Family

We woke up early on Wednesday morning and had a breakfast of sorts. We were out of proper coffee, so Mum made flasks of instant coffee even though she hates the stuff. When a small dog visited our motel room that morning, I could see why so many people prefer dogs to other people. We made our way down the ribbon-like West Coast. The leaves of straight-trunked rimu trees hung down, and other trees and bushes were sculpted by the wind – it was a rugged and at times sinister world that felt a long way from the East. Moving to the West Coast wouldn’t be easy – no matter how long you’d been there, you’d never be one of them. Saying that, look at what I did seven years ago. Again we were lucky with the weather. We stopped for our instant coffee at lovely Lake Mahinapua with the reflection of the mountains in the water, then at Lake Ianthe. This was all uncharted territory for me – though I’d been to the West Coast before, I’d never been south of Hokitika. We hopped from one DOC site to the next, remarking at how great an asset all these sites are to the country.

We arrived at Fox Glacier, the day’s destination, in mid-afternoon. During my brother’s New Zealand interlude in 2012-13, he was based there. He took people up for tandem parachute jumps. A couple of years earlier, on the day of the first major Christchurch earthquake, a parachuting plane crashed, killing all nine people on board. The aftermath of the crash was a controversial mess; evidence was literally buried. While Dad dozed in the car, Mum and I walked to the Fox Glacier lookout point – not a short trek anymore because the glacier has retreated so much. Later in the day we had another longish walk to Lake Matheson, which is situated a short distance from the glacier. Matheson is famous for its photo opportunity – a perfect reflection – but the best of the day’s weather had gone and the water was choppy. The walk around Matheson was peppered by rimu and totara trees. There were also lancewoods that evolved in an interesting way. During the time of the moa, lancewoods developed bone-like spiky structures until they grew nine feet tall, so their leaves above that height would be out of the moa’s range.

We arrived at our motel room in Fox to a rare and spectacular 180-degree rainbow. The room was much more spacious and comfortable than the one at Greymouth, but after a lovely day – albeit one in which I struggled with my sinuses – things turned sour in the evening. Booking motel rooms – one night at a time, each taking hours – had become a very stressful pursuit for Mum. It didn’t help that I’d thrown a spanner into the works by scheduling a two-hour lesson for the following evening, but Mum was unreasonably angry at everything and everybody. I found a place in Alexandra on Agoda instead of the usual booking.com, and to my great relief I convinced her to book it. We played Skip-Bo yet again. It was a long game: cards didn’t move easily from our stacks. Mum built up a useful lead but I kept coming back until we both needed to shift just one card to win. Mum pipped me – phew – and drew even with Dad at four games apiece; I remained one behind.

On Monday night Mum and Dad went to Geraldine’s most famous restaurant with some ex-neighbours. I had my Romanian lesson so I stayed at my parents’ place and saved them over $30. (They’re paying for everything while I’m here. There’s no point trying to change that.) In our lesson we covered serious and heavy subjects like last week’s LPG plant explosion near Bucharest – it killed three and injured dozens – and what happens to homeless people when they are discharged from hospital. My brother, still in crutches following his knee operation, called later that evening. Then the next morning we were off to the West Coast.

After briefly catching some action from day one of the US Open, we set off at nine on the inland route. It was a glorious day; the sunny weather would follow us for most of the trip. There was remarkably little traffic. Mum and Dad shared the driving – there was no chance of me getting behind the wheel. Springfield, at the foot of the Arthur’s Pass, seemed to have lost its Simpsons doughnut since I last went over the pass in 2009. We passed Lake Lyndon, then the Castle Hill Range. We then stopped at Lake Pearson which was gin clear. Maybe my brother and I swam there 37 years ago. An Emirates A380, minutes away from landing at Christchurch, was flying low overhead. Unbelievably for somewhere so beautiful, nobody else was there. In the UK, a spot like that would be rammed and it would cost you a fiver just to park your car. In Romania, it would be rather less crowded, but there’d be rubbish everywhere including at least one mattress and maybe a fridge. On a late winter’s day in New Zealand, however, it was pristine and deserted.

At Arthur’s Pass village – strangely the only placename in the whole country not to have been stripped of its apostrophe – we saw a group of very tame keas, or maybe kea’s, ready to wrench off our wing mirrors. (Outside the village you’ll have a hard time spotting one of those native parrots. And I know, the plural should just be kea.)

