Eating

Drinking hoppy beer and eating hoppy kangaroo – the joys of Sydney.

/ Eric Brown / 5 Comments

When you visit Australia, what’s the one thing you must do? Obviously, you need to eat their national animal, the kangaroo, right?

Australia and New Zealand. They go together like peanut butter and jelly (or jello, as they call it here). Frick and Frack. Shields and Yarnell.

They’re really quite similar, aren’t they? For starters, their flags are practically identical.

Aussie on top, Kiwi on the bottom.

Aussie on top, Kiwi on the bottom.

They both say “g’day” and “no worries.” In both countries a double espresso is a “long black” and a cappuccino is a “short white.” Their accents are pretty similar, although Kiwis say “fush and chups,” which is how I tell them apart. From now on, if I can’t tell if someone is Aussie or Kiwi, I may be forced to trick them into saying either “fish” or “chips” or, if I’m lucky, both. My sense is, however, that Kiwis have a bit of a chip (or chup) on their shoulder about their bigger, richer neighbor. While we were in New Zealand, we heard more than a few barbs aimed at the folks next door. Eec/ Dare I say it? New Zealand seems like Canada to Aussie’s America, which is to say that the place is nicer, safer, and cleaner, and all that pisses the Kiwis off just a bit. As far as I can tell, the Aussies don’t seem to notice.

Anyway, notwithstanding the shocking similarities, seeing as how we made it all the way to New Zealand, it made sense to give Australia a chance to show its stuff.

I will say that the bar was sitting a bit high. New Zealand was lovely. We covered almost 1200 miles over the two islands. Here’s the final route:

Our route through the Shire.

Our route through the Shire.

The people were almost comically friendly. Eighteen seconds out of any downtown in New Zealand and we were back in Middle Earth. The whole country is basically one big Shire full of happy hobbits. Top that, Oz!

On the other hand, we’re city people, and as it turns out, our first stop, Sydney, is an excellent city.

We hit the ground running. In December when we were still in Egypt (which feels like lifetimes ago) I bought tickets to the February 13 Paul Simon/Sting concert in Sydney. We landed, dropped our bags at our hotel (after three weeks in an RV we got to sleep in an actual bed again!) and dashed over to the arena for three hours of real, live popular culture. The walk back to the hotel took us through some of the gritty sections of downtown, complete with more than a few clubs of ill repute, drunken revelers, and other non-Kiwi like experiences. Unlike Wellington, New Zealand, which is just a nicer version of Victoria, British Columbia, Sydney has an underbelly.

In addition to all the fine culture, the nice people of Sydney also served us what may be the best meal of the trip so far, if you don’t count Peter Lugar. We went to a place called Monopole, in the Pott’s Point neighborhood. Despite its name, which brings to mind the central feature of a strip club, it delivered a near-perfect meal. We started with a scallop ceviche, served with grilled avocado and corn and topped with a buttermilk avocado cream and a hint of fresh tarragon. Damn, friends, this was a good dish.

Then there was that kangaroo. It seemed kind of rude to come to Australia and eat their most famous animal, but I just couldn’t help myself. They served us a simply smashing kangaroo loin in a red wine reduction with a dandy little raw beet salad. The ‘roo was tender and tasty and I don’t care who knows it. I promise, however, not to eat koala. (For the record, Janine wants me to remind everyone that there are lots of kangaroos in Australia and that eating the national animal is not against the law or anything.)

Sydney is known for its Asian food, and we went all in, searing our innards at a northern Thai place called House. Isan food from northern Thailand is known for being fiery, and let’s just say that the House burned down, despite the copious amounts of India Pale Ale I used to attempt to put out the flames. We also had really good ramen at one of the very many good looking ramen joints in town.

We went on to sample even more culture in Sydney. After touring at least a half dozen theaters in Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Argentina, we finally saw a show. At one of the six theatres in the Sydney Opera House, The Sydney Theatre Company (run by Cate Blanchett’s husband) presented a strange but good production of Tennessee Williams’s play Suddenly Last Summer starring one of Australia’s most beloved actresses, Robyn Nevin. The production employed a very weird technique – half the time the actors performed behind a white cyclorama, but the live performance was captured by cameras and projected on the screen. Every so often, the stage would rotate and the audience could see the actors directly. The technique distracted me from the (mostly) great acting, but Janine felt it gave the wordiness of the text some oomph. I’m happy to say that we disagreed unbickeringly. No matter, this was risky theatre done with verve and I give them points for that.

