ZEALANTICS LIVE! episode the second

The water seemed to leap up like a land-borne wave as the transport truck shot by the malfunctioning hydrant at the edge of Greymouth’s southern suburbs, and, after a brief but unsuccessful bout with gravity, it came crashing down over my newly-laundered clothes. Normally this would be a source of consternation, but I wasn’t that bothered as I had already done about 6-7 km of unsuccessful hitching on this day and it was strikingly hot. The New Zealand sun hits you with a force entirely unlike anything I’ve experienced before visiting: the locals say it’s because of a deficit in the ozone layer over New Zealand (possibly caused by livestock.. emissions), and don’t seem to be bothered by it in the way pansy North Americans like me can be. Whatever the cause of the sun’s angriness it is a real thing, which is why my catching an inadvertent wave beside a highway wasn’t as bad as it could have been – though it was a little grimier than your average tsunami.

At long last a small pickup truck pulled over and I cheerily hopped in, with the goal of making it to the greenstone (pounamu, a local variety of jade) carving capital of Hokitika. The guy was willing to drop me there on his way south to Pukekura, an outpost I knew only from kitschy advertisements on tourist map corners, where he managed the inn/hostel and the nearby pub. After a glance at a map revealed this to be some 50 kilometers further south than Hokitika – with my goal being to hitch down the entire coast to Queenstown – I asked if I could set up a tent on the grounds for some nominal fee, and a short call to his girl later it was agreed upon. I was going to stay the night in Pukekura.

Now Pukekura is famous for two things: having a permanent population of 2 (two), and having a rather distinct hate for possums (and Aucklanders, for that matter). We chatted about the area as he drove, which led me to ask about the local fishing prospects (I had been carrying my fly fishing gear this whole time); this was a fortunate question as it immediately led to me being invited to join him and his friend that evening on a surfcasting trip. As there is only one real answer to such things I immediately agreed, and a short turnaround/setting up of camp later we were bound for the coast.

The lines went out into the waves (in roughly the direction of Tasmania, I was cheerily informed) and, with the aid of some beers he produced from the back of the truck we three set to chatting. Fresh off my backwoodsy experience (I suppose fresh is a relative term, but my clothes were mostly clean) I asked them about the area’s approach to possum extirpation – which turned out to be a hot-button topic. It seems that the government, which usually makes a lot of noise about protecting indigenous species (especially songbirds), thinks the best way to kill possums is by dropping an aerial poison, referred to locally as ‘1080’. The problem, my hosts explained between checking lines, is that 1080 tends to kill absolutely everything else as well, leading to a woodsy walk a week or so after an aerial drop being littered with bird, deer, and all manner of other corpses (families are directed to keep children inside during and immediately after a drop). This is all in the name of protecting the local dairy industry (the significant taxpayer) from the terrors of bovine tuberculosis, a disease possums can carry which manifests in sores all over the possums rather than the expected cough, which neither guy (both lifelong possum profiteers) had never seen on a single possum. Predictably, Pukekura is rather against the government’s plans:

In the end we caught nothing (no elephant fish! I was so disappointed after hearing there was such a thing) but the attention of a marauding swarm of local sandflies, and so eventually retired to the Puke pub for snacks and more chat before bed. It was here that I saw the most grizzled old man imaginable trading tips for maximizing profits from possum fur sales (such as those he had with him in a stack on the wooden bartop) – apparently a savvy move is to float them in a tub of water for some time so the felt side gains moisture weight and can be stretched – with the conspicuously attractive bartender, a girl who drives in nightly to relieve the pregnant girlfriend of my host in her time of need. As the semi-knockout knowingly swapped secrets with the octogenarian in battered gumboots (sounds like the worst pub snack ever), I couldn’t help but privately marvel at the differences between this and my urbane, if shabby, existence in Wellington. That being said, both residents of Pukekura were marvellously generous (a theme among West Coasters) and also surprisingly politically aware. Alas for them that their part of the country, which comprises 9% of the total land area, only contains 1% of the population; it’s not surprising that the farce of 1080 aerial dropping can be put over on them against their will.

