Traveling Part 1

Gay and Ron deposit me at the bus station in Invercargill, the city/town closest to their house, and as the bus pulls away I feel like I am separating myself apart like a yolk from the white, except that what I find is that the egg cracked open and the beating heart of a living, fertilized chick is left behind, at the station, with them, and all I have now, on the bus, are empty proteins that no one can use.

                 I have spoken about this; I will not go over it again.

                 Throughout the drive I cry and then I sleep; the sleeping helps some. I wake up with a thin film over my raw spots so that when I step out at Te Anau I can manage to make it to my hostel without falling apart completely. It is raining.

                Invercargill is at the south end of New Zealand and is a place of bogs, sea, sky and the rainforest Catlin area.  Te Anau is in the south west of the South Island. It sits at the border of a huge national park called Fiordlands, which describes itself perfectly.  If you can imagine thousand year old rainforests precariously covering thousand foot peaks and simultaneous drops that the sea flows into, and if you can imagine this area infested with birds, most of whom evolved not to fly, then you will have a sort of approximation of what Fiordlands was like before European settlers. Now, many of the species of birds have either gone extinct or are so endangered that they have been moved to special islands where they can be protected from stoats, cats, rabbits, rats or other other predators.

                For instance, Fiordlands was once home to a brilliant bird, the Kakapo, which waddled along quite happily until stoats and cats came along to eat it and its eggs. Since there are no predators on New Zealand, the kakapo would not run from a stoat or a cat, but would instead sort of watch a stoat or a cat approach, and maybe would run up a tree and maybe make a haphazard jump out of it in an attempt to escape. Maybe. Generally it would just watch the stoat approach. You can imagine a stoat or cat’s response.

                These kakapoas are wonderful creatures, but they’re rather peculiar breeders. The male makes a great BOOMING noise, with special muscles in his chest, which then reverberates around the fiords and can be heard for miles. This great bass sound tells the female, “hey! I’m here! Come get me!” but it doesn’t exactly tell the female where  he is, so she has a bit of a scavenger hunt to find him, which she only really wants to do when all the trees in the forest bloom at the right time, which only really happens every seven years or so (even though he’s booming way more often than that). Then, at that time, when the trees have bloomed, and if she can find the male, then she will lay one egg.

                When there were no stoats or anything, this bizarre type of mating ritual kept their numbers low enough for there to be enough food for everyone, but when Europeans introduced stoats and cats, the kakapos couldn’t keep up, because the stoats would eat the one egg as well as the two parents. So they’ve been relocated to various small islands that were religiously cleansed of all rats, cats, stoats and other varmints. In 1995 there were just 50 kakapos left in the world; now there are 126.

                But that means there is no more Booming in Fiordlands.

                So Fiordlands is a protected place, but that doesn’t mean it’s untouched.  Predators are here, as mentioned, as well as a giant power station right under Manipuri Lake, which supplies 14% of New Zealand’s power, as well as most of the power for the aluminum smelting plant near Invercargill. 

                The power plant is relatively unobtrusive above the lake. There’s a structure that’s set into the hill, but when you think “power station” you think turbines and giant power stacks. None of that is evident. Instead, most of your attention is drawn to the power lines going across the lake to the opposite hill.

                In the visitor’s center at the base of the power station they have many scales diagrams of what it looks like under the lake, the many tunnels and turbines. I won’t go into details because when I was there I didn’t actually study those diagrams long enough to understand them. Also, I don’t particularly care.

                All that really matters is that the power station is the reason there is a road through this part of Fiordlands. Most of Fiordlands doesn’t have a any roads through it, so this is unique. It’s actually the best road in New Zealand—because of the weight of the materials going to the power station, they had to spend a billion dollars per inch of road (that’s not an accurate number,  but it was close), so this road is aerodynamically perfect. It could probably fly a plane. Or something. They went into a lot of technical details about the road and the power station, and mostly when they were talking about that I was like, “Yeah, yeah, but WHAT ABOUT THAT TREE WE JUST PASSED?”

