It’s easy to see why New Zealand would be regarded as the backpackers’ paradise. In one thin chapter of the Lonely Planet devoted to “Extreme New Zealand,” the description of activities include: bungy jumping, spelunking, hang gliding, mountain biking, rock climbing, skydiving, jet boating, parasailing, kiteboarding, scuba diving, sea kayaking and white water rafting—a partial list of activities designed for those seeking an adrenalin rush or two.
My wife and I were part of a
group of 12 that just toured New Zealand. Other than my youngest sister and her husband, the rest of us were family and friends
well into their 70s. The one “youngster” that joined our group who we did not
know beforehand was in her late ‘50s taking a break from work.
Although one out of three of
this group did do the bungy jump, (while the rest of us enjoyed the spectacle)
we didn’t do much that would qualify as “extreme” but found New Zealand
enjoyable for a host of other reasons.
We got around both North and South
islands by flying on the regional jets of Air New Zealand. In exchange for
missing some of the gorgeous scenery we would have seen along the highways, we covered
more in the two weeks of New Zealand.
Consisted of two main
islands, North and South, the country is nearly 30% longer than California, but
much skinnier in the east-west direction as California has nearly 60% more area
than New Zealand—California also has 8 times more people.
The South Island broke away
from Gondwanan, the ancient supercontinent, before the arrival of mammals and
the gradual formation of the North Island through geological times was the
result of deposits from volcanic eruption over the eons. Thus the flora and
fauna were allowed to evolve into unique forms greatly different from the rest
of the world.
Flightless birds, such as the
moa and the kiwi were residents unique to New Zealand. Unfortunately with the
arrival of man and their pets, the moa was soon driven to extinction. We had to
settle for taking a photo of some of us standing next to the life-size statue
by the harbor of Queenstown.
Kiwi birds, now a protected
species, are nocturnal. To see them we paid to enter darkened aviary and squint
at the brown round objects walking on the floor of a simulated forest. The bird
is the national mascot and New Zealanders often refer themselves as Kiwi, the
bird and not the fruit that originated from China.
For a tour guide, we got
lucky. Overseas Adventure Travel, the tour operator, assigned Devlin Tikitiki
to our group. Devlin was a Kiwi but also a Maori who studied and now taught
Maori history, culture and language. Throughout the tour, Devlin would
entertain us with Maori lore and legend and sang Maori songs and chants.
It also helped to begin our
tour in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, and a visit to Te Papa, the
national museum where a trove of Maori artifacts were on display and Maori
customs explained.
From Devlin we learned that
the Polynesians were great navigators who sailed across the vast Pacific on
their double-hulled seagoing canoes (wakas).
The ancestors may have originated from the island of Taiwan and migrated
eastward and reached as far north as Hawaii, as far east as the Easter Island
and finally settled in New Zealand around 8-900 years ago. The Polynesians that
settled on New Zealand became known as the Maoris. There are now strong genetic and linguistic evidence
to support this conclusion.
The Polynesians/Maoris
followed the ocean currents and winds and observed the positions of the sun,
moon and stars. They also watched for and followed the flights of sea birds. Since
they did not have a written language, they passed on their knowledge by oral
tradition from one generation to the next, a feat I found especially impressive.
I wasn’t the only one. Generations in the West looked into alternative
explanations and evidence before accepting the seafaring prowess of the
Polynesians.
Legendary English explorer,
Captain James Cook, was probably the first to observe the linguistic similarity
of the Hawaiian and the Maori and come to appreciate the Polynesian knowledge
of the Pacific Ocean. He invited one to sail with him as he explored and
charted New Zealand and the many islands in the Pacific.
In the late 18th
century, Cook reported to Great Britain and Europe of what he found in New
Zealand. Thus the migration of Europeans began. By 1840 the British Crown
entered the Treaty of Waitangi with
as many of the many Maori tribes scattered throughout New Zealand as possible
in order to “protect” the Maori under the wings of British imperialism and give
encroachment of Maori lands by the new settlers some legal cover.
When Europeans first begin to
arrive in New Zealand, there were around 100,000 Maoris already living there. There
are now about 600,000 living in New Zealand that claims some sort of Maori lineage.
My research did not tell me how many of the original numbers of Maoris survived
from the disease and warfare, nor the numbers today that could be considered
“pure” Maori, i.e., an ancestry free of mixed marriages.
We do know that the white New
Zealanders were not as brutal as the North Americans that systematically wiped
out the native Indian populations. There are a number of reasons for the
difference in behavior. First, the Europeans that migrated from their original
homeland wanted to get away from the culture of class distinction and
oppression. They came to New Zealand with an egalitarian mindset. Second, there
was plenty of land to go around and third, the Maori farmers provided important
sources of food that would feed the new arrivals as well.
