Travel by DAR

New Zealand: Nine Lives

(First published in Esquire)

For your hosts, it’s been nothing more than a normal week of derring-do. But for you, a week in the wild adventureland of New Zealand has been harrowing enough to make you take haven, good and proper, in this hot tub. You are safe now, chin-deep in 104-degree water as an ice-green river races beside you under a purpling sky. Steam levitates from your tub into the Sequoias towering above, spotted with berries and echoing with the sound of giant alpine parrots like a Neanderthal stage set. Take a deserved sip of your honey mead. Take another. After the heroics you’ve survived, you can use a little reflection.

Reflection from a Hot Tub, Number One. First thing you did, upon arrival one week ago, you went jet boating. No sooner were you off your plane (which had landed in a freak Auckland tornado after being hit by lightning twice – no one’s fault, of course, except that you should have suspected at once how the tone of your trip was being set) than you let your New Zealand hosts talk you into putting on a crash helmet, strapping into the bow of a thin aluminum shell, then proceeding down an alleyway of a river between outcroppings of sheer granite at 40 mph. “Between” doesn’t really get at the point of the venture; your pilot, a twenty-year-old native whose eyes you never saw because they were encased in dream-goggles, was endeavoring to skim as close as he could to the granite outcroppings. Two inches was pretty good in his estimation. One and a half, even better. To glance at this pilot with a look that had Northern Hemisphere-style terror in it, or truculence, or tears of mercy – to glance at him with any sanity, in other words – was to challenge him to go closer. That was your first morning.

Take another sip of your honey mead from the preserve of your hot tub. Luxuriate in the cedar-scented drizzle, pleasant in the New Zealand manner – placid with the threat of menace close behind. Reflection Number Two: concerning why you didn’t pack up then and there and go home. No. You let them put you on a living, breathing, dust-blustering helicopter (previous to this, the closest you’d been to such a thing was M*A*S*H reruns) to corkscrew up the gorge of yet another river so you could put on yet another crash helmet and go whitewater rafting. On a grade-five river. With no ropes to hold on to. Through passes called the “Toilet,” the “Mother-in-Law,” the “Oh Shit.” In Alaska, you were told, they don’t let pros go through passes like these. But this isn’t Alaska. This is Alaska one hundred years ago.

Serenely, jungle ferns bend to kiss the killing current beside your hot tub as all around you the drizzle turns to hail the size of rock-crystal nuggets. Put your head underwater to hear the sound of hail from below, like a daredevil’s applause. Ponder why New Zealand Man (both more lighthearted and more protein-oriented than Cro-Magnon Man, eating, at seventy kilos a year, more red meat than almost anyone on the globe, thus fueling himself to smile in the face of death) seems to thrive on these forms of sport. Ponder why New Zealand Woman (primly pretty, in the queenly style of many Commonwealth lands, with a starchy sexiness and even crisper handshakes than the men) puts up with it. Ponder why you still didn’t go home, even after the guide beside you in the raft broke his leg in two places and you’d heard the rumor about the Japanese honeymoon couple who’d been decapitated; why you in fact elected to go “scenic flying.”

Recall this, and marvel: that through your own free will, with no one holding a gun to your head, you caught another turbulent plane ride from whose heights – five thousand feet one instant, two thousand the next (it’s a very windy land) – you acknowledged that New Zealand’s beauty gets in your blood. No need in New Zealand to wonder where the pretty postcards come from. Up there, every damn place you pointed your lens was another Ansel Adams original. Glacier carved cliffs rising straight out of blue fjords more spectacular than Norway’s. Luxuriant rain forests with waterfalls more varied than Zimbabwe’s. Grassy alpine meadows swarming with white dots: sheep on the fairways, sheep on the runways; your viewfinder was positively Mother Goosey with sheep. But no cities; you didn’t bother to zoom in on the cities because, against all that rough and ready landscape, they seemed too tamely Anglicized, overscrubbed as a retirement burg or a Masterpiece Theatre set: how a British Rotary Club would design downtown. Even the urban punkers were nothing to pit yourself against, being as soft-spoken as their fellow countrymen, far less rowdy than an equivalent group in, say, Australia.

That, in fact, would explain the other lack in your photos: the people themselves. Reflect on this as you rise from the hot tub to view the inch-thick hail melting to the consistency of pineapple sorbet. Contemplate why New Zealand Man, for all his harum scarum ways, is camera shy. Why, beneath his rugged meat-eating exterior, he is appealingly reticent; as retiring as the kiwi bird he’s chosen for his state symbol, elusive and droll. If the story of New Zealand is the story of macho heroics, you think, then, what is one to make of the fact that its inhabitants are so deferential, with manners as quietly courteous as you’ve seen anywhere? Reflection the Last, amounting to a revelation: that New Zealand Man, living so quintessentially the outdoor life, has something over the rest of us; as if, taking risks out in the open that way, coming clean with all that adventure, he knows when not to swagger, he can afford to be kind. In a flash it reminds you of the time, half a world away, when you spent an evening with the boxing champion of Ireland – the pugilist supreme of another physical land – who turned out to be one of the gentlest, most courtly man you’d ever met.