                The group that I’m going to be kayaking with is only ten people, which is good. Four of them are French.  At one point I try out my French, but the man uses a word that I don’t know, and so that puts a lid on that pretty quickly (he says, “nous avons un grande paramble,” or something, and by using context clues I assume he means “we’re going to have a great adventure,” or “trek,” but I ask what that last word means, and he says he doesn’t know, and then we don’t speak anymore. It is very sad). There are two Australians (I think?) and three Scottish people. The Scottish people somehow end up close to me, maybe because we are all around the same age.

                One of them is female, maybe a couple years older, and she either is lacking in female company or just a very nosy person in general.  I am feeling tired and raw (separated from my yolk raw) and not inclined to be personable or friendly, but she wants to be friends. She asks a series of increasingly invasive questions, ending somewhere around, “How did you know you wanted to be a writer?” which is a question so big and so small at the same time that I sort of gape at her before saying something like, “well, what else was there?” then I feel that maybe that is presumptuous and a little too destiny laden to give her the full picture (especially since I’m not particularly fond of destiny answers). So I say, “I liked reading, and writing, and people liked what I wrote, so I kept doing it. And now—now it is what I do.”

                So I ask her why she wanted to be a doctor, and she talks about getting certain grades and then going into the job they tell you to go into if you get those grades, which I think is maybe the equivalent of my answer, only for doctors.

                Why are we talking to each other? I am so tired of people I don’t care about. Just because this person is female does not mean we have to be friends. I fantasize about having Simon here. He would be just as annoying, and we would be talking instead of being quiet and contemplative like I would like to be, ideally, and he would not want to talk about trees or native wildlife, but I would think of all these things fondly, rather than cursing the reproductive rights given to most of the world.   

                She goes back to her man-friends.

                One of her man friends is in my kayak, because the kayaks are all doubles.

                The good thing is that her man-friend is as strong as an ox and doesn’t need me to paddle that much (although I paddle like Wonder Woman, don’t get me wrong). The bad thing is that he’s got about the emotional and mental facilities of a ten year old. This is fine when I’m on board for going fast and being in the front of the group, feeling like an intrepid explorer paddling through dangerous waters, but bad during all other times. Like when he paddles us over to her and his brother’s kayak and flips up their router.  Or when he is generally loud and talkative, rather than quiet.

                Ok ok, so the company is less than ideal. Simon would have been better than annoying man-child at paddling us through.

                It is raining and the wind is going at a pretty good clip for the beginning part of the morning. They have us layered up in wetsuits, spray guards, splash guards (to prevent water from getting into the kayak) and then rain coats and hats with ear flaps on top of all of it, as well as fleeces and our own jackets and rain coats on top of it all, so I’m warm as toast, and comfortable, but visibility is poor. 

                At this point we are just heading out to the places we want to get to, so we’re not actually looking for anything. Man-child and I are at the head of the pack. I am paddling like the dickens, and several times man-child tells me to slow down.

                “Oh, Sorry,” I say.

                “No, it’s ok,” he says. “I just don’t want you to get knackered. Steady, slow strokes.” (For the record? I am doing fine—not knackered at all. We are having to wait up frequently for the group anyway. Humph).

                But it’s hard to go steady and slow when you could just go fast and hard, especially against the wind and rain.  I feel like if I could just paddle hard enough, far enough, maybe I could get past whatever feeling this is.  Maybe I could reach some sort of equilibrium.  But each time I get a good clip going, each time I get a good thumping heart beat going, man-child pulls me back.

                About half way through the morning the tour guide (whose name, no joke, is Cloudi Rainbow) leads us to an island full of 1000 year old trees—specifically Rata trees, what they call “ironwood,” because they grow so slowly that their trunks are small but super hard.

                I wish, fervently wish, that I could take out my camera, but it’s raining too hard to risk it.

