Report of my journey to New Zealand and Australia:
Adventures Downunder Feb-Mar 2007
I am sailing in a whirlwind of travel now at the end of my month in New Zealand. Before coming here I spent two weeks in Australia traveling with Morgaine and her 8 year old daughter, Makyziah. Before that I spent nine days in England. That has been my traveling since last I wrote you all upon my return from Costa Rica.
I have spent many hours in airplanes to do this journey. There are some obvious negative aspects to that on my health and the health of the planet. But I know inside myself that my being has wished to fly in my body for eons and I see planes as a step in this direction like the internet is a step towards our abilities to communicate telepathically. On the planes I do get a lot of writing and reading done which is very needed.
Also there are occasionally movies that call to me. On these flights I have seen three and all of them I highly recommend to those who have not seen them. They are: “Fast Food Nation”—showing us a movie version of the across the board negative impact of industrial food; “Inconvenient Truth”—Al Gore lays out clearly our global crisis around global warming with lots of creative media; and one I bet many of you have not seen, “Who Killed the Electric Car?”—a very powerful view of the complicated world we live in and the forces that shape it. Learn what happened to the California initiative to have zero emissions from cars. Powerful! See them and tell others about them. And to think these were shown by airlines (Specifically, Qantas and Emirates)!
Time in chilly England
England gave me a little more winter and we even had some snow in London. I spent a few days there visiting with friends, Kew Gardens, and Chelsea Physic Gardens. Then I went to Schumacher to meet with people there and turn in my application to attend their MSc. program in Holistic Science this autumn. That all felt good. Unfortunately I came down with a chest cold and that took away from my trip to Hastings with Marianne to visit one of our teachers from school, Colin Spencer, and his partner Claire, in their lovely country home build in 1819. I tried to make the most of it and we enjoyed a long walk and history lesson from Colin down to the English Channel. If any of you travel to England and want to stay at their pleasant B and B, let me know and I will hook you up.
Australia
With my cold and luggage I flew off to Sydney, Australia. Though hard, the trip was not as bad as I feared it would be. Most of the time I was in Australia, I was under the weather. I was glad that Morgaine was there to help. We were kindly hosted outside of Melbourne by Morgaine’s Friends, Yodi and Pier. While visiting them we had the honor of a day with David Holmgren and Su Bennett who caretake the permaculture site, Melidora. David is one of the originators of the permaculture movement. We spent a fascinating day down along a stream behind there house that they help caretake. David expressed that we needed to stop battling the exotics but instead observe their evolution with the currently native plants. It was a day full of insights.
We stayed a little while in Melbourne and did not get much out of being there other than a nice day at their botanical gardens and a couple of visits to an innovative restaurant called Lentil as Anything (check out their website). They focus on high vibe food and encourage you to pay as you feel. It has been a successful movement there with several locations. I would love to see that idea take hold all over the planet.
From Melbourne we flew to Perth on the far side of the country. I was interested in checking out one of the half a dozen Mediterranean climates of the world. We stayed at the eco-friendly One World backpackers and checked out a grassroots movement teaching permaculture principles called City Farm (associated with the Men of the Trees movement). We also visited the botanical gardens there which I was very impressed with. They emphasized native plants and had lots of information on who many of the plants were to the aborigines (a general term encompassing many different tribes of peoples spread throughout Australia.) It felt wonderful to walk through their abundant gardens and meet people at their weekly market all built on an abandoned railroad yard. We also ventured to Freemantle and had some time in their vibrant marketplace.
Up to this point I felt myself struggling some to stay focused and positive while in Australia. Besides the exceptions mentioned above and the overall kindness of the people we met, I felt there was a shallowness to our encounters. My physical dis-ease did not help this perspective very much. To connect more with the land, the three of us took a train north of the city and hitchhiked 100 km to camp out for a couple of days. This worked beautifully and I felt a real shift in myself. The hitchhiking was challenging to get to a river we saw on the map, but we eventually made it. This place was a little heaven despite the presence of lots of little ticks. The cool waters and forest of paperbark trees were very healing. On that journey we also had a wonderful encounter with an ancient plant called balga (Xanthorrhoea) who reminded me of the Welwitschias. I had a chance to really commune with it and learned a lot. Morgaine summarized this plant well in her letter to family: “the balgas are these most ancient of plants, also called grass trees, that look like cousin It. They were regarded as the most useful plant for aboriginals of western Australia, being used for food, tools and shelter. They only grow 2 cm a year, so when I see one my height or taller, I feel awe-inspired.”
