The last two weeks have been pretty disjointed, mainly because I took a week long trip in the middle of them to an island off the east coast of the North Island.
I spent the first weekend in my new apartment settling in, visiting a fish market, and heading out to a Halloween party somewhere in SE Auckland. I literally only have three backpacks with me, so I wasn't sure at all what to dress as for the party. I went with John and Sehui (pronounced Se-hee) to a nearby discount store and tried to find a costume, but the entire place was crammed full of people getting ready for their own parties. Instead, I just went and got lost in the surprisingly deep back section of the store looking at all the housewares.
Back at the apartment, I decided to just go as myself, basically. I dressed up as a backpacker.
Apparently the costume didn't read at all without the backpack, because when John and Sehui's friends started convening at our apartment they were very confused about why I was dressed up as a hippy.
We hung around for a bit, waiting for Sehui to finish doing skeleton makeup for her friend. I got to know the Joker (David), a couple pirates (Carlos and Esteban), and a couple witches (who didn't really talk to me). Then we walked down to a liquor store and bought a 12-pack of German BLACK BEER (lager style stout! [??!?]), which I tried unsuccessfully to cram into my backpack. We then waited around outside of the liquor store for about 20 minutes waiting for our Uber to pick us up.
The Halloween party was fun, and still a bit unusual for New Zealanders. A few kiwis were hosting in their suburban house, which they had decked out with some excellent decorations inside and out. The best parts were the prison cell hanging from the ceiling (for taking pictures inside of), and a giant grim reaper descending from the second floor landing to eat everyone's soul. We hung around, I tried to explain my interest in fishbones to a couple different groups of people, overdid it by adding too much vodka to a drink, and watched in fascination/silent horror as the hosts pulled out a branded beer pong table (kiwi pong!).
And then I took off for Great Mercury Island. This trip was part of an ongoing field school, and the Principle Investigators were heading out with a professional crew for a week to do some targeted excavations at the start of the 2016-17 field season. They were a little shorthanded, and someone volunteered me to join them. So I showed up at 7am on a Wednesday with a backpack full of clothes in front of a garage, ready to help out.
We loaded up a van, two trucks, and trailer with our personal gear and a load of bins, and then started a 4 hour drive out to Whitianga (the 'wh' in Māori words is pronounced as an 'F' by most English speakers and in some Māori dialects). It was like driving through a weird, alternate universe California, until we got to the mountains of the Coromandel and were suddenly driving through kauri and tree fern forests.
In 'Whiti' we unloaded all of our gear onto a fishing boat we chartered, and rode it for 2 hours through some heavy swells out to Great Mercury Island, aka Ahuahu. I rode on top of the boat for most of the way, ducking the spray from really big waves until even that didn't stop me from getting splashed. We pulled into a harbor where the dock we meant to pull into was blocked by a small motor boat. "Move your fucking boat! We told you weeks ago!"
Then it was all unloading, and waiting for someone to go out and fetch the vehicles we'd use to transport the stuff to our quarters on the tombolo, the neck connecting the island's north and south halves. We were in front of a giant boat house, and our host on the island came and greeted us, then went away to...somewhere. His name is Michael, and then it was mentioned that he's actually SIR Michael, a man with $700 million who jointly owns the island and lives there full time and sponsors the ongoing archaeological fieldwork. I went into the boat house to use the bathroom. There were statues that looked like they belonged in a Chinese mausoleum standing guard in the hallway.
After moving in to some shearer's quarters and getting an introduction to the island, we fell into a rhythm for the rest of the week. Wake up at 7, have breakfast (weet bix or yogurt with granola, toast with butter and marmite), put on sunscreen, go to work from 8 to 12:30 or so. Come back to the house for lunch (build your own sandwich from homemade bread, or have some leftovers), then head back out and work til 5 or so. Go back to the house, do chores (I specialized in uploading our photos), clean the dirt off our selves, have dinner around 7 (a new delicious dish cooked by the PI's every night), followed by compulsory desert (date pud, chocolate pud, pineapple pud, etc.), and then bed usually by 10.
For work, I mostly helped fill out paperwork for another person who was digging test cores with spades and a corer across the top of the island to get a better understanding of its geology. I also spent a small amount of time helping with a swamp coring project on the north end of the island. But the real action was at the excavation on Coralie Bay, just a 10 minute walk from our quarters. We opened one 3x2 m trench, and three 1x1 m units. We didn't get any clear idea of what we were working on. There was tons of obsidian shatter and some charcoal from vegetation clearing events in the 1x1's, while the big trench found a really unusual collection of items (elephant seal tusks, more charcoal and obsidian, a dog mandible).
Very quickly, the week ended. We backfilled our units under incredibly intense wind, put everything away and cleaned our quarters ahead of the sheep shearer's arrival, inventoried the project's supplies ahead of the field school in February, and hauled all of our stuff back out onto a boat for the ride to Whitianga. We transferred all of our things back into our cars, and rode home to Auckland.
And on that ride, we were rudely thrust back into the cold uncaring world, which had just voted Donald Trump to be the 45th US President.
No comments:
Post a Comment