The decade beginning 1980 has
been a transformative one for New Zealand as the country undertook social and
economic reform. By vigorously declaring itself as an anti-nuclear state, the
U.S. was forced to downgrade its relationship with the Kiwis from being an ally
to being just friends. The New Zealanders also reviewed their relations with
the Maori and came to recognize the Maori language and culture as something special
and a worthy national treasure.
Renaissance of a culture that
relies on oral tradition could be difficult after generations of rust and lack
of practice. Fortunately, in the case of the Maoris, the missionaries that came
at the turn of the 20th century invented a phonetic alphabet to
replicate the Maori language in order to introduce the Bible to the Maori
population. The Maori Bible provided the means to put all the oral traditions
into a written form and thus facilitated the passing down of the Maori language
and stories.
The revival of Maori customs
and traditions comes in handy in today’s New Zealand. Tourists are invariably
curious about the culture of the country they are visiting. In Kiwi land,
without the Maori culture to talk about and the sacred marae meeting house to show, the tour guide would only have the
sets of trolls and Golem in Wellington, created by moviemaker Sir Peter Jackson
for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, to show as local
culture.
The All Black national rugby
team has been dominating the international rugby world and is very much an
integral part of the New Zealand culture. On days they play, just about every
TV is tuned to the game. On the day we were leaving Auckland to return to the
U.S., the national rugby team was playing and overwhelming the visiting
Australian team to make history by winning 18 in a row.
The New Zealand team is known
for the haka, a Maori war dance,
which the team performs in front of their opponent before commencing the match.
The dance consists of loud chants and shouts, vigorous body movements and
stamping feet, and distorted face with bulging eyes and the tongue hanging out,
all of which is designed to intimidate the other side before the first whistle.
Even if you don’t understand rugby, seeing the haka by the burly rugby players would be worth the price of admission.
New Zealand also had a gold
rush not long after the gold rush in California and Australia. The rush
attracted Chinese gold miners and they encountered discrimination in ways
similar to what they encountered in the U.S. One of the gold rush sites was
Arrow River near Queenstown. As the exhibit by the river in today’s Arrowtown told
the story, by 1865 the easy picking of alluvial gold were largely taken and the
European miners began to move on to other places that promised easier picking.
The local authorities concerned
that the settlement would become a ghost town invited the Chinese miners to
come and rework the tailings. They were surprised
when the Chinese miners were able to extract more gold from the river where
previous miners thought were exhausted.
Soon the Chinese presence
aroused resentment and feelings of racial prejudice. To discourage further
migration, in 1881 New Zealand imposed a poll tax on every entering Chinese,
about the time the US imposed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1883.
The Chinese in New Zealand,
according to the exhibit, felt the verbal sting of racial bias but never
experienced physical violence and loss of lives, as was the case in the U.S.
(There were 5000 Chinese and about 1% of the NZ population at the time.)
In 2002, the prime minister,
Helen Clark, formally apologized to the Chinese community for past
discriminatory practices against their forefathers. Two years later, the
government in a gesture of reconciliation gave a lump sum of 5 million NZ dollars
to the community, which the Chinese community put into “Chinese Poll Tax
Heritage Trust.”
The trustees were all
descendants of the early Chinese settlers. So far funds from the trust have
gone to support projects that preserve the memory of the early Chinese
immigrants and to preserve the history, language and culture associated with
the early settlers.
Through a mutual friend
living in San Francisco, I was introduced to Kai Luey and his wife, Rose,
living in Auckland. Kai is a trustee of the poll tax heritage trust, an
international business executive and a recognized civic leader of the Chinese
community in Auckland.
According to the 2013 census,
there are 171,411 Chinese living in New Zealand representing 4.3% of the total
population. Only 30 some thousands of the census were descended from the early
settlers. The rest immigrated to NZ after 1960. Kai told me that today Chinese
in New Zealand enjoy a level playing field. He has been among the group of
Chinese that made donations to city park of Auckland and to support the NZ
Olympic team in Beijing 2008.
Energetic Kai has been the
organizer of a series of annual “going bananas” conferences for the Chinese in
New Zealand. In the U.S., banana is a derisive term used to accuse someone that
looks like an Asian on the outside but is a westerner inside.
In New Zealand, banana
celebrates the successful integration of the Chinese into the mainstream. This
is reflective of a progressive country that welcomes diversity, consistent with
a tradition that goes back to 1893 when women gained the right to vote, the
first nation to do so anywhere in the world.