saving akira

"Nice to meet you, son", said the ruddy-faced man in the baby blue cloth hat. "Hope you brought your togs with you."

"Brought my what?"

To be honest, I didn't really say that. Instead I allowed my brain 1/2 a second to sift through its expanding collection of Kiwi English, and then said "Well, truthfully, I'm not much of a swimmer". At that point in time, I was yet to realise that this is almost the Kiwi equivalent of a man in Australia saying "No thanks, I don't drink beer". I've learned a lot since then.

It seems from an outsider's p.o.v. that New Zealanders always have swimming plans lurking somewhere at the back of their minds. In any given tourist brochure you pick up, the basic sales pitch goes like this: "Come and experience the finest [blah blah thingie whatever] NZ has to offer, and enjoy a refreshing swim afterwards in our nearby [lake / mineral pool / white sandy beach / other body of water]". If the brochure advertises an activity, the first thing listed under "requirements" will be "swimwear". And if it's aimed at the local tourist market, you can guarantee the phrase "bring your togs!" will appear somewhere – always with the joyful exclamation mark. It seems there's no kind of day out into which a Kiwi* can't insert some paddling time. Quite impressive really, but a tiny bit socially awkward if you don't like swimming. And guess who doesn't :-(

So, given that I'd just revealed I was from an alien planet, I think the cloth-hatted man's response was very gracious. "Oh well, there's plenty of nice beach on Motuihe. You can always go for a wander along the coast. The ground can be a wee bit sharp, though; did you bring your jandals**?"

This conversation, btw, was taking place at the back end of a ferry headed for Motuihe, an island in the Hauraki Gulf outside Auckland. Mr. Cloth-Hat was one of the stewards of the Motuihe Conservation Project, who are re-planting the island with native NZ trees. Similar completed projects on neighbouring islands have had amazing results: on nearby Tiritiri Matangi 80% of the island has been re-planted and it's now the best place in the country to see some of NZ's most fabulous birds.

Anyway, while I was on Motuihe, in the morning I basically planted little baby manukas (a.k.a. tea trees) in root-trainer pots, which was repetitive but strangely relaxing. After lunch I went off in search of pohutukawa trees on the windward side of the island. They needed to be 'banded' – which is to say that, working with two other people, I had to put wide hessian bands around them, tied between two sticks. This is so that strong headwinds don't rip the young trees out of the ground and hurl them into the waters of the Gulf.

Mind you, at the time I was less than crystal clear about exactly what kind of tree I was meant to be protecting. The word pohutukawa flashed by me a few times without connecting firmly to anything in my brain, and it was only later that I really got the name right. Here's the conversation that finally did it:

KIWI PERSON:      "So what did you do on Motuihe?"

ME:                           "Well, in the morning I planted Manuka and in the
                                  afternoon I banded those trees that sound like a
                                  Japanese film director."

KIWI:                       "Sound like what?"

ME:                           "You know, Akira Kurosawa."

KIWI:                       "Aaaah, you mean pohutukawa".

ME:                           "Um ... yeah, that could be them."

The following weekend I saw lots more pohutukawa on Rangitoto. And a couple of things just struck me as I was typing that. First, it's one of those sentences you only get to write once in a lifetime. (I like those.) And second, I should probably explain what the Hell it means.

So, Rangitoto Island. This is basically a volcano that shot up in the middle of the Hauraki Gulf about 600 years ago, a little way outside the North Head of Auckland's harbour. Rangitoto has that classic cone shape that everyone thinks of whenever the word "volcano" comes up in conversation – it kind of squats conspicuously out there beyond the heads, doing a reasonable impression of Mt. Fuji with half the air let out. It's an open invitation to anyone who's never seen a volcano before ... and until a few weeks ago, that was me.

One of the weirdest things to contemplate vis-a-vis Rangitoto is that, at the time of its emergence, there were quite a few Maori living on the (very) nearby island of Motatapu. So picture this: you're pottering about in your tropical ocean paradise one day, carving delicious edible sculptures out of ripe summer fruits or whatever, and suddenly an enormous mountain pushes itself angrily out of the sea in front of you, vomiting ash and lava onto you, your loved ones, your drinking buddies, your crops, your fabulous fruit sculpture (which you've spent hours on) and pretty much everything else within your rapidly shrinking field of vision.

All of which begs the question: "Jeez ... how would you cope?"

So anyway, you get onto the island and you've got the whole anatomy of a volcanic eruption laid out before you, which is pretty remarkable. I mean, Motuihe was pretty, but it's more or less your standard semi-tropical island (albeit with some funky birds, whom I dutifully chased with a camera). Rangitoto, on the other hand, had some ugly, scarred areas along with some pleasant and even beautiful parts, and I found the whole jigsaw of it quite fascinating.

To start with, on the lower parts of the island there are vast amounts of loose volcanic rock called scoria lying around. These came out of the crater as magma, tumbled down the sides of the mountain and solidified to create snapshots of Rangitoto's birth pains. Some of the scoria lies in valleys that sweep dramatically down from the summit, giving it the appearance of a solid river (and the light-coloured mosses growing on top provide quite a convincing 'white-water' effect). Elsewhere it's seemingly thrown about quite randomly, making certain parts of Rangitoto look like abandoned quarries.

