Cracker by Damian Christie

So I made it to Kabul. I was literally giggling and bouncing in my seat with excitement when we flew over the mountain ranges approaching the city.

The plane descended very suddenly, which I learned is standard – although apparently far worse is the semi-regular “corkscrew plummet” planes adopt to prevent missile lock. And I thought landing in Wellington was bad.

With this in mind, I wasn’t too concerned when the passengers around me took seeing Kabul a thousand feet below as a sign to get out their cellphones and start calling friends on the ground. And I’d thought I was being a bit daring not turning my iPod off…

A laconic looking guard at the passport control brandished an antique Kalashnikov, leaning against the wall in an old Russian-inspired, grey woolen uniform, drawing on a cigarette. Sure he was probably just relaxing after a hard day, but somehow it all looked so corrupt. Too many bad movies perhaps.

“Who is this guy?” asked the customs official with a grin, pointing at my passport photo. Okay, a few years have passed, and it did take about 200 shots to get one I liked, but was this a serious inquiry, a request for a bribe, or just a universal joke about how age wearies us all? There was nothing in Lonely Planet about this. Fortunately a forced smile seemed to do the job.

It’s hard to turn my first impressions of Kabul into adjectives. Dusty. Impoverished. Ruined. Incredible. Those will do for a start. Shacks, bombed out buildings, armed guards every 50 metres, both private and public. A swathe of cars and bicycles weaving across the road anarchically, signaling their approach and vaguist of intentions with blasts on the horn. Children everywhere but in school.

I checked in to my guest house, took a shower (I’m going to enjoy hot and cold running water before heading to the provinces in a couple of days) and bought some beer from a young boy, who obligingly interrupted his game of dusty street football to man the shack.

After a couple of hours of letting the 24 hours of airport/plane/airport/plane/airport/plane/airport fade away, I felt ready to hit the streets. But nothing is quite so simple in Kabul. UN workers, for example, aren’t allowed to walk down the road. If they want to go to the store, a car drives them to the door and waits outside. Asking around the guesthouse I found a Nepalese NGO worker, Girish, willing to take a stroll with me. He keeps getting mistaken for a local, he said. Exactly what I needed.

We set off, a simple jaunt down the road. I felt happy to be amongst it all, the dust, the fumes from the diesel generators, the horns, the smell of sheep wandering the streets.

"Don’t walk so close to the curb", Girish warned. "Dodgy drivers?" I asked. "No", he says, "it's in case a suicide bomber tries to run into you. And while we’re at it, let’s cross the road and face the oncoming traffic, so nothing can sneak up from behind."

Needless to say it wasn’t the longest walk I’ve ever taken. But good to stretch the legs.

Damian's travel is thanks to a grant from the Asia NZ Foundation. Not so much this bit, in Afghanistan, but the next bit I'm doing, in Pakistan. But I wouldn't be in Afghanistan if I wasn't going to Pakistan too, you know? So, thanks, Asia NZ.

It was with some bemusement I discovered yesterday that the crowd at Wellingtonista have nominated Cracker in their Best of Wellington awards. It was only earlier that morning I had been jokingly asking Russell to pick up my predicted clean sweep.

I have, after all, been on the receiving end of various kinds of stick for penning a certain Metro article on our capital a few months back. I’m surprised I wasn’t nominated alongside Terry and Kerry in this category.

Little Dudes building a sand castle, Island Bay

However as the dust has settled I guess the Wellington blogosphere has realised that if my piece had any impact, it was to reduce the number of JAFAs visiting, and that can hardly be considered a bad thing, can it?

Sunbathing, Welly styles

Truth is, this little town ain’t so bad, even if I’m not exactly unpacking all my cartons and perusing the local real estate section. And there have been more than a few great weekends down here of late, including a stunning Sunday spent in the Greater Wellington Suburb of Martinborough doing the wine & food thing with tens of thousands of other Wellingtonians.

