samadhisoft.com

Life is good here in New Zealand. it’s 75 F outside and a light breeze is blowing and there’s all the sunlight and beauty anyone could want. Good friends, good tennis and, of course, my beautiful, beloved and very patient wife at home who is holding down the fort for me at the nursery – deep in the midst of the Washington winter – and all so I can be here enjoying all of this.

I am blessed – there is no doubt.

A good friend of mine here in New Zealand sent me a wonderful article this morning:

Forever young: understanding the true presence of Christ helps us become elders, not just elderly.

The truths the author talks about transcend any particular faith but I found them beautiful to read cloaked in Christian clothes as they were.

The essential truth that underlies all faiths can still find expression within them when the faithful seek substance over form and meaning and significance over dogma and conformity.

All faiths wither away over time under the onslaught of those who seek to explain and own their deep truths. But still, still, the light can shine forth from the midst of the edifice occasionally revealing the clear light of those who began the dance.

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My motorcycle adventures continue unabated but I’m at peace with it all. It is all winding up towards a good completion and I am content to wait until all the wheels turn at their own pace.

When I last left off telling the saga of the motorcycle, I’d just been offered $300 USD by the shipping company as compensation for the trouble caused when they lost my title. And, I was wondering what my options were as $300 seemed almost an insult compared to the size of the inconvenience and expenses I’d been cast into.

Well, my decision was to carry the battle to the next level. I requested and obtained the E-mail identity and name of the V.P. at the shipping company who’d decided that $300 was fair compensation and I’d gotten clear on how the shipping company was organized (it’s actually five companies gathered together as one) and I’d determined who the top corporate officers were.

I told the lady who I’d been working with, who was also the individual that misplaced my title, that I was going to carry the matter to a higher level as I thought the $300 was completely inadequate.

My intent was to write to the top officers explaining my problem, mention the V.P. by name and inform them that I intended to setup a website which would appear whenever anyone searched for anything to do with any of the five conjoined companies. A website which would detail, at great length, my altercation with them and how badly I’d been used in the entire business. In the end, the bad publicity would far outweigh the cost to them of having done the right thing by me in the first place.

So, I was sharpening my knives. But, it never came to that because the very next morning, I received a voice-mail from the lady at the shipping company saying that my title, after three weeks of being lost, had been found and was going to be winging it’s way to me via DHL before the day was over.

The title shipped from Los Angeles on December 6th and as of this moment, I know that it is through customs in Auckland and winging its way from Auckland to Christchurch and will probably be in my hands by tomorrow. It’s Sunday here now.

So, that’s all good.

I had the brakes on the m/c inspected last Thursday and they were good so I will have all the paperwork together at last to register the machine here on Monday or Tuesday and be legal on the New Zealand highways. Yahoo!

But, there’s more saga yet…. (No, no, my readers scream!) Yes, yes, I smile. You may all think you saw the fat lady stand up but I assure you, she has not sung yet.

The other day when I was out riding my m/c (quite illegally, I might add), I stopped and when I tried to start it again, it would not start. After a lot of fussing, I got it going again and thought it was just a fluke.

Then, the next day, I drove out to customs by the airport and when I came out, the battery appeared to be dead again. So, I pulled the battery and walked to the local garage and got it recharged and put it back into the m/c and boom – it started right up.

And then the day after that, on Thursday, when I took the machine into the motorcycle place down in New Brighton to have the brake inspection done, I asked the mechanic to check out the alternator to see if it was actually recharging the battery or not. He said the alternator was fine but he thought maybe the battery was bad.

I wasn’t to sure of this as I knew the battery had been replaced within the last six months so I decided to take that under advisement and took off. And, when I took off, my m/c started right up – so I wasn’t worried.

I should have been worried – because 20 minutes later, after picking up something I’d bought on an on-line auction (ironically, a battery charger of all things), I walked outside to depart and the battery appeared to be flat yet again. The m/c would not start. It wouldn’t even turn over. Damn!

So out comes the battery again and off I walk to the local garage for another hour’s worth of battery charging while I wait and drink coffee. Then, I put the battery back in and try it and I get … nothing. Now, I know the battery’s charged and I can barely get a click. Now I’m deeply worried and confused about what’s going on.

