Moving to New Zealand!

New Zealand is not a huge country. It’s comparable in size to Great Britain — a manageable, comfortable, country-sized country. Australia, next door, is far bigger than a country needs to be; America, my previous home, is unnecessarily huge. Europe is home to countries smaller than a typical Australian cattle station — Luxembourg is so small it barely shows up on most maps, and the Vatican is smaller than Pukekohe.

Traffic in Pukekohe!

New Zealand is a pleasingly-sized place. But, given the emptiness of the place, getting around isn’t always the easiest task in the world. Driving in New Zealand can frequently prove to be a frustrating experience. Pukekohe, delightful town that it is, is exceptionally easy to navigate — not a traffic light in the place, with cars kept flowing thanks to roundabouts, wonderful invention that they are, at almost every junction of any note. But try heading north into Auckland, and things change quickly. The imaginatively and creatively named Southern Motorway heads up from Drury to the centre of the city, and for the most part it’s an easy run — easy, but shockingly dull and dreary. Almost as soon as you pass Papakura, you find yourself in the urban sprawl that represents the worst of Aukland. And one you pass the TipTop ice-cream factory and Sylvia Park’s shopping mall, you wonder if maybe heading south to Hamilton might not have been such a bad idea after all. From Greenlane north, traffic routinely slows, often to a full stop. From here you’ll inch along, crawling past Auckland Grammar School and marveling at the site of the new prison that’s being built to overlook the motorway. Despite the monstrous upheavals resulting from massive overhauls to the Newmarket viaduct, and the cut-and-cover of the Victoria Park tunnel, traffic still struggles to flow smoothly as it approaches, along the waterfront motorway (an astonishingly strange use for prime harbourside real estate), the Auckland Harbour Bridge.

The motorway goes south to Hamilton, and Wellington-bound Aucklanders find themselves, south of Hamilton, in the middle of some of the world’s loveliest scenery, and the drive from the country’s main city to its capital winds, twists and wriggles around the natural contours of the land. No motorway — oh, no, the motorway disappears before you even reach Huntly. The roads meander through the countryside, sometimes wide and straight, sometimes narrow, serpentine and circuitous. Hills are steep, curves are sharp. It’s an adventure of a drive, sometimes, and not for all passengers. It might be possible, I’m sure, to build a motorway between the two cities, but I’m very glad nobody has. There isn’t, I don’t believe, enough traffic to warrant a highway, and the landscape would surely be the poorer for a two-lane-each-way scar slashed through it. The Northern Gateway from Albany to Puhoi is an efficient means of bypassing Orewa, but it is a gash in the surface of the land that makes one question whether it is out of propotion with the benefit it offers. Certainly, I question the merits of the “Holiday Highway” that is often suggested, an extension of the Northern Gateway motorway from its current end, at the Johnsons Hill Tunnels south of Puhoi, which would continue the road past Warkworth and, depending on who’s talking, all the way up to Wellsford. But, as with the route south, is there really enough traffic to warrant it?

While the roads between towns in New Zealand are, as a rule, empty, in the cities, traffic can be unbearable; certainly, trying to negotiate the tangle that is Auckland’s motorway junctions is routinely an ordeal capable of adding close to an hour to a journey. So what’s the alternative? Auckland, at least, has a rail service, but this is only a benefit to those of us who live on one of the two lines, one heading south to Pukekohe, the other west to Henderson. But even trains are a half-answer to the problem. Between Britomart and Papakura, the stop before Pukekohe, the service is good. Trains run frequently, and the service is tolerably, if not brilliantly, reliable. But south of Papakura, things are different. Here in Pukekohe, we might see one train, possibly two, an hour, during commuting times. During the day, however, miss a train and you’ll be waiting up to two hours for the next. And don’t even bother looking for a train at the weekend — on Saturdays and Sundays, you’re either driving to the city or leaving your car at Papakura station, where all the services end.

When I go into the city on Thursday for my new technology bit for Radio New Zealand’s Nine To Noon show, I’ll need to be at the studio by 11. The drive should take forty minutes; I’ll allow twice that, just to be sure. I won’t be taking the train; if I catch the half-past-eight train, I’ll be in town an hour and a half early, but if I miss it, I’ll miss my show. New Zealand, as I’ve said repeatedly and I’ll say again now, is a beautiful, lovely country, one I’m delighted to live in. I just really, really wish it were easier to get round.

Many were the reasons we settled on New Zealand. Canada, while tempting, was possibly not quite not-American enough — my apologies to any Canadians reading this, but there’s a reason why you lot all live within sight of the American border. I did consider moving the family back to England, but when even my own father was saying “Don’t come home, son,” then I decided that there had to be a reason why the UK was one to scratch off my list. I briefly — briefly — offered Dubai as a possibility (there’s certainly no shortage of well-paid work), but Deb roundly dispatched that idea; she’s right, of course — the Middle East simply isn’t the stablest place on the planet right now.

We considered Australia, too. It’s OK — I can admit it. But while there were some positive things to be said about the West Island, one comprehensive deal-breaker, for Deb at least, was the wildlife. Australia has, to be blunt, more things that can kill you than, probably, any other country in the world.

(We’re talking about natural things here, of course. If we opened the discussion up to anything that can kill, then it simply wouldn’t even resemble a fair fight, with the US winning by a distressingly large margin. No, we’re keeping this focussed on living things.)

A quick read of Bill Bryon’s Down Under (Americans might know it as In a Sunburned Country) will leave you with a clear image of a country filled with spiders, snakes, even octopodes, that will kill you as soon as look at you. Believe Bryson, and even Sydney or Melbourne is heaving with creepy-crawlies that ooze venom from every inch, and anyone careless enough not to shake their shoes out before putting them on is plunging his toes into a mess of lethal, angry spiders whose glance can be deadly.

While this is, clearly, just a slight exaggeration, it was enormously comforting, when we finally arrived in New Zealand, that our choice of country was pleasingly snake-free. It was also, as far as we were aware, quite satisfyingly free of the spiders that terrorise Australia, the funnel-webs and black widows and countless other death-on-eight-legs nasties.

There is, though, one spider that calls New Zealand home but that you’d rather it didn’t call your house home. The white-tailed spider, so called because the arse-end of its tapering black abdomen looks like someone’s dipped it white paint, is capable of inflicting a rather ugly, although not deadly, bite. I had the great good fortune of discovering how ugly last month.

One Wednesday morning, I noticed a tiny bump on my right index finger, just below the outermost knuckle; I wrote it off as a minor insect bite. It itched, slightly; I rubbed and scratched it, slightly. As the day went by, it itched a little more, until, that evening, I was aware that it was looking, and feeling, rather inflamed. The next morning, I rolled over in bed and happened to bump it against Deb’s elbow. It hurt. I turned on the light, and took a close look. What had been a small bump the night before was now a swollen black-and-purple eruption on my finger. I called the doctor’s surgery, and spoke to the out-of-hours nurse, who said that it sounded like a white-tailed spider bite, and that it was clearly showing signs of infection. Wait until the surgery opens, she said, then call and make an appointment. There was, definitely, a note of urgency in her voice.

So when eight o’clock arrived, I called in and made an appointment for eleven. By the time the doctor saw me, the red streaks of infection were visible past my wrist, and my hand was aching quite unpleasantly. The blister, or boil, or whatever it was, was most painful. The doctor put me on a hefty dose of oral antibiotics (he toyed, he said, with the possibility of intravenous drugs, but in the end I was glad that he’d not sent me to hospital to get dosed up), and then lanced the boil and gently squoze out the oozing nastiness.

