The Great Trip

Dr. Who Eat Your Heart Out

So, it does appear that time travel is really possible. Let me see if I can explain it as I understand it. When you travel west and pass a special line on the planet called the “International Dating Hotline”, you have the opportunity to make a toll-free call to the love after-life and post-dating help desk, currently outsourced to a call center in India. To make this call, a phone appears to you in a dream on the day before yesterday. The operator will ask if you want to reverse the charges on a long-distance call to a telephone booth in Lebanon. If you miss your chance to make this call or a Lebanese cab driver refuses the charges, one day of you life is deducted never to be regained in this life. You can, however, recover the day if you are reincarnated as a cow traveling east from around the planet, and survive the journey through the USA without becoming a Big Mac. This explanation must be true because I found it on the internet.

Well, so maybe not totally accurate but it makes the most sense to me at the moment. From what I can gather the earliest note of what is called the Circumnavigators Paradox comes from the Twelfth Century. It was noted that a person, depending of his direction of travel, would either gain or lose a day upon completion of a circumnavigation. This is why the International Date Line was put in place to account for this physical issue. Suffice it to say that we left Hawaii and went through a time-warp of some manufacture and landed in New Zealand.
So, there we were 8 AM Auckland time bleary eyed and somewhat confused stumbling around with our backpacks and looking for a way into the city. After being herded onto a mini-bus and driven to our hostel in downtown Auckland our eyes started focusing again and we began to take in downtown. Auckland feels a bit like London without the bad exchange rate or San Francisco with a touch of an accent. The sky-line is filled, as it should be, with tall buildings sporting the names of international companies in neon and florescent lights. The streets are filled with suits and backpackers puttering around the city. The suits have a determined look and a place to be, the backpackers have a load to carry and no place in particular to be, which makes for interesting people watching. Take-Away (Translated To-Go Food) is king and easy on the wallet; every type of food you could ever desire is being stuffed, baked, fried, boiled, or wood-grilled on nearly every street corner.


Anissa and I discovered (not in an Abel Tasman* way) a Take-Away mall next to the hostel with every country in Asia represented. For the four days we were in Auckland we ate nearly every meal from the counters of the mall. With the money we saved from eating on the cheap for most meals we splurged at Monsoon Poon.

I am not really sure what Poon translates to, but on the business card the motto reads “LOVE U LONG TIME”. The monsoon must refer to the deluge of flavors in every dish they serve. The restaurant is a Pan-Asian celebration of food; you can start your meal, as we did, in India with a veggie pakora then move to Singapore for some street noodles and then up to the Kashmir region for a 25 spice lamb served with a pyramid of red-yellow saffron rice. To finish the meal you can down a cup of espresso and waddle out the door or (we chose the waddle) enjoy something sweet from Vietnam if you wish. The jewel colored Turkish glass lamps hanging from the ceiling played across distressed wood tables from India and ancient doorways transported from Thailand, down-tempo techno music rolled softly under the voices of the people at the tables around us, and we felt as if we could have been in any top restaurant anywhere in the world. This meal was worth all the cheap noodles we ate at the Pan-Asian food-court saving for the experience.

After such a rich cultural experience we felt that some blood-sport was needed to round out the Auckland experience. Where does one find such blood-sport in NZ? At the local Rugby Pitch of course. We had the chance to see the Auckland Blues bludgeon the Australian Brumbies in league play. If you are unaware of the rules for the game of Rugby I will sum them up for you here as best I can.

To open the game there is a kick-off of a ball about the shape of a (American) football, but twice the size, to the opposing team. From that point on, the goal of the team without the ball is to make the spectators say, “OOhhhhh Ouch” as loud as possible by tackling the player gripping the ball, then the ball turns over to the other team. If you have possession of the ball you can only run forward trying to avoid being sent home on a stretcher. To top it all, the ball must never be thrown forward ­­­— that would just be too easy — you must run ahead 10 yards and then throw the ball to your teammate 15 yards behind you. Finally, if you happen to get near the aerials at either end of the field you dive and slide on your belly across a white spray-painted line with your arms fully extended to score five points and get tossed around by your teammates in celebration.


Unlike us silly Americans you do this without any pads or protection such as helmets or shoulder pads. The win is awarded to the team that can walk off the field under their own power after eighty minuets of play. Once again, in the wisdom of the game founders, the game is played in two forty minutes halves with half-time of, are you ready, five minutes. There is no place for sissies in this game, let alone a wardrobe malfunction at half-time, which is probably why it hasn’t caught on in the US. Rugby may start to catch on in the US if the Hollywood vote has anything to say.

As proof that the sport is coming into favor in the US, Anissa and I met the Hollywood actor Robert Patrick in the parking lot after the game (you can search IMDB if you don’t know him by name. You might recognize him most recently as the father of Johnny Cash in the movie “Walk the Line”). He was a very kind chap as we interrupted him lighting up a gourmet cigarette. He was in the area filming a new movie; it appears, according to him, that New Zealand is the new Hollywood. We couldn’t ask for a better cherry to top our Auckland dessert, because the very next day we were heading out on the road to see the country.

Whether or not you have to go through a time-warp to visit Auckland it is truly worth the trip. We are having a wonderful time. There is so much more to come.

Cheers from New Zealand

Rion and Anissa

* Abel Tasman was the first westerner to discover the Islands of New Zealand and chart the west coast while he was on contract with the Dutch East India Company. He was looking for the Great South Land, believed to balance the land mass in the known north. He gave the land mass it’s name ‘Nieuw Zeeland’ or ‘New Sealand’ as translated to English. 

posted by Rion and Anissa @ 12:16 AM