Now, over the past few days, as all this has gone on, I’ve made any number of attempts to push-start the bike without success. But now I’m really really stuck so I start thinking about why I haven’t been able to push-start it and I realize what a ninny I’ve been. Like some know-nothing beginner, I’ve been dropping it into first gear and popping the clutch when I’ve tried to start it and, Duh, the engine’s resistance is so high in first gear, all that happens is that the back tire just skids and the engine doesn’t turn over. And, if the engine doesn’t turn over -the m/c cannot start.

So, armed with this semi-profound insight, I push the m/c again and pop it into third gear and VROOM! it starts. Whew, that’s a relief as I’m back on a residential street in Burnside or someplace and I am miles from home and the garage. Thank you, Jesus!

So, back to the garage I go ready to step up and buy that new $99 battery they’d offered me awhile ago. I turn the machine in and they go to work and I kill time inspecting the various m/c’s out in the display room. They’ve got quite a lot of motorcycles there that I’ve never seen in the U.S.

Fifteen minutes later, the mechanic comes out and says, “We have a problem.” Oh, oh. Back we go to see what it is.

He connects the new battery up and shows me that the full required voltage is, indeed, feeding into the starter motor and nothing’s happening. He said he gets the same result with the old (suspect) battery – which may not be so suspect now.

He pops the end off the starter motor while I’m watching and out comes various chunks of what, at one time, were my starter motor brushes. It’s a real mess. He says he can’t understand how anything in that shape could have possibly been starting and I agree. And yet remind him that just this morning, I’d started it at this very shop and rode off. Very weird. Everyone shakes their head.

So, I have to leave the bike there. it’s Thursday afternoon and he’s going to look if he has the necessary brushes and, if not, it’s a simple thing to order them in from Honda down in Dunedin down the coast 100 miles or so. Off on the bus I go.

Friday, I call several times during the day. “Nope, Mate, they haven’t come yet.” Saturday arrives and I’m calling again. Now they are concerned. They are trying to trace the courier package. My brushes and some other parts they’d ordered up from Dunedin by courier seem to have all gone astray.

I mean – what are the chances? Dunedin is 100 miles or so south of Christchurch. These are the only two relatively large cities on the entire island. Surely the courier hasn’t forgotten the way? “Nope, Mate, they’re still not here, sorry.” 3:30 PM Saturday comes and goes. That’s the last possible time they could have been delivered until Monday by courier.

Ah well. it all seems to be part of a larger pattern swirling around this entire motorcycle shipping business. I don’t know what it’s all about but I’m going to go with it gracefully – mostly because I’d look pretty silly and ineffectual shouting and moaning about it, eh?

So, it’s now 5 PM Sunday afternoon on a beautiful day here. My starter motor brushes are, hopefully, somewhere out there on the South Island and I believe my title is in Christchurch by now in a DHL office somewhere in the city. Eventually, they will all creep and crawl their way here and all of this will come together. And, until then, I will wait and enjoy all the other blessings showering down on me.

Sometime, I’ll have to tell you how much fun I’ve been having playing tennis again after all of these years.

Cheers, from paradise.

Well, as you may have noticed, I haven’t been blogging much since I arrived here. I wrote up the trip and my arrival but nothing since then.

It’s been a busy three weeks. A definite flurry of getting reacquainted with friends I haven’t seen since last year. And there’s been a lot of tennis played as the weather, for the most part, has been excellent here.

But, I would say that preeminent thing that has preoccupied me since my arrival has been my motorcycle. I arrived on Tuesday, November 13th, here in New Zealand and my motorcycle was unpacked from its shipping container on Friday, November 23rd – about 10 days later. That’s not bad, considering there was a two week delay getting it aboard a ship in Los Angeles. The late Friday arrival however, meant I couldn’t begin my part of the activities until Monday the 26th.

Bringing a foreign vehicle into New Zealand is not for the faint hearted. Early Monday morning, I was on a bus headed out to near the Christchurch Airport to visit the NZ Biosecurity office there to process paperwork for my motorcycle and to arrange an inspection. Then, with papers from those folks in hand, I went over to the Customs House which is a mile up the road, quite close to the airport, proper. More papers were given and received there.

A lot of the paperwork shuffle was mysterious to me but I gathered that when the entire process was done, Customs would have been assured that Biosecurity had signed off and then customs would sign off as well.

