Our restless first week in New Zealand was all about doing things I’ve never done before. Here are the highlights:

A brilliant entrepreneur came out to our hostel to teach us how to do one version of  haka, the war dance of the indigenous Maori civilization. The cool fact: At the end of the dance, the warriors would stick out their tongues. The length of the tongue was believed to correspond to the length of the man’s penis, and thus his strength as a warrior. The traditional haka performed by the All Blacks celebrates the wife of a Maori tribal chief who protected the hiding spot of another chief. He was under attack, but his attackers were not allowed to touch the woman. That left him unscathed.

The basics of touch rugby are pretty straightforward. Two teams face each other trying to stop the other from touching the ball on the ground in their opponent’s end zone. A team gets six touches, or downs, before their drive ends and a turnover is forced. The strangest thing is keeping a five foot neutral zone at the beginning of each down. A defensive player can’t encroach on the neutral zone until the ballcarrier runs forward or passes the ball. All passes, of course, must be sideways or backwards.

I was not inclined to go zorbing because it seemed kind of dumb. After I was told the sport was invented in New Zealand, I decided I had to try it. Zorbing is pretty much like being in a human washing machine. In a ball filled with about a foot of water within another ball, you roll down a hill either zig-zagging or straight-down. I just sat criss-crossed on the ground and paddled the water. I’m not quite sure that did anything.

We white-water rafted off the tallest waterfall in the world that a private company takes groups over. The seven-meter fall almost saw me end up in the waterfall but our steward, who was on the back of the raft next to me, pressed down on my head so that I stayed in the vessel. I’m pretty sure I blacked out somewhere in there. I thought this was the most awesome thing I had done in my life, but then…

The next day we swam, crawled, waded, black-water tubed and squeezed through a cave. I’ve shifted through my share of fences on runs and such, but I had never been through as many tight squeezes as in this cave. To get in our inner tubes the first time required a backwards dive off the middle of a rock wall. My landing didn’t quite work out and I drank some water — further proof that me and water aren’t good friends. The few times we turned off our helmet lights were daunting. It’s so dark that you would think you were dead.

Watching a New Zealand movie that was described by one person as Wedding Crashers meets Hangover meant seeing shots of Auckland’s skyline were I would have been accustomed to seeing L.A.’s. The raunchy comedy moved a little slow, was unsurprising and generally lackluster. Another cool fact: The radio stations here don’t even bleep out the N-word, let alone curse words.

I’ve visited every single one of them except the new Miami Marlins stadium. The Oakland picture is from Creative Commons because, sadly, I can’t locate my own album from that weekend trip.

What exactly does a team president for a sports franchise do?
Michael Cramer, executive director of The Texas Program in Sports and Media, formerly served as president of the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Stars.

His answer: “Pretty much everything except selecting the players and general manager.”

Of course, he said, “It really depends on the team and the extent of the ownership.”

As a result, most of his time was consumed by selling sponsorships and trying to build new stadiums.

Cramer acknowledged that he worked closely with Rangers owner Tom Hicks when deciding on general managers and managers. He admitted that they considered how different hires might affect ticket sales and the team brand.

That thinking might have played a role in Hicks’ desire to go after “top-shelf” people like John Hart as general manager and Buck Showalter as manager.

Before hiring the duo, Hicks, Cramer and their crew enlisted  Dallas-based recruiter Bob Beaudine to draft a book on possible candidates. The list turned up some “non-top-of-the-list candidates,” as Cramer described them. One of those being Oakland Athletics’ scouting director Grady Fuson, who would eventually move up the ranks with the Rangers. But Hicks stuck with his original guts and went with the big names.

“Many candidates wouldn’t have surfaced if you just started calling people you know,” Cramer said. “But the results were mixed.”

Other tidbits from Cramer:

• Resigning is usually a meeting of the minds between the person leaving and the management staying behind. Both sides know when the time is up. Players get old and sometimes its not a team that matches the manager anymore.
• The only real downside to being an interim manager, Cramer said, is that you know you are “being scrutinized heavily and that you could be out on the street next year.” But you have to remember that you are “making tons of more money and have an opportunity to show that I am deserving of it.”
• Turning down an offer to become an interim manager could backfire. So why would you turn down the visibility and money?

Though a fire alarm going off cut my interview short, I also spoke with former Georgetown basketball coach Craig Esherick. He’s now an assistant professor of sport management at George Mason University and color commentator for college basketball games.

He went to law school and even joined the D.C. bar, but he put his career on hold to become an assistant coach for John Thompson at Georgetown. Why?

“An opportunity to be an assistant coach might not always be there,” he said. “I knew my law degree would always be there.”

