Toll Insanity

Last night I went for a little trip up country. This involved using the one and only toll road in the whole of NZ. Using this road makes me angry, firstly because toll roads are a crime against motorists who have already paid for the road through fuel taxes and so on, and secondly because the toll collection system was designed by a moron. Japan knows how to do toll roads. Obviously the people who designed the toll collection system got together and asked themselves "whats the most important thing to consider when you're fleecing motorists?" Answer...make it as painless as possible. While people may not like paying Y700 to go on the highway they tend to put up with it because it's easy. Just slow down, toss a few coins at the old dude in the box then mash the gas pedal to the floor and off you go. If that's a little too much like hard work you can eliminate the tossing and braking parts and get an ETC card which bills you electronically as you blast through the toll gate. While you are justified in moaning about the cost you can't complain that they make it difficult. Here in NZ it's totally the opposite. At $2, the toll to use the Northern gateway is a bargain. Great new highway, designer bridges, sculpted native bush,  scenic landscape and a gleaming new tunnel make this a nice bit of road for very little money . Where it all comes crashing down is the hoops you must jump through to pay that money.

NZTA offers several ways to pay...all of which are a complete pain in the arse! You can use your mobile phone and a credit card but, as doing this while driving is illegal, you must exit the highway and stop. You could pay online but in order to do that you would have to find the internet so you must exit the highway and stop. You could also pay at the kiosks which are at either end of the toll road but as they are located some way off the road you must exit the highway and stop. Are you starting to see a pattern emerging here? It seems to have eluded the Muppet's in control of this road that the whole idea of a highway is that you do not have to stop for anything. I imagine they were possibly inmates of a mental institution and that the blueprint was drawn up on an big piece of cardboard using crayons.  Obviously a electronic gadget geek was on the committee as was some faceless bureaucrat who saw the opportunity to do some empire building. As they were desperate to avoid having any human component in the system it was decided to provide a vending machine type thing to deal with those stick in the mud, flat earth types who insisted on paying with actual money. Not for us a simple grandad in a box to take your coins with a cheery greeting....we get a touch screen robot which, as all sci-fi geeks know, is way more efficient and cool. Except it isn't. What it is in fact is confusing and irritating. I used the kiosk last night and paid by the archaic method of putting a single gold coloured coin in a slot. This procedure involved exiting the highway and parking the car in a car park. I then had to exit the car and walk over to the kiosk where the machine is located. Next you wait in a line of equally annoyed and confused people. When you do get to the machine you discover that you need to know the registration number of your car to make this thing work. As the car park is quite large this tends to involve a lot of shouting as people scream out letters and digits to each other due to the fact that the cars number plate isn't actually visible form the kiosk. As you go to type in your reg number on the touch screen you will find that it doesn't work that well due to the last user  having smeared grease all over it from a bucket of KFC that he was eating before he had to exit the highway and stop. After depositing your coin in the slot you are issued with a receipt...that is if the paper hasn't run out. Or the ink. Or that it just doesn't work. Which is what happened to me. Not only did this infernal machine swallow the first coin without crediting it, it refused to print out the reciept after the second coin was sacrificed. The next step it seems is to leave the receipt in the slot at the bottom of the machine. Throwing it on the ground also appears to be a popular choice judging from the amount of them littering the kiosk. Which is certainly better than having another useless piece of paper cluttering up the interior of your car. As you turn to leave you will inevitably be stopped by a confused European tourist and asked for instructions on how to work the damn thing. You are now free to continue your journey, or rather join the queue of cars waiting to continue their journey.

If this sounds like an awful lot of cocking about that's because it is. No wonder then that a large percentage of people using this road  say to themselves "fuck all that!!" and just drive on through without stopping. This works particularly well if you are driving someone Else's car. A spy camera on a pole takes a nice picture of the car's number plate and you have 5 days to pay the toll by credit card. No bill is sent and most people forget to do it, caught up as they are on the treadmill that is modern life. This is where the bureaucratic evil empire swings into action. Admin fees are charged and reminders sent out. If you don't pay promptly the penalties skyrocket. If  the driver of your car was not you but was in fact your cousin from Namibia for example, you can transfer liability to him. But only after you fill out a tedious form supplying his details to the toll Nazi's and and having it witnessed by a Justice of the peace. JP's are about as hard to find as rocking horse shit these days on account that nobody wants to do this thankless unpaid job. The ones that are willing tend to be about 70 years old and are available for witnessing statements for about 2 hours a day, usually between morning tea and lunchtime. Except Fridays as they have to tend to their rose garden. Or weekends as the grandchildren might be visiting. In short, if you're a 9 to 5 working stiff, you're screwed. Seeing as filling out forms and taking time off work to run around town looking for a JP, a 50c stamp, an envelope and a postbox is even more of a waste of your life, some people just pay the fine to make it go away. Others just ignore it until it gets passed on the the courts where it then wastes valuable time and resources. The admin and enforcement costs are so great that the road barely makes any money. The whole thing is a disaster from start to finish. So next time you come to a toll gate on the expressway say a big cheery Mai Do! (if in Kansai) to the grandad in the box and be satisfied in the knowledge that you're being robbed in the most efficient way there is all while staying firmly rooted in the past. Something Japan excells at.