My infected finger, after three days

That evening, as I ate dinner, Deb saw something on my arm and asked me to show her. I rolled up my sleeve past my elbow, and we were both a little concerned to see that the infection had visibly tracked up my forearm past the elbow; while I didn’t have a fever, the skin under the infection tracks was quite warm. I called my friend Dean — he’s an ophthalmologist by trade, so while this wasn’t entirely his speciality, he knows a thing or two about how bodies work — to ask for a little reassurance and peace of mind. He told me that it was likely just a matter of time before the antibiotics kicked in, and so I relaxed. I went to bed quite early, having spent much of the afternoon lying on the sofa, feeling quite exhausted.

In the morning, the infection tracks had disappeared, but I still felt quite weary, and called in sick to work for a second day, not something I make a habit of doing. I went back to the doctor’s, as I had been instructed, and was told that the infection was clearly fading, but that it would take a while to go away completely. I religiously finished off the medicine, and changed the dressing on what was now a nasty, wide, blistery wound on my finger that continued to weep yellow pus. Deb helped me clean it – her idea of colloidal silver definitely gets some credit for finally making the oozing go away.

I went back to school on Monday, but was still tired, very tired. A week later, I went to the school nurse to get the dressing changed, and was quite surprised by what she told me. White-tails, she said, aren’t terribly common, but when they bite, they deliver quite a hit. She wasn’t at all surprised to hear that I was still, a week and a half on, feeling exhausted — the venom, she told me, can take weeks to work its way out of the body. She said I had done the right thing in taking myself to the doctor — “You could have lost your hand,” she said, and while this sounds a little excessive, clearly the little buggers can do a decent bit of damage.

About two weeks after the bite

I’ve tried to find out more about just what these things are capable of, but there doesn’t seem to be a massive amount of information to support the nurse’s contention that I could have lost a hand. Yes, they clearly can inject a lingering venom that can knock you off your feet for quite a while, but most of what I’ve been able to turn up in the medical literature talks about arachnogenic necrosis, the rotting of flesh due to spider bites, the consensus being that there’s no evidence of necrosis due to white-tail bites. But don’t tell a Kiwi this. New Zealanders know — they don’t believe; they know — that a bite from a white-tailed spider is A Bad Thing. Tell someone here that you’ve been bitten by a mosquito, or a flea, or stung by a wasp, and you’ll get many — possibly dozens — of seconds of sympathy; then you’ll be told to man up and get on with it. But get bitten by a white-tailed spider and you’re at death’s door. Apparently.

So now, well over a month later, I feel fine. The fatigue lasted another week, as did the worst excesses of the wound, but my finger is now almost perfectly normal; only a region of discolouration gives any indication that I was, by all accounts, facing arachnogenic doom. Good job we didn’t move to Australia.

I didn’t choose Auckland. It chose me.

Three years ago, Debbie and I were in Florida, making plans for the move to New Zealand that we’d decided we wanted to make but weren’t quite sure yet would actually be happening. One Saturday morning, Daughter at her grandparents’ for the night, Deb and I sat outside Panera Bread having our breakfast of bagels, cream cheese and tolerable coffee. As we sat there, on the edge of a strip-mall car park with a view of Countryside Mall across the six lanes of County Route 580, we decided that Christchurch was a sweet-sounding place. The name echoed Oxford and the England I was missing; the photographs I’d found on the Web gave a clear image of a happening town.

I applied for jobs pretty much indiscriminately; one way or another, we were going to get into New Zealand. The offer I finally received came from Warkworth, north of Auckland. So that was it — we were moving to Warkworth. And so, in April of 2009, I came here, followed a couple of months later by The Girls. That was the extent to which we had formed a preference for Auckland; that was the degree to which Auckland was our first choice.

Otago University, Dunedin

Indeed, before we moved, I had come to NZ on a recce about six months earlier, and visited Auckland, Dunedin and Wellington. Dunedin was an intriguing possibility, a university town — never a bad thing — but, ultimately, not an enormous amount going on if you’re not a student. And having grown up in Salford, I am done with drizzle, which ultimately ruled out Dunedin. Auckland struck me, on that trip, as being a touch anonymous, a little on the big-and-generic side, but I still saw its charms — in the day I spend exploring the city, I had breakfast in Parnell, lunch in Devonport, a beer up the Sky Tower, coffees in numerous bits in between, and sensed that there was something underneath the surface that could be worth exploring further. Wellington pleased me on that first visit, but, as I’ve written recently, I don’t know that it would have been right for us.

So we fetched up in Warkworth — not, then, part of the City of Auckland, but, even though it was a good three-quarters of an hour north of the city, part of the Auckland Region. It’s a thoroughly lovely town, very scenic and touristy, and while being technically in Auckland, it was clearly not of Auckland. Indeed, once you pass Albany on the Northern Motorway, the city ends quite abruptly, and the only drivers who see any signs of civilization in the half-hour between there and Warkworth are the ones who nip down through Silverdale and Orewa and Waiwera to avoid the $2 toll through the Johnsons Hill tunnels south of Puhoi.

This is the Auckland that I hadn’t known about before I arrived, the Auckland that isn’t the harbour and Queen St and the suburbs. This is the Auckland we now enjoy in Pukekohe, like Warkworth once part of the Auckland region but now, since the restructuring of Auckland, Manukau, North Shore and all the districts around those three cities into the new SuperCity of Auckland, actually part of Auckland. Pukekohe is a town, a self-contained country town of around 23,000 souls, distinct from the sprawl of South Auckland, that vaguely and never officially defined expanse of Auckland south of the city centre and its surrounding upmarket suburbs. This is Auckland, too. This is a town with character and substance, a town we’re proud to call home now. It’s not The City — there’s a good dozen kilometers between Pukekohe and Drury, south of Papakura, where South Auckland ends.

Waitemata Harbour and Rangitoto Island from the SkyTower

But even Auckland proper, the city, isn’t a city as, say, an American would know one. It’s the biggest city in the country, but that isn’t really the most stellar of achievements. This is a small country — there’s barely four and a half million of us here. To be fair, nearly one in three of those Kiwis is in Auckland, but that still only makes a population of less than one and a half million. By way of perspective, this is about a third of the population of Sydney, and smaller than cities such as Tampa or Pittsburgh, Melbourne or Manchester — cities all, but none quite in the “Big City” league.

I bring the “Big City” reference up for the same reason that I felt prompted to write this post (and hence its title): I’ve been reading a lot lately from Americans who don’t want to move to Auckland — or indeed anywhere in the North Island — when they emigrate to New Zealand, because they don’t want to live in “The Big City.” If you think Auckland is “The Big City,” then you’ve never been to Auckland, but too many NZ-facing Americans dismiss the place out of hand, imagining, presumably, the kind of urban splodge that they’ve seen in, say, south-west California or the north-east from Boston to Baltimore. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The SkyTower, Auckland

Auckland’s downtown, its city centre, the CBD, is focussed on Queen Street and the Waitemata Harbour waterfront. It’s as Big City as you’ll find in New Zealand, which is to say, it’s not a terribly big city at all. The CBD, a tightly-contained shopping and dining area, sits in a basin surrounded on three sides by, working clockwise from the east, Parnell, Karangahape Road (known, to the gratitude of typists and spell-checkers across the land, as K Road), and Ponsonby, with the harbour to the north. And it’s a working harbour (at least when the harbourmen aren’t on strike); it’s the largest, busiest shipping port in New Zealand, and while it’s a beating economic heart for the city, a part of me wishes that the seafront real estate of Bledisloe and Captain Cook Wharves could be repurposed into something less unlovely than towers of shipping containers.

