When I hobbled back through town forty-five minutes later (unlike Holly, I was in no shape for full-out morning marathons), I found myself smack in the middle of Auckland’s morning rush hour. It was a misnomer, really, considering that nobody actually seemed to be in a hurry. Cute, closely shaven men in impeccably tailored suits strolled up Customs Street, while adorably accessorized women breezed out of Starbucks with to-go lattes in hand. People laughed and made conversation with their friends or coworkers. No one stepped into the crosswalk until the signal instructed them to do so, and if they bumped into someone moving the other way, they apologized. It looked like an artist’s rendering of some pristine, well-organized city of the future, a place where smartly dressed people look thrilled to be sharing communal spaces. Except this wasn’t a sketch or a digitized model; it was the largest and most populous city in New Zealand.
You’re kidding me. You actually like it here?” said our local Kiwi pal Carmi when she picked us up the next day in her gunmetal gray Toyota Marino.
We’d met the twenty-four-year-old in cyberspace after she’d stumbled upon our blog. When she learned that we’d be in New Zealand, she’d e-mailed to ask if we’d like her to play chauffeur and tour guide during our stay in her city. Our response: a unanimous “hell yeah.” We’d planned to stay in Auckland for only four days—long enough to spend some time with local friends of Holly’s—but that was three days too long in Carmi’s book.
“What do you like about Auckland?” she asked in utter disbelief.
“It just seems like such a livable city,” said Holly. After spending our first day exploring, we’d all been impressed by the sheer amount of land devoted to parks, paths, and outdoor spaces—not to mention the waterfront views. The city had been built on a narrow stretch of land threaded between two harbors dividing the Tasman Sea from the Pacific. Every bay and cove was filled to bursting with gleaming white boats, from tiny skiffs to yachts. It wasn’t hard to guess why it had been nicknamed the City of Sails.
What we couldn’t figure out was why the locals seemed to have such a neutral impression of their own hometown. They voiced the same complaints as most other city dwellers: too much traffic, skyrocketing home prices, the fact that so much urban sprawl had developed in recent years. How could Aucklanders be so unaware of their city’s awesomeness relative to everyone else’s?
“Wait till you start traveling through the rest of the country,” Carmi said. “Then you’ll see why you shouldn’t have spent so much time here.”
She explained that the North and South islands were jam-packed with extraordinary natural wonders of IMAX-worthy proportions. Rain forests, redwood forests, deciduous forests, electric blue glaciers, limestone karst, knife-edged mountains, bubbling volcanoes, deeply cut fjords, steaming sulfur pools, and crystalline beaches rimming aquamarine waters had all been crammed into a landmass smaller in size than Italy. A total of 4 million people live in New Zealand, a third of whom are in Auckland, which makes this a nation of small towns and one of the least densely populated countries in the world. You can actually leave your front door unlocked in most places. Sheep outnumber people ten to one.
“Hey, d’you guys think you’d ever try something like that? I’ve never been, but I’d heard it’s sweet as,” said Carmi, pointing up at the Auckland Sky Tower. It looked distinctly like the Seattle Space Needle, except, according to our walking guidebook, Jen, it was 471 feet taller—the tallest freestanding structure in the Southern Hemisphere.
“Sweet as what?” Holly asked, squinting up at the tiny figures leaping off the side of the tower in a feat that looked like BASE jumping with a rope instead of a parachute.
“Sweet as. It’s an expression, and you’d better get used to it. Kiwis say it a lot.”
“Hey, Amanda, let’s do it! Want to go this afternoon?” Jen asked eagerly, always ready to fling herself off something if it involved an adrenaline rush and bragging rights.
“Hell to the no,” I said. Jen had been trying to talk me into doing some kind of famous bungee jump in the South Island, and I’d had a similar response. My days of seeking out crazy near-death experiences were just about over.
“Holly?” Jen asked.
“Sorry—at this point, I think my credit card company would decline me just on principle.”
“Okay, so now that that’s settled,” Carmi said. “Where would you ladies like to go?”
“Oooh! I know! Let’s go shopping!”
