Walking amongst spirits

I’ve finally traveled again (North Island of New Zealand sans parents, to be more specific), so of course I have seen things that have encouraged me to put fingers to keyboard and update this diary.  Sorry for the five months hiatus, I will try not to let that happen again, for those people who actually check whether I’ve updated periodically.

This trip was far lazier than my last trip to NZ.  Left to my own devices, I travel in a very roundabout lazy way compared to the frenetic, scheduled, MUST-SEE-EVERYTHING-OR-ITS-NOT-A-VACATION trips my parents take (many of you may may already realize this due to the fact that i’ve been “traveling” for almost 2 years now).   Literally, for 5 days, I stayed in my friends house and read books, taking time to breathe, relax, and ground myself. “But Jenna, you’re in a foreign country! you have to see it to appreciate it!” you may say, and you’d be right… I did see parts of it, and the things I saw expanded my experience and perception, and gave me lots to ponder. I’m just saying that relaxing for a few days before throwing yourself into tourism has its perks; it was only two weeks I was gone from Australia, but it felt like I’d been away for a year.

I was lucky enough to be able to spend the first night in New Zealand with a friend of mine from NY. Rachel has been working with the Peace Corps for the last 10 months in Samoa, and was in New Zealand on their orders over the weekend. We only had about 10 hours with each other, but it was wonderful to be able to catch up with a dear friend, and compare our notes of life away from America.  The rest of my trip was mostly spent with my friend Zaid, who was my 5-day-neighbor at the Woodford Folk Festival back in January.  He was kind enough to let me stay with him and show me around the island a bit, which was extraordinarily kind for someone who’d ostensibly known me for all of a week of cumulative time.  We got along really well though, and had massive debates about the nature of consciousness and reality, how to attain enlightenment, and what truth really is.  And we went on a roadtrip to the two most intensely spiritual places i’ve ever experienced, Waipoua Forest, one of the only remaining old growth Kaori forests, and Cape Reinga, the northernmost tip of New Zealand.

We didn’t have too many days for our roadtrip due to Zaid having to work, so we got up at 5am on day 1 to drive north, and ended up getting stuck in Auckland traffic in the rain.  However, after we cleared the traffic, the trip got off to a most auspicious start:  We were followed for 4 hours by a rainbow on our left (at points, it was even a double rainbow, though not as… intense as this one), as storms passed overhead.  We took a small detour to a waterfall, and then another to a remote gorgeous beach, where we nearly had to push the car off a cliff to jump start it after I accidentally left the lights on and the battery died.  I swear, Dr Seuss must have come to New Zealand before he illustrated The Lorax, because we saw what can really only be described as truffala trees while driving back to the main road.

Though detours are often the most fun parts of a trip, as the spontaneousness adds an extra thrill to what you’re seeing, my heart beat harder when we got to the Kaori forest. The first tree we saw, Tane Ma Huta, is known as the lord of the forest, and he was magnificent. We were all stunned into silence as we took in his 13 meter girth… You just kept on craning your neck upwards, and he was still in your line of sight.

Being the godless atheist I am, it’s hard to admit, but it felt like I was standing in the presence of divinity. So much power and strength and calm radiated from this tree, and from the rest of the Kaori trees that we went to see.

The video doesn’t do the forest justice, but it gives you some idea of what I was looking at. At some point while walking along I just started talking to the trees, acknowledging their immense age (some are over 2000 years old, which makes any person’s visit nothing more weighty than the time you pay to any one mosquito you brush away during your lifetime) and majesty and my gratefulness for being there. Honestly, I couldn’t help myself: being there energized me, made me feel like I had points of light under my skin.  I brushed my lips against the bark of a few of them (yeah, I’m not just a tree hugger, i’m a tree kisser too), and for the rest of the day, my lips tingled, and I was unsure whether I’d accidentally poisoned myself.  Still, it was a singularly wonderful place, and my only regret was that I hadn’t existed back in the days when they were everywhere on the island, before the settlers came and hacked so many down.

The next day we went to Cape Reinga, where the Maori stories say all the souls of the dead depart. It’s the northern tip of New Zealand, where the waters rage as the currents  of the Pacific and the Tasman Sea clash, and it was another place I felt godstruck.  At the end of the island lies a stretch of land that curls it’s way slowly down to the seething ocean, with stumped trees and grasses that have no choice but to yield to the raging wind that whips back and forth across, stirred up by the turmoil of the water beneath.  At the end of the rock, defying wind resistance, poor soil nutrition, and other science, there’s a lone 900 year old tree curving up and growing where nothing should, where  the Maori believe that the dead sink into the roots to the underworld. 

It’s hard to explain how it feels to be there… I was with friends, but I felt alone, but not in a lonely way… it felt like my soul had to come to terms with the length of its existence, but in the best possible way.  It was comforting, and somehow a calm was created by all the chaos of the elements.  You have to be there to really get it, I think.

The rest of the trip was eventful only in the way that spending time with people you don’t know too well can be… Nevertheless, we got along pretty well (although I’m still shocked that there’s anyone on the planet who thinks the Princess Bride is a bad movie), and it was overall a very relaxing trip home.  We stopped at a brilliant café on the way home called Eutopia, which must have stepped directly out of a movie.  The outside was shaped like a ship, and the inside was set with crystals and light, with curved surfaces and hidden nooks.  I would highly recommend stopping there to take a photo, if not to try their coffee and food. 

New Zealand ties with Australia as my favorite place in the world in terms of spectacular beauty.  It is the only country I know of where you can go from frosty glacier to ocean in an hour, where a drive can quickly change from lush green pastures to barren red dirt to stunning white sand dunes and crystal blue water.  It turns my sense of space upside down, and I am left just feeling like I’ve experienced some sort of wonderful magic trick.  In short:  definitely a good vacation, and a place worth returning to in my future.

Next time I go:  definitely a trip to Hot Water beach, where you dig holes in the sand and they turn into natural spas as they fill with water.   where else but NZ?

Your moment of Zen:  An artist I’ve been listening to nonstop recently

Much love!

Advertisement