Traveling 2

Recap: No one can get in and out of Hokitika because the bus does not go down the west coast that far, because of the washed out bridge just to the south. I was south of the washed out bridge, but then I took a plane OVER it. But now I am in Hokitika, and unable to get OUT of Hokitika, because the bus doesn’t go down that far.  There are no cars, the shuttle and taxis all cost a hundred dollars. The manager of the hostel is very upset because the lack of a bus coming down means he has no customers. There, all caught up.

                The hostel at Hokitika is pretty much empty.

                I’ll find out, later, that there’s a large group of men staying there, as well as a young kiwi family (with a small, shrieking child that the parents do nothing to train or curtail in any way shape or form), and an older German couple, but when I trudge into the hostel it all seems very quiet and very very empty. When a hostel is supposed to hold two or three times that number of people, when the room I’m staying in has eight beds and I’m the only one in there—well, I thought it was kind of nice. It means I have the whole room to myself (yes, I will lay out my jeans all over that spare bed. And my keys can go just there, on the windowsill, and I don’t mind if I DO put my shoes by the door, , and I’m going to turn the lights on and off when I decide they need to go on and off! So take THAT!).

                The hostel is similar to other hostels in that they’ve tried to inject a youthful vibe with bizarre decoration schemes that sort of work: the walls in the kitchen and hallways are painted in various broad cartoon illustrations of birds flipping eggs, or a cadre of animal friends driving caravans, and going to the showers with bath caps and towels slung over their shoulders. In my room, an illustration of a cat in a cross legged yoga position takes up one full wall, its face squniched into some sort of half stoned, half sleepy caricature of “cat at yoga rest.” The main room, the living room, with couches, TV and a large table where you can play cards, has a sliding door to a balcony, and one wall is completely glass paned, and actually allows you to see down below into the store that we’re perched above: the Jade factory.

                Hokitika’s main “thing” is jade. The Jade factory, where you can watch women actually grinding Jade to make fancy jade necklaces in traditional Maori shapes and spirals and fish hooks and whale tails, etc, is right below us. All the other stores here in Hokitika sell Jade in much greater numbers than I’ve seen throughout the rest of the country. I mean, yes, I’ve seen Jade being sold—it’s like the country’s main souvenir, main item of note. When I was in Invercargill one of the first items I bought, for my very good friend, was a Jade Necklace, because it was clearly a very special item in a special store with special Maori meanings and everything.  They have a lot of Jade rock, and it’s beautiful. But here in Hokitika it’s an obsession. You can’t really go anywhere (read: Hokitika is basically four blocks long and four blocks wide) without smacking into Jade this or Jade that.

                I will discover all this in the course of time. I cursorily look around the hostel, peer into the Jade factory from the top floor, and move on.  It’s midday, so the manager is just starting to clean the kitchen. I tell him to keep an eye out for people with cars, but he tells me the last chap with a car left this morning.

                But five minutes later, or maybe ten minutes, after I’ve put on my bathing suit, BOUND AND DETERMINED TO GO TO THE BEACH, he knocks on my door, and tells me I might be in luck.  Someone with a car has just come in, and is looking to go to Greymouth, north, exactly where I want to go!

                I figure out later that the chap who left earlier that morning is this guy, who is now here, because he didn’t realize that the bridge was washed out quite THAT bad. He was hoping to go south, to some town where he would take some fabulous three hundred dollar helicopter ride, but because of the bridge, he could not get where he needed to go, and so came back to Hokitika within the hour.

                His name is Marcus, and he’s—you guessed it—he’s German. Of course he’s German. EVERYONE IN NEW ZEALAND IS GERMAN.

                I ask him if he would be willing to take me to Greymouth (while he’s changing his pants. His door is open, I barge in, he’s in his underwear, I ask him, somehow not noticing the underwear situation, and he’s like, “sure, that’s fine,” and then ten minutes later I’m like, “Oh, shorts—you’re now in shorts, shorts are your normal attire, not underpants. Oh. Ok. I should have maybe waited for you to not be in underwear. Sorry about that. Sorry.”) And he says that’s fine, he says yes, he will take me to Greymouth. He’s going up that way anyway, we’re both traveling solo, and this is the perfect situation.

                When gas is ten dollars a liter (that’s forty dollars a gallon, folks), I am amenable to spending five dollars for a half hour of driving with another traveler who’s close to my age.  

                Anyway, he says he’s not going to Greymouth until tomorrow because tomorrow he’ll go on a short alpine plane ride (in lieu of his originally planned helicopter ride), then we’ll drive a half hour to Greymouth, and I’ll pick up my bus to get to Nelson, the place I wanted to get to in the first place.

                So everything is fine, and we have a day to kill. I am keen on the beach.