Dude on a BMX, Oriental Bay

(Although does anyone else find the whole Movember thing is actually getting a bit too ubiquitous? I mean, great cause and all, but soooo many people are doing it, and when they’re all gathered en masse like they were in Martinborough, it starts to resemble an old MOT convention. Later in the day, a few too many pinot noirs mixed with just the right number of chardonnays and hours of beating sun, and I feel not entirely unlike an acid-riddled Hunter S, walking into that hotel lobby during the police convention.)

The Island, of Island Bay fame

Scattered throughout this blog are a few photos I’ve taken around town (Island Bay and Oriental Bay) on my new (old) Rolleiflex TLR. Photos I felt like sharing, possibly so I can say I’ve actually contributed something positive to Wellington, just in case you wanted to vote for me. (If you're from Auckland, you should just vote for me anyway). There are more photos and bigger versions of these ones in the gallery link below.

That’s all. If you need me, I’ll be in Afghanistan.

If things have been a bit quiet of late here at Cracker HQ, it's not because there's been nothing going on. Quite the opposite in fact – for the past few weeks I have been busily planning my super-secret overseas excursion.

Well, when I say super-secret, there probably aren't too many people at the Matterhorn who haven't at some point heard me slur the phrase "Yessir, I'm going to Afghanistan and it's very dangerous and I might die and I'm so incredibly brave would you like to buy me a drink? (hic)".

What's made my super-secret trip all the more exciting is that the second country I am now visiting, after Afghanistan, has recently declared itself to be a state of emergency. Pakistan is now In The News, and in this far flung parochial paradise, if anything from abroad gets itself into the first fifteen minutes of the nightly 6pm bulletin, you know it's Big News.

Of course this has all meant a deal of uncertainty regarding my travel plans, and even led to me uttering completely without irony the phrase "well if things get too dangerous in Pakistan I can just hole up for a bit in Afghanistan where it's safe." But despite MFAT travel advisories suggesting that there's no good reason on earth why I should willingly head in that general direction at the moment, I reckon I'll be okay.

Either way, I'm incredibly brave.

I will of course be blogging as much as possible, and the various things I hope to achieve while overseas will emerge in due course. Suffice to say I'm not going there for work – although if things get hot enough you might just hear from Our Man on the Ground in Karachi.

My departure seems to have approached so suddenly – it dawned on me only today that next weekend, I'll be in Kabul. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'm sure it'll be a lot different from the weekend just gone, when I went to a brilliant gig by the Phoenix Foundation (brilliant, although they do need to know when to play their last song, and end on a high, rather than bashing out a few more low key numbers simply because the crowd keep asking for more…), and probably a lot less boozy than my last weekend in NZ, when I will be heading over the hill to Toast Martinborough.

Normally I'd ask for travel tips, so if on the off-chance anyone has been to Kabul of late and can recommend any hot nightspots or local bands (Graham Reid, I'm looking in your direction), or likewise in Karachi or Lahore, hit the feedback button below.
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Does anyone else find the Erin Brockovich ads for Noel Leeming annoying and cynical to the extreme?

Yeah yeah it's great that a New Zealand company is getting in behind a charity, but why did they only launch their sponsorship of Habitat for Humanity at the same time as the multi-media advertising campaign crowing about how great they are for making such a contribution? Oh that's right, because otherwise no-one would have known what an amazingly altruistic company Noel Leeming is.

I'd love to know how much a massive media campaign like this would cost –including shooting in LA and whatever Ms Brockovich got paid– compared to how much Noel Leeming is giving to Habitat for Humanity.

And is Brockovich's favourite movie really the appallingly schmultzy 'Pay it Forward', or is that just a convenient way to point out that Noel Leeming does a lot of great work for charity (but doesn't like to talk about it)? Given how Brockovich is happy to sell out to a New Zealand electronics retailer, perhaps her favourite movie should be that other Julia Roberts film, the one with Richard Gere… what's it called?