Unlike American cities, in particular modern American cities like, say, Orlando, built as they are almost entirely around cars, Auckland is very much a city for people. It is, I suppose, a walkable city, but what the guidebooks don’t point out  — I learned this the hard way on my very first visit to the city, following the Lonely Planet walking tour of Auckland — is that, south of the Civic Centre, all the way to K Road, Queen Street is vertiginously steep; legend has it that, before tackling Everest, Sir Ed practised here. Parnell Rise is similarly precipitous. Walkable, then, but not for the faint of heart. But all this serves to remind that Auckland started out life not as a big city, as American cities appear to have done, but as a collection of smaller villages — Newmarket, Grey Lynn, St Heliers, Point Chevalier — that eventually blended into one but which each maintained a distinct character and centre. Contrast this with, say, Tampa, a business district surrounded by sprawling suburbs, and no identifiable soul or heart.

Devonport, Auckland

Many of these suburbs are lovely — Devonport, on the North Shore and facing the CBD waterfront across the harbour is one of my favourite areas of Auckland, and the neighbourhoods of Mission Bay and Kohimarama, out east down Tamaki Drive, are quite charming. For a little bit of Bohemian wilderness, a little further out of town is Titirangi, in the Waitakeres.

Outside the urban extent, you’re into soft, green countryside that my Irish cousin Eamonn, on visiting for the Rugby world cup last year, told me reminded him of Ireland; other parts, depending where I find myself, put me in mind of central England or even, occasionally, the Japanese countryside (geographically, if not culturally, Japan and New Zealand could almost be twins). It’s very easy to leave the concrete and find yourself in farmland, sheep and cattle pastures, fields and hills — and still be able to see the Sky Tower.

Vulcan Lane, in Auckland's CBD

There is, of course, sprawl, as there would be in any city of size; eastern suburbs of Auckland, around Botany, are rapidly becoming indistinguishable from the Pinellas County exurbs we fled when we left Florida, with endless subdivisions branching off a four- or six-lane highway with a shopping mall at the end, for example. West Auckland has a reputation for being the Essex or the New Jersey of Auckland, while South Auckland is one of the most economically depressed parts of the country.

May will see the end of our second year in Pukekohe, and we have no plans to move. We’ve spent time in Hamilton and Taupo, Rotorua and Tauranga, we’ve visited Wellington and Napier. They’re all fine, fine cities. But Auckland gives us what we want — we have a wonderful, quiet, happy small-town life in Pukekohe, but we know that, if we need it, a city that’s big, but not Big, is less than half an hour up the remarkably uncreatively-named Southern Motorway.

The dock at Devonport at sunset

In hindsight, I am very, very pleased that we found ourselves close to Auckland. Christchurch remains a city I’d like to visit, but the sympathy I feel for those whose lives have been torn apart by the endless waves of earthquakes that won’t let Cantabrians even catch their breaths is matched only by the relief that we didn’t move there two years before those earthquakes began their destruction. Auckland is my home. Don’t dismiss it out of hand.

There was a time when I thought I could get a pretty good coffee at Starbucks. There was a time, also, when I had never been to New Zealand. By no coincidence whatsoever, those two things ceased to be true of me at about the same time.

I should have realized, almost as soon as I arrived in New Zealand for the first time, that coffee would figure reasonably prominently in the trip. Air NZ’s overnight flight from Los Angeles arrives in Auckland at an hour I generally speaking prefer to pretend doesn’t even exist — certainly, in my younger days, I would typically see 5am as the end of the evening, not the beginning of the morning. But when you step off a Boeing into a country you’re planning to explore with a view to emigrating, then the day is most definitely beginning, not ending.

And so, ink dry on entry permit in passport, you make your way down from the immigration gate to the baggage claim area. And you wait. New Zealand’s border guards are no more efficient than any other country’s that I can think of (they’re certainly less officious than the American gatekeepers at Niagara Falls, who make their disdain for anyone who’s actually left the country to go to that frozen socialist wasteland to the north quite apparent); rather, fetching five hundred people’s suitcases off a 747 takes a while. The wait, of course, is tiresome. You stand, along with all the people you’ve spent the last thirteen hours breathing recycled air with, waiting for a sign that your luggage is about to emerge. And you wait. And wait a little longer. The conveyor belt starts to move, and people stand up just a little straighter. The knot of impatient travelers clumped round the chute onto which the baggage handlers will dump bags gets a little thicker. Then out comes the small, tartan holdall.

This is an unfailing truth of airports. I’ve traveled through airports on four different continents, in a dozen countries, and it’s always, always the same — a small, tartan holdall, first down the chute, loops round and round the luggage carousel, round and round, never claimed, never picked up. It’s always there. I don’t know if it’s the same small, tartan holdall following me, or if the airports of Hong Kong, and Manila, and Pittsburgh, and Moscow, all of them, have their own small, tartan holdalls, but it’s there regardless, always there, always the first out, never claimed.

Then the wait continues, another five minutes of noises, of grunts and bangs and shouting, and occasionally a flashing yellow light. And finally actual luggage starts to appear. Mine is never first. I’ve never been entirely sure why not, but it never, ever is. There is no good reason why it shouldn’t be, is there? Everyone’s luggage gets loaded onto the plane — everyone’s luggage has to be unloaded, and somebody’s has to be first. I’ve flown first class, third class, every damned class in between, but my bags are never first.

Because my bags are never first, I invariably have a long wait to collect my bags. And, given that I rarely sleep well on planes — something, I suspect, to do with being 6’3″ tall in a seat better suited to someone 3’6″ for half a day — I’m not always in the most attractive, or even recognizably human, of moods. The immigration experience at Auckland airport, to be entirely fair, doesn’t always offer the most uplifting experience a weary passenger could hope for after a trans-Pacific; the border guards, despite being, as we’ve established, less obnoxious than many of their American counterparts, are often every last bit as grumpy as they are entirely and reasonably entitled to be for having to be at work at such an unfeasible hour.

And so, in a nutshell, albeit a rather long and unfocussed nutshell, is the frame of mind in which I downed the stairs and into the baggage hall. The room itself is a bit dark, a bit dull, more than a bit utilitarian, but, on the left just as you enter, is a small kiosk that makes things, well, all right. It gives out coffee.

It doesn’t sell coffee. It doesn’t give out great coffee. I believe it offers tea, but this is unimportant. What matters is that it gives out coffee. This, a shagged-out traveller’s enduring first impression of New Zealand, is one of life’s most joyfully unexpected, small but appreciated, wonders. It shows that New Zealand is a country that understands the most basic, the most fundamental, of human needs, and is willing to meet them when they are most crucial.

And, more importantly, it lets a new arrival know that, alongside the great food and astonishing wines, New Zealand offers some of the finest coffee a coffee-drinker could hope for.

On that first visit, my eyes were opened. I grew up in, largely, a tea-drinking household. Coffee was always available, but in the form of granules — not beans, not ground, but little bits that (I made the mistake of tasting one, once) were little more than concentrated little balls of brown and bitter. I eventually graduated to freeze-dried, kidding myself that this was a little bit more like it. And it was — a little bit. But not much — it still, in hindsight, wasn’t real coffee. It was still reconstituted, still imitation. At the age of 19, I went to Rome, where I tried real coffee for the very first time, but I wasn’t ready for it. My palate was simply immature. Two years later, when I found myself in Jerusalem, drinking coffee so thick it was treacly, so strong it could jump-start a Sherman tank, I started to realise that this was more properly what I should be seeking out.

