Peeing Across New Zealand

Days 12 and 13 Photos

2006-09-18T19:47:00.000-07:00

Not many pictures this time, sorry. I was getting pretty bored with taking pictures since I'd taken some 300 or so by this point. There really wasn't anything all that amazing to take pictures of these last days anyway.
The "sporty girls," as I called them. You'll have to open the picture up larger to be able to see the butt cheek hanging out of her skirt, though. The other was more or less identically revealing. Pretty risque for an airport parking lot.

Us standing in front of some water, a boat of some sort and more of the damn mountains they're so fond of down there. Actually, you had a much more scenic view of these in the pictures I took from the gondola place in the earlier post.

Us standing in front of a Moa. Behind us and to the right, if I'm remembering correctly, is where the statue of Jebediah Queenstown was. I'm very disappointed in myself for not getting a picture of that.

And that, is that. Thanks to everyone who took to time even to scan through some of these posts. I enjoyed writing them, even if most of you bastards didn't read them.

Tavelogue Days 12 and 13

2006-09-18T19:46:00.000-07:00

Travelogue Days 12 and 13

Day 12

Well, hmm. Sadly, there isn’t that much that can be said about our 12^th day in the trip. Jamie and Ami were leaving around noon, so we pretty much puttered around the house through the morning, waiting for the inevitable end of our trip. Libby spent a little time in the morning packing, then went back and finished in the afternoon—I stayed plenty clear of the packing, just to keep from causing any unnecessary stress with my near complete lack of Tetris skills.

Invercargill’s airport, though, did have a quite amusing statue in the front. It’s of two “sporty” girls—I’m not sure what sport they would be playing, and of course I didn’t take the time to notice such details. Probably it was some local color sport of choice for girls involving sheep or “decks” or kicking unsuspecting farm boys in the fork. Who knows. Maybe they were punting kiwis, lord knows I would have if I could have. All I know is that it involved a ball. Anyway, the statue itself was amusing because these two girls were wearing quite short skirts and both of them had their hands in the air. Usually, detail isn’t paid to the little things in these types of commemorative statues, but this artist obviously felt that the little things DID matter—well, actually, the not-so-little things in this case. These girls were . . . substantial. Not chunky or obese or anything, but possibly stocky, or husky by boy standards. And stocky girls have “back,” to be sure. And a noted consequence of raising one’s arms while wearing a short, I don’t know what it would be called—a jumpskirt outfit, maybe?—is that one’s lower parts will be partially exposed. And these girls were bearing butt cheeks, or at least the hint of the crease where butt cheek meets upper thigh. It made me laugh and take a picture.

Besides that, we packed and I figured out how to work the custom weather features on their satellite TV, because I like weather and am a loser. Libby and everyone else went shopping AGAIN, for what I have no idea, but it couldn’t possibly have been important. And that, sadly, was pretty much it. We finished packing and went to bed fairly early because we had to leave for the airport in the morning at 6:00 to make Molly and JF’s flight in Queenstown.

Day 13 (and 14, technically)

Our day started early and the first few hours of it were spent on the road to Queenstown. John was able to go along with us, which was nice—it meant one less goodbye that we had to say the night before. Mostly we dozed on the trip. Most notable was John, who curled up in a ball on one of the back seats of the van and covered himself up with ALL of the blankets that Karen had packed for us to sleep in on the trip. No part of his body was visible, and he wouldn’t move while we packed our bags over the top of him, into the large back seat. Then, not knowing that John was even along for the ride, Molly tossed one of her 200 lb. bags on what she thought was a pile of blankets. Much hilarity ensued, except from John under the covers, who just muttered a few incoherent curses and went back to sleep within five minutes.

In Queenstown, we saw Molly and JF off, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair and all of those other sad-emotion-type actions that people do, but we had a few hours to kill before our flight left, so we decided to wander around the commerce district of Queenstown, which was something we hadn’t had time to do on our first trip through.

We stopped into a Chemist—which is a much more diabolically satisfying name than our equivalent “drugstore” can boast (oh, and it is possible to buy codeine products over the counter there for colds, which kept Libby, James, John and Karen, I believe, half stoned for a few days of the trip as well—and if they weren’t taking the cold medicine, then I guess they must have just been stoned instead)—so that Darrell could buy, of all things, a comb. He said he had been without one for an unfathomable period of time, like a year or two. I’m not sure if he was looking for some special, orthopedic comb or something, and that was why he hadn’t found one for such a long period, or if he just hadn’t thought about it when he was somewhere that sells them, and I don’t remember if he was successful in finding one while he was there, but we stopped to look for one, I do remember that.

After the Chemist, we wandered around more or less aimlessly, up one street and down the next. Queenstown has what must be a prosperous commercial district. Everything is so expensive there that they would HAVE to be prosperous. We passed a few realtors on the streets too and they all had pictures of houses they were selling in the area. A small, beat up, one bedroom loft would sell for something like $100,000, and small houses were going for half a million dollars. It was criminal. (And, of course, I can’t verify any of those numbers, I might be way off base for all I can remember, but I know they were WAY overpriced and that’s all anyone needs to remember)

We bopped into and past about a quarter million “outdoors” stores, selling camping, skiing and hiking gear. You can’t punt a kiwi in Queenstown without it careening off two or three outdoorsy stores during its flight. Every third store sold this type of gear, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating here. Not much at least. After a time, even Libby and Darrell were able to pass them without caring what they had for sale—especially since the first several we passed had identical equipment and clothing at near identical, inflated prices.

We also passed through a park, which had a commemorative statue to Jebediah Queenstown in it. He was standing—surveying the land that he would conquer and settle, which would be subsequently named after him—next to his big blue sheep, Ferdeckin (I’m not sure how kiwis would pronounce this, but I THINK it would be amusing and appropriately sheep-shagging related), who was rumored to be his legal wife and chief military advisor. I also completely failed to take of a picture of this hilarious statue, and I humbly apologize for that.

We had another “hamburger” at a place called Fergburger, which wasn’t at all sexy like it sounded like it should be and which served us another one of New Zealand’s ridiculous culinary disasters on two buns—though, admittedly, this one was far more edible—and then we headed to the airport.

At the airport, we were informed that we should pack EVERYTHING into our checked bags, because the lady behind the counter had no idea what they were and weren’t confiscating thanks to the failed terrorist plot to blow up Washington or whatever. If she had, instead, chosen to stay informed on the day-to-day business of her chosen profession, she would have learned that, in fact, they were only restricting any liquids from entering the planes and electronic devices had pretty much all been cleared. Of course, we didn’t find this out until we were in Aukland and our checked bags were already in the hold of the plane with the gremlins and snakes, so we went the entire trip unable to use any of the distracting devices that we had packed specifically for the purpose of using on the very long plane flight.

Instead, we were forced to watch pretty much ALL of the in flight movie and television options that we hadn’t watched already on the way out, which we did for almost the entire flight because neither of us slept for more than two or three hours. It was a long, long, boring, and almost entirely unmemorable flight. The only sort of interesting thing that happened was time related again. We left at 12:30 pm from Queenstown on the 17^th, and we arrived in Wichita at 8:50 pm on the 17^th—meaning our twenty-six or so hour flight took us only eight real hours. It was very weird.

Also, it took me FAR longer to get used to the time change coming back than it did going down. I was groggy and out of it for nearly two weeks—and my sleep schedule still hasn’t completely recovered almost a month later.

Ah, hell. Has anyone else ever put a pot of coffee on to brew then, distracted for some reason, forgotten to put the decanter back where it belongs? I just did. And it made quite a mess in my kitchen. I was so distracted with trying to remember if anything interesting, at all, had happened on our flight home that I came back into my office with the decanter still sitting on the counter. Stupid.

In Conclusion

I highly recommend a trip to New Zealand. Even if you don’t have highly entertaining family members to fill your days, as we had, there is more than enough country to see to keep a traveler busy for at least a month—and I’m only counting the south island since I have no knowledge whatsoever of the north island.

And I could certainly see the appeal of moving down there now. Libby and I had a conversation about that while we were there—how, in many ways, it was nice to leave EVERYTHING behind. “It’s a lot like when we went to college,” she said. And it was, almost exactly. When I moved to Wichita for school, I left all of my high school friends and my family behind, and I only sort of keep up with any of them anymore (extended family, obviously, not immediate, who I talk to at least once or twice a year, if they’re lucky). I had a fresh start. I could be whoever I wanted to be and nobody would know any different. It was very liberating in many ways, and we agreed that moving down there would be almost exactly like that—a fresh start with a clean slate and no preconceived notions by us or by those around us. But, then, eventually, just like when we moved away to college, we would build up the new responsibilities and the new problems and the new drama and everything would end up exactly the way it always had been, just with different names to remember and different scenery (which, admittedly, is pretty fantastic). And that, we figured, just wasn’t enough of a trade for losing contact with all of the friends and family that we have here.

So, sorry all, you’re stuck with me and my god-awful-long emails and my whatever else you lot have a problem with. And, folks in New Zealand, we’re definitely planning on coming down as often as we can—it is a wonderful place to visit—but I don’t think we’ll be ex-patting it down there with you anytime soon, unless the world descends into utter chaos and we need a place to hide until it all blows over. Then, perhaps, New Zealand would be a pretty perfect place. I can’t imagine any world powers worrying that much about taking over New Zealand. And that, I think, is one of its most endearing charms.

To those of you who actually took the time to read all of these -logues, thank you. To everyone else, cram a bastard in it.

Days 10 and 11 photos

2006-09-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

A sea lion. Notice the shape and natural posturing of the head--it would be perfect to attach a laser to.

Waipapa Lighthouse. Not even shabby chic, really.

A dog herding a flock of sheep. Far more fun to watch than to look at in a still photograph.

Slope Point. Libby is standing roughly two and a half feet away from sudden death.

This is the drop down from where Libby was standing. Sorry if this isn't the greatest quality, I was holding the camera out in front of me, trying not to get any closer than I had to.

The southernmost sign in New Zealand. I believe you can see the start of the fence that I peed on to the left. If you followed that back another fifteen yards or so, you'd find my marked spot.

The view from the opposite side of that drop I was talking about earlier. I think this gives a little better perspective of just how high up it was. But it still doesn't do it justice.

Never stop in a flock of sheep. You will die.

Jamie, trying to whip a sea bird of some sort--probably an albatross--with a strip of kelp.

The petrified forest. Yeah, I know, not so foresty. I'm told there are strips of rocks on the beach and these are the old trees or something. Whatever. Looks like rocks to me.

Porpoise Bay. It is a bay, but there were no porpoises. To the left of me was snack bar and picnic area that represented the only civilization we'd been in all day.

John, looking contemplative, at Porpoise Bay. No, really he's listening to the cyst in his head. It's saying, "I swear to you, JF SAID he wanted you to push him over the edge." But John wouldn't listen. Instead, JF had to jump on his own. Very sad and tragic, except for the part where he's a French-Canadian.

NZ's Niagara Falls. Not as impressive as the one in North America, but FAR more pleasant to visit--unless you like wax museums and carnival atmospheres, then the North American version is definitely for you.

The diner in Owaka. Be sure to ask them to "hold the salad" on your burger. Trust me on this.

The land bridge connecting Nugget Point Lighthouse to the main body of land. Don't let the foliage fool you, the drop on the opposite side is very nearly straight down.

The rocks out from the lighthouse on Nugget Point that probably killed a person or two. Not the most hospitable place for a sailing vessel.

The family gathered around the table in El Tigre. Notice the cake. It weighed about three hundred pounds and was solid chocolate. They constructed it with a little known chocolate that forms on the surface of dwarf stars. Tasty but filling.