                Marcus wants to go on a walk to some lake. He shows me a map. The map is green, and the lake is blue, and the area with the beach is orange. I do some hasty deductions. I think, well, probably the green means trees. That’s good, but not as good as orange, which means probably means sand.

                “I’m not as interested in a hike as I’m interested in the beach,” I say.

                “Yah, but I think this beach is not so good, there is a lot of—how do you say—the dead wood, there.”  Marcus has slightly curly brown hair and a little spot of beard hair right under his lower lip.

                I frown. “Dead wood? You mean Drift wood? But that’s perfect. That’s exactly what I want.”

                Marcus looks skeptical. I look skeptical about Marcus’s beach choosing skills. We try to make a time to meet back up but eventually he says that he will just meet me on the beach. I think that probably it will not happen, because the beach is a big place. But whatever. We part ways.

                I wander around town a little bit. I find an arts and crafts market (they sell jade necklaces, succulents, baby clothes, donuts, and organic candles). I find an entire store that sells nothing but possum fur. Possum fur hats, gloves, scarves, coats—you name it. Even possum fur nipple warmers. Yes. You read that correctly. Possums are a problem in New Zealand because they strip the trees really quickly—they eat the leaves and bark and the trees can’t recover, plus a host of other problems. One of New Zealand’s greatest challenges is simply killing all the animals—rats, stoats, possums, rabbits—that aren’t supposed to be there, because they throw off the delicate balance of the island. So if you really want a fur coat but feel bad about hurting a poor animal to get that fur coat, order a possum coat from New Zealand. That possum was living on borrowed time and borrowed soil anyway. Don’t worry; they’re just as expensive (and just as soft).

                I eventually get to the beach.

                Oh, AND THIS BEACH IS SENT BY GOD AND LORD KRISHNA AND DOUGLAS ADAMS AND PROBABLY MY MOTHER AS WELL (even though she is alive and well, but she really loves looking for stones on beaches). So Much Drift Wood! So Many Stones! So Few People! So Much Sun!

                So I am feeling Excellent. This morning I took an ALPINE FLIGHT, and now I am HERE.

                I put my backpack down behind a large driftwood log, and set to work, because this is serious business. All of these stones! I leapfrog from one to the other. And here’s one! And this one!

                Eventually I realize that I am collecting the wrong stones. The stones I am collecting are nice, but the nicer stones are all GREEN. There are GREEN stones—brilliantly deeply GREEN stones, that glimmer and shine against the dark black sand, green stones with black lines or spots, green stones with white lines or spots, solid green stones, half and half green stones, square green stones, round green stones, plain green stones, interesting green stones—the list goes on and on.

                I take the stones over to the driftwood log where my backpack is, high above the surf. I put them in piles. This is so very very satisfying. I am so so happy. I am trotting back and forth. I have piles of stones in my pockets and piles on the log. Some piles are rejects but that I’ve kept there because I still like them and I might make another pile, later, and will need more stones and will have to draw from a reserve pile. So I have my reserve pile, and I have my currently working on piles, and I’m searching for new stones, and the sea is bringing in new stones with every wave. It’s wonderful. Truly truly wonderful.

                At some point I realize something horrific. The green color disappears when the stones dry out. And I’m not going to be taking the stones back to the states wet—that would be too much extra weight. They have to be dry. But when they’re dry they get white looking.

                CURSE YE GODS!

                So then I have to make MORE piles, drying OUT piles, I have to line all the rocks up, and I have to make ELIMINATIONS, I have to think about which rocks will look best both dry AND wet. But I’m not going to risk going back to the sea with a handful of rocks to get them all wet again—some of these rocks are small. What if I lost one and it tumbled into the surf? The obvious solution is just to lick each stone so that I remember what the original green color looked like, and so I can compare the dry color and the wet color, and make an educated decision because of it.

                This is how Marcus finds me, on the beach, licking each stone, considering it, and then carefully putting it back into specific piles on an old piece of driftwood.

                He says, “How does a stone taste?” He is trying to be nice.

                I say, “Salty! I think I got some sand in that last one—but look!” I pull out of my pockets the DEFINITE groupings of rocks that I’ve already made. He dutifully looks the groupings of rocks.

                I am making one last group of rocks. I am a little sad that he is here (although happy to have company) because I really could make piles of rocks all afternoon, and I can tell that he wants to move onto something else. I ask for his opinion about the group of rocks—he tells me his opinion and I promptly ignore all of it.

                Marcus asks if I want to swim, and I say, “yes, but I didn’t want to swim without a partner.” He nods. I had thought about diving in earlier, the waves are waves I’ve seen off the coast of North Carolina, before, where once you’re past the breakers you’re fine, you can manage. There are a group of boys in wet suits and boogey boards swimming—well, they swim, get pulled down the beach by the current, get out before they hit a wall of large rocks a little ways down, get out, run up the beach, and repeat the process. But it’s a new beach, a beach I don’t know, and I don’t know where the drop off point is, and I don’t know what the coast guard rules are here. So it’s good that Marcus is here.