                We paddle around the island and continue on.

                Around midday we meet up with a motor boat for lunch. We line the kayaks up along the back of the boat and climb out.  They’ve got cups of soup if we want them, and we’ve all brought lunches. I packed an avocado and mushroom sandwich, along with various extras. The boat has a roof, so we have some shelter from the rain.

                Then we clamber back into the kayaks. It’s stopped raining so badly, or else we’ve reached a more sheltered area. The wind is less, now, which makes me less inclined to paddle like the dickens.

                In the morning the peaks were fairly far apart, and the water channel was wide. But now the channel is narrower, and the peaks taller. We’ve gone down another arm of the Doubtful sound, a more secluded channel. Also, the clouds have lifted, so we can see the tops of the peaks, rather than just an amorphous mist above us that we can’t focus on through the rain. Now, with the air clear, we can see the dips and tops, and the smaller wisps of clouds hanging in nooks or in rings around the tops. All of a sudden we can see the scope of the place. I feel like I was blind all morning.

                Cloudi, our guide, shows man-child (who is in charge of steering) our trajectory so that our kayak can be at the front of the group and know where, approximately, we’re heading. Man-child gets tired of fast paddling half way through the afternoon, though, so there goes that plan. I’m not tired of fast paddling, but I’m like, a quarter as strong as he is, and a double kayak and two full grown adults is a lot of weight, so I am a slow paddler. I manage a turtle crawl at full strength. But still, there are times when I am hauling all our weight, and he says, “Oh, sorry, I was zoning out.” That is fine, man child, that is totally fine. I had us creeping along and didn’t need your help at all. If you wanted us to get home next Christmas then you could have stayed zoned out.

                But now we’re not just heading to, now we’re here. So now we take our time. We kayak close to the wall of the fiord—we see the lichens and mosses and the ferns. We see waterfalls—so many waterfalls. There’s been so much rain in the last couple days, and in just this morning, that the normal waterfalls are twice their normal size, and smaller waterfalls have cropped up where there never were any before. We see the five hundred year old Beech forest (although not as up close, nor for as long as I would have liked!). We see the tree daisy. Cloudi talks about the continual process of slips—where the rock of the fiord slips into the water, and then mosses and lichens start growing on the newly exposed rock again. Once the mosses and lichens are established, smaller plants can grow in on them, and then shrubs, and then small trees, and then bigger trees. In fact, trees and plants all hold on tenuously in an outward direction—their roots can’t dig deep, so they have to spread outwards, flat. So when the rock slips, they all just go.

                 We eventually find ourselves in an area of the fiord where there isn’t anyone else. No motor boats (not that there were many, if any, motor boats to be had originally), no other kayakers, no other sailboats, nobody. The water is still, the wind is still, the day isn’t sunny, but we can see the peaks.

                Cloudi gathers us into the middle of the fiord and asks us for two minutes of silence. Finally, I think.

                But apparently two minutes of silence means two minutes of whispering and harsh, stifled laughs.

                Sigh.

                It is difficult to be a tourist, to be a traveler. When you are working or living in a place you get to know people or places and you make them your own. They become a part of you. Cloudi, for instance, has kayaked in Doubtful sound several times a week, has camped in Doubtful sound maybe once a week, for three months. He knows this place, he has intimate knowledge of it that I do not. And the man who runs the boat, who owns the company and has been doing this for fifteen years, has a more intimate understanding still. Coming so recently from such a close understanding of an area and of the work, the fiords feel pale in comparison; they feel rushed, and loud, and confusing. I envy Cloudi the space and time he has to get to know them in all their weathers, in all their moods, with all the different groups, with all the different moods he takes excursions groups on. 

                For a variety of reasons I am unable, in this moment of un-silence, to center myself and just accept that a number of things are imperfect and that that’s part of the way it is. Right now I feel like egg whites, like I left my beating heart behind and that without it I am jiggly and center-less. I feel like this whole kayak trip and fiord trip is sort of silly. I feel like being a tourist is sort of silly.  I feel like I want to paddle and paddle and maybe that would be something I could hold onto.

