Trip 40 — Niue and Dogojima Walks

Interlude: Niue to Japan via Fiji
Friday, 1 March 2024

(Last Friday, resort to Alofi and back to airport: 14318 steps/11.69 km/7.26 mi/2h 3m)
Grand total (unchanged): 82043 steps/66.77 km/41.49 mi/12h 15m
(including Friday's extras ~135051 steps/~110.63 km/~68.74 mi/~19h 57m)

Leaving Niue is a drawn-out procedure, because the same people checking passengers in for the outgoing flight have to then prepare for the new arrivals. They urge you to check in several hours before the 1:45 p.m. departure. The Scenic Matavai Resort goes so far as to establish an 8:30 checkout time, after which they drive people to the airport, wait for them to check in, and then bring them back to the resort for an hour or two.

It's almost five and a half kilometers from the resort to the airport (despite a sign indicating a 1.5-kilometer-shorter distance), and then it's a further three kilometers or so to the center of Alofi. The timing of the flight check-in isn't very well aligned with the bustling Friday-morning market, which runs from 5 to 8 a.m. (despite a sign at its entrance indicating a noon closure). I wanted to see the market, but it would have meant leaving the resort by 6:30, passing the airport, catching the end of the market, retracing the half-hour to the airport to check in, perhaps going back into town for lunch, and then covering the Alofi-to-the-airport stretch for a fourth time.

Besides, it was raining.

So when the others took the van, I walked. I checked in — there were Barry and Trini — and continued into town.

"Are you heading out today?" Victoria asked as she drove by.

"Yes. It was great meeting you. I hope to return!"

"Have a good journey and see you next time!"

I strolled the main road one more time, went down one of the sea tracks, and backtracked toward the Vaiolama Cafe for lunch.

"Hi, Seth!" It was Mele from Toi. "I've seen you walking twice today! Do you want a ride?"

"No, thank you! I'm headed out today. Hope to see you again!"

I had a fish burger and a lime milkshake at Vaiolama, taking my chances in the uncovered area during a break in the rain. Then I proceeded toward the airport turnoff.

"You still won't take a lift?" Victoria again. By now I was starting to recognize cars, drivers, and plates, including one black car with the plate "BANANA" that passed me three times and whose driver was the only one not to wave back at me. Maybe he owned the dogs in Toi.

I laughed. "No, thanks. Just the final stretch now!"

It had become a sunny, humid, hot day, and I paused at the supermarket across from the airport for a cold drink.

"Are you the walker from New York?" someone asked in the parking lot.

"Yes, I am."

"I saw you on the news. You walked around the whole island?"

"I did! It was beautiful, and everyone was wonderful. I heard you used to have a tradition of walking the island, a takai, but it doesn't happen anymore."

"It doesn't. But you may have just revived it."

Sariah found me at the airport. She was sitting in the telecommunications office, where I'd purchased my SIM card.

"Now you're here!" I said.

"Yes," she answered. "Because I..." — she mimed strumming a guitar — "for the new arrivals."

She had been the first person I'd seen after exiting the customs area a week before, part of the duo musically welcoming people to Niue. I hadn't recognized her.

"You'd better get going," she said. "They're about to close the security queue."

"Really?" It was still more than an hour before departure. "Is the plane in yet?"

"Yes, it just landed." But they box all the departing passengers into a room before the arrivals come off the plane.

"OK," I said. "Thank you again for everything."

And there, to the right of the SIM-card window, where I took my first step of Abecedarian Walk 19, I left my dog stick. It had been more than that to me. It was a good walking stick for stepping down the sea tracks, and it was helpful for scratching the copious mosquito bites around my ankles. It also, I thought, augmented my dignity as an ambler, in a manner befitting someone who will soon ease into the second half of his first century.

I leaned the stick against the wall. I like to think that the next walker came off the plane and completed a takai with it.

---

I flew to Auckland, and then on to Christchurch, and the following morning took a bus to Akaroa, a French-settled town on a harbor that occupies the center of a volcanic knob, a sort of pimple on New Zealand's South Island. It was a relaxed place, with visitors from New Zealand and several continents, a slightly touristy seaside getaway town.

My main purpose was to see the Hector's dolphins, so I booked a boat tour to swim in their waters. The numbers of these littlest dolphins have decreased since the 1970s, largely due to net fishing, as their echolocation doesn't detect the nets. There were just six of us on the tour, and we squeezed into wetsuits and cruised around the harbor, looking to see whether the beautiful mammals might like some company.

We observed many of them, but they were teasing us, poking up on one side of the boat and then swimming around to the other side. One pod stayed with the boat for a while, thereby encouraging us to get in the water, but they kept their distance in twos and fours. The experience was rather like a party where one tries to mingle but can't find the right fit, so we returned to the boat, observed several more denizens of the harbor (New Zealand fur seals lazing on the rocks, a colony of a hundred gray spotted cormorants, a northern giant petrel bobbing in the water, a tiny white-flippered penguin), and had hot chocolate.

Back in Christchurch, I spent the night in jail — the former Addington Prison is now a hostel, where guests are "inmates" and the rooms are cell-sized — and then I took the 7 a.m. Coastal Pacific train almost to its northern terminus at Picton, where people transfer to the interisland ferry that brings them to Wellington. But I alighted one stop earlier, at Blenheim, in the heart of the Marlborough wine region. The headphone commentary on the train called Blenheim the "sunshine capital of New Zealand," with 2500 annual hours of sun. "They're wrong," said one passenger who lived there — but that day it was living up to its reputation.

Villa Maria sauvignon blanc has been my everyday white wine since 2003, when it arrested my tongue as part of a tasting flight at a restaurant in Fort Collins, Colorado. From the Blenheim station to Villa Maria's tasting room is a pleasant, if sidewalk-scarce, 7.94 kilometers (9681 steps, 1h 27m), so I made that the afternoon's goal.

Villa Maria ships the basic stuff abroad and keeps the best bottles in the country, so I was able to try a few things I couldn't get elsewhere. I don't usually think of Marlborough beyond sauvignon blanc, but they made an excellent pinot noir and a luscious dessert riesling.

"In two days, it will be our Savalanche," she said as she poured. "It's time to pick all the sauvignon blanc for this year. Picture the road you came in on." There were wineries in all directions. "Now imagine it with trucks all over the place. We don't have traffic lights; we have roundabouts, and sometimes the drivers take them too fast. One time a truck came around — just a normal truck, not a trailer — but he didn't slow down in time. The grapes splattered all over the windshield."

"But I bet they smelled wonderful," I said.

Just south of Villa Maria (4.28 km, 5088 steps, 43m) was Jackson Estates, which I visited purely because Jackson is my four-year-old nephew's name, and then it was a short walk (2.07 km, 2585 steps, 23m) to Blenheim's airport. From here I would fly to Wellington.

I had plenty of time, but I'm in the habit of preparing to enter an airport as I'm walking into it, so I was taking things out of my pockets and reaching to remove my belt, in anticipation of a security checkpoint.

Only there wasn't one. I entered the building, continued about 15 steps, and realized I was in front of one of the boarding gates. A 12-seat Cessna 208 Caravan was whirring its propellers, about to take off for Christchurch. An Air New Zealand plane arrived, its nose almost kissing the glass of the terminal, and it swapped incoming and outbound passengers and was on its way.

My Dash 8 to Wellington did the same. There was no ID check either. For flights with fewer than 90 seats, which are all that operate at Blenheim, they don't bother checking names or belongings.

After a brief delay while they shooed some birds of the runway, we were airborne, and I watched the wheels go into their slot behind the propeller next to me. Seven minutes later, the seatbelt sign went off, as we reached our cruising altitude. Half a second later, it went back on again, and the flight attendant announced the beginning of our descent. We were in the air for just under 16 minutes.

I dined quayside in Wellington and went to bed early, in preparation for the 7:55 a.m. Northern Explorer train to Auckland, an 11-hour ride. For the first three hours we were among flat fields so tidily sown as to make a geometry teacher proud. Then we started to climb, winding our way past farms and crossing viaducts. The highlight of the journey, at its midpoint, was the Raurimu Spiral. To negotiate the steep descent here, the train made a full circle and then tunneled under its own route, after which it proceeded into a horseshoe curve followed by a hairpin turn.

For my last night in Auckland, I dined at Culprit, which happens to be Jackson's favorite word. The menu — mostly fixed, with a couple of options and add-ons — was a series of whimsically improbable combinations. Among the seafood starter was a gazpacho with a mussel-and-squid-ink fritter and smoked yogurt. The kingfish sashimi, with buttermilk and skin-on finger lime, was my favorite part of the meal.

In the second course, the highlight was a cornflake-rolled pig cheek on a stick with piccalilli gel and green apple. A cleansing bite was an airplane-shaped piece of watermelon-and-champagne jelly, with a lime-tarragon dried "sherbet": The instruction was to zoom the plane through the powder and then pop it in. Perhaps the only part of the meal I didn't love was the main course, the tomahawk schnitzel; the breading was overwhelming. But overall, the meal — followed by a Gershwin cocktail at Caretaker, which borrowed the tell-us-what-kind-of-thing-you-like concept (but, fortunately, not the secret-phone-number concept) from the old Milk & Honey in New York — was a lovely way to wrap up my time in New Zealand.

I booked a ticket to Japan with a 21-hour layover in Fiji — why not? Here the humidity — somehow much stronger than in Niue — soaked me as soon as I left the plane in Nadi. There wasn't much time for exploration, but the lively, colorful produce market tickled my nose, eyes, and mouth, with a chicken roti filling me up and coconut water quenching my thirst. Central Nadi is just a few blocks square, but the city sprawls, with a string of villages, and their appealing churches, schools, and eateries, along the airport road.

Ceviche of walu (Spanish mackerel) and avocado seemed to be popular; I chose it for a light dinner last night and there it was on the plane to Tokyo this evening. It's been four years since I was last in my favorite Asian country, and apparently I'm a little rusty; in my haste to make the 8:13 train after exiting customs at 8:09, I bought the wrong train ticket and entered the wrong platform. But here I am now, almost at Shinjuku, and it won't take more than half an eyeful of neon and a whiff of Memory Lane ramen to re-center my psyche.

Go on to Dogojima day 1