Turning again to the road the next day, I wasn’t more than 2 or 3 kilometers out of ‘town’ before a car mercifully pulled over to take me south. The driver brokenly said that he was headed for Franz Josef, my goal for the day, and I happily hopped in for the ride. After a brief grace period in which I chatted to another passenger (a Canadian who had also been hitching) we fell silent, before being treated to the driver’s music as we climbed the hills – King Crimson’s ‘Hall of the Crimson King’ in true epic ear shattering style – en route to the small village near the foot of the world-famous glacier. From the back seat I hadn’t even yet discovered the generous driver’s name before the other Canadian jumped out towards a local hostel and I was able to move to the front, but I wanted to see the eponymous glacier, just as the driver did, and so we kept traveling. It turned out he was named Jonathan (or Yonatan, as I later discovered), and he was an Israeli maybe 2 years older than I. I immediately took a liking to his adventurous spirit, his humour, and his halting way of speech: my real South Island travel supergroup (apologies to my murderous Murchison pal) was born.

We took the much more manly (and sweaty) 5 hour round trip walking route to see the glacier, eschewing the little ants far below as they easily crawled up the riverbanks towards the wonderful view that awaited us all. After a very long-seeming hike replete with endless p.u.d.’s (pointless up and downs) we arrived at the wooden viewing platform, and were met only with a picnic table and this view: ladies and gentlemen, I give you Zealantics live #2.

Of possums, profits, and posterity

Hitch-hiking can sometimes be an effortless experience in which you are flung along your chosen road, ride after ride bringing you swiftly to your goal location. It can also be the most demoralising thing imaginable, as you watch dozens of likely rides fly by full of empty seats and are cheerily waved at by the drivers as they plunge on at about thirty times your current speed. By length of description you can infer which I experienced when leaving Nelson: from the outskirts of the suburb of Richmond I walked approximately 16 kilometers to the village of Wakefield, all the while doing constant pointless pirouettes with a fixed smile and jovial Canadiattitude turned up to maximum. As I prepared to leave Wakefield along the same seemingly pointless highway I had been following, however, I happened to see a car pull up some 50 metres behind me and expel a 20-something young man with a backpack, some serious workboots, and an average-sized rifle in a transparent carrying case: I waited for him to catch up, and discovered that he was Thomas “call me Tom, mate” Murphy – recently resident in a local logging camp. Thus it was that I formed my first South Island travel supergroup.

It took us some time longer to find a ride, which we passed in conversation about local activities and proclivities, but soon we were southern bound at breakneck speed in a series of decreasingly excellent automobiles, the last of which driven by a man who (alarmingly) had recently given up the “bad drugs” and lived for a month in silence at the local Buddhist/hippie retreat and was eager to talk. So it was that Thomas and I found ourselves pulling into the town of Murchison (Tom’s hometown) as evening began to make the likelihood of me getting further towards the coast seem less and less likely. We went to the local, ordered a welcome beer after our day’s travels/travails, and set to chatting as we cooled down from the road.

To say that Murchison is a different kind of place would be an understatement. It’s where hostels spring up in basements (replete with owners that scream at their dogs for being “cunts” when they come inside smelling of awful), sandals are referred to as “Samoan safety boots”, and “horse pooh” can be bought from smiling children for $2.50 a large sack – or $1.00 a grocery bag, if you please. The hostel manager, a sweet-seeming young woman about my age, was happy to have my business but was sure to warn me to hide any contraband (my word), as the police were due to come by later as part of some probation agreement she’d agreed to; this was a town where getting arrested “attempting” (my favourite part of the story) to urinate on a cop car’s windshield was something to slap knees over, rather than manacles onto wrists. It’s also where I agreed, after several games of pool and a few beers gifted by locals (all profoundly heterosexual men, oddly enough), to join in with Tom and his friend on some ‘possuming’ the next night.

Possuming is pretty much what you would think it was, given a moment’s thought about the status of possums in New Zealand (invasive species, threat to birds and dairy industry, etc.). After lunch and a collection of .22 shells being done from friends at the hostel (who mostly obliged) and some at the bar (who had them in their trucks), we were off to the hills south of Murchison to attempt to profitably denude the forest of the malevolent marsupials. As I hadn’t fired a gun since boy scouts, my role in this enterprise was to direct a spotlight, hastily roped to the top of the pickup, towards the bush as Tom’s friend drove along a remote logging road in the hills. Tom, standing beside me rifle at the ready, was to shoot at the possums as the light glinted off of their eyes, before merrily jumping off of the slow-moving 4x4 to go and quickly dispossess the dispatched possum of its skin. Remember, now, that the possum is ruining large tracts of NZ forest from an ecological perspective, and that (perhaps most importantly) buyers will pay ten dollars or more per skin in order to make attractive coats, socks, and a remarkable range of apparel (possum thong, anyone?): ‘possuming’ can be big business if done efficiently.