                Megan tells me that I am having an existential crisis. She says that my parameters have shifted, and that this is the point in time when I should decide whether or not I want to go live on a sheep farm for the rest of my life.

                It is tempting. I could just pull a Linda hasslestrom and write and farm sheep.

                After we got out of the kayaks, after we take off the wetsuits, after we put on dry clothes, they put us on a van so we can get back to the visitors center, by the power station. In the van they have laminated information sheets about the plants and animals in the area. I’ve been listening to the tour guides, but I’ve not reliably had my notebook out, and the one time I did have my notebook out, that Scottish girl was asking the captain of the boat many invasive questions, and he seemed quite chipper about answering all of them in detail. The captain of the boat was the one with all the good info—I had already exhausted all of Cloudi’s information and knew the captain would have more, but she got to him before I did.

                So in the van they give us laminated information sheets and I feel—I feel voracious. I feel consumed. I read all about Polycarp forests and flightless birds and swamps and gondwana land. These sheets are frustratingly brief—they go into detail about some things and then leave you hanging. On one sheet, they have every scientific name for each bird except one.  What is that? Who ARE these people?

                I’m recording all of these things in my notebook, already thinking about how to explain, show, paraphrase, redirect, regroup this information. I’m also, for some reason, mumbling most of this information out loud, and gesturing broadly whenever I can’t figure out how to paraphrase it right, or when I’m confused.  The Scottish people are trying to ignore me but I think they are a little bemused/confused. When they try and pass me the tin of cookies it takes me a good thirty seconds to juggle all the laminated sheets and my notebook and my paper cup of hot tea in order to take one.

                It is at this moment, with these laminated sheets, that Fiordlands comes together for me. And these stupid people in this van, and this kayak trip is really not precisely what I wanted from Fiordlands (not that I could have known that before hand). Now that I know more, I know that I want to go from tree to tree, looking at the lichen, and the moss, at the bark, at the pattern of the leaves. I want to go with someone who is so bizarrely fascinated with moss and lichen and bark that a laminated sheet would never be enough.  

                That might be a pipe dream—pre-eminent botanists don’t just fall out of trees when you knock on one. 

                In any case, Fiordlands is beautiful. But it far too much and the weather is far too unpredictable to meander through it on your own, taking your time. You have to be experienced, or go with a guide.

                When we get back to our original point of origin I hear someone say that at one point it rained a meter in three hours. Or something. How is that possible. I don’t even know. It didn’t feel like that. That would feel like drowning. Maybe he means somewhere else.

                I go back to the hostel and take hot shower, because even though I changed back into warm clothes, I got cold and wet again from the air and the on again off again rain and the spray of the boat.               

               

                Here is another thing you need to know about New Zealand: it turns out that it’s full of Germans. And by full of Germans, I mean that Germany is probably a ghost town at this very moment. I have met thousands of Germans. Simon is German. In my hostel in Te Anau, no less than FOUR HUNDRED GERMANS slept in the same dorm as me. In the rest of my hostels and travels, I consistently found Germans. In one of my rooms at a different hostel, there were four people, none of whom knew each other, and three of them were German.

                The reason for this is that Germany has a really nice work visa set up with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Germans can work for a year with any of the above countries really easily. So a lot of just-out-of-high-schoolers, unsure of what they want to do, spend a year abroad, working on various farms, traveling a little, working a little, traveling a little, working a little, and then after a year they theoretically know all their inner secrets and come back to Germany ready to become full time adults. This is not always the case, of course.

                Surprisingly, most of the Germans that I meet are not in the above category, but are older, or have slightly different stories. Maybe I just gravitate towards different types of people. In any case, they’re all Germans. I think I meet one person from French Indonesia.