I'm always a bit sceptical of politicians trying to branch out into the new media.

Politicians having blogs for instance. Rodney Hide’s I don’t mind – I’m pretty sure he writes it himself. But John Tamihere never used to write his – this became apparent when one very able press secretary was replaced by another who had issues with sentence stringing. To the uninformed observer it must’ve seemed as though JT had overnight suffered some form of stroke which left him without the basics of spelling and grammar.

And it can backfire. For politicians, the Internet is a wild frontier, a brave new world filled with nutbars, pornography and most alarming of all, people filled with a strong belief in free speech. Worse still, these people have access to the same platforms as you do.

This was well illustrated in the past couple of weeks with the ‘guerilla’ footage of National Leader John Key at the Porirua Markets. A few sound effects, a bit of commentary, and wowsers, John Key suddenly looks like a guy who doesn’t know how to sniff vegetables properly and couldn’t give a toss about the common man.

But you’re a public figure, orchestrating a walkabout to make it look like you’re ‘one of us’, that’s what you can expect.

Likewise, if you post video blogs and speeches on the Internet, you can expect people to respond. Here’s one of my favourites, from a New Zealander teaching English in Japan. Make sure you watch it at least until she refers to Key sounding like he’s giving a drunken speech at the rugby clubrooms, or whatever she says. Defamatory but delicious.

But that’s the Internet. People will say things you don’t agree with. You’re allowed to respond to them, argue with them or ignore them.

What you really shouldn’t do though, when someone offers their reasoned perspective, is ban them.

Which is exactly what the Nats did to “MonarchyNZ” when he posted a few comments on a recent video by Gerry Brownlee.

You can read the comments and judge for yourself whether MonarchyNZ was trolling and should have been banned. But I can’t see anything objectionable there, certainly nothing that would be moderated out on this blog, let alone result in a ban.

Personally I would have been far more inclined to ban the obsequious toad who posted comments like “I'm hoping for something bold, brave and innovative like the [National Party’s] roading policy.”

And

Have you watched John Keys speech on roading policy? The video is 30 minutes long but I think it's well worth watching.

MonarchyNZ’s only offence as far as I can see – and God knows there’s a few people on various comments threads who’d see you shot for it – is to prefer Labour. But the fact he actually SAT THROUGH a four minute video blog by Gerry Brownlee should at least give him the right to comment doesn’t it? If it were me I’d be asking for four minutes of my life back (and I say that not for a second against Gerry or National, simply that I can’t imagine willingly sitting through four minutes of ANY uninterrupted political diatribe).

I don’t know who NatNZ is, in the sense of which person clicked the ban button, but for someone in charge of the Nat’s on-line musings it’s pretty rubbish behaviour. This guy either has a) no idea how the Internet works or b) is high on the power of being gatekeeper to the National Party’s e-missives.

This line particularly makes me laugh:

“If you ever find you have something constructive to say, you'll be welcome back.”

NatNZ if by chance you’re reading, here’s a link you should click.

See how "constructive", in it’s erm, more conventional sense, does not mean “in favour of the National party”? See that?

And while you’re there, check this one out too.

Righto.

Now. On another related matter. I don’t necessarily agree with GayNZ and other media’s line regarding Bill English’s son and his alleged comments on Bebo. As I think Russell was getting at last week, many of the comments, while foul, aren’t anything I wouldn’t expect to hear directed from the boys of one school to another. Certainly they have a very familiar ring to what I remember being yelled from the Upper Hutt College school bus when it drove past St Pat’s Silverstream. Does it make everyone that yelled those comments homophobic? No. Does it make it right? No. But I don’t think it should mean Bill English should be singled out.

