Antipodes

After a five-hour flight from Los Angeles I landed in late evening at the main Hawaiian airport just outside Honolulu. The weather was warm and steamy and the winking neons were bright against the tropical moonlight. I settled into a hotel among the high-rise buildings of Waikiki. From the window of my room I could just see the surf of Waikiki beach, phosphorescent in the moonlight. The next day I hired a car and toured O'ahu Island. I found it to be a curious mixture of American, Japanese and Polynesian. The surf crashed on the volcanic rocks of the coast and the booby gulls roosted on raffia shelters, their feathers ruffling in the wind and their beady eyes scanning the horizon for signs of food. In a large pool a killer whale leapt and twirled gracefully, showing no signs of aggression. I visited the anthropological museum to see the shrunken heads and learn about cannibalism. Outside it on a swathe of immaculately cut grass one of the long-eared statues of Easter Island stood sentinel among the hibiscus blooms with their overpowering scent and deep colours. In the middle of the island I stopped the car on a country road and looked around. Pineapples were growing in the red volcanic soil in neat rows that stretched as far as the horizon on all sides. Further down the road there was a piece of island rainforest with giant Swiss-cheese plants that twined around the tropical hardwood trees and draped them with vines and stilt-roots.
In Kealakekua, the valley where Captain James Cook was bludgeoned to death in 1779, I took a lesson in how to hula-dance, moving only the pelvis. Like Arabic dancing it requires certain muscles to be highly developed. As far as anyone knows, Cook never tried it. I am supposedly directly descended on my mother's side from the famous explorer. Certainly there were sea-captains in the Cook family, our family, and they came from the East Coast of England, as James Cook did. He died at the hands of the Polynesians, who feared invasion and crushed his skull with mahogany clubs. The place where it happened was spectacularly beautiful: brilliant green vegetation, trees with splays of stilt-roots, tall waterfalls cascading into crystal pools. And like the rest of the Pacific, it had an air of being perennially relaxed and peaceful, much in contrast to the act of violence that more than two centuries ago both created and changed history.
I took a short flight to Hawaii Island, landing out of the silver banks of cloud at Hilo Airport. In another hired car I drove up to Kilauea Volcano. I sat in the visitor's centre to watch a collection of films about recent eruptions. It was an elegant and modern wooden building, which smelt of newness. Less than two years later it was totally destroyed in less than ten minutes during a violent outpouring of lava from the nearby main vent of Kilauea. The broad shield-like bulge of Mauna Loa, the largest of the Hawaiian volcanoes, dominated the horizon, with its dish-like cap of white cloud.
Down on the south coast of the island, the waves crashed against the lava cliffs. Twenty metres above them, a sign recorded that in the nineteenth century a Polynesian village was wiped out by a tsunami that came over the top of these tall basaltic ramparts. Along the chain of volcanoes road, the pahoehoe lava appeared frozen into a series of fantastic shapes, punctuated at intervals by fumaroles that coughed and hissed as they emitted streams of gasses which could easily asphyxiate the unwary visitor.
The flight from Honolulu to Adelaide was one of the longest I have been on: a ceaseless round of in-flight meals and interminable third-rate movies, while outside the ocean stretched away to the horizon, dappled by the shadows of small, fluffy clouds, endlessly monotonous.
Australia and New Zealand are ingrained in the culture of the United Kingdom and the links are so strong that it is practically a rite of passage to visit these places. I have family in Adelaide and hence it was easy to find a welcome. It was also a lesson in how Australian culture is founded on the demon drink. I am not sure whether it is still so, but in 1985 when I was there, one could drive into a "bottle shop" and order one's beer, wine and spirits without even leaving the car. And often there were queues of vehicles tanking up. Petrol on one side of the road, Castlemaine Three-X beer on the other side--in about equal quantities. At Penfold's Winery in the Barossa Valley they told me that they only exported two per cent of their production (two million litres of wine a year), and that in a nation of beer-drinkers!
The Barossa Valley looked like a piece of central California cross-fertilised with a hock-growing area of the Rhine Valley. It was originally settled by Germans, whose dorf-like villages were full of houses in lath-and-plaster black and white. The roadsides were adorned with wattle trees, with their brilliant, drooping splays of bright yellow flowers. But despite the attractions of the outdoors, my uncle Bernard and I spent most of our time in the tasting rooms of various wineries until, when we finally staggered out of the last one, we realised that there had been a thunderstorm and the watery atmosphere was just beginning to clear. Suddenly, the sun broke through the lowering clouds and a double rainbow appeared in the sky. At least, I think it appeared, but we had been tasting wine for so long that I could hardly be certain!