As so often happens, once we had gotten our lessons from the journey, we were zoomed back to the beginning. In this case a couple from Ireland came by as soon as we got to the road and drove us all the way back to Perth. That brought an end to our traveling time together and I bid Morgaine and Makyziah farewell. They went on to travel for several weeks across the country for more adventures there and have now returned to the states. I caught a flight to New Zealand for an entirely different experience.
New Zealand
The first thing I have to say about NZ is that it seems to have very little connection in any way to AU beyond being in the general same part of the world and having a history of colonialization. It reflects my own ignorance. The vibe is totally different.
For financial reasons I chose to hitch around on my travels here. In these last three weeks I have had the honor of 46 rides from people covering several thousand kilometers. Some of the rides have been nothing short of miraculous and I have met a wide range of people from Maori indigenous elders to modern Maori to all forms of Kiwis-- sheep shearers to antique restorers. There has also been a good number of kind tourists mostly from Europe. I feel it is a real blessing to have seen the country in this way as I would have missed a lot of important encounters had I traveled by bus or rental car. Not only did I get to experience the beauty of NZ, I also go to hear a wide range of stories of the challenges here. Some of those challenges are the same ones we are facing all over the world as corporate mentality continues to erode our humanity. People here are amazed how much I have seen and experienced in my time here.
As you know, my purpose for being here is to get to know the plants and healers as well as visit sacred places. All of this has happened in magical ways. As soon as I got off the plane and passed through their misguided quarantine, I began hitchhiking out of Auckland. This had its challenges.
Soon after I had been standing on the motorway two cop cars appeared lights flashing. The first one rolled down his window and told me that for my own safety I was not allowed on the highway. And if I stayed, there would be a $450 fine. I felt I was talking to a shark who had, fortunately, recently eaten. He pointed to the top of the hill to an on ramp with no pull off area. He said that that was were I needed to be. So I walked up there with my heart on the ground. Things did not look good. I began to look around for a place to spend the night as it was approaching evening.
But angels were looking out for me and within a half an hour Don stopped in his smoked mussels truck—pulled right up onto the grass and whooshed me out of there. He asked me where I was going. Toward Rotorua I said. He seemed surprised and said that he was going to Coromandel Peninsula and figured I was going there being how I looked.
Don turned out to be a great story teller and over the next few hours I learned all about his life. He had grown his kind heart through the trials of the underside of life. I was impressed with his strong sense of morality. He invited me to camp on his lawn which I did and over the next three days grounded and got a sense of this new world I had arrived in. I met the great Kauri trees and many of their relatives. I walked on the beaches and gathered seaweed from the beautiful turquoise waters (there are over 600 species of seaweeds around NZ—40% are only here!)
I then headed out crossing the small mountain range to the east side of the island and made my way down toward Rotorua (also known as Roto-vegas). On the way I spent my first night in the bush. I got there on the wings of a 17 year old kiwi full of energy. He dropped me off not too far from the road at his favorite off roads track and told me to walk in and I would find some nice bush. I did and it was wonderful to be out there away from everyone with tall Rimu (one of the twenty unique conifers of NZ) trees overhead and vines of supplejack climbing them (a relative of Smilax). Through the night I could hear the scurrying of possums around and I wondered about their aggressiveness. NZ has only two native mammals—both small rare bats. Through introductions there are now many including the possums (estimated to be 70 million of them), deer, rats running through the woods plus 40 million sheep and millions of cows. And least we forget the 4 million humans, the most destructive of the introduced mammals. The plant story is just as telling. There are about 2300 native plants with over 20,000 introduced plants. More than 2000 of these introduced plants have gone native. NZ is so beautiful on the surface but beneath that pollution runs rampant and there is this distorted view that they need to eliminate the exotic beings (except the sheep and cows and humans and crop/horticulture plants.) I was so thankful for my time with David Holmgren in AU as he prepared my mind for this. The reality is that these naturalized plants and animals are not going away no matter how much you poison, pull or trap them. The energy to do that and the further damage to the ecosystem is wasteful. We have to find ways to co-evolve. When people would bring up the possum whom they love to trash (and is a protected animal in AU where it comes from), I would suggest a analysis be done on the environmental impact of the sheep compared to the possums (not even to mention the humans who have somehow come to see themselves as the center of the universe—oh that ego!).
On my way to Rotorua I was picked up by a Maori father and son. They shared such kindness with me, spending the whole day taking me to their favorite lakes in the area including a swim in Lake Taupo (an ancient crater with an explosion 26,500 years ago producing a hundred times the fallout of Krakatoa). They also took me to a museum of an unearthed Maori village buried from a volcanic explosion 120 years back. Fascinating. They fed me and showed such respect towards me. I was honored to be with them.
I stayed in Rotorua a couple more days then made my way south stopping at Waikite Valley to soak in the hot springs there that have the largest outpouring of hot water in NZ—600 liters a second. I camped there and had a profound experience sitting before that spring!