KE35

 

Here's something I bought last week in an internet auction. It's a 1978 Toyota Corolla SR hardtop KE35. It is pretty much identical to my first car except for the colour (my one was red) and the Alloy wheels. It has had only 2 owners from new, the last one had it since 1980. It has travelled only 77,000kms. Cars like these are rapidly increasing in price these days as young guys looking for something different and cool are snapping them up. Finding an original low mileage 70's car is near on impossible now so when I saw this one I figured that it would probably be the last opportunity to own such a car for a reasonable price.

These Corollas were assembled here in NZ which is both a good and bad thing. The Aussie/NZ versions of this car were different from the US/Japan ones which had tacky interiors and hideous front and rear styling. We got nicer seats and carpets and proper chrome bumpers with out any of those silly rubber bits that were stuck onto the American ones. The down side is that they were assembled in a miserable place called Thames in a factory built from bits of pine trees and sheets of corrugated iron. The build quality was variable and the process for painting the cars produced here was abysmal and the cars started rusting from the day they rolled off the line. Be that as it may however, the Kiwi version is to my mind the prettiest looking Corolla ever made. The styling of the car is pure early 70's American . The roofline is Ford Torino as is the instrument cluster, the rear fenders and bootlid  look like a 74 Mustang and the quarter windows and front grille are replicas of the Australian Ford Falcon XA coupe. The vents in the bonnet and the frameless doors are classic design features of the muscle cars from the US. The main difference between them is the matter of size. Being a sensible Japanese car its a lot smaller of course. The 3K engine is a mere 1200cc. There also little in the way of extra options....you have to change gear and wind up the windows all by yourself. So, it was a sensible car for the sensible man who wanted the look of a fire breathing muscle car but without the fuel bills and the parking hassles.

Thirty four years on and these cars still turn heads, all the more so now because there are so few left. This one is 100% original which makes it even more special. The interior is in mint condition and there is nothing missing or broken. There are a few minor rust sports and the paintwork needs some attention so I will probably repaint it later this year. At first I wasn't too struck on the green colour but it's growing on me and I will probably keep it that colour.  As a coincidence this car has been living for 32 years at a house just down the street from the place where I worked when I had my first car. Getting into it and driving it past my old workplace was like being transported back to a time when I was 18. The sound and feel brought back so many memories. For that reason alone I feel it was worth buying this KE35 coupe for $3600....exactly the same price that I paid for the first one all those years ago! Spooky eh?

 

Summer Roundup

It seems that December and January have passed by really quickly. I have not put anything up here due to these reasons. 1 The weather this summer has sucked. 2 Business has been really good which has taken most of my time. 3 I couldn't be bothered. Anyway, here's a summary of what we've been up to....

 Christmas..... a lot of relatives showed up. My sister and a friend came from Melbourne, my brother from Wellington and my cousin from Gisborne and an Aunt and uncle from Ireland. Turkey and Ham and Mince pies were consumed in great numbers.

 Milking cows....Shizuka got a chance to experience the glamour of the dairy industry at my Cousins farm in Northland. Now she knows why they make so much money!

 Barbecuing...In between the rain and wind we have been doing this a lot.

 A bit of sailing.....an overnight to Great Barrier Island and an evening harbour cruise.

 Buying Landrover parts....for my old series 2A Landrover. This involved 2 day trips, one to Glenbrook south of Auckland and to Whangarei 2 hours north.

A day trip to Rangitoto Island.....to celebrate Shizuka's 11th anniversary of arriving in Auckland. We took the volcanic explorer tour to the top and checked out the lava fields and the old beach houses.

The Value Chain

The other day I bought a new TV. I didn't want to buy a new TV but events have forced my hand. Firstly, like Japan, NZ will change to digital transmission next year. That means my old glass CRT TV will be useless unless I spend $150 on a decode box thing. Seeing the TV's probably not even worth half that it's seems pointless to do this. Secondly, a local electronics store ran a special deal last week. I bought a brand new 47inch HD LCD which has the digital decoder inside it for ...NZ$499. Now it's a no-name Chinese brand but it has a full warranty and service backup. Five hundred bucks for a huge flat screen TV! It's not that long ago when these things were $5000. It's mind boggling how the prices of some highly engineered things can fall so steeply when at the same time the price of something as simple as a tomato can be heading for the stratosphere. I mentioned this to some friends at a gathering over some beers and it led to a rather interesting conversation. These guys range from a bit younger than me to quite a bit older. Some are employee's and some, like me, are self employed. One thing they all have in common is that they acknowledge the fact that the world has changed hugely in the last 3 years. 