And so I moved to Japan — a great career move, no doubt, and a wonderful adventure that was to last ten years, but in terms of coffee, not the best move possible. As with anything else, the Japanese value form over content, and so while coffee becomes a lavish ritual of hand-grinding the beans, and slowly pouring boiling water over the ground coffee in a filter atop the cup, what I was drinking, I realised, was the appearance of coffee.

When Starbucks finally appeared in Shinjuku in, I believe, about 1997, I thought that I might finally start drinking coffee, real coffee. I had no idea what to order when I first visited the branch on the concourse opposite the south exit of Shinjuku Station, over the tracks from Takashimaya and Kinokuniya and Tokyu Hands, and so I asked the young lady what might be good. I found myself drinking a mocha, and, still an immature coffee drinker, rather enjoying it.

This, then, became my Starbucks order of choice, and I drank it until Debbie convinced me to try a latte — all the coffee flavour, none of the chocolatey syrupiness. After a couple of attempts, I was convinced. As Starbucks branches spread across Tokyo, and then up to Omiya, the commuter-belt suburb I then called home, I became a regular latte drinker. Starbucks, I realised, was the McDonald’s of coffee — while it was never brilliant, it was also never dreadful. And it was always, always the same, consistently and reliably safe — I tried lattes on trips to Oregon, to Beijing, to Manchester, and not only was the coffee identical, but even the layout and the decor of the stores were carbon copies. Consistency became predictability.

A move to Florida in 2001 did little to improve matters. While Deb and I were given a French press and a burr grinder as a wedding present, and so my home-made coffee was unimpeachable, coffee bought out was still likely to be from Starbucks, there being precious little in the way of alternatives in Pinellas County. The Tech Café, in Safety Harbor, did make a very pleasant latte, and this would be my escape of choice when Daughter was doing her ballet practice at the dance school a couple of blocks up the road. But when Starbucks opened up in the bizarrely named Shoppes [sic] at Harbour [sic] Pointe [sic] development at the end of Main Street, the Tech Café changed hands, then closed up shop, and the espresso juggernaut crushed another that had been foolish enough to stand in its path.

But the Tech Café, and Dan, its highly eccentric but utterly charming, owner, had taught me that there was so much more to coffee than Starbucks. While the free coffee at Auckland airport really wasn’t, in pure coffee terms, that spectacular, it did point up to me the importance of coffee in New Zealand.

And so, on my very first visit to the country, I found myself, at breakfast time, walking along Parnell Road in Auckland and looking for a cup of coffee. I had heard that New Zealand was capable of good coffee, and I was keen to carry out a little field research. Lonely Planet wasn’t a massive amount of help as I tried to pick out a coffee shop to sit and relax — certainly the Lonely Planet map of Auckland gave no idea how understated the word “Rise” was in the street name “Parnell Rise;” “Parnell Sheer Bloody Cliff” might well have been a touch more appropriate — with a cup. The clincher, in the end, was a “Free Wifi” sticker on the window of Esquire’s Coffee.

My first flat white in New Zealand

I sat, outside, in the warm early-summer sun, looking at the silver fern drawn into the fawn-and-white-coloured foam on top of my flat white. Please, please don’t ask me the difference between a flat white and a latte — other than the fact that “flat white” sounds so much more down-to-earth than “latte,” they’re essentially the same drink. Starbucks in New Zealand and Australia (yes, I’ve been in both — their city mugs do make decent souvenirs) sell both flat whites and lattes, but I have a strong suspicion that they’re exactly the same thing.

I took a sip, and immediately knew that I liked New Zealand very, very much. I also knew that I would never really enjoy Starbucks’ coffee ever again. This flat white was a revaluation — smooth where Starbucks’ was harsh, rich where the latte was bitter. It was the first of several flat whites I had that day. I used jet lag as an excuse; I told myself that I’d need the caffeine to help me get up Queen Street (that one’s not as unreasonable as it might sound — the top end, as you approach Karangahape Road, is damn near vertical). But all I was doing was justifying my fix. I wanted flat whites. Lots of them.

I was back in the US for nearly six months, and I didn’t get a good latte once. I tried Starbucks, but it wasn’t the same any more. The milk wasn’t velvety and soft, but viciously scalding. The espresso wasn’t rich and creamy, but burnt and bitter and harsh. It was coffee, but barely.

And so , in 2009, I moved to New Zealand to live, and, shortly after arriving, I found myself in the Duck’s Crossing café in Warkworth, drinking an impossibly perfect flat white — smooth, rich, right. The sign outside the café said “Gravity Coffee;” when I saw bags of the beans — whole beans, no less — on sale. 200g would cost me about seven dollars — I was sold.

The coffee I plunged in my press pot was every bit as rich and delicious as the espresso I’d tasted at the café. I was happy.

But could it last? The Duck’s Crossing, for all its wonders, was but one café, one source. On the one hand, it was entirely possible that this was the standard, the benchmark, for coffee across New Zealand. On the other, it could just as easily be the only place in the country that knew what it was doing behind a Gaggia.

Research was in order, and, one by one, I tried each and every café in town. They were all, each one of them, good. They were very good. I tried further afield, in Matakana, in Orewa. Coffee was consistently, reliably, wonderful.

It seems to make no difference here whether you try a smart-looking restaurant like the Cornwall Park Restaurant, at the foot of One Tree Hill, where I enjoyed a creamily excellent flat white a week or so ago, or a coffee shop attached to a tourist trap — in fact, ask Debbie or Daughter where the very best coffee of all is to be found, and they’ll both tell you that the café of the Bird Gardens in Katikati, between Waihi and Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty, made the finest flat white any of us has ever tasted. And who am I to argue? The coffee I have found in every café I have visited, North Island and South, has been outstanding, consistently and reliably. This, it would appear, is a country that just gets coffee.

There has been speculation about why this might be. New Zealand — and, giving credit where it is due, Australia — has been producing excellent coffee for much longer than the “Third Wave of Coffee” has been spreading south and east from Seattle; an oft-cited reason is that waves of post-war Italian immigrants brought their espresso mojo with them. Whatever the reason, coffee is one of New Zealand’s few sensibly-priced pleasures. I’ve whined about the high cost of living in New Zealand elsepost, so I won’t rewarm those coals; instead, I’ll point out that while, compared to, American prices, beer, or beef, tends to be surprisingly expensive, a good — an excellent, an outstanding — flat white will cost you as much in Kiwi dollars as a Starbucks over-roast in scalded milk will in American dollars. And I know where the better bargain is to be found.

I went back to Esquire’s in Parnell a couple of months after I arrived; I wanted to use their free Wifi to Skype-call Debbie, who was still back in Florida packing up our old life. It might have been better than Starbucks; I know realise that this is not an achievement. But, compared to, well, pretty much any high-street café, and certainly compared to La Red Berry, my favourite coffee in Pukokohe, well, it is sorely lacking.

I find Wellington to be the most confounding city in New Zealand. Last month I made my fourth visit to the capital, and almost wished, by the end of the day, that I hadn’t.

My very first visit to New Zealand, in 2008, ended with a trip to Wellington, to an interview for a job I didn’t get in Naenae, in Lower Hutt, north of the city. I flew in the day before the interview, and spent a highly enjoyable afternoon exploring Wellington. On this trip I first stayed at the Carillon Motor Inn, the eccentric joys of which I wrote about elsepost, and I found myself most enamoured of the city, if not of the Carillon.

Wellington on a good day

This had much to do with the city. On my first visit, the sunshine bathed Wellington. From the Botanical Gardens, at the top of the climb of the cable car, the view of the city, and of the port it hugs, was splendid. Walking Lambton Quay was a joy. The wonderful old buildings of the parliamentary quarter were magnificent. It was a good day.