We also saw Tosca at the Opera House, which reminded me why I have come to really like opera. It was a huge production with massive sets, a cast of more than fifty, an enormous and wonderful orchestra, an overwrought love story, and great big, unamplified voices. Opera audiences are almost as fun as the show itself, and Sydney’s didn’t disappoint. There were dowager empress types, old guys with short ties and pants up to their necks, and a goodly assortment of the aged and the aging out for a night on the town.

The Sydney Opera House really is all that. It’s every bit as dramatic from the inside looking out as it is from the outside looking in. As you might imagine, building it was no picnic. Before the opera, we dug deep for the guided tour, in which we learned of the tribulations of its construction. For any of you out there who have remodeled your house, or, heaven forbid, built one from scratch, take heart – this project went ten years and $70 million over budget. The architect quit two thirds of the way in. When they poured the foundation, they didn’t actually know how they were going to build those famous sails. I’m here to tell you that it was worth it. When Washington, D.C. wanted to create a big performing arts showpiece, it settled for the square, boring Kennedy Center. Sydney built this. These are my kind of people.

The Sydney Opera House - worth every penny.

The Sydney Opera House – worth every penny.

There was so much we didn’t see or eat in Sydney, which in addition to being cultural and delicious is also a truly beautiful city. It’s got harbors, hills, some really lovely neighborhoods, and the famous Bondi Beach. What’s not to like? I’m only sorry that we didn’t have more time. We are told that Melbourne, the big city to the south, is more elegant, more hip, and even more delicious. If that’s the case, we may never leave.

Food, Culture, Burlesque, and a Girlfriend Named Itchy – the Joys of Wellington

/ Eric Brown / 1 Comment

After spending the morning padding around a perfect black sand beach in the entertainingly named town of Whanganui, we felt that we were missing something.

On the black sand beach at Whanganui

On the black sand beach at Whanganui

The sand was amazingly fine - like powdered sugar, but black.

The sand was amazingly fine – like powdered sugar, but black.

Where are all the sword swallowers, we thought?

Okay, we didn’t think that, but we were ready for a little city life to balance all this fresh air. We were pointed toward Wellington, which people say reminds them of San Francisco. We were hoping for a little culture, maybe a nice meal. Oh, and while we’re at it, maybe we’ll take in a burlesque show.

Okay, that’s not what we were thinking, but how do you pass up the chance to see a Kiwi burlesque show? It turns out that there are countercultural hipstery types wherever you go, and New Zealand is no exception. As anybody who’s been to Brooklyn in the past decade knows, there has been a revival of semi-ironic versions of old burlesque. On the last Saturday night of the month, Wellington puts on its version, which may not put it in the big leagues, but which was worth an evening just for the cultural weirdness of it all.

The evening was hosted by a British woman who called herself Miss Behave, and she got the festivities going by shoving the stem of a fake rose through a hole in her tongue and twisting it about. She followed that by swallowing a sword (although the retired burlesque performer seated next to us said that Miss Behave once swallowed a table leg with the table still attached). Later in the show, she set a man’s head on fire.

She tossed it to a petrified close-up magician, whose hands shook so much he almost dropped his playing cards. After him was a woman folksinger who looked like she got cold feet in the middle of her last haircut – only half her head had been attended to. She proceeded to warble a song of love and loss that was clearly about a former lost love – a girl called Itchy, which sent the mind spinning in deeply unfortunate directions. At least she wasn’t called Stinky. Then came the David Lynch moment when Voluptuous Twinkle took the stage. VT did her best to keep step to Barry Manilow’s Copacabana up to the moment when she revealed what may be among the world’s largest pasties.

Next was the most unfunny standup comic I’ve ever been subjected to, a woman from our own San Francisco. To say that she died onstage would be unfair to the dead.

The hero of the night was a scatological poet. With his beautifully sculpted Smith Brothers beard, suspenders, and touring cap, this guy riffed on New Zealand niceness, men who fancy his girlfriend, and he concluded with the funniest dirty poem I’ve ever heard, whose topic I’ll only reveal in person.

It was funky, weird, and like any funhouse, lots of fun if you don’t expect the comics to be funny, the strippers to be sexy, or the magicians to be magical. Keep up the good work, Kiwis!

Wellington is a fantastic city. For starters, it’s a fine place to park your RV. The city council, in its wisdom, runs an RV park right on the waterfront within easy walking distance to almost everything you want to see. The waterfront is full of restaurants, bars with beanbag chairs, and really terrific museums.

The Wellington waterfront ain't beanbag - wait, yes it is.

The Wellington waterfront ain’t beanbag – wait, yes it is.