Days 10 and 11--Beaches and the Catlins

2006-09-16T09:01:00.000-07:00

Travelogue Days 10 and 11

Day 10

The next two days we covered a pretty fair amount of distance and saw a number of different sites. With only a few days left in our trip, a bit of a sense of urgency started to press on us if we were going to hit the sites that we had originally planned to hit. As far as I was concerned, I did want to see the sites, especially since I knew this travelogue would be awfully boring if all of my posts amounted to: “Today we slept in then got up, had a pie, and played Magic for nine hours.” While this sounds like a pretty splendid vacation to me, it doesn’t make for very good reading. There were a few things still on the list to do, but since we had the first installment of Darrell’s 60^th birthday party happening in the early evening, we knew we couldn’t stray too far from home. So we decided to have a beach day.

Oreti Beach

Oreti Beach, while not being what you’d call particularly scenic or, at least on the day we were out there, popular, had the distinct advantage of being very close to Invercargill—about 5 KM to the west, if my map is accurate (or my map skills aren’t faulty, which they probably are). The day was blustery, drizzly and cold. Again. And, being a beach on the southwestern end of the country, and since most of the weather blows up from, you guessed it, the southwest, we were in a perfect locale to really admire what the local weather referred to as “gale force winds.” Of course, being from Kansas, I had a good chuckle at what they called gale force, but it was certainly brisk even by Kansas’ straight line wind standards. Add the chill and the damp and you have the makings of the perfect day at the beach.

This beach did have a very interesting characteristic that I had never experienced before—which isn’t saying much since my repertoire of beaches is not very extensive. I didn’t have my handy measuring wheel (this is, I just found out on the Webernet, what those devices are officially called—seems like someone in the coining department was asleep at the wheel there . . .get it? Puns are hilarious), but I would have estimated that the distance between where the coastline clearly ended and where the ocean began was somewhere near 1/8^th of a mile, possibly more.

This seemed like an unnecessarily expansive stretch for a beach. But, then, it all started to make some sort of sense. Up to this point, all of the coastline that we had seen had been sheer rock faces. Obviously, the universal law of Equal-Beach Exchange dictated that, if there were sheer rock faces covering some beaches, other beaches would have to extend further back to keep the acceptable beach mean distance of around fifty feet constant. Of course I planned to publish my findings in Discover magazine or New Zealand Beach Tri-Quarterly, but I forgot about it until just after I typed this sentence, which I haven’t yet finished typing, and, besides, my measuring wheel was confiscated at customs—they didn’t want me polluting their metricked up system with my English weights and measures, it seems, and they are a bit fascist about it.

People, we were told, regularly drive their cars out onto this expansive beach, some to do dangerous car-driving things, others to spend the night watching the sea air destroy their paint jobs. That day there was a minivan parked about a half mile or so down the way. Its owner was probably baking the New Zealand equivalent of meth—which, I think, is called meth (though, I might recall someone saying it had another name too). We didn’t stop to ask.

After Darrell pulled out his stunt kite and we made some practical use of the high winds—about ten minutes of use before the rest of us started shuffling our feet and casually heading back to the van without looking like we were heading back to the van—we piled back in and headed off to our next destination: Riverton.

Riverton

Riverton, which is also located along the southern coast in the Southland region, was something like a forty-five minute drive from Invercargill. The town itself seemed rather pleasant and, of course, it had some great views off the coast. Our intention was to head to the beach near town, but along the way we spotted an interesting store to stop in—we also spotted a few Op Shops and a number of gift stores which we somehow managed to avoid, thank god. The shop we stopped at was a paua jewelry manufacturer and seller. This also afforded us the opportunity to have our picture taken in front of yet another large statue, this one a giant paua shell made from, I was told, real paua. The beach outside town is littered with the shells, and, when we did finally make it to the beach, Libby and I were able to find a half dozen or so shells without much trouble (which we smuggled out of the country—eat that New Zealand!).

The jewelry store, aside from offering us ample opportunity to spend more money, also provided me with the most amusing sign picture that I took the entire trip—that sign of the radiation warning that is situated directly next to the only men’s toilet. Aside from that, if you happen to be in the market for some paua jewelry or other paua knick-knacks—and they had a healthy selection of jade jewelry also—I highly recommend this store. Its prices were probably the best we found while we were down there.

After shopping, we hit the beach, as I mentioned before, and did a little scavenging. The kite was pulled out again, this time with slightly more success since the weather had lightened up a bit, and we spent a half hour or so enjoying the sounds of the ocean. It was here that I also found a vial of a suspicious yellow liquid. It looked like a specimen beaker, and it was sealed. I cleverly decided to leave it the hell alone and backed away slowly. Probably I missed out on my only opportunity to gain superpowers. I’ll never really know for sure, though.

From Riverton we headed back to Invercargill and, after some quick cleanup, we headed to Mevlana, the restaurant where Pete works, where we were having our “outside the family” 60^th birthday party for Darrell. This restaurant was, really, quite fantastic. It’s a Turkish restaurant and, I believe, this was the first place that I had ever eaten Turkish cuisine—consciously, at least. Having been previously led astray by people who thought I would like curry, an episode that ended with me spending the better part of two days with my ass plastered to a toilet, and I don’t use the word “plastered” without due consideration of its visual effects, which are quite accurate, I have always been a little mistrusting of middle-eastern and Indian food. But this restaurant, in part at least, assuaged those fears.

The owners, who are fantastic people, went out of their way to provide us with a wonderful meal of mutton, chicken, steak, pita and hummus that left our tummies full and happy. And, because we were all lushes, the “kids’” end of the table bogarted all but about two of the bottles of wine, which we quickly drank down before anybody else had the chance to notice that they, themselves, didn’t have any wine of their own. We were all introduced to the crowd, since many of us weren’t local, and I found out that I am a freelance writer, according to Karen. This, I supposed, could be called a mere stretching of the truth if one removed the “-lance” part of the first word, since I don’t think I’ve ever been paid to write anything, but I continue to do it anyway for some reason.

After dinner and a little socializing, we returned home and Molly talked the family into playing a game that she called Werewolf, though we’ve been told that it has other names like Gangster that people have played it under. The setup was simple, requiring only a partial deck of cards—one card for each player, with one red queen and one joker. Whoever got the joker was the werewolf, whoever got the red queen was the witch (we found out later that there are several other characters that can be added if there are considerably more people playing) and everyone else is a villager. During a game turn, the werewolf kills a victim, the witch tries to find out who the werewolf is, then the village as a whole has to sentence one person to death based on a majority vote.

We were a little surprised to find just how much fun this game was. We spent the next three and a half hours playing game after game—shouting and screaming defenses and accusations and justifications—and killing Karen, usually first for some reason. We discovered that, due to their natural charisma and poor judgment, Jamie and John should never, ever be given civic responsibilities. The pair of them were responsible for the outright slaying of innocent villagers so many times that it wasn’t even funny. Well, actually, it was quite, quite funny. There really isn’t much point to the game itself, except to see if the werewolf can get away with it and kill the entire village. John was the only one to win, and I think it was just because he had the uncanny luck of being the werewolf in three out of four games that we played during one stretch, and nobody thought it could be possible that he was the werewolf again.

After that we called it a night and, as I mentioned earlier, I scared the bejesus out of Molly again when we walked home.

Day 11

The Catlins

The 11^th day we were informed that we were taking another road trip, this time along the southern coastline eastward, to and through the Catlins. This was a trip that we had hoped to make the weekend before, but time constraints and, more importantly, a desire to sit around and be inebriated won out in the end. The Catlins, we were promised, were extraordinary and something that we simply “had to see” (we also “had to see” Stewart Island, and we will just have to see it next time). I think there was a general malaisiness about the trip, at least among the kids, possibly because nobody was entirely sure if we could spend the better part of a day with all eleven of us cramped in a giant van without at least minor bloodshed. And with good reason. In the right mood, there probably isn’t a van giant enough to contain this family. Fortunately, we were able to spend the day NOT in that mood, and only a few minor napping accidents occurred.

The trip, as a whole, started around 9:00 in the morning and we didn’t arrive back home until close to 7:00 that evening, and it ran us through several “areas of interest” along the southern coast. The Catlins are a strange, nearly unoccupied little place. Little villages dot the single road that runs through the entire region—and when I say village, I hope mental images of quaint little New England hamlets with shops using words like “Ye” and “Olde” and mental smells of freshly-burned witch come to mind, because that’s sort of what these four and five house towns were like, only without the evidence of witch burnings (though I never saw a single woman in any of them!). All told, there are only something like 1200 people who live in the entire area (which is roughly as big as my thumb on this map—or around 750 square miles, I estimate).

This type of sparsity ( . . .whatever, Spell Check. I KNOW sparsity is a word—sure, I’ll give you malaisiness, that was a stretch, but sparsity exists, dammit! And dammit exists too! Argh! Ack, it never ends!) would not seem strange to someone from, say western Kansas or Nebraska—there is a word for that kind of sparseness: uninhabitable—but visitors who are accustomed to seeing friendly faces or places to stop and pee, forget it, unless you consider sheep faces friendly and don’t mind peeing on the side of the road (or on the country’s southernmost point, but I’m getting ahead of myself).

In other words, we were moving from map point to map point. There weren’t really any cities or anything else along the way—just these points on the map, that signs had been dutifully made of in order to reinforce their existence and roads had been twisted to run into to facilitate visitation of, all along the coastline. And there are PLENTY of these stops along the way. A full trip, visiting all of them, would take at least two days, maybe three. According to the map, there were, I believe, something like thirty points of interest to visit (I think, we left that map in New Zealand and all I have now is a mostly useless South Island map to work with). We managed to hit only five of the coastline sites and one of the towns and still it took us the entire day.

Our first stop, which I believe only took us an hour or so to get to from Invercargill (but I can’t be sure because I spent most of the time in the van in a semi-conscious state—I prefer to blame it on high carbon dioxide levels from so many people in the car, but probably I just have a short attention span for car rides), was Waipapa Lighthouse.

Waipapa Lighthouse sounds like it should be fascinating and/or extraordinary. It is, in fact, not so much. The lighthouse itself would leave lighthouse enthusiasts somewhat let down. Consider it the lighthouse experience equivalent of a trainspotter viewing a daily Amtrak line moving through any of the six or seven towns across the US that still have Amtrak stops. By noteworthy lighthouse standards, it was pretty bleh. It was also inaccessible as it was located on a berm (damn you Spell Check, I know these are words, what’s wrong with you? Trainspotter and bleh are words too. Well, maybe not bleh, but it should be. Why do you have to taunt me so?) just off the beach and completely fenced off. It was pretty small, fairly run down and had no creepy older men in full yellow rain gear shouting possibly provocative but ultimately insane rants at the sea from just to one side or the other of the blazing light, which would go out as soon as a ship needed it most.

There were, however, a few sea lions. Big, blubbery and basking—the two sea lions that we could see didn’t seemed a bit non-nonplussed (which you’d think would just be “plussed,” but it’s not—stick that word up your ass, Spell Check) to see us. In fact, one of them allowed us to get far closer than I would have ever gotten to a wild animal that didn’t use flopping about like an epileptic as its primary means of land transport. We took pictures and said things like, “Wow. A sea lion. Look how close we are to it. Isn’t this an example of a large animal that we don’t get to see in our everyday lives in an up-close-and-personal sort of way? Do you think we can ride it?” This last was my idea, and it received almost no consideration by the group as a whole. I did take the opportunity to eyeball the approximate head size of the beast, for future reference, in case we can’t get enough walruses. I think a laser will fit just fine on the top of a sea lion’s head too, in case anyone was wondering.

Our next stop, which took us a little longer to reach, was Slope Point. Slope Point is the actual, official, southernmost point of New Zealand. This accomplishment is celebrated, however, in a most unexpected way—with a small sign in the middle of a sheep paddock, which can only be reached by walking through ANOTHER sheep paddock. There, after a quarter of a mile walk, we found a sign declaring the latitude and longitude of the spot and another, attached sign that cleverly pointed us in the directions of the South Pole and the Equator. Pretty showy, those Kiwis.