 

Everybody thinks of September 2001 as a turning point of sorts. That's what the media have been trumpeting for years. But for most of us the only difference it made was that getting on an airplane became an even greater pain in the ass than it was before. 2008 is the year that matters to my group of mates. Before Lehman and sub prime and the credit crunch, most of these guys had plans for the future. These ranged from buying houses and building boats to cutting back on the amount of time they spent working and investing for their retirement. 2008 changed everything. All those plans have had to be modified due to plunging incomes, employment uncertainty and financial loss. We now tend to think in terms of before and after....as one friend put it "the world fell apart". It's taken 3 years for these guys to realise that the next 20 years are going to be nothing like the last 20. Everything has been turned on it's head. Things that were expensive luxury items have become cheap while basic staple food has risen significantly. Interest rates are at historic lows while our currency defies gravity. Tradespeople have jacked up their hourly labour rates but yet they all complain that they are not making any money. The rise in price of commodities like oil and milk and rice are squeezing people hard and making them nervous. There has been an enormous disconnect and uncoupling of things that were presumed to be set in stone.  All over the world, it's slowing dawning on people that things ain't what they used to be and will never be again. If you don't believe that think of it this way.... 10 years ago, what would you have said if someone told you that you would be able to buy a top of the line TV for the same price as 2 weeks worth of groceries.

MMP

MMP....A lottery

When you divide your time between two countries you naturally end up doing Lot's of comparisons. The differences are stark. Japan has it's huge population of 127 million while NZ is relatively empty with only 4 million. One is heavily industrialised while the other is basically a glorified farm. Race, language, culture, history, attitude....all poles apart.  Physically speaking there's some similarities....both consist of a string of islands in the Pacific Ocean. Roughly the same land area, at the same latitude North and South with similar volcanoes and earthquakes thrown in. For me however the greatest similarity is the way the people of these two countries have buried their heads in the sand when it comes to the choosing who should run the country. NZ can be summed up with this....A country with tremendous potential which will never be achieved due to the fact that it's people insist on letting a bunch of dummies run the place. For Japan it's like this......A country which achieved it's full potential 20 years ago and is now in decline due to the fact that it's people insist on letting a bunch of dummies run the place.

The reason for this particular observation is that it is election time here in NZ. Yes it's that time that comes around every 3 years where the elite try to persuade the peasantry that they actually live in a democracy and that what they think really matters. I don't ever bother to vote here as I don't want to participate in this farce. People say to me "if you don't vote, you can't complain".  Whenever anyone says this to me I want to punch them in the face and scream "wake up you moron" at them. This statement is not only a worn out cliche but is completely wrong. By not voting I have more right to complain about the result than someone who has.  If you vote you are supporting the system and directly influencing the result....therefore you cannot complain as you got the result you contributed to. By voting you give politicians a mandate to pass all sorts of laws while agreeing that you will only hold them accountable on a day 3 years in the future. It's not that I am anti democracy, it's just that I don't care for our style of democracy. Foreigners who live in japan often complain that they pay taxes but aren't allowed to vote but really, would you want to? It's even more of a scam than NZ. There are parties within parties and anyway it's all irrelevant as it's the bureaucrats that actually run the country. If I had the right to vote in Japan I'd sell it for the price of a bottle of Kirin beer and consider it a good deal.

Aiding and abetting NZ's politicians in this smoke and mirrors show is our fantastically ridiculous electoral system called Mixed Member Proportional or MMP. Now most people have never heard of MMP. It was dreamt up shortly after World War II by the victorious allies. Fed up with the German's penchant for marching all over Europe, the big winners decided that an electoral system that kept Germany weak and divided was the best insurance to avoid a re-run. (Remember, Hitler was voted into power). Voila...MMP was created. As Italy was guilty by association, MMP was also forced onto the Italians. 65 years of peace in Europe and 60 Italian coalition governments since 1946 show that it's worked a treat. Yep...Coalition governments are the name of the game under MMP so you know that another Mr. Hitler isn't comming up through that system.  Japan dodged this particular bullet when the Americans decided to run Japan as their own colony and appointed General MacArthur as head honcho. He went on to become the best leader Japan ever had and set the country up for great things.  The only other place of note to use MMP is Venezuela where El Presidente Hugo Chavez seems to be having a lot of fun with it.

For some weird and unexplained reason New Zealand adopted this insane system of it's own free will in 1996. (the huge disinformation campaign that was run at the time may have had something to do with it). At the best of times coalitions tend to be unstable marriages of convenience that are cobbled together by some unlikely bedfellows. They tend to have uninspirational leaders and avoid contentious issues in case one of the partners gets upset and throws their toys out of the cot. Middle of the road Mediocrity flourishes under this system but ironically, MMP provides a home for extremists, personality cults and one  trick pony parties too. The party list vote is the real joker in the pack with MMP. I won't bore anyone with the details but under MMP, people who get soundly rejected by their electorates can slide on into parliament on their party list. Cannabis smoking hippies, militant unionists, professional protesters, radical free marketeers and Maori separatists have all made it to the big time much to the disgust of the average Kiwi who has taken 15 years to wake up to the fact. Another perverse consequence is the advent of minority governments, something which is not supposed to happen under a proportional system. Election night is more like watching the lotto results as nobody knows how things are going to shake down. Even after all the smoke has cleared the results can be mind boggling. Parties who get 4.9% of the popular vote can get nothing while parties with 2% can end up with 3 or 4 seats! Under MMP the average voter has no clue who will actually benefit from his vote so the parties can fill their ranks with talentless dummies. Negotiations and horse trading on forming a government can go on for weeks. Principles and promises get dumped rather quickly when the prospect of a ministerial limousine is dangled. History teachers can become finance ministers and lawyers can run hospitals. One party managed to stitch together an arrangement that lasted 9 years and which rammed through some highly unpopular and controversial laws in order to keep it's coalition partners happy and itself in power.

