Relationships between the U.S. and New Zealand are at an all-time low. This should have been obvious to me when I got on the plane for New Zealand and the stewardesses performed the ‘haka’ ( an aggressive, pre-battle Moari war dance) when any Americans got on board. Also they tortured us by making our fat, corpulent bodies sit in seats made for nice, skinny athletic New Zealanders. That was really nasty.
New Zealand does a lot of advertising to get people to come visit then tries to kill off as many of them as possible by inventing all sorts of dangerous sports for them to try. A.J. Hacket invented Bungee-jumping which people have been trying in droves like lemmings with rubber bands on their ankles. It was also here that Zorbing was invented which is letting yourself be put in a big clear ball and allowing total strangers (and foreigners at that) roll you down a hill. I question who should be paying who for this. Edmund Hillary invented climbing the highest mountain in the world but that’s in another country, however wait long enough and someone will build a higher one here in New Zealand. A sucker, er, tourist can take part in such nerve destroying sports such as acrobatic plane flying, deep scuba diving in cold water meant only for whales, sky diving with another human being for a backpack, swinging over a canyon on a pendulum bungee, flying a tiny plane attached to a crane by a cable and swimming with sabre-toothed, man-eating, vicious dolphins.
The famous symbol of New Zealand is the kiwi bird which actually isn’t a bird at all but is really a brown tennis ball with a beak and legs. It doesn’t say much for a country to have a mascot that is known to sleep 20 hours a day but then if I had a beak twice as long as my head and legs like a Chicago Bulls basketball player I would hide myself in daylight too. There was once actually an announcement on New Zealand radio that if anyone ever found kiwi eggs in the wild they should not try putting them into a microwave to hatch them. (Honest, I am not making this up. – copyright Dave Berry)
Measurements in New Zealand are centimeters, meters, kilometers and heaps. The standard liquid measurement is the beer can. (For example- “How much gasoline will the lawn mower hold, James? ” “Oh, about 5 beer cans full.”)
New Zealand is one of the world’s largest producers of rain. If N.Z. could sell off it’s excess water to the parched areas of Australia they would be richer than the Arabs. Tourists from drought stricken Queensland have been seen filling up and hoarding bottles of water to take back with them. There are companies here that are famous for making rain gear but many Kiwis save money and trouble by simply rubberizing their bodies from head to toe. Planes flying to New Zealand don’t even use radar to find their way in. They simply watch for an enormous mass of rain clouds and know that New Zealand is under it. Actually, the Maori name for New Zealand is ‘Aotearoa’ which according to the Tourist Bureau’s translation means Land of the Great White Cloud but more accurately translated means ‘Land of the Great White Cloud that %&#$@* rains all the time so that you can’t get a *&$$#A%$ thing done without getting drenched to the bone’.
There is a greater integration in New Zealand between the ‘Pakula’ (Maori for white people which translated correctly actually means bleached out numbskulls who taste like the white meat on chickens’. ) and the Maori’s than exists in other countries containing two racial groups. For instance many places and stores have their signs written in both Maori and English. This is ethnically wholesome but makes it tough on travelers to recognize the McDonald’s when it is called ‘McHongi’s’. Speaking of dual languages, I had trouble with the local Maori council since my name turns out to be an old Maori name for kiwi bladder and therefore is not a name that can be used by Pakulas. Because of this I went back to using my old high school nickname which was “Hey stupid” while I was there.
Unfortunately New Zealand is not the paradise that so many think it is. New Zealand has it’s problems too. Unemployment is high, especially among Maori entertainers whose tongues are not long enough. It also doesn’t help the economy that there is so much counterfeit money going around. I know this is true because I’ve gotten $10.00 bills before with a picture of some famous bloke on them but then the watermark is of some dame.
The food here is good, though. Buying fish and chips can be a major undertaking though, the effort being finding the fish in amongst all the paper they wrap it in. For some reason the fish and chips are wrapped in enough paper to withstand a nuclear explosion. It is so nicely wrapped up that you could keep it and give it for a Christmas present. It is rumoured that one kauri tree has to fall to make the paper that every 20 fish and chips are wrapped in. It is good that the Maori’s hadn’t had fish and chips in the pre-Pakula days otherwise the entire island would be stripped of trees.
New Zealand is cursed with really ugly fish. If you look at a poster charting the local fish in the southern seas you l ll see that Australia has really pretty fish, all nicely colored and structured and proportional, but New Zealand’s all look like they are mutants that swam down from some French nuclear testing site. They are all buggy eyed and look so bony that you wonder if there is really any meat on them. One also has to wonder if beauty is also a sign of intelligence in fish since the Australian fish have all elected to swim in some of the warmest waters of the world whereas the New Zealand fish are definitely not. There is one fish commonly eaten called a John Dory. I don’t know who John Dorry was but someone must have really hated his guts to name such a beast after him. If I had known what this thing looked like while it still had skin on I would have never touched it.
Rotorua is an interesting town on the north island. It is full with volcanic activity such as geysers and hot springs and boiling mud baths. It’s nice because you can fart anywhere in town and no one can blame it on you because of the constant sulfur smell in the air. I don’t know if this is good for the young people though. I see them sitting around the pools sniffing the fumes and getting high. Officials have claimed that putting the mud from the baths on your face will make you more beautiful. I don’t believe it because I stuck my head in one for an hour and I still looked the same, except muddy. It did, however, singe off a lot of unwanted body hair.
In the north part of the northern island farmers put up signs along the side of the road selling delicious things from their farms and orchards. One can stop and buy oranges, kiwi fruit, mandarins, grapefruits and other goodies. I shouldn’t have stopped at the sign that said ‘Chicken Manure’ on it, though. I can’t be blamed if I didn’t know what ‘manure’ meant. I thought that it was a Maori word for something yummy. The people that I shared it with hadn’t known what it mean either. It wasn’t bad with a little salt, though.
They have slot machines in New Zealand now that they must have bought from a company in Las Vegas. They are a bit different from those in Vegas however. Here they are outside on the sidewalk, take your money quickly and don’t give anything back. They are called Telecom phone machines. They are New Zealand’s answer to a national lottery which makes a lot of money for the state since everybody does it and they never pay anything back out.
The clerks in the stores love to give people plastic bags. lt’s a national obsession as though one couldn’t get enough plastic bags in ones life. In one shopping expedition one comes home with enough plastic bags to build their own hot air balloon. I think it is a precaution against New Zealand’s unpredictable weather- if it starts to rain on your way home one can always cover one’s essential body parts with them.
The English settling New Zealand firmly believed that New Zealand didn’t have enough plants there already so they brought some more with them. This is sort of like bringing the mountains to Mohammed. New Zealand already had more plants and trees than a person could make toothpicks out of. They brought over one called gorse that really took over. It’s called I gorse’ because anyone who has ever gotten it on their property says “Gorse, doesn’t that grow fast!” They also brought pine trees over because they wanted to make New Zealand as much like England as possible. It wasn’t enough that New Zealand already had enough rainy weather, rocky fields, shoppes , cows, rugged sea sides, ships and mud to remind them of home already.
New Zealanders are shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to their wool industry. Here they are, one of the world’s great producers of wool and what do the Kiwi’s do in bad weather? They run around half naked. It will be blustery, cold and rainy and what will he wear to pick up something at the store? A tank top t-shirt and shorts not to mention sandles. Or bare foot. I freeze to death just looking at them. I strongly suspect that the real reason they shear their sheep there is not that they really need the wool but rather they think it is good for the sheep to rough it a bit by running around half naked.