By early afternoon Monday, I had a Biosecurity inspection scheduled at the Hilton Haulage Yard, where my motorcycle crate was, for 9 AM Tuesday morning.

Bright and early Tuesday, armed with all of the previous day’s papers and with a fully charged electric screwdriver for disassembling the crate, I arrived at the Hilton Haulage Yard and was issued with a bright orange vest and taken out to where my crate was. A very nice fellow from Biosecurity was already there looking at other imported goods and after a brief chat and a few photos of the crate prior to unpacking, he allowed as how I could disassemble it and then he’d do the Biosecurity inspection.

The crate was intact. It was sprung just a bit along one vertical seam but essentially, it weathered the trip well.

I employed the electric screwdriver and in about five minutes, we were ready to lift the crate’s top off the motorcycle and see how it had survived the trip. And … the answer was pretty well.

Several of the tie-down ropes had come loose so it was obvious that there had been some serious shaking at some point but with the wheel chocks and the crate so snug around the bike, it had apparently survived undamaged. That was the cause for some smiles.

The Biosecurity inspection was passed with no problems and this then had to be communicated back to the customs folks so they could sign off. Both customs and Biosecurity had to sign off before Hilton Haulage would allow me to remove my stuff from their premises. I called customs and he was working on my paperwork and asked that I come back out to the Customs House to sign more papers and to bring the Biosecurity clearance.

So, another bus ride from southeast Christchurch to downtown, a bus transfer and then out to northwest Christchurch where the Customs House is. I had to sign a paper at customs agreeing that if I sold the motorcycle within NZ for the next two years, I would owe NZ customs duty which had been waived as the machine was my personal property. Papers were shuffled, papers were given and papers were taken away and, at some point, I was back out the door, confused and with different and more papers than I’d had when I’d gone in. Then onto the bus again to return to Hilton Haulage to reassemble my motorcycle. The ladies there accepted all my paperwork and gave me a release to remove my stuff.

The reassembly went well. It took about an hour. In spite of the fact that I’d packed a small set of tools selected to aid in the reassembly, I’d still forgotten to pack a number 8 metric wrench so it was a bit of a tussle with my Leatherman all-purpose tool but, eventually, it was all together. During this, several of the guys that worked at Hilton dropped by to see the assembly and to visit. One of them, Dion Leen, was a motorcycle rider and after awhile, he told me about a fellow named Ian Templeton at “Just Bikes” down in New Brighton who is the guy to know if you need a good reliable motorcycle mechanic. That was a piece of good luck and I wrote the information down.

It was getting around to about 4 PM when I got everything assembled. During this time, the fellow, Trent, I’d sold my motorcycle crate to on TradeMe (New Zealand’s equivalent to EBay in the US), had come by to collect the crate which I’d disassembled for him into all flat pieces. Trent was quite nice and gave me a ride to a local gas station and back so I could fill my small gasoline container (shipped for just this purpose) with fuel so I could put it in the motorcycle which had been drained for shipping.

Finally the moment came. Had I connected the battery right, was the battery charged, had I jiggled the wrong wires, had I blown any fuses, had I connected the fuel lines correctly. Do you think I was worried about any of these things? Naw!!! I turned the key and cranked it with three of Hilton’s finest standing as witnesses.

And it cranked, and it cranked, and it cranked. I knew it’s a hard-starter after being off for a few weeks. And, I’d had to re-add the gasoline as well. But, I was beginning to wonder if it would catch before the battery expired. Finally, it coughed. Then it ran a few licks twice. And, then it caught and ran. Hoo Ya! I’ve got to tell you, the alternatives were not pretty.

I had a lot of stuff to carry. Sharon’s helmet, a box of books we’d shipped in the crate, the little gas container and my bag with all my papers. The luggage compartment was already full with rags, ropes, tools and manuals. So, after a lot of strapping down and checking, I put on my coat and helmet and waved a goodbye to Dion and the other guys there and took off for my first motorcycle ride on the other side of the highway from what I’ve always known.