There were two interesting things about Slope Point—beyond the fact that it was in the middle of a sheep field and required a twenty minute walk to get to it from the road, that is. The first is that, without a doubt, this attraction would be banned and forbidden to EVERYONE, even the people who owned the pastures, if this place was in the States. On three sides of the sign, there is the sheerest, most palm-sweat-inducing, rocky-bottomed drop, and there is absolutely not a thing in the world but sure-footedness keeping people who wander too close from meeting a pulpy end on the jagged coastline below. I tried to take a few pictures, but I’m afraid that the perspective just didn’t translate very well into two dimensions. In the same way, my description here can’t possibly do justice to the vertigo inducing feeling of walking up to the edge of a place, without knowing beforehand how high up one is, and with no barrier or warnings, only to look down suddenly on a couple hundred foot drop to crashing waves and rugged outcroppings. I am not mortified by heights, but I certainly consider them one of my weaknesses, and, though I’ve never experienced vertigo before, I feel pretty confident that if I hadn’t backed away from the edge as quickly as I could without slipping to my death, I would have swooned like a belle and kersplattered my way to the great hereafter. The experience and the view did, however, leave an impression, no doubt about that.

The second interesting thing about Slope Point was that I got to pee on very nearly the southernmost point of New Zealand. This is interesting to me, at least. Unfortunately, it didn’t dawn on me at the time that I should actually be peeing over the southern edge, to make it official—plus it might have been a bit rude since there were family members all around. So, not thinking, I wandered off a bit and peed on some farmer’s fence just a little bit north of the southernmost point. Still, even if it wasn’t THE southernmost point, it was the furthest south I’ve ever peed, and pretty darn far south by any standards. Now I just need to hit the other end of the world with a dousing of Pat juice and my life will be complete.

From Slope Point we hit Curio Bay then Porpoise Bay. Curio Bay was unique because much of the coastline was made up of petrified forest. It doesn’t, however, make for a terribly interesting description because, well, it’s just long dead trees, really. They were rather, I don’t know, nifty, I guess. I don’t think I’ve seen a proper petrified forest before, so it was a first experience for me. It wasn’t exciting enough—or long enough since Slope Point—to warrant me peeing on, though.

At some point in the trip—I think it might have been between Slope Point and Curio Bay, actually—we very nearly had a sheep-van pile-up, which would have been incredibly interesting for me to describe here. We were rounding a blind corner when, all of a sudden, a flock of sheep was blocking the road. The shepherd, instead of driving ahead of the sheep which I believe is the custom—if I remember my bible metaphors correctly, anyway—was dawdling behind, closing gates or something, and his sheep were tromping down the road thinking they were heading to wherever the sheep equivalent of Mecca or Shangri-La or El Dorado is (yes, I know, Mecca falls into a different class than the last two, but I typed it first so that shows proper respect). Most of us were suddenly jolted from our naps as the van . . .slowed.

I would like to say that the van shrieked to a halt or squealed to a stop or something more colorful, but, really, because the van was carrying a pretty full load and the roads necessitated us driving around 40 mph the whole time, we really weren’t going fast enough for there to be any drama to our deceleration. In fact, that’s probably the best descriptive term for what we did—abrupt deceleration.

Anyway, the trick to getting through a flock of sheep is to not stop. If you stop, like sharks in water, your vehicle and everyone in it will die and be devoured by the sheep. Or something like that, the local legend goes.

Somewhere along the way we had the distinct pleasure of seeing an honest-to-god sheep dog bolt across a pasture and single-um-pawedly round up around 100 sheep. That was also rather fun to watch—like a, I don’t know, really fast, agile, potentially dangerous . . . insect of some sort . . . flying across an open area to round up a bunch of . . . non-dangerous . . . but still group-oriented bees. . . . Hmm. That one needs some work. It was probably more like a dog darting around a pasture and sheep all swarming to one corner. But remember, sheep look like maggots from the sky—that’s an important mental image to ALWAYS keep in your mind when thinking about sheep. Trust me. It might save your life someday when you’re driving through a flock of them.

So, Porpoise Bay was the first real civilization that we had stepped into in quite awhile. We had passed through a few of the aforementioned “towns” earlier, but there weren’t what one would be possessed to call services available in any of those. In Porpoise Bay—which was decidedly free of porpoises—we found a nice snack bar/convenience store place, some public restrooms and some more nice views of the ocean and the bay itself. From the some of the paintings that decorated the walls of some of the buildings, I would wager that Porpoise Bay is a popular jumping off point for surfers, but I can’t verify that without looking it up on the internet, which I don’t feel capable of doing at this moment—I have no good reason, just that I don’t feel like learning anything at the moment. We were also told that, a few years earlier, whales had been spotted in the bay. I was very excited for the people a few years earlier who got to see that, but less excited for us since we got to see doodly (bastard! Doodly IS a word! I have never known hate like this, Spell Check. I will destroy you) squat. Then I had a cookie and a soda because it was rounding 2:00 and I hadn’t eaten anything since my morning cup of coffee. After our snack break and some more picture taking, we hit the road again, this time trying to found a town with some sort of substantial food to offer.

I should note at this point that it was a Tuesday. Normally this wouldn’t be important, as Tuesdays almost never are. But we found out in not one but two small towns, Tuesday is the day that people don’t buy things in the Catlins. Since there are no serious towns for a kajillion miles from the Catlins, rural residents have to rely on the working whims of the town dwellers, and, apparently, someone somewhere decided that Tuesdays were not meant for work because EVERYWHERE was closed. We hit a few restaurants in two relatively close cities and none of them was open, nor were any other businesses.

Then, in the town of Owaka, which was not the name of an ewok in Return of the Jedi but should have been, we found a café that had its front doors open. We quickly stopped, slid out of the van, went inside and started forming a line at the counter. It wasn’t until about fifteen minutes later, after the owner had taken our orders and started cooking our food, that any of us noticed the sign on the door that signified that he, too, was not opened on Tuesdays. We found out that we had just happened to catch him unloading a shipment and the café happened to be open for that short time. We felt a little bad, but he seemed appreciative of the business, or at least feigned politeness well, and most of us were hungry enough by that point not to care TOO much.

The café, indistinctly named Catlins Diner and Café, was unlike anything I had ever been in before for another reason, besides the fact that it was technically closed while serving me food. Attached to the café there is a hostel for backpackers. Backpackers, in New Zealand at least, are more like hitchhikers than what people in the States envision as a backpacker. In the States a backpacker is usually some gearhead who spends a fortune buying equipment just because the idea of it is really cool—and then he or she will take it out about once a year for a dusting and a couple of miles of walking in a state park before an uncomfortable night or two on the rocks.

There, apparently, backpackers wander all over the place like hippies with no VWs, and, sometimes, they like to stop at places like this to rent a bed and have a night of sleep. The hostel area, which we were able to sneak a peak into, smelled like an old, moist, butt towel and looked about as clean. The beds were sunken and, I’m pretty sure, the source of the smell. In short, I think I’d recommend the ground over the beds in this place—though they did have a TV in the “living” area they provided, which would allow a traveler to catch up on the morning news show that is pretty much ALL that’s available in every hotel we stayed in.

One other note about the café and, in fact, any restaurant that serves hamburgers—that I noticed at least—in New Zealand. Beware the New Zealand hamburger, unless you are from California, then these burgers will probably seem pretty reasonable to you weirdoes. I had two hamburgers while in New Zealand and both of them had all sorts of crazy crap on them, which is a dining disaster in my opinion. Theories as to what does and doesn’t belong on a hamburger are, of course, widely varied, and, with the exception of my own Law, wrong. The center of attention in all hamburgers should be, naturally, the burger. Anything that is added to it is meant to complement the flavor of the meat, not overpower it. Hamburgers should also never be a source of roughage. The color green should never be spotted anywhere but, perhaps, on a slice of dill pickle served next to the burger, which the diner can dutifully ignore. A proper hamburger should have the following: two buns, a burger, a single condiment—never mustard, which is the devil’s condiment and condemns eaters instantly to a circle of hell most unpleasant—and a slice of cheese if the diner chooses. That is all. At this café, the chef added what he called “salad” to the burger, which turned out to be a one-inch pile of onions and another one-inch pile of coleslaw. Even after scraping all of it off, with many select curses on the country that would tolerate such a behavior, the hamburger still tasted like the cow had been inhumanely killed by a two-story onion loaf and the buns reeked of whatever evil juice is used to make cabbage inedible in coleslaw. I was, however, starving, so I ate it anyway, pausing only briefly to continue my tirade on Hamburger Theory (which was adopted as Law by a panel of expert, consisting of me, shortly after the trip).

After lunch, and after calling to change our dinner reservation at El Tigre (where the family’s 60^th birthday was being held), we headed to our last point, which was, I think, the one that made the whole trip through the Catlins worthwhile, Nugget Point. Nugget Point, we heard, had another lighthouse. It also had a walk “over a land bridge with a sheer drop to certain death on both sides,” someone, I believe John, who was always eager to ease our fears, said. Basically, we had to drive up some steep hills to arrive at the parking area, then we had to hike about a quarter mile up and down some more steep hills, then we arrived at Nugget Point.

This is actually a rather tough site to describe. The coastline in this area was, again, elevated from the surface of the water. Think Cliffs of Insanity from The Princess Bride. However, attached to these cliffs there is a land bridge, about ten feet wide (which was not nearly as scary as I was picturing it in my head—I was seeing swaying suspension bridges in my head when John was describing it) that connects the cliffs to another outcropping of land. On this outcropping there was another lighthouse. This lighthouse, unlike the first, was well worth the trip—and I wager that even the lighthouse freaks would enjoy seeing this one. The lighthouse itself probably wasn’t that special (I wouldn’t know, since my expertise on lighthouses extends only to what I learned from the movie Hysterical, and this lighthouse wasn’t haunted or nearly as big as the one in the movie was), but its location certainly was.

Nugget Point is a pleasant enough sounding name for a place punctuated by massive, jutting shards of death, which is exactly why the lighthouse needed to be built in the first place. It’s a nice, euphemistic name—like Crocodile Dundee calling his machete a “knife.” I can’t even imagine how much of a pain in the ass that lighthouse must have been to build—many of us were finding ourselves winded after the hike, and we didn’t have to carry a stack of lumber or whatever else they make lighthouses out of . . . light, I suppose, which might not be all that heavy, now that I think about it. Anyway, just off the outcropping where the lighthouse is built, there are several massive rock points spearing out of the water. It’s no wonder people decided the area probably needed a lighthouse, it certainly didn’t look like any place I would want to take a boat through, even with the full benefit of daylight vision, much less by lighthouse light.

Surprisingly, there were fences built along the land bridge and another around the scenic patio that had been built just in front of the lighthouse to allow people to see just how deadly the water below really was (again, it would have sucked hard to be the person who had to build that stuff). It might have been the safest attraction I’d been to the whole trip, and it also ranked among the most worthwhile to see while in the south island, I think. Also, if anyone is planning a suicide jump any time in the near future, I would certainly recommend Nugget Point, if you want it to look like a suicide, that is. If you want it to look like an accident, stick with Slope Point. Both of these places offer a very scenic final view and ultimate resting place, I think. Definitely worth the time and trouble it would take to get there. Maybe I should start marketing some “specialty” trips targeting that particular demographic. Could be some real money there—after all, they won’t have anything else to spend it on afterwards. Something to think about.

After Nugget Point we headed home, which took around an hour and a half. After a little time to clean up and change, we gathered at El Tigre for the final installment of 60^th birthday celebrations.

El Tigre is a nice restaurant. No, El Tigre is a nice restaurant, in atmosphere, product and service, and it is handsomely reflected in the price. As both John and Sara pointed out, El Tigre was probably one of the nicest restaurants outside of Queenstown in all of the south island, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was a true statement. It certainly impressed me. The menu was quite extravagant, with main courses including things like ostrich, baby chickens, veal, venison, fillet mignon and just about every type of exotic food that one might hope to find in a foreign land (no kiwi, though, or penguin, which disappointed me). And, yes, I said baby chickens. Cute, fuzzy, baby chickens. And cute, doe-eyed baby cows. This place has something against the cuter and more vulnerable of the edible species. I steered clear of those plates, because I’m not a baby killer, and decided to try the ostrich. I was a little surprised that it tasted very much like steak. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, though, anything that big and cantankerous couldn’t possibly taste like a chicken or other smaller bird.