Once we’d gone through Otira and had made it over the pass, the landscape changed markedly. There were far fewer pine trees and more natives, such as the punga. We were greeted by wild goats on the roadside, reminding me of my adopted home, and a solitary weka. We were too early to check in to our motel at Paroa, which is basically a suburb of Greymouth, so we went down the coast a little way first, taking advantage of the sunshine. I’d almost forgotten what a Kiwi tradition these motels are. All those weird and wacky Aaltons and Aamiras vying for prime position in the phone book. I have fond memories of Mum buttering our toast with a toothbrush in a knifeless motel in Hamilton which featured bunk beds. I’m sure we were too stingy to stay at any of the (many) places that boasted waterbeds. Our motel this time was very cramped. Mum somehow put together a meal of sausages, beans and spuds, then we played two games of Skip-Bo on one of the beds. Mum and I each won one, cutting Dad’s lead to 4-3-3.

It’s another beautiful day – mid to high teens, without a cloud in the sky. I can have no complaints about the weather since I arrived here. I’ve been getting a load of extra sleep – I’m sure I have the more benign temperatures to thank for that; my much reduced screen time must be a big help too.

This afternoon we went to the cemetery in Temuka – the fifth cemetery I’ve been to so far on this trip – where many members of Mum’s family are buried. She put flowers on her parents’ grave, and then she searched for her other relatives. Her aunt Rene, who died in 2000, was famous for her extremely tall sponge cakes which I remember well. There was also her uncle William, known as Wormy Bill. Finally she found her great-grandfather who arrived on the boat from Ireland at the age of 50, in 1874. In the meantime I saw surnames of classmates and teachers I remembered from my (short, hard) time at the local school. Unlike what you see in the UK (and Romania, for that matter), modern New Zealand gravestones often provide information beyond dates of birth and death. You’ll see an engraved trout perhaps, or a handsaw. One lady had clearly won Lotto: the six coloured balls appeared above her name. You could see the changing styles of the different stonemasons over time, as well as the transition to machine engraving in about 2000. From the cemetery we went to Milford Lagoon – the mouth of the Opihi River – where people have huts (some live there permanently) and Dad used to catch brown trout.

Yesterday – another fantastic day – we went to Tekapo. I hadn’t been there for 15-plus years. The drive there is lovely, and the lake and surrounding mountains are as picturesque as ever, but Tekapo (which was a slice of paradise when I first saw it as a kid) is gradually morphing into a full-on resort like Queenstown or Wanaka. Somewhere to avoid, in other words. Busloads of Asian tourists had arrived there, and it was as if they’d landed on the moon. The small church, devoid of people as I remember it, now had queues. From Tekapo we drove to Lake Alexandrina. My late uncle had a bach there – he’d pretty much built it – and 30 years ago (probably to the day, just about) I stayed there with Mum and Dad while my brother stayed at our other uncle’s farm on the West Coast. My uncle sadly lost the bach after his second divorce.

After we got home, we went to uncle and aunt’s place in Woodbury – they’re the ones who had the farm on the West Coast until 1996 – and had a big slap-up meal of roast beef and plenty of vegetables, followed by lemon meringue pie. With all the crisps and nuts and crackers beforehand, it was a veritable feast.

On Thursday I played tennis with Mum for the first time in absolutely ages. The brand spanking new courts, also used for netball, are just around the corner from here. We played for a very enjoyable hour and a quarter. She can still move around the court impressively, although her backhand isn’t quite what it was, and her loss of muscle mass means she’s lost some power. Balls don’t bounce very high on the astro surface – points are shorter on average than on the concrete I normally play on. While we were playing, we tried to remember the names of some of the players at the club in England. Was it Barbara? No, Brenda. I hope we can play once or twice more before I go back to Romania.

I forgot to mention in my recent posts that one of the flyers at Dad’s club is illiterate. Seriously, he makes and flies model planes, and works as a car mechanic, without being able to read or write. I mentioned him in my Romanian lesson on Tuesday and they were amazed.

Last week was quite a big one for news, with the Wagner leader Yegveny Prigozhin killed in that plane crash. Donald Trump’s mugshot will go into the annals of history – and he’s already trying to use it to his advantage. And India became the fourth country to land on the moon.

The Skip-Bo scores are now 4-1-1, with Dad the big winner so far. The probability of one specific player winning four games (or more) out of six is almost exactly 10%, assuming all players have an equal chance in each game. That assumption might not hold here – Mum’s competitive edge surely boosts her chances, making Dad’s four wins even more of an outlier.