But then I went back with The Girls, a year or so later, in early spring, and had to wonder if I were in the same city. Where once I had seen beauty framed by blue skies, instead I saw drear and dullness weighed down by the granite and slate of grey, heavy clouds that blanketed the sky and watered us steadily. The view from the hill, well, wasn’t — there might, for all we knew, have been a city in front of us, but we had now way of knowing. Nowhere, I’ll grant you, no city will look its best under such circumstances, but Wellington wears its winters heavy.

A third trip, again alone, again, by coincidence, for a job interview in Naenae (didn’t get that job either), that December again reminded me of the charms of the city. And so, when I heard that drinks were being laid on for the Nine To Noon team at Radio New Zealand’s headquarters on The Terrace, I booked my flight. And, as the day grew nearer, the clouds grew heavier.

I had, between my broadcast bit in the morning and the drink-up in the evening, about five hours to kill, and the weather was truly grim — drizzle if I was lucky, full-on rain if I wasn’t. After wrapping up my on-air bit, I walked back down The Terrace as far as Parliament; I was just in time for the next guided tour. I had taken the tour on my first visit, so I knew it was worth an hour of my time, and, after all, it was under cover — one major plus-point before the guide even said “hello.”

The Beehive, Wellington, in the sunshine

The tour was, of course, excellent. It started in the Beehive (of which more anon), and led through the Parliamentary library and into the House itself; Parliament not being session (this was just a few days after a rather dispiriting general election, and no new government had been officially formed), we were allowed to visit the floor of the House, which surprised, but also rather pleased, me. Photographs weren’t allowed; I did point out that even the Australians allow photos in the the two chambers of their Parliament during tours — telling a Kiwi that the Aussies do it better is almost guaranteed, usually, to get a result — but we had all had to surrender cameras and cellphones before the tour began.

An hour killed, I found myself outside Parliament in the steadily-building rain. I crossed the road to a cafe, and bought a cup of coffee, thinking that if I drank it slowly I could make another hour go away. As I sat at a table waiting for my flat white, I noticed a familiar-looking man walk through the door. After a couple of seconds, I recognized him as Winston Peters, leader of New Zealand First, one of the largest of the minority parties in New Zealand’s parliament. Not being overly impressed with the man, I didn’t bother to go and say hello. But I was surprised at how relaxed senior politicians are about going out in public in New Zealand. This has to be a good thing. Unlike New Zealand First.

But the coffee only lasted so long, and so, the rain having eased off considerably, I started to walk down toward Cuba Street, the funky, edgy end of town. I don’t think I’ve seen any town, any city — this includes, by the way, New York, London, Melbourne, San Francisco, Tokyo, even Auckland — anywhere that has the cafe density of Cuba Street. Every third business, it seems, has an espresso machine hissing away, and if it’s not a cafe, it’s a restaurant, or a grocer’s. Food heaven, indeed. So I stopped for lunch at a Turkish cafe that made the best doner kebab I’ve tasted in as long as I can remember — hot, spicy, oily, lamby, delicious — and then carried on toward Te Papa.

Te Papa Tongarewa calls itself “The Museum of New Zealand,” but that doesn’t quite do the place justice. It’s a huge, expansive collection of everything it means to be Kiwi — whether that means Maori, or Pakeha, or Pasifika, or any other flavor of New Zealander. Everything is represented here, from kaupapa Maori to contemporary Pakeha pop culture. The geology of New Zealand is depicted in charts, diagrammes and a model house that replicates the massive earthquake that shook Edgecombe in 1987. I spent maybe three hours wandering around the place, fascinated. I could easily have spent longer.

Possibly the most amazing thing about Te Papa is the fact that it’s free. It’s a publicly-owned museum, and so the public have free access. This is how it should be. A museum of this calibre could, should it choose, charge a large sum for admission and still hope to see plenty of visitors, but Te Papa, belonging to the people, does not charge the people admission. This is a wonderful place.

The Beehive, Wellington, in the rain

Less wonderful is the Beehive. Designed in the 1960s, and built in the 1970s, before the world realized precisely how ugly concrete really can be, the Beehive squats like a stumpy dalek, all harsh angles and freaky fins and vast sharp edges of ugly, next to the classical buildings of New Zealand’s Parliament. While it is, undeniably, an iconic symbol of Wellington, it is also testimony to the fact that construction, by and large, really should have been put on hold for much of the period between about 1960 and 1980. It’s not simply that the Beehive is ugly. It almost, but not quite, transcends ugliness, but, sadly, instead of crossing over from “ugly” to “so ugly it’s actually interesting,” it simply remains firmly in “ugly” territory. Not only is it ugly; it’s also horribly out of place. Next to the 1922 Parliament House, a lovely neoclassical construction, and the gothic-revival Library, the grey and dull brown Beehive is simply wrong.

And so the score in Wellington remains a tie — 2-2 between me and the weather. I still have a fondness for the place, and I still want to spend a little more time exploring the city, and the area around it, but more and more I find myself thinking it’s definitely a great place to visit, and a wonderful place to come home from.

I was in Wellington last week for Christmas drinks at Radio New Zealand with the Nine To Noon contributors, and I found myself drawn into a conversation with Kathryn Ryan and a couple of business pundits who were knocking around ideas about why businesses in New Zealand never seem to grow particularly huge. It’s a question I’ve heard asked before — why is it that the entrepreneurial spirit, or at least serious entrepreneurial success at very high levels, seems somewhat lacking round these parts?

I offered a little bit of insight, that the typical Kiwi is, generally speaking, not terribly driven to keep flogging himself once he’s made enough to buy the bach and keep him in Speight’s for life, an attitude I do rather find myself respecting.But it’s not, I’ll admit, the most profound insight ever offered in that context (nor the most original — I wrote about it, briefly, myself a few months ago), and I quietly reminded myself that, to be utterly fair, I was slightly out of my depth in that particular conversation.

(Not that I feel badly about it, though. My fortnightly bit on the show is commentary on new technology, not business; had the conversation wandered off in that direction, I’m fairly confident I would have held my own quite admirably. But the chances of the evening getting sufficiently geeky were fairly slim, and so we stuck to the business of business.)

Had that conversation taken place this week, however, I would have had a rather more penetrating insight to offer. I bought a new iPhone 4S last month, and, for the most part, it’s become a rather invaluable addition to my modern lifestyle. But the battery life, as has been well documented elsewhere, has been quite disappointing, and so on Monday I took my shiny new toy to to Vodafone shop in Pukekohe to get it replaced.

The lass behind the counter dismissed me with some hand-waving about iPhones always having poor battery life — nonsense, of course, as I explained to her. But she was having none of it, so I asked to speak to the manager, a young woman who was quite splendidly arrogant and more than a little condescending. Much was wrong about the conversation I had with her, starting with but by no means limited to her snotty, snarky tone, but what chafed more than anything was the requirement, if they were to lend me a replacement phone while my iPhone went off to be looked at (“Hmmm…looks like the battery’s buggered!”), to pay a $200 bond.

Shocked, stunned, speechless, I left the shop and went home to contact the company. Of course, if you’re going to contact the company, then you go straight to the top, as I’ve done many times in the past, and, to their eternal credit, Vodafone make this reasonably easy. A little bit of poking around on their website leads to a page with photos of all their top executives, including their CEO, Russell Stanners. But the photos aren’t what’s impressive. What makes the company remarkable is the fact that each of the photos has an email link below it, and so I found Stanners’ email address more easily than I find addresses of heads of most companies.

I emailed him, explaining that I was most dischuffed with the treatment I’d received, and that I would like a new phone. That evening, I received a reply from Russell Stanners himself (or, at the very least, from someone who writes his emails for him) assuring me that this would be dealt with forthwith, if not sooner, by Vodafone’s retail manager. And, today, I picked up a new iPhone – from, I’m delighted to say, the snotty manageress who refused to replace my phone on Monday.