Elections are always a circus of false promises and bribes but under MMP the promises and bribes must be so much bigger as you have to appeal not only to your voter base but to those of your potential coalition partners. This has led to some ruinous policy and bad legislation which breed huge problems for future generations. Our welfare system is unaffordable. Our superannuation system is unsustainable. Our immigration policy undermines our culture and traditions and our education system is a failure. Our current PM is a likeable chap who has spent the last 3 years smiling and waving at everyone while telling them that everythings going to be OK and that we don't need to change anything. He's smiling because he's figured out a couple of things. NZ doesn't have a written constitution so there's nothing that isn't negotiable. There is apparently a bill of rights but nobody knows what it says because nobody has read it. So governments can make things up as they go along. 

There are only a handful of things Kiwis really care about. 

1 The right to go to the beach and catch a fish. 

2 The right to see All blacks rugby games live on free to air TV. 

3 The right to speculate in residential real estate and pay no tax on the profits. 

4 The right to watch Coronation Street (a long running British soap opera) on prime time TV

These things are taken as sacred and God given. Any government that messes with these rights will find itself out on it's ass in short order. If it didn't mess with these things a single party government could do whatever else it liked....Want to turn the country into a Republic?....No problem. A new flag perhaps?....lets have a design competition. Our current PM knows he could slip a lot of things through that would be good for the country but he won't rock the boat because he knows that in MMP coalition governments the tail wags the dog and if you want to stick around in his job it's better to do nothing.  Our PM is going to smile and wave his way into a second term because he knows this.

RWC

Opening night

It's that time here in NZ again. November is my favourite month here. It's starting to warm up but it's not yet sunburn season. The nights are cool so sleeping isn't difficult. The mosquito's and other such bugs are not around yet but the days are stretching out so we have fired up the barbecue a few times already. Everyone seems to be in a happier frame of mind at this time of year, even more so this year as the All Blacks did manage to win the Rugby World Cup. 

The whole RWC thing went off with out too many hitches it seems. Opening night was something special with huge fireworks on the water front and at Eden park. We saw it all go down from Shane's Yacht, floating just off Westhaven along with everyone else who owns a boat in this town. The harbour was packed with everything from dinghy's to cruiseships but that was nothing compared to the crowd on the waterfront. Half the city turned out to see the opener and as a result of the Auckland Mayor, Lefty Len, and his transport people urging them to use public transport, most of them did. The woeful train and bus system had a meltdown while the few that did use their cars found lots of available parking and a smooth run into and out of the city. Once again, it has been proven beyond doubt...Public transport does not and will never work in Auckland. The people here live in detached houses mostly on plots of land larger than 600sq Metres. People here can't believe that in Japan people can have houses on 100sqM. Just walking around the city shows anybody with eyes and a brain in their head that Auckland is not Tokyo or London or anywhere else that has a working train system. The city is big, spread out and is built around 2 harbours and a mountain range. The population is just not dense enough whatever manipulated statistics our socialist mayor and his left wing cronies have put about. These people want us to believe they are competent enough to run the city when it's glaringly obvious to everyone that they couldn't even organise a fireworks show properly. Faced with a potential international PR disaster, the national government stepped in and booted Lefty Len and the Auckland council into touch,(to use a rugby term) and took over all the arrangements for the rest of the tournament. The IRB who own the competition did not earn much admiration or respect either with their propensity for dispensing fines for small infringements of their rules. One player copped a fine for wearing a non approved mouth guard. Their over zealous policing of the sponsorship arrangements didn't earn them many friends here.

 Now I'm not a rugby fan and I only watched the final but I believe the event was good for the country and all the talking heads on TV agree it was the best RWC yet. International Jet setters flew in for it, Mega yachts tied up for it. Everybody got into the spirit and there were national flags flying everywhere. Even the most obscure rugby playing countries like Namibia and Romania were well supported by the locals. The Japan team was particularly welcomed as it is full of Kiwis anyway. Even though they did not win any games they are a popular team here and everyone is sure that with a bit more time and money they will progress. 

Even though Rugby is a fairly violent sport it seems the fans are not. There were very few arrests and no incidents of any note. Completely different story from soccer where hooligans in Europe regularly cause riots and rivalry between clubs is anything but friendly. It's enough to safely conclude that Rugby people are of a higher class than soccer types!

