The time of year I had chosen to arrive into Auckland was an another one of my impeccably bad calls. The final Sunday of the Christmas break before those sensible enough to not have given up on their jobs returned to work was hardly going to be the time to be tearing up the streets, red paint in hand. This realisation could not have hit me harder at any other point than whilst ambling around at 6:30AM, my stomach clearly attempting to eat itself, trying desperately to make it anywhere that would be offering food before I passed out in a bin. After waking at the stroke of midnight I had laid in my bed for hours, failing to return to sleep but hoping that I could simply trick my body into believing I had actually only woken at 6AM, cracking on with a full day before returning merilly for an early night.
The hours passed slowly and painfully. It was clear unless I fashioned some kind of weapon and hunted the local wildlife I would not be eating until the rest of the city awoke, and salted seagull with a side of gravel was beginning to sound disturbingly appetising. Doing the maths I calculated it had been a full twenty-four hours since last eating, a meal consisting of only a small collection of final snacks on the plane in. There was, of course, the option to take full advantage of this state and instead hunt down some rum, getting blind drunk off a single measure; that would be a fine way to first see a new place, opening up a whole host of opportunities not easily found by my much more anxious sober mind. But for the sake of my liver and my belongings I stuck to the original plan, eventually stumbling upon a supermarket that had indeed been open the entire time I had been looking for one. Successfully making it through the booze aisle still only holding the baked goods I had deemed most delicious-looking, I mashed the self-service checkout enough to convince it to let me leave and headed out to see the rest of the city waking up.
Walking around the streets of Auckland started to bring back fragments of the previous days journey from the airport to the city. It is a wonderful combination of steep hills rolling out in all directions with winding roads and highways all cutting each other up and diverting around huge flailing trees, most likely older than the city itself, firmly holding their own against the concrete jungle. It was a magnificent sprawl that I spent a good few happy hours walking through, finally in a state that seemed both conscious and sustainable.
One of the most noticeable things when in an entirely foreign land is the difference in the birdsong. It’s very easy to grow numb to the background noise of your homeland, but being in a different ecosystem completely changes that tune and you find yourself wondering if you’ll ever grow comfortable with it. Coming from England, the extent of wild birds that expose themselves in daily life rarely push past the ornithological delights of seagulls, pigeons and ducks. I think I saw a heron once, though it might have been an ornament, or even a well-used coat rack for all I know. As I sat in Albert Park, still wondering what the hell I was doing there, an Eastern Rosella took an interest in me, probably also wondering what the hell I was doing there. I grew fascinated with it, despite its gross abundance in the country, and did my best do avoid the looks of disbelief as I threw all manner of poses trying to obtain the best angle and lighting combination to photograph the pest.
After recommending a modelling agency and thanking the Rosella for its time, I returned to base and took to the challenge of talking to people in the hostel common room. The self-righteous narcissism that can so subtly creep into conversation in many different forms has a fine way of switching my interest in someone completely off and, over the years of meeting many people in travelling accommodation, it has done so many times. Gently coasting over a well-beaten path does not make you a pioneer. The prices of the plane tickets and hotels do not in fact meant that these places owe you anything. No-one is impressed by your vegan-yoga-meditation rituals and culturally-appropriated dreadlocks and tribal tattoos.
It was unfortunately the case that a few of these raging stereotypes were inhabiting the joint at the same time as me. I sat there, eating the flavourless instant noodles that constituted my pathetic excuse for a meal, listening to woeful one-up after woeful one-up, wondering how absent it was possible for these men’s (and it never isn’t men) fathers to have been. At one point in the conversation, a girl whose name I did not catch alluded to a time she worked as a volunteer in a Tanzanian hospital, and all the life-changing sights that came through that – by far the most interesting offer for a conversational thread to pull, and one I’m still upset the mouthful of noodles I couldn’t quite gag down in time meant I was not able to. But did this stop old Devin McWanderlust jabbing back in with the time a group of Indonesian locals worshipped his flawless body on the beaches of Lombok? How dare you even think for a second it might.
I’m still unsure whether my loathing of these people is an over-indulgence of my pre-empted scepticism, or whether is it simply because they are quite loathable people. Maybe that could be a ‘find-yourself’ goal for this trip – hate people less. Or, at least, hate nice people less. No use not hating a twat.
As terrible as the general timing for being in Auckland was, it did allow for one of the most surreal and concerning spectacles I may witness for a while. The time was 4PM, I had been laying in bed, wasting time and praying to god I didn’t fall asleep too early again, as the hue of the whole room lazily shifted to a vibrant yellow-orange. Wondering what the hell kind of mess had screened up the windows I got up to have a look only to discover it was the sky itself that had been set ablaze.