Holly, who anticipates visits to foreign grocery stores the way religious disciples look forward to their pilgrimage to Mecca or the Wailing Wall, requested that our first stop be the New World supermarket we’d passed on the way into town to check out all the unusual and exotic foods consumed by New Zealanders.
“Is she being serious?” Carmi asked me as Holly slid into the backseat.
“Completely. It’s a borderline addiction.”
After a quick spin through the aisles, Holly purchased a few essential rations and we struck off to find some real culture in greater Auckland. We made it to most of the spots on Carmi’s hit list, including the “superflash,” newly renovated Auckland Museum, Viaduct Harbour, and the Queen Street market, rocking out between stops to a mix of songs she’d created for us with local artists like Brooke Fraser, Dave Dobbyn, and her personal favorite, Fat Freddy’s Drop.
“New Zealanders really live for music,” she said passionately. “We savor every song. And our bands can rival just about anyone else’s in the world. We’re good at making music but even better at celebrating it.”
As it turned out, Carmi was a wellspring of information about all things Kiwi. As we made our way to Mission Bay, a beachfront strip of trendy restaurants and cafés, Holly peppered her with the same questions about marriage and relationships she’d been asking women the globe over: “How do people meet here? How old are they when they get married? How old are they when they have kids?”
Lobbing the answers back with the speed and precision of a tennis pro smacking balls over a net, Carmi kept us riveted with her revelations about New Zealand culture.
On gender roles: “After decades of proving that women are equal to men, relationships between guys and girls are very progressive. You’ll usually see the men looking after the babies, putting them in prams, and taking them for walks while the mum goes off to work and earns the living.”
On meeting guys: “We definitely don’t go on ‘dates’ here like you girls do in the States. None of this Sex and the City stuff. It’s not like a guy will come up to you in a bar and ask you out. You usually just meet someone through friends and get together. That’s it.”
On matrimony: “You’ll find lots of couples who’ve been dating for years and years and live together but don’t get married. Marriage itself doesn’t really seem to be as much of a priority as it used to be.”
Listening intently, we chewed on this information and filed it away for future reference. In the event that any of us ever defected from our New York lives in order to pursue a future in Kiwiland, this was exactly what we’d need to know.
Later that afternoon, Carmi dropped us off at the home of Nora and Eric, a couple Holly knew through a friend of a friend from high school. Even though they’d never actually met Holly, they’d already offered to let all three of us stay with them for a couple of nights.
Nora and Eric had what appeared to be a pretty idyllic (and by Carmi’s standards fairly prototypical) New Zealand relationship. They’d recently opened a Pilates studio in a trendy Auckland neighborhood, moved into a snug two-bedroom bungalow a block from the beach, and had an adorable one-year-old girl with platinum ringlets named Madison. We wondered if they were married or if Nora just hadn’t taken her husband’s name (maybe it was one of those independent Kiwi girl things?), but she quickly set the record straight.
“Oh, Eric and I aren’t married. Well, not yet,” she said as she cheerfully installed Holly and me in their guestroom. “We’ve tossed around the idea, but with everything el
se going on—you know, the baby, the studio—we just haven’t gotten around to it.”
She turned to smile at the angelic blond girl on her hip. “Isn’t that right, my little darling? Mummy and Daddy are just sooo busy!”
Madison stared at her mom for a second before bursting into giggles and reaching up to pat her cheek. Nora handed the baby to Holly so she could grab a stack of towels.
“So are you girls all set, then? Jen, we’ll make up a bed for you tonight on the couch before we all go to sleep. Oh—one more thing.”
She pointed out a small red button on the wall near the bedside lamp. “For some reason, the last people who lived here installed this alarm just in case anyone tried to break in. But don’t worry. Auckland’s so safe, touch wood, we should never need to use it. Just try not to hit if you’re getting up in the middle of the night.”
We promised we’d be careful and thanked Nora again for her hospitality.
“Oh, don’t be silly.” Nora waved her hand. “We’re always thrilled to have guests. And Eric’s doing up a little dinner tonight, so get ready. He’s a good cook.”
