Hello again (+ Wellington, NZ, part 1)

It’s been a while. Perhaps a predictable while, for a blog started with good intentions, but complicated by circumstances, given that it’s a place-based blog. During the year since my last blog post, I was only in Cambridge five scattered months, split up by a month-long trip to New Zealand and a few weeks at home in the US for the holidays, and then cut short by the slapdown so many countless people have experienced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In mid-March, in about the span of a week, I went from anticipating the burgeoning spring, walks on the fen, and concerts in college chapels, to packing up my room, booking a flight home, and leaving Cambridge for the foreseeable future. Although I didn’t know how long I would need to hunker down at home, I had a feeling it would be months. Unlike many of my friends on year-long programs, however, I was fairly confident I would be back, and only had to mourn the probable loss of a season or two in Cambridge.

Now I have a return flight to Cambridge booked for September, almost exactly 6 months from the day I left. Although the future is no more certain than it was when I left, I feel the need to grasp the Cambridge time slipping inexorably by. It won’t be quite the same Cambridge—one of the reasons it didn’t feel impossible to leave in the first place—but the cultural-physical landscape of millennia is still there.

I also feel the need to keep constructing my little word-lenses for what I can still access of that landscape, as well as for what I remember of the pre-COVID Cambridge which never made it onto this blog (some of which is sitting in half-finished posts already). The urge to write that I described in my first post has never gone away–just gotten a little held up in execution. So I’ve made a goal to start posting regularly again, long or short, every two weeks, as of now on Saturdays.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d give a little taste of the places I’ve lavished my place-love on when I haven’t been in Cambridge over the last year.

Today, how about some New Zealand?

From Cambridge to New Zealand

First a bit of context—for my PhD, I’m studying a group of plants native to NZ (authentically pronounced N-“zed,” by the way), flowering shrubs called hebes (“hee-bees”; the scientific name is Veronica). These are actually popular horticultural plants in England, so I see them all the time there—but I’m interested in their incredible diversity in the wild in New Zealand (there are over 100 species) and how it all evolved.

Why/how am I studying plants from NZ if I’m (usually) in Cambridge? Well, to make a long story short, New Zealand ecology is extremely cool (i.e., it’s an island with no native mammals except for bats and was the last major landmass to be settled by humans, only 800 years ago)—and computers, collaborators, and airplanes make a long-distance research relationship possible.

The longer story is that my PhD supervisor also studied New Zealand ecosystems for his PhD (also from Cambridge), and in the meantime my undergraduate supervisor collaborated with some of the same researchers in NZ (which, incidentally, is how I was introduced to my PhD supervisor). So I already had a good network of researchers to collaborate with. Independently, I had gone on a brief study abroad in NZ as an undergrad and fell in love with the remote mountains and grasslands of the South Island of NZ. So naturally, when planning my PhD we came up with a research question that was tailored to New Zealand. That is, basically, how do the kind of fast-rising mountains like those in New Zealand influence how fast plants like the extremely diverse hebes evolve? It doesn’t actually require me to go physically to NZ, because our collaborators had already collected the plant samples I needed and shipped them to me to do lab work with them in Cambridge. And from there all my work–reconstructing how the plants evolved–is done on the computer (which has also made working remotely post-COVID quite easy). However, any excuse to go to New Zealand is a good one (minus the carbon footprint of flying literally halfway around the world…), and a scientific conference where I could present my work and meet with collaborators in person was just such an excuse. In fact, there were two relevant conferences happening in November and December. Which is, by the way, the beginning of summer in New Zealand.

So I got funding (conferences are magical that way) and booked a month-long trip. For the Australasian Systematic Botany Society conference, I spent a week in Wellington, the vibrant, hipster capital situated on a harbor at the bottom of the North Island, separated from the South Island by a narrow strait. Then, for the New Zealand Ecological Society conference, I travelled to Christchurch, the biggest city on the sparsely-populated South Island (the South Island generally has more sheep than people), once a thriving metropolis but still recovering from a devestating earthquake in 2011. And finally, I spent the rest of the trip visiting with my secondary PhD supervisor, a veteran ecologist who hails from charming Dunedin, the second-biggest city on the South Island and the home of the University of Otago.

Here are some excerpts of journal entries from my time there, basically unedited—you decide how much you want to read. I’ll start with Wellington.

November 20-23, 2019, Wellington

On my first day, when fighting jet lag gave me a get-out-of-work-free card, I spent the post-airport day first sitting in Waitangi Park on the harbor front, listening to tuis (birds that sound like R2-D2) and talking to Mom on the phone. Then after checking in to my hostel—my room had an incredible 10^th-floor view of central Wellington against the hills crowded with green and houses and then giving away to the blue harbor—I roamed the heart of Wellington. Specifically, the Golden Mile, which I learned about in the tourist map I picked up at the airport. It was a perfect spring day (besides a bit of Wellington wind) and the golden hour, and I was utterly charmed by the city—quirky eclectic architecture, luminous glass and stone, colorful shops and restaurants, bustling dinner/commute hour on the waterfront. I took artsy phone pics of buildings and boats and whimsical city art. My favorite discovery was a wooden bridge decked out with sculptures of birds and fish and abstract shapes leading to a modern art museum. Also, poetry on stone slabs along the waterfront (Lauris Edmond, from Scenes of a Small City: “It’s true you can’t live here by chance, you have to do and be, not simply watch or even describe. This is the city of action, the world headquarters of the verb—”). And murals of NZ birds and fish everywhere (including pollution awareness—dolphins and sharks full of plastic). And the unintentional abstract expressionist art of primary-color container ship blocks and rusted container cranes and boat-related detritus along the piers. People queuing for the ferry to outer islands after work. Rowers training in their long white cloud-boats. A dalmatian on a dock craning its neck for attention from its people enjoying post-work drinks in the boat below.

Then I found and followed Cuba St, a colorful shopping/cultural district, to a hipster café recommended by Esther, Fidel’s, where I ate too-spicy fish tacos in the artsiest back room (walls made of corrugated iron and collaged with references to the dictator), alone but not really because the next table over was a Kiwi mother and adorable precocious three year old having a perpetually entertaining conversation (eg explaining what corrugated iron is and where steak comes from—“What???”).

The weather hasn’t been as beautiful since then, and my days have been less whimsical and more confined to the hostel while I prepare for the conference. Yesterday in addition to the back of the Te Papa Museum, where the conference is being held and where my main collaborator works (I haven’t gone in to the exhibitions yet—I saw them on my 2015 study abroad visit to Wellington, and will certainly have other chances to during the conference next week), I saw the New World supermarket and the YHA hostel (YHA has a more fun vibe but much less stunning view than my first hostel), and on a whim, after looking up Wellington orchestra concerts on prompting from Dad while on the phone and discovering there was a concert in 20 minutes, went to the Michael Fowler Center just down the street. Heard the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra play Mahler Symphony 2, which was quite good.

And now here I am in my YHA room, procrastinating and nibbling on artisan dark chocolate with Fijian Ginger and Kerikeri Mandarin from the supermarket. My window is open to cooing pigeons roosted on the corrugated iron roof of an anonymous building and R&B blasting from a narrow courtyard below it, where people seem to be clearing out junk. I’ve also noticed a starling flying in and out of a drainpipe and I think I can hear the babies keening.

I want to go take the Wellington cable car to the Botanic Gardens—can I justify it with most of my rough presentation slides down?

Some retrospective catch up

Aaaand I will never forgive myself for lapsing in my journal for the rest of my time in Wellington. Here are some retrospective descriptions of a few more Wellington adventures (there were many).

November 23-24, 2019, Wellington

I did justify spending quite a bit of my weekend exploring rather than working. And I did take the shiny red funicular cable car, an icon of Wellington that was installed in the early 20^th century to serve an upscale new neighborhood up in the hills, Kelburn, to the Wellington Botanic Gardens. That was a sunny afternoon of wandering through lush leafy paths that webbed whimsically all over the hills, admiring the mystique of tree ferns and cabbage trees, and listening intently to unfamiliar bird calls. I was especially happy with spotting several kakas, rare native NZ parrots that have made the urban green space of Wellington home. They pulled their green-brown bulks along tree branches with their beaks and made whooping screeches as they flew between trees.

The next day I was accidentally two hours early to church in the Matairangi Mt. Victoria district of Wellington—I had taken the bus up and down over the hills and couldn’t do anything but wait. So I looked at Google maps for the nearest green space (which I could actually see from the street, green hills rising up) and followed the directions to Alexandra Park, which ended up being on the very ridge that led to the highest point in Wellington, a hill called Mt. Victoria. I didn’t think I would make it there, but I kept walking and either way I was relishing the serendipitous stroll through more green and more birds with periodic views over the misty harbor and valleys nestled with houses and high rises and baseball fields. Then I looked at the map and realized I could probably make it to Mt. Victoria and back to church if I took a different route back (never mind my Sunday skirt and sandals). So I hustled and got to the paved trail that wound around and up Mt. Victoria, where I took windy selfies with the 360 view of the harbor. I could see the Te Papa Museum where I had been spending my time and some of the iconic buildings I had seen on my Golden Mile walk. Then I hurried on down the residential route back to the church, which ended up being just as enchanting as the ridge walk. This (yet again iconic) part of Wellington is houses perched amid jungle-like greenery on ridiculously steep streets, to the point that there are stairs/paths for pedestrians down the hillsides as shortcuts between the switch-backing streets. These stairs took me through the secret gardens of the white clapboard and modernist flat-roofed houses, absolutely verdant with spring green. I didn’t mind my sore feet one bit.

To be continued…

Downtown Wellington

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Cable Car and Wellington Botanic Gardens

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Mount Victoria ridge walk

• 

• 

• 

•