At this point in time, the out of control bush fires across in Australia had been raging for three to four whole months, and had consumed fourteen-million hectares of bush along with claiming twenty-four lives. The extent of the fires was so great at this point that the great, billowing plume of smoke had blown the two-thousand kilometre journey across the Tasman sea and was passing above northern New Zealand, altering the natural refraction of light in the atmosphere and dousing the entire sky in a deep, fiery glow.
The evening’s original plan of hiking up to the top of Mount Eden for a sunset view over the city had been shot down in flames, almost literally. Given the new state of the atmosphere I grabbed my camera and bag as quickly as I could, racing up to the lookout early in the hopes of capturing the scene at its peak first, for a fat old cheque from National Geographic. After an embarrassingly difficult hike, made only worse by my new-found apparent inability to follow directions, I reached the peak to take it all in.
As far as the eye could see the world was bathed in the ominous glow. The distant Northern coastline and all its docks and freight, the Easterly shores and islands breaking out on the horizon, every single one of the suburbs rolling off into the South. It was eerie and concerning. Interrogating the sky for any kind of hint of a break in it all was fruitless, itself being an endless blend of both orange-tinted and thick black clouds that really made you wonder if it actually was on fire. Through the whole hour I was up on the peak, the phenomena showed no signs of letting off, this was how the rest of the evening was going to be, and who knew how much longer the effect would last? This was just a by-product, but it hammered home the scale of the heart of the problem, burning alive two-thousand kilometres away.
It was on my way back down to the city that I was collared by a tiny local man for my choice of band t-shirt. It is for this exact reason that I have packed mainly band t-shirts, so if you ever see me on my travels, feel free to stop me and tell me why the merchandise I’m wearing is shit. The choice of the day was a recent favourite, Idles. A band who, if ever you’re a male and battling such troubles as masculine identity or dishing out domestic or sexual violence, you should give a good listen to… and please stop being violent.
It was a good half an hour or so of awkwardly walking in a similar direction to each other, chatting about all kinds of different music, and him eventually convincing me that the live music scene in New Zealand was dire and I should get out the country as soon as possible. But it was pleasant, and much more enjoyable than hearing another story about a white man peacocking in Asia that I’m sure was being told at that exact point somewhere in the hostel.
Having made it back around 7PM and quickly seeing the crowd laced with the same pretentious plebs as the night before, I made the adult decision of a good gain on the jet lag front, and very happily went off to bed without supper.
Drunkenly-made holiday-friends are always an interesting dilemma. At the time, when everyone is socially lubricated in a foreign country, it seems like the absolute right thing to say, “If ever you’re in [insert generic place of residence here] hit me up!” But years of separation without conversation dilutes those friendships to only an occasional passing like or comment on social media. We had met two such people on the island of Siargao, The Philippines, around eighteen months before I arrived in Auckland. We had all gotten very drunk on very good rum, multiple times together, and at several points had very confidently exchanged the above notion. But that does not make it any less strange a feeling, at least in my head, to open up a conversation a considerable time later along the lines of, “Remember me? Well I’m in your city. Wanna get fucked up?”
As fickle as it played in my mind, I had nothing to lose so that is more or less the way this next section began. The fuckery could not quite reach the levels it had in the Philippines, due to a number of unfortunate circumstances. Josh and Georgia had to re-organise their entire lives for a very imminent emigration to London, UK; in my complete lack of any kind of schedule, it turned out that this was in fact a school night and they were still responsible employees; and because I would be willing to bet my right kidney that there is not a single bar in New Zealand, never mind Auckland, that you can get a good rum for a dollar.
Their nutrition levels were at a much higher level than mine as we sat there, the two drinks each of us working through clearly having more of an effect on me. We chatted about what had happened the night we last drank together, what we’d all been doing since and our future plans – mine being avoiding the UK for as long as possible and theirs for emigration there in the next few months. I still don’t understand why so many people are so keen to relocate to the UK given the recent political shifts, the imminent demise of the NHS and the general laughing stock of a country it has now become. But I remember pondering that thought well as the moment I realised, sat there on a rooftop, dock-side bar soaking in the rays, drinking over-priced Pilsners and catching up with old friends, very few responsibilities other than my own well-being, that this whole thing might not be so bad after all.
We parted ways with the prospect of our paths crossing once more somewhere in South-East Asia filling me with a deep warmth similar to that I was feeling from the booze and the sun, and I drunkenly wandered back through the streets to the hostel happy for the first time in a while. Even our old friend Devin would have had to try hard to put a dent in this drunken glee. But it was with an even bigger smile I found the room was bereft of any of his kind. I sat with the remainder of the group, talking with various people whose names I had no chance of remembering, and to my surprise many of them were just like me – fresh into the country, alone but not yet lonely, unsure what to make of it so far but ready to jump in with open arms.
I retired to bed at a solid 10PM on the final night in Auckland finally clear of the jet lag. I was ready to leave, but wondering if I had timed it just slightly better, how much more I could have fallen in love with the place.
Ramblings of a Lost Englishman 