We were extremely lucky with the weather down south, and Friday was another sunny day. I woke up to the news that Michael Parkinson, the chat-show host for several decades, had died aged 88. He always made his guests feel at ease – not a simple task. The interviews that stick most in my mind are those with the Beckhams. That morning Mum’s younger brother, who lives in fake Palmerston, called her. He’s a strange guy in many ways. He’s quick-witted, but lately has morphed into a Trump-supporting nutjob who watches endless sport on TV. He came to my brother’s wedding in 2018 and toured Ireland with his older sister – it was the first time he’d been further than Australia. In 2019 he had bowel cancer at the same time as my father had it, and did well to survive it. He’ll need a colonoscopy bag for the rest of his life. Mum passed the phone to me and we had a good chat.

Mum and Dad decided we’d go to Dunedin for the day – I hadn’t been there since 2005. The day gave Mum a good chance to reminisce because she went to teaching college in Dunedin and began her career on the Otago Peninsula. We stopped off on the way at beautiful Waikouaiti, then visited Otago Museum in Dunedin. Mum’s teachers’ college was just around the corner from there, but back in the late sixties the museum had a Romania level of public-friendliness, so she never visited. What we saw in 2023 was something very impressive – less structured or themed than Te Papa, say, but all the better for that. The extensive collection of model ships was particularly stunning, as were all the moa skeletons and the ornate knives, daggers and swords, mostly from Asian countries. We could have spent longer there.

From Dunedin we drove down the peninsula – that road is now equipped with a smart-looking bike lane that gets plenty of use. We stopped first at Macandrew Bay where Mum did teacher training, then at Portobello where she first taught for real. It must have been breaktime as walked past the school; some kids told us not to miss the krill in the dark. They were referring to the bioluminescent krill that glows in the dark on the beach. We walked around the cemetery in Portobello – our whole family, including myself, have always been drawn to cemeteries – and we drove further down the peninsula, where the houses became cheaper and the inhabitants’ lifestyles grew slightly more alternative. We passed Aramoana, the scene of a mass shooting in 1990, and reached the albatross colony at Taiaroa Head. I went to Taiaroa when I was nine, months before the shooting – the centre had only just opened, and because it was summer there was much more to see then. My most vivid memory is the stench of the meal that the mother albatross regurgitated for her chick. There was little to see this time except a David Attenborough video on repeat.

Back in Moeraki, we watched another quiz imported from Britain, this time hosted by the comedian Michael McIntyre. I struggled to figure out the rules. What I did figure though was that humans are pretty bad at assessing risk and reward, and make all sorts of crazy inferences based on tiny sample sizes. I see that Labour want to introduce a financial literacy subject in schools, a policy supported by National. I’m happy to see “risk assessment” as one of the components of that. I agree with Mum who says it should just come under the umbrella of maths. I finally won Skip-Bo at my fifth attempt.

Unlike the previous four days, Saturday was bitter as a cold southerly came through. Before we left, we watched Parliament TV which turns into an exhibition of paintings when parliament is not sitting. We stopped on the way back at Riverstone, a rather obscene castle, and looked in the gift shop which sold mostly overpriced made-in-China tat.

On Thursday, a beautiful day, we went to Naseby where I would see my friend. Naseby is about 115 km from Moeraki – further than you think – so my parents decided to plump for fossil fuel for our trip down south, rather than taking the EV. I’d have liked to have made the trip on my own and spent longer with my friend, but I suppose as a passenger I could more easily admire the views. From Moeraki there’s a long beach that ends up at the delightfully named Shag Point, then you turn off at Palmerston – the real one, not the fake one north of Wellington – and follow State Highway 85, a.k.a. the Pig Root (yes, Root, not Route) into the Maniototo, which is where a gold rush took place in the 1860s. The peaks, some of which are volcanic, stood out brilliantly on such a perfect day.

We arrived in Naseby at 10:30. Mum and Dad spent two hours looking around the village which, at an elevation of 2000-odd feet, is perhaps most famous for its curling centre. In that time I had a good long chat with my friend who bought an old Presbyterian manse six years ago which is now done up beautifully. I met her husband who was working from home, and their lovely and very friendly dog. At one point we discussed her daughter who is on the autistic spectrum, who lives (almost literally) a stone’s throw away. They’ve certainly helped her navigate life with her condition. I’m likely on the spectrum too, and while I’m glad that my parents never saddled me with a label, some acknowledgement that I wasn’t “normal but being awkward” and wouldn’t “grow out of it” might have come in handy. My friend met my parents; if she’d mentioned this blog I’d have been busted like you wouldn’t believe.