He started off as a graduate assistant, saying that his four years as a player there served as the interview. He then became an assistant coach and finally the head coach after Thompson retired.

Esherick wasn’t happy when he was fired after Georgetown’s worst season in 31 years. Esherick had a record of 103-74 over the years and the university president had offered him a vote of confidence just days before. Esherick said he had no idea what the president was thinking.

I’ve found great success saving money by buying tickets to sports events from websites such as Stubhub, RazorGator and TicketCity. I even unsuccessfully tried to sell tickets on Stubhub once to a Washington Nationals game that got rained out and I could no longer attend.

But the secondary ticket websites are not without their annoyances. You never really know the final price until right before you hit the “confirm purchase” button. There’s the shipping fees and the convenience fees of about 10 percent. The primary ticket market, of course, isn’t much better.

On my radio show about the business of sports on KXSC, I chatted with Stubhub flack Joellen Ferrer and TicketsNow SVP and GM Julia Vander Ploeg.

Here’s some of the facts they offered:

• More than 50 percent of tickets on Stubhub are purchased for below face value.
• The San Francisco Giants have teamed up with Stubhub so a fan could buy tickets two minutes before a game starts, or even after it has started, get a barcode texted or emailed to them and enter the stadium by having the stadium workers scan the barcode on the phone. Stubhub can’t wait to expand this to a larger audience.
• About 50 percent of tickets on secondary market are still sold outside of venues, mostly by scalpers.
• Through Stubhub, you can buy tickets for about 90 percent of events right up to the last minute.
• Eventually Ticketmaster, which owns TicketsNow, hopes to create an integrated marketplace that would combine primary- and secondary-market tickets onto one list. That way you don’t have to dig through both websites. Seatgeek tries to do that by combining tickets from all the secondary ticket websites into one list, but the data is always a few hours behind.
• Vander Ploeg expects group buying will eventually come to the secondary market. Ticketmaster is now linked up with Facebook, so friends can see where other friends are sitting at events. I just want something that reserves a few seats and lets my friends and I to each pay by ourselves.
• She also said that the secondary ticket market is not always a business that operates at the expense of fans.
• Finally, there will be a dramatic rise in paperless ticketing.

Objective: Visit India for five days to join my family in celebrating my cousin’s wedding to a guy who runs a tech outsourcing start-up. Use a rapid multi-city tour to get a glimpse of how India has evolved during the past decade. The results of my survey of a small corner of northwest India are below.

GUJARAT, India — I suppose the baby girl urinating inches from my foot on the sidewalk outside Ahmadabad’s airport was the perfect introduction to modern India —  14 years older than I last saw it.

India is a country trying to sail the tide of industrialization to match the glamor of the Western world while drowning in traditions that render it incredibly dirty compared to Western standards. Known for being ravaged by Persians than the Brits, Indians can now only blame themselves for any developmental delays.

Traditions such as graft and bartering began to show themselves within 30 minutes of landing in India. Bringing your car into the airport to pick someone up isn’t free, even if you aren’t parking.  Somewhere along the line, my uncle lost his entry ticket and the attendant at the exit wanted to charge him the highest cost possible as a penalty. After some argument from my uncle, the attendant said he would call it even if my uncle paid for a couple of hours and dropped a little extra into the attendant’s pocket.

With that mess out of the way, it was onto driving back at about 4 a.m. My uncle blazed through the empty highways at alarming speeds, which turned out to be nothing compared to the crazy driving of people across Gujarat and southwestern Rajasthan that I would witness during the next five days.

Here the mantra is that if you see space, take it without worrying for anyone but yourself. That gives way to the darting, dodging and weaving of trailers, buses, jeeps, rikshas, tiny little cars, pedestrians, motorcycles and scooters.

The last two groups dominate the roadways. Crashes are avoided only by the width of a finger, and yet I witnessed not a single crash scene nor did I see more than a couple of broken down vehicles.

Cows, dogs, horses, camels, sheep and pigs are sacred. They roam the roads as they wish. Sometimes drivers egg them on with their horns, but more often than not, they swerve around them like they would any vehicle.

Lanes are a concept rather than a reality — except on one new freeway that has giant bilingual signs that emphasize the importance of utilizing lanes.

Driving on the wrong side of the road and driving without a seatbelt are not penalized the majority of the time by the traffic officers waving around large wooden sticks at traffic circles. Instead, I witnessed first-hand how they prey on out-of-state vehicles, taxis and rikshas who they think might not have the right papers. Then, they accept a bribe, noting that going to court to fight a ticket would cost much more.