Disclaimer: OK, so I can’t COMPLETELY remember if there were, in fact, baby chickens on the menu. I swear up and down that there were, but Libby can’t verify it. I will leave it up to another family member to post a reply to this to either verify or deny my claims. I’d hate to be sued by the New Zealand Anti-Defamation League, Baby Chicken Eaters Division or something for being inaccurate about this.

We ate, drank, reminisced about old family stories, and took turns enjoying what I think was the most appealing feature of the entire restaurant—the handicap bathroom. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was far and away the nicest bathroom that I had the honor of peeing in the whole trip. It was spacious, well-decorated and had individually rolled hand towels in a basket off to the side. It was opulent and decadent. I relished every moment I was in there. I did, of course, feel a little guilty using the handicap restroom, but, as I stated in the earlier post, we were pretty much the only customers left at that point in the evening, so it wasn’t like I was depriving anyone of essential services. Plus, the other toilet was a hole in comparison.

By the time we finished eating, it was coming up on 10:00, so we decided to take the birthday cake home and eat it there, which we did, with more wine and laughter and stories. It didn’t take long after the cake for all of us to start feeling the onset of end-of-vacation blues, though.

The next day the Canadians and Libby and I were going to have to pack everything up and Jamie and Ami were heading back to the north island. Fortunately for all of you readers—or at least the ones that I have been talking to, who keep complaining “but your stories are so LONG” –things pretty much came to a screeching halt after this day. My next post will be pretty short, so you have that to look forward to.

Days 8 and 9 Photos

2006-09-04T17:18:00.000-07:00

The family picture with the dog we inherited for ten minutes. I'm on the far left, looking dashingly the most attractive of all. I sort of feel sorry for how homely the rest of them are.

A row of sheep. One of these will feel Libby's wrath. Or at least her unsteady shearing hand.

Libby, shearing a sheep with an archaic hand-shear. I can't imagine that these are still being used. If they are, someone from Gillette, or whoever the sheep equivalent is, needs to send some reps down their way.

The Piss Up. Jamie and John and some people from America that I spoke with for a time about gas prices and such--I can't remember their names, which isn't surprising since I can't remember anyone's names. I believe Jamie and John may be sober, they sure look it.

JF had his glasses off by this point, so we knew he meant business. This was the only time I saw him without his glasses when we weren't going to bed or waking up. Pete, who doesn't drink, obviously didn't find us as amusing as we found ourselves.

Karen. I wasn't in the room when this was taken, but I can hear what she's saying in my head still: "That damn Cybill Shepherd was such a bitch." That, actually, might have been the PG rated version of what she was actually saying. Ask her about Cybill Shepherd the next time you see her. She's really quite fond of the lady.

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.

Lots of rocks . . .hey, what's up with this underline? I can't make it go away no matter what I do. How very odd. Rocks and a long drop--this was alongside the trail in Bluff. The trail wasn't close enough for my hands to sweat, but I had plenty of opportunity to catch up when we went to the Catlins a few days later.

Libby in front of the ocean. Weird, the underline is gone now and I didn't do anything. Perspective in these pictures doesn't really do justice to just how dead someone would be if they stumbled back just two or three steps from where she's standing. The answer is very.

Sara and rocks and ocean and potential death.

This was the second take of a picture of John, Sara, Jamie and Ami. The first one they were just standing there, sort of vaguely smiling. Then they said, "Wait, we weren't posing, take another." Then I shot this one. Hams.

Libby making the international sign for Grizzly Bear, which is odd since there are no bears of any sort in New Zealand. This was on the path that led up over a quite large hill through some impressively dank and thick forested area. Probably considered a "moderate" hike, but my out of shape ass was doing some huffing and puffing.

And, finally, us eating again in the cafe adjacent to the M.A.S.H. sign. We were having tea. I had a scone with jam and some tea with milk. I felt just like a colonist. Or a loyalist. Or whoever still eats tea with scones . . .non-me's with accents. That's the term.

Days 8 and 9--Party Pt. 1 and Bluff

2006-09-04T17:17:00.000-07:00

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.

More to Come

2006-08-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

I forgot to mention at the end of the last set of days that, as of right now, this is all I have completed. I still have four days' worth of travels--and our trip home--that I haven't written on. Though much of the time these last days was spent reveling in our communal cleverness around increasingly large piles of empty recyclable glass containers, especially in the evenings, we did still manage to see several sites including a whirlwind tour of the Catlins along and up the southern and southeastern coastlines. I haven't, however, had much time (or possibly gumption) to sit down and write up these entries what with work starting back up and all. I hope to get some of them done in the next week or so and I think they are definitely worth staying tuned for as some of the pictures, especially of the Catlins, are fantastic (well, maybe not fantastic, but definitely worth seeing).

Day 6 and 7 Photos

2006-08-22T19:06:00.000-07:00

One of the pieces of new, unfathomably dangerous (and, so, fun) playground equipment at Queens Park. This one was like a skateboard that you could slide back and forth while standing on.

Another piece of equipment. This one spins while people try to run around it. Sounds perfectly safe, no?

Scenery in the park. It was a quite lovely park, fully of trees and hills and water and other scenic things. It was, however, sadly lacking in run-ins with ducks and squirrels and gay men in the public restrooms. Our parks win on those counts.

The brewery. Not what you'd call a big operation. The barrel has all of the empty bottles that our samples came from. 5-6 liters total, I think.

The family at dinner. We joked that all of our pictures were taken at the dinner table or not at all. Though it was a joke, after looking through the pictures it was mostly true. From left to right: Darrell, Karen, Sara, John, Ami, Peter, Libby, James, JF, and Molly.

I forgot to mention our discovery of the photo taking and editing program on Darrell's new macbook. We spent a solid hour entertaining ourselves with these pictures. This is Ami.

And John.

And Karen. They weren't this dark originally, I hope they turn out well enough to see on the blog. I would recommend everyone buy a macbook just so you can play around with this program. We ended up with something like 150 pictures of all of us in various poses. Of course, now most of them seem significantly less amusing, but what can you do.

Days 6 and 7

2006-08-22T19:05:00.000-07:00

Travelogue Days 6 and 7

Days 6 and 7 were more pretty easy days. Unfortunately, Libby contracted some travel funk, which set in around our third day of travel and still hadn’t let up by the seventh day. In fact, both the sixth and seventh days she was pretty wiped out by it. Molly and JF came into the first flight feeling similarly, and JF was still suffering slightly from it even by the seventh day also, so it’s possible that Libby got it from them. However, since we spent nearly a day aboard a plane with around 200 people with god-knows what ailments, it’s impossible to specifically lay the blame on Canada. This hasn’t prevented us from trying, though. She also passed the funk on to Karen, and since she was our events coordinator, this considerably slowed down the pace of the trip, though I don’t think anyone complained about it one bit.

The upside is that I’ve finally, more or less, adjusted to the time-zone. I’ve been able to stay up until midnight and, remarkably, on Day 7 I slept until 9:30 in the morning. Everyone will also be glad to hear that my bowels seem to be functioning normally again. I have conquered the bathroom a few times now and put a few into the Win column. This makes me feel like quite the accomplished traveler, believe me.

On Day 6 we managed to get out into the city for the afternoon and see a few of the sites available, such as they are.

The first was Queens Park, which is a quite impressively large public park in the middle of town. It is, by American standards, a fantastic park. It is spacious and verdant and filled with public activities including new park equipment for children that is so spectacularly dangerous it would never have proceeded beyond the conceptual stages in the States. Obviously, pointless litigation has not reached the desperate level it has back home, and hopefully it never will here. But, lawyers being lawyers, and people being people, I doubt that will be the case.

Sara works at Queens Park taking care of the winter gardens, which are located in an impressive greenhouse. This greenhouse had several exotic plants and I was able to see my first living Venus Flytrap (not the one from WKRP, though, which would have been equally memorable to me). There were also many other wonderful and exotic plants that I’m sure I should have cared about. Unfortunately, I am not a plant person and they almost completely failed to make much of an impression on me beyond the fact that a few were fabulously ugly.

Also in the park there is an aviary (pronounced “a-vir-ee” here) filled with many colorful local birds: parrots, pootafoots, cocktrices, dongilmongrenals, whooping ducks and many other strangely named (as all things are down here) birds. It would appear that I’m also not entirely interested in birds either. As was stated in an earlier days’ log, though, New Zealand has a variety of birds that should be incredibly interesting to the right type of person, and many of the ones that are still alive were available for viewing in the aviary. I, however, found myself interested only in what the birds might taste like after a nice rub and an hour of slow cooking on the grill, but since many of the birds were endangered, I sadly won’t get the chance to find out. Damn the European settlers for not considering what their ancestors might want to taste.

After the park we visited the Southland Museum, which is adjacent to the park. The Southland Museum is a curious collection of uncommon things. Have you ever looked at an object and wondered: “What is that? Where did it come from? How did it get here?” Have you seen something and simply thought, “Wow! That’s Amazing!”

Yeah, OK, I can’t continue on with that. It’s verbatim from the flyer I picked up while we were there because I couldn’t remember anything of particular interest being in the museum. It had a gift shop that had a nice selection of jade jewelry—at least Libby thought so because she picked up a few more pieces there. I didn’t do much more than scan over the things in it. The museum itself, by small town standards, was quite large, pretty well done and it had a few interesting exhibits. I’ve always loved the idea of museums—places where old things are stored so people can see what things used to be like. History, culture and how society works are all very interesting ideas and lord knows people need to study more of it. In application, though, I find myself walking around from one exhibit to the next, reading about one out of twenty randomly selected cards about how the adz was an essential tool or how some people were miraculously saved from freezing to death in Antarctica or some other supposedly non-fictional land and I find myself, sadly, unengaged. This, it should be noted, is not the fault of the museum, it is my own. I have been equally unengaged in the Smithsonian. It is a fault of my character, I am sure, and I do not wish to detract from the enjoyment that people who love museums would receive from visiting this establishment. Just don’t bring me along, please.

This museum did have a living display of tuataras, a strange lizard that I’ve been told has a third eye when it is young. This eye, which undoubtedly sees either into the future or straight into the souls of other tuataras, is eventually covered up by skin. I guess this happens when the tuatara is old enough to not care what the future brings or it has no further need of reading souls. Nature is truly a mystery. To me at least it is.

After the museum we walked over to the Invercargill Brewery, because we hadn’t learned enough about how local beer is made yet. Actually, we were hoping for some free handouts, and we weren’t disappointed one bit. The owner, whose name escapes me, was a very friendly bloke who welcomed us into the brewery for a “tour” roughly an hour before closing time. The tour consisted of us walking in from the street into a surprisingly not large room where the brewing took place. He pulled out three, liter bottles of beer (they make four different beers but their run of one of them had run out) and poured us a cup each. Then he went back and grabbed some more liter bottles because what he had brought would have only given us a taste, and he wanted to supply us with a solid half-glass of each sample.

We spent the hour in there tasting all of his beers and hearing how he made and marketed his beer. We also learned how he came to set up his brewery, which started outside of town, and how he made the move into town. It was, to me at least, much more interesting and applicable than the museum tour had been. Interesting because, even though I don’t have much of a personal taste for beer, I appreciate much of what alcohol has to offer and applicable because that word sounded good when I wrote it in there a little while ago (it’s not like I have any ambitions of opening my own brewery, so where would I “apply” what I found out?). After the tasting we went into his small sales room and bought $100 or so worth of beer, so his time wasn’t a complete waste. I also experienced, for the first time, the refillable beer container. Liquor stores also have this feature, where people can bring their own containers—usually two liter bottles—and fill them with beer straight from a tap instead of paying extra for bottles or cans. It’s really quite an ingenious idea, if the beer can be drunk before it goes flat (which would probably be fairly quick).