Interestingly though, walking down Lambton Quay I overheard a young man on his way to luch, bragging loudly to his two female companions. Paraphrasing:

“So yes, after that whole thing with Bill and his son’s comments on Bebo, I went on-line and checked, and there were four of the MPs kids who had sites with the same sort of thing. So I told Bill about it, and they’ve been set to private now…”

“Which kids were those?” I asked, turning to him mid-stride? He blushed and went quiet. I hope I didn’t ruin his chances with the girls.

Anyway, I don’t care which kids they were, or what comments they made (I don’t imagine they were half as bad as young Master English’s alleged comments), but chances are half the things teenagers say when they think they’re not being watched are going to be potentially embarrassing to an MP.

The point being, the Internet’s a dangerous place. With election year coming up and all votes counting, the Net can certainly Giveth, but it will just as quickly Taketh Away.

Warning: The following anecdote is a thinly disguised attempt for the author to complain about the demise of customer service at our National Carrier. The tale's only redemption is found at the end, where a popular phrase is re-coined beautifully by an immigrant cab driver. Otherwise it's basically just a big whinge.

You have been warned.

Remember that ad where the guy had his wife’s car keys or whatever it was, and only realised once he’d boarded the plane, so he gave them to the flight attendant, who passed them on to the pilot who then “threw them out the window” (to a waiting tarmac jockey who passed them on to the wife or something)?

It’s worth remembering that ad was not for Air New Zealand, but Ansett. RIP.

For various reasons, both business and pleasure, I fly quite a bit. Recently it seems to be every week. Because of that, I have a Koru Lounge membership, which means I can eat, check email and after a long day’s work, have a beer before the long flight home. It’s good, and when flights are delayed like mine was the other night, for an hour and a half, life saving.

Today I was sitting at the slightly inaptly named New Plymouth Koru Lounge (which is really just a small room with a telly, a minibar fridge and some sammies), I decided to avail myself of the multi-brand cellphone charger. “Knowing me I’ll leave my bloody phone there” I thought, as I plugged it in.

As I take my seat on the plane, I realise that my prophecy has indeed become one of those self-fulfilling ones. I wonder whether they’ll let me dash off and grab my phone, or perhaps send a tarmac jockey (I don’t know if that’s what they’re called, but if I keep saying it, it’ll stick) to do it. But I decide against it. I’d rather not inconvenience anyone, and anyway, it should be easy enough to get them to chuck my phone on the next plane and I’ll drive out to the airport and get it.

Somewhere over the Manawatu the flight attendant returns to my seat after calling the airport on my behalf. “We can’t do that any more” she says, “it’s a liability issue.”

The same reason is given to me when I repeat my request at Wellington airport. They can’t take responsibility for getting my phone to me. I suggest that if they can safely land a plane with two hundred people on board in a howling Wellington Southerly, they can probably get my cellphone to me. And if not, I’m fine with that, I’ll sign a waiver, just give it a good old-fashioned kiwi go, eh?

Nup.

I have to say to any non-Aucklanders out there, yes I know it’s just a cellphone, but two small points.

a) It’s Friday. The weekend waits expectantly and I have no memory for my friends’ phone numbers.
b) I’m expecting some very important work-related calls to my mobile over the weekend.

But the main point, c) I guess, is that surely it’s just a pretty simple thing to ask, for what is essentially a service industry. Yes it was my fault, but if I’d spilt a drink on myself in a restaurant, would it be unreasonable to ask for a cloth?

Speaking later to one of Air New Zealand’s communications people, I’m told another story. It’s not about liability in case my phone gets lost. It’s a CAA regulation that prohibits sending unaccompanied cellphones, unless they’re processed as freight. Please. If you gave the cellphone to a flight attendant, it wouldn’t be unattended now, would it?

So I realised I would be spending the weekend without my phone, and would have to make my own arrangements to get it back, such as a courier (who would presumably pick it up, put it in a bubble-wrap package and put it on the same plane) on Monday.

Frustrated, I told the story to my fairly recently arrived Tongan taxi driver as we left the airport. He considered it for a minute.

“It’s PC gone stupid."