                He says the water’s cold. I’ve been wading around in the surf all afternoon and my feet and shins have gotten used to it—it’s not so bad. I tell him this. I tell him that once our faces are wet the temperature regulators in our bodies will adjust accordingly.

                We stride into the waves, into the breakers—not terribly rough—and HOLY FRITADAS, it’s FREAKING FREEZING.

                I’ve been in my share of cold water. I’ve swum in Quarries in Maine, in the Ocean in Maine. I got half and half wet in the ocean in California, too. But this is like, so much colder—I don’t even know how it stands up to those cold levels. With the other bodies of water I got used to them. It was cold but it was doable. You move around a little, you get your head wet and all of a sudden you realize you’ve been in the water for three hours and it’s time for dinner.

                 This is not doable. I have no idea why.

                MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE NEW ZEALAND IS NEXT TO ANTARCTICA.

                Anyway. We get out right quick.

                Then we spend the next several hours spread out on the beach, recovering, getting warm again. He tells me he doesn’t like the Lord of the Rings. I give him hell for that. Etc.

                At six o’clock the sun is only half way down the sky, and we have to walk a little way down the beach to get back to town. It’s so warm, and Marcus is talking. It’s difficult to concentrate, though, because Marcus is talking about gun control in the U.S, but we’re on the beach with all those rocks. I do not know why he wants to talk about gun control when there are ROCKS around, when I could be looking for more ROCKS—

                He asks whether the media’s representation of gun control in America is accurate—do I feel safe going to school, to the mall? The media in Europe convinces him that, no, I do not. What do I think?

The Beach at Hokitika at Sunset--note the driftwood!

                But I’m like, Look! A Rock! Oh and this one has red in it! Do I have enough red and white rocks to go with all the green ones—Red and Green are on opposite sides of the color wheel, sometimes that’s a good thing, and sometimes a bad thing. Will it be a good thing? I should pick this one up. “Oh—um, maybe I feel safe. Sure. No, wait. I DO feel safe. Lots of places in America are like Hokitika—you feel safe here, right? It’s like that. Except when a shooter comes to somewhere like here. Then everyone freaks out. Haha, DID YOU HEAR, DICK CHENEY SHOT HIS FRIENDS FACE OFF, THE DICK.”

                “What?

                “Dick Cheney shot his friends face off. Oh! And another rock! Do you like this one?”

                “I think you have too many rocks. Does that happen often?”

                “How could I have too many rocks? My bag does not feel too heavy when I wear it on my hips.”

                “Does it happen often?”

                “What?”

                “Shooting people in the face?”

                “Oh! No. I don’t think so. Most people—unless they’re stupid or insane, keep a hold of their guns and are responsible. But guns are an identity---we have whole stores—“oh I am bored and frustrated with this conversation already. Is it my job to illuminate America’s problem with violence and assault weapons for everyone I meet? “Is this a rock?” I pick up something round and hard, but also with a hole at the top.

                “No, it is a seaweed pod.”

                “Maybe I should keep it anyway.”

                “Whole stores?”

                “Yes.”

                “Do you own a gun?”

                “Excuse me?”

                “It’s a question.”

                “I will have you know that my class is Middle Class White Liberal Intellectual. We do not own Guns. My Mother is from New York City.” I am haughty about this.  I tell him that it’s an issue of poverty level—that the rich keep the regulations loose, pay to keep the regulations loose, and then that allows every crazy person in the joint to go nuts whenever they want. Blah Blah Blah.

                He nods, but I think he’s a little overwhelmed. When we get back to the hostel we both cook dinner (he chops up a quarter of a cabbage, cooks it down with salt and pepper, and then eats it. I have a curry vegetable stir fry with coconut cream, curry powder and thai spice, brown rice, and a melange of vegetables from a farmer’s stand. He looks at my cutting board and says, “You have so many vegetables.” I tried to ask if he wanted to do a combo thing for dinner, but he didn’t,) and then afterwards we read each other’s fortunes. He is going to come into some money and have an epiphany. I am going to live out Charlotte Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The Lover. The Enemy. The War between the Lover and Enemy. The Falseness. The Big House. The Illness. The Baby. The Widower. Etc.

                I discover that today, in the process of searching for stones and ribbing Marcus about his distaste for Lord of the Rings, I got a huge sunburn, right across my shoulders and arms. I forgot Sunblock, and New Zealand has less ozone in their atmosphere than we do. The burn is worst on my left shoulder. I can already see the tan line, and it’s already hot, even though it hasn’t been a full day yet. I don’t have any aloe vera. 

               

                The next morning I meet two more Germans, in the hostel kitchen. They ask me, as everyone seems to ask me, “Why Rocks?” 