It was during Day 6 that we began to make fun of some of the New Zealand pronunciations of words. Well, we had made fun of them before, but from this point on we had Ami to make fun of individually. The language might take a little getting used to by American travelers, but I’ve really not had much trouble at all except when hearing people talk on the phone. This, I doubt, has anything to do with the people talking on the phone and everything to do with the fact that I am a bit deaf and have difficulty hearing even American English speakers on the phone many times. I do watch a fair amount of British television, which I think makes my ears a bit more used to deciphering accents than many people, but I’ve really had no problems understanding what people are saying otherwise. And compared to British, Australian or Irish English, New Zealand English doesn’t seem to have as many strange words and phrases that need to be deciphered (it also helped that we had expat residents along with us if problems arose, I suppose).

Within a day or two I discovered that my name in New Zealand is Pet. Actually, it’s a bit more like “Peyt,” with the “y” acting more like a diphthong (I think that’s right—it’s been ages since I took a linguistics course and I’m sure Molly will correct me if that’s not a proper usage of the word). JF usually comes out “Jiyff,” which I’m betting sounds exactly like the pronunciation for Jeff. Usually when we watch the morning news I sit there repeating amusing words back, trying poorly to imitate the accent. I am not, however, much of an actor or voice impersonator, so I’m sure plenty of fun could be had at the expense of my attempts.

I have also come to personally love the way almost any concept can be slanged with the addition of the simple word “as.” This is a rather common phenomenon and even made an appearance in an advertisement circular while we were here. For instance, say it is very hot outside. The clever observer could say, “It’s hot as.” Naturally, those unfamiliar with the slang would be inclined to ask “Hot as what, milady?” (because people unfamiliar with the slang are, naturally, butlers). This answer, however, is entirely up to the listener to supply. It can be as hot as whatever. The circular I kept was for a camera store and it says on the front page (Fat As Deals at Skinny As Prices). We have become quite enamored with the concept of As-ing anything we could over the past few days. Jamie, I think, has come up with the most colorful so far. When describing food, he said it was “yum as.” I am fully planning to take this habit back to the States. I might also allow my students to use slang in their papers, but only if they As them up, just to try and spread it around as much as possible. So, in a few years, if people in North America start using this often, I am the one responsible for it, for better or worse.

Mostly, though, I have been trying to get Ami, who is a native Kiwi, to say comical sentences including the word “deck.”

“Ami,” I would say conversationally, “say ‘I like to jump up and down on decks of many sizes.” To this the entire family laughs because we are, apparently, a group of perverts who like to laugh at the expense of others. I always knew that I, personally, was, but I am always surprised when others have my same sense of humor. And the humor lies entirely in how they say the word “deck.” It usually sounds like “dick.” “Ami, say ‘I like to erect decks in people’s backyards.’” “Ami, say ‘I love to bounce around on big black decks.’” And on and on. I am really quite hilarious. So far, she has completely failed to participate in my juvenile attempts to make fun of her language, and I can hardly blame her. It is truly a remarkable aspect of the American persona that I, a foreigner, could come to another country and make fun of their language instead of them making fun of my language. But things are as they are, I suppose. And it is funny, I don’t care what country you are from.

Later that night and, embarrassingly, through much of Day 7, I did something that I honestly never thought I would spend a significant amount of time doing: playing a role playing card game. Pete is an avid collector and player of Magic: The Gathering cards, and late on the fifth day he talked JF into playing with him. JF played a game and then spent several hours in a little world with Petie creating a good deck for himself. The rest of us spent our time drinking wine and laughing at how clever we consistently were—which, in fact, we often were, this family could make a fairly successful reality program, I think. Eventually, we four international travelers went back to our hotel. Libby and JF were still not feeling well, so it wasn’t very late at all.

The 6^th day I found myself sitting around the house all morning and early afternoon waiting for the John and Sara contingent of the family to show up for the day’s activities (Jamie and Ami were staying with them). The night before, they had stuck around, drinking, until fairly late and then went home to carry the party on. They were supposed to show up around 9:00 to take me out for pie for breakfast.

Ah, pie. The New Zealand pie, as it is in many English speaking, non-American countries, is a staple of the food industry. Here use pastry bread (or dough, whichever it would be) filled with various concoctions that usually follow the gravy, meat and cheese line. There are other, non-meat and more creative options available, but the traditional meat dinner in a bread roll pie was what I was most interested in trying. Being a farmboy, I like my meat and potatoes, and my favorite dinner foods tend to fall into these categories. Seasoned only with salt and maybe a little pepper, covering the full spectrum of browns available and gravy-y is exactly how I like my foods whenever I have the choice, and the New Zealand pie falls exactly into this category.

So I was up and over to the Loves’ house (it’s only about three blocks away from our hotel, so we’re able to walk there and stumble back drunk, or at least tipsy, as we usually are, without needing a vehicle) by 8:45. Since I hate talking on the phone in America, I was trying to avoid using the one here in New Zealand entirely (considering it, like not having to drive for two weeks, a luxury of being on vacation—or holiday as they call it here), so I mentally refused to call over to John and Sara’s house to find out what was going on when they still hadn’t shown up by 10:00. With time to kill, I let Pete and JF talk me into a game of Magic.

Pete set me up with a deck that, I’m convinced, he knew sucked hard. Using his carefully constructed deck, he systematically destroyed and embarrassed me. JF lasted a little longer the first game but eventually suffered the same fate. It was short and, for Pete at least, sweet. We played another game with a slightly different strategy. Well, JF had a strategy, I suppose, but mostly I just died quickly again. He, however, was able to use my distraction to beat Peter, which made him “bored” with the game and we quit (this, we found out, was always Pete’s response to losing pretty much any game—he would be “bored” with it and quit, but, man, if he’s winning, he could play all day).

Later that evening, after the guys’ activities fell through (Libby and Molly went back to the hotel to sleep and Ami and Sara went out clubbing—and, to make our nerdiness obvious and in the name of complete disclosure, I suppose I should admit that we were planning to go LAN gaming, which involves all of us sitting around computers in a lounge playing the same game together, but the lounge was booked for the night so we had to go back to the house and occupy ourselves), the five of us—Pete, John, JF, Jamie and myself—decided to play a game of Magic.

After spending a little time getting a deck together for John, Jamie and myself (I wasn’t going to play with the stacked-against-me deck Pete set me up with before—he called it his “what were you thinking?” deck, since that’s what someone would ask the person using it after that person was completely and embarrassingly destroyed, and somehow he thought this was a fair deck to give me as someone just learning the game), we broke up into teams to help Jamie, John and myself who had almost no experience playing the game. We decided it would be fair for JF and Pete to be on a team. Even though they both knew what they were doing, we figured numbers would give us an advantage.

This was entirely not the case as they soundly whooped us twice.

This was all well and good. We had nothing better to do that night and Pete loved the fact that he was able to play his favorite game with his family (he especially loved the beating us badly part and, being the youngest, I suppose I can see why). Had we left it at that, it would not have been something to make us the potential target of ridicule—from people who have no experience with these types of games or who did not grow up mildly addicted to role playing games as I was (and still, I suppose, am in many ways since those are mostly the video games that I purchase to play at home).

On Day 7, we were really at a loss for anything interesting to do. I did finally get to start my day with a pie, so that made me happy (it was everything I hoped it would be and more—steak and cheese with plenty of brown gravy oozing out the sides with every bite, it was like a brown, greasy jelly donut and wonderful). We had to stay near the house to receive a package that was being delivered for the big party we were having the following night (salmon that we had shipped from the salmon farm covered earlier, which we knew couldn’t sit unattended on a porch while we were out of town for the whole day), so we had to plan our day accordingly. Since Karen was starting to feel ill herself, we decided that another day of doing mostly nothing sounded just fine. “Mostly nothing,” in this family at least, means shopping. Those who decided this sounded like a splendid idea (obviously not including me), thought hitting the second hand stores, here called Op Shops (which stands for Opportunity Shops), would be fun. So everyone but John, Darrell and me headed out around 10:00 and stayed out for three or four hours.

Again, this left us, John and I, with nothing to do, so we pulled out all of Pete’s Magic cards, convinced that we could come up with a deck and strategy that would allow us to beat him and JF, finally. I should be embarrassed to admit that John and I sat at the table for the entire time they were gone sorting through and reading cards, trying to figure out what would work best against them. Of course we were already at a disadvantage because both Pete and JF had already gone through all of the decks picking out the best cards, but we figured we could make up for that with sheer numbers again.

After three hours of deck creation (we kindly fixed Jamie’s deck too, even though he was so lame as to run off to shop with the girls instead of staying behind to play with cards) everyone came back and it was established that the boys had a score to settle in the kitchen. A “No Girls Allowed” sign was put up on the door to complete the ambience (and which was totally ignored) and we set about our business.

Eventually, the girls decided to go shoe shopping since we were doing stereotypical boy things in the kitchen, which was great because it gave us a few hours of uninterrupted time. We used that time to, once again, get trounced by Peter and JF. We put up a better fight, though, and finally decided to separate the teams differently. JF and Pete would have to be on different teams, and, since Pete had the best deck, he would get one of us on his team. This, unfortunately, didn’t work out so well for Pete. Without JF there to tip the scales in their favor, Pete and his partner (remember, John, James and I all still sucked at this game, so we were more cannon fodder or, at the very least, shackles than anything else) lost twice. After the first time, Petie was bored with playing, but we forced him to play another game. By the end of the second game, he had pulled out his handheld Nintendo and started playing it before he was even dead, so we called it a day.

Nothing much of note happened the rest of the day. We made another attempt at the LAN gaming, to cap off our already thorough nerd-fest, but quickly tired of it because the people who worked there kept jumping into whatever games we were playing and kicking our butts. Lame as.

All in all, it was a great day. I would say it was like reliving my childhood but, sadly I suppose, I have never left my childhood that far behind, so I only need to slow down slightly for it to catch up again.

The Peeing Across New Zealand Part

2006-08-21T06:04:00.000-07:00

So I've received a few comments about the lack of coverage of my supposedly main theme-peeing across New Zealand. I guess I ought to address those concerns now before I get anymore of my posts taken care of.

The idea of this theme occurred to us as we were driving on that first full day because, as we stopped at every small town on the road, I needed to break off to find a restroom. Then jokes were made that my goal must be to pee in every restroom I found along the way. This, of course, everyone in the van found awfully amusing--myself included--so I adopted it as my vacation's theme.

That said, there is only so much description of restrooms I can include in each post before it gets boring and, more likely, ridiculous. Suffice it to say that I did, in fact, use pretty much every restroom that I found along the way. However, with a few exceptions, there were relatively few that were worth commenting on. They mostly followed the theme of being a place to relieve myself and little more of interest could be drawn from them. There were two notable exceptions.

The first was in Riverton, where a very amusing sign was situated directly adjacent to the men's restroom. I will include the picture here because it is, I think, one of the best signs ever, and the fact that it was so near a necessary facility gave it that much more of an impact.

The second was in El Tigre, the very posh restaurant where the family held Darrell's 60th birthday party on, I think, our 11th day (I haven't finished writing that day's travels up yet, so I can't remember for sure if it was that day or not). If you ever find yourself in El Tigre, the handicap accessible restroom comes HIGHLY recommended. There were little, neatly folded hand towels and everything. The non-handicapped restroom was paled by comparison. And, no, I wasn't denying any more deserving handicapped person access to the restroom by using it--by this time in the evening we were the only people still left in the restaurant, and they only have two restrooms--the other of which someone else was in--so I figured there was no harm done by my using it. I didn't, however, take a picture because I didn't have the camera with me.

So, there. That's all I can really say about the theme. Just trust that I DID use "toilets" pretty much everywhere in the southern island that we stopped. The restrooms were only slightly varied, though, so there wasn't much more that I could say about them after I described the toilets that most of them had in common (see earlier posting).

