Al Park (singing) and his band at the Cellar Bar, Wednesday nights.

It’s an odd feeling, meeting in a five-million-year-old crater halfway down the South Island of New Zealand, and then hearing a San Diego song blast in your ears.

I’m in Lyttelton, a harbor in New Zealand created by an ancient volcanic blow-out that let the seas rush in and form one of the country’s quirkier seaports, a harbor that has strange connections to San Diego, even though it’s 7000 miles away. First, there’s the sailing ship Euterpe, which voyaged halfway around the world from Britain in the 1870s, loaded to the gunwales with immigrants. It would pull in here at Lyttelton to debouch them. And the incredible thing? Judging by photos taken back in those pioneering days, Lyttelton doesn’t look all that different today than it did then — and neither does Euterpe. The square rigger is still afloat and shipshape, the oldest operational ship of its type in the world. These days, it sails out of San Diego, and has been renamed — you guessed it — Star of India.

Al Park is the bard of Lyttelton, and sings of San Diego if you ask.

But there’s more to this Lyttelton-Diego connection: Al Park gets me thinking about it. He’s the cool gent at the microphone, singing one of his own compositions, a song set in — where else? — San Diego and TJ.

I’m sinking sunset six-packs by the pool

I’m getting lazy

A Santa Ana blows off the desert

The future and the freeway’s looking hazy…

Al is singing to this clubby crowd with the confidence of a much-loved local. Like an extraordinary number of musicians, he finds a kind of refuge in this sailor town, and so helps keep its 19th-century traditions alive and well — like a little country, locked inside the crater and inside its own time zone. I find myself thinking of Looking Glass’s 1972 ode to a port town, “Brandy.”

Brandy, You’re a fine girl

What a good wife you would be

But my life, my love and my lady, is the sea.

I’ve always loved the line “At night, when the bars close down/Brandy walks through a silent town”.

“Commit No Nuisance,” says the sign above this cellar bar of The British Hotel, a watering hole that somehow survived the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. The hotel looks out over this last port before Antarctica, where the U.S. anchors its South Pole operation, Operation Deep Freeze. Its red icebreaker ship shelters here between trips down to the frozen continent.

But tonight, Al’s singing of sunnier climes: California, where he lived for a while.

I came to LA, I was looking for my future

But I only found my past

In the city of the angels, all the people came to haunt me

I had to get out fast

So I headed down south...

And then he launches into his singalong chorus:

Ensenada, Tijuana…Latin ladies across the border

In the Baja

Margaritas and tequilas and Latin señoritas

In the Baja

Soon, the whole cellar’s joining in on those last two lines; they repeat and repeat, and it becomes a sort of anthem. Yes, it’s the tourist take on Baja; it shows how people over here view California and Mexico: a place that sets a twinge of lost youth and wilder love tugging at their memories.

Next day, standing on the steep surrounding hills, looking up the long blue harbor, I can just imagine the Euterpe/Star of India bowling in past the cliffs on a south polar wind, with passengers crowding her decks, feasting their eyes on their first view of green land after four months at sea.