                No one seems to know that I’m American, either. When I was in France the U.S flag was tattooed onto my forehead, but here I’ll have whole conversations with people and they’ll say, “So, you’re British?” at the end of it. In France I got used to everyone knowing where I was from, but here, when people ask me “So, where are you from?” it’s a genuine question. They really have no idea. I could be South African. They have no idea. I would have thought that the accent would clue them in, because my accent sounds just George Clooney’s accent, or Brad Pitt’s. But I guess people don’t listen that carefully. I might not be able to match Hugh Jackman’s accent to another, random Australian’s, although that’s because Hugh Jackman plays an American accent in lots of movies.

               

                I spend some time in Te Anau, the town, the next day, and I collect lots of rocks. I hear whispers of a bridge  washed out from all the rain the last couple days; the washed out bridge is right where I need to go in a couple days. But I have a couple days till I need to get to that part—I’m sure it will be fixed by then. I’m not worried.

                 My bus leaves that evening for Queenstown, a big, central city in the mountains, right along the lake. It’s a really beautiful city, but it is the home of extreme sports, drinking and spending money, so I don’t plan to spend any time there.

First view of the Tasman Sea!

                When I board the bus to Queenstown, the driver tells me that there’s a road washed out. I say I’m intending to go to Fox Glacier. He says that Fox Glacier’s a fine place to spend a couple days. I think, “Well, I have no intention of spending a couple days in Fox Glacier. The Bridge will clearly be fixed before I need to leave.”

                The bus ride from Queenstown to Fox Glacier, the next day, is an amazing one. We go through Haast Pass, which takes us from the east side of the island to the west side. The west side, thus far, has been all Fiordlands National Park, which I went into on my Kayaking excursion, but which you can’t live in or stay in. So when we bus up we bus up north of Fiordlands, over Haast pass, and officially onto the west coast.

Thundercreek Falls over the Haast Pass

                The west coast is all rainforest, mountains, and generally wonderful terrain that you just want to roll around in and take photos of forever.  For instance, Haast Pass is all covered in magnificent beech rainforest, with the beeches covered in dripping mosses and lichens. It’s wonderful.  I could spend a week here.  We stop for twenty minutes at a waterfall and I climb down to the river and take some stones from Thunder Creek Falls. Sadly, I don’t have enough time to be terribly selective.

                Then I’m in Fox Glacier. I decide to check out exactly what’s up with this bridge. I ask the lady at the desk, and she tells me (and another gentleman, also asking) that indeed, there is exactly one road that goes up the entire west coast, and so one bridge is a crucial thing. She says that all the rain actually made the river curve a whole new channel, which washed out part of road, too, so they’re not only dealing with washed out bridge, but the whole road and bank is structurally unsound, too. Plus, the river still isn’t down to it’s normal height, what with runoff still coming off the mountains. They estimate it will be five days till they get a temporary bridge in place, but even then they may only let trucks through.

                I panic. I have only planned on spending one night in Fox Glacier, not five. NOT FIVE. I have a plan, I have a SCHEDULE. The schedule involves a really great circular route all around South Island that puts me right back in Christchurch for my flight home no earlier or later than I need to be. No wasted time. No back tracking.

                If you have lived or traveled with me you will know that I am one for schedules. I really like them. I have a weekly planner in my head with lovely colored blocks, and if I get anxious then the weekly schedule becomes more tightly packed as I plan things that I normally wouldn’t plan. For instance, if I’m really upset about something, then from 10:30 to 10:45 AM becomes “Shower time,” and is a green block.

                So when I’m traveling, I schedule things similarly. I know what day I’m ending up at a certain place. This is unfortunate, because it makes me less flexible. I mourned this early on when Simon subtly tried to hint that we should meet up in DunEEdin. He didn't hint it that much, but I could have prompted that we meet up—my bus tickets were more flexible than his. But my schedule was not flexible at all. I am very not flexible when it comes to schedules like this.

