NZ Day 8: Hamilton Gardens

Bursting into song about the wonders of New Zealand.

“The Russian fort is woody / In this town that’s full of goodies / The butterflies, they flutter by / And farts come from their bootys”

Not bad for a first draft? At any rate, it is conclusive proof that I am 100% CLASSY.

Here’s more evidence! (Gator #1 invited Gator #2 in for tea, but it was a TRAP)

Anyway, the reason I’m all dressed up in sun-protective gear is because Kerry and I bicycled over to the Hamilton Gardens to spend the first half of the day snapping photos, disturbing insects, and bothering waterfowl, such as these:

That’s a cicada skin, left behind on the underside of a leaf after the insect molted and crawled away. And of course, a duck, being ducky.

Hamilton Gardens was, and is, an amazing place to be a photographer. You’re probably saying, “but I can see gardens all over the world; why would I want to waste my precious time in New Zealand walking around a garden?”

Perhaps some of these pictures will help explain why!

The place is a feast for the senses, and that feast has multiple courses. There are themed and curated gardens, kept carefully behind partitions, and large open sections that grow a little more improvisational and merge slowly across each other.

(You’re probably looking at those pictures of thistles and saying, “he totally cranked up the saturation. There’s no way those colors are real.” Nope. That’s how they looked, my friends.)

We didn’t pay much attention to the signposts, and just wandered around. I have no idea how many of these plants are native to New Zealand, or even to the same hemisphere.

The Monarch butterflies were familiar, though! I grew up in a town called Santa Cruz, and during part of the year we could see them hibernating at Natural Bridges State Beach. (Check out this Forestry Service article about their migration routes.) Monarchs were brought to New Zealand from North America, and seem to have a pretty good foothold here, despite the cold winters.

They were very busy drinking nectar, so as long we we didn’t interrupt them, it was possible to get incredibly close. Check out this iPhone video:

Now that is close! By the way, that loud hissing sound you hear is the cicadas, scattered throughout the foliage and talking to each other. It’s intense, but after a while it fades into the background and you stop noticing it.

It makes me wonder: Do New Zealanders travel to places like North America and walk into the redwoods, and get disoriented because the forest is so very quiet?

The birds let us get pretty close too.

Anybody know what kind of bird this is?

That’s me trying to blend in with the local foliage!

OAKTOWN REPRAZENT IN DA FOLIAGE YO.

One of the newer exhibits was this tudor-accented topiary, groomed into precise tessellations, and decorated with carvings of mythic creatures and gods.

I think some of the carvings were deliberately made to look deranged, or cartoonish, to evoke Lewis Carroll’s poetry. I mean, look at that basilisk thing. Is it menacingly reptilian? Or adorably dopey? I can’t decide.

And of course, what mythic garden would be complete without Pan, frolicking in the bushes? (Trying to track down a nymph no doubt.)

Elsewhere in the gardens, the Lewis Carroll influence was obvious!

The heat from the gravel and stones in this particular garden was mesmerizing, and the desire to sit down on that bench and lose a few hours was intense. The place had a sense of comfortable timelessness to it, like it would remain early afternoon for as long as you cared to linger there.

By contrast, the “productive” garden area – full of edible plants, and decorated with signs discussing composting and suggesting recipes – brought feelings of growth and renewal. Everything in it looked like it was just about to be pulled up and chopped into a salad bowl, or stirred into a stewpot. Mmmmm!

It looked delicious and I caught a few fellow tourists reaching into the exhibits and plucking out onions, or tomatoes, or peas, and sneaking them furtively into their pockets or mouths.

Even the things that weren’t technically edible looked delicious.

Doesn’t that flower just look good enough to chomp? (As an aside, I’m very pleased with the framing of this photo. It’s on par with the framing that Kerry manages to get almost all the time. I don’t know how she does it…)

Azolla: Free-floating water ferns! They contain a nitrogen fixing bacteria (Abaeberia azollae), and can be used as a mulch on the garden, or as chicken feed. Azolla grows rapidly and is a pest to lakes, ponds, and waterways, so it needs to be contained – like in this bathtub – for garden use.