                It is difficult to answer that question. What do you mean, why rocks. WHAT ELSE IS THERE? Eventually I tell them about my mother and how she and my sister and father and I would search for clear quartz during our beach vacations along the east coast. And that seems to make sense, but it is not really the reason that I am picking up much larger stones, grouping them in baggies, labeling them and bringing them home. We never did that. I can’t really explain my current behavior. 

                The Germans say, “Oh, but this beach is not so good, I think, it is covered in the dead wood. You know New Zealand has some fonderful beaches, fonderful white sand with de shells, lofely shells, but this beach is not so nice, I tink.”

                And I’m like, “What is wrong with you guys? This beach was CLEARLY the best beach.”

                Anyway, I tell them about how I flew over the washed out bridge so that I could get to the ocean, because I missed it, because I came to New Zealand for the proximity to the Ocean (OCEAN).

                The man asks me—well, he MEANS to ask me if I work with the ocean in my line of work, but his actual words are, “Is the ocean vital for your life?” 

                I look at him and I say, “Yes. Yes it is.” And he looks at me like that's some sort of crazy hippy answer. Maybe it is. But I feel constantly parched, in Iowa, like the bones in my arms are crumbling from the inside out. Megan White says this is a thing to do with Negative Ions. 

                In any case; I bid them farewell. Crazy Germans. 

                Marcus drives me to Greymouth. We have a pleasant time, except that my sunburn and the rather active day I had yesterday means that I’m a little groggier today. He drops me off at the bus depot, and we say goodbye, and he takes off for his hostel. It was fun, but I’m not sad to see him go.

                I travel by bus for five hours to Nelson, at the top of the South Island. Nelson is supposed to be one of the sunniest areas of New Zealand. I am hoping for more beach time. But on the bus my sunburn starts getting painful, and I’m tired and groggy, and I have food but on the bus there’s a no eating rule.

                So when I get into Nelson I am on a fast track to bads-ville. I’m grumpy and tired and I can’t hardly think in a straight line. I give the lady at the desk the print out of my bus tickets and she says that actually, I haven’t booked enough nights to get me from one bus ticket to the next—I have gotten days mixed up. But she is nice and fixes things for me.

                The problem with traveling is that days get confusing. Dates get confusing, too. The first things to go are days of the week—Saturday means nothing when every day is Saturday. The next things to go are actual dates, which don’t mean anything when you have no deadlines to reach for (some people are better at this than others. If you don’t book or plan ahead of time, the dates break down much faster than otherwise).  So I vaguely knew that I had four or three colored blocks in my head that I would spend in Nelson, before another colored block that I would spend in Kaikora, before another colored block that would mean I would fly home, but I could really not tell you what those colored blocks meant in dates or times or anything that corresponded to the real world.

                But the lady fixes everything for me, and the world is good.

                When I get to my room I find that it’s a mixed room—not a big deal—but that means that somehow a family of Koreans is there. It’s rare to see older people in the hostels, and I’m a little bit tense. Not because I think they’re going to harm me, but because I don’t know how they’re going to act.

                The next morning I wake up feeling tired and gross and ill. I had gone to the grocery store and gotten aloe vera lotion the night before, for my burn, but that didn’t help so much as just short term soothe the skin. Still, I am determined to make the most of the time in Nelson.

                So I put on short sleeves, to cover my shoulders, and I strike out. I will find the beach. I will look for more stones, since I had such luck with it in Hokitika.

                But Nelson is like, a posh beach town. There are women in cute dresses. This is my first indication that things are going to go badly. The ladies are wearing strappy sandals and dresses that require either no bras or complicated bra configurations, generally unknown to me. The men are in chinos and flashy watches. Oh dear.

                The main street, I soon find out, is all high end fashion stores. Not a souvenir shop in sight. I use the map in my head (which has been thrown off kilter because I generally operate around Canada = north, Mexico= south, Atlantic=East, Pacific =West, but here that is not a scheme to operate on, since New Zealand is tilted, The Pacific is on the East, and people point to South America, which seems an awful long way away) to guide me to where I think the sea is, but I never make it. Instead, I make it to the travel guide place, where I tell them I want to go to the beach, they put me on the bus, the bus takes me fifteen minutes away to a nearby town, deposits me next to a small beach which is all smooth white sand, clear green and blue water, and no rocks or driftwood in sight.

                The Germans would have been absolutely delighted.

                But I am so bored.

                I bob around for a little while. This water is warm, even. I can see my feet.

                But I am so bored.

                When the wind picks up I get out, dry off, and figure out how to catch the bus back to Nelson.

