Day 2 Photos

A picture from the Skyline place over Queenstown. We took scads of these types of pictures, so I'll spare everyone and just include a few.










The Luge. This is Molly. Notice the way she is pulling way back--which means she is seriously riding the brake. Sad. Two minutes later a four year old will make her look even more foolish.










As you can see, the beauty of the scenery was only partially eclipsed by my own. Notice that I'm wearing a jacket with a Canadian flag on it. I decided early on that it was easier to claim to be Canadian if asked because then I wouldn't have to explain the near complete boobiness of the actions of my country's leaders. This might have been an unnecessary precaution, since most people were only seeing dollar signs when I approached their business' counter, but I took it anyway.





Queenstown from on high. That big open island there in the middle is a golf course. Probably one of the most expensive ones in the world based on property values.










A sheep on the hill underneat the gondola we were riding up. This isn't the sheep we almost thunked. There were a half dozen or so and a few goats total wandering around up there as if they owned the place.















Not a very good picture, but this is the inside of the wine cave at Gibston's vineyard. Actually, I'm not sure why I'm including it except that it's about the only picture I have of the interesting parts of the vineyard.









Karen after being nearly expelled from the jet boat. Years of being a roadie for Jethro Tull left Karen nearly deaf, I'm afraid, so she didn't hear Blair's warning to "hold on." It almost cost her a trip into the sub-antarctic waters. A lesson for all you youngins and your loud music.








Continuing our theme of taking pictures of all statues dedicated to nothing in particular. This is an elk, I'm told. They have no native elk, of course, but they do raise them like livestock. I guess that makes them important enough to commemorate in more permanent ways than Franklin Mint could provide.













Sadly, because it was dark, we weren't able to get any pictures of the Glow Worm caves in Te Anau. Instead, I will share a strange phenomenon, the shivering Canadian. These two, despite the fact that they both weather far more cold than anyone else in the family, were constantly huddled up for warmth. Every time we walked into a building or room, they would be the first to find the heat source and block what little it put off for themselves. I can't explain this.

Day 2--Queenstown to Te Anau

New Zealand Travelogue

Day 2

Day 2 started early for me. I’m not sure what “jet lag” actually is, but for me it’s meant going to bed early and waking up at unreasonable times in the morning. My normal sleep schedule is, at the best of times, iffy. I routinely can’t fall asleep before 3:00 in the morning and can’t sleep beyond 9:00 in the morning, even when I have nothing to get up for. With the time adjustment, going to bed at 10:00 here is like staying up until 5:00 in the morning at home. As such, I’ve been feeling tired around 8:00 in the evening and getting to bed well before 10:00. However, I can’t sleep past 5:00 yet, and I am usually awake before 4:00 and spend a restless hour tossing and turning. The downside is that I’m spending a lot of my days nodding off as soon as we start driving somewhere, but the upside is that I’ve had some time to work on this travelogue before everyone else gets up in the morning.

Skyline Gondola-Restaurant-Luge

We decided to start our second full day of travel with a trip up to the highest point in Queenstown (at least it was the highest point that I could see, I suspect there are higher points, but, since our visit apparently wasn’t important enough for the city council to personally guide us and inform me otherwise, I will just have to stick with what I know first hand) via four-person gondolas. These gondolas offered little in the way of haunting serenades from stereotypically dressed, mustachioed men, but they did offer a great view of Queenstown.

Queenstown is one of those mysterious towns that people have to really want to live in. Almost the entire town is carved into the sides of mountains. The few open, non-hilly areas are filled too, of course, but the one that was the most obviously easy to build on, smack in the middle of town, was dedicated to, of all things, a golf course. Nearly every other construction required some impressive excavation, but that didn’t seem to deter many people from wanting to live there, and it lends itself to a very impressive view and an extraordinarily scenic townscape, which I was more than happy to enjoy.

I am looking at the brochure from Skyline as I sit here, and they claim that this gondola ride is “[r]eputed to be the steepest lift in the Southern Hemisphere.” Obviously, Skyline is as interested in verifying their facts and claims as much as I am. If they repute it to be the steepest (whatever qualification that is), then I guess I will just run with that and leave be. The activity center is located at the top of Bob’s Peak. I’m sure the “Bob” in reference was someone of note, but I’ll be jiggered if I saw any suggestion of this close at hand.

After the gondola ride up, visitors can spend their time with various activities. There is a café and, for more expensive tastes, a restaurant. There is a gift shop, of course, as well as a few other ways to spend one’s money with little to show for it in the long run. There was also a bungee jump along the side of the mountain, though we didn’t see anyone doing this, and an option to parasail over the city, which we saw several people doing. From what we’ve heard, fatalities while parasailing aren’t unheard of (problems with people being properly strapped in and such followed by a few horrible seconds of free fall ending in a loud crash as a then corpse smashes into a Toyota on the ground—because all long falls in cities, as we’ve learned from years of documented proof provided to us by Hollywood, end on the top of a car), but the general attitude here is to be prepared to die when you do anything. Liability is, from what I’ve seen, entirely up to the participant. If you don’t want to die, or at least take a chance that you might, then you probably ought to keep both feet firmly planted on the ground while in New Zealand.

There were, however, two activities that we enjoyed immensely and which I would recommend. The first was a little sight-seeing. From the viewing deck, it’s possible to see an impressive panoramic including The Remarkables mountain range, Coronet Peak, Lake Wakatipu as well as some other peaks that the brochure is bragging about. I only include the names in case anyone wants to, I don’t know, look them up and find out some history or something (something I should probably do personally, maybe I’ll get around to it later—but probably I won’t, so do it yourself, lazy). The Remarkables are one of the main ski ranges in the region and, though mighty impressive, their name might be a little over the top. I am, of course, remarking on them right now, so the name is at least literally true, but it still seems to lack a certain amount of subtlety and consideration. Anyway, take some pictures, burn some film, enjoy the view. It was, I think, one of the most spectacular that we enjoyed.

The second activity was the Luge. The word “luge,” for many (and for me) calls to mind the Olympic event where one or two people jump into stream-lined buckets and hurtle down an icy crack at break-neck speeds. The Skyline’s version of the luge, in theory, recreates that experience. Except, instead of having almost no controls (as I imagine Olympic luges have because I have never seen one first-hand and refuse to do any further research on the subject since it in no way will better my understanding of how the world works), these luges have a handlebar that must be delicately gauged between “go” and “brake” as the smallish cart (still vaguely bucket shaped but more closely resembling a narrow go-cart) “hurtles” down the carefully laid out course at around ten miles per hour (or fifteen-ish millihectares or whatever the rest of the world uses for speed measurements).

Everyone but Karen took part in the event and it was, despite its fairly tame nature, quite exhilarating. It took most of us only through the first turn to get the hang of it. If we, like many of the youth on the hill, had purchased multiple rides down the hill, I have no doubt that we would have been hugging the corners and nearly flying down the course. The first go everyone is required to take the “scenic” route to get used to the controls. There was also a “fast” and “expert” route available (or maybe these were the same thing, we entered our course fast enough that I didn’t have time to see what my other options really were) and many younger folks were riding down then racing back up to the top for another go. The exception to this was Molly, who finished the scenic trail nearly five minutes later than everyone else. She had the nervous posturing of a little old lady out for an afternoon run to the store for adult diapers and fiber. She was peering over the top of her handlebar and poking along somewhere just under sauntering speed when we saw her near the bottom (which was a fairly simple straightaway). Children of no older than five were screeching to a stop behind her and forming an impressive queue as she was unwilling to hug one rail or the other to allow them to pass. It was quite hilarious and the rest of us had many laughs at her expense.