Foreigner Rule #1

The other day I read an article in the Japan Times by an American guy who has lived in Japan a long time. In it he was moaning about the fact that despite his long residency and participation in his local community he is still seen as an outsider and a foreigner. Consequently his few long term friends are all fellow ex-pats. He feels that just because he owns a Japanese passport that the native people here should accept and embrace him as one of their own. It seems to me that anybody who thinks this way really needs to wake up and face reality.

The first thing that I learned about spending any time in this country is this.... 

 You are not Japanese and you never will be. 

You can think of it as the golden rule or being a foreigner 1.01.... 

This can be kind of difficult to grasp for westerners who come from countries where there are lots of immigrants. In NZ people show up from all kinds of countries and cultures and after being here for about 5 minutes proclaim themselves as Kiwis. Buy yourself an All Blacks shirt and we tend to throw in a passport with it. Australia is much the same...learn how to drink their awful beer and you've pretty much passed the citizenship test. Anybody can lay claim to being a Kiwi/Aussie/Canadian/American and therefore, these words have ceased to have any real meaning. A brilliant example of this is an idiot named Hameed Sooden who went to Iraq a few years ago to save some souls for his activist christian type group and got himself kidnapped by some members of an  Islamic extremist type group. This was big news here in NZ because he was described as a New Zealander. The local media here had a field day over this poor Kiwi who was in great danger. But then a few facts came out. Mr Sooden is an ethnic Indian who is a Canadian citizen. His claim to being a Kiwi came from the fact that he has (in his Canadian passport no doubt) a NZ residency permit. His occupation was "a student". In short he is a foreigner with no connection to this country who came here to exploit our lax immigration rules and suckle on the cow that is the NZ taxpayer. He could have asked for help from the Indian or Canadian governments but of course he choose to sponge off the easiest one...NZ. When rescued in Baghdad by the British SAS he distinguished himself by refusing to co-operate with his rescuers and displaying a stunning amount of ingratitude to them. Sorry....Hameed Sooden is not a Kiwi in my book and should not be allowed to pass himself off as one. He is in fact an international mongrel/hybrid who flits from one nationality to another whenever it suits him. It's a shame that the Jihadist's didn't lop his head off. The Japanese have kept things clear and simple while we have devalued and debased our national identities by allowing all and sundry to adopt them at the drop of a hat.

Japan is not like this. It doesn't matter that you have lived there for 50 years, that your wife is Japanese, you speak fluent Japanese, the company you work for is Japanese, you live in a traditional Japanese house and wear a kimono on your day off. You can try all you want to look/sound/smell/behave Japanese but you won't succeed. You are and always will be a gaijin.  Now lots of people get all pissed off by this and feel that this is a bad thing but I don't agree with that. When you hear of someones nationality being described as Japanese you are in no doubt as to what to expect that person to look/sound/act like. I am in no doubt that this is a good thing. 

Missing the Point

Today some fearless internet warrior who goes by the name "anonymous" left a comment to the effect that he didn't like my approach to being a foreigner in Japan. He went further by comparing me to a Chinese peasant and asked if I spat on the platform. (No, I didn't spit on it like a Chinese peasant nor did I urinate on it like a Japanese salaryman)

OK, whatever, it's not like I actually give a fuck what he thinks but some of the things he said confirm that he missed the point I was making by a spectacular margin. So for people just like "anonymous" here it is in plain language.  

Life anywhere is full of pros and cons. Being a foreigner in Japan carries with it a lot of negatives. On the other hand there are some positives. If you don't take advantage of the positives you will end up with a life where the negative outweighs everything else. Being a foreigner here means you do not have to conform with a lot of the pointless rules and bullshit conventions that the Japanese have to. They don't expect you to. And that's the point. You can pick and choose which ones work for you and just ignore those that you don't like. That way you have a counterbalance to all the disadvantages and discrimination that you will encounter here. And to my friend "anonymous", the word is "stereotypical" not "prototypical". I do hope you weren't teaching English when you lived here.

Gaijin-San

Gaijin-San

Last month Shizuka returned to Aichi to visit her family. She was there for 3 weeks and returned with an interesting point of view. Because she has spent the last 10 years living in NZ she now feels like a foreigner in Japan. Now you may think that feeling this way would make anybody a little bit sad but not so with Shizuka. She says that feeling like a foreigner means you tend to act like a foreigner. With this new found attitude she can get away with doing and saying things that ordinary Japanese would dearly love to but are afraid of doing.


She thinks this is great and has learned to become as rude and pretend to be as ignorant as any gaijin. I witnessed this myself when we were in Nagoya last year. We were about to buy tickets at a train station when all the ticket machines crashed and shut down. Now I've never seen this happen before so didn't really know how to respond to it. Not so for the 50 odd schoolkids behind us. They knew exactly what was going on and en mass they all ran to the only manned ticket window. So now we were faced with standing in a line of squawking schoolkids for god knows how long. Not a problem for Gaijin Shizuka however. She calmly strolled to the front of the line and just cut in. I couldn't quite believe that A) she had done it so blatantly and B) not one of the kids protested. Because I am obviously a  foreigner and she was behaving in such an unJapanese manner everybody assumed she was too. I like to think of this as the "gaijin Privilege"....you never have to stand in a line of Japanese schoolkids!!