The “productive” area was even more saturated with insects than the other gardens.

Among the “productive” gardens was one of more local origin called the Te Parapara Garden. Here’s me pretending to be one of the wall carvings.

Dig this: Te Parapara was originally the name of the pre-European Maori settlement in what is now the centre of Hamilton Gardens!

The section is part tribute, part reference, and has two sub-sections, one presenting the uncultivated food the Maori gathered from the forest and grassland, the other presenting the system they developed for organized farming of these and other tropical crops in a sub-tropical climate. When Europeans showed up in the 1840’s, this system was well-established in plantations all over the islands.

Speaking of tropical, another highlight for us was the tropical-themed garden. 200 different species of plants, according to the documentation, hardy enough to be grown outdoors but still giving the appearance of the tropics.

The colors were intense, and many of the plants had a thickness and stiffness to them that made the garden feel as much like a sculpture or a carving than something grown from the soil.

I wonder what it would take to grow these in my back yard? I have a bunch of succulents there already – perhaps it’s time to add to the collection when I get back home?

Even the doorways were interesting here…

…And each of them led to something new and unique, like this Italian Renaissance-themed garden with many pockets and sections to explore.

Having so many distinct styles so close together, but confined to their own sections, appealed to my OCD nature. It was like browsing a collection of trading cards or figurines neatly organized on a shelf. Sharpened borders, matching sizes, and no intermediate space becomes just as important a part of the structure as the content itself.

I assume this is why most of my plants back home are in pots. They’re all together in the garden, but they’re also distinct and – in a very real way – protected from one another. Plants will happily fight to the death for root and sun space, and I don’t want to lose any “weaker” species to “stronger” ones. I gotta catch ’em all!

Perhaps this is why I was so impressed by the Victorian Flower Garden:

All the plants seemed to be co-existing, even though they were placed together in what looks like a big tangle. I assume this is a combination of careful selection and careful grooming.

The effect was lovely, and the open setting – colorful and layered without being overwhelming – made this garden my favorite, slightly outranking the Tudor garden with the weird topiary.

We both wanted to stay longer, but we had a bus to catch. There were three or four sections that we just didn’t have time to see. It would also have been nice to set down a little picnic blanket and have lunch somewhere. Nope! Got to get going.

There is so much of New Zealand to see – including dozens of things Kerry and I already know about and deliberately decided to skip – that it’s unlikely I’ll ever return to the Hamilton Gardens to finish my tour. Plus, the sections are always in flux – their contents are literally growing. A return visit would not be a return to the same sights as before. So if you think you can skip it just because you’ve seen my pictures, well, it just ain’t so!

Kerry and I returned to the Albert Court Motor Lodge and fetched the rest of our luggage from the garage near the office, which the clerk had graciously let us use for our visit to the gardens. A while after that we were riding the bus out of town, towards Tirau. This would provide us a flatter approach to Hobbiton than the route we’d originally planned.

Tirau turned out to be a collection of shops strung out along Highway 1 where it briefly merges with Highway 27 and Highway 5, with a few motels scattered in like eddies in a river. Like speedboats in that same river, big trucks would come roaring up and down the highway through town at all times of day or night, with little regard for pedestrians or the wake of noise they left. We went out for dinner and watched them zooming by as we ate.

Out of curiosity, Kerry bought a popular local drink, called “L&P”. Kiwis think this drink is awesome, but to us it tastes obnoxious. We’ve decided the “L&P” stands for “Lemon and Puke”.

Our motel room reeked so much of cigarettes that we had to keep the windows open and even move the bed closer to the windows, but at the same time the noise from the trucks was punishing. Sleep wasn’t easy.

But who cares! Today was amazing, and tomorrow we’re going to Hobbiton!

NZ Day 6: Waipu Wandering

We got a decent amount of sleep, and it was all downhill into central Whangarei to catch the shuttle directly to Waipu. This would mark our first diverging from the schedule we’d meticulously prepared over the previous two months. We would be skipping the Waipu caves and their dark ceilings, sparkling with glow-worms, but we would also be skipping another several thousand feet of hills, as steep as the ones that punished us on that first day of riding. Now we knew our limitations, and we knew this was a necessary change.