Hope that clears things up for everyone!

Days 4 and 5 Photos

2006-08-20T12:14:00.000-07:00

Before leaving Te Anau, we stopped for another statue picture, this time of a takahe.

A picture of one of our meals--I dont' remember if this was day four or five, but I thought the wine bottles on display (with beer as a side) were telling.

Fat Sheep, who was surprisingly prone to being chilly, sitting in front of the space heater in our hotel room.

The sign for Demolition World, starring the wrestling tag team who were completely absent during our visit.

A sampling of the buildings in Demolition World. There were, I think, more than a dozen different buildings, each furnished and decorated inside and out.

Another picture in Demolition World.

And, finally, the morbidly obese pigs that were at Demolition World. They refused to get up and move around while we were there, and I can't says as I blame them. Their legs would doubtless collapse.

Days 4 and 5--Invercargill

2006-08-20T11:34:00.000-07:00

Travelogue Day 4 and 5

Day 4 was a comparatively uneventful day. After cramming in a considerable amount of what there is to do on the South Island (not considerable compared to what there actually is to see but considerable because we’d only spent three days doing it), Day 4 was pretty relaxed. After waking at the latest time possible to get us out of our hotel by the 10:00 check-out time, we traveled south from Te Anau to Invercargill, where the Loves live.

At this point it goes without saying that the trip down was very scenic, filled with more mountains (well, mountains by my central United States standards but probably they were only hills by most standards) and pastures and heaps and heaps of sheep. Another common site in the pastures was deer—and I don’t mean the occasional, frolicking herd as we might sometimes spot back home if we’re lucky. The market here for venison is considerably more developed than it is in the States (and there is a market for it abroad as well), and along with sheep, cattle and other more traditional livestock, we’ve seen several pastures filled with grazing deer and even some elk. Not surprisingly, deer are a bit more difficult to raise than cattle or sheep, and I’ve heard they have no qualms with kicking teeth in whenever they feel hassled.

Hearing this made me think back to the days of working cattle when I was growing up. It was the standard for the younger of us, who invariably were stuck in the “chute” pushing and prodding the animals up to where they would be worked over however we were working them over that day, to get the crap kicked out of us by the animals. More than once I had the extreme displeasure of knowing what it’s like for a couple hundred pounds of irritated animal to personally—and I think maliciously—try to end my chances of creating offspring. Remembering this, I felt a little sorry for the people who would have to do something similar with a flightier and more dangerous animal. And then I laughed a little inside because it wasn’t me and in many ways I’m a very petty person.

We only stopped once on the road in Winton where we had lunch at another great little roadside café. . It’s really great how every small town along the road has so much to offer. I imagine it’s a lot like the towns here in the States were before the major highways diverted all drive-by business to the bigger cities. Probably there were more sites we could have visited on the way, but we were still in a dozing state whenever we were on the road and I think we managed to sleep for most of the trip

In Invercargill we found our hotel, checked in and met up with Libby’s two youngest brothers, John and Pete. Of course, both of them were overjoyed to see us because we have that effect on people. John and his partner Sara also live in Invercargill and later, when Sara got off work, she joined us at the house. Mostly we spent the rest of the day chatting. Also, not surprisingly, the wine was broken out. Since we were still pretty travel-worn, though, we ended the night pretty early back in our hotel.

Travel Note: Earlier I briefly discussed the nature of the weather and heating here in New Zealand, but a few more days have offered me a few new perspectives on the subject. I can’t stress enough to bring cool weather clothes and keep them handy. I’ve been told that, even in the warmer months, people will still dress in layers because the temperature can switch quickly and rain can crop up about any time.

Remarkably, even though the temperatures, even in the warm parts of the year, are likely to get cool, I have not yet been in a house or establishment with central heating. This is a foreign concept to nearly everyone here. John noted that it was because of electricity and burning fuel availability, which makes some sort of sense.

Electricity, since this is a small, pretty much self-contained island (from an energy perspective at least), would be in fairly high demand and the prices would reflect that. On the other hand, there seems to be an abundance of coal on the island and, obviously, no shortage of trees to burn. During the building booms that have happened in previous decades, it made more sense to include fuel burning stoves that could heat good portions of the house than to use electric heating of any sort, and, despite many obvious advances in the field of central heating, New Zealanders have stuck to this idea. More often than not, rooms are individually heated—using electric radiators or space heaters wherever necessary. Nearly every room in a house has a door so that it can be isolated from the rest of the house and the heat can be trapped.

This is a great idea, unless you have any intention of being in more than one or two rooms in your house and you like to be warm. Among the most uncomfortable experience that I’ve had while here happened in one of the earlier hotel rooms we stayed. The bathroom had no heat and it wasn’t close enough to the heater to receive any of the heat. It was freezing in there. In some ways it made me feel like a rugged explorer, expelling my hard-earned waste or showering away the remains of a back-breaking day of running off the natives or whatever. In most ways, though, it made me feel clammy and cold (and then blind when the fog rose from the shower and filled the non-ventilated room) and when I stepped out onto the cold floor or sat down on the toilet seat that maintained the same temperature as a playground flagpole in the dead of winter (I totally should have dared Libby to press her tongue to the seat to see if it would stick, I’m sure she would have done it in the name of good fun), I spent a good deal of time cursing the backwards planners who allowed something so horrible to happen to me at 6:00 in the morning.

John and I were discussing the lack of central heating and he told me that the typical Kiwi response to such an observation would be to “toughen up” and deal with it. This seems like exactly the response I would expect from many of the people in this country, and it’s not surprising since most of them have never experienced the benefits of central heating and/or a working thermostat (another drawback is that rooms often get too hot or too cold because the settings on the heat sources aren’t terribly responsive—the one room we’ve been in that had an honest-to-god thermostat in it was exactly as unpredictable as all of the ones that didn’t). I was also told that new construction was adopting a sort of central heating that did a little better job of keeping the house as a whole comfortable, though I doubt I will get to experience first-hand how they were able to muck this up too while I’m here.

Invercargill

Invercargill, I’m sad to report, is awfully dull by the standards of the rest of the cities we’ve visited so far. That’s not to say that there is anything particularly wrong with the city. Invercargill is located in the flattest part of New Zealand that we’ve been in so far—it is at the southern end of Southland and quite near to the bottom of the whole country. This means that, from a scenic perspective, Invercargill is about as dull as our towns in Kansas. The difference, of course, is that Invercargillians (or Invercargilites or whatever they call themselves) can hop in a car and be somewhere stunningly beautiful in an hour or so, which is a pretty fair shake, I suppose.

The town itself is smallish, and, as such, the people have a very distinctive small-town attitude. They are friendly and very considerate, in a way that reminds me of how people used to act (in my memory, at least) in the smaller towns back when I was growing up (which is not how they act so much anymore). Just around the corner from our hotel, there is a small grocery and convenience store where we had planned to do much of our shopping to stock our room and buy all of the amusingly-named and amusingly-conceived foods that we were planning to bring back to the States as half-hearted souvenirs for friends and family (sorry friends and family if this ruins the surprise). I went in there and gathered up an armful of product and took it to the counter.

When preparing for this trip, we were informed that New Zealand is a mostly plastic country—meaning it was theoretically possible to never use cash to purchase things. Libby and I ran with this idea and I personally swore to make this trip without pulling out a single dollar of New Zealand money (which is colorful and funny, like most foreign currency—which obviously suggests that American money is, in fact, the funny money by international standards). My first trip to the store, all I had on me was our credit card. After swiping the card, the lady behind the counter informed me that they didn’t take credit cards. “Oh,” I said, a little confused how a store would take debit but not credit cards since this was, I believe, the first time I’d ever been anyplace set up like that. “I’ll run back to the hotel and grab our debit card then.”

On my second trip in, I had the debit card. She swiped that and I entered my PIN number, which brought back an “invalid card type” error. “Balls,” I said under my breath. I’d thought about breaking out a “bollocks” to test my vernacular but figured that would sound silly and pretentious coming from an American mouth (which doesn’t stop me from saying it when I’m home—“bollocks” is a great word, as are most of the British expletives that I try to use as often as possible). “Let me run back and get some cash, I guess.” To this she said something very surprising to me. “Just take the groceries with you and come back once you’ve had a chance to get some cash.”

This flustered me immensely. Under no circumstances that I could conceive would something like this happen to me in the States. Well, unless maybe I knew the shop-keep or something, but then I would have known what form of payment would be accepted. “No, no,” I dithered. “I will be right back.” But she kept insisting, so Pete, whom Libby had sent to be my grocery boy, grabbed the groceries and we went back to the hotel. I walked back to our room and put the groceries away, still a little shocked and surprised but mostly impressed that an act showing this magnitude of trust and consideration could still take place somewhere in the world of business. Then I borrowed some cash from Molly and JF and went back and paid the bill.

Whether or not this is typical behavior from the people in this city is beyond me. Maybe it was just an individual action by a young woman who, perhaps, had an undo consideration for Americans and wanted to make some sort of impression or maybe she was clinically insane and would be shortly fired because she kept giving away free groceries. Either way, I found it a most inspiring moment.

I do also have one story pertaining to Invercargill’s international reputation. Almost never does Invercargill make an appearance on the international stage. It has, really, only two claims to fame. The first is that Burt Monro, the character portrayed in The World’s Fastest Indian, a recently released movie starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, came from Invercargill. The movie, in fact, was also filmed here in the city and the back of Pete’s head even makes an appearance (they had a general casting call for extras and the back of Pete’s head was the only family member to make the cut).

The second happened in the late 60s when the Rolling Stones toured the area. After the concert, for reasons I haven’t been curious enough to fully find out because I can’t stand the Stones on any level, Mick Jagger referred to Invercargill as “the arsehole of the world.” Though I don’t think the city ever elected to put this on their signs coming into town, this was the reputation Invercargill had to live down for a very long time. In fact, the story is still circulating, so they might not have lived it down yet. I don’t think I agree that it is the world’s arsehole. I don’t think it’s anywhere’s arsehole, really. It might be a bellybutton or man-nipple by anatomical standards, but not an arsehole. I’ve been far worse places.

At any rate, our first full day in Invercargill was the first travel-free day that we had. Jamie, the second oldest in the family and the eldest boy, and his partner Ami joined us around 8:00 in the evening.

“Partner” is an interesting terminology used here in New Zealand. It can be used to describe people who own a business together, as it is used in the States, but it also means any two people who have chosen to “be together” in a significant, monogamous relationship. People who have been married for years are called partners. People who have been together for a much shorter time but who have not been married are called partners. Naturally, any relationship variations in between also fall into the category of partnership. Two people who live together for a certain amount of time (I’ve heard two years, but I haven’t been able to verify this in any significant way) are, as far as the government is concerned, just as “partnered” as people who have been legally bound through marriage. In recent years, and much to the chagrin of the religious right here in the country, homosexual couples have been extended the same partnership rights as heterosexual couples. The extent of the official nature of this partnership I am not entirely sure either—if gay marriage is official as well as partnership or if the partnership is the extent of what is allowed. Either way, the rights seem to be pretty much the same as far as the government is concerned, whether one is married or “common law” married. To make matters slightly less confusing, people in a partnership are generally introduced as one or the other’s partner and it is left simply at that. This, it seems to me, is a rather progressive way of dealing with the problem—eliminating the terminology associated with the religious rite of marriage. As such, the States will probably never adopt anything of the nature, no matter how many problems it might alleviate.

With Jamie and Ami arriving, and Sara still scheduled to work, we kept the day’s events relatively low-key and mostly focused on, thank god, shopping. This was fantastic (the low-key, not the shopping, shopping is never fantastic) because it finally allowed Libby, the Canadians and I the chance to catch up on some sleep in the morning (though, not surprisingly, I was still up at 5:00, backtracking from the landmark 6:30 I had made it to the day before). It also afforded us a little time to nap in the afternoon (though I found myself compelled to work on this damn travelogue instead of napping). In between, we managed to hit the main drag of shops downtown and visit one attraction of some interest (of some interest to me, at least, this one might not be everyone’s cup of overpriced coffee).