As you head up towards the summit, the scoria disappears and you find yourself walking through forest, surrounded by giant tree ferns and pohutukawa and other exotic greenery.

  

At this point you start to notice the soils of Rangitoto, which also came from the crater. Their colours change dramatically from one location to another, ranging from yellow through outback red to deep purple. According to the signs around the island, the soil's colour can tell you what it was originally and how early or late in the process it was released from the Earth. All of which is cool, of course ... but mainly, I just thought it was kinda pretty.

Further up still and you can look out over Motatapu – the island where those poor Maori were living when their weekend was ruined by the arrival of a scary magma-spitting mountain on their doorstep. When Rangitoto erupted, Motatapu was completely covered in ash, and even now it's almost treeless. Looking out from the lush forested slopes of Rangitoto – a volcano, don't forget – to the naked hills of Motatapu is quite bizarre; you get the sense of nature arranging things in exactly the opposite way to what you'd expect.

And then of course there's the crater. This, I have to admit, was a bit disappointing. Expecting a massive, gaping, fearsome hole, instead what I saw was ... well, it looked like a thickly-forested valley. Probably because that's exactly what it is. Even the fluffy little green birds with the striking white eyeliner who were flitting around the crater's edge didn't seem to feel overawed by it. They were just there to enjoy the pohutukawa seeds.

And that was Rangitoto.

Before I 'sign off', I want to mention something a bit odd that happened while I was wandering through the fields of scoria.

The environment of Rangitoto inspires plenty of free mental association, and as my mind wandered about I found myself once again thinking of a certain famous Japanese film director.

To explain the oddness of this, I have to tell you that I'm not a massive Kurosawa fan. I haven't even seen Seven Samurai or Yojimbo (his most famous works, the second of which was re-made as one of my all-time favourite films, Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars). However, late one night about six months ago, Australia's multicultural TV network SBS showed a film called The Dreams of Akira Kurosawa.

As far as I could understand, there were two main characters in the film: Kurosawa himself, and some other guy that was walking around listening to him deliver monologues. It seemed like a kind of Dante/Virgil pairing, with Kurosawa leading his friend through various hellish landscapes and explaining the nightmares that he associated with them.

I couldn't work out whether, in the rubric of the story, these were meant to be actual landscapes or just regions of Kurosawa's mind. But they were filmed in an interesting way. The film makers had obviously gone to real locations and shot them, but it often appeared as though they'd filmed the actors separately on a green screen, to show that they weren't actually walking on the landscapes but rather floating slightly above them. And the scoria fields I saw around me on Rangitoto looked a lot like some of the locations in that film.

More than that: there's something not-quite-real about the idea of hiking around a volcano which heaved itself out of the ocean just a few geological blinks-of-an-eye before you got there. It really does give you the sensation of being a little physically detached. There are moments when you feel as though you might not really be there – perhaps you're walking in front of a green screen and the background images are being matched into the picture as you go. Much like The Dreams of Akira Kurosawa.

To finish off with yet another irrelevant sidebar ('cause, for those of you who didn't know, my super hero name is "Captain Tangent"): a couple of people have asked me whether I'm struggling with Maori place names. The answer is definitely "yes". Even the word Maori itself is tricky to pronounce, and I was a little surprised to learn just how wrongly I'd been saying it before I got here. But speaking of things Japanese (or at least of one Japanese guy), someone here told me a very interesting thing: a few Japanese immigrants and students who come to NZ decide to try learning the Maori language, and they apparently find it quite easy to pick up. Isn't that interesting?

Okay, so maybe not hugely interesting. Unless you're a Word Nerd, of course. But I have been thinking about it as various Maori place names flash by me on road signs etc., and as I hear and read Japanese around the place. (I learned to read and write Katakana and Hiragana last year, so now I'm an avid reader of Japanese signs, even though I usually don't understand what the words mean.) And from a phonetic point of view, I think the Japanese-finding-Maori-quite-easy phenomenon kinda makes sense. Check it out:

Japanese:   "Hajimemashite. Watashino namaewa Antoni desu."

                       ("Nice to meet you. My name's Anthony.")

Maori:         "Kia Ora, Antoni. Pohutukawa?"

                        ("Welcome, Anthony. Christmas tree?")

Now, don't they seem to you like they could almost be the same language?

Okay, enough of this silliness. I'd better go. Stay tuned for news of my road trip to the volcanic Central North Island, wherein stinky sulphurous fun was had by all :-)

Take care and stay well. Bye!

(* Just btw, New Zealanders do actually call themselves "Kiwis". If you think you're scoring points by equating a New Zealander to a flightless bird {which I think a lot of Australians do} ... well, you're not. Sorry.)

(**"Flip-flops" if you're English or American, "Thongs" if you're Australian, and probably a different preposterous name if you're from any other part of the English-speaking world.)