So what’s the moral of the story? It’s simple, really. Kiwis work best when they’re working together as individuals. The young lass I spoke to first at the Vodafone shop had no connection to the business; she just worked there. She didn’t care about me, or about the company, and that’s the danger of a big, corporate structure in a country like New Zealand that is built, very strongly, and much more so than other societies, on connections between individuals. In the US, by contrast, small businesses are such an endangered breed that the idea of simply being a small cog in a huge corporate engine is a fundamental expectation of most workers. The Japanese zaibatsu model even more solidly entrenches this expectation, with workers all but owned by their corporate families.

In New Zealand, however, small businesses remain sufficiently widespread that the descent in corporate anonymity has yet to happen. A stroll down Pukekohe’s high street shows both that this remains true and that it might not much longer — despite the majority of businesses being local, single-location concerns, the national chains increasingly are gaining inroads. The local cafés, for example, still well outnumber the chain coffee shops — as well they should; the food, and especially the coffee, and, for Debbie, the tea, at La Red Berry, for example, will ever outshine anything on offer at, say, Columbus Coffee or McDonald’s — and I still get my haircuts at Lynette’s, and will do as long as the chain hairdressers stay away and allow her to stay in business. The new cinema in Pukekohe is an independent, but the newly-opened branches of Cotton On and Pagani, and the vast and likely overwhelming Farmer’s currently under construction and due to open next year, will likely ensure that local clothing shops will forever be excluded from King Street.

And so the small-business model remains the one that matters most in New Zealand. As long as I was dealing with a drone, a minimum-wage placeholder who simply handles cash for a company she has no stake in and no relationship with, my experience was deeply unsatisfactory. But as soon as I started talking to someone who actually cares — the shopkeeper, if you want to pursue the analogy (and why not? It works.), the business owner, the bloke whose name is on the website, if not on the shop window any longer — problems were resolved, the right thing was done, and I walked away a happy customer.

This is why businesses in New Zealand don’t take over the world. Kiwis don’t want corporate — Kiwis want personal. New Zealand might look like a country, but it’s not. It’s a town, and a bloody small one at that. It’s not the country to come to if you plan to get rich — bugger off to Australia if that’s your goal — but if you want people, and connections with people, it’s without equal.

With being a serial immigrant comes a little bit of perspective regarding various countries’ immigration policies, and of the people whose job it is to handle immigrants, foreigners and aliens.

New Zealand visitor's permi

After moving to Japan in 1991, it didn’t take long for me to realise that one of the best places to see institutional racism on display was at the local nyukoku-kanrikyoku, the immigration office, where officious little men with even more than the typical Japanese distrust of foreigners would abuse elderly Asian immigrants who spoke little Japanese but could understand from tone of voice that they were being insulted even before their children could translate for them. I went for my annual visa renewals, and for my re-entry permits, armed with a good book and a thick skin, knowing that I’d usually have to wait up to a couple of hours before my couple of minutes of condescension.

I assumed, fool that, clearly, I was, that when I moved to the United States in 2001, things would be more palatable. An hour-long wait in the August sun outside Tampa’s immigration office soon disabused me of that notion; once my turn had come for an X-raying and a search of my belongings, I was allowed inside to sit and wait for nearly three hours before a guard came round checking that everyone had the correct forms of payment. I showed him my cheque; he told me that only money orders were acceptable. I showed him the bit on the INS paperwork that said how cheques should be made payable to the INS; he told me that “we don’t take cheques at this office.” So off I went to get a money order, and came back the next day for another hour’s queuing up outside before I could show that I was safe enough to be granted admission, and for another few hours’ sitting on a hard, low-backed plastic chair. I was told it would take 18 months to process my green-card application; I finally became a legal, but deeply unimpressed, permanent resident in 2005.

So when I started working on my application to bring myself and The Girls to New Zealand, I was fully braced for another draining of my will to live, another process of humiliation and insult. And I was, wonder of wonders, quite wonderfully wrong. Instead of the Japanese attitude of “Fine, you can stay, but don’t think we actually like having you here,” or the American “What makes you think you deserve to live here?” it was quite incredibly refreshing to have a very clear, very real sense that New Zealand actually wanted us to come, actually wanted us to move to NZ and become part of the country, the community.

New Zealand residence visa

Our application for residency was handled by a real person, Maxine, who was quite willing to work with me, quite prepared to answer questions when I had them, actually to speak to me and treat me decently — not too much, one wouldn’t have thought, to expect from a fellow human being, but apparently nobody every thought to mention this idea to Maxine’s counterparts in Takasaki or Tampa. My application for American residence — and this, mark you, while I was already living in the US, and married to an American — took nearly five years. My application for New Zealand residence took less than five months. In fact, it took less than three. There was, from the beginning, a very real sense that this country actually wanted us, and was delighted that we wanted to come.

So when Maxine wrote to me in June of 2009 to tell me that we had been approved, we were, not entirely unreasonably, quite thrilled. We had full, permanent residence privileges in our new country, and we were pleased. From the first, we have had all the privileges that come with residence, including access to health care and the right to vote, on the same basis as native Kiwis. There was, however, one very small but important detail that we had to bear in mind. Our residence visas were single-entry visas; in order to leave New Zealand, and then return without our resident status lapsing, we needed returning resident visas. The good people at Immigration New Zealand kindly supplied two-year RRVs for all three of us with our residence visas, but they were good only for two years, at the end of which we would be renewing them.

It wasn’t going to be a problem, of course. We met the criteria for indefinite RRVs — I had a job, we owned a house — and it was just a question of filling in paperwork and paying an application fee. But which forms to complete? I tried rooting around the Immigration New Zealand website, but to little avail — I was looking for information about returning resident visas, but found details of permanent resident visas. In the end, steeling myself, I took The Girls to the immigration office on Queen Street in Auckland.

Expecting the worst, we entered the office; the experience was quite disorienting. There was carpet on the floor, there were flags and decorations marking the Rugby World Cup (this was back in September) hanging from every available surface, there was light and bright colours. Oddly, there was no queue at the counter. We approached, and the lady behind the counter actually smiled. Very confusing. I explained what we wanted, why were there, and why I hadn’t simply printed off forms from their website. Very kindly, very clearly and without even a glimmer of sarcasm or patronising, she explained that the system had recently been overhauled, with the old distinction between visas, issued outside the country, and permits, issued onshore, done away with. She handed me the correct forms, told us where to go to get photos taken, and sent us on our way.

Forms completed and photos snapped, we went back. The same lady (I was surprised; I was sure that, if her boss had overheard her being nice to a customer, she’d have been summarily fired) checked our papers and told us that we were in the queue to speak to an officer. Here we go, I thought, in the queue — should have brought a sleeping bag and pillow. But we sat — in, it should be said, decently comfortable chairs — for barely fifteen minutes before our names showed up on the computer screen on the wall.

We handed our papers to a young lady, herself, it appeared, an immigrant, who looked them over, asked a couple of cursory questions, took payment from us and then printed out our new permanent resident visas.

That was it. That was all it took. No screaming (by her or by us), no racism, no nasty, snarky comments, no sense that we had a hell of a nerve asking to be admitted to God’s Own Earth. We spent more time talking to her about who she’d drawn in the office sweepstakes for the Rugby than we did dealing with the business of the day.

