Slipping into Paradise Why I Live in New Zealand

Chapter 1 Why I Live in New Zealand The affair began on the flight from Sydney to Auckland. I was sitting next to a tall, blond woman. She was beautiful. She was young-thirty-four. She was also smart (she had studied at Harvard, the University of California-San Francisco, France, Germany) and spoke five languages fluently. She was a doctor and she had a charming sense of humor. As the plane circled Auckland and I looked out, I realized I was falling in love. Not with her. I already fell in love with her six years previously. She was my wife. I mean with Newzillin (New Zealand). As we circled over Auckland, I could see the whole city laid out beneath me, but what really got my attention were the ocean, the harbor, and the bays. Everywhere you looked there was water, and small green islands with volcanoes on them. It reminded me of Hawaii, and I have always had a soft spot for Hawaii, ever since I lived there as a fourteen-year-old for one year, and then had strange ecstatic dreams about tropical oceans for years after. When I got off the plane, I saw green hills surrounding the airport. But they were not the green I was used to. This green was like no other green I had ever seen. It was green green. And the blue of the water near the airport was blue blue. There was a strong breeze blowing in the balmy summer (it was December-remember, reversed seasons in the Southern Hemisphere), as it often blows in Auckland, taking away the little pollution there is. So the light is not distorted in the way it is in Los Angeles. I had just been running in California, at Laguna Beach, where my mother lived, and while I loved the place as you can only love the places of your childhood, I could barely see the hills just a mile or less away, so bad was the smog. Yellow air everywhere. So this is what the world looked like when you were seeing it without interference. There is a joke about New Zealanders. As soon as you arrive in the customs area at the airport, the officer, sensitive as all New Zealanders are to perceptions of their country, asks: "How do you like New Zealand?" (The mandatory answer of course is: "The most beautiful country on earth," or, as they say here, Godzone.) How on earth, foreigners wonder, can you know when you have just disembarked? But I knew, I knew. And it was no joke, the woman at the desk did ask me, and I answered truthfully: I am in love! (I am not alone. When my eighty-four-year-old mother had been here for less than a day, she, too, was asked how she liked her new adopted country. Like a nice Jewish lady she always answers a question with a question, so she said, truthfully, "What's not to like?") People were unbelievably friendly at the airport; there is free coffee and tea, and special lanes at immigration for families with kids. There was a telephone with a big sign: free local calls. Volunteers brought carts to arriving passengers, and offered help. There was a small stream with tropical flowers in the middle of the terminal. We rented a car and started to drive into the city. The breeze was light, the air was warm, and it felt just like the tropics. Everybody was in shorts and sandals. Actually, lots of kids were barefoot-something else I had not seen since I was in the ninth grade in Kailua. We left the airport and were immediately driving alongside a mangrove swamp. Mangroves! Like Bali. Where was I? Was this really a temperate climate? (For the longest time I was convinced the climate here was tropical, or at least semitropical. I was chagrined to learn it was more soberly called temperate.) Sea wherever you looked. And volcanic mountains. What a paradise, I thought, feeling like I had been given a drug. I was high on the beauty of this place just driving from the airport. What would happen to me in the next few weeks? Leila worried. She was right. Within two days I told her: "I have found my home." Why did I feel like this? DoeMasson, Jeffrey Moussaieff is the author of 'Slipping into Paradise Why I Live in New Zealand', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345466143 and ISBN 0345466144.