Vigor

The culture here in New Zealand seems to be a fascinating hybrid of Scottish and Maori. One branch of the Young lineage comes from Paisley, which was also one of the places in Scotland that saw a huge amount of emigration to New Zealand in the 1800s.  And I’ve been fascinated by the cultures of the South Pacific islanders — especially their language, mythology, and ethnoastronomy — since reading Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania in my 20s.

I kept hearing that New Zealand was like “being in Middle-Earth” but the truth has been more complicated.  Just as the culture contains strains of Scottish and Maori, so too does the ecology seem to hybridize pastoral Scotland/England/Ireland and tropical South Pacific.

Now, IANAB (“I am not a botanist”) but it’s jarring to see a rolling, grassy hillside peppered with sheep and then…a palm tree.  There are parts of the North Island that, sure, look like the Pacific Northwest.  But there are also large swathes that look like a particularly well-watered San Diego.  There are even parts that are downright jungly.  (Fun fact:  the Chinese word for “jungle” 丛林 translates literally to “clump forest”.)

You could just as easily say that New Zealand is Jurassic Park as you could that it’s Middle-Earth.

We’ll see if this holds for the South Island when I get there.