First the shops. What is there to say about entire streets of small stores that greatly range in nature that can’t easily be imagined by anyone who has ever visited such a row of stores before? It is possible to find some neat little items, of course, but it is also entirely likely that the same items will be equally available back home, and probably at a much cheaper price. Supply and demand is such in New Zealand that prices for just about every item one can imagine are higher than they would be in every English speaking place in the Northern Hemisphere. It is, after all, an island located on the opposite end of the world from most of the manufacturers who supply it, and the prices for goods are gauged as such. This actually ties in quite nicely with the one attraction we visited today as well, but I will get to that in a minute.

As an example of pricing, consider this book that I found in a bookstore along the strip. There are several authors that I have discovered over the past few years that I have a bugger of a time finding in the States. They are British satirists and fiction humorists mostly, and, for some reason, our bookstores don’t keep their work in stock. Usually I end up finding them on Amazon because even the used bookstores on Ebay don’t carry them (because they don’t stock the books normally in the States to buy new so, duh, there won’t be any used ones available either). I was, however, able to find a few of these authors on the shelves of a bookstore here in Invercargill. However, the prices on the books were pretty over the top compared to what I would pay to buy them new on Amazon. Even though the back of the book would clearly state the Canadian price at $11, and the Canadian dollar is only slightly higher than the New Zealand dollar right now, the New Zealand sticker on the back of the book was for $23—for a paperback. Now, there are many things in this world that I am willing to be bent over for, but a paperback book is not one of them. Even if Jesus Christ himself came down from on high and put his “X” on the title page, I have a hard time believing that I would shell out nearly twice the asking price for a paperback book. If, and this is a big “if,” the book were to open itself, read me the opening passages, share with me the meaning of life, and offer to pick up a second job on the side to help pay me back for my expense, then I might consider paying twice cover price for a book.

And so on and so forth.

Things are pretty much the same for everything down here. This is why Karen and Darrell paid to have us pick up a Kitchenaide mixer and ship it down. It’s just that much cheaper, even with the high cost of shipping, to buy it in the States. Someone with business ambitions should really be establishing a toehold down here right now, because I expect there will be a real chance to make a buck once all the kinks are worked out.

Or maybe not. Which brings us to the other stop we made.

Demolition World

There was actually some debate as to the name of this place before we arrived. It was alternately referred to as Salvage Land and then Salvation Land and then Deconstructionists Realm because John, the only one who knew where the place was located, wasn’t sure what it was actually called. But visiting there confirmed that it was, indeed, Demolition World. And, interestingly enough, the picture on the wall by the entrance includes a picture of the WWF tag team Demolition. How or if this pair is associated with the salvage yard I have no idea. Possibly someone will get in trouble for this infringement on a mediocre, at best, copyright. I am, however, a little sad that I even knew who the people in the picture were. It proves that, at one time at least, I knew enough about wrestlers to know who these two comically dressed athletes were.

Demolition World is a quite entertaining way to dress up the concept of salvage. Any and all demolition in and around Invercargill is fair game for this company, and they can prove it with the multitude of windows, doors, construction materials and assorted bric-a-brac they have to choose from. In this way, they are not that different from a standard salvage yard. They have many bargains available to those who have enough patience to sift through the rubble. The thing that is different, however, is the way they present much of the materials.

The owners and the other people who work there have gone to the trouble of using much of their construction materials to piece together a facsimile of a village. There is no set time period, but most of the props and costumes seem to fall in the late 19^th to early 20^th century range. There is a school house and a church and a few bars and a few houses and any of a number of other types of buildings presented. Each of these buildings, then, is filled with mannequins that have been dressed up (actually, it’s a truly creepy number of mannequins living there—I’m reasonably sure I would be far too creeped out by all of the human shapes always looming around me to ever work in the place) and who are living in fully furnished worlds. All of the materials were salvaged from one place or another and all of the items are for sale.

In addition to the Demolition World that they have created, there are a number of animals—mostly of the farm variety, but including a building of more exotic birds—to entertain those who have little exposure to such animals. The people working there are happy to supply visitors with some bread to feed to the llamas, donkeys, chickens, roosters and ducks, and all of the animals were friendly enough. They also had two very fat pigs of a local breed. These pigs had small tusks and sleep apnea because they were so morbidly obese. Fat Sheep would have been quite at home with these real life animals who seemed too large to do much more than waddle their way to and from the food trough. I laughed outwardly, but not inwardly, at their absurdity.

From an economic standpoint this brought up a very interesting issue which John and JF were debating on the ride downtown. John observed that this type of facility stemmed from a desire to follow “conservationist” principles in New Zealand. JF, however, pointed out his feeling that this was a “bullshit,” after the fact, observation, and that people only used salvaged goods because they were cheaper and that, until recent decades, getting anything down here was an ordeal. As such, people conserved out of necessity, not because they gave a particular damn about not wasting the world around them. I found this debate, between two idealists on opposite sides of the same coin, quite interesting. Being somewhat jaded, I suppose I probably agree most with JF’s observation. However, I have noted that the attitude down here, whether fueled by necessity or a more “in tune” relationship with the environment, is, in fact, more conservation-minded, and I think people do take far greater pains to keep things nice here than people in the States do.

I don’t think I need to offer any examples to back JF’s side of the coin. People offer plenty of examples on a daily basis to prove that this way of thinking is pretty standard, at least in our part of the world. But I will offer an example that helps John’s case somewhat. Back in the 60s and early 70s, government officials planned to raise the level of Lake Manapouri nearly thirty meters. The idea was to maximize the output of the power plant that was being built between the lake and Doubtful Sound. Naturally, the area dumps an impressive amount of water from the higher altitude Manapouri to the Sound and hundreds of thousands of families’ worth of hydroelectric power is harnessed from it. More water in the lake meant more power that could be produced.

When word got out around the south island, many people rallied around the cause to save the lake, which is a gorgeous natural treasure filled with small islands that would have been completely submerged if the water would have been raised. Around 260,000 signatures were acquired and given to the elected government, who chose to ignore the clear desire of much of the population and press on with their plans despite popular demand. All of these government officials were quickly voted out at the first opportunity and replaced with people who were willing to save the lake. A significant boon for the nation’s energy supply—and any subsequent inconveniences—were deemed less important than saving a beautiful natural occurrence. Now the lake has to be maintained at a certain level and cannot fall below that level due to hydroelectric processing. I don’t know if I’m just jaded or what, but I have a difficult time believing that Americans would choose this course of action. But that debate is for another time.

Day 3 Photos

2006-08-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

One of many waterfalls on the way to, and all the way through, Doubtful Sound. Our guide said that, when it's rainy, there are hundreds of waterfalls. He said someone counted over twelve hundred one time, but I'm not sure I buy that.

Pat and Libby with some trees and landscape and such.

One of the weird ass birds that is native to New Zealand, the takahe, which is flightless and awfully friendly. One could almost literally walk up and take a bite out of one of these birds. Sorry the picture sucks, it was as close as we could get and there was no way around the chain link fence.

Molly and JF with Doubtful Sound in the background.

Pretty much the same picture as before, but sans Canadians. Interesting note, I've heard that Doubtful Sound isn't actually a sound, it's a fjord (which they spell fiord in NZ) because it was formed by glaciers.

One of the many peaks visible from the water in Doubtful Sound.

The hydroelectric plant situated between the lake and the sound. This is as exciting as it gets.

Pat and JF sporting their rain gear. Rain gear is awfully vital if one is planning on visiting just about everywhere we saw in New Zealand.

Day 3--Doubtful Sound

2006-08-20T11:10:00.000-07:00

Day 3

While I have decided to refer to this as Day 3 of our travels (because this was the third day we were in New Zealand, in case you hadn’t figured that out yet), this was, in fact, our fifth day of traveling, and I believe it was starting to show somewhat in our dispositions, as nerves began to fray more easily and narcolepsy beset at least me (others may have been dozing off all the time as well, I wouldn’t know). Also, and I know this falls into the category of “things nobody really wants to know,” but I haven’t been able to put a proper deuceki in the “win” category since the morning before we left the States. I did a little math this morning on the subject. We’ve been eating like work mules—three solid meals a day with some snacking to go along with it. All told, we are probably taking in a few pounds of food a day, and, since I haven’t made any proper deposits into the New Zealand waste treatment organization, I gather that I have gained somewhere near ten pounds so far. Where it is all going is some subject of wonder for me, but it can’t be anywhere good. I wonder if it is gathering in my feet and legs, since they seem to be rather sluggish of late. I might have to invest in a box of bran flakes and a barrel of fruit and greenery in the next day or things might start to get ugly.

I also think that I am starting to come down with the cold that Molly and JF brought with them from the Great White North. I started to notice it yesterday when, no matter how many times he repeated himself, I couldn’t make out what JF was saying. His accent, while noticeable, has never been prohibitive towards communication, but, for some reason, yesterday I just couldn’t hear him well enough to make out what he was saying. So I just kept nodding my head and/or laughing whenever I thought it was appropriate. At the time I thought it was because of all the background noise, but, after further consideration, I’ve decided that it’s because my ears are full of fluid. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Love girls speak at volume every time they put voice to thought, I probably wouldn’t have been able to hear them either. Actually, this is an unfair generalization. Molly does not speak loudly. She is very soft-spoken pretty much all of the time. The family has a story about Libby’s mother, whom they call Grammy. Grammy would call over to the house, probably to complain about someone or something, and, after a few minutes of talking and making sure that Grammy was on a real role, Karen would set the phone down on the counter, coming back every once in awhile to say “uh-huh” before putting it back on the counter. This was before the days of speaker phones, but I know they could still hear every word Grammy was saying. It is possible to do this trick with both Karen and Libby, though I have been too apprehensive of getting caught to actually try it. I have had to pull the phone away from my ear a few times while talking to both, though, to keep from doing more damage than years of driving tractor and listening to loud music ever could.

Day 3, by comparison to Days 1 and 2, was fairly relaxed. We did not spend the day running everywhere and cramming as many sites into the day as possible. Instead, we participated in a single, day-long event, a ride out to Doubtful Sound.

Doubtful Sound

The city of Manapouri, which I don’t think we saw much of, so I can’t really comment on, is located on the southeastern bank of Lake Manapouri (at least they are good about keeping the names of their lakes and cities consistent). Lake Manapouri is relatively large (at least according to the scale on the map I’m looking at now) lake that was, for all intents and purposes, one of the most splendid lakes I’ve ever been on. Unfortunately, the weather was not cooperating with us as it was cold and alternately raining (later, as we took the bus ride from the lake to the sound, it would rain, clear up, then snow on us—the weather suffers from multiple personalities here, and like a victim of the mental ailment, one never really knows for sure which personality is going to have control at any given time. I’ve noticed that the weather forecast, which is usually very specific over a weeklong period in the States, will usually only give a temperature range for the current day and pretty much always has a chance of rain in the forecast. Beyond that, they are either unwilling to say or it’s that unnecessary, besides warning if an unusual cold or warm front might be moving in, to make a prediction). We were unable to go outside the cabin on the boat and clearly see the water and surroundings, but what I could see from the boat looked quite impressive.

All along the water, there is the most impressively thick tree life. These trees, I’ve been told, are being held up by a tangled root system that is almost entirely self-sustained, meaning it barely breaks under the surface of the ground. Simply enough, the roots have nothing to go into because the hills surrounding the lake are made entirely of rock. Still, over decades, lichen, moss, small growth and the like builds up until trees can get a footing and then the trees roots all intertwine and support one another.

