Middle Kingdom meets Middle-Earth in New Zealand
- Source: Global Times
- [09:48 December 09 2009]
- Comments
Lake Tekapo. Photo: Ming E Wong
By Ming E Wong
I'd first visited New Zealand many years ago as a fresh-grad backpacker and was blown away by its physical beauty – mountains, forests, fiords, rolling plains, giant ferns, rugged coasts, waterfalls, natural hot-pools you can soak in, glaciers you can visit via helicopter or hang-glider. Not to mention seals, whales and dolphins. But as an Asian city-dweller I soon tired of the monotonous diet that seemed largely to consist of lamb, fish and chips, pies and then more lamb.
Fast forward 20 years and New Zealand is still unfairly blessed with physical beauty. But change is evident. For a start, there are now a lot more people – 4.3 million as opposed to 3 million and fewer sheep, a mere 40 million rather than 70 million. Many of two legged residents are newcomers drawn to the quality of life that the country has to offer and many are Asian.
This explains why cities such as Auckland and Christchurch now offer a variety of decent Asian cuisines. In Riccarton, a working class suburb of Christchurch, I had authentic-tasting xiaolongbao. In Lake Tekapo, surely one of the most scenic locations in the country, I ate silky smooth salmon sashimi at the Japanese Kohan restaurant. The restaurateurs probably source their stuff from the Mount Cook Salmon Farm just up the road on Highway No 8 where you can stop at salmon farms to feed the fish and pick up takeaway sashimi complete with soya sauce, wasabi and chopsticks.
New Zealand cooking as a whole has gone both gourmet and upmarket, with a lot of emphasis on organic ingredients, sophisticated cooking and pleasing décor. Even in a small place like Arrowtown (population 2,151), South Island, we had chose between Thai, Indian, a lovely-looking English pub lunch and a chic Italian place. We finally decided for the stylish Saffron restaurant which serves local and delicious pinot noirs to complement its international menu and took pies from the next-door bakery for dinner.
Gold rush
But Arrowtown also has another special allure for Asians. In the late 19th cen-tury, thousands of Chinese came to New Zealand to prospect for gold. They had an extremely hard time – the local government and fellow white settlers were less than friendly and the stone and wooden shacks they built on the river terraces at the far end of town were precarious protection against the harsh winter. I stood in front of these melancholic leftover huts in the Chinese Miners' Settlement and imagined I could still smell the remnants of rice and opium these early Chinese smoked to give them small comfort far away from the Middle Kingdom.