3 Islands Tour

Islington Bay. Rangitoto island. 13*C

Last week brought a big high pressure system over the whole country bringing clear sunny weather. A snap decision was made on Thursday afternoon that we would go for a sailing tour of the Hauraki Gulf. Shane's yacht is about 95% completed and he was keen to test out the systems and see how the boat sailed in the predicted light winds. A quick trip to the super market and the liquor store for supplies and then we were off to the Marina for an evening departure. The night was dark with no moon and not a breath of wind. Getting out of the slip was no problem and we motored out onto the harbour. Westharbour marina lies at the end of a dredged channel which twists and turns for quite a way out until you reach the main shipping channel. Being a broken ass marina a lot of the channel makers are not lit and of those that are, not all of the lights are actually working. Travelling in and out in the dark requires a sharp watch in order to avoid slamming into a marker post or alternatively, running aground. Once down to the harbour bridge things get a bit easier but you still need to watch out for the many ferries that criss cross the harbour.

Our destination that night was Islington Bay at Rangitoto Island. Its not a particularly nice bay but is well sheltered and has good holding for the anchor with the bottom being thick mud. We arrived at about 10PM so apart from the 2 other yachts in the bay there was absolutely nothing to see. The water was like glass and we had a very calm and still though cold night. This was good as Shizuka is not a particularly good sailor and is prone to seasickness or, as she puts it, "shipsick" .

Underway. 6.5 Knots

 Friday morning was bright and clear and we ate breakfast overlooking the spectacular Rangitoto. This island is a dormant volcano that rises 260 metres and sits slap bang in the middle of the Auckland Harbour entrance. It's a huge symmetrical  lump of black basalt and scoria and is an Auckland icon. It's completely undeveloped and is covered in native forest. Right next to it and joined to it by a causeway is Motutapu island. This island is a lot older than Rangitoto and is a complete contrast having no forest at all. By 9.30AM we were underway and heading north to Kawau Island. The wind picked up a bit and we blasted through the Rakino channel at 7 knots. At one point I caught sight of a dark object leaping out of the water beside the boat. At this speed that could only be one thing. A few seconds later it happened again and this time I could clearly see what is was. We were being visited by dolphins. I have seen them before while sailing and they are an amazing sight riding the bow wave of boats. Shizuka has never seen this sight however so I told her to go out onto the deck and look over the side. A few seconds later she was jumping up and down in delight and snapping away with her camera. There were about 10 dolphins swimming along and leaping out of the water. This went on for about 20 minutes so she was treated to a good show.

Dolphins. Rakino Channel

 We made it into Bon Accord harbour at Kawau and had another very still peaceful night. By midnight he water was like a sheet of glass and as there was no moon bio-luminescence was incredible. It was like an underwater fireworks shows whenever anything moved in the water. Saturday morning brought some light showers and a fresh breeze so we sailed all the way down to Waiheke Island.
Waiheke is the most developed island in the Gulf and many people commute from here to Auckland CBD which is a 35 minute trip on the high speed ferry. There are many expensive houses here and the island likes to market itself as sophisticated and arty. Signs of this are everywhere and range from the hobby vineyards to giant corrugated iron sculptures on the hills above the ferry port. There are also some nice white sandy beaches and the water is clean and clear. Waiheke is very popular with daytrippers and tourists but I really don't care for the place. The place just seems too pretentious to me and the anchorages are more crowded than the other islands. During our night here we were kept awake by a neighbouring powerboat which was pretending to be a floating nightclub. I prefer the less trendy islands further north.

Navigating. Kawau island.

By Sunday morning we were running short on food so we set a course for home. It was another beautiful day and there was lots of traffic in the harbour. For some reason the self steering on this boat won't hold a course and steers the boat round and round in circles but everything else works well. Apart from the nights being cold this was a good midwinter trip.

The Hauraki Gulf is full of beautiful islands, some inhabited, some not and is one of the best points of living here. Most of these island are designated as national parks and development is tightly controlled. While I agree in principle with the park idea, I do question the way that some of the islands are off limits to visitors. The Department of Conservation is in charge of this area and no doubt does much good work here. It seems to me that it gets bigger and more powerful every year and is gaining control of ever increasing amounts of land. Once a piece of land comes under DoC control there will be no further development allowed and DoC staff will decide who can and can't go there. Some of the people who work for the department are eliteist greenies and have their own agendas and pet projects which often involve barring public access to these areas. Rangitoto is a case in point. There is a small number of  beach houses on the island that were built many years ago. The impact of these houses is low and they create few problems. When the island came under DoC control the owners of these houses were told that they could continue to use them but could not resell them or transfer them to anybody else. Therefore, when the owner dies the house will become the property of DoC. Effectively, they have confiscated these houses that have, in some cases, been in the family for generations. Some of the other islands have been designated as bird sanctuaries and landing is only permitted to approved people. The impression I get from DoC staff is that they feel that the conservation estate is an exclusive club for greenies, native bird experts and eco scientists and that the general public needs to be kept away and prohibited from comming into it. The world needs a balance between development and conservation. In the Hauraki Gulf Marine park the scales are tilted too far.