On the banks of the Murray River I found a fish-and-chip shop run by a Korean immigrant. With a packet full of chips and a large bottle of gassy sarsparilla, I sat in the car watching a flock of wild emus flounce around a paddock and peck fastidiously at the grass. Later in the day, at a place called Kangaroo Creek, I managed to photograph a Kookaburra in flight, but the only kangaroos to be seen were penned up in a local zoo, along with koalas, dingos and wallabies. These last were shivering with the cold and huddling together, for it was August and mid-winter, though still temperate by northern European standards.
After a brief look at Melbourne, a very gentile town with its sedate trams and Victorian commercial architecture, and Sidney, dominated by the harbour bridge and opera house, I departed for Auckland.
There is no denying that the Kiwis are the country cousins of the Aussies. It is immediately apparent in their accents. But there are people who prefer the more relaxed atmosphere of New Zealand. Indeed it was so somnolent that occasionally someone would go mad and shoot everyone in sight, just because he couldn't stand the silence. In Auckland, the country's largest city, on Sunday there were no trains and only one bus an hour departed from the central bus station. Nevertheless, it was still possible to visit the aquarium and stand on a moving pavement that shuttled one along through a glass tunnel, above which shoals of sharks, turtles and colourful fish swam languidly. In the Auckland zoo Galars with snow-white plumage and bright yellow combs preened themselves. In a darkened room a kiwi (the bird, not the fruit or the people) stumbled, a furry ball on stick-like legs, as if it were drunk or stunned. They are nocturnal animals and do not like to be observed.
I hired a car and headed south towards the vast oval expanse of Lake Taupo, with the Chateau Range of volcanoes forming a backdrop white with snow behind it. Every so often one came across the cultural centres of the Maoris. These were distinguished by massive sculptures, fantastic beaked animals in russet-stained wood with gleaming mother-of-pearl eyes. From behind these, the creased, brown faces of the Maoris stared out sullenly with hostile glances. Half way to Botany Bay there was an archaeological site, a Maori village that had been engulfed by deposits from a pyroclastic eruption. It had been excavated to show how the indigenous population lived at the time when European settlement began. There had also been a hotel at the site, run by a Scottish emigre couple, and it too had been excavated. The museum contained a crate full of bottles of whisky which had been buried in 1885 and dug out a century later. The whisky was visibly intact, yellow and liquid in its ancient bottles. Nearby in a sheltered glade a waterfall plashed and glittered, throwing up showers of droplet that refracted the light into the colours of the rainbow as it filtered through the trees.
At Rotorua the thin ground trembled underfoot with the subterranean movements of hot water, steam and gases, for Rotorua is the country's prime geothermal area. That night I lay in a pool of heated water drinking Lion beer and looking up at the stars, the unfamiliar constellations of the southern hemisphere, trying to identify the Southern Cross.
Waiotapu, Wakarawerawera, Waimangu--the names of the geothermal springs at Rotorua are pure Polynesian, fitting toponyms for Aoteroa, the Land of the Long White Cloud, as the Polynesians called New Zealand. George Bernard Shaw visited and judged these places to be hideous manifestations of hell. But at one point one descends into two volcanic craters in which there are boiling lakes of water. They were the most beautiful natural landscapes that I had ever seen in my life. Wading birds circled around the boiling rivers and steaming waterfalls, unable to land for fear of burning themselves, for the water comes out of the ground at 96 degrees Centigrade. An Australian tourist went to the toilet in a small concrete rest-room and howled with pain when she flushed it, for the plumbing was connected to the geothermal system and water came steaming out at sixty degrees. Nevertheless, there was something ineluctably fascinating about the belching mud volcanoes and steaming flats of hot water, mirroring brilliant red and yellow chemical precipitates. At Waiotapu there was a geyser--named, eccentrically, after the Prince of Wales--that spouted steam for 75 minutes after a park ranger had flung a kilo of soap powder into the crevice (which reduced the surface tension in the heated water and let it erupt).
After a few days I flew on to Nadi in the Fijian Islands. In the mid-1980s New Zealand was a picturesque place that seemed locked in the embrace of time. In the suburbs of Auckland ancient Morris Minors puttered around among the well-tended front gardens and scarlet pillar-boxes. It looked like Britain in the 1950s--but with parrots.