Christmas In Whitianga

Ooooh, girl. I had such a good time in Whitianga over Christmas! Not to toot my own horn too much or anything, but clearly I am a genius for deciding to get out of Welly for a couple of days and embrace, if only briefly, the backpacker lifestyle again. Let me recount it for you in near-real time, shall I?

Well, first of all, you have to know that it’s a little embarrassing that I’ve been living in New Zealand all this time and yet have basically only traveled in it for a couple of days, on my way down to Wellington from Auckland back in August. I don’t have a car so even exploring the immediate area around here has been a little daunting; plus I’m, you know, at work every day from nine to five so I don’t get the chance to do much touristy stuff. Going up to Raumati, almost a full forty minutes’ drive away up the coast, for my work Christmas thing last week, felt very adventuresome indeed in that context.

Mom and I had decided that since we don’t care about arbitrary dates for our holiday family cheer, she’d give herself a couple of days at home after school got out and that she’d spend December 25th with my sister and just fly out to meet me here New Year’s Eve-ish, and we’d celebrate together then, doing what we most like to do when we’re around each other: read separate books sitting side by side on the couch, take walks, talk late into the night, make yummy dinners, and go to the beach. She gets in tomorrow morning and I couldn’t be more excited, but back in October when I was making these plans with her, that still left the question of what, exactly, to do for the socially-mandated Holidays themselves.

This time last year, when I was reading my NZ Lonely Planet every night before bed, I’d thought that the Coromandel Peninsula would be a good place to go at some point. A little internet research determined that there was a friendly (and soon to shut down, which is really a shame) hostel up there that was known for putting on nice backpackers’ Christmases, which I thought would be a good backup plan if for some reason I felt like being social that day. I was expecting to spend most of my time by myself up there and brought three big heavy books, thinking that I’d read them on the beach in my big sunglasses and enjoy myself inordinately.

Friday I got myself to the airport and to Whitianga (which is pronounced “Fitianga,” thank you very much) via an uneventful hour-long flight to Auckland and an extremely long and annoying shuttle van to the peninsula. I fetched up at the door of the good old Cat’s Pyjamas, feeling a little shy about staying in a hostel again. The truth is that I am not a very good backpacker. I firmly believe that the heavens conspired to bring me to the Maple Lodge amongst people I really liked and got along with, but other than that it’s always a little rough to show up somewhere and have to figure out where your dorm bunk is and where the grocery store is and you just never know how it’s going to go. I felt very glad to have my books.

So I was thrilled to meet the lovely Wendy, proprietor, along with her fabulously insane husband Buster, of the hostel, who told me that a lot of nice girls had just moved into the six-bed dorm and that I should move in with them as well. I took her advice and ended up spending the evening bonding with them and realizing that I truly do love British women. If you are female and from the UK (or Ireland!): girl, totally call me and we will go have a nice chai latte together. British men: you are lovely as well but please, for the good of everyone involved (including your countrywomen who will have to listen to me whine at length about you after it all goes to hell), stay at least an arm’s length away from me at all times because the combination of your plummy vowels and your dry wit is seriously my kryptonite, okay?

Anyway, Saturday all the girls in my dorm got up and had breakfast together, beginning a lovely communal trend that would continue throughout the week and soon encompass many more of the hostel’s English-speakers, and decided to go to a nearby beach with a guy who was staying there longer-term. We hopped on a very tiny ferry that took us the 3.2 seconds it took to get across the…inlet, I guess it was…and walked down to Front Beach, where I went for a walk and took some pictures of stuff:

Here are some clouds in a tidepool. I was trying to take a picture of the multitudinous hermit crabs skittering hilariously around, but instead just ended up being ever so arty instead. Also please note weird gray-green pop-bead-necklace like algae, over there.

Ah, here’s that hermit crab. I took it out of its pool for a minute and I waited and waited and waited for it to come all the way out of its shell, but it thwarted my incipient dreams of becoming a nature photographer and therefore you only get to see a little claw there. Still, though, cool, right?

And here we have Classic New Zealand Shot #367 and #368, some lovely pohukutawa trees blooming at the edge of the beach.

When I got back everyone else was making a gigantic sand castle.

As everyone knows, there are few things more fun than building a gigantic sand castle, so we got right down to it and fortified the battlements and entrenched the parapets and so on and so forth. I love how that sort of thing is very calmly industrious, and how everyone suddenly sounds like an expert, saying things like “We need to shore up the tower there,” and “Make sure you dig an extra tunnel in case we have to make a quick getaway.” I thought about the Key Girls a lot as we were doing this, about this awesome game we used to play with sand and a hose, wearing our days-of-the-week undies and screaming BREAAAAAAK! every time one of the moats was breached by putting a thumb over the hose spout. I wonder if we’ll ever do that again, me and the Key Girls, build sandcastles in our skivvies. I would have given a lot to have had them with me that afternoon, regardless of the underwear situation.

Some crayfish in a box with which we shared the ferry back to Whitianga.

Apropos of nothing, here is a store down the road at which you’ll find a couple of girls and maybe a tranny or two, but really, it’s mainly blokes.

We had a slumber party in the dorm that night, talking about boys and body image issues, as you do, making the first of several late nights for me. I was ten years older than the youngest of the girls there, which was a little weird to think about, because my extra ten years? Seem to have brought me nothing in terms of insight into either of those topics of conversation. You know you’re immature when the twenty-three year old starts telling you that you need to just do what makes you happy, yeah, and that one day you too will find love, you just have to be open to it, you know? Hmm.

The next morning was Christmas Eve and I had a half-day kayak trip scheduled to leave from Hahei Beach. I always forget this, but I just love kayaking, and it was really a perfect day. I patted myself on the back for having made the plans in advance and had a really fun morning. The only thing that could have made it possibly better would have been if I’d had a wet suit and snorkeling stuff, because apparently there’s a lot of good stuff underwater in the marine reserve.

You know what’s better than kayaking on a gorgeous day? Kayaking on a gorgeous day, and then stopping for morning tea made by your very friendly Steve-Irwin-levels-of-enthused shirtless paddler guide guy.

And then finding a little hobbit hole under some tree roots from under which to peek at the sky and sip your hot chocolate. That’s pretty good. You have to admit that’s pretty good.

When I got back to Whitianga it turned out that crazy Buster, Wendy’s partner, was offering very cheap scenic flights in his little plane, the cockpit (I guess) of which was about the size of a Mini. I hopped in his car with a couple of other girls, neatly forgetting my camera of course and getting to see the same coastline I’d just been paddling from the air. It was a pretty funny flight: we had to push the airplane out of the hangar and Buster kept up a running commentary about all the various movies that have been filmed there (the Narnia series, apparently) and also how the quality of life in the area is going all to hell because of the rampant development in the last couple of years. He let Hayley, the girl sitting in the front, drive the plane a little and I was a little jealous of her, but not too much because I only narrowly missed being sick by deep yoga breaths and the marshalling of all my gastric forces, so to speak, and it would have sucked to throw up all over the dashboard or whatever.

I hooked up with the girls from my dorm when we got back and we all trundled over to the movie theater to see that truly terrible new James Bond movie. To be fair, I didn’t hate everything about the movie, as there was some good footage of Venice and also I liked a green dress that the girl wore at some point. The Brits (i.e. everyone I was with) were a little hurt when I mentioned how much it sucked.

“You just don’t understand,” Emma said. “This is a cultural icon for us.”

“They’re…rebuilding Bond,” said Mat, casting his eyes reverently at the heavens.

I shrugged and walked over to the pub with everyone else, where I ordered my new favorite drink, lemon-lime-and-bitters and chatted with a bunch of new people who had checked into the hostel while we were gone. After a huge and very very drunk guy physically picked me and all the other girls up off the floor (one at a time), it was time to go to a house party across the street (Whitianga is a pretty small place) and sit around and talk and laugh and flirt some more before calling it another late night.

{I am only halfway through with this story but I am going to keep soldiering on with it. You may feel free to take a tea break or something, though, if you’re tired.}

Now, we’d all been preparing for the vaunted Christmas Day barbecue by buying presents at the two-dollar shop and by getting together to contribute different delicious food items (my dorm made fruit salad and ginger biscuits). Some people had caught some mussels the day before while diving and Buster—who not only flies planes but also cooks bivalves—made fritters out of them, along with many many sausages. Wendy made three trillion desserts and their friends as well as the backpackers all brought yummy things and we sat around and ate and ate and ate. It was the most social Christmas I’ve had in a really long time, and it was extra super good fun, starting from when we all got up for breakfast and played “Fairytale Of New York” for the first of three hundred million excellent times.