After this, we took the gondola back down to the base (almost fatally thunking a sheep in the head as we skirted near the ground—yes, there were sheep and goats grazing on the side of the mountain, who they belonged to is quite beyond me, but there are sheep literally everywhere in this country) and moved on to our next event of the day.

Vineyard, Gibston Valley

From what we were told, Queenstown is quickly becoming one of the premier regions for wine in the world. Its latitude south closely mirrors the northern latitude of the major wine producing regions in France and Oregon, lending itself naturally to the production of some very nice wines. While we’ve been here, I’ve had my fair share, and, though I am hardly an expert (we tend to buy wine for quantity over quality at home since we can move through it at a rather alarming rate, so my tastes are unrefined at best), they have been quite nice, possibly even nice-plus. I’m not sure what grade goes above “nice,” but the wines from this region might also go that high. We were informed by our guide at the vineyard that Queenstown is now considered one of the three major pinot noir regions in the world, and we all felt very impressed by this fact and pleased to be a part of the experience.

At any rate, there are several dozen wineries around Queenstown. On our way into town the night before, I saw the one that I felt we must visit. It boasted The Essential Wine Adventure. How we could pass up something that was both “essential” and an “adventure” was quite beyond me. In fact, if it was “essential,” then we didn’t have a choice in the matter. Somehow, though, we were able to take a pass on that winery and, instead, went to Gibston Valley, which was considerably closer than the Adventure. The vineyard also included a Cheesery, a term I don’t think I had ever heard of before but which makes perfect sense to me now, and the cheeses there were also nice-plus or better. At least I think they were. Since my tastes in cheese also tend to hover around the quantity over quality measure, I can’t be entirely sure. Everything they set out before us to taste seemed quite, again, nice, except for the goat cheese, which always tastes like goats to me. And, while there is a certain musky quality about a goat that I can understand many would feel also belongs in a good cheese, I tend to prefer my cheeses to taste less gamy.

It was at this point in the trip that I started to discover the playful animosity between Australians and Kiwis. Our guide, because we had a group of people from Sydney in the group, poked fun at them a bit, referring to them as the “neighbors across the ditch.” This was, I would later find out, pretty mild by Australia-jibing standards. Fairly frequently, Australians are referred to as simpletons, dullards and, at best, boorish and bemused. For point of reference, think of how Americans often refer to people of the south. We also make fun of Canadians that way, but really I think most Americans do that because Canada is such an easy target and they are too nice to make a fuss. In many ways it is exactly how I’ve heard people referring to Americans pretty much everywhere in the world, except here, and in reference to the Australians, there is no real venom attached to it. It is more like the red-headed step-child passive-aggressively venting a little frustration at a more favored child. At any rate, I find it quite amusing, being somewhat passive-aggressive in nature myself.

The brief tour took us into what we were told was the largest wine cavern in New Zealand. It was man-made and pretty impressive, again considering that the mountains are made of pretty much solid rock. We tasted a few of the wines and then headed back. Karen informed us that, as a marketing ploy, the guides would ask us to carry our glasses with us back to the main sales counter “to help the staff out.” This brought all of us strategically back into the hub of economic activity where we could be further plied into buying some wine. This, in fact, was exactly what happened and, interestingly enough, we ended up buying something like twelve bottles of wine amongst the group of us. Hurray for smart marketing ploys, I guess.

Jet boating with Blair

Our next activity was, I think, the most exhausting one of the day—not because it was particularly strenuous physically or mentally, but because it was stressful in the white-knuckle sense.

We met up on the Shootover River with a friend of Karen and Darrell’s named Blair. Another activity that garners some popular tourist attention in Queenstown is jet boating. There are several professional organizations that cater specifically to the New Zealand tourist who has a need for speed. The professional boats are rather large, seating what looked to be ten or so people in them (we saw a few of them zip by, performing seemingly impossible 180s and 360s on the river, and that would be my best estimate to how many people were usually in the boats). They are sleek, powerful looking boats that sit up high on the water. All of the boats are made of aluminum (pronounced al-yoo-min-i-yum here for a reason that was explained to me at least twice while we were down there but which I have failed to commit to memory for its sheer preposterousness) and are surprisingly durable. From what I saw of how they were treated, they would have to be.

Blair was a jet boating enthusiast. He enjoyed doing it, I think, on a spiritual level, connecting with both his boat and the water in a way that non-enthusiasts would never understand. At least this is what I sincerely hoped as he streaked us through a narrow gorge, under a felled tree at speeds I had never experienced on the water before. If, in fact, he didn’t have that kind of link to the boat and the water, we were goners.

Blair’s boat, unlike the commercial ones, was small, seating only five people. It too was aluminum and he informed us that it had a V-8 car engine for a motor. This, I thought, seemed impressive. I understand the concept of a V-8 (besides knowing that I “should have had one”). It is a higher-performance engine when used in cars. It provides quicker starts and higher speeds and, when coupled with friction and gravity and such, makes vehicles go quickly to and from places. Without much of the friction or gravity, though, I could not fathom why such a powerful engine was needed for a boat. And I still can’t fathom why such a powerful engine is needed for a boat. Blair, however, seemed to be in heaven as he tooled us around the water.

Because he could only fit five in the boat, we split into two groups. Darrell, Molly and JF went in the first group, and Karen, Libby and I sat on the shore for twenty minutes or so to go on the second ride.

It didn’t take long for Blair to show off the power of his boat once we were aboard. He powered it up and we, well, zoomed across a smallish, open lake toward the river (there are many descriptive words for traveling at speed, but few of them seem to work here—“zoomed” really fits it perfectly because we moved very much at a speed and with the near complete disregard for the laws of physics that a young child might imagine when making exactly that sound).

Once in the river and shortly after we blasted under our first felled tree, Libby asked, “Is there a depth finder on this boat?”

Blair responded, smiling broadly, “No. When we stop moving, the water is too low.”

And this was true. If there was a shimmer of water over the river rock covered bottom, he skimmed over the top of it. He later informed us that enough speed could carry the boat over small patches of dry land in the right circumstances. I feel fairly certain that, if those circumstances had existed out there that day, we would have seen the proof first-hand. As it was, it was not an unusual feeling for the bottom of the boat to scrape unsettlingly against the rock on the bottom. And several times we smacked into dangerous looking tree branches. I have not spent a great deal of time aboard speedboats back home, but I have spent enough time to know that traditional fiberglass boats do not like to run into debris and other detritus that might poke out of the water. Having experienced the type of jaw-clenching terror that a puncture might occur when striking such a protrusion while aboard these types of speedboats, it was just that much more stressful for me every time we smacked into something just below the visible surface. Blair just turned to us with an ear-to-ear smile on his face every time it happened. This, however, was not very reassuring, since Blair had this smile on his face for the entire twenty-some minutes we were clinging for our lives aboard his boat.

After a few more arbitrary jolts one direction or the other, just to test the responsiveness of his boat and passengers, Blair asked me, “What do you do?”

“I teach English.”

“I would like to teach jet boating. That’s my dream job.”

Karen observes, “You’d be good at it.”

