving a prison sentence for fraud when he lost his hand to a circular saw. Apart from serving time in New Zealand, he was also wanted for fraud in Australia, and even managed to steal about 10,000 dollars in France while he was in the hospital for his re-attachment surgery which leads me to the well-worn truth that when it comes to crime, yes, the one armed man is to blame.
No comments:
Post a Comment