And, it wasn’t bad. When you drive a right-hand drive car, it seems very weird because everything in the car is reversed as well as everything outside. And, you have to keep very clear about the fact that NOW, most of the car is to your left so you don’t sideswipe vehicles, bicycles or people as you drive. With a motorcycle, much of this goes away. The motorcycle, itself, is the same as you’ve only known so all you have to deal with is the fact that you are on the other side of the road and that’s really not much of a problem.

The truth was, I was a lot more worried as I began my ride home in a light rain, that I wasn’t legal to be on the New Zealand roads. You see, I’d been through Biosecurity and Customs but I hadn’t yet dealt with New Zealand Land Transport. Those are the folks that issue license plates,isues registrations and verify the road-worthiness of all vehicles here in New Zealand. So, riding down the road with Washington State license plates on the back, I felt like a big target that was flashing, “Here I am, illegal as hell, riding down your highways – come and get me.”

But, the trip went well and in 20 minutes, I pulled into the garage space under our building and two days of fun were done.

But, there was more, much more, fun to be had in the near future.

Prior to my departure from the U.S., there were rumblings that my motorcycle title had been mislaid by the shipping company. I’d had to FedX my original ownership title to Global Transport in Seattle, the company I’d contracted with to do the shipping. They, in turn, had sent it down to Los Angeles where Conterm, who Global had contracted with, would show it to U.S. Customs who needed to see it before they’d allow the motorcycle to be shipped out of the country. Apparently, it made it to U.S. Customs and then back to Conterm. But, after that, the trail gets hazy.

At first there was a delay getting it back, and then there was a claim that it had been sent by mistake to the New Zealand associates of Conterm and then, after I arrived here and continued to press them to find the lost title, it was finally admitted that it had, indeed, been put into the wrong DHL packet somehow and shipped off – and now no one could find it.

Well, this has turned out to be a enormous problem for me. New Zealand Land Transport absolutely will not allow a newly imported vehicle to be registered here unless they see the original title to prove that the importer owns the vehicle.

So, here I am, in New Zealand for three months with a motorcycle I’ve shipped half way around the world and I cannot legally drive it here until I come up with a title. The U.S. authorities in Washington State where we’ve applied for a duplicate title, estimate six to eight weeks. New Zealand Land Transport, where I’ve applied to to allow me to circumvent this problem on this end, say nothing can be done in less than four to six weeks.

Just today, Conterm, who has admitted in an E-mail to losing the document and with whom I’ve been going back and forth for over a week regarding compensation for my losses here, have finally allowed as how they will pay my expenses – wait for it… – up to $300 US. Whooo-ee. Now that’s a generous deal. Just today, I paid $60 NZ to get a paper notarized here as part of sorting this mess out.

I’d asked then to consider reimbursing me for what it would cost me to rent a motorcycle or a car here for the period I cannot ride the motorcycle and this was their response. Motorcycles rent for no less than $150 NZ per day here. Cars can, perhaps be found for $25 to $50 per day. Meanwhile, I am sitting here with a machine I cannot use while my three months in NZ are ticking away. NOT GOOD.

$1500 US to ship it. Many hours to make the crate. Tons of planning and now I have a 450 pound steel and aluminum nick-nack in my garage here and no transport. And Conterm in a Multinational Corporation – and they can offer me $300 US. Amazing. I am wondering what my options here are.

Well, it’s been 15 days since I last posted and half a world away. I’ve been here for a week settling in and, frankly, procrastinating about posting. So much stuff has happened, it’s seemed daunting to wade into it all.

For those of you with short attention spans, the executive summary is that everything’s OK – you can go now 🙂 .

So, I left the Seattle area on November 6th and flew down to LAX and then got a rental car and drove down to Aliso Viejo in Orange County where my son, Dan, and his family live. I spent three days at their place and this is all written up here in “At Dan’s Place“.

After three days at Dan’s place, I spent a fourth evening at our friend Lare-Dog’s place out at Silverado Canyon where he lives in an RV. On the last day at Dan’s, he, Lare-dog and myself spent the day riding around Southern Orange County in Lare-dog’s restored 1951 Chevy. What a great trip down memory lane that was. It made me remember growing up in Southen California and being a beach bum when I was younger. It made me remember going to the beach, summer days, cruising around, drive-in theaters, drive-in hamburger stands and the 60’s. In those days, the sun was a friend.