Onetangi Bay. Waiheke Island.

Auckland Approaches.

The Roof Resolution

Leak free roof!

I have to retract some of my previous comments about insurance companies that I made here last month. On first enquiry it seemed that damage by typhoons were not covered by our policy. Then it was conveyed that it wasn't the typhoon that was the issue but rather that we weren't covered for things falling on the house from the air such as airborne debris, errant satellites and airplanes. Now I can understand not wanting to be liable for meteors landing or terrorist attacks but a tree falling on someones property has got to be a fairly regular occurrence, especially in this land of a billion trees growing on near vertical mountains everywhere. After quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing the insurance company finally admitted that, yes, we actually were covered for this event and that there would be an investigator assigned who would come and interview us about the whole incident. A bit tricky seeing as we are on the other side of the planet at the moment. The investigator turned out to be a realistic guy however and on sending him the builders quote and some pics he decided to fore go the interview and site inspection. He told us by phone that the whole insurance business is up to it's neck in investigating all the claims in the earthquake and tsunami area and that they just don't have enough people to go around checking out every claim in Kansai. He gave us a budget we could spend and told us to just go ahead and fix it. Sweet!. That's one less problem I have to deal with on my return.

The other issue was what to do with the huge pieces of dead tree lying on the boundary. All attempts to track down the neighbour who owns this tree have proved to be futile. It always amazes me how people in this country can just disappear into thin air in spite of the fact that you have to register your residency with your local city hall and that you basically can't live a normal life if you don't. No wonder there's so many people still claiming a pension for relatives who died years ago. Anyway, I concluded that the only way this tree is going to go away is if I cut it up myself. I have a chainsaw here in Auckland that would be well capable of doing just that and I went through the mental exercise of how it would be to carry it onto an airplane. With the drama of taking a cordless drill through still fresh in my mind, I am trying to imagine what the good folk at AVSEC Level 4 will make of a 16 inch petrol chainsaw tucked away inside my bag. Then there's the problem of  the Biosecurity people when I bring it back to NZ. I would have to pay for a full decontamination of the saw as everybody knows of the enormous risk posed to the country by foreign woodchips and sawdust. So that plan was classified as unrealistic. 

Now the next thought I had was to find out if I can hire a chainsaw in Kameoka. Tool hire places are common in western countries but not so much in Japan it seems. After much online searching we found an outfit in Kyoto who will rent chainsaws to crazy people who actually intend to operate them themselves instead of unquestioningly paying a professional a large amount of money to do it for them. Surprise number 2 was how reasonable the price was. Y4000 for a 3 day hire. Very reasonable I thought...this plan might actually work. Then we read the fine print! Following the greatest of Japanese traditions, the details of the deal are uniquely Japanese. You see, the chainsaw does not come with a chain. Y4000 gets you the saw but if you want to use it to actually cut anything you will have to buy a chain for it. The price of a new chain.... Y6000. Now I can see the point of this....a lot of people will probably have no clue how to drive a chainsaw and will no doubt fuck up the chain in the course of the 3 days. It's the way they go about dealing with this issue that I find mind boggling. Instead of paying a bond which is refundable if you don't break it, you have to buy a new chain which, presumably, you can keep after you return the saw. Setting aside the issue of how ridiculous this scenario is and being totally pragmatic about the whole thing, I calculate the cost of this proposition. Y6000 + Y4000+ say Y500 for petrol and the fact that the hire place is a 2 hour round trip x2 away. This is getting a bit costly. I'm sure I could buy a used saw from one of those 2nd hand dealers in Shin Sekai for this price. Shizuka decides to call the builder who is going to fix the roof and ask him if he can help. In true Osakajin business fashion he offers to hire a saw and cut the tree up and stack the logs out of the way for Y10,000 the same day he works on the roof. I like this company. I had expected much sucking of air through teeth and a long and rambling explanation of how it couldn't be done. We arranged a day for it to be done and told him to call the real estate agent who will come by the house with the key. All sorted.... or so it seemed.

Dont mess with him!

The day before the job was to be done Shizuka received 2 emails. One was from the agent complaining bitterly about how rude and obnoxious the builder is. The other was from the builder saying how incompetent and useless the agent is. A couple of phone calls in which Shizuka had to play referee established that it was basically blue collar Osaka Vs white collar Kyoto points of view. Japan is a hierarchical country and everybody has their place in the grand scheme of things. This dispute seems to stem from both parties asserting the claim to be the most important and therefore the superior. A bit of smoothing of feathers was done and the agent agreed to drop the key in the mailbox the night before. A face to face meeting was avoided and everyone was able to claim a small victory. So much for the famous Japanese "Wa". The next day everything went smoothly. The roof was fixed, the tree was cut, the agent and builder were pacified and the insurance company paid for it all. Once again this country has managed to confound me. A seemingly simple thing can be bizarrely complicated and expensive while things which you would guess to be difficult can be resolved surprisingly easy.