“The commercial organizations won’t have me.”

“Oh?” Libby asked.

“Ye. I’m too dodgy and I’m too hard on the equipment.” This he followed up with a few quick jabs in this direction and that.

As we neared the end of our trip, he admitted to us that this was his third boat. “What happened to the first two?” Libby asked.

“Wrote them off.” Blair answered. “See those black marks there?” He pointed to some black scuff marks on the dash, which was less than ten inches away from my chest at this point.

“Those are from my mate’s shoes. He fell out awhile back. There were three of us in the boat and it flipped. American bloke in the back seat.”

“Was anyone hurt?” Karen asked.

“My American friend had a gash on his forehead that bled everywhere.” He gave us that same broad-toothed smile, which I was beginning to suspect tapped directly into some deep, unsettling type of crazy. He might use this smile to describe the birth of his firstborn child or to explain how his best-mate died in a sheep stampede. After the trip I came to appreciate this not as unsettling craziness but just part and parcel for the type of people that inhabit this part of the world. Maybe they just enjoy life that much, or maybe they are all a little unbent by conventional, American standards. Either way, it certainly added an element of something to the experience.

And then, after an unseatingly abrupt 360 of his own (that nearly threw Karen from the boat because she didn’t hear Blair’s warning to “hold onto something”), we cruised into the dock and loaded up the boat. After some quick goodbyes and a refueling, we scooted on our merry way to our next destination, the city of Te Anau.

Traveling to Te Anau

The first hour or so of our trip, us four foreigners dozed fitfully. The combination of jet-lag and the excitement of what was already a full-day’s experience had tuckered us out. We eventually woke as we neared the small town of Mossburn, where Karen informed us we would be stopping for ice cream. While I do love ice cream and New Zealand’s winter is nowhere near harsh by my normal winter standards, something cold did not sound very good. “Eat what you want. You don’t have to eat ice cream, it’s just something you have to do when you go through Mossburn.” Why, exactly, it was something we had to do, I don’t know. But we stopped at a little roadside eatery and picked up a few things to eat.

Libby and I got two corndogs because they looked rather tasty. Instead of the traditional cornmeal cover that we were used to, these looked lightly battered, almost tempura-style.

Travel Tip: New Zealand, and we’re told Australian, corndogs should be avoided unless you have already acquired a taste for down under sausage. They have almost no concept of an American hotdog—and if you are going to get an “American hotdog” they will call it exactly that. In addition to this, Sausage here is not so much as we expect it in the States. It seems far greasier and, well, not right. It is difficult to put a finger on exactly what isn’t right, though. Like American sausage, theirs is essentially smooshed pig in a casing. There might be less seasoning, or maybe the casings are different. Whatever it is, though, their sausage is really not very good. I had one breakfast sausage that tasted like a breakfast sausage, but, otherwise, every sausage I have tried has been a let down. And they use these sausages in their corndogs. We were very disappointed to discover this and found our corndogs to be inedible. We passed them off to Darrell who will, as all good fathers do, eat anything that his children pass on.

Also while we were there, Molly pointed out a fat, stuffed sheep doll on the bottom shelf in their “tourist” display. Libby fell immediately in love with Fat Sheep and told me to buy it for her, which I did because it was very soft and we had no pillows for the car trips, and Fat Sheep looked like a prime candidate.

When I went to the counter to pay for it, the lady working behind the counter said, “That’s made of real sheep skin, you know.”

“It is?” I asked, somewhat doubtful because, though I haven’t been around a lot of sheep, I have enough experience to know that even the softest sheep doesn’t feel smoothly soft and vaguely synthetic like this sheep did.

“Naw. Just kiddin’,” she said, giving me that same suspect smile that Blair always sported.

From that point on, Fat Sheep became our mascot. We laughed at the way his one inch feet could barely touch the ground if you set him down in a traditional sheep-standing fashion because of his massive girth. We pondered how a sheep could possibly get himself into such a state (we decided that he was a Buddha-esque wiseman and that other sheep would travel many miles to visit him, and they would always bring an offering of deep-fried grass for his advice. This, we established, was Fat Sheep’s main dietary intake, deep-fried grass, which explained why he was so morbidly obese). And then Libby, in a cutely disturbing way, started “listening” to Fat Sheep and relaying messages of various sorts to our group. She cuddled and talked to him for the rest of the ride to Te Anau. It was very cute and if she’d been smiling from ear to ear I would have suspected that she’d contracted the New Zealand crazies.

Along the way we also decided that he needed a proper name, as Fat Sheep seemed a little insulting for a sage of his stature to the sheep community. After tossing around several options, we decided on Hogget, which is the term used for sheep meat that comes from a sheep between the age of one and two years old. Under one is lamb. One to two is hogget. Two and over is mutton. I had no idea, but as some Eskimo cultures had many necessary names for snow, it seems reasonable that New Zealand would have several names for sheep meat. There is, after all, a very, very lot of it. Or should that be very, very a lot of it? Whichever, sheep are plentiful in New Zealand.

Later that night, Libby ended up sleeping with Fat Sheep (despite our wishes to show proper respect, we have sort of forgotten about his official name and stuck with “Fat Sheep” as it is much more fun to say), curled up around him in our bed. It was awfully cute to see a thirty-one year old woman snuggling a toy like a child. It was reassuring in some small way.

Te Anau’s Glowworm Cave

Our last activity took place on Lake Te Anau. We boarded for this night and the next at a “villa” establishment that, I believe, was owned by Holiday Inn (they had some of their signage around the room anyway).

Travel Tip: Indoor heating seems to be a novel concept for just about everyone in New Zealand. It’s no surprise that, in a country so full of wood, fireplaces would be used to provide much indoor heat. However, this rule does not apply to hotel rooms as none of ours has had a fireplace at all. Heating, like electricity in general, seems to be an afterthought if anything to most establishments here. The rooms, while spacious, have usually only had one or two wall units to heat all of the space—and we will be lucky if there is one or two electrical outlets per room. These units usually don’t have temperature controls that are meant to be fiddled with and they do an excellent job of heating an area of about four feet around them as they have no blowers. Most of our beds have been equipped with heat pads (like an electric blanket, only under the bottom sheet instead of pulled over the body), but here we’ve gotten into problems with electricity supplies.

As I stated before, if one is lucky, a room in New Zealand will have one, maybe two, electrical outlets. These outlets, unlike American ones, have individual switches to turn them on and off and have only one outlet to plug into. Two is the perfect number of outlets for a room if you are plugging in a heat pad for one bed and an electric clock, as most rooms do, but forget about plugging anything else in (and we have had a few rooms that didn’t have enough for the heat pad and the alarm clock, so the alarm clock was left unplugged).

In other words, if you come in winter, be prepared to focus most of your activities to a four-foot diameter area of space in a room and if you need to recharge your batteries (besides needing a converter or transformer in the first place), be prepared to run a cord under a bed or behind a couch or to leave things sitting on a counter in the restroom.

In the evening, after we’d had a few hours to settle in a little, we hit lake Te Anau on a biggish passenger boat with the intent of visiting a cavern system inhabited by strange insects called glow worms. Along the way, the tour guides gave us a brief history of the area (I remember only something about someone named, possibly, Quinton MacKinnon who spent two years trying to find an overland route connecting Milford Sound—there was a reward of fifty shillings, which hardly seems like a good wage for two years’ work. Beyond this, I don’t recall anything of the educational nature of this area. Sorry. Maybe next time.)

The tour guide told us how the island is being overrun by opossums and about the development of the budding opossum fur industry. “But the opossums are usually not skinned in the traditional way,” he informed us. “They are usually plucked like a chicken. If done by hand, though, this can be a very time consuming task. So someone invented a machine to do the job. It’s a great Wallace and Gromit looking contraption with wheels and gears and lights and it sucks the opossum into a tube on one end and shoots a bit of fluff out one spot and a naked opossum out the other.”

We laughed at this. “It sounds like we have a few doubters among us, but they have also invented a portable version of the opossum plucker. It runs on petrol power. So it’s a petrol powered portable opossum plucker . . .patented.” Tour guides here are, so far at least, a riot.

Oh, wait, I do remember one other factoid. He also told us about a tribe of Maori who separated from the rest of the tribes and pressed into Fiordland to make a life for themselves. This tribe often resorted to guerilla tactics when attacking the settlers. “Because Australians taste like chicken, I’m told.” I remember this factoid not because I think it’s true (they probably taste like sheep also), but because it prompted us to actually consider the taste of people for a second time in a two day period. The first time had been in the van on the way to Queenstown and it had been JF and I who were discussing it. I can’t remember why we were discussing this topic, except that we discussed a very broad range of different topics over the few days we’d been together, because we have little else to do to pass the time.

Really this is a long way of getting around to the punch line, or what exists of one. When my personal flavor was discussed, for some reason it was decided that I would taste “cantankerous,” which sounds gamy and unpleasant. I suppose that is something in my favor should I ever be in a position to negotiate with cannibals.

Back to the tour and onto the tour guides themselves for a minute. Tour guides in this country are wonderful. We spent a fair amount of time in the company of guides through the first days of the trip, and, overall, I found them to be quite hilarious. I asked Karen if the park services here in New Zealand hired professional writers to script some of the better jokes they had, but I received no convincing answer one way or the other on the point. She informed me that, generally speaking, all of the tour guides she’d experienced were surprisingly witty—and their wit is very dry and sarcastic, which I have a particular fondness for.

As for The Glowworm Caves, they were quite fascinating. Situated north on the opposite side of Te Anau lake from the city of Te Anau lies an extraordinary cavern system. The caves are multi-layered (I’m sure there is an official terminology for this, but I have no idea what it would be) meaning that, as water levels lowered, new exits for the running water were created with each new level, creating caves at varying altitudes that opened onto the lake. Outside the caves, the park services have created an education building.

After the boat has docked, visitors are ushered inside, given something warm to drink and asked to sit down for a short video describing the nature of the cave and its inhabitants, and all of the various do’s and don’ts are explained. The video was obviously not written by the tour guides (or the Tour Guide Writers Guild, which I’m increasingly convinced exists even if no tour guide would ever admit to it) as it is hokey, boring and difficult to pay attention to. Corny images of people pop up, supposedly enjoying the amazing sites, then those images “fade” only to be replaced by the same person’s face in profile, showing a likewise unbelievable expression of wonder. Very cheesy.

Once inside, the tour begins. After a fairly brief walk into the heart of the glowworm’s habitat, the tour guide ushered us into a small row boat and turned off all the lights. By feel, the guide used a mounted chain to pull us deeper into the cave. After a time, it became possible to see a myriad of small pinpoints of light on the ceiling.

On some levels this is an extremely fascinating experience. These glowworms are carnivorous and, unlike glowworms the rest of the world over, they use their translucence to attract prey and not to mate. On an entirely other level for me, the fascination of staring five feet up into a mess of glowing bugs that I know are slithering around in their own slime grew somewhat boring after about twelve seconds. We sat there in complete silence so as not to disturb the insects for a few minutes, floating back and forth as the guide spun the boat and allowed everyone the chance to clearly and patiently stare at every single square inch of the probably twenty by twenty cave. The experience, while definitely worth having, was probably not what I would call a repeater, so I am certainly glad that Karen and Darrell were willing to sit through it all again so that we might share it.

After the caves, we took the boat home and, again, turned in early. The nights were still ending too quickly, to me at least, but eventually we had to get used to the time shift. The good news was, this was the last day of hectic running around that we would be doing. The next day we were scheduled for an all day cruise into Doubtful Sound, so we still had to get up in the morning, but at least we could come back to the hotel room we were already comfortable in and then sleep long into the next morning.

Day 1 Photos

The sign outside the centre, and, I believe, you can see the official launching off point, training facility, whatever it was where just about every trip to Antarctica starts.










My contribution to one of the "interactive" displays in the museum. Libby suggested the cocoa. Ice weasels scoff at such things.











Us in front of the Hagglund. Not a very good picture of the vehicle, I'm afraid. There are two parts to it, a cab where the driver and a few passengers can sit and a trailer where most of the passengers are hauled.









A Big Fish. There is a running theme in New Zealand of dedicating large statues to just about everything. We tried to take pictures of as many of them as possible, but this might be the only one I include, just so everyone gets an idea of what we were looking at when, and if, I ever mention the type of thing.













In front of Mt. Cook. Because posting pictures is such a nightmare on this site, I won't include the one with nobody in it. Just imagine that landscape with no people. Mt. Cook is back there somewhere. I didn't think it was that distinguishable from everything else in the horizon, but someone must have thought it was pretty special.






Dinner in Queenstown. Photo taken by a beautifully self-absorbed waitress (or possibly owner of the restaurant, I wasn't sure). From left to right: Molly, Karen, JF, Darrell, Pat, Libby.

Day 1--Christchurch to Queenstown

Day 1

Day one of our trip brought us from Christchurch down to the tourist hub of Queenstown. Originally our plan was to spend considerably more time in Queenstown, doing some jet-boating, watching some people bungy jumping (because there was no way we would do it ourselves, being the ground-huggers that we are), and a few other things. But our hobbled travel arrangements pretty much made that impossible. Instead, and possibly even better than our original plans, we decided to hit at least one attraction in Christchurch and then make a few stops along our way down to Queenstown.

The Antarctic Centre

After a light breakfast, we spent fifteen minutes or so driving around, following signs and avoiding traffic, and we eventually ended up in a parking lot that was perfectly adjacent to the hotel parking lot we had come from, though neatly concealed by trees and angles from our original vantage point. When we arrived at the Antarctic Centre, it was still closed, so we wandered around the outskirts of the building, waiting for it to open. Then, after a few minutes, we realized that, unlike any attraction I’d ever been to in the States, the front doors were open and we were allowed to wait inside while the employees counted down their drawers and prepared to open for the day.

It is a little known fact, at least in my circle of friends, that Christchurch is the primary jumping-off point for pretty much all Antarctic research that is and has been done through the years. There are no end of facts that I could share with everyone here, but I’m feeling far too lazy to look anything up. Just do a web search for Antarctic Centre and Christchurch and feel free to educate yourself as much as you see fit.

We spent the first forty-five minutes traipsing through the museum. I have always had a passing fascination with museums. If I can pass them, I stayed fascinated. Museums always sound like a great way to spend time, but, in reality, they are usually just a series of old things with informative yet strangely disinteresting information next to the display. This museum was pretty much like that, though they did have some truly ingenious interactive aspects was well. For instance, they had a “blizzard room” that, once an hour or every forty-five minutes, I’m not sure, would recreate the feel of an actual blizzard. Patrons were to put little booties on (to keep the snow inside clean) and layer up in some heavy winter parkas that the museum provided. Then we were to step into the room and experience first hand the freezing, blowing, snowy environment. This sounded intriguing to me. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to do it because we had also signed up to take a ride on the Hagglund, a vehicle used to get around in the unpredictable Antarctic, and the ride was set to start before the blizzard room reset again.

The museum had several other displays that piqued my interest and kept me, by museum standards, very well entertained. Since I apparently have the attention span of a five year old, this was a pretty impressive feat.

Then we began our Hagglund, or Haggy, ride. This mechanical marvel was created to cart people around the Antarctic as best as possible, which, considering that the “best” by Antarctic standards usually includes temperatures near absolute zero, ice floes that shifted on a near daily basis and any number of other obstacles, this contraption needed to be about the most versatile vehicle ever created. And from what I experienced of it, it might just be. The Centre had created, behind their main building, a vehicle obstacle course with steep hills and water hazards and whatever other facsimile of actual Antarctic conditions they could come up with.

Since we had not read any of the clearly indicated signs around the ride’s departure point, we had no idea what we were in for. I was expecting a short jaunt around the property, just to see how the machine worked and to get a feel for the way explorers and scientists trek out into one of the earth’s last frontiers. So it came as quite a surprise to me when, right in the middle of one of our tour guide’s sentences, we took an abrupt plunge down a very steep hill. We then quickly climbed another hill, sped down it, hit some rough patches and slowed down to a stop.

The tour guide then continued to share bits of information with us. And, again, without any real warning, we started careening around sharp corners and up and down steep hills. We were, for the most part, tossed around like a box full of dice, clinging to the ceiling stirrups for dear life. It was much like a roller coaster ride without safety restraints (which was fairly clearly indicated by the signs at the starting point, had we taken the time to read any of them, which, of course, we did when we got back). We also discovered how the vehicles could float in water and continue moving when our driver took us into a six or seven foot deep pool. All in all, it was a very interesting and strangely invigorating experience. After getting out, we shared a brief “survivor” moment with the strangers who had shared the ride with us and we moved on.

Travel Tip: If you, like me, enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning (or afternoon or evening or pretty much any time drinking seems like a feasible thing to do, as I usually feel) I strongly recommend bringing a large parcel of your favorite brand along with you, and, probably, your own Mr. Coffee if you would like to prepare it. This could prove a logistical challenge, but I sometimes think it would be well worth the trouble. While New Zealand has feverishly grasped the concept of espresso bars (you can’t swing a dead sheep without hitting a café selling espressos and cappuccinos), hotels do not share this enthusiasm for coffee. Apparently, when not purchasing extremely over-priced designer coffees (and they are over-priced even by Starbucks’ standards), Kiwis drink a lot of instant coffee. Karen informed me that she and Libby’s brother John are the only two people they know in Invercargill who own coffee makers. Many people use French presses to prepare coffee, but no hotel we’ve been in has offered us even that option. Fortunately for me, I have always sort of enjoyed hot tea with milk and sugar, which has always been an option available to us in our rooms. The hotels always supply us with a “milk” of some sort. Sometimes it is, as near as I can figure, a type of creamer that comes in little, non-refrigerated plastic containers, though some places refrigerate it, which worries me a little when it isn’t. It is always called milk, but I have been loathe to try it in anything but my tea. After a few days, I am finding it a nearly suitable replacement for my daily coffee, though I expect I will drink nothing but coffee for several days when we return—even though it will still be in the upper 90s and it will surely cause me to sweat like a stevedore.

Note: Once we arrived in Invercargill, the coffee supply evened out thanks to John, who provided our room with a wonderful welcome basket, which included a package of coffee that we could prepare in a French press. A French press, for those who have never used one, is a container of varying sizes with a plunger. Coffee grounds are put in the bottom of the container and water is poured directly onto them. A plunger then pushes all of the grounds to the bottom of the container, leaving, in theory, just the coffee on the top. Sadly, these plungers never get all of the grounds, and by the end of the trip we were getting somewhat used to not drinking the last swallow of coffee in the cup, because it was usually a muddy slush of coffee grounds. How or why this is the standard versus a nice, clean, efficient coffee maker, I have no idea.

Down to Queenstown

From Christchurch we began our journey down to Queenstown. New Zealand’s road system is practical in the extreme. The concepts of super-highway and freeway are completely foreign to them. While this lends to a laid-back attitude to travel and affords travelers the option to visit many interesting sites and stop at every town and village that dots the landscape, it hardly lends itself to speedy travel from point A to point B. Frugality seemed to be the name of the game, and I would strongly recommend visitors never travel on their own until at least a nominal familiarity with the road system is established.

One interesting feature we noted several times on the trip was the single-lane bridge. This is exactly as it sounds. Drivers must make sure there isn’t someone coming the other direction on the bridge before crossing it, otherwise many horrible or inconvenient things will take place. I have noted several times in the past few days that city planners and engineers in this country must be at least partially insane for many of their plans to sound like good ideas, even if they did save a little money. Just how much money, exactly, one lane of bridge would cost versus two lanes is a question I would very much like to pose to the transportation department officials in this country, because I seriously doubt the extra expense would outweigh the possible problems a single lane bridge has.

While I’m on the subject, New Zealand’s roads, as I said before, are practical in the extreme. There is no road that doesn’t have a definite destination. From Christchurch to Queenstown, there was really only one travel option, and even that took us in a meandering path. Roads were installed where it seemed roads belonged, following old trails through the mountains or around even the smallest obstacle. And the roads are all two lanes with no discernable shoulders in case of car problems. Even though the country is relatively small, it takes as much time to travel across it as it would to cross twice the area in the States. Karen has also informed us that many Japanese travelers, who could never get a driver’s license in their own country because of the prohibitive costs involved, can easily get travel licenses that they can use here in New Zealand. How this process works, exactly, is a mystery to me, but the end result is that people who have never been behind the wheel of a car are somehow allowed to terrorize the good travelers of New Zealand. This has led to many, I’m sure, disappointingly non-comical events over the years. So far, we have not had any run-ins with horrible drivers, but I expect it is only a matter of time.

The “Peeing Across New Zealand” Challenge

Personally, I found all of the towns along the way a small blessing. Since I have a notoriously small bladder, and I find myself a compulsive fluid drinker, it quickly became a running joke in our van that it must be my goal to pee in ever single town in New Zealand. This was a goal that I quickly and eagerly embraced, since it meant that I would be able to stop every forty-five minutes or so for a potty break, whether I needed it or not (and, more often than not, I did, in fact, need it, even if I wouldn’t admit it at the time). Libby constantly reminds me that “overactive bladder isn’t normal at any age,” as the commercial informs. I tell her to piss off and everyone laughs at my expense while I casually clench my legs together and wish there was some way I could purchase some low-profile diapers for the remainder of the trip. What New Zealand’s attitude is towards adult diapers I am not sure, but I expect someone will find out for me at my humorous expense.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t until after the first day that it dawned on us we should be taking pictures of each bathroom as we moved from city to city (or bathroom to bathroom in a single city as the case often was). This would have offered a visual tour of all of my bathroom visits. I could have given some descriptive detail about each bathroom, how well it’s maintained and so forth. This would have been a brilliant idea and a good novelty theme to sell to a book publisher. Unfortunately, we didn’t think of it until most of our driving was already out of the way. Oh well.

I will give everyone another brief travel tip here, though. In New Zealand, restrooms are called Toilets. We pondered over this one night for a good period of time and decided that we didn’t like this reference to the restrooms. It wasn’t euphemistic enough. On the other hand, we agreed, “restroom” and “bathroom” didn’t really fit the bill very well either, since very little resting or bathing ever takes place in them, in the public versions at least. This prompted a round of naming that proposed what I think should be the new standard around the globe—The Squat Spot. While it lacks much of the euphemistic charm of a restroom or powder room, it deftly describes exactly what it is being used for and it has a nifty little ring to it that will help foreign travelers remember what it is. Of course, this doesn’t include all male toilet activities (for which we briefly discussed the name Squirt Hole, but decided it was just a little too graphic). Actually, though this topic gave us much pleasure at the late hour we had it, we eventually conceded that Squat Spot was in no way superior to Toilet, so we abandoned our plans to get in touch with the Prime Minister of New Zealand to start pushing the new standard name.

Anyway, many of the toilets in New Zealand have two button options for flushing on the top of the tank. I, naturally, pushed them both the first time I saw them, and they both seemed to flush. After some further experimenting (and the compilation in my head of several dozen not-quite-helpful diagrams that accompanied these buttons in many different bathrooms), I discovered that these buttons are “half flush” and “full flush.” The full flush, obviously, needs to be used with the patron’s discretion, when a half flush simply will not do. Whether you need the full flush or not, though, often depends on the toilet. Most of them rush water from the back straight down the hole. In these, the half flush will take care of most anything (this also made it nearly impossible for me to get video evidence of the Coriolis Effect in action—I ended up taping the sink draining, which also barely worked). But in some, the water is barely a trickle from the half flush, and the full is needed if anything but water exchange needs to take place. Sadly, there is no way to know what type of toilet you will be using without trying it first. But you should always begin with the half flush option, just because it saves water, and if the country is conscientious enough to install toilets that conserve water, then we should be conscientious enough to try and push the smaller button whenever we have the option. Well, once the proper amount of water has been wasted on button pushing experimentation, that is.

Aoraki/Mt. Cook and High Country Salmon

Along the way we made numerous stops in numerous small towns. My only advice, if taking a road cruise through the country, would be to stop at as many small towns as time affords. Even the smallest, most desperate looking town will usually have a nice restaurant or interesting shop. Many of them have historic or educational points of interest as well, and New Zealanders seem very keen to impart as much knowledge and wisdom about their country to travelers as I have ever seen anywhere.

Two stops we made that bare brief mention were at Mt. Cook (Aoraki was its native name) and High Country Salmon.

Mt. Cook is one of the most frequently photographed landscapes in New Zealand. I have no way of verifying this claim short of saying that two out of the four scenic pictures they had on the wall in the airport in Queenstown were of Mt. Cook. Of course this doesn’t take into consideration the fact that it’s just outside of Queenstown, but who cares. The mountain is strategically located immediately opposite a travel/information/gift shop building, which seems like good planning on nature’s part. In between the mountain and the gift shop, there is a beautiful, crystal clear lake, which, obviously, lends itself to the taking of many pictures. There is a story behind the lake and the mountain and its naming, but I don’t really remember any of it. Wikipedia, I’m sure, has much of the vital information if anyone is curious enough to want it. It was very pretty, though.

Next we visited High Country Salmon. Located near the town of Twizel (whose citizens, I’m sure, are called Twizlers, or should be if they are not) on “highway” SH8, High Country Salmon was a nifty little salmon farm. One of the owners cheerfully greeted us as we stepped down onto the dock area surrounding some of the salmon. As we approached, she gave each of us a handful of fish food, which we tossed, one piece at a time, into the water. The salmon were so impressively big that we played a game of tossing food in strategic places to see if we could prompt them to splash somebody when they surfaced for the morsel. This offered us nearly two minutes of entertainment.

I only mention this place, not because it was particularly interesting or informative, but because they had some of the most superb smoked salmon that I have had in my life. I am not, generally speaking, much of a fish eater. I enjoy the occasional plate of fish and chips and have craved Long John’s once or twice. Having grown up as far away as possible from any large bodies of water, my idea of fish is generally something white, flaky and only offering as much flavor as its batter has. Eating fish in Kansas is a risky venture at best—though in recent years, as freezing and shipping technologies have improved, the fish that we do get in Kansas has become increasingly better in quality and availability—and it is too late, I fear, for me to turn over a new leaf. I like the idea of salmon because I know it’s something healthy that I should like, but the taste just seems too fishy to me, and fish taste reminds me of fish smell, and I’ve seen the type of water that produces fish smell. It and the previously digested bits floating in it would seem less that tasty to my way of thinking.

But this smoked salmon had the consistency and, in many ways, the taste of summer sausage or other smoked beef or pork products. It was scrumptious and pretty affordable. Half a foot-long fish (one side, port side, maybe—do nautical terms apply to fish as well?—of a fish, that was twelve inches in length, to make that vague description possibly more clear) ran about $42NZ. It was, the lady informed us, a special, but that seemed like a very reasonable price for such a large piece of smoked salmon. Karen ordered some to have shipped to her house in Invercargill for our later consumption. And, if you ever find yourself in the Twizel area, I suggest you do the same (I know the Loves would appreciate the gesture, or you could ship it to somewhere that you, yourself, would be able to enjoy it, that might work too).

Queenstown

From there we made a pretty straight shot into Queenstown. The day was dragging and so were we by this point. We were still moderately jet-lagged and ready to settle in somewhere for the evening.

Since it was well past dark, we couldn’t see any of the town as we entered. We found our hotel, which was a three-bedroom condo that, for some reason or other, was cheaper than nearly everywhere else in town. It wasn’t because the place lacked quality, it was very comfortable and offered us every accommodation that our previous hotel had given us, it was just cheaper. We walked through a bit of the town’s main commercial area, found a restaurant to eat at (which was ridiculously over-priced, though the food was good) and sat down for some family stories and a little too much wine.

Here I will completely go back on my earlier promise not to discuss prices. So far, prices in New Zealand are not what I would be tempted to call bargains. Cappuccino comes in one size, small, and it runs $3-$4. A hamburger dinner will routinely run around $15. Granted their dollar is about $.60 to the American dollar, but that still ends up pricier than what I’m used to in middle America. Especially in Queenstown, expect to pay a hearty chunk of change for just about every attraction. It is a tourist hub and the prices reflect it. But the town itself has many charms, which I will get to in Day 2.

Traveling Pictures

Here is me keeping a watch out for volcanoes. Very disappointing.












Libby and Molly on the plane. Notice how cheerful they are.













Another one out the window in Nadi. Not the best quality, but that's what two panes of window portal will do to a picture.

Traveling to New Zealand

First, let me start with a note about this blog. We have pictures to add to this, but I can't, for the life of me, figure out an easy way to add pictures to the middle of these entries that I have already created. The stupid program keeps inserting the pictures at the beginning and then I have to drag the pictures down, one paragraph at a time, to where I want to put them. This is stupid and I refuse to participate. Instead, I will simply create a second page with the pictures that should accompany the day. This first day of travel there weren't many pictures, but other days there were quite alot. On those days, I will only include a few pictures, just to keep everyone's eyes from bleeding.

Anyway, on with our first day of vacation.

Well, we are . . .here, sort of. It is the wee hours of the morning right now and I find myself not sleeping. Those who have never traveled west to the end of time may have a difficult time sympathizing, but just let me point out how disconcerting traveling over the date line actually is. We left Newton at 12:30 Wednesday afternoon. Our flight left at 3:05 for Dallas. (Libby just woke up and told me that she was having weird dreams about flying still—that her uncle Gary was trying to get through customs with bags full beef jerky and firecrackers. Both are very bad things to try and bring through customs. Now, for some reason, she is softly singing “Up, Up and Away” [in my beautiful balloon]. If this is what jet lag is like, then I guess it’s not so bad. Up at weird hours and doing crazy-type things is fairly entertaining at least) After the puddle jumper, we took a connecting flight to Los Angles.

Of course, when I packed my carry on baggage, I had grand designs of getting so many things done along the way. I packed the textbook for the new class I’m teaching this semester and three books to read and some notepads so I could write profound things and notes from some other writing that I wanted to sort through and get into order. In my head while I was packing, I envisioned myself catching up on hours of productive things that I had been putting off for the last few weeks, months, years. After all, I was a captive audience, what else could I do.

But, I thought to myself while I was packing, I can only be productive for so long before my eyes get tired and my brain gets bored and, after all, I am on vacation and I should enjoy myself some while we’re in the air. So I packed a portable DVD player with Season 1 of a certain series—to be discussed later—and my Gameboy with a few time-consuming role playing games. These, I told myself, would be something I could reward myself with for a job well done.

All this time, in the back of my mind, I was aware of the fact that the airlines, too, would have entertainment options on the plane, at least on the overseas flight they would. But I figured that would be easy enough to ignore and it looked like they were showing only movies that I had no interest in seeing (we got online before leaving and checked their web posting for movies).

Needless to say, I accomplished absolutely nothing productive on the flight down here. I made it about eighty pages into a David Sedaris book, but nothing else productive left my book bag. I did, however, run out the batteries on my Gameboy, iPod and DVD player. It’s amazing how, once one is actually in the air and surrounded by strangers confined to the same spot for a very long period of time, one immediately wishes to reward oneself for the “job well done” of killing time without killing people. And by “one” I, of course, mean “me.” I know people get on planes every day and conduct business. But as soon as I was on the planes, all I wanted to do was forget that I was confined on a machine that was clearly defying all of the laws of nature, and that I was sharing B.O. space with about 250 other people, and do it in a non-thinking kind of way. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

LAX, in Los Angles, is a large, confusing and mostly horrible airport. Really, you could substitute any large airport’s name into the above statement and it would be true. Airports are designed for the maximum of screwing patrons out of their money and the minimum of convenience for getting from one flight to another. Libby and I arrived with about three hours of lay-over between our flights, so we had plenty of time to wander around looking for our overseas flight. And I would have wandered around, more or less aimlessly, asking nobody where I should be going, determined to find it on my own until I only had a half hour left and then, and only then, asking for directions, but Libby, being a better traveler than I, almost immediately noticed that, despite what our boarding passes said, American Airlines sublet their New Zealand travel to Qantas and we needed to move to a completely different terminal. This took a half hour or so of toting our carry-ons through construction and various poorly labeled concourses.

After getting to the international terminal, we passed through security because we wanted to make sure that we knew where we were supposed to be. Of course this meant that we wouldn’t be coming out again without the hassle of taking off all of our clothes and bending over for the standard body-cavity search we now feel is necessary to make sure bad people aren’t sneaking nail clippers onto planes. (Speaking of which, Libby got onto the plane with a veritable arsenal of knitting needles—some of which were very long and very pointy. How is it that nail clippers are dangerous and long, stabbing objects are OK? Probably it’s a conspiracy of the Knitter’s Republic of Airline Passengers—KRAP to those on the inside, and not to be confused with the Knitter’s Union of interNational Travelers, which is full of unpleasant people) We hadn’t met up with Molly and J.F. (Libby’s sister and her husband) yet, but we figured they could find their way, what with them being experienced and worldly travelers.

Unfortunately, that meant that we had cut ourselves off from the impressive selection of restaurants and shops in the main airport and limited ourselves to the two or three piss-poor selections to choose from. Apparently, international travelers don’t need to eat, or have an inordinate amount of money to blow, because we were forced to pay $35 for two sandwiches, a coffee and bottle of water, and a small cup of yogurt since our domestic flights don’t even provide bags of peanuts anymore in flight. But, as a promise to Libby, this will be the only time that I complain about how ridiculously expensive it is to travel. It took her all of about an hour to get tired of hearing about that from me and she has threatened bodily harm on me if I don’t contain myself. (Of course I won’t remember this promise later if there is some pricing of some sort that I wish to complain about, but it’s a nice gesture on my part, I think, to at least supply the lip service. Come to think of it, what kind of travel guide would this be if I didn’t discuss price differences. Screw that. This guide is nothing if it can’t be incredibly useful to someone down the road. My whole experience would have been a waste if I couldn’t help someone down the road through it. Yeah, that will work.)

So, forty-five minutes before our flight was scheduled to leave, we still hadn’t seen Molly and JF. Libby kept wandering back down to security and asking me to watch for “salt and pepper shakers” coming up the walkway (Molly and JF are cute-as-a-button “little people” by normal person standards and this in some way equates salt and pepper shakers in her mind. Eventually, Molly and JF retaliated by labeling us the ketchup and mustard bottles, which I suppose is fair). Right before boarding started, though, we spotted them coming through security. Apparently, they hadn’t noticed that American didn’t fly their own planes to New Zealand, as I wouldn’t have noticed if Libby wasn’t with me, and they had spent the last hour wandering around their domestic area asking employees who obviously had no idea where they should go. Somehow they found their correct destination and they arrived at our terminal just as we were boarding.

And then we were on our way. Luckily, the flight wasn’t crammed full, so the quicker thinking people were able to leave full rows and spread out on less full rows. Fortunately, the very smelly stranger who was scheduled to share the three-seat row with Libby and I was a fast thinker and he jumped into the empty row in front of us, which meant that we had a little more room to spread out and an empty seat to store our pillows and personal bags in, allowing us at least the full range of limited leg room that was afforded us.

Before I get any further, I would like to note that Qantas was an excellent airline to travel. The staff was exceedingly, almost annoyingly, cheerful (and Australian, so they all that that “no worries” quality to them) and they stayed that way through the whole, long trip, even after we had been delayed for six hours. They served us two hot meals and supplied us with plenty of bottles of water, fruit and hot cocoa through the night (to those few of us who were unable to sleep, that is). I highly recommend their airline. It was a breath of fresh air after dealing with American-based (and here I mean the companies are American, not just the ones that use that word in their name) airlines for so long.

The flight itself was mostly long, boring and uneventful, except for inside my head. As I mentioned earlier, I had brought the first season of a television series along with me. I borrowed it from Kris (who had borrowed it from Brian about six months back but never returned it). It was the ABC series “Lost.” For those of you unfamiliar with the show, let me just explain to you how NOT appropriate this series was for me to take on an overseas flight to the south pacific. In the first episode, we learn that an international flight from Sydney to LAX has crashed on a small tropical island in the middle of nowhere. Every five minutes there is a flashback scene to the airplane hitting major turbulence quickly followed by the entire tail section of the plane sheering off. Not the sort of thing to let an uneasy mind rest.

So, instead of resting, I decided to create my own cast of characters from the people surrounding me. Unfortunately, in the series, NO cabin crew or airline personnel survived (for very long at least), so that meant that the rather attractive blond flight attendant who looked like a slightly younger Sharon Stone was a goner. Oh well. After walking the aisles a few times, I noticed that our cast was going to be significantly less attractive than the television cast. There were a few young hotties, which was fantastic for me as a survivor looking for places to spread my seed so the human race could press on or whatever excuse I came up with at the time to get in their pants, but the cast of attractive male characters was going to be sorely lacking.

Now, normally I would be the last person to toot my own horn, or even claim that I own a horn, but this flight was, I think, unusually lacking in the male character department. Let’s just say that I would have, in all likelihood, been a contender for at least a supporting cast role, by conventional television standards. Actually, we couldn’t have pulled off a conventional television cast. We would have had a main cast of characters filled with attractive females and disproportionately “carney” looking male leads. I would have been the sort of normal looking “freak,” possibly the replacement for the fat guy on the TV series. And, based on what I was seeing of the people, it was also going to be a very uninteresting series, probably not even making it all the way through our pilot episode. If I was going to single-handedly repopulate the human race, I would have to do it in a single one hour time slot.

It was also at about this time that I pondered the disconcerting notion that I had lost a day. Anyone who has traveled west past the date line knows what this is like, and I had been told by a few people how odd the concept was, but it wasn’t until I experienced it first hand that I really knew what they were talking about. We left home at noon on August 2^nd, and we were scheduled to arrive in Aukland at 5:30 on August 4^th, though our actual travel time was only around twenty-four hours. Beyond the sheer confusion of somehow losing a day without being drunk or stoned, I was also a little sad, because August 3^rd has always been one of my favorite days. For instance, I find myself always celebrating the great discoverers in Western civilization on August 3^rd because this was both the day that Columbus set out for American and the day that Hudson discovered the large body of water off Canada that he had the humble foresight to name after himself. Also on this day in 1882, Congress passed the Immigration Act, banning Chinese immigrants for ten years. I could just imagine the throngs of proud Chinese-Americans, filling the streets to join their ethnically diverse brothers and sisters to celebrate the happy melting pot-ness of modern America, but, sadly, I missed the day entirely. I hope everyone else celebrated extra hard for me.

Otherwise, the first, I don’t know, many hours of the flight were uneventful. The entertainment package the plane had was really quite extensive. There was a slew of movies—at least twenty in all—ranging from new releases to classics. There were a few dozen television shows to choose from, so I was able to see a few newer BBC comedies that I hadn’t heard of before (and probably won’t hear of again). There were documentaries and news programs and just all sorts of stuff. One could fly a dozen times a month and not view all of the options on there. In addition, the controls for the TV could be pulled away from the arm rests and used as controllers to play video games (of the solitaire and chess variety), and they had a flight path locator program that pulled up all of the statistics of the flight (how far to go, how high we were, that sort of thing) and showed a little plane over the ocean heading towards Aukland on the north island of New Zealand.

All in all, they amply supplied us with entertainment, or at least would have if two of our three systems hadn’t been malfunctioning. I, however, had my DVD player and Gameboy, so I was fine without them. But it did mean that I didn’t get to see any of the movies unless they were force feeding it to all of the seats, as they did twice after they grounded us in Nadi (pronounced both “naughty” and “naddy” by our Australian pilot) in the Fiji Islands.

Which they did because of horrible fog in Aukland. We were only about forty-five minutes out from Aukland when the pilot came on and said we were diverting back to the Fiji islands because Aukland airport was closed. This was about two hours out of our way. So I watched our little airplane abruptly change course and head north towards some little islands.

My only hope was that I would get to witness the explosion of an active volcano as karmic justification for us being mildly inconvenienced. I stared out the window for most of the time that we were stuck on the tarmac in Nadi, which was about two hours, and not one single time did a mountain explode. And we couldn’t get off the plane because there was no customs official at the airport, so they couldn’t deplane us without contaminating the entire country with our stink. Which meant the stink stayed in the plane, where it was building to a menacing funk. And it didn’t help that the air conditioner was only blowing out non-cooled air.

Eventually we got back into the air, but we were slated to land in Aukland nearly six hours after we were scheduled to land, and we had no way of contacting Libby’s parents, Karen and Darrell. Because of our delay, we were likely to miss both of our connecting flights, and unless they had the foresight to check the flight status of not the last flight we should have been on, which I think was delayed but eventually arrived, but two flights earlier—and there was no reason why anyone would ever think to do that—then they would be standing in the airport watching an entire plane disembark and never see the four of us, and this is exactly what happened. When we did finally get into Aukland and gathered up all of our bags and processed through customs, we bought a phone card, found a phone and called Darrell’s cell phone.

From here our options were few and the laid-back Australian attitude became mildly irritating. Instead of bending over backwards to get us into Queenstown (which, incidentally, is in the middle of the south island and is the main tourist hub of at least that part of the country) or find us suitable accommodations, the Qantas personnel were pretty much just telling us that there was no way for us to get to Queenstown that day, and we should find some way to occupy ourselves until the following day when flights would be available. While the prospects of sight-seeing a strange new town did have a little appeal, doing it in hour thirty-one of our travels seemed pretty unappealing, so we made arrangements to fly at least as far as Christchurch (which is on the east coast towards the northern end of the south island). We told this to Darrell and he agreed to drive from Queenstown, where they’d been waiting for the last six hours, to Christchurch. It would take them about six more hours to get there—though everybody in the airport claimed it would only take three hours.

It was on the flight into Christchurch that we were finally able to see some of the extraordinary landscape of the country that we were visiting. Snow capped mountains, lush green fields and sparse human developments were all we could see. About midway through that flight, as I sat there listening to some of my favorite music on my mp3 player, able to look up from an enjoyable book to see splendid vistas, sitting next to my wonderful wife, it dawned on me just how idyllic this experience was and how lucky I was to be experiencing it. And that, dear friends, is as corny as I am capable of getting.

I also noted with some trepidation that, from the sky, fields full of sheep look almost exactly like writhing maggots plundering a putrid green body. But even a field full of giant maggots couldn’t dampen my spirits.

Once we landed there was plenty of local color in the airport to keep my mind occupied. There was a girls rugby team (I assumed they played rugby because they were far too beat up looking to be soccer players and rugby is a more popular sport in New Zealand), a homeless bearded lady, and no end of chipper, pleasant people wandering around in the airport. Eventually, we decided that we would be spending the first night in Christchurch because traveling back to Queenstown would have gotten us there around 2:00 in the morning or later—and since that would have put us at forty-five hours of straight traveling, we figured it was time for a night of sleep. Once Karen and Darrell caught up with us at the hotel, we had a quick dinner and promptly passed out, content to at least be heading in the right direction again and anxious to start sightseeing the next day.

Oh, and for those of you who are keeping score. It’s gotten into the 40s here in the evenings. I had to wear a pair of gloves and pull the hood up on my jacket when I went outside. Eat that summer dwellers!

At any rate, we had finally arrived and, as it turned out, the delay forcing us into Christchurch instead of Queenstown afforded us an entire extra day of exploring the sites along the way, which we would not have otherwise had. So everything worked out just fine in the end.