The Te Papa Museum is the national museum of New Zealand and has sections on natural history, social history, modern art, among others. And it’s free! So is the Museum of the City of Wellington, which had a fascinating film on the sinking of a ferry between the islands (which we’d be taking the next day!), and a year by year history of the city. The City Gallery museum (also free!) featured a retrospective on the work of Yvonne Todd, New Zealand’s version of Cindy Sherman. We just stumbled in, not knowing what the place was, and were delighted.

On to the food!

Our first stop in Wellington was the Mt. Vic Chippery, the best fish and chips place I’ve ever been to. You have a choice of four or five different fishes, a bunch of frying styles (tempura, beer battered, panko coated and a few others), and a choice of fries. They also have a bunch of dipping sauces. People who have difficulty making decisions should stay far away. As it was, we turned to the tatted fellow manning the fryer who recommended the gurnard (also known as the sea robin), a bottom feeding fish with a skull and wings (seriously) cooked tempura style, and holy christmas if it wasn’t the best damned fish and chips I’ll ever eat. The fry guy told me about the fish’s taste for what he called “apex crustaceans” and pantomimed how it flaps its wings. How can you not love a place like this? We ordered two pieces, which turned out to each be the size of a surfboard, and made quick work of them. If they sold beer it would be one of the world’s great meals.

Breakfast in Wellington is similarly exciting. The food was as good as the service was bad at Duke Carvell’s, but I didn’t care. I had a dish of baked eggs, cherry tomatoes, roast red pepper, black pudding, chorizo and mozzarella, with the fruitiest, hoppiest beer I’ve had since New York and I didn’t care if the server never came back with the bill. The next day we went to the breakfast place next door, Floriditas, which was just as good, except with nice, smiling waitstaff. In two days we had two better breakfasts than we had in eleven years in Palo Alto. Sigh.

We had a smashing three course bistro menu at Logan Brown, which is housed in a converted 1920s bank. There was a perfectly cured salmon appetizer with a horseradish panna cotta, of all things, and a lamb entrée that was good because it was great, but bad because it’s hard to imagine that we’ll have a better one while we’re here. On our last night, we had the Sunday Roast dinner at the Boulcott Street Bistro. It was a perfect porchetta-like roast pork, with a crackling, sticky pork skin and a fatty, juicy inside. Bring on the Lipitor.

Porky, fatty, crispy, yummy.

Porky, fatty, crispy, yummy.

The short of it is that they can cook here, and how.

Oh, and the glorious thing about English-speaking countries is that they show English-speaking movies! We stumbled into the Embassy Theater, a 20’s movie palace that has two cocktail bars and will bring a cheese plate to your seat. Why, oh, why does one have to travel to New Zealand to get a decent moviegoing experience? Oh, we saw Birdman and The Imitation Game. Liked ‘em both.

There’s Wellington for you – funky, weird, yummy. They know how to show a movie, how to make breakfast, and how to fry fish. They’re still working on the burlesque, though.

We rented an RV in New Zealand. That was a good idea, right?

/ Eric Brown / 8 Comments

Don’t come to New Zealand unless you’re prepared to encounter people who are very, very, very nice. Gandhi nice.

We landed in Auckland and I went straight for a shop to buy a SIM card for my phone so we could surf the net without worry. The gentleman behind the counter said that he could sell me a SIM card but that the shop next door was running a special on SIM cards and that I should go there. Welcome to New Zealand. The land of the ridiculously nice.

In this post, there will be no lady under the stairs. No cops shaking down unsuspecting tourists. No aggressive panhandling. No danger of animal mauling. No shysters. No carpet salesmen. No hucksters. No con men. Nothing but nice people. Very, very nice people.

Oh, and there seem to be a lot of RVs here. Many people suggested that the best way to see New Zealand is by driving around in an RV carrying your home on your back like a turtle. With an RV you have freedom to go where you want when you want! Hungry? Pull over and make a sandwich! Have to go potty? Go potty, right in your own vehicle! Sounds like heaven, doesn’t it?

We arrived in Auckland after about twenty four hours of travel and went right to the RV rental place, where we watched a short video on how to use one of these things, after which we were permitted to just drive the thing away. What’s the matter with people? I mean, there we were – two dangerously sleep deprived travelers entrusted with a massive vehicle with a steering wheel on the wrong side and traffic moving in the wrong direction. It reminds me of the time when we checked our daughter out of the baby clinic she was born in. They just handed us our baby and wished us luck.