New Zealand permanent resident vis

So now we’re permanent. We can stay here, and come and go, as we see fit. And in a couple more years we can apply for New Zealand citizenship, a path I fully expect us to go down. We do feel like we belong here. When we were watching the All Blacks dismantling the Japanese defence in the early stages of the Rugby World Cup, having seen England barely manage to pull off a little-deserved win against Argentina, Debbie remarked to our neighbour, David, that she was thinking that she should switch her allegiance to the All Blacks. “Can I be an honorary Kiwi?” she asked. “You live here, don’t you?” replied David. “This is your home, isn’t it? Then you’re as much a Kiwi as I am.”

Moving to New Zealand from any country will involve just a little bit of culture shock; even for poms (remarks I’ve made elsewhere notwithstanding), New Zealand is a new country, with its own ways of doing things. But I didn’t come here directly from the UK; eight years living in the US, a surprisingly buttoned-down country, for all its “land of the free” propaganda, left me finding New Zealand a quite refreshingly relaxed place to be, and nothing sums up that relaxed nature better than three words you’ll often hear here.

“She’ll be right.” Most any potential hurdle or hazard you encounter in NZ life will be met with a smile, a shrug and a “she’ll be right.” Instead of endless rules, regulations, restrictions and prohibitions, here in New Zealand people do seem to be willing — quite happy, even — to let events unfold, comfortable and safe in the knowledge that she’ll be right.

Last summer we built a barbecue in the back garden. We went to the local engineering workshop to order some iron bars. They took our measurements, took our order, but didn’t want our money. “Pay us when you pick it up. She’ll be right.” Debbie, ever the American, was at once amazed and delighted that a business would commit time, materials and effort to a job, even a fifty-dollar job, without payment upfront. But no worries, mate, she’ll be right.

As regular readers will be aware, we’ve recently installed solar panels on the roof of our house. We also, as I shall blog about soon (not today; I have talked at far too great length lately about such matters) installed central heating. The total cost for these two systems was comfortably in the five-figure range, not a sum we had lying around, so we spoke to the National Bank about an increase on our mortgage. We supplied the revised property valuation, the contractors’ estimates, and the application form. Next thing we knew, we had a large sum of money deposited in our account. We’ve had the work done, of course, and we’re very happy with it, but nobody from the bank has ever bothered to check that the home improvements that were meant to provide extra value to the property securing the extra loan were actually done. She’ll be right.

I’ve been branching out a little of late; while physics teaching is still highly enjoyable, I’ve been making now-regular appearances on Radio New Zealand‘s Nine To Noon programme as their technology correspondent. I was having dinner with my predecessor, Nat, who let slip that he would be taking some time off from the show. Encouraged, possibly, by the glass of wine in front of me (and, to be fair, its predecessors that evening), I suggested to Nat that I might make a good replacement. “Send me an email in the morning,” he said, “with links to your blogs. I’ll pass it on.” I duly followed his advice, and a week later the show’s producer called me, asking when I could start. No interview, no audition. Nat had recommended me; that was good enough for them. She’ll be right. I’ve done four slots so far, and they keep asking me back for more, so she clearly will be right.

Many more examples spring to mind. There’s the waterfall in Whangarei, tall enough that falling over would spoil, at the very least, your day, and, more likely, your life, but which has no railings, no barriers, nothing to stop visitors from walking out into the stepping stones in the middle of the Hatea river and peering over the edge. There’s Melvin, the B&B owner in Taumaranui who let us leave without paying (we only had a credit card; he didn’t accept them), knowing we’d be back in a day or two and who trusted that we’d bring cash with us then. And so on, and so on.

It would be easy to dismiss this attitude as a little bit slack, or lazy, or even naive. I have no doubt that there are some who exploit it, either to excuse their own idleness and carelessness or to take advantage of others. But if they exist, I have yet to encounter them. It’s good to remember that, living as we do on these small, remote, isolated and lonely islands, a million miles from anywhere in the middle of the South Pacific, the good people of New Zealand look after each other. They trust each other, and they trust that things will work out right.

So far they have. She’ll be right.

The cost of living is one of the greatest of the surprises that greet newcomers to New Zealand. Food, housing, petrol, books — many are the regular purchases that are almost shockingly expensive compared to back home, especially when “back home” is the United States (and I would like to make abundantly clear at this point that, while I did live in Florida for more years than I’m altogether comfortable discussing, and while both Wife and Daughter call America home, I’m British by birth, northern by the grace of God), and the latest expense we’re attempting to address at our new home in Pukekohe is electricity.
I’ve moaned, whinged and complained about heat

and, more specifically, the lack of it at great enough length that I think I can safely skip the subject for this post. I’ll just point out that when we moved into our old, cold, uninsulated house, we simply assumed that all we’d need to do in order to keep warm would be to fire up the oil heaters. This worked, of course, but was also terrifyingly expensive. Coming, as we had, from the almost obscene abundance of the United States, we reckoned without the crazy price of New Zealand energy.

It’s a good thing, I’ll allow, that New Zealand is a remarkably green energy producer. Around half of NZ’s electricity supply comes from hydroelectric plants —not, I’ll allow, a perfect environmental solution, but a better one than, say, a nuclear power plant — and a decent chunk more comes from geothermal generation around places like Taupo and Rotorua, where the steam clouds by the roads signal the presence of underground energy exploitation, or from the wind farms north of Wellington. But I’m still not happy with the price of the Green Watt.

The typical electrical unit, or kilowatt-hour (KWh) costs about 8¢ in Florida. A kiwi kilowatt-hour will set you back around three times that price. When we realized that, we decided that it was time to start generating our own. And the solution we settled on was solar power.

On Wednesday (after about four weeks of off-again-on-again installation from an electrician who made it quite clear that we were very, very low down his list of priorities, and repeated deadline-slippage from the company managing the install; we’re pleased with the system, but I’m really not sure I’d use that company again, but they weren’t quite bad enough for me to feel the need to name them here), we finally commissioned the system, and today, a typical very-early-spring day in the southern reaches of Auckland, we generated nearly 12 units in the day’s ten and a half hours of usable sunshine, of which we exported five. We fully expect to see this number increase by a decent proportion as the days grow longer and the sun climbs higher in the sky.

The system, of course, wasn’t cheap. But we didn’t pay for it ourselves upfront; instead, we spoke to the nice people at National Bank, who were quite willing to roll the cost, over $20,000, into our mortgage, which makes our new power station quite affordable — in fact, we expect that, over the course of a typical year, we’ll end up saving as much on electricity bills as we’re losing in increased mortgage payments. And that’s without even considering the very real probability that power prices will rise, which will see us saving even more.

As part of the installation process, we found ourselves switching power companies. We had been buying our electricity from Genesis Energy; I’d signed up with them when I started renting a house in Warkworth two years ago on the recommendation of the previous tenant, and inertia kept us with them when we moved to Pukekohe. We had no problems with their service in general; what turned us off them was the fact that they weren’t willing to offer us net metering.

When we generate electricity, we’ll use some or all of it. If we use all of it, all well and good; if we only use some of it, then we have to do something with the surplus. Some people decide to go completely off the grid, and feed their surplus into batteries, but we’re not ready to go that far, and so we sell back what’s left over after we’ve taken what we need to the grid. Genesis Energy weren’t willing to offer us a net-metering agreement, whereby what we sell them is credited to us at the same price they charge us for the power we buy from them. Only one company in New Zealand will, and so we’ve switched to Meridian Energy.

As I speak, the sun is climbing higher in the sky on a lovely, sunny August morning. We’re currently generating a little shy of 2KW, plenty less than we’re using right now with the central heating, the dishwashers, the washing machine and the other heavy-duty appliances quiet. As a result, our system is, in fact, exporting power back to Meridian, and we’re net producers, so far this morning, of electricity.