Everyone got their two-dollar presents and opened them up and played with them and drank a lot of beer and wine and played a little Uno and did yoga on the lawn and went back for thirds of the trifle and maybe just one more mince pie.

I got a jar of Marmite for my present, which I, um, accidentally left behind because I am just not ready to ingest yeast extract at this juncture, you know?

Christmas Day ended up with a dive off the ferry pier and the concomitant inauguration of my new bikini, which, I am sorry to report, is not nearly as good as my lost bikini, the top being too small with straps that bite into my neck, and the bottom being too big and…flappy, somehow. There was nothing for it but to go back to the hostel and talk to a bunch of eighteen-year-old Scottish rugby players, who turned my assumptions about eighteen-year-olds and rugby players around by being very thoughtful, lovely, and articulate, even after seven or eight Speight’s each.

We had big plans for Boxing Day, which was the last day we’d all be together. Two carsful of hostel folks headed up to Onemana Beach for more bikini-oriented activities. Your little Floridiana Chiara was happy to be doing synchronized swimming and the always-popular whale imitations the day after Christmas, to be sure, but the English and Scottish people pretty much lost their minds at being able to do so—they kept talking about how their whole village wraps up in woollens and goes to drink strong grog down at the old quarry—and that was very cute. We threw a hacky sack around and flew kites and felt very glad to be at the beach and on holiday and in New Zealand and alive in general.

Doesn’t this look like fun? I don’t remember the last time I lay out—rest assured everyone is covered in a thick layer of SPF 30 as well as a light dusting of very sticky sand.

And here are the boys, each cuter than the last. When I took this picture they were, and I’m not even kidding, discussing Britney Spears and Paris Hilton with great seriousness.

We were very ambitious that day and so decided to head over to the famous Hot Water Beach after picking up the fixings for a huge barbecue dinner, which THANK HEAVENS we left at the hostel and didn’t attempt to cook over an open fire, as initially suggested. We managed to squeeze even more people into our two cars and trundled over there, looking at the gorgeous rolling hills and listening to “Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love” by Barry White. We found a couple of already-dug holes and set about burning our various extremities and building up the walls that separated us from the very cold incoming tides, waiting for the inevitable moment wherein the sea would rush in and freeze us all to death, after having been parboiled in the sulfurous underground seep. And of course I forgot the camera, so you will just have to believe me that it is extremely great to sit in extremely hot water and yell BUILD UP THAT WALL BUILD IT UP GO GO GO OW DAMN THIS IS HOT WATER GO GO DIG IT BUILD IT GO!

Finally it got dark and after losing some keys and losing some flip-flops and losing some other stuff we hurtled back to the hostel for our last night there, getting started with the mountains of meat we’d bought at around ten and ending up with marshmallows and caramelized bananas and mini-pavlovas three hours later. (I cooked some corn on the cob). The British people talked about their Britishness, discussing flagons of scrumpy and the fact that the Londoner in the crowd didn’t actually know what a combine harvester was (“I know it has to do with farming,” she said, much to the hilarity of the Devon and Gloucestershire folks). I can’t participate in that sort of thing so I kept my conversation to the regular limits of strippers and hot tubs and repeated vigorous exclamations of “Girrrrrrrrrl,” and a fantastically ridiculous time was had by all. Such a good ending to such a good day, and to such a good trip in general.

Yesterday most of us were heading out, so we made pancakes (“American” and “regular,” according to everyone else; “regular” and “crepes” to me) in the morning and sat around exchanging email addresses and phone numbers and promises to keep in touch and to come visit. Someone asked, when I said I was going home that day, if I was flying to America, and I said “No, home to Wellington,” and that was a pretty cool thing to be able to say.

As I packed up and got ready to go I was reminded of the really weird transient nature of backpacker friendship: you get close very quickly and have the same conversations over and over again, and you feel actual sadness at the thought of having to say goodbye. You’re never really sure if you’ll see these people again, and that’s a strange un-sure-ness, because you feel oddly close with all these people who have come together randomly for a few days, at the same time in the same place with no possibility of having meant to do so. You can’t plan something like this; you can hope that you’ll find good people and a good place with whom and at which to spend your holidays, but you can’t really know you will. You just have to be grateful when it all comes together nicely, have to accept the gift when it comes your way, glinting in the sun and covered in sand.