Cause and Effect

The large break in transmission has been due to one very good reason....nothing interesting happened in July. Typically for this time of the year, everyone has gone into hibernation and exciting and blog worthy events have been few and far between. The story of the month is about business. Normally the customers I have to deal with are OK by and large but last month brought an influx of idiots who can't or won't follow simple instructions. I think that these people are always there but during busy times you don't notice them so much. You can safely ignore them and their unrealistic demands when you've got plenty of reasonable customers. When times get quiet, like during midwinter, the ratio of morons to good people seems to increase exponentially. Which brings me to the subject of doing business on the internet or as the IT geeks call it, E- commerce.

Because of the anonymity of Email people will write things that they would never have the balls to say to your face. The weakest and meekest become fearless warriors when parked safely behind their keyboards. In this way ridiculous offers and unreasonable demands can be sent in the rudest fashion without the danger of facing the outraged other party. They know they are being unreasonable but the system both allows them to do it and protects them from any repercussions. They do it because they can. For them a conversation on the net is not a real conversation. Most email enquiries now lack even the most basic of courtesies such as Hello, Please, Thank you, Name or a contact phone number. 

Instead a typical email enquiry will be something like this... 

“ $4500 CASH?”  or  “Whats your lowest price?”   

even worse are the emails that are complete gibberish ...This is an actual email that some halfwit sent to me.. 

“wat is yr add i wnt to hv look the v n is it c.v .t transm”   

I have no idea what that means.

Like most businesses I have a phone and a mobile phone and my adds all clearly state what the number is. Why people need to send incomprehensible TXT messages on their computer keyboards is beyond me. The internet has made it possible to be rude and discourteous on a grand Scale.

Anybody who has ever been to a real life auction knows that its usually hours of boredom with a few seconds of excitement thrown in when you get to bid on the item you want. I doubt that the creators of the first internet auction sites would ever have dreamed that their efforts would give birth to a new phenomenon…. Auctions as entertainment. Karl Marx once said “religion is the opium of the masses”. In the late 20th Century TV replaced religion and now in the 21st the internet auction is becoming the new religion.These days instead of watching Soap operas on TV, people are watching auctions on the internet. It seems that people prefer auctions to TV because it can be an interactive experience. A good indicator of the number of people doing this is the Question and answer section of each auction. A quick study of the average auction shows that the people who ask questions rarely actually bid. For them, just participating is entertainment enough and they usually have no intention of buying the item. Then there's the kind of internet/auction/consumer law/car geek know-it-all who tries to turn the Q&A on your listing into a forum where he can express all his opinions and prejudices. They have no intention of bidding or buying anything but like to try and sabotage other peoples business just for fun or because they have an axe to grind. I also regularly encounter the dumbest kind of  people who just look at the pictures and don't read the listing. These can be identified by the stupid questions they ask which are invariably about things that are clearly spelled out in the listing. 

Another consequence of the internet auction phenomenon is the rise of worthless rubbish. In years gone by, clothes that didn’t get worn were given away or thrown away. Now they are sold. Old clocks, shoes, cups and plates, mattresses and garden tools and all manner of things that would previously have been classed as junk and simply disposed of are now listed and sold. Before the internet nobody would pay to advertise something that was worth only a couple of dollars. Even if it’s just a $1 reserve, everything now has a value. Great for the recycling movement but bad news for the economy. Economic growth comes from production and consumption of new items not the endless exchange of old goods. 

The other thing that has changed is peoples appetite for risk. Ten years ago nobody would buy anything that was pre-used, be it a washing machine or a car, without first inspecting it. It now seems that people are happy to bid and buy on the strength of a photograph on the internet. Unfortunately, the appetite for accepting the consequences of such a strategy isn't so strong. I had one particular idiot who after looking at the pictures of a BMW decided that he didn't need to bother himself to come and check it out for himself. After winning the auction and (outbidding some people who had come and seen it) he then showed up and proclaimed that he thought the colour was a different shade of blue and that he would not pay for it as he didn't like the colour it actually is.  Not only did he waste everybody's time but I also lost the underbidder who went and bought another car the next morning. Tyre kickers and timewasters now don’t even have to leave their living room in order to be a nuisance.

I've said it before to colleagues in the industry and I'll say it again here. The Internet was the worst thing that ever happened to business. Everyone in my industry has to work harder, longer and for less than before. Customers have become ruder, more demanding and unreasonable. 

E- commerce has turned the whole thing into a race for the bottom.

In the old days, when business was done face to face, things where far simpler. Sure, you had to deal with idiots back then too, but they were more polite and actually had to get off their asses and travel to you during business hours. This meant that there tended to be fewer of them as it took some effort and expense to to find out what was for sale and to asses the quality of it. This in itself tended to weed out the timewasters, wannabes and out-of-town tyrekickers.

Now, it's an avalanche of crap...24/7... from all over the country.