Most officers either carry sticks or rifles. Some military officers either have AK-47s or bayonets. I would like to know why India doesn’t like handguns.

With officers few and far between, the roads are largely regulated by what Americans might consider the excessive use of horns. In India, the lack of crashes provides evidence that it might be more brilliant than annoying. Poor road conditions and those horns can drive someone insane, but the Indians seem unaffected. Honking is so common that where an American truck might have a rearside message saying “call this number to comment on my driving,” Indian trucks say something to the effect of “honk please before passing.”

Emergency vehicles are a rare sight and people honk at police jeeps like they do any car. My mom doesn’t even know what the 911-equivalent is here.

Off the roadways, they’ve turned what looks as if it should be a soccer pitch into a so-called party plot. Something like a scene of a concert stage area at a county fair, the grassy plot seems great for a city short on clean public parks.

Street vendors are as abundant as those wandering cows and dogs. And just about everywhere you can imagine, people take over open space and pop up on businesses. How they make money as they barter along the way is an open question.

While everyone has cell phones and are unafraid to talk on them while driving, few seem to be walking around with iPods. Perhaps, they need their ears open to hear the horns or I am just overexposed to iPods on a college campus.

At stores and restaurants, forget about credit cards. Luckily, there’s no 99 cents tacked onto the end of every price. But it seems like a great market to exploit for giants like Reliance, Virgin or Tata if they can figure out how to convince shopowners that accepting credit would boost their bottom lines. By the way, nearly every ad you will see in Ahmadabad belongs to cell phone giants Airtel or Vodafone. State-owned BSNL is conspicuously absent.

At temples, my gripe is that their security screenings have become as daunting as airport security screenings because they are marred by different applications of what should be the same religious rules. It’s funny when temples ask you take off your dirty shoes so you appear clean in front of gods, but then don’t offer you a place to immediately wash your hands.

I’m all for respecting gods, but religion is something so personal that I’m always against rules that takes away from that. People should be allowed to do what they want — outside of maybe bringing guns into a temple — rather being herded around like sheep (sheep herders do exist in India and they also block roads).

Maybe the reason for making the lead-up to temples look like prison is that so many Indians will do anything to get close to their gods. We blame people for treating Brad Pitt like a god. Why is it Indians don’t get more blame for treating gods like Brad Pitt?

The temple-goers are also guilty like most Indians here of the small offense of trash-cutting and the more serious problem of trash burning. Refuse collection barely exists. Where trash isn’t burned, it’s thrown onto sidewalks for the cows and their animal brothers and sisters to sift through.

Some rikshas have converted to CNG. For the most part though, the area is worse than the Los Angeles basin in terms of visible air pollution.

Water and hot water only still only comes at certain times of day at four of the five places we stayed. Proper drainage in bathrooms is often nonexistent. I’m not even sure that even one in four people in Ahmadabad use toilet paper.

Whether it’s along freeways or along the steps leading to a mountain-top temple, India seems to be a country full of entrepreneurs. Whereever there’s room to open up a shop, someone has.  In Udaipur, tour guides hop into your car and take you around the city. That tour includes a palace that seems way to high in the air to need holes for military gunners to shoot through.

Our driver from Ahmadabad to Udaipur was part of that entrepreneurial industry as well. Since no one cane drive around easily, car rentals are rare. Instead, these professional drivers ferry you around for less than 10 rupees per kilometer. (It takes 52 rupees to equal $1.) They eat and sleep at the same places as you, paying their own dime.

Most portions of the long-haul trip feel like the drive through California’s Central Valley toward either Las Vegas or Northern California.

Despite the thatched huts and the how-are-those-still-standing shanties seen along roadways, India’s clearly going richer slowly. Sexy condos are taking shape, and my other uncle’s two-story apartment is supposedly worth $250,000 despite being a dump in a trashy location.

Like everywhere else, there’s the 1 percent, the 53 percent and the 99 percent.

Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta — all very technologically advanced cities — might be further along in development and dropping tainted traditions than the corner I visited. When I return to India, I hope those cities have found ways to properly dispose of trash, found proper homes for animals so they aren’t eating plastic on the streets and made driving a little less frenetic.

One thing I especially hope for is a country as large and talented as India can find ways to ensure public safety with a legitimate police force and innovative use of technology.

I found it disturbing that I was refused entry to the airport for my departure because I hadn’t printed out my itinerary or a boarding pass. I usually just keep things electronically on my phone.

At Ahmadabad, a mumbling police officer who garnered little respect from me despite his big-old rifle wouldn’t let me get past him until an airline agent came out to deliver me a hard-copy of my travel plans. That ordeal past me, my journey began back to the clean air of Los Angeles.