SEARCHING FOR NEW ZEALAND’S ELUSIVE (AND EXPENSIVE) KIWI.
The kiwi, being a fat and flightless bird, can’t go too far or too fast. So it figures that, if you roam the New Zealand countryside on a bicycle for two weeks, you’d stand a decent chance of running into one.
It’s the national symbol, after all. They have to be around, someplace.
New Zealanders are plenty mixed up about kiwis. They call themselves Kiwis. They call that small green fruit a kiwi, too. It’s hard to keep things straight in a hemisphere that doesn’t even have a North Star to steer by.
In New Zealand, you see pictures of kiwis everyplace. The long-beaked standard-bearer of New Zealand — the bird with the body of a bowling ball — is on T-shirts, coffee mugs, candy bars, postage stamps. A likeness of a kiwi graces New Zealand’s dollar coin, larger than the likeness of long-beaked Queen Elizabeth on the flip side.
How hard could it be to find a real one? The answer is, plenty hard. Hundreds of miles this reporter pedaled, on a bicycle tour of the country’s South Island, looking for one.
“Good luck, mate,” said the fellow in the tourist office. “I think you’re going to need it.”
On the first day, near the town of Greymouth, there was a bird by the side of the road that was pleasingly plump and flightless. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a chicken.
Then another chicken, and another. All flightless and plump, all unmistakably chickens. There are a lot of chickens in New Zealand.
There are even more sheep than chickens. According to the government, the country has 30 million sheep and 5 million people. That means there are six sheep per person, a notion that has given birth to many jokes, few of them printable.
Besides chickens, there were gulls, sparrows, hawks and other birds that weren’t kiwis. There was no shortage of a pesky New Zealand parrot called a kea that was said to enjoy pecking apart bike saddles of cyclists who leave their bikes unattended outside cafes.
Meanwhile, pedaling a bike on vacation still turns out to be pedaling a bike. New Zealand is home to the Southern Alps, which, while not as high as the other Alps, are high enough to, as cyclists like to say, get your attention. No matter the hemisphere, roads go uphill before they go downhill.
A bicycle is the way to see most places, New Zealand included. Walking is too slow and cars are too fast. A bike splits the difference, and is a great way to work off a steak-and-kidney pie, assuming you actually manage to get one down.
Everything in New Zealand is different, not just the notion of bird watching. You drive on the left, which means you cycle on the left, too. That means you look for oncoming cars from the right, of all places. The first time you forget which way to turn your neck is guaranteed to be the time the trailer truck comes barreling along.
So the road is not your road. And the stars of the Southern Hemisphere are not your stars. The electric plugs are not your plugs and the coffee is not your coffee but something called “long black” and “short white.” In New Zealand, it’s easy to find a sausage roll. It’s hard to find a doughnut.
In New Zealand, the day is not your day, either. When it’s Wednesday in California, it’s Thursday in New Zealand. They tell you that you’ll get the day back when you cross the international date line on the way home, after your vacation is over, when it’s too late to do you any good.
Mile after mile went by, even if they were kilometers. No kiwis.
“They’re nocturnal, mate,” said the pop in the mom-and-pop store in Hari Hari. “They’re endangered. And they don’t hang out by the side of the road.”
The search for the kiwi, like any grail quest, was beginning to take on mythic proportions.
On the South Island of New Zealand, everything is remote, spread out, oversize. Towns have one cafe and one small market in them, and they’re usually the same place.
The kiwi-free road along the west coast hugs the cliffs above the Tasman Sea, much as Highway 1 hugs the cliffs of Monterey County. With Highway 1 out of action for a while, because of the condemned bridge at Big Sur, motorists seeking to hug cliffs might very well have to venture to New Zealand. There are no cliffs more huggable than the ones around Knights Point, on Haast Pass Highway.
The problem with Haast Pass Highway is that it leads to Haast Pass. The road goes up, then up some more. Eventually it goes down, if you can wait around that long.
But still no kiwi. And the days were passing too quickly, as they do on good vacations.
“You won’t see a kiwi on the highway, luv,” said the lady at the kiwi nature center. “They’re nocturnal and very shy. You better buy a ticket and come inside.”
New Zealand may not be awash in kiwis, but it is drowning in kiwi nature centers. All over New Zealand are indoor kiwi aviaries where kiwis are on display for tourists inside dark rooms. The dark rooms are designed to trick the poor birds into thinking that the aviary’s daytime operating hours are the middle of the night.
Visiting a kiwi aviary isn’t particularly cheap. The Christchurch one costs $30. The Hokitika one costs $24. The Queenstown aviary costs $48. The Franz Josef aviary costs $58 for a “backstage pass” that includes a guide.
This reporter pedaled up to the kiwi aviary in Franz Josef. Yes, the woman at the ticket booth said, there was a live kiwi inside. Guaranteed. Buy a ticket. If you don’t see a live kiwi, she said, you get your money back.
This visitor asked if it was also guaranteed that the live kiwi would be walking around, or eating, or doing something interesting. “No,” the ticket woman said. Hmmm. In the aviary cafe, a small group of visitors was having coffee. It turned out that they were on a bus tour that included a visit to the aviary. It was time to do some investigative reporting.
“The kiwi center was part of the tour, so we had to go,” said one of the visitors, who was from Germany. She didn’t seem too happy about it.
Yes, she had seen the kiwi. It had been hunkered down in the corner of its dark enclosure, she said, ignoring proffered worms, ignoring proffered beetles, ignoring visitors, doing nothing.
Another tourist, Kevin, who had paid to see a kiwi, said his bird was hiding inside its hutch, all but invisible. A slender sticklike protrusion poked from the enclosure. It might have been the long beak of the kiwi and it might have been a stick. It was dark and hard to tell. The kiwi was intent on performing the kiwi equivalent of a Greta Garbo imitation.
“Save your money,” Kevin said. “Use it on the beer instead.”
As with all journeys of any merit, when not finding what you’re looking for, you discover most everything else. In New Zealand, the discoveries included the beer. It’s terrific stuff, and the perfect way to end a day of cycling and failed kiwi sighting. Other discoveries are the peanut slab candy bar, the fjords of Milford Sound, a flavor of ice cream called hokey pokey (vanilla with bits of honey crunch), hard apple cider on tap, friendly folks, spooky glow worms, preposterous New Zealand TV game shows and a budget hotel in Christchurch that used to be the city jail. (Unlike the former occupants, you get a key.)
All of that stuff comes with scenery, too. It’s not ordinary scenery. New Zealand, everyone knows, is the place that served as the backdrop for the Lord of the Rings movies of nearly two decades ago. Kiwis — the human ones — have been turning a buck over that legacy ever since. Lord of the Rings tours! Lord of the Rings T-shirts! Lord of the Rings rings!
It all makes some sort of sense. The quest to find the inscrutable, legendary kiwi courtesy of a bicycle turns out to be much the same as the quest to dispose of the inscrutable, legendary ring courtesy of a movie theater. Both involve long stretches of spectacular scenery viewed from uncomfortable seats. Both take you into uncharted territory full of unlikely characters. When it’s time to go home, from the movie theater or from the airport, it turns out that the journey was the point of the exercise.