We wended our way slowly back from Naseby; Dad wanted to find views he could turn into paintings. We stopped at Kyeburn (literally “Cows Creek”), a busy settlement during the gold rush but now almost deserted, although it still has a functioning library. Reading the plaques and information boards in these near-ghost towns, you see the great importance placed on education in the latter part of the 19th century. There are many streets and towns in the area that start with good old Scottish Dun-; my favourite was Dunrobin. We stopped in the interesting village of Dunback and stumbled upon a hippie enclave down one of the side streets. Eventually we were back in real Palmerston where Dad and I browsed a junk shop packed with old die-cast models. Outside the entrance were boxes of old LPs. We picked up two Top of the Tops records from the early 1970s; the next day Dad realised the tracks would be covers and almost certainly total dross. We picked up fish and chips at Palmerston – yum – and drove back to Moeraki where we watched lots of telly and I lost again at Skip-Bo. Not a bad day.

On Tuesday we went to my parents’ bach / holiday home / luxury villa in Moeraki, where we’d spend four nights. Mum was in a shitty mood before we left – three hours of angry huffing and puffing and why won’t he agree to sell the bloody place while getting packed up to leave. The Moeraki house is in a beautiful spot which lends itself to relaxation, and when we got there, Mum relaxed immediately. When the car was unpacked, she was soon into the Sudoku. They used to let the place out at weekends, and there are still a few “shoes off” and “10am checkout” signs floating around. They also have a stack of magazines, presumably for those former guests – all House and Garden or a well-produced South Island lifestyle magazine called something like Attitude or Altitude. Amid the recipes and clothing recommendations, the lifestyle magazine was full of interviews with local farmers or businesspeople, and for some reason it was deemed necessary to tell the reader which school each interviewee attended. But, but, she’s forty – how can that still matter? I left my high school in 1996 and by ’97 it was already an irrelevance to me.

That evening we watched the women’s World Cup semi-final between Spain and Sweden which came to life with a flurry of late goals. Spain just shaded it, winning 2-1. My father, not a big follower of sport, has got into this tournament far more than I would have imagined. He isn’t the only one. Obviously it helped that New Zealand were co-hosts, but probably people found the women’s event a nice change from all the overpaid prima donnas and cynical play in the men’s game.

Wednesday was a sunny day, and in the morning we walked to the boulders. Many people believe that Moeraki is the boulders, unaware that a whole village exists beyond them. I remember a succession of trips to the boulders as a kid in 1989-90, and every time it was either wet or the tide was in. This time the tide was out and the weather was glorious. Mum, who was very interested in nature throughout the whole trip, gave a name to a jagged vein, or seam, that must have poked its way into the rocks millions of years ago: the stegosaurus rocks. On the way back Dad pointed out the house of a friend of theirs named Cliff who lived precariously on the hillside, in a severe case of nominative determinism.

When we got home I was able to read for a bit on the deck. I optimistically brought several books with me – I’ll have loads of time, won’t I? – forgetting or just not realising that my parents watch (conservatively) 45 hours of TV a week. The vast majority of that is TV1. Every third ad seems to be for a retirement home; they’re really targeting the i-generation (i standing for incontinence). The bloody Chase is on every night. I don’t mind it, but three times a week would be plenty. Mum, Dad and I are all at roughly the same level. I can handle geography, music (sometimes), sport if it’s the right era, and various random crap that doesn’t fit neatly into any category, but otherwise I’m limited. I’m pretty sure those years of depression have taken their toll on me – during all that barrenness I could hardly take in anything. All three of us are terrible at anything to do with films and TV series. We sit there agog as both contestants and the Chaser spit out in a second the name of the actor who played character X in film Y. They aren’t guessing; they actually know. Anyway, whether it’s the Chase or some appalling $3 million house-keep-or-flip show from Australia, it’s very hard to read a book – or do much else – with the TV on in a doorless, wall-less cavern.

Later on Wednesday afternoon we walked to the lighthouse. We didn’t spot any yellow-eyed penguins unfortunately, but there were at least a dozen seals sunning themselves. We came back via the Maori cemetery and met an interesting man who grew up in Scotland and has spent most of his life in Melbourne, now enjoying travelling around the lower South Island with no particular place to go.

That evening we learnt that Lauren Dickason had been found guilty of murdering her three daughters in Timaru. As Dad said, how can you commit such an act without some measure of insanity? Imagine being a juror on that case after such an appalling tragedy.

After hearing that someone had struck the $37 million Powerball jackpot, we watched the second semi-final which saw England take on Australia in Sydney. The dislike of England, even by New Zealanders when they’re playing Australia, is baffling to me. I was happy to see England beat Australia, comfortably in the end, 3-1.