The bicycles fit sideways into the luggage compartment under the bus without any acrobatics, and we piled our bags around them, except for our backpacks which we were too paranoid to relinquish. My rough estimate is that we were carrying about $11000 worth of gear in those backpacks, mostly in the form of camera lenses. That’s pretty absurd, especially since we could have left half that gear at home and barely changed our enjoyment of the trip.

The green countryside scrolled by, and we found ourselves in Waipu before my stomach had a chance to notice it was on a bus and get upset – a childish behavior that it picked up years ago when I was riding commuter shuttles to work. We stepped off into an early autumn day with a fresh breeze and just a hint of ocean salt, and a few minutes later we had our gear reassembled and were riding back down the main street of Waipu, looking for our hotel, and for a place to get snacks.

The motel room was cheap, but dingy and cramped. The single-pane window opened directly onto a parking space. All the usual hardware was stacked in a corner – television on top of VCR on top of mini-fridge, unplugged and dusty. We stripped the bikes down, hauled the bags inside, then hauled the bikes in after. The room was now incredibly cramped, but we didn’t care – it was time to go out and get snacks!

The restaurant across from the hotel was excellent. Actually, it was as good as the hotel was bad! We ate burgers and salad, and drank cider at a spacious table. Encouraged by the weather, we decided to go out riding and see what else we could find. What we found was a pastoral paradise.

We rode out through a ragged patchwork of lush green fields, crisscrossed by slow rivers along soft banks of mud and sand, and threaded by dirt roads with deep ruts and high shoulders of tangled late-summer grass. Dark horses, cream-colored sheep, and speckled cows meandered their way along, nibbling on grass or lounging in the sun, between fences of rusty wire and wooden posts. Across all this blew a steady coastal breeze, fresh but not cold, weaving into the trees and carrying the scent of the sea, and higher up, carrying along an army of fleecy white clouds, sailing like galleons in the sky. It was like riding around inside everyone’s collective hallucination of the perfect day in the countryside. A living daydream, filling up every kind of sense.

It was a feeling like the one I felt in western Kansas, on a particular day when I was bicycling there three years ago. Not exactly the same; the Kansas air had been warmer, and pungent with the smell of old grass and wet soil. A Halloween smell. Waipu was bringing me a younger, lighter smell – something like Easter. Looking around, I would not have felt surprised to see little pastel eggs tucked into the hollows of trees, and peeking out from rabbit holes.

Savoring this vivid impression, I stopped by the side of the road and dug a chocolate bar out of my saddlebag. A hundred feet away, Kerry pedaled up to a horse behind a low fence, but it saw her coming and backed nervously away, intimidated by the combined size of bicycle and rider. Kerry chastised the horse for being a scaredy-cat, and giggled. “Silly horse,” I said, talking casually over our headsets. “Doesn’t it know that bicyclists always have snacks?”

Once again, all the effort of hauling these awkward bicycle contraptions around felt absolutely worth it. We were traveling within, not just passing through.

We pedaled around the area north of town, then came back and made a left turn, headed towards the sea. The road curved around and undulated over a few gentle hills. Nothing intimidating like what we saw the day before, thank goodness. We stopped in a random spot, peed behind some bushes, then flopped down in the grass and chomped through a bag full of bubble gum. This is how a day of cycling is supposed to go! Not a death march, but a long string of roadside picnics.

“I’m still getting used to the idea of spending an entire day riding a bike,” Kerry said. “I mean, not pedaling the whole time obviously, but… It’s strange being ‘in transit’ for so long, you know? I’m used to riding a bike to get somewhere. So I get this feeling of impatience, like, we should just never stop, and pedal hard, so we can hurry up and get to the next town, the next thing. But I know that’s not the right way to think about it, so I’m pushing back against that idea in my head. That’s taking effort, but I think I can get there. We’ll see. Still, it’s good that we’re doing other stuff too and not just bicycling day after day like some of the trips you’ve taken.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t expect you to like bicycling as much as I do. You’d have to be as crazy as I am; and that’s pretty crazy. But I’m really happy you’re here with me.”