                I just want to take a shower and a nap, but when I get to the room, the Korean family is there. Did they go out at all today? They were here this morning, before I left, putzing around. Normally, young people are in the hostel rooms as little as possible. But here they are. It's their room too, but it means that I have no privacy, no room or place to myself, no place where I don't have to be on guard, or at least polite. I have no place to just stop and relax. Around younger people I maybe wouldn't have worried about it, but they're older, and it's a strange, different dynamic. I am not comfortable at all. I feel like I have interrupted them in their personal hotel room. It doesn't feel right to interrupt their mid afternoon nap.
                 I pause for a moment and then leave.
                The rest of the day is generally a bad day.

                The next day I feel infinitely better. I have more energy! I now realize that Nelson is not the beach hotspot that I wanted for myself. Fine. I will do other things. Instead I go to a giant church (no, I do not sleep in it), a couple mediocre art galleries, and am generally searching for souvenir shops. Nelson has no souvenir shops. It is utterly devoid of souvenir shops.

                Instead I end up at a museum. I am hesitant. But I pay seven dollars and go into the first floor.

                The museum is supposed to be about the Taranaki wars, the wars between the Maori people and the first white settlers. But the first floor is like some sort of flashing, schizophrenic, denial wonderland. There are a couple amped up panels with Maori stories about how their gods brought fishing nets back to the village, but right next to those panels are panels about how white settlers mined for various types of rocks, and across from that is information on glow worms. And I’m like, this is not all from the same time period, nor even the same genre of information, and there are no wars mentioned anywhere. Eventually any mention of Maori anything disappears almost completely, and the museum devolves into a display of settler’s first christening gowns, and the types of sewing machines they used in the early years.

                That was not worth seven dollars.

                I go back out to the main hallway and I’m just about to leave when the lady at the desk asks if I’ve been upstairs—there’s another portion. I race up there, and that’s where everything good is.

                The upstairs starts off with a series of questions about how the Taranaki Wars started—with the government? With greedy land sellers? With this misunderstanding? With this figure? This series of questions allows a murky beginning, a more complex beginning—rather than “And then the first shot was fire and the war was on!” which is the inclination of many historians. I appreciate the murkiness, and the levels of intricacy.

                The story continues on in this matter—describing the Maori’s initial contact with white settlers as positive; the maori wanted to trade and coexist, as long as the white settlers stayed in designated areas. Some of the Maori were more willing than others to allow the white settlers on more land. Especially when they realized that the British Government was keen to run them over they tried many different ways of communicating and establishing themselves as a formidable opponent—simply occupying the land they wished not to have the whites occupy, signing treaties (the Maori versions gave them sovereignty over most of NZ, whereas the English version did not give them sovereignty), and even appointing a King to communicate directly with the British Crown.

                Some of the white settlers and traders did good, honest business with the Maoris, and the museum does a good job of presenting both early Maoris and early white settlers/trades people who were early influences on peaceful relations between the two cultures.

                The first Taranaki War went from 1860 to 1861, and then there was a cease fire on March 18th, 1861 that held for two years before the Second Taranaki War, by far the bloodier of the two, that went from 1863 to 1866. There had been issues with land—where could the whites settle, what blocks where they allowed to be in, etc. There had been a block of disputed land that the Government was supposed to do an inquiry about—who had sold the land, was it rightfully sold, etc. They found that actually, it had been rightfully sold and that they didn’t need to give the land back. They neglected to tell the Maori about their findings.

                So they marched into the land in question. In so doing they had to pass through other areas that were unquestionably Maori, which was seen as trespassing. The Maori then ambushed a British military patrol group, killing nine.

                This is where things get confusing (as in every war, things are confusing). Ultimately, the British hired some pretty ruthless individuals to pretty much slaughter and destroy the Maori’s in any and every way possible. For instance, before the war, the Maori had tools and buildings set up to process grains, but the British destroyed those, even though there was no real gain to be had from it on their end.

                So after the war the Maori had little viable land and little remaining technology; they had very little to support themselves with. Their communities and structures had fallen apart.

                On the plane, on the way home, I heard an American saying that the Maori had been treated “fairly well.” And I wanted to scream at him, “I only went to this one museum, I know absolutely nothing, I know so little, and I know this. I know that you are wrong.”

                The museum highlighted the efforts of various Maori and British leaders who tried peaceful solutions, particularly the efforts of Titokowaru, who led his people on a campaign peace march and encouraged compromise. But the British kept taking more and more land, so much land that the Maori couldn’t raise enough crops to feed themselves, so Titokowaru started encouraging active resistance; instead, eventually conceding that war was necessary. He eventually led his followers to not only successfully attack a British military stronghold, but also successfully defended his own people’s base camp against a major commander (Mcdonald) three times—the third time killing and injuring many british troops, and getting McDonald fired for incompetence. McDonald wormed his way back into the army so he could extract revenge, hit Titokowaru’s stronghold again, was defeated again, and this time resigned  (Much cheering!! Woooop!!!!). Still though, ultimately the Maori were trounced.