At some point, we stopped at a great Mexican restaurant along the coast called Olamendis. As we walked in and looked around, I remembered the many long and wistful on-line conversations among American expatriots now living in New Zealand about missing Mexican restaurants and Mexican food. So I shot a lot of fun photos of Olimendis for them.

The big ride-around and our visit to Olimendis along with all the photos are written up here in “A ’51 Chevy and Olamendis“.

When I left Lear-dog’s place the next morning, I headed back into the heart of Orange County and caught the 405 freeway and headed up towards Los Angeles. That route takes you through Long Beach where I grew up and lived until we moved down to Orange County in 1980. Curious, I jumped off on 7th Street and pulled into my Alma Mater, California State University at Long Beach.

I’ve done this before – like every few years when I’m down. And it is always a trip down memory lane for me and a feeling of wonder both. I remember all the places that amazing things happened to me on Campus and I also see all the buildings and development that weren’t there when I attended from ’72 to ’76.

From there, I drove further into Long Beach on city streets and passed several of the places I lived in the 70’s. It is amazing how memory fades. I’m losing how to get from place to place there now. Those maps we all build in our minds of places that we so take for granted have started to seriously fade. I had to wander to look to recognize things so I’d know where to go next.

And, then when I found the place I was looking for, it was so small. The streets seemed smaller and dingier. Across from where we lived when Dan was in 3rd grade, there’s an elementary school. I remember so clearly going over and meeting his third grade class and his teacher and we took pictures which I think we still have somewhere. When you sat on our front porch, the entire school yard was just across the street and on the far side, a long ways away, there were the permanent school buildings.

Now, there are temporary school trailers (the kind that inevitably become permanent, if a neighborhood is struggling) right up against the school fence all along our side of the street and everything looks crowded and small.

I remember how happy we all were when I graduated college in 1976 and my first wife, Rose, her sister Ernie and myself all sat smiling and all dressed up on the front steps there. And the neighborhood was full of light and it was a good place to live and to be.

Now the people seem furtive and the neighborhood is a lot more run-down. The light I remember seems to have fled the place.

From there, I drove over to Long Beach Blvd, a major north-south artery connecting downtown Long Beach with North Long Beach, or Northtown as we called it then. I decided to drive up the boulevard all the way to the areas I lived in before I joined the service in 1966. All my time from fourth grade until I went off in the Military was spent there. I knew from previous trips what I would find. The town I grew up in, which was blue-collar white, is gone. All the faces now are brown and black and it looks like a war zone to my eyes. Ten foot fences with barbed wire surround the schools I attended. And if you drive by one of your old houses, you’d better not linger too long looking at it least a gang-banger comes out and asks you, “What for“.

But, I didn’t make it that far. Even half way up to Northtown, it got too desperate and too raw and I decided I just wanted to go and not destroy any more memories. So I jumped back onto the 405 and headed towards Los Angeles again and lunch with my long time friend and college buddy Freddie.

At some point, I passed a sign that said I was now in Los Angeles proper, population 3.7 million or so. And Los Angeles is just a small piece of all of it. From the home of the Valley Girls in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles to the beginning of the Camp Pendelton Marine Base south of Nixon’s Western Whitehouse town of San Clemente, it is solid unrelenting people and concrete. And every year, it gets more and more densely entwined and relentlessly expands into every empty lot and every unclaimed hillside. The smart and affluent ones move upscale to the newer areas and the less affluent and the less intelligent stay behind and city spreads and leaves a slow decades long type of living gangrene behind. It changes so slowly that the people who live there can hardly see it. But, when you’ve been away, it breaks your heart.

In southern Orange County, some of the hills are still not developed or they are being retained as wildlife corredors. Dan and I took his son, Cody, on walks in some of these areas. I pointed out to Dan, that beneath all the glitter of the California lifestyle, the freeways, the shopping centers and the endless distractions, it’s just a coastal scrub desert. If it were not for the huge amounts of water being brought in and the trucks and trains running food and supplies in night and day, the number of people who could actually make a living off this land would be small, indeed. I told him it all hangs by a thread and that he should pay attention to how vulnerable he and those he loves are if the systems that are Los Angeles and Southern California ever begin to shut down. Mad Max won’t begin to describe it.

