COVER N. 232 - NEW ZEALAND

Postmark: Whanganui NZ 13.03.2023 

Posted on the 13th March; Received on the 5th April 2023
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Half the globe at the very least! That's what the very clean and dandy cover I got from the antipodes of my own country had to travel to finally come to rest inside my mailbox.

Oh, how I would love to be on the return trip, myself...

New Zealand,.. The first time I ever saw a rugby match on TV, many, many years ago, I was absolutely mesmerised by the strange ritual that those guys wearing black jerseys and shorts  executed before kick-off (well, in those days, you really couldn't tell, because TV, at least here, only showed black, white and a nice range of greys in between...).

So much so, that I decided I would play rugby myself....a decision that was as fast abandoned as it was taken, when I realised that a pair of rugby shoes was way outside my mother's financial envelope....

So I turned to volleyball instead, but all through my volleyball career, which lasted  until I got out of high school to go to university, I would also have to deal with material frustration, since  I never laid my feet inside the much coveted  Onitsuka Tiger sneakers  all my colleagues had...

Come to think of it, the Tiger shoes were my second  great material disappointment.

The first had been an Action Man action figure that I also absolutely craved for when I was 6 or so, but never got, in spite of many conversations and written letters to the guy with the long white beard, when the time no nag him came... 

Some years ago, on Christmas Eve, when presents were passed around, I got a very finely wrapped box from both my daughters. Suspecting a pair of  room  shoes, due to the format of the box, something that I was indeed in need of at the time, I started to carefully unwrap the present, as I usually do. All of a sudden, a logo emerged from the wrapping that made me tear the paper as fast as I could:  Ta-dam! Lo and behold... an Action Man action figure! I couldn't be happier  and  the immense smile on the faces of Barbara and Marta was the perfect Christmas gift a father could ask for. Bloody brats! They always knew how to sugar-coat me  😀

As usual I digress, but that's just the way  words and memoirs intermingle, at least for me, sparked by the simple beauty of an envelope, dressed with carefully laid on stamps and addressed in a fine handwriting....

Thank you so much Wendy! 

Kupe, I read, was a Polynesian sailor and explorer, and the first human to set foot in New Zealand, during a  Polynesian diaspora the reasons for which are not yet fully ascertained by historians, Inter-tribal conflicts. need to find places to live due to volcanic eruptions in their places of origin, sheer exploration and expansion, all these are plausible reasons to justify Kupe's Journey,  although legend has it that the real reason was to follow and kill a giant octopus that was killing all the fish in his Hawaiki homeland. 

- On 05JUN2019, NZ Post issued a sheetlet with eight 1.30 NZ Dollar stamps celebrating the legend of Kupe the great Navigator.

Two of these stamps were used on the cover, and these depict Matawhaorua, Kupe's waka (a traditional Polynesian boat type) and Kupe's wife, Hine-te-Aparangi, who his credited with having first sighted Aotearoa,  the Mahori name for the land we came to know as New Zealand. "He aotearoa - a long white cloud!" she exclaimed, upon noticing a white cloud on the horizon, what would indicate that in all due probability, there would be land underneath it.

- On 24JUL1991, NZ Post issued a souvenir sheet with a pair of two stamps featuring images of Hector's Dolphins (Cephalorhynchus hectori). Further to the 80 and 45 Cent denominations, the stamps also included  a 5 cent  charity tax, the proceeds of which were transmitted to the  Children's Health Camps movement. 

The Health stamp tradition is also present in the last stamp on the cover.

- On 24JUN1998 NZ Post issued a souvenir sheet dedicated to the theme of  water safety for children, featuring 2 pairs of the 40 + 5 cent, which can be seen on the cover, and  of its 80 + 5 cent companion, which bore the image of a baby leaning to swim under supervision of an adult.

The neat postmark informs us that the letter was mailed from  Whanganui, a city with 42.6 thousand inhabitants on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand.