Travelogue Day 8
By this day in the trip my sleep schedule had finally adapted to the time change. This was, it turned out, something of a mixed blessing. It was nice because, after around a week of not sleeping more than a few hours every night, I was starting to wear down pretty seriously. Being able to get to sleep at a decent time and sleep later in the morning allowed me to catch up a little bit. Unfortunately, it also meant that I wasn’t waking up three or four hours before everyone else, so I wasn’t getting any of this writing kept up.
Because of this, here I am, two weeks after returning, sitting here trying to remember what we did on these particular days. I can still remember quite a lot of it vividly, but some parts—like what we did in between our scheduled activities—is pretty much a blur. I do have a few quick notes to remind me of what took place on each day, so hopefully that will be enough to spark memories. If not, be prepared to buy some lines of BS that I’m making up as I go.
Day 8 was our first party day. Yes, I know, “partying” sounds like what we did pretty much every night we were down there, but this party was different. Not only would it have plenty of food and booze, it would have strangers and would be held at John and Sara’s. Day 8 was also the day Karen had scheduled us to have a family portrait taken by her friend, Louise.
The morning passed more or less the same as the last few had. I was up earlier than Libby, so I walked over to the Loves’ to have some coffee, check my email and read the newspaper.
It was around this time that we heard about the mighty and terrible terror plot that the British government had uncovered. Actually, it might have been a day or so after this, I can’t remember, but I’m thinking of something relevant to it now, so I better keep working forward as long as I can. We, of course, were prepared to be inconvenienced by the new restrictions to carry-on baggage, but otherwise we weren’t that put out by the news. After all, we were coming from New Zealand, surely they wouldn’t put too many new restrictions on us. What self-respecting terrorist would come out of New Zealand? Australia would be enough of a stretch, but a terrorist from New Zealand is nearly as inconceivable as a terrorist from Andorra. What would they be doing here in the first place?
Anyway, I do want to apologize to anyone who might have been flying the day that happened. Since we were a day in the future, as soon as I read the paper and heard about the plot, I should have gotten in touch with everyone and passed on the news. That way word could have been spread and many travel inconveniences could have been avoided. That was totally my bad for not living up to my responsibilities of living a day in the future, I guess.
Family Portrait
Eventually everyone showed up and we arrived at Louise‘s house about fifteen minutes after we said we would be there. It was pissing down rain all morning and was scheduled to keep doing it the entire day—so she was a little surprised that we had showed up at all and not simply rescheduled it for the next day. I was surprised that we were only fifteen minutes late. The Love family works on a pretty relaxed timeframe—the same way that many cultures work on their own time: Indian Time, Mexican Time, Aussie Time. Really, it’s only the oddball people like me, who can’t help but be punctual to the point of fault who don’t work on this kind of time, it seems. Still, since I’m the one writing this, I feel it’s my right to judge.
We raced out during a break in the rain (which ended up only lasting a few minutes), set up the family and somehow Louise managed to take about 500 digital pictures of the family in various states of smiling and looking in unfortunate directions. At one point, their dog, I don’t remember his name, wandered into the picture and had a lay down in front of the group—posing as if he belonged there and knew he belonged there. We kept him because every good family picture needs a dog in it. It then began to rain again and we bolted inside (it would again quit in about ten minutes and that time the sun came out, but even that only lasted for another ten minutes or so before it went back to raining).
In the picture, all of us are wearing coats that the Kiwis refer to as Swannies or maybe they spell it Swanis, I don’t believe I ever saw it spelled out. They are waterproof wool jackets, often following a plaid theme because all self-actualized New Zealanders wish they could be lumberjacks, designed to keep the rain out and the outpouring of sweat their non-breathing, thick insulating design creates trapped near the body. Libby seemed to think we needed some to take home, then I reminded her that I barely needed to break out a winter coat anymore since my time outdoors in the freezing cold only lasts as long as it takes the car to warm up. They would, however, have been nice to have during the Ice Storm (not the crappy Kevin Kline movie) when we lost power for a week. We could have cuddled up next to each other and passed our time itching.
After the picture and at Karen’s insistence, Libby was ushered to the back pens where Robin, Louise’s husband, kept some sheep. The intention was to let Libby shear a sheep. Because it was cold and wet outside, and warm and dry inside, but mostly because I had absolutely zero interest in tromping in the mud to hang out with livestock (I have, after all, spent most of my life trying to avoid exactly this activity), I stayed inside and chatted with everyone else. Libby, however, was given a pair of hand shears—the manual kind, not the electric kind—while Robin pinned a sheep. She apologized profusely to the sheep for the expected maiming of its flesh and went to work. A few awkward snips later, she had a handful of wool, which she put in a ziplock and hauled home with us.
That same wool will remain in the ziplock bag, probably on a shelf in our closet, for the next fifty years, or until one of us dies, the other becomes a shut in, and, eventually, someone from social services has to come into our house and forcibly remove us before burning the stinking, putrid remains of it all to the ground. Bleak outlook? Probably. But I fully anticipate being one of those people who poops off the side of the bed to save time and effort when I’m old and don’t care anymore, and I intend to make sure Libby is the same way if I should go first (I am currently running a subliminal hypnosis tape to the sound of “ocean tides” that I told her would help her sleep, if that doesn’t work, I’ll have to come up with something more drastic). This is, I think, the only reasonable way to go.
From there we went back to the Loves’ and quickly went our separate ways for the rest of the afternoon. John and Sara wanted to get their house set up and work on the cooking and Libby wanted to take a nap so she’d be prepared to stay up late that night. I worked on the earlier editions of the –logue, hoping that I could finish some of the earlier days so the family could proofread and fact-check them for me. By this point I had not yet fully completed a single day’s description, instead working to get the major points down before I forgot them. This was a brilliant plan and one that I should have kept up with. Mental note for future trips, I guess.
John and Sara’s Party
The party, or “piss up” as it was being called, was a brilliant success. The food was great (especially the smoked salmon that Karen had shipped from the salmon farm) and everyone had a great time. Because of the great central heating conspiracy and the very nearly freezing temperatures, most of the house had to be shut off to keep the heat in the kitchen and living room, where two dozen people or so crammed close together.
We also got to see a little New Zealand “hail” that evening. Darrell introduced me to the hail earlier in the day when we made a run to the store for a printer cartridge. Their hail is a kind of slushy, runny sleet that melts very shortly after reaching the ground. Libby and I actually heard it falling the night before on our hotel’s roof. Not surprisingly, since it rains all the time, asphalt and cedar shingles would be a complete waste of time and money. Most houses have ceramic or metal roofs—our hotel’s was metal. Thus, at around 5:00 in the morning, it sounded very much like I was sleeping in a machine shed as the “hail” hit the roof. Even the most pathetic of hails sounds like a rain of frogs when you’re living under a metal roof.
Here is yet another future business venture for some aspiring entrepreneur. Though I only visited one liquor store (and we had to be introduced to the owners—guess who spends a fair amount of time buying alcohol . . .), I saw no evidence to suggest that big ole boxes of cheap wine are available in the country. I did see some boxes at the liquor store, but they only held probably a third of what our boxes here in the States hold, and they weren’t really any cheaper than the bottles. I know people are drinking the wine, and it only seems logical that families like ours, who could go through ten bottles or more in a night, would eagerly snap up the supply. Just a thought.
And we could have really used some big boxes of cheap wine that night, because we ended up running completely out of booze. Completely. And around 10:30 too. It turned out to not be a problem, though, since everyone had managed to get awfully sozzled during the time they had.
I really only remember two specific events during the party. The first involved Molly. She and JF were actually drinking, for the first and, I believe, only time while we were down there. And Molly and I had a rather long conversation about, get this, linguistics. Yes, the ideal party conversation. Well, actually, any topic is a good one when you’re drinking, I suppose. Anyway, we discussed infixes (like a suffix or prefix but coming in the middle of the word). We don’t really have any of them in English, but several languages make frequent and successful use of them. The only one of them in English that we could think of is, actually, a bit of a fudge-up and certainly slang in our language, using the F Bomb in the middle of a word as in “ri-fucking-diculous” or “un-fucking-believable.” We laughed about this some, because everything seems funnier when you’re drunk.
The other was a conversation I had with a family friend named Sarah. Sarah, who was almost certainly drunker than me, caught me by one of the doors when I was doing my “mingling” maneuver that I spend most parties using to keep me from getting too tired of listening to the same drunk people say the same things over and over.
“Tell me some gossip,” she said. “What?” I replied, not entirely sure what the rules to this game were. “Tell me some gossip. Make it up!” She was really quite insistent, which only served to fluster me further, and I completely failed to come up with any good stories to share. While I might be a fair shake at making up preposterous stories, I am not the type of person who can do it on the fly like that. So she filled in the blanks for me.
“Karen just broke a glass and Sara is absolutely pissed about it. She’s trying to find Karen and I bet she punches her in the nose. Why, just the other week, we (she and her partner, I want to say Phil but I can’t remember for sure and John would never email me back to confirm or deny this, so that is what I’m going to call him even if that’s not right) came over for dinner and I broke one of their wine glasses. Twenty minutes later, Sara found Phil and punched him in the face!” And so on. Sarah actually spent most of the time that I was around her stirring up exactly this kind of fun, which made the evening go by quite quickly and amusingly. By the end of the night, my jaws ached from laughing so much.
Right before the alcohol ran out (coincidence?), Karen, Darrell, Libby and Pete took off. The rest of us hung out for another hour or so, then Molly, JF and I hitched a ride with a friend of John and Sara’s who happened to be leaving at the same time and who generously offered to swing us by the hotel, even though none of us knew exactly where it was we were going. After fifteen minutes or so of extra driving, we happened upon Abbot, the street Karen and Darrell’s house is on, and we were able to track down our hotel (I was so lost that I thought we were heading in the completely wrong direction at exactly the time when we drove up to the hotel).
When I got in, Libby was already in bed, but I was still pretty wound for sound, so I stayed up and tried to work on the –logue a bit. Sadly, my fingers were unwilling to cooperate, so I was left with nothing but the television to pass the time—which, as I’ve said before, is no way to pass the time at all anywhere that we stayed while in New Zealand. My choices were as follows: Demolition Man, starring Sylvester Stallone; Dungeons and Dragons starring Miscellaneous Wayans; and non-stop phone sex line advertisements. The adverts were pictures of women with accompanying phone numbers. Each picture would stay up about ten seconds and they cycled like a slide show. These, I discovered, run pretty much every night on one of the channels and, even though they can show nudity on network TV (though they don’t make very good use of this policy, I only saw one set of boobies on TV the whole time we were there), all of the pictures of alluringly fake women were blurred out, so they completely failed to keep my interest.
Since I’d seen Demolition Man and new first hand that it was terrible (possibly beyond terrible, actually), I decided to watch Dungeons and Dragons instead. I had heard this movie was also beyond terrible, but had never watched it myself to make sure. It is entirely beyond terrible. Demolition Man, against all reason, is probably a better movie. How Jeremy Irons thought this movie was a good career choice is quite beyond my grasp, but I stuck it out and watched every last second of it. Quite an accomplishment, I think, and one well worth bragging about.
After that, with a somewhat sour taste in my mouth from the hour and a half that I had just wasted, I went to bed.
Day 9
It was Sunday so we started our day at church. He he, just kidding. I believe I remember us driving by a church at some point in the trip. I think it was near a ping pong hall or something. I actually don’t remember seeing many churches. I don’t know if that was just my selective memory or if there actually aren’t churches on every third street corner like there are here at home.
On Day 9 we decided to take a short road trip down to Bluff, which is the southernmost city in the country. Bluff could, and possibly should, be a very pretty town. All of the southern coastline that I saw was carved out of impressive rock formations, which meant that Bluff was situated on top of just such a formation. Steep hills lifted the city further and further up into increasingly more scenic vistas. The only problem is, from almost all of the city, what should be wonderful scenery is blotted with a wonderful view of the Aluminum Smelting plant. Remember this from earlier? The one that sucks off all the nice, clean electricity? It’s located out in the middle of, I think, a bay of some sort, and it’s visible from just about every part of town, what with town being on a hill and all.
Possibly because of this, Bluff seemed to be a bit on the shabbier end. The houses had a bit more of a run-down look to them and the town as a whole seemed a bit, I don’t know, grittier. But maybe that was just my impression of the city based on the fact that I could always see that smelting plant whenever I looked over my shoulder.
There is, however, a really fantastic walking path that runs along the southern coast and then juts up and through some forest to eventually bring hikers onto a peak that allows for a fantastic view of the ocean and surrounding coastlines. If you keep your back to the aluminum smelter, it’s almost possible to completely enjoy the view. There are also old gun turret buildings scattered along the path. At some point, New Zealand apparently had an army and thought that maybe people might attack them from the ocean, of which they had an unobstructed view—during one of the World Wars, but which one I’m not entirely sure. I somehow doubt that this ever happened, and now their current first line of defense, from what I gather, is their equivalent to our Boy Scouts. As with the terrorists, what self-respecting army would ever attack? Who can you brag to about taking over a country full of mountains, sheep and people who think wearing shorts and wool coats when it’s nearly freezing out is a good idea?
There is also a sign down near a parking lot, about as near the elevated coastline as one can get without hover shoes, that most people consider the southernmost point of the island. At least that was how I interpreted it as we gathered under the sign for a picture. Of course, I found out a few days later that this wasn’t, in fact, the southernmost point, but it is the point that most people make it to, since the actual southernmost point is on the edge of a sheep paddock much removed from any sort of civilization.
We took the “medium” hike, which still jaunted us through some pretty steep forest trail and back down a surprisingly treacherous path (again, this wouldn’t have flown in the States, they would have had to install 1000 yards of stairs to keep people from slipping, which I nearly did a few times because I’m as sure-footed as a two-legged mountain goat). It was still raining and quite cold, especially since the wind tends to whip unobstructed straight off the ocean, and that was why we didn’t take the longer hike. Also, several members of our party were lazy and didn’t want to walk that long. I won’t name names. You know who you are, lazies.
Anyway, this coastline was, like everything in New Zealand, quite beautiful and blah, blah, blah. Big rocks and crashing waves and lots of trees and green and hills and well-kept trails and so on and so forth. Come see New Zealand, blah, blah, blah. Damn scenic places and their always demanding description. Look at the pictures, that ought to do a pretty good job of illustrating what it was like.
After Bluff, we returned home and set about our busy plans of doing just about nothing. We returned to our hotel for a little while to nap some more and we returned late in the afternoon to see what was going on for dinner.
After eating, the entire family crammed into the living room for a TV night. Someone, apparently, got the notion that spending around five hours watching that Attenborough fellow in some documentaries seemed like a splendidly entertaining way to spend an evening. And, while they were educational and, by “doco” standards, interesting, at least half the room was sleeping through the last four hours of shows. After the voice of reason finally broke through, Karen talked everyone into watching a movie starring Bob Hoskins and Sir Judi Dench called “Mrs. Henderson Presents.” By this point we were pretty sleepy, our will to live having been sucked by various mammals living out their lives under the watchful eye of cameramen with far too much capacity for sitting still, but Karen promised us “lots of boobies,” so we toughed it out in the name of seeing nudity.
The movie was fairly watchable, if not terribly original or inspired—and the ending left much to be desired—but it was based on a true story, so it was like learning, which made us all feel good, and there were a variety of pleasant mams to appease our salacious eyes, which also made us feel good in an entirely different way.
After the movie, Libby, Molly, JF and I walked back to the hotel and I started a new tradition. Our hotel was inset slightly from the road, situated slightly behind a strip-mall-type building that housed the “lolly shop,” a wedding store, a fish shop (of which there are many, and this one served mostly Chinese Food for some reason and almost no fish that I could see from their menu) and a few other miscellaneous stores. The corner into our hotel’s drive was, basically, blind, since the store fronts completely blocked it from view. For reasons known only to the cruel recesses of my sub-conscious, I decided it would be funny to wait around the corner and scare the pants off Molly and JF, who were about a half-block behind us.
And that is exactly what I did. With a “Baah!” (short and punctuated, not like the sound a sheep makes) I jumped around the corner as soon as I saw their shadows draw near, and they both pissed themselves in terror. At least that’s how I remember it. I would go on to do this the next three nights in a row—and one of the times the two of them were no more than six steps behind me, but it still scared Molly. She’s apparently a sucker for that sort of thing—just a note to anyone who might be in a position to enjoy just such a sophomoric prank.
Flush with the heady triumph of making someone micturate themselves (in my memory, at least) and warm in the glow of many bared bosoms, I retired for the evening, completely aware that it really couldn’t get any better without Stacey Keach and Lee Horsely fighting it out in a death match of my own whimsical creation.
I THINK this was at Bluff, but it might have been out somewhere in the Catlins two days later. Considering how cold and miserable we looked, I sort of thought this was in Bluff.
One of those signs, like in M.A.S.H. that has a bunch of towns and distances. This is that "not-quite-the-southernmost" point in New Zealand I mentioned. Everyone in New Zealand is required by law to have their picture taken under this sign at least once in their lives.