This sounds like a great idea, and is, in fact, something of a miracle of nature’s determination, but the downside lies in the nature of trees themselves. People who are familiar with trees know that one of their most prominent features is their heft. Nobody has ever lifted a tree and said, “My, that was a lark. Let’s lift another.” Add that to a basically non-existent root system and in most places you would have a recipe for disaster. In Kansas, large trees that have existed for decades, thinking tree thoughts, doing tree things, and weathering dozens of storms of a decidedly destructive nature, will suddenly, and without warning fall on valuable structures and people (who, presumably, have value also) during storms that left no lasting impression. Imagine what would happen if those same trees didn’t dig their roots several feet into the ground as they grew.

And that is essentially the problem that occurs with some frequency on the hills near Doubtful Sound. They are called tree slides. I’m not sure if that’s what they are officially called or not, I believe I remember hearing someone say something about tree avalanches also. If tree slide isn’t the official name, it should be because it has a nice ring to it. Basically, though, what happens is this: one or two trees towards the top of a hill will stop being a tree and start being a problem, falling in the direction gravity wills it to. When a tree falls in the forest (whether it makes a sound or not) it will do relatively little damage, perhaps smashing a few smaller trees in the process. On a large hill with nothing to stop it but trees with no roots, one or two falling trees can cause mass destruction, clearing large swathes of forest. These clearings scar the sides of all of the hills surrounding Lake Manapouri and the Doubtful Sound and it takes decades for the process to repeat itself, but repeat itself it invariably does.

New Zealand desperately disappointed me by not providing me with a good tree slide while we were on this trip. I also didn’t see any volcanoes, though there are no active ones on the South Island. And there was no earthquake, though they apparently get them here (one of the tour guides actually pointed out a large crack in one of the mountainsides and mentioned that it was a fault line—somewhat disconcerting as one travels very near it). All in all, it was a bit of a let down in the natural disaster department.

After the initial boat ride, we took a tour bus across the mountains to meet up with the big tour boat we would spend the next few hours on, the one that would tool us around Doubtful Sound.

Doubtful Sound, incidentally, received its name when the explorer who discovered it (European explorer, obviously, all others need not apply—and I think it was Captain Cook, but I’m not sure if I’m filling in the blanks with names that I recognize from middle school here or not) balked at the opportunity to enter it to look for a place to harbor, claiming the rough seas and narrow passages into the sound made it “doubtful” they would be able to get out again. Obviously, since we cruised out of the sound and into the ocean for a moment then turned around and entered the sound again, he was a full of crap puss. They should rename it the Full of Crap Puss Sound.

Sorry, that was a bit of a stretch. Anyway, the bus ride afforded us some splendid views and the driver, who was in no hurry to get us anywhere either on the way or on the way back, stopped several times to let us get out to take pictures. There were some good, elevated points that allowed us pictures of the group of us with the Sound in the background. Probably these will be the pictures that end up as Libby’s screen savers for the next hundred years.

From the bus we boarded our cruise ship. This ship was designed to carry well over 100 passengers, and we had around thirty that day, so there was plenty of room to spread out. It was two levels and had multiple viewing decks, so we staked out a spot at a table on the upper level. Karen and Darrell had paid for the lunch, so we took a seat and started eating while we waited for the boat to leave port.

For the next couple of hours, we cruised up and down the Sound, branching off a few times to explore this tributary or that. Unfortunately, there is only so much that can be said about being on a large boat for a few hours looking at the scenery. One is that the scenery was, as we had come to expect (actually, by this point we were starting to get a little desensitized to the beauty that was constantly flooding our senses, which is a rather sad thing), brilliant. Another was that, still suffering from the effects of traveling, the lull of the boat kept me in a near catatonic state for the entire afternoon. I would doze in and out of conversations and, in fact, carefully considered whether it would be too bothersome to anyone if I had a lie down on the floor and fell fast asleep in a converted fetal position (converted to a not-so-fetal position by my predominantly inflexible frame). Actually, this might have something to do with why I don’t have more memorable comments to make on the subject of how we spent the afternoon. Who knows?

We did get to see three animals that I had never seen before in my life while we were out there, which was very neat. The first were the dolphins, or maybe they were porpoises. Whichever it was, there is a pod of a couple dozen that lives in the Sound, and they are often visible by those on the boat as it passes from one end of the Sound to the other. Our guide informed us that they had been absent for the past few days, so we counted ourselves lucky to have seen them at all. They completely failed to do entertaining flips, and not a single one of them saved my life when an evil kidnapper knocked me overboard during a daring rescue attempt. So I think Hollywood and Douglas Adams may be playing them up a bit.

Next we saw a penguin. A crested something or other, apparently it is very rare. Or pretty rare, that’s right. There were three different types of penguins that we had the chance to see that day, one was very rare, one was pretty rare, and the third was somewhat rare. I think the crested whatever was the middle one. Whichever it was, the penguin used its rocket launcher eyes to destroy a walrus with a laser attached to its forehead, so indeed it was very lucky that we saw it when we did, because it quickly dove back under water when it was done (actually, it appeared as just a black spot with small white areas from where we were—it was sitting on one of the major rocks that block the sound from the ocean). And the last bit of wildlife that we saw was a furry seal, which we purposely didn’t club. It did look very cuddly, though, before it jumped into the water and disappeared. Karen and Darrell informed us that they had arranged to have all of these animals make appearances because it is not uncommon for people to pay for this tour and never get to see one of the types of possible wildlife, and we were able to see three of them. So we counted ourselves lucky.

New Zealand’s wildlife is actually a topic that I took uncharacteristic interest in while we were here, and not because some of it is just so damn strange (though this was probably at least part of the reason). During the drive down from Christchurch, Karen started filling us in on some of the fauna’s local history, and I found myself asking questions that someone who might know the names of specific non-food animals might ask. The two islands of New Zealand, which came together from different origins (the upper was part of Australia and the lower formed from tectonic shift), had spent millennia with absolutely no land mammals. There were, however, a few bats that were native to the country prior to human habitation. One of them was small and spent its days brooding about its lost evolutionary heritage and the other, which was as large as a Dodge Dart, quickly became extinct because of its impossibly poor craftsmanship (this may be, in part, a fabrication of my memory, which is, unfortunately, too intimately attached to my imagination).

What this meant for the wildlife of the island was simple, there were no carnivores to terrorize the birds of the island, of which there were many. Several species adapted flightless lifestyles and none of them developed the good sense to stay the hell away from humans. Thus, when the Maori arrived several hundred years ago, they were literally able to fill their tables with meals of birds that they could walk up to and thunk a crusher on the head. The Maori also had what they felt was the good sense to bring dogs and rats, which they used as a food source, to the island. These animals, and the humans who brought them, had a pretty noticeable effect on the birds of the island, significantly depleting their numbers. The Maori, however, unlike the white folk who followed a few centuries later, had the forethought to notice that they were overtaxing one of their food sources and they backed off. This might have worked to save several of the species had whitie not moved in and made a complete wash of the whole thing.

The white man, in his infinite wisdom, brought several other ground mammals to the islands—stoats and opossums being the most notable—and in a very short time many species had been entirely wiped out and several others were brought to the brink of extinction. Add to that a large feral cat population and you’ve got quite a problem saving what’s left of the birdies that had no problem existing for several thousand years before milk-producers showed up. The birds that existed here were nothing short of spectacular, filling every niche that was left open by the lack of mammals. All of them, I know, have names that I can never remember, so I won’t even make an attempt. Trust me, though, some of them were mighty interesting and a few were even comical.

The most comical of all of them, though, is the kiwi. This small, vaguely football shaped animal with a hooked beak is the symbol of the country and exists in startlingly low numbers now, but efforts to rid some of the small islands of all predators and reintroduce endangered birds to them (an ingenious concept that would be impossible almost anywhere but here, since there are so many easily isolated islands here) has had some success. This is great for the birds but it was very disappointing for me, as I had to cross Punt a Kiwi off my Things to Do While in New Zealand list. From what my brain had gathered, kiwis were everywhere here—picking through garbage, harassing small children, chewing up and shorting out power transformers, you name it—and finding one to punt would be a no-brainer. In fact, the only kiwi I saw was a stuffed one in a museum, which the curator refused to let me touch much less kick.

The most unsettling aspect of this wildlife lesson for me, and probably the reason why I had such an interest in it, was that I was hearing almost no background noise from birds and had spent nearly a day seeing absolutely no animals besides livestock. On the trip down from Christchurch, I actively searched for birds for the first time in my life, and I only saw a handful of them. Coming from where I do, I am quite accustomed to seeing roadkill of a varied and spectacularly gruesome nature several times a day. Opossums, raccoons, squirrels, coyotes and even some deer and the occasional armadillo, all dead on the road. In my yard alone I cannot count the number of rabbits and squirrels that we have living there on both hands, and forget about the birds that are all the time crapping on my lawn furniture. It was a completely foreign concept to me. I could not (and, in many ways, still cannot) conceive of a place where there are no small, furry animals scurrying about. But that is exactly the case in New Zealand. And if things work out the way most people would like them to, all of the non-native, non-pet animals in the country will eventually be eliminated to give the birds a chance to once again live in piece.

I should note that, once we reached Queenstown, I started hearing the familiar sound of songbirds again, and, after spending a few days watching the landscape, I started noticing many more birds flapping around. Possibly all of the birds between Christchurch and Queenstown were taking a bird Sabbath and that’s why there were only a few non-believers out and about. Or maybe they heard a foreigner would be passing through and they wanted to play up my sympathy for their plight by exhibiting just how scarce they really weren’t. It’s a mystery.

Anyway, after the trip, we hopped back on the bus and headed back to the lake. On the way there, we stopped at the Manapouri Power Station, which is an impressive construction designed to siphon power off the country’s greatest natural resource, water. Lake Manapouri naturally sits a few hundred feet above sea level. Doubtful Sound, which empties into the sea, is, obviously, at sea level. The lake drains naturally into the Sound, so it just made sense to harness that energy on its way. The Power Station generates enough electricity to power a few hundred thousand houses. Unfortunately, though, almost all of its energy is used, instead, to power the huge aluminum smelting plant located at the very southern tip of the south island in Bluff. It’s a mixed blessing since the smelting plant accounts for something like half of New Zealand’s gross domestic product (according to Jamie).

We drove a considerable distance into the side of a mountain—which all had to be blown out with dynamite—and sat eagerly as the bus driver executed a nine-point turn at the bottom (I, at least, was eager to see if the bus could be turned around in such a narrow space without creating an Austin Powers moment where the bus was crammed into a space it couldn’t escape from, but I guess they’d probably done the maneuver before). He then let us out of the bus and we were escorted down into the heart of the hydroelectric plant.

Imagine the most stultifyingly boring activity that you can. Now, add a little Paul Anka to the background music, dress everyone in sweat pants and detach your still living and perfectly lucid head from your body and place it on a table facing an empty wall (no, wait, put a pair of the sweat pants on the wall since there wouldn’t be any point to include them otherwise). This is about the level of interest this power plant should generate in anyone who isn’t directly interested in either the creation of electricity or the harnessing of water power. And the whole time we were in there, about twenty minutes, the bus driver stood in the only doorway out, blocking everyone’s exit, so we had to stay in this suffocatingly small viewing area until he paroled us. Either he felt this was an exceedingly interesting opportunity for us and he wanted to make sure we had enough time to fully realize that opportunity, or he was a jerk who liked to make people suffer. Since he seemed like a pretty nice guy up to that point (and was pretty amusing, as all the tour guides had been up to this point), I choose to think that he was personally fascinated by the plant and couldn’t conceive how other people might not share that enthusiasm. It was a great piss-load of giant machinery dug into a remote part of the inside of a mountain, I will give him that much.

After that, we returned to Te Anau and, because we were still knackered (here I am trying to incorporate still more of the vernacular into my work whenever possible, though I think this word isn’t exclusive to New Zealand), we went out for an early dinner at a great little restaurant on the main drag (the Olive Tree, I believe) and went home for yet another early night of sleep. It was another great, if exhausting, day.

Day 2 Photos

2006-08-19T20:36:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-19T19:37:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-18T12:03:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-18T01:56:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-18T01:52:00.000-07:00

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.