No matter. We were in New Zealand, which is full of nice, English-speaking people! We were not going to have to pack our suitcases for more than two weeks! All we had to figure out was how to get certain amounts of, er, waste out of our vehicle and into a drain somewhere.

Our first stop was a little surfing town called Raglan. I can’t remember why or how we picked this place, but damn if it didn’t feel a lot like home. It’s set on a sweet little bay and if it got any more laid back it would disintegrate completely. After checking in at the only RV park in town, we wandered into the little village for a perfectly wonderful pan-fried flounder and craft beer at a charming little outdoor pub.

Sunset on our first night in New Zealand, in the little hippie town of Raglan.

Sunset on our first night in New Zealand, in the little hippie town of Raglan.

We meandered through the town, which could be plopped down in Marin County and nobody would notice. Everyone just seemed…happy. Even tattooed skateboarders smiled and waved. Since when do hipsters smile? In New Zealand, that’s where. To borrow a phrase I heard recently, Raglan is a hotbed of social rest. The next morning we made breakfast in our new home then took another stroll through town, where we stumbled on a place that looked so good we had breakfast again. I had corn fritters with salsa, quacamole and poached eggs. Janine had avocado toast. Avocado toast! We wept tears of breakfast perfection joy. The coffee was roasty and toasty and would take the paint off an aircraft carrier. After three months of Nescafe, I heard angels sing. Craft beer, good coffee, great breakfasts, happy people. Are you kidding me?

We have no particular itinerary. We know that we’re going to go from the North Island to the South Island, but that’s about it. New Zealand has all sorts of crazy cool things to see – fjords, glaciers, thermal pools, and Middle Earthy stuff.

We kicked things off by driving to a town called Waitomo where we took a little boat ride through a cave on the ceiling of which hang what they call glowworms, but which are actually glowing pupae of fly larvae. Glowing fly larvae pupae! That’s what I’m talking about.

We then made for Rotorua, a town that stinks. It actually stinks, because wherever you look you will see sulfuric steam emit from cracks in the ground. Where there’s steam, there’s boiling water, and people come to Rotorua to see bubbling mud pots and steep in stinky mineral baths. I happen to love a stinky sulfuric mineral bath, although Rotorua as a town is nothing to write home about. We came, we soaked, we left.

From Rotorua, we planned to set off for Whanganui, a little town on the west coast of the North Island that would put us within striking distance of Wellington, about which we had heard great things.

I should note that not all had gone smoothly with the RV. On the first day, I lost the cap to the water tank. We couldn’t figure out how to make the hot water work. I had some, um, difficulties dumping the toilet tank.

But we were finding our sea legs nevertheless, and we were confident that the journey to Whanganui would be scenic and fun! Like Gilligan and the Skipper, we set out on a three hour tour. We had no idea what the best way to get to this place was. After reversing course twice, we decided to climb a relatively harmless-looking mountain range and shave a few miles off the journey. We had the road largely to ourselves and made it over the pass without too much trouble. About an hour and a half in, though, the RV started beeping. Perhaps a door was open? But why did it only start beeping now? After a little more beeping, we figured it out – our fuel gauge was on empty. Most of the road was one way in each direction, there was no shoulder to speak of, and we were in the middle of a national forest.

Even though I was freaking out, our out-of-gas ride through the national park was so beautiful that I had to take a picture.

Even though I was freaking out, our out-of-gas ride through the national park was so beautiful that I had to take a picture.

There were no towns, no people, no nothing. Oh, and we had no cell coverage. If we ran out of gas, we were hosed. There are only three things you can do in a situation like this. You can go forward, you can go backward, or you can stop. We decided to go forward. With each uphill, we held our breath. With each downhill, we let it out. After what seemed like an eternity, we finally saw a sign ahead, but our hearts fell. It said, Whanganhui – 56 kilometers. There was no way in hell we were going to make it for another 56 kilometers. Surely there was another town before Whanganui, although I couldn’t find one on the map.

About fifteen minutes later we saw the makings of a town…but there was no gas station. We kept going. Janine was driving and she would give the thing just enough gas to get to the top of a hill and then coast down. This went on for at least another stomach-churning half hour until we started to make out civilization and then I finally fixed on a cell phone signal. At the very least we’d be able to call for help. Janine pushed and prodded the vehicle just a bit further and then there it was – the most beautiful BP station I’ve ever seen. I damn near forgave them for the spill. It took seventy seven liters of fuel. According to the manual the fuel tank only holds seventy five liters. Fortunately, we’re just slightly luckier than we are stupid, and we are really, really stupid.

The next time we plan to take a mountain pass though uninhabited country, we might just want to stop for gas first.