While somewhat grisly from a cargo perspective, the possum pelts were undeniably fine – as such things go – and a few remarkably short-feeling hours later we returned to camp out of bullets (if not good cheer in a manic backwoods-y kind of way) and took stock of the night’s produce. In all Tom had collected 31 skins (thus making the job worth about $100 dollars per hour), and offered to pay me $50 dollars for my part once he took them to Greymouth to meet with the fur agent. While I love NZ songbirds, fear the evils of bovine tuberculosis, and support rustic business as much as the next guy, I didn’t feel quite right taking payment for my small part in the hunt; instead I opted to accept a ride to Greymouth without having to pay a share in the gas money, and to have another free beer before retiring to my tent. As I lay down, reflecting on the odd circumstances that led to my sleeping in the wilderness outside Murchison, I heard the (presumably grateful) calls of the local Morepork owls – so named because of its call which sounds unerringly like an owl saying “MOrePOrk!!”. All was once again right in that stretch of woods.

A quick breakfast and a 3 hour drive in the back of a 4x4 pickup truck – with almost 3 dozen fairly fresh possum pelts for company – later, I found myself happily bidding adieu to Thomas and his friend, and hello to a rather serious washing-up in a gas station bathroom. A reorganising of my bag, a stocking-up on dry goods, and a short yet profound mental reel later, I pointed my boots south along highway 6 – otherwise known as the only road heading south. Through an improbable series of events beginning outside the hamlet of Wakefield I found myself on the wild West Coast of the south island and, to be honest, I couldn’t have been more pleased. The sun beat down as I watched the waves to my right, and I restarted my ungainly pirouettes.

ZEALANTICS LIVE! episode the first

After a vaguely nauseating ride from windy Welly’s harbour to the hamlet of Picton, I stepped off of the ferry full of purpose – if short on concrete plans (a theme of my New Zealand venture). Soon I was off towards the town of Nelson via a series of hitched rides – the most baffling being a ride from some Germans who were going “to a marina”, which was quickly revealed to be the very nearby village of Tuamarina (another in a series of ‘damnit New Zealand’ moments) – and happily booked into a hostel as my jumping-off point for my only pre-planned adventure in the south island: the Abel Tasman Coast Track.

After a wallet-draining bus ride I started my hike in full sunshine and with full weight in my bag – including the sizable laptop on which I now type, among other things. This being a sub-migration, however, I happily shouldered a few pounds of pointless technology for the later good; so it was that I trundled around golden-sanded bays and lush ferny forests with a stamina-challenging 42 pound bag. Abel Tasman Track is one of those places to which pictures actually do justice, so I will refer you to my facebook for those.

During the 3 nights I spent in the park there were two notable incidents to speak to, as a narrative about sweating up and down hills seems onerous even to this self-indulgent writer. The latter – the sandfly apocalypse at Waiharakeke beach campsite – is covered by the inaugural edition of Zealantics live, but the former deserves special attention as an almost perfect example of an inability on my part to just ‘be cool’: allow me to explain.

Usually when hiking your main interactions with people are with those going the opposite direction, to which a friendly hello (or my personal version: ‘ehya’) and a nod satisfies the requirements of good form: after all both parties are under some physical duress and have places they want to be. Once in a while, however, you may find yourself catching up to and passing someone going your way, which usually merits some kind of mumbled thanks as they make way for you to ‘play through’, as it were, and some upgraded version of the ‘ehya’, with a remark on the weather thrown in for congeniality’s sake. On this occasion I was the one doing the passing, and I mentally preloaded my niceties as I closed distance on what were admittedly some remarkable looking legs over the course of ten minutes or so; when the moment came I was ready to pass with dignity and gratitude… or at least I was until I saw the person to be passed.