                The last part of the museum talked about how after the war the white settlers “forgot,” or at least, didn’t talk about, the war for about forty years. The Maori never forgot. Then the whites started memorializing in typically racist ways—showing pictures of spic and span white soldiers standing tall above glum looking Maori. But the caption of the picture explains precisely this dynamic, pointing out the obvious racism of the photo, and of the settler’s mindsets. It’s interesting and great because very seldom in the united states, even now, do you get museums where racism is pointed out so that you can see it and mark it for yourself, so that even if you’ve never taken a class you can start to understand it when you see it again. It’s more likely that they just hope you learn by example, but even then, most of the Native American Museums are more like the museum downstairs, on the first floor, with the blinking lights and the bizarre lack of story line, than what I’m walking through right now.

                This section talks about how the Maori consider the Taranaki wars to be continuous, ongoing, even now, and that their community is not healed from the problems created at that time. It has a chart with the differences between western culture and Maori culture—how in Maori culture family is everything, you are your family, and in western culture your individual hopes and dreams are more important. At the very end they have bios of several community leaders of the Maori—professors, artists, communicators, health organizers, who are trying to improve the lives of Maori and New Zealanders. 

                When I leave the museum I’m exhausted.

                It’s interesting and a little bizarre that the bottom floor, the more accessible part of the museum, the first section you are supposed to go into—is so horrible. The upstairs, on the other hand, the less accessible section, is so good.  Clearly, two different people curated the different parts of the museum, and did not communicate at all.

                They give me a little sheet to fill out afterwards.

                Don’t worry; I leave comments.

               

The One Ring. Twice. 

                Almost directly after leaving the Museum I find the makers of The One Ring.

  

Rings For Cate And Vigo. These pictures are large because they are more important.  

                But that’s my last day in Nelson. The next morning I get a bus to Kaikora. “Kaikora” literally means “eat-crayfish,” because crayfish are the predominant seafood around here for the indigenous people. When I say “crayfish,” I don’t want you to picture those little shelled creatures under stones that you find in streams on the east coast or in the south of the United States. I want you to picture Maine Lobsters without front claws. Those are the types of Crayfish that I want you to picture.

                I ask the woman at the front desk where to get cheap seafood and she brings out a map which has a seal reserve clearly labeled. She also shows me where the seafood barbeque food truck is set up.

                It’s a nice walk, by the ocean. I can see the mountains in the distance, and the water is so blue, so green, and the rocks are sometimes white and square, sometimes pummiced, and some of the larger base rocks are wonderfully striated, and I’ve got Gimli’s voice in my head when he says, “And then we’ll go through Emmens-weil, a maze of Razor-Sharp-Rocks!” and I’m like, “Gimli, You are so right! If these were taller, and a little sharper, that’s what this would be!”

                I find the barbeque seafood truck, and after much deliberation I get a paua patty. Paua is New Zealand Abalone. But this is like, a frozen patty that’s been unfrozen, and is now greasy and breaded and in between two pieces of white bread that have been coated in butter. It’s mushy and not terribly good.

                I walk on.

                The Seal Colony is a parking lot that looks out at a round jut of rock into the ocean, where the Seals have decided they will go to sun themselves. In fact, they like this area so much that they don’t mind that there are humans all over the freaking place. There is one seal right in the middle of the parking lot, taking advantage of the hot asphalt. When I pass by this seal the first time I assume it’s dead, because it has a pink nose and is lying daigonally across a parking space. When I pass by it the second time it snuffles and coughs and wiggles around, rearranged himself more comfortably, and goes back to sleep. People are taking pictures quite close. This seal has no problems with that.

                Most of the seals are on a raise of rocks a little way out—i.e. not in the parking lot. They don’t move much, just sleeping in the late afternoon light, the warm, glowing, summer light.

                When I go back to my room there’s a German girl in the room. She’s crying, I think, but before I can tell her that it’s ok, I can leave, she hastily exits, and I’ve got the room to myself.  

               

                My Seal Swim starts at 9:30 the next morning. I walk into town with my entire pack, all a hundred million pounds of pack. The Seal Swim has told me I can keep all my bags there during the swim, even after the swim, until my bus comes to take me to Christchurch, where I will get my plane to fly back to the states.

                This morning I forget to eat breakfast.

                They put us in wetsuits. Some of the thirteen year olds complain about this, so I pull out some of the stories of various times at Synchro camp where the really thin girls got borderline hypothermia from the outdoor swimming pool. I’m like, “That pool was warmer than this ocean, and you’re about her size, so I would put it on, if I were you!”

                BAM. Horror story = End of whining.

                We see some dolphins when we are in the boat on the way to the spot where we will watch the seals; the dolphins swim quite close to the boat. It is exciting and lovely. They are maybe two feet from us.