The setup isn’t perfect, though. Meridian pay us the same price that they charge us, hence “net metering.” What we’d really like to see is a feed-in tariff system along the lines of the arrangements in place in countries from Australia to Germany, whereby exported units are bought at a substantially higher price than retail units are sold by the grid. While I’m not advocating actually moving to Australia — let’s not get carried away, now — I do believe that this is one thing the Australians have got right. If our house were in, say, Melbourne instead of Auckland, we’d likely get about the same amount of sunlight over the year, but while we’d be paying about the same for our imported power, but receiving up to 60¢ for each unit we export, a rate that has been locked in by legislation, I understand, for at least another ten years.

While our current situation could be improved, we’re very happy with what we have right now, and we are hopeful that the New Zealand government will catch up with the rest of the world and start to offer incentives to early-adopter localised power generators. What we do generates no emissions, is safe and clean, and generates electricity a matter of a few feet away from where it’s consumed, massively reducing transmission overheads such as infrastructure development costs, maintenance, inefficiency and the inherent danger of long-distance high-voltage AC transmission. Little by little, we’re replacing our appliances with more efficient ones — our new washer-dryer combo replaces an old dryer that was so antiquated its one-energy-star rating was simply a result of the fact that they don’t give no-star ratings — and monitoring our daily consumption quite aggressively. As soon as this post is finished I’ll be checking the fridge’s overnight usage — Ben Elton would be proud of me — and looking for other ways of paring back our consumption

For anyone who’s interested in learning more about our system from a technical angle, visit Steve’s Tech Blog, where I’ve posted a little about tech specs; you can visit our inverter’s stats page online, too, and see exactly how much energy we’ve generated recently.

More frequent visitors to this site may have noticed that keeping warm has become something of a recurring theme. There would be a quite simple reason for this fact, of course; as has been discussed at quite obsessive length here, for example, or here, winters in New Zealand tend to be long and wet. They’re also fairly, but not absurdly, cold; paradoxically, however, you’ll feel colder inside your house than outside.

Again, the analysis about this can be followed elsepost; what I’d like to talk about today is one of the things we’ve been doing about it. Before I sat down in my living room, newly insulated since we pulled the drywall down over the summer holidays and insulated all the exterior surfaces before replacing the sheetrock with GIB-board, I noted from the thermostat rigged up to our somewhat under-performing heat transfer system that the temperature in here, mid-morning, was 12˚C. Now, don’t get me wrong. If you’re outside, in the direct sunshine (and today is as gloriously sunny a day as has been enjoyed in New Zealand in some time), if you’re moving around, if you’re rugged up in a dozen layers of coats, jackets, sweaters, hoodies and Lord knows what, then 12˚ is an entirely reasonable and perfectly pleasant temperature. But on the sofa I’m not really moving around that much, the room’s southern aspect captures less sun than might be utterly optimal, and I’m only wearing the four layers. So I’m cold.

That’s why i’m in the lounge. Debbie has a tendency to huddle up in the office, but I find that to be too cramped and dungeonly. I prefer the lounge, for the simple reason that it has a fireplace. And that’s what is keeping me warm right now, and it is glorious. The flames are dancing, orange and golden and wonderful, around logs of ti-tree and pine, and the glow is inching the mercury up, slowly but noticeably. With strategic arrangement of newspaper, kindling and logs, I can usually whip up a fire to warm the room to the upper reaches of comfortable without too much trouble, but it hasn’t always been so.

Our pot-bellied stove, getting ready to feed my belly.

When we bought our cottage last year, there was, as I have documented (read: “whinged about”), only one source of heating in the entire house. It was, to be fair, quite interesting — a pot-bellied stove in the dining room. It wasn’t something we would ever have thought to install ourselves, but since it was there, we embraced it, almost literally. It’s a splendidly efficient piece of kit; the iron belly retains heat inside itself so well that combustion can’t help but happen. Yesterday’s Herald, scrunched up, is enough to get a fire started. But, obviously, we needed something to keep the fire going, and I found a convenient source of wood on my way home from work. An odd place to buy firewood, I’ll allow, but a mechanic’s in Drury was selling big sacks of pine offcuts for a tenner or so a time, and I would pick up a batch once or twice a week.

Pine, as we’ve come to learn — it’s amazing what you become an expert on when you live in New Zealand — burns hot, and burns fast. No kindling was needed; just get the sports section flaming, and toss in a few blocks of pine, and you’re in business. Hot, fast heat, but twenty minutes later the stove was emptying and ready to be fueled up again. This, then, while effective, wasn’t a sustainable way to heat the house. We found a supplier of casuarina in Paerata, and ordered a truckload, which was delivered during last winter’s school holidays. Suddenly the newspaper wasn’t enough to catch it alight; it burned well, hot and long, but needed something hotter than paper to start the fire, and so kindling went on the shopping list for every trip to the Pak-n-Save.

Casuarina is a hot-burning wood, we discovered. Coal is also a very, very hot-burning fuel, so hot in fact that we saw the base of our stove glow orange once (just the once, now) when we pushed it a little. But coal is dirty, messy and not that easy to find good sources for, which was a priority, of which more to follow. It did, however, have one major advantage — it was easy to fit in the stove. The pot-belly has a rather small mouth to take fuel, and so I was finding that, every time I went out to the garage to bring in firewood, I had to rifle through the woodpile to find pieces small enough to fit in the stove.

What to do with the rest? Well, we eventually had an open wood burner installed in the lounge, and so larger logs were set aside for the fireplace. But they didn’t want to burn in the fireplace. Well, that’s not entirely true. They burned, but with coaxing. Plenty of kindling was needed, and while the occasional box wasn’t going to break us, we were suddenly chomping through it at an alarming, and increasingly expensive, rate. But then, in October, I lit my last fire of the year, and promptly put the matter out of my mind.

During the summer, I spent a couple of days at a friend’s property with The Girls, felling and chopping up old, dead trees that were ready to be put to good use in my fireplace. I’m not sure what kind of trees they were, but some of the branches were old and dead and quite light, making them very useful as fire-starters. With a few of these flaky, crumbly bits of wood, no kindling was necessary, and the fireplace pumped out warmth like the very depths of Hell. Heaven indeed.

And then the wood ran out. We bought a batch of ti-tree (that’s what’s on the fire as we speak, raising the room to, already, over nineteen degrees) from a friend’s son who wanted to make a little more pocket money. Again, it burns like a demon, but it takes a fair old bit of encouragement to get started. The pot-belly loves it; the fireplace is a little less sure.

We also invested (and remember, folks — the value of investments can go down as well as up) in a batch of hotmix from TradeMe. Hotmix, it would appear, is a mixture of pine, for starting purposes, and assorted hardwood; I have no idea what the wood we got might be. The big problem wasn’t what kind of wood it was, though. Firewood, we’ve come to learn, needs seasoning after being cut; put simply, it needs to dry out, because green, sap-filled wood won’t burn as well. It’s a simple enough process — just leave your chopped wood to stand for six months to a year. But don’t forget that, if you leave anything outside in New Zealand, then, with a certainty that makes even death or taxes look like a bit of a gamble, it’s going to get wet.

And wet it got. Wet wood, if it burns at all, burns most grudgingly. If I bring a batch into the living room and stack it by the fire, then, maybe, after a week it might have dried out enough from the warmth that it will catch fire instead of sucking the heat out of the flames from the actually flammable logs. But it’s no sure thing.

And so we keep on carrying baskets of firewood in from the garage, building fires and tending them. The temperature is now a toasty 21˚C, and life is, as it tends to be in New Zealand, good.