Now those who have known me for some time have surely noted my occasional (alright, perpetual) awkwardness in forced social situations, and especially those involving attractive women: this… was one of those situations. Turning with impressive grace for one with such an unwieldy pack was a stunning redhead – something on the order of a Shirley Manson with a bit of Gwyneth Paltrow thrown in for good measure – who, to my complete astonishment, heartily addressed me first and quickly fell into step both literally and conversationally. A pronounced yet easily comprehensible Irish accent bewitched me as we walked two abreast (sometimes I love the English language) throughout the day, taking in the sights with the immediate familiarity one ascribes to suddenly inserted single-serving friends. I absolutely loved it, and walked as though on air as my South Island trip began to look like one of my all-time greatest ideas ever: not even a remarkable forward-facing fall down a hill while we walked single file (happily she was not behind me to witness the event) could dampen my spirits on this sunny day of beaches and brogue.

At last, alas, the moment of necessity came. From early on in our companionship it was revealed that we were bound for different campsites, and as we descended to the strip of glory that is Bark Bay beach I sighed inwardly. I could only be so upset, however, as I had experienced a perfect adventurous day with a preposterously enticing redhead. All I had to do was take my leave with adventurous decorum – perhaps even whatever debonair aplomb I could manage while sweating and wearing wool socks with shorts – and victory was mine. Those who know me, alas, know that this is never the case.

As we stood, a touch more than companionably close, and surveyed the area maps posted by the park wardens, I began to build up the courage needed to ask a series of potentially embarrassing (or incredibly rewarding) questions of the sylvan apparition from the Emerald Isle; there remained every possibility of meeting anew further down the trail, or indeed on the road down the wild west coast of the South Island. At this crucial instant a harrier jet-sized bumblebee shot from the undergrowth directly towards my right eye, which brought out an instinctive lash of my right hand; the sound of the connection was clearly audible as I sent it spinning into the wooden sign in front of us, and down to the sand at our feet.

I felt my chance for romance begin to slip away as she declared her inability to watch the insect writhe out its death throes, which was a reasonable assumption if you had heard the force with which I instinctively swatted this bee. Thinking on my feet (perhaps not the thing to do if you’ve been out in the sun all day), I muttered a comment about an honourable burial and launched a wave of sand with my boot in order to cover it and reduce the element of visual trauma in my potential moment. With a gasp she reached down and, with the aid of a folding map, excavated the bee which, to my absolute amazement, took a moment to aright and clean itself and then promptly flew away. My crest fell deeper than the bee’s burial had been as I stammered through polite remarks and took my leave to the strident screams of a series of local birds (a sign further down the beach explained that the birds were nesting and not to be disturbed, inconveniently enough); in the end I never even got her name, to say nothing of contact information or knowledge of inconspicuous birthmarks. These things happen sometimes.

This isn’t to say that I let the bee incident dampen my enjoyment of the trip as a whole, though, as it was a very worthwhile exploration of an area – and a biome – I had never experienced outside of photos or travel films. The trip concluded as the rains came, and I made my way back to Nelson to prepare for my trip to the west coast. After a turnaround day full of fattening foods I stepped out onto the road south with my thumb held aloft and my chin nearly as high. In Aotearoa, there is always more to come.

Goddamn bird.

Of enervation, ennui, and the end (of Wellington)

In the end I made my peace with Dave (decent guy for all his faults), as no cloud is truly without a silver lining when it comes to flatmates… or so conventional wisdom would have you believe. As it turns out there ended up being one flatmate that I never saw eye to eye with, but given the circumstances this was hardly a huge mystery.

When you live in a house with a dozen or so people, you tend to meet them in one of two places: in the kitchen, or in front of the television. This inevitably leads to random chitchat, the occasional shared drink, and a laugh or two as you bemoan the fate you concurrently hold – which in this case was continued residence in Upoko Manor. The house had never been particularly clean or inviting in my first couple of months there, but with the advent of American tenants who were fond of the bottle (or the makeshift still, as noted before) it began to deteriorate in lots of noticeable ways.

Every few feet, it seemed, marked a new stain from a spill of some kind or other. To this add a kitchen perpetually askew (it turns out that an erstwhile resident Kiwi had been taking care of the house’s kitchen messes – I remained out of the equation by cleaning as I cooked and escaping with my nice cookware at the end) and an interesting layer of semi-crushed beer cans over the living/television room carpet, amongst usual wear and tear. It wasn’t the partying Americans, however, that brought the house to a social and/or tidiness halt, however.

