December 6, 2012
After getting tied up, we felt pretty dazed. We had about 4 hours of rum-soaked sleep the night before, and we were landsick. Landsickness is what happens when you first step on solid ground after many days at sea. You feel off-kilter and out of it, slow to process life and slow to react. We usually treat landsickness with drinking, but in this case we’d done enough of that. We did know we wanted a nice hearty meal and some coffee; so our friends Bob and Linda suggested we eat at the Marina Cafe, the little restaurant right at the marina.
I had my first culture clash with New Zealand when we went to the counter at the Marina Cafe to order some coffee and lunch. They seemed to have a good selection of coffee drinks, and I thought a cafe au lait might be very nice! I ordered one and got a blank look. It’s half coffee and half warm milk, I explained. They said, “Oh, like a latte.” No, I said, not a latte (which is espresso based), just milk with regular coffee. I got another blank look. I thought maybe I wasn’t being clear, so more loudly I enunciated, “Re-gu-lar coffee.” I got another blank look. I said, “You know, like from a Mr. Coffee!” More blank looks ensued.
Thankfully someone stepped in at this point to explain all the coffee drinks here are espresso based, and maybe I’d like a flat white, which is similar to a cafe au lait. Rich would get a long black, which was 2 shots of espresso with hot water added. Well, OK, we could try that, but I thought how odd they don’t have “normal” coffee at this cafe.
I would come to find out that there is no “normal” coffee as we know it in New Zealand, that the coffee drinks here are all espresso-based. Brewed coffee (or “filter coffee” as they call it) is a uniquely American phenomenon, and the Cafe staff must have thought I had a screw loose when I went on about how someone named Mr. Coffee makes something called regular coffee and why can’t they make it like that? New Zealand coffee will be the subject of my next blog post, but for now we had managed to order two coffees and an open-faced steak sandwich to split.
Bob and Linda found us a table and we sat down to wait for our lunch. This time of the year is busy with all the cruisers from the boats that have been arriving for the past 2 months and locals getting ready for the start of summer in New Zealand. People seemed to be everywhere, and we saw a few people we knew.
We got the info on everything: the cruising club down the way (like a yacht club), the Opua store (the local general store), the town of Paihia about 3 miles away with a grocery store, restaurants and shops, the bigger town of Kerikeri about 35 minutes away with more of all that, the town of Russell a ferry ride away (car or on foot depending on where you catch it), the city of Whangarei about 45 minutes away, farmer’s markets, places you can walk, where you can buy a car, nearby road trips to take, etc. etc. etc.
Up until we arrived, Rich and I had a plan. We’d get to Opua, secure Legacy, then asap (like the next morning) get on a bus and go down to Starbucks in Auckland, about 3 hours south of here. We’d spend a couple of days there and look into where we could keep the boat. We were desperate for a city, a real city, with lots of people and restaurants and (of course) Starbucks! But as we sat here, dazed and confused, with everyone seeming to talk about everything and all the things we needed to experience here, we realized this was all the “city” we could handle right now (plus the coffee drinks were really good). I think, had we gone into Auckland, our heads would have exploded. Bob understood how overwhelmed we must feel and summed up the information overload perfectly with this statement: “It’s like trying to drink from a fire hose.” I guess everyone who arrives here goes through it as there’s a lot to process.
After lunch, we went and got some liability insurance (a requirement for getting a slip at the marina) from the people at The Marina Shop, and they were all so nice! In addition to the insurance, we also got an offer to borrow a car for a day and a Vodafone dongle so we could have internet access. We then went to the marina office to get signed in, and they were really nice, too. By the end of the afternoon, we felt no need at all to rush off to Auckand as this place was pretty great!
Several people we knew were going to the Cruising Club that night, the local yacht club which the public can visit on a limited basis. As much as we would love to have gone, we were too exhausted. We went back to the boat, had a little more rum to celebrate our real arrival in New Zealand, and then conked out and slept for 12 hours. –Cyndi
