Dispatch from Kopua Monastery, New Zealand,

Dispatch from Kopua Monastery, New Zealand,
Thursday, April 21
We just arrived at Kopua in time for lunch. It feels wonderful to be here in this peaceful, truly out-of-the-way place in the rural Hawkes Bay region of the northern island. I’ll describe the setting and life here in the next dispatch, since we’ve only just arrived. This is the first time I’ve really felt the space, time, and sense of inner quiet to continue the story of our trip, having been in constant movement for four days, ever since we left Manila and descended into "Airline Limbo". Let me se if I can reconstruct this very post-modern experience.
But before the description I must add that while it was Philippine Airlines that caused our descent into limbo in the first place, they were extremely helpful in getting us to our destination as quickly and easily as possible. In Singapore a superbly efficient, friendly, and apologetic supervisor met us coming off the plane and handed us tickets on Quantas for Melbourne and Auckland as well as vouchers for lunch and supper at the Singapore Airport. Singapore, by the way, has to be one of the great airports in the world. Free computer terminals all over the airport (including ones dedicated only to games), shops and restaurants of every conceivable kind making it look like Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills (Hermes, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Burberry etc. so, of course, we really stocked up), and even a live band playing some pretty good jazz in a great atrium alongside waterfalls lined with giant orchids. If you have to spend a day in some airport, Singapore’s limbo is far from purgatory, unless high end shopping is one of your besetting sins, in which case it’s on the road to hell.
Getting back to the story, I wrote the last dispatch on the plane bound for Singapore. From the time we left Manila Sunday morning to the time we landed in Auckland Monday afternoon at 4pm (via Singapore and Melbourne) we spent the entire time either in airports or airplanes. (Jeanne says it was 48 hours in real time from the time we left Baras Beach in the Philippines to the time we got to Auckland.) When we hopped into our rental car near the Auckland airport and drive into a beautiful sunny New Zealand afternoon we both breathed deeply, realizing that this was our first real outdoor air for a long time.
We landed in Melbourne, our last stop before Auckland, at 4:30 am, to wait for our 9:30 flight to Auckland. I think the closer one gets to the destination, the slower time trudges along. The place was deserted and we were exhausted and ready for some sleep (people talked and moved around through most of the night on our flight from Singapore, kept awake by incessant really bad movies). By this time I was experiencing that sort of persistent buzz in my brain that comes with too little and intermittent sleep. The brain synapses fire off random thoughts in every direction, and there’s a complete inability to think about any one thing for more than two minutes. I think we’d pay practically any kind of money to just be horizontal for a few hours, but no such opportunity in Melbourne airport, and no decent breakfast. We did sleep fitfully for a little while on the airport benches, until the airline personnel started to come in and make lots of noise. Did I tell you that our kids gave me an ipod for my birthday, and we loaded it with books, and our kind of music, which has been a real godsend on long flights and airport madness?
It felt so good to finally arrive in Auckland and come up out of Airport Limbo for air, fresh, clean New Zealand air. It was a gorgeous warm afternoon when we arrived; we breezed through customs (expect for a minute check of the dust on our hiking boots, since they are rightly afraid of getting unwanted seeds on this island). Our rental car company picked us up in a few minutes and we felt the exhilaration of driving off in our own little car toward Auckland. The only problem is that we were still seriously sleep deprived and suddenly confronted with the daunting realization that we had to drive on the left instead of the right. No problem; we’d done this in England before. But in our state of mind it was a harrowing task to get into Auckland in rush hour traffic. At least twice we narrowly escaped death, revealing ourselves as tourists, by swinging out into oncoming traffic on the right (and I mean right in every sense) lane, to face a line of irate, honking Kiwi motorists, and then having to back up, hoping the cars behind would cooperate (which they mostly did not). This is the first time I actually begged for Jeanne’s "back seat driving," knowing this was definitely a two person operation. By the way, should you ever get to the clean, beautiful, and congested city of Auckland, you should know that the names of the streets change randomly, and without notice every few blocks, so that it’s impossible to follow directions. ("I thought we were on Rose St. and now it’s Pendle Dr. Didn’t you watch the map?") This is not a good situation for marital concord.
We ended up in a decent downtown Auckland hotel/hostel, ate at the closest restaurant and dropped into bed and slept for 12 hours straight. We would have been satisfied with a flophouse and grub by that time. But we awoke the next morning feel much better.
After getting a grip on what day it was (Tuesday), we set off very carefully in our car for the rain forest ranges and coastline beaches just west of Auckland. On the way we stopped at a big chain super market to get some food for lunch and snacks, which is where you really learn that you’re in a different country and culture. This is, supposedly, an English-speaking country, but you could have fooled us. We found ourselves looking bewildered and saying "Excuse me," or just Huh?" a lot when people talked to us or tried to give directions. And there are new terms to learn. Shopping carts, for example, are trundlers. This was just the first of the many new terms we had to learn. We puzzled over an electrical plug adapter that called distinguished between "earthed" and "unearthed" plugs, thinking it was some kind of alien invention until we recalled our term "grounded." At the restaurant last night the waitress had to explain the meaning of half the items on the menu.
We had a thrilling drive on the curvy narrow roads of the lush and hilly rainforests west of Auckland, and even visited a couple of spectacular beaches right near sunset. This is a country where you really want to spend the money to rent a fast car with a "stiff" suspension, at l;east if Jeanne weren’t in the passenger seat. For you movie aficionados, one of the beaches we visited was used in the opening of the film "The Piano," when a Holly Hunter’s piano is unloaded from a boat by Harvey Keitel, on a beach bounded by huge jutting rock formations in crashing surf.
No more Auckland for us, so we spent the night at another hostel on our drive south toward our next destination, Lake Taupo, where we arrived on Wednesday, April 20. Taupo is New Zealand’s largest lake and was formed by one of the biggest volcanic eruption in historical times--some 1800 years ago-- that reshaped the island. (It’s said that the ash from the eruption created dark cool days and red skies that were discussed in Roman documents of the time.) The lake is large, but, as Jeanne said, if you can see the other side, compared to Lake Michigan it’s not that big. From the town of Taupo you can look at distant snow-covered volcanic peaks to the south on a clear day. It being mostly cloudy, we only got a peek now and then. We took a lovely four-hour hike up to a falls and an area called "craters of the moon," acres and acres of fissures and pits emitting hot steam from geothermal activity still going on underground. It felt so good to get out and walk again of God’s green earth after being cooped up for so long in the very human confines of airports, no matter how hyped up they might be. Somehow an orchid next to an escalator cannot compare with birds singing along the hiking path, with an aquamarine river surging below.
Sorry for this long, rather unreflective dispatch. I’m just trying to catch up. Tomorrow I’ll describe more of the Kopua monastery with its communal life and surroundings.