From the time of my first tour around the house I was told tales of a terrible creature that inhabited the deeps of the basement. It was the kind of thing (person, I suppose, is the proper term) that would send people fleeing from a room en masse whenever it entered – despite being outnumbered by a remarkable amount in most cases. Wherever it went it dropped long silvery black hairs in its wake as it stared continuously into a small netbook laptop; if it were only a question of hair, though, few would have had a problem with it.

No, the thing that sent entire roomfuls of people fleeing as quickly as their legs could carry them was the stench. Few could describe exactly what it was that our nostrils were being forced to deal with on a daily basis: some said it was extreme body odour, others perpetually un-cleaned clothes (and room in general) that had absorbed a panoply of food spills. All agreed that it was nothing to be trifled with, and retreated at the first snippet of the ghoulish laugh that the creature (also known as Voldemort, Stenchomort, or simply ‘THE BEAST’) would emit, on average, about every 3-4 minutes when absorbed by the chatroom it perpetually tapped away at on the laptop. To be caught early in a cooking process by the creature as it came up to burn its dominantly meat-based diet was the deepest-held fear of all in the house, and would frequently lead to otherwise productive people abandoning doing dishes – or making tea/food/etc. – for hours at a time until the creature oozed back downstairs and windows could be breathlessly opened.

I found myself celebrating my last weeks of tenancy with a slew of attempts at cookery in the kitchen; after all I had a lot of odds and ends in my pantry to use up, and damned if I was going to abandon a vast amount of precious foodstuffs in my semi poverty-stricken state. So it was that one day I set about making a layer cake filled with custard, for the enjoyment of all of my household friends as well as myself. The cake turned out a bit flat/unleavened, but this was not going to dissuade me from making an acceptable treat – bringing the ingredients together exactly to specifications, I began to heat up the custard filling mixture on the stovetop. Alas - something quickly went amiss… to my great sadness and frustration.

The unearthly laugh of the creature from the abyss sounded at the bottom of the stairwell, but I held out some hope: not every mindless cackle immediately led to kitchen occupation. I hoped against hope that I would be able to finish my confection in peace (custard, as you know, being something that requires near-constant attention to pull off correctly) as the moments went on. Suddenly I heard a 240 pound (one estimate) footfall at the bottom of the stairs, and I knew that my blissful kitchen time was at an end.

I considered pouring the entire mixture out into the waiting sink in order to get out of the room before it became malodourously occupied, but decided that my failure of a cake simply needed something else to make it worth presenting to my good friends. So it was that I found myself stirring my pot while the creature filed in, blasting bad punk rock from its laptop and completely oblivious to anyone else’s presence (or sense of hygiene, obviously). As my custard mixture reached the crucial boil I dipped the temperature just as I had done many times before in order to simmer it to a desired thickness, all the while trying to escape my olfactory reality. I found myself disassociating, much like in police reports for victims of violent crimes, from my harsh existence as the creature worked beside me, arms held aloft to reach in and out of cupboards again and again… I tried as hard as I could to seamlessly blend all of my being into a clumsily played live guitar solo as my eyes watered. Previously opened windows were, alarmingly, shut by the creature to snuff out the ever-present (but never so incredibly welcome) winds of Wellington, and I found myself praying for the completion of my culinary attempt to rescue the lamentable cake.

Something, however, was amiss. In the time I had been floating next to my body in guitar solo-ghost mode I had stopped looking at my custard (staring out the window like a lookout on a tall ship) my custard had gone off the bubble. The heat was still on at the usual rate, and I had done nothing unusual: it was simply another case of the occasional power dips that plagued the house from time to time. Turning up the mixture led to increased sadness as it began to stick and ruin itself. My custard, and accompanying layer cake, was simply not to be on this day. I carried the pot out of the kitchen like a wounded bird (to be cleaned later, obviously) and stripped myself of all outside-facing clothing in order to remove the smells that had permeated them during my kitchen time. Donning new duds and rinsing out my hair and nose, I returned to the upstairs carpet of cans a failure from a treat-making perspective.