The “little dinner” turned out to be a feast, and Eric and Nora had even bigger plans for our stomachs the second night. Their friend Ryan from Texas and his very pregnant wife, Kim, were throwing a dinner party for some other couples with kids, and we’d been invited. I was starting to think that Kiwis weren’t just friendly to visitors—they actually competed to see who could be more accommodating.
“Don’t worry, you won’t be the only unattached guests there,” said Nora. “Ryan says he’ll invite his single friend Cameron so you girls can chat him up if the rest of us get sidetracked with boring baby stuff.”
Ah—the token single male. I suddenly had a flash of Mark Darcy in a ridiculous reindeer sweater at the Christmas party in the first Bridget Jones movie. Except in our version, there’d be two sad singletons to scrap over him.
“He’s mine, ladies,” I joked. “Don’t even think about it.”
“Back off, Pressy,” said Jen. “I already claimed him, like, five minutes ago.”
As it turned out, the mysterious Cam was nothing like the frumpy, uptight Mark Darcy. He was a handsome Paul Rudd look-alike who was playing with all the kids when we arrived. I wondered if Jen or I really would want dibs on the guy; besides being supercute, he seemed incredibly sweet.
The hostess, Kim, on the other hand, acted edgy and hormonal around us from the second we walked in the door. We didn’t take it personally—the woman was near-to-bursting pregnant—but I was a little surprised when she immediately put us to work in the kitchen slicing up sausages, bread cubes, and cheese.
“Oh, and d’you mind washing up the dishes afterward?” she asked, not waiting for an answer before turning and stalking off.
“Hey, whoa, are those American accents I hear?” Judging from the drawl, I figured the voice belonged to her husband, Ryan, who tracked us down in the kitchen. He lounged in the doorway with a beer while we sliced. I’d spent half of my childhood in Texas, and this was truly a Lone Star good ol’ boy—big, brawny, and loud. I could easily picture him spending late nights drinking at the kind of place where peanut shells on the floor were considered fancy decor.
“So, tell me, ladies. What brings y’all down under? How’d you find yourselves here?”
I’d wondered the same thing about him. A Kiwi-Texan mash-up seemed most unusual. After catching us up on all he missed about his home state (“Real barbecue sauce. And Whataburger fries. Oh, and bars that stay open past midnight”), Ryan walked over to the fridge and asked, since we already had our hands dirty, if we would mind seasoning his meat. We all stared blankly as he pulled out a three-pound slab of steak and slapped it on the cutting board near the sink.
He laughed at his own joke and promised that he’d do it himself. But overhearing his comment from the other room, Kim instantly reappeared to let us know that actually, we should probably mingle with the other guests in the living room.
By now all of the couples had arrived, and we hung out with the young moms and dads, who for the most part seemed interested in hearing our stories from the trip.
“C’mon, fill us in on all the juiciest bits,” said Alice, whose three-year-old son, Kieran, was tearing around the house like an airplane. “We’re all mommies and daddies now, so we really don’t get the chance to—”
She stopped short as we all heard a crash, followed by a wail. “Oh, crap. Sorry…be right back.”
We soon sat down to dinner, a gourmet multicourse food orgy complete with wines, salads, creamy side dishes, grilled and sliced meats, and a fluffy meringue dessert known as Pavlova. The Kiwis at the table made us promise, when we headed to their larger neighbor across the Tasman Sea, that we wouldn’t believe any of those “Aussie bastards” who tried to say they’d invented the dessert.
“It’s always been ours. They keep trying to claim it,” said Alice’s husband, Ted.
“Ah, enough with that old Pavlova rivalry!” bellowed Ryan, who was sitting across the table from us next to Cam. With each course (and number of beers consumed), he’d gotten progressively louder and more vocal about expressing how much he missed the “good ol’ U.S. of A.” Now he turned his attention to our personal lives. “What I want to know is…which one of you girls doesn’t have a boyfriend?”
“Honey…please,” said an exasperated Kim, who’d been shooting us sidelong glances for the past two hours and now looked ready to evict us. Or murder her husband. Or both.