“Awww,” she said, and gave me a hug.

We rode on, and about a half mile later we rolled around a corner and found the water – a long shallow inlet with pasture on either side, sweeping out to connect with the deeper ocean, kinked by a few bars of white sand, and with a thin crest of surf sketching out the interface between the incoming waves and the receding tide. Just up from the shore on our side of the inlet was an old graveyard, the headstones bleached and weather-beaten in some cases and sharp and shiny in others, all behind a fence with a single strand of electrified wire strung along it in plastic brackets, to keep the cows from crapping on the dead. We parked our bikes and went strolling around.

You can tell we’re only out for the day because the bicycle in the picture is lacking about 40 pounds of extra gear!

Seeing this coastal graveyard and this blue ocean and these huge clouds brought a lot of other associations to mind. Some musical, some literary. Sting’s “The Soul Cages” echoed through my ears. Fragments of poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson. Images etched into my imagination when I read “The Sea Wolf” in the 7th grade. I felt detached from my own era, but it wasn’t a disorienting feeling; it was a comfortable one. This graveyard by the sea was telling me something.

“Here is an environment, a source of sensations, that you cannot make your individual stamp upon, no matter what you try. Even solid stone, etched with descriptions of who you were and what you did, and placed here, will simply wear away into an anonymous blob in a thousand years, and it will be millions more years before this place even begins to look slightly different, from exactly how it looked a million years before you passed through. Maybe the shoreline will have a different shape but it will still be the same shore. All the poems written, all the ships built and launched, all the perfect picnic days and garbage left behind in human history compresses down to a thought … an afterthought, even … and I could be anyone standing here. Or no one.”

“But is that really true? Humans do have a collective impact, after all. In seven thousand years we managed to create the Sahara Desert from grassland, with help from domesticated animals. Some people say that 15000 years ago the Great Plains was forested and only became grass because humans kept setting fires. Others say the forest retreated naturally as the glaciers melted away. And, we’re certainly good at mass extinction…”

Abruptly I realized I’d been staring at the same distant sandbar for an entire minute. I walked back to my bike and stowed the camera. Time to ride out for snacks!

Kerry chatted with a few people sitting around in lawn chairs, dangling fishing poles down into the water. They told her that if we wanted to swim at a proper beach, we should cycle only “a kilometer or so” down the road and we’d find one, along with a general store. That sounded good.

Of course, “a kilometer or so” turned out to be four or five miles. We were both rapidly coming to the conclusion that New Zealanders could not be trusted to give accurate estimates of distance. It’s probably not Kiwis in particular, it’s probably just people who drive cars and don’t bicycle. Back home, most people have at least tried bicycling. In New Zealand, people ride mountain bikes on tracks, but touring seems to be strictly for tourists. The idea of using a bicycle to get from one town to another seems absurd to just about everyone we’ve talked to here…

Eventually we did find a nice beach, and a nice general store. Many snacks were snacked upon.

I’ve never seen such a perfect demonstration of a beach forming from millions of discarded shells!

We collected a bunch of them and took a few photos, then left them around for kids to find. No sense hauling them back to the hotel.

As the afternoon moved on to evening, the shadows got deeper and more lush. Even though we were riding back the way we came, along the same road, everything looked different.

Whenever the temptation came upon us to stop and eat a snack, or take a photograph, we just went with it. The landscape seemed to be taunting us to find the right collection of buttons and switches that would capture the perfect photograph. Vacation with gadgets! Fun stuff.

Even the clouds got in on the act!

When we got back to town, I felt hungry and Kerry felt tired, so she took a nap and I walked over to the same restaurant, and went though the day’s photographs.

Kerry’s nap didn’t last long, though: A bunch of Waipu locals gathered in the pub to watch the latest cricket game. Their shouts and laughter went straight through the thin walls of the hotel. Minus one star!

In the original schedule, Waipu was just a handy town to spend the night after exploring the Waipu Caves, but it turned out to be a fun place to explore in its own right, and very restorative. Kerry and I went to bed feeling a lot more refreshed than we’d been the previous night in Whangarei.

Good thing too, since the next day we’d be stuck in shuttles for six hours!