David and Lili's World Tour

NEW ZEALAND

May 2023 - Tauranga

This was New Zealand's wettest summer ever (in places), but we still managed to get out for camping trips and music festivals. Also we received some wonderful visitors. Climate change is here. The ocean temperature at our coast was recently up a stunning 4 degrees celsius, a marine heatwave. Ouch. We think that governments should act with more urgency to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but at least we can do our bit to adapt. We are growing as much fresh food as possible, and we just obtained a baby mango tree to plant in the spring! Nobody is growing mangoes in the Bay of Plenty so this is an experiment. Fingers crossed!

November 2022 - HOME (also Brazil / USA visit)

There's no place like home. For us, this is Tauranga, and we feel this more strongly than ever after visiting the USA and Brazil, our previous homes. It has been 3 years since I updated this travel blog, because of the covid19 lockdowns of course. During this time we went on many camping trips, but mostly we socialized with local friends, and we worked on projects to upgrade our house and garden.

New Zealand was probably the best place in the world to wait out the pandemic. We maintained zero covid for most of the time, and therefore we could live normally in terms of social gatherings without masks. We got our national vaccination rate up to 90% before we opened the border, and we had one of the world's lowest death rates per capita. Despite this good news, there were loud protests against government policy, ostensibly because some front-line workers were mandated to get vaccinated to keep their jobs. We happened to be in Wellington when protestors occupied the Parliament grounds, so we scouted it out, and it was shocking to see pro-Trump and QAnon flags, white supremacists, and Christian fundamentalists camped on the Parliament lawn at a protest that was supposedly about vaccination policy. What a scene! There was live music, free food, and wildly misleading anti-vax placards.

I get it. The whole world was frustrated with lockdowns and sickness, angry at governments and greedy corporations, unsure who to trust, and nobody likes mandates, especially regarding very personal choices regarding one's own health. Furthermore, biological science is quite complex, and historically some vaccines have had major side-effects, so it was reasonable to be skeptical of the new mRNA technology. But this protest movement was spreading blatant misinformation and extreme political propaganda. Sigh. For us it was sad to see how divided New Zealand has become recently. After visiting the protest camp, it was clear that a lot of this division has been imported from the USA.

For the record, I subscribe to New Scientist magazine, and this is my primary source of information for topics like vaccination effectiveness. This magazine discusses funding sources, meta-studies, potentials for bias and conflicts of interest, areas where more research is needed, various hypotheses to explain evidence when there is uncertainty, and it publishes feedback from astute and well-informed readers. This is science news by scientists for scientists, and it is objective and transparent, so therefore it is far more reliable and trustworthy than Facebook. It's a great magazine! Unfortunately it has a paywall.

Speaking of far-right politics, we were just in Brazil and the USA, and both just had elections. We visited friends and family which was AWESOME, but again, the political scene was shocking. Trump and Bolsonaro are both objectively horrible, but they have widespread support. Welcome to post-truth democracy, where manufactured memes spread faster and further than facts. The Republican party in America has completely lost the plot. If you live outside of a certain information bubble, you know this to be true. January sixth, anyone? In Brazil, corruption is endemic. It is called The Mechanism, and this works for all political parties. Therefore the degree that Lula and the Worker's Party (PT) are corrupt is not that interesting, because clearly Bolsonaro and his party are corrupt too! Instead the question should be, which candidate / party is better for workers, for the environment, for peaceful, truthful, progressive policy, helping the poor, improving public schools and hospitals, transitioning to clean energy? Priorities people! What new laws will get passed if your party gains power? Tax cuts for the rich?

BRAZIL:

USA:

I would like to stress that it was AWESOME to visit friends and family in the USA and Brazil. The pandemic is over. Yea! The photos tell the story, fun times with great people. And New Zealand, ah yes, it is great to be home.

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More New Zealand: 2008 . . . 2009. . . 2010 . . . 2014 . . . 2018

More Brazil: 2016

More USA: 2017

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