                And then they take us to a large boil of rock, just sticking out of the water maybe two or three stories, with seals all over it. Some of the seals are playing the water below. They go deep sea fishing for three days at a time, so when they come back up on land they’re utterly exhausted. Like, totally done. So they just sleep for a million hours a day. But they get overheated because their fur is really thick, to protect them from the cold water at such depths, so they have to go into the water and cool down. And they have to be in the water for a while, because their fur is so thick that the water doesn’t actually penetrate and get to their skin for a while. That’s when we can swim with them.

                It’s started raining, but it doesn’t bother us that much. We’re in the water, and it’s not that cold, with our wetsuits on. Every once in a while a bubble of water will slip under the suit—up my arm or under my chin or shins, but my general body heat disperses those jewels of cold quickly enough so that I don’t notice them too much.

                There are a couple seals there with us, mostly playing with each other. We’ve been warned ahead of time that they may not interact with us—they may ignore us completely.  These guys are champion ignorers—they’re tusseling and could care less that several blobbey humans in bright yellow fins are staring at them.

                I feel a little weird, actually, because it’s not so much “swimming” with the seals, as it is “floating and watching the seals swim in close proximity.” I’m glad that they don’t seem to care, but I feel awkward. If I were playing outside, I would not want a group of creatures gathering to stare at me. Undoubtedly cool, but again—oh god, my geek is showing—after the initial oooh and ahh of an up close seal wears off, I am almost more excited and mystified by the seaweed and by the very tiny, almost invisible creatures floating around in groups that I can see with my snorkel mask (so clear!!!).

                The seaweed is thick, and long, a dull green and yellow, and it moves with the water in sinuous shapes, bellowing in and out. It has a sort of handsome sentience, a sort of power to it. I don’t think that it will wrap me up if I get close, but I do feel like it will wrap me up. And I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. I’m not sure if I wouldn’t, actually, totally enjoy that. When I snorkel through the seaweed that floats at the surface it’s surprisingly stiff, like walking through those plastic hanging curtains in factory situations. It doesn’t look stiff. It looks like ribbons, like bedsheets, like a down comforter.

                The seals are flipping and playing and have their mouths locked on each other, whirling around and around. Their eyes are big, sort of square ish, and milky white looking, underwater. I’ve heard that seal eyes—in fact, most undersea creature’s eyes—are flat, and most land creature’s eyes are round. Something to do with the light.

                 Here’s where I rant about the other people on the trip. Not the gorgeous German family with their six foot two son who looks like he has just stepped out of a Ralph Loren Summer Sports Ad, who is also in my group and who I have no problem swimming with—but the more portly gentleman who can’t quite maneuver himself in the water and keeps bashing me in the head with his flippers, and keeps getting too close to the rock (which we are supposed to keep away from, in order to give the seals their space) and in general is a blunderbus.

                But not all of us can be awesome-sauce synchronized swimmers, so I’ll move on.

                When I get back into the boat it’s sunny, and warm, and I peel off my top layer of wetsuit so that my arms are showing, and I notice that my left shoulder is beginning to peel. Despite the Ralph Loren Model sitting opposite me, this shoulder peeling occupies my attention for the entire trip back to the Seal Swim head quarters.

                I am just so not capable of continuing my own species, it’s not even funny.

               

                I shower and change at the Seal Swim headquarters, and then I get my official big extravagant New Zealand Meal in town. I get a seafood salad—it has a quarter of a crayfish, some mussels and some calamari. I also get a dish of mashed potatoes because I am cold and need something starchy. (Sarah Burke! I thought of you!)

                It is delicious, but I had forgotten to bring my camera. I am sorry. The Crayfish tasted similar to lobster, but maybe not as sweet. So. There you go. Now you know. Also, the Mashed Potatoes are amazing.  

                Kaikora is my last stop. That afternoon I board the bus to Christchurch, and then from Christchurch I get another bus to the airport.

                In the airport I attempt a fancy maneuver wherein I stay up all night so that I will then sleep soundly for the entire trans-pacific flight. I spend the time writing stuff for my blog and peeling the skin on my shoulder, which has blossomed into a massive bubbling, roiling mass of flaking skin. It’s utterly disgusting and I’m glad that most of the people here in the airport are asleep so I don’t gross them out too much.

                The not-sleeping attempt doesn’t work. What happens is that by the time morning rolls around, I am so tired, and so queasy, that I am worried about barfing all over my flight from Christchurch to Sydney, so I sleep on that flight, instead.

                So when I get on my flight trans-pacific, I have had enough sleep to keep me awake, but not enough to keep me awake permanently, so I continue to drift in and out every other hour or so. I do have pills in my bag that are supposed to make me drowsy, but they are all the way up in the overhead bin, and the two people next to me are large, bald (shaved bald) Australians. I do not know if these two men knew each other before the flight, but they are two peas in a pod, and get along famously. The one closest to me jiggles his leg a great deal. They make large hand gestures. For some reason I cannot ask them to move so I can get to my bag, even though I am screaming, in my head, to just ask them to move.