Having said all of that, we’re having a beautiful California-like evening here in Christchurch tonight. It was a hot afternoon and I went down and practiced tennis and then swam in the lap-pool. Now, I’ve opened the west facing curtains since the suns gone down and I’m sitting here shirtless typing. The sky is a dusky yellow fading up into the lightest of blues over the Southern Alps in the far distance. Around me is the South Island; half the size of Colorado and with only a million souls, total. Indeed, I’m in the center of the island’s largest city with 340,000 folks. It is paradise in the deep South Pacific. I’m am very blessed to be here.

But, I digress. So I continued up and met Freddie and we had a great lunch and drank endless cups of coffee and talked about all the stuff that we always seem to talk about – politics, religion, meaning and purpose. He’s a brilliant man and I am proud to call him my friend.

Then to LAX, turn in the car, check my checked luggage, call my sweetie-pie wife and wait to fly off to the other side of the world.

Next: “New Zealand Arrival“.

The Flight from LAx to Auckland was about as I remembered it. I drank so much coffee talking with Freddie in Los Angeles that I think it prevented me from sleeping as well as I have on earlier trips – but it wasn’t too bad.

The cabin lights came on after a long and semi-restless night and breakfast was served and the sun began to light the sky on the window on my side of the place as we began our decent into Auckland after crossing the entire Pacific Ocean. A distance I remember it took me over two weeks to cross on the ship, the Direct Tui, when I came here on her in 2003.

It was my third time to do it but there’s still something purely magical to me to step into the line for citizens and residents of New Zealand rather than into the lines for everyone else. It is always the first caress I get that tells me that this place is now mine. The usual questions from the NZ customs agent and then off to collect my luggage and answer more questions.

“Oh, you work on a nursery, eh? Well, take your bags to line C and follow the directions there.” Line C took me to some nice folks who took all of my luggage apart again. It had all been gone through thoroughly in Los Angeles as they looked for bombs or whatever. Now their interest was Bio-Security. To make sure I wasn’t bringing in dirt caught in the treads of my shoes or food items that were not canned or sealed. I didn’t see the search in L.A. but I got to watch this one and they we nice folks. We talked and joked about things and, before long, everything was sort-of stuffed back into my luggage and I was free to check it in again. Remember, I was only in Auckland at this point. I still had another 2 hour flight down to Christchurch on the south Island before I was done traveling so I had to check it in for the Auckland to Christchurch flight.

Luckily, I was able to check my bags for the Christchurch flight at the International Terminal where I’d come in so that I didn’t have to schlep them over to the Domestic Terminal as we sometimes have to do.

So, free of my big luggage and with just my small hand-carry, I followed the blue line from the International Terminal to the Domestic Terminal and enjoyed my first morning back in New Zealand.

The first half of the flight to Christchurch is always boring as you are over the sea but then, later, you begin to pass down the length of a least part of the South Island. Mountains give way to hills and hills to plains and all the while you are remembering maps and trying to place yourself based on what you see.

I have a special mission this trip and that is to begin to zero in on areas not too far from Christchurch were we can find heavily forested land out in the countryside not more than two hours drive from the city.

So, I was gawking out the windows and shooting pictures of likely looking places and thinking that later I could use Google Earth to match of the patterns of brown and green in my images so I could reconstruct where exactly I was when I shot the photos.

20 photos later (I’ll spare you the other 19), we were on the ground and my friends, Tobi and Alex were there just as they had promised to pick me up (oh, beautiful people!).

We dropped my luggage off at the apartment and went off to The Lotus Heart restaurant on Colombo and ate lunch and talked and caught up on things. What a lovely ‘welcome back’. Then, they had errands and they brought me back to my place and came up for a few minutes and we all looked around and then they took off.

Looking around – that was nice. My beloved was here for a month back in August and did some interior decorating so there was lots to see. New thangkas on the walls, some new furniture, everything newly painted – it was beautiful.

And how different it all was from when I arrived last year and had to find temporary accomodations while I waited for the renters in our apartment to move out so I could take possession. Everything was in a turmoil and temporary and I didn’t get into the apartment until December 22nd after having arrived around November 10th.

This year, it couldn’t have been any more different. A beautiful apartment was waiting; warm, decorated, inviting and ours. It was a big pleasure to just look around and contemplate the next three months.