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Chapter 5

A dog walked by a few minutes ago, a male pup of about 20 pounds, black and white. I whistled and snapped my fingers, but the dog did not even flinch.

It sniffed the grass and lifted its leg on a nearby

Someone had visited the beach before me.

tree. In front of the doorstep of my motorhome, it sniffed for a very long time, and I was afraid it was about to make a deposit that I might later step upon in darkness. So I got up from my picnic table and walked around the canine, shouting and stomping the ground. The dog didn’t appear to know I was there.

"It’s blind and deaf," I told myself as the dog took off in an easterly direction, its nose to the ground. I observed it closely, fully expecting it would bang into a tree or the small camper van 30 yards distant. But it bumped nothing, and, in fact, turned sharply to avoid the RV, sniffing with each step.

I have never met such an intense, solitary, self-absorbed dog.

An ad in the Whangarei Leader newspaper for the Mad Butcher advertises 12 chicken drumsticks for $10. So that means I can get them for only $4 in US dollars, or 33 cents each. This sounds like a good deal.

In New Zealand, a shopping cart is called a trundler.

Whangarei, population 46,000 is a major commercial hub. It’s the largest town in the Northland area of New Zealand and thus serves a population far larger than its own residents. The town’s appearance is nothing special except in the marina area. Many of the tourists arrive here in their private sailboats, and the evidence is plentiful. One glance reveals literally hundreds of boats, most in the 40 foot and longer range. These are serious sailors.

A teenager was polishing the roof of one sailboat, a 44-footer named Phantom from Seattle. "We took two years to get here," his 40ish father told me after I cornered him a few minutes later on the dock. "We sold our home on Bainbridge Island four years ago, and bought the boat. Really, if someone wanted to, they could afford to do this, too. It’s not expensive to live once you have the boat."

He said that from Seattle, they followed the West coast of the U.S. far down coastal Mexico, where they stayed for three months. After that, they hit the open seas. "Our longest single crossing was 23 days. The boat is too small for four of us. It would be perfect for a couple. We were very ready to get to port on that port."

The family would fly home to Seattle next week, he explained. "We need to do some work," he said. "It’ll be my first work in more than two years. It’ll be quite a shock." He said he is in the construction business.

I asked him if he were tired of sailing. "No, we’ll just work awhile to make some money and then we’ll come back to get the boat. We’ll sail to Fiji from here."

The marina area, called the Town Basin, is a lovely place to spend a few hours just hanging out. There are outdoor cafes and tourist shops, and even a cyber café for those who need to make contact with the outside world. I spent an hour online, sitting next to a fellow from Cape Cod who was checking his email.

For lunch, I spent a whopping $5 for fish bits with salsa, and coffee, served to me at my table at a beautiful outdoor café. Nearby, a street musician strummed his guitar, playing, of all things, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." The restaurant’s own music system was featuring Rob Orbison’s "Only the Lonely."

Beautiful people from around the world were dining at other tables, many, I’m sure, holed up on their sailing ships a few dozen yards away.

Such a life seems very idyllic to me. If only I didn’t get seasick so easily.

A big attraction in Town Basin is Clapham’s Clocks, a huge museum packed with 1,500 of the most beautiful and amazing clocks you have ever seen. Admission is $2 (again, remember I am talking about U.S. dollars), which earns you a guided tour.

The knowledgeable guide walked

Chances are about 99.9% sure that you have never seen as many clocks in one place as are displayed at Clapham’s Clocks.

from one clock to the next, explaining each and in many cases turning them on. The oldest clock in the collection is from 1720.

One wall is cuckoo clocks, all set at different times so they will go off throughout the day. Another area displays clocks from horseless carriages. An old factory-workers’ punch clock is fascinating. Workers had to literally "punch in," earning the clock its name.

Novelty clocks, it seems, come in all shapes and themes. Mickey Mouse, singing spiders and even clocks on the face of a guitar picturing Elvis are just a few. And there are pocket watches, music box clocks, and even an English automatic tea making clock from 1950: add tea and water, set the clock, and your teapot will be ready to pour when you arise.

Perhaps the most wonderful clocks are those that play music. One, from the 1800s, is in a stunning, hand-carved wooden cabinet about six feet tall, and plays two-foot wide metal disks, each punched individually to create its captivating tune. This clock served as the entertainment aboard a New Zealand passenger ship.

The museum contains the collection of Mr. A. Clapham, who built some of the clocks himself.

This is the place to learn about New Zealand's only oil refinery.

My first stop yesterday, however, was at a place you might not think of as a tourist destination: New Zealand’s one and only oil refinery. The focal point of a short, self-guided tour at the visitor center is an incredibly detailed scale model of the refinery that is illuminated in different places as the recorded narration explains the purpose of each structure. The model is one floor below, with a sloped, cutaway glass ceiling. So you are looking down. From end-to-end, the highly detailed display must be 50 feet long.

Nearby, a film explains the history of the refinery, opened in 1964 to help New Zealand lessen its dependence of foreign suppliers. The film, however, was produced shortly after the refinery opened, and looks very much like it should be retired. John Philip Sousa’s "Stars and Stripes Forever," plays loudly as black and white scenes of the new refinery are shown.

The Marsden Point Oil Refinery is located just off Highway One near Ruakaka. Admission is free.

One thing I learned at the oil refinery is that oil is not simply located in huge underground lakes, as some people think. Instead, according to a display: "Very often it is in a seemingly solid rock, which on close inspection contains myriads of minute spaces or spores. By moving from one space to another through fractures, oil migrates slowly upwards. When the migrating oil comes up against an impermeable layer or seal, it backs up in the pores of the reservoir rock and an accumulation occurs."

All along the highway for the last two days have been incredible expanses of Pampas Grass, a tall — eight to ten

Pampas grass. It's everywhere.

foot high "weed" that looks like a feather duster. How something so beautiful can be considered a weed is beyond me, but a weed it is, at least according to what I was told at a Whangarei garden shop. The woman there told me I might have been looking at a plant called ToeToe. "They look the same, but bloom at different times."

As we talked, a young boy pointed to a small fish in a portable "pond" for a home garden. "Oh, those are mosquito fish," she said. "You can’t buy those."

She told the boy it was illegal to put the fish into public waters. I asked her why. "You know, I don’t know," she said, and flagged down another employee. "They eat the fins of the native fish," she explained. "They’ve really had a major impact in some places."

I told the women about how in my old hometown of Sacramento, the county used to provide free mosquito fish to anyone who requested them for use in their home ponds to eat mosquito larvae. "This must be a different type," one of the woman said.

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