                So when the lady at the front desk says FIVE DAYS I am sent into a tail spin. Plus, i I left Fox Glacier via bus, now, I will have to spend four or five days just driving by bus all around the southern part of south island. I will be in a new hostel each night, never having enough time to explore any town thoroughly, and I will never really get to proper beach town. That is my goal. BEACH TOWN. WARM SUN BEACH SUN SEA OCEAN OCEAN, LA MER, THE SEA SUN SAND STONES SUN. It will be a nightmare.

                But then she says, “It may be possible to helicopter over the bridge.”

                And I am like, “that will be very expensive. Laughably expensive.”

                But part of me, the schedule part, is like, “wait a minute, hear her out. This could be the answer we’ve been looking for.”

                She tells us that there is a guy who normally does scenic alpine flights who has been flying people and goods back and forth, over the bridge. He may be able to give a discounted rate because he’s been taking people and goods on both legs of the trip, not just one leg.

                I tell her that I would like to know how much it is. Then I go online, look at my finances, and figure out the amount that I would pay for something like that. I will not pay more than this figure I have decided to pay. There are two figures—the high figure I do not want to pay, but assume I will have to pay, and the low figure I would rather pay but think that, if I do this alpine helicopter thing, that is probably too low.

                I bug her about hearing about this several times that afternoon, but people in New Zealand don’t just answer phone calls like they do in the states.

view of Fox Glacier

                In the meantime, I go on the hike to the glacier I’ve come to see. It’s a long hike, through rainforest, which is very lovely.  I talk to many imaginary people on the hike. Some of you are there! We get along famously.

                I eventually come to the glacier, but because of the rains the ground around the glacier is unsteady and they don’t let me get too close.

                When I get back to the hostel I cook dinner (I make a curry stir fry with some vegetables I got at a roadside stand that day). Then I do some work on a blog post, and by the time I get to my room I realize that I’ve become that older girl in the room that comes in really late at night, and all the 19 year olds think, “my god, how can she stay out so late? What the hell is she doing? I cannot conceive of being out of my room past eight o’clock!” 

                I have become that older backpacker. It is a bizarre thing. When I was in France my entire being was filled with fear 90% of the time. Now I am a lot of things—I am sad, I am tired, and raw and open and actually a lot of the time I am crying for various reasons—but fear is very far from the list of priorities. Part of the reason is that the people here in New Zealand are not people I’m terribly worried about. The first night, in Te Anau, the people in the hostel were cooking three course meals in the hostel kitchen. They had salmon fillets and mushroom caps and toasted baguette; they were pouring wine and crumbling feta over their side salads. It was bizarre. Those are not the types of people who are going to be stealing my third generation ipod. So while I am cautious and watchful, I am not on lockdown. I’m also older and more confident.

                I also have more money, which means a lot.

                So the next morning I am having a nice lie in. The annoying 19 year olds have finally zipped their last zip and have gotten themselves out to do whatever bright and chipper hike they’ve decided for this god forsaken time in the morning, when the door swings open again.

                This time it’s someone else—it’s the front desk lady. She announces that the helicopter ride is going to cost the lower of my two prices, and I have to be at the airstrip at nine, an hour from now. Am I in?

                I only take two seconds to think about it before I say, “YES. YES I AM IN.”

                And then I am charging my camera battery, I am listing out the reasons why this is a good idea, I am packing everything, I am eating breakfast (the remnants of vegetable curry stir-fry) I am trudging to the airstrip with me and my forty extra pounds of bags, I am waiting next to the skydivers (who all seem to have dreadlocks).

                And then a plane lands—it turns out it’s not a helicopter, it’s a plane, a small plane  that looks like one of those things you make models of when you’re a kid. Three people step out, and it turns out the pilot, Ben, isn’t ferrying the other two to this side of the bridge, the other two have just decided they wanted an alpine flight.

                Well, ok. Whatever.

                So we put all hundred pounds of my luggage in the backseat, even my food bags which have begun to have a funny smell in them, a la The Stinker, and I strap on the earphones with the little microphone in front, and then very shortly, we’re off!