“What? What’s wrong now? I’m just asking these nice ladies a question on behalf of my good buddy Cam here, who by the way is totally available,” he said, nudging his friend, who blushed and shrugged as if to say, “Sorry, I don’t actually know this guy.”
“I have an idea.” Kim ignored his comment, hoisting herself with some effort into a standing position. “I think it’s time that we all switch the groups around so everyone gets the chance to talk to everyone else. I mean, there’s no need to have all of the Americans in one cozy little cluster on one side of the table. C’mon, everybody—up.”
Everyone stared at Kim for a second, unsure whether to follow her instructions. Kim repeated herself, and after the group slowly stood, Ryan told us to sit back down. He wasn’t going anywhere, he said. Kim switched tactics, coming to our end of the table and wedging a chair between Ryan and Cam.
“So, ladies, I really want to know more about you, too. None of you are married, right? Wow. How old are you again?”
Holly provided our ages, and Kim continued grilling—about our lives back home, Jen’s breakup, and Holly’s long-distance status, whether we worried that taking a yearlong trip might set us back a few years in the dating-and-mating game.
“I mean, you do want to have kids, don’t you?” she asked, now incredibly concerned for our welfare and health. “You know that it gets riskier the longer you wait, right?”
After several long minutes spent trying to produce inoffensive answers while a drunk Ryan mocked his wife, Eric and Nora came over to rescue us, saying that they really had to get home to put Madison to bed.
“Well, I can drop the girls off at your place later. Really, it’s no problem,” Ryan drawled, insisting that the three of us continue our night with him and Cam at a bar up the road. I couldn’t even look at Kim.
We declined the offer (several times, in fact). Cam gave us each a hug and said that if we ever came back through town, to look him up. Kim paced behind her husband in the living room as we walked out and piled in with Madison in the backseat of the car.
“I think that went well,” Eric joked as he pulled out of the driveway.
“I’ll call her tomorrow,” said Nora, and that was the last we spoke of dinner.
Later that night I fell into a fitful sleep in the guest room and dreamed that I was in a race chasing after Cam, desperate to win him so he could father my children. I eventually caught him, but when he turned around he’d somehow morphed into Kim, who
was furious at me for trying to have an affair with her husband. I woke up sweating and reached over to fumble for the light, only to hear the high-pitched wail of sirens fill the house. Holly shot up in bed next to me and ripped off her sleep mask. “What’s happening? What’s going on?”
Eric shot into the bedroom, pulled open a panel on the wall, and killed the noise.
Somehow, despite Nora’s warnings, I’d hit the panic button.
After that, we decided that Carmi was right. It was time to get moving. We thanked Eric and Nora for their hospitality and started planning our road trip.
After some serious deliberation, we decided against the hop-on, hop-off backpacker bus tour through the North and South Islands (otherwise known as the “Kiwi Experience”) in favor of renting our own set of wheels. The bus cost a little less, but the car would offer more freedom and flexibility. No more bus, train, and plane schedules for us, no sir. We couldn’t wait to be on the open road, in charge of our own destiny.
And once we made the four-hour drive from Auckland to the volcanic village of Rotorua, we realized we’d made a wise decision. Checking in at the Hot Rock hostel, we watched as an enormous green monster of a bus pulled into the parking lot and sixty bedraggled high school–and college-age backpackers spilled out, straining under the weight of their backpacks, day packs, and plastic bags filled with chips, cereal, candy bars, and loaves of bread. It would have seemed like a dream road trip situation the summer after college (or, um…a few months ago?), but the whole concept just didn’t sound quite as appealing to me anymore.
Most backpackers spend about a day or two at most in Rotorua. We’d scheduled four. “Too long! Keep moving!” I could practically hear Carmi shouting, but Jen, Holly, and I were done with blowing into and out of places at warp speed. As we’d learned during the latter half of our Southeast Asia trek, putting too much on your must-see list is the fastest way to ensure that you’ll be exhausted and miserable and totally miss the point.
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