Day 5: Sunday, Feb 24, Auckland/Waitomo

Today we went to church at a CRC church in south Auckland (same denomination as the first church we went to in Sydney). This was the smallest church we had been to and maybe had 40 people. It was mostly gray hairs, but there were a surprising number of kids in their early-twenties. Everything was a capella because they had no pianist. The building indicated that it had been a modest church and had shrunk, and this was confirmed by an older gentleman. Apparently the neighborhood had become lower-class and then populated by immigrants and a lot of the church members passed away or moved away. The guy sitting next to me was Dutch, probably in his 70’s, and might have been a founding member of the church. All the churches we have visited so far have had tea, coffee, and snacks afterward with almost everyone mingling afterward, and this church was no exception. We got an invitation to someone’s house for lunch and accepted.

We had lunch with a family that happens to homeschool. The dad is a native kiwi, the mom is from Scotland, and they have one biological kid. However, they adopted a 4yo (now 17) Russian orphan that they thought was an only child. Not until after they adopted her did they find out that she had two older (teen) siblings that this family then decided to adopt. They then received a note from the siblings referring to yet another sibling. In the end this family adopted four Russians ranging from 17 to 4. They spoke very little English and their new family spoke no Russian. Everything worked out and they joke about it quite a bit. Their son taught English in South Korea for a while, so they also had a kid from SK stay with them for a semester at one point.

Our conversation ran over most of the same topics covered with other people. NZ has some lingering land disputes with the Maori, but they are very grateful that their problems are tiny compared to the Aussies’. NZ has a parliamentary system like Germany’s (I can’t remember the acronym, but I think it is MMP) and unlike Australia. You cast two votes: one for a person and one for a party. The people are elected in a straightforward manner. However, the remaining seats are filled proportionally by the parties according to the percentage of votes they get. If there are 10 seats for parties and the Labour party gets 50% of the party vote, they fill 5 seats with people of their own choosing. Apparently the Green Party candidates routinely get trounced, but because of the warm fuzzies connected with the idea of the Green Party they have enough MPs (Members of Parliament) to be a minor but sometimes deciding force. (Our host said the Green party is frequently called the Watermelon Party because they are “green on the outside and red on the inside.”) Our host’s opinion was that Helen Clark is very politically shrewd and that the Election Finance Act is part of a calculated bid to keep Labour in power. That seems to be a consensus view and I would have to agree. Squelching political speech (including ads) always helps the party in power. NZ is non-nuclear. This means they have no nuclear power plants, but it also means that they don’t allow vessels with nuclear weapons to dock in their ports. (I’m not sure about nuclear-powered vessels.)

After lunch we drove south to Waitomo. Waitomo is home to several caves famous for their formations but also for their glowworms. The worms really were interesting and the experience was a little other-worldly. These worms spend most of their life in the larval stage, during which they hang from the cave ceiling and drop down several short (6 in) strands of sticky string like spider web netting. The excrement on the tip of their abdomen reacts with something (air, I think) to produce a fluorescent glow that attracts bugs. The result looks like a lot of tiny green LED lights installed in the cave ceiling. The lights are very dim individually, but in the cave underneath them you could easily see the people with you. They primarily live above underground rivers that bring bugs into the cave. It seems that a lot of them survive without outside bugs – eggs are laid in groups of about twenty, and the first bug to hatch eats its brothers and sisters. If two worms come in contact, the bigger one eats the smaller one. After the hatched flies mate they are attracted to lights like any other bug and end up becoming food for other glowworm larvae.

Blurred glowworms. Sorry, no tripod. The streaked dots are luminescent glowworms; the light is revealing the web-like feeding strands. Click on the photo for a better view.

We saw a couple wearing a Michigan sweater and a Berkeley sweater. Turns out they are French and German and have never been to the U.S. Why the sweaters? They were cheap.