                At first we fly low, over the foot hills, over the farms, but then we’re climbing, higher and higher, and then we’re over the mountains, over the Southern Alps. Very quickly I am basically just slumped there, my mouth open, because on the left is the low, green grass farmland, with the sea beyond (yes, we can see the sea!) and then on the right is the up high white peaky mountains. We can see them so clearly—the sky is blue, the snow is shining, really bright, and the dark stone color is a dark relief. And I am thinking, “Light the torches! Gondor is in trouble! Come to our aid! Who will help the White City? ROHIRM!!!!!!!” It is very much like that, with the stirring music, and the swooping camera angles—because those shots were filmed in a plane and I happen to be in a plane.

                I think, “Oh, my camera will never manage to get those shots,” but my camera is the little camera that could, and manages to pull some off pretty good shots.

                I, however, am having trouble functioning—I am taking pictures, I am drooling, and I am also fixating on the door handle. The pilot’s door handle has two positions: “Locked” and “Open.” It is located within convenient reaching distance of my hand. So when the air that is coming up from the mountains and is “perfectly normal,” according to Ben, creates turbulence, and when I have the perfectly normal inclination to grab madly for something, I have to stop myself from madly grabbing the handle of the door, which would suck us all out into a million foot drop.

                I spend a great deal of time watching that door handle. I have my hand well away from it—I find a strap that I can grab closer to my side—but I still watch that door handle, just to make sure.

                I also watch the mountains, and the glaciers that we fly over. We fly over both glaciers, Fox Glacier and Franz Joseph. But I watch the door handle a lot, too.

                As I tell a fellow traveler later, it could have been a half hour, it could have been two hours, I really have no idea.

                But he said (he took the same flight, only a day later) that it was barely twenty five minutes.

                Well. For a twenty five minute flight I A. got over the washed out bridge and kept my schedule intact. B. got a superb view of the mountains that I never thought I would get. C. Got to fly in a plane, and managed not to dump everyone out.

Fox Glacier, from above

                We touch down in a small town called Hokitika, a beach town (YES! THE BEACH! THE SEA!). The couple in the plane with me offer to drive me into town, to the information center so I can figure out how to pick up my bus from there. I thank them profusely (they were from Prague, so I tell them many wonderful things about their city, particularly their castle cathedral, which I particularly admired when I was there). Then I cheerfully wave them goodbye and step into the information center.

                But when I get to the information center, they tell me that because of the washed out bridge, the bus company isn’t sending busses down this far. Busses are picking people up a half hour north, in Greymouth. The only way to get to Greymouth is by taxi (120dollars) or by shuttle (100dollars). Or, if I have a friend, I could share a ride with them. Do I have any friends? They ask me.

                No, I say. I don’t have any friends. I’m traveling alone. I briefly think of the people from Prague, but they’re long gone; I don’t even know their names.

                I ask, what about car rental places? Do they have any of those?

                They say, well, they do, but since it’s such a small place what they do is you have to call ahead and then they drive a car in for you if you’re going to rent a car. They don’t keep cars here.

                So I’m basically as stuck in Hokitika as I was in Fox Glacier, except in Fox Glacier there was at least bus access—here there’s not even that.

                I thank the people at the information center, and trudge across the street to the backpacker’s hostel. I figure, I was looking for the sea; here is the sea. I was looking for the beach, here is the beach. If have to rearrange my schedule, this is a better place to do it. Maybe someone will come in in the next couple days with a car who I can drive out with—if so, they will be at the backpackers. In the meantime, I would rather be here, with the sea and the sun, than in Fox Glacier, where it was cold.

                So I tell the manager to keep an eye out for people with cars.

TO BE CONTINUED

Will I ever leave Hokitika? Will my travel plans be ruined? Will I meet the man of my dreams? Whatever happened to that seal swim thing? Stay tuned to find out!