                We land in LA at around 7AM their time, which is I don’t know even what it is my time. But I’ve been up for about thirty six hours, by this point, with only a couple hours of plane sleep. I go through customs. Again, I tell them about everything. I don’t tell them about my collection of rocks. I don’t think they need to know about those. But I DO tell them about the dirt I’ve found in the treads of my hiking boots. They should know about that in case there are bacteria they don’t want getting into the US.

                They send me all the way through to the agricultural people with their special scanners, but when I show them my boots, with my special tired anxious face, they look at me like, “bitch, why are you wasting our time.”   

                And then they say, “Just be sure to wash them whenever you get to where you’re going.”

                And I’m like, “THIS IS HOW THE WOOD BORER BEETLE GOT INTO THE COUNTRY. WE’RE ALL DOOMED.” But then I’m also worried about them scanning my bags and finding those rocks.

                And then there’s another couple hours of waiting in LA. We board the plane in LA at noon. It’s a three hour flight. We land in Minneapolis at six PM, and it’s dark.

                HOW DID THAT HAPPEN. I DON’T UNDERSTAND. Literally. Where did the sun go? And the hours?

                It’s a complete mystery to me—especially since the first time I took this trip, from Minneapolis to LA, the flight was like, FIVE HOURS LONG. And now it’s only three? And somehow time is cut in half?

                HOW.

                Very very confused.

                When I get out of the airport and pick up my bag, the cold of winter bitch-slaps me in the face, and it’s only 40 degrees out. I’m still peeling my sunburn.

                Logan Adams, from the MFA program, picks me up. He lives in Minneapolis because he’s all cool and hip and urban. He used to have dreads. Then he used to have a faux mohawk. Now he has a really cool wife and makes really good food and writes really good fiction. Also they have a shower with two shower heads (What. That’s an important detail. How many of you have that?). 

                So Logan picks me up from the light-rail and I’m basically like, “Thanks so much, I really appreciate—“and then I burst into tears.

                But Logan is great. He’s like, “Here is this awesome food I made that you will eat. Amelia. Here is my shower. Here is this inflatable mattress. Whatever’s Clever. Here is your own space with a closeable door and a significant lack of Germans. Marxism. Here is breakfast the next morning with eggs and bacon that I’ve just like, whipped up together. Reddit. Here’s twelve hours of sleep just handed to you on a freaking platter.”

                After twelve hours of sleep I can once again understand the concept of time zones.

                I catch a bus to Ames. Megan White picks me up at the bus stop and looks at all my rocks!

                My cats welcome me home too. They are Beautiful. Haroun is the exact color gray of a paua shell.  Suri is a super snuggler. Why did I leave them?  Oh yes. Sheep. Sun. Sea.

                Sarah Burke asked me, during a welcome back everyone breakfast at the Grove (a diner place in Ames) if it was surreal to be back in Ames. How can I answer that question? It may be a good one. I think I felt surreal after coming back from France. But now it feels different.  I was there. New Zealand was real. Now I am here. This place is real too. Gay and Ron have been emailing me, which makes me feel very good. I like that.  Simon emailed once, as well, but he’s backpacking around and doesn’t have consistent internet. I miss them.

                People have been saying things like, “How was New Zealand?” and “So, tell me all about it!” and “So, what was the best part!?”

                I cannot answer any of those questions.  I mean, this blog alone has been ten posts of about 12- 15 pages each. That’s 120-150 pages of material. I am sorry, but I cannot tell you “all about New Zealand” in a ten minute conversation. I feel as though I have explained. I have told. I do not need to tell or explain again.  I don’t really want to talk about it. It is a special thing; It is a rock, it is a stone, it is a glowing place that I keep it in my pocket, and I do not necessarily want to keep sharing it, even though the sharing of it has helped make it the glowing place it is. It has been a little strange, finding out that so many people have been reading (or not reading) the blog. I don’t mind that people read—I intended for them to read. But it makes me want to either never talk to anyone again, or demand that everyone read the blog right now, so that we’re all on the same page and they don’t ask me such ridiculous questions. 

                When I was in New Zealand I felt like I was so alone and that this was the only way to communicate, but now I feel like everyone knows everything and that’s a little overwhelming. I guess that’s the point of writing. But that’s also the wonderful thing about fiction. When you write fiction, people read but they still don’t know anything. It’s still a mystery, there’s that element of removal.

                Anyway. I imagine I’ll get over it.

               

                The next post will be pictures and descriptions of the flora and fauna of New Zealand. I have to do some last bits of research so I get all my ducks in order for it. Then I’ll post, and then that will be it. 

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!