South Island
Then after a series of wonderful rides I somehow magically appeared at the bottom of the island at the capitol, Wellington. I was blessed to have a night with friends of my parents there and the next morning, Elisa took me around to see the Maori exhibit at the Te Papa Museum and a visit to the Otari Nature Reserve with an impressive collection of plants representing half the flora of NZ.
Then I caught a huge ferry traveling 3 hours across the Cook Strait to the south island. On the journey I met a number of interesting Europeans—One a plant enthusiast from France also a Dane who had a car heading my way. He and I camped out that night and made a fire baking kumara (sweet potatoes) and roasting corn. We had a wonderful time under the starry night sharing stories.
The next morning he dropped me at the road and soon a man named Rod picked me up. He was on his way to meet an elder named Steven who had been homesteading for 30 years. Rod is going through some big changes in his life and wanted to check in on Steven’s life and learn from him a bit. We had a lot to talk about and I ended up hanging out with them for that day. We had a walkabout Steven’s homestead seeing all the remarkable ways he is a model of the striving for self-sufficiency. I found him a very interesting person. He was co-incidentally driving that afternoon to pick up a horse in the direction I was going so we had a nice ride together all the way to the coast.
Soon after he dropped me off, a young man with the familiar name to me of Liam, stopped and gave me a lift. He took me on tour of the area which is famous for greenstone (serpentine/jade). I ended up camping in his family’s back yard. Liam’s father, Dinny is a real bush lover. Once he knew my interests he stacked a wonderful pile of plant books in front of me that I spent hours going through. We also went for a sunset bush walk up to a beautiful gorge with turquoise water and old forest. I was blessed by their kindness.
The Glaciers
I was on a tight schedule so headed out to the road the next morning. After a short ride to the next town, a young Scottish doctor who had relocated to NZ picked me up and drove me all the way to the glaciers. Ever since seeing my parents’ pictures of the glaciers with a tropical forest below them, I knew I needed to go there. And there I was. They were as spectacular as I had hoped. These two glaciers, Fox and Franz Joseph (really silly names for glaciers in my opinion! In Maori the area is known as Ka Roimata o Hine Hukatere (Tears of the Avalanche Girl)) were powerful and foreboding. Out of the base of them were caves with rivers roaring forth. I was amazed by the disheveled landscapes and the pioneering plants that re-colonized them. I was very amazed by one of the plants that seemed to be the first to come back called Tutu in Maori (Coriaria). This plant has killed a number of humans and countless cattle but is also a very powerful healing medicine.
After a day with the glaciers, I retreated to a campground and the next morning started hitching back north. This was my third encounter with glaciers-first time as a child in Iceland and the second on my quest to see the source of the Ganges up in the Himalayas at a place called Gamuk. I was blessed with only a sprinkling of rain in a place where it averages over 8 meters of rain a year.
Some wonderful rides came the next day and whooshed me back to the top of the island. I spent the night at Rod’s house (the man who had picked me up a few days before). I met his young family and we did a plant walk around his land taking in the diverse beings there. We found an edible mushroom the Maori call harore (Pholiota). Though I was in NZ a month early for the mushroom season I saw a nice collection of mushrooms along the way including Ganoderma, Russulas, Auricularia, and Lycoperdon.
That day I hitched further north to the top of the island getting a kind ride from a French man who was touring about after a year of nursing in New Caledonia. He took me to an idyllic place called Golden Bay. I stayed there only a night having a full time with one of the founders of the Tui Community, Robina. She is a energized crusader for a better world and I enjoyed my time with her. She also had a great book collection. She took me to visit an herbalist, John Massey, who had spent some years in the states and even went to the California School of Herbal Studies back in 1982. He is a kindred soul and our hours together passed full of good stories, a healthy meal and a nice walk around his gardens. In Golden Bay there is always fruit to eat any time of year. It is one of those relatively rare places on earth were apple trees grow next to lemon trees.
That afternoon a couple of rides took me back over the mountain to visit with Hera, a friend of Luke’s. We only had a day together but shared some good stories and walked in the bush around her house. She is an accomplished basket maker in the Maori style. We parted after having a wonderful dunk into a sacred glowing crystal pool.
I got a little stuck hitching back to the ferry but eventually an angel appeared, Marianna, and lifted my spirits back up and showed me her home being converted to a permaculture forest and then took me to the ferry back across to the north island handing me a bag of food as we parted. I felt fed at every level as I rode back across the Cook Strait.
