My first and last stops in New Zealand were in Auckland, where I stayed with Mark and Annie (Mark is Woodstock class of ’78, both have been on staff), though we barely knew each other – we may have met during one of my visits to the school, and Annie and I worked together (at a distance) on the Woodstock history, but none of us remembers too clearly.
At any rate, Mark picked me up at the airport upon my arrival from Brazil (via Buenos Aires) and remarked: “Whenever I come to the international terminal, it’s to pick up someone I don’t know.” Woodstockers are like that.
The statue of a woman on the rock in the water commemorates a local legend for which the town is named. “Whakatane” means (roughly) “does the work of a man” – she single-handedly saved a big war canoe from slipping out to sea. Or something.
The best down time I’ve had on this trip so far was a visit to David and Sally Kibblewhite (who had been my teachers at Woodstock School) in their beautiful home in Opotiki, on New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty. The weather was beautiful: I finally got to see some sunshine after days of clouds and/or conference rooms. But there was something strange and unsettling about the light. Was my body, tuned for the high sun of the northern hemisphere summer, rebelling against the return to short winter days? Or was it that the sun was on the wrong side? I never did figure it out. I also would not have said that I knew much about the night sky, but that, too, looked wrong. I did finally see the Southern Cross, which included the brightest star I’ve ever seen in any sky, anywhere.
Our last day in Porto Alegre, a bunch of us went to the open-air market at Brique da Redençao, which runs every Sunday from 9 or 10 am. The official booths even take Visa, though you have to go to one of a handful of special stands to use it, and ONLY Visa is accepted (this is true of many places in Brazil, as we had found).
It’s a combination of artisans’ fair and flea market, with some very interesting things. I bought a mate cup (cuia), a little wooden carving of a jaguar, a stunning jasper necklace, and something very special for my daughter – all of which got me grief upon arrival in Australia (they’re very strict about quarantining wood and animal products, to protect their fragile ecosystem). But nothing has been confiscated. Yet.