Back to the North Island
I arrived in Wellington late and walked to base backpackers for the night. I slept well and after a morning of errands I walked out to the highway to head north. I had some trepidation around this as my guidebook had warned about the challenges of hitching from Wellington. I got to the onramp and it was a hard scene. But after sitting with it for a while, a man named Adam from two lanes over at a stoplight picked me up and lifted me out of that metropolis. It was raining some but it did not dampen my spirits one bit. Besides they were in a drought and needed the rain. After a couple of short rides, a North American couple picked me up in their traveling van and took me northward.
I spent that night under a big bridge by a beautiful river. The next morning in a slight drizzle I made my way out to a little road that lead to the center of the north island. I was on my way to a Maori plant class that started the next day. While waiting for a ride, I noticed a prolific plum tree across the road. I ate my fill, perhaps ten of them, and put another 30 in my pockets feeling the abundance of nature. Soon my ride came.
This ride was with Welby Barrett and felt very much like a pre-arranged meeting. This white-haired 68-year-old Maori great-grandfather was a just the person I was hoping to meet. In his own way he pointed out plants all along the way to Rotorua and shared who they were and what kind of medicine they provided. He said that he had shared the plant knowledge with all his children and even his grandchildren (who numbered in the 30’s). He was a round jolly man who seemed happy through and through. He had the accent of the English and said he was descended from a man named Barrett who had owned whaling ships. Some years back there had been a family reunion with English Barretts coming also and the total number attending were over 2000 people! Wow, that’s quite a reunion.
I truly felt lucky to have spent time with that man and took lots of notes. He let me off in Rotorua and I stayed there a few hours catching up on email and buying food for the weekend. Then I headed back out on the road and three more rides took me right to the forest lodge where I was to spend the weekend learning Maori medicine. There were 14 students with half of them being Maori. It was a delight to intersect there with a brother named Tyler. We met in Asheville last year and planned on this intersection once we knew we were both coming to NZ. He is there immersed in a 6-week herbal studies intensive.
Maori Herbal Class
The weekend went by fast taught by a pakea (white person) named Robert McGowan who had immersed himself in Maori healing ways over 30 years ago. He had a good knowledge of the plants in the bush as well as the Maori culture. I took away some good nuggets from our time.
That weekend for me peaked my journey to NZ. In my last week I hoped to integrate all I had learned in my several thousand km journey around the islands. Fortunately, an angel in the class, Brita has a native plant nursery near by and offered to provide a homebase for me to ground for a few days. And I did that, getting caught up on my notes and some on my emails. I took a wonderful walk up into a forest of Kauri’s to say goodbye to them and had a wonderful evening hot spring soak with the infinite universe overhead. There is nothing like feeling that home feeling while out in the world. Thank you, Brita.
From there I hitched my way toward Auckland stopping for a night with Zac, a Maori man who had picked me up earlier on my trip. I had some time with his extended family learning about their history and visiting their Mauri (spiritual meeting house). They dropped me off in the small town of Te Ahora (The Love) which boasts the only soda spring geyser in the world. I sat and watched a couple rounds of that (every 30 minutes) and enjoyed drinking the bubbly water. I restocked some on food, had some internet time and spent a couple of hours in the library reading plant books.
A series of four very kind rides took me a couple of hundred kilometers to a beautiful beach called Piha west of Auckland and I spent an idyllic night in the dunes beneath the moon. In the morning I did a little coastal plant walk and yoga on the beach. I was impressed by the amount of seaweed washed ashore and the cliffs that reminded me of the NW of the US.
A friend who lives in NZ of my friend Chris who traveled with me in Africa, recommended that I stay at a place called Swanson Sanctuary outside of Auckland. As soon as I made arrangements to go there, it seemed the universe gave me the green light to get there. Two rides from the ocean and I was standing at the sanctuary being welcomed by a woman named Rose. The place is hopefully the kind of place that will pop up all over the world. It is a sweet retreat center that pays the bills by an idea called a gift economy. A couple of dozen people are at the core of it and help to make it happen. One of them, a kiwi named Frances, appeared and was all about plants and nature. She owns about 70 hectares which she is planning to preserve as native forest and educate people about the importance of that. As you can imagine we had a lot to share!
We ventured for to the Auckland Botanical Gardens and had a memorable five hours there. Finally I was able to taste the “fruit” of the podocarp—so Sweet and Yummy! We had a number of memorable tastes that day. They had one of the best kid’s garden areas I have ever seen and I enjoyed our time in the native forests. Frances and I also enlivened a garden bed at the house with what I call the Forcinelli method—digging a hole, throwing in brush, and covering it with the dirt mixed with compost. Made the bed look like a pregnant mother. I encouraged them to do that all over the land and have a goal of feeding themselves over the next year.
The sanctuary was just what I needed to ground and integrate my trip to NZ. I now venture back to the north of Australia for three weeks to see what it has to off. More on that next time…