It was in this instant that I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I had to leave this scent-forsaken house. I had accomplished all the relevant paper working I needed to do in order to work at a school in the upcoming season, and had seen a pathetically small amount of my adoptive country. In a couple of weeks my extraneous possessions were put into storage, my last food supplies had been consumed, and I found myself on a boat heading across the Cook Strait. The wind blew in my face, and for this I was grateful: irrational though I know such a thought was, I knew that no iota of the stench of the creature, and of the complacent decay inherent in life at Upoko Manor over the last month, could reach me. I had an entire other island to explore, and a bag on my back once more.



OH NO THE BEAST! sucks to your ass-mar

Of trout, tripping, and trauma.

Sometimes, people will give you the oddest looks. The middle-aged Maori woman was proving this potentiality as I came to realise quite what had happened when I had dislodged my fly-rod’s tip from the overhanging branch; while I’m sure the time will come when I appreciate New Zealand’s acceptance of barbed hooks, however, it certainly wasn’t on this day. Perhaps some opening explanation is in order.

Dave was making moonshine at the house, which struck me as odd but was apparently quite the normal practice at the university he had attended back home in the USA. Through a combination of supplies he had stolen from various conference halls and event centres while on assignment for the temp labour company, along with a series of two litre pop bottles and an antiquated pressure cooker he’d found in the basement, he had been creating liquor of unknown strength for some time. Distillation expertise aside, Dave was not my favourite roommate atop the hill.

While Dave was racist, xenophobic, anti-intellectual, and miserly, he was also an alcoholic and a perpetual smoker: when not actually puffing away in the corner of the living room (next to an open window but naturally blowing towards the television, as though he couldn’t turn away for an instant), he could predictably be found rolling another cigarette while enjoying a mountain dew. This isn’t to say that he lacked any redeeming qualities, however. He liked to work as many hours as possible temping (all the better to loot), and was thus away for most of the time. I suppose that was just one quality, after all, but I am sure there are others. But why would I describe one of my dozen or so roommates, especially in relation to a Maori woman’s concerned gaze? Let’s go another step further back, shall we?

The All Blacks were busy celebrating their very recent Rugby World Cup victory over the villainous French when I swept into the pub where my roommates were quaffing with impunity – my having arrived somewhat late initially having doomed me to watching the game down the street at a less popular venue before my repair to their location. High spirits were the order of the day as we celebrated the AB’s win and we talked as a group for some time, until a yawn from me brought a certain degree of derision my way. After some good-natured ribbing I reminded my compatriots that I had planned on an early start for my inaugural New Zealand fly fishing trip and began to beg my leave from their increasingly blurry festivities, only to be stopped by a challenge from Dave, the bootlegging anti-intellectual. It seemed that there was no way I was going to catch anything anyways, and that I was being rather a huge bitch by leaving early (at 2AM). This struck me as an odd challenge from someone who described his fishing experience as “getting drunk all morning with my family, having lunch, then getting drunk all afternoon before going out to the clubs!!”, but I took it in stride as I made my way back to the top of Mt. Victoria to sleep some celebration off.

Though feeling a bit delicate the next day, I nonetheless roused myself somewhat early and made my way down to the train station in order to get out into the country. A couple of small towns later I was at the river, which was unsurprisingly bereft of any other fishermen due to the previous night’s celebrations. As it had been years since I last did any fly-casting I was not surprised to find myself rather terrible at it, but at least there were no observers to my terrible attempts on the path across the river at this early hour; at any rate my ineptitude was short-lived and by lunchtime I was rolling my line out with a passable degree of skill, though without any fishy success to show for it.

After a sandwich I decided to try my luck just below an overarching pedestrian foot bridge, as I liked the look of a pool in the river there and felt that I could stand to be seen now that I had brought my casting skills up to an acceptable level. I switched my fly from a dun-coloured nymph to a flashy baitfish imitator and made my way under the bridge to find a position to cast from. Suddenly, upon standing up after crouching under the bridge, I found that I had accidentally pushed my rod tip up into an overhanging branch – thus seriously tangling my line. This became an object of mirth for passers-by, as the tangle was about 11 feet off of the ground and seemingly worsening as I tried to work my fly out of the foliage. Finally I resolved to simply tug it loose from the leaves and, after warning the Maori woman out on a stroll to watch out for flying fish hooks, gave it a pull.

My footwear betrayed me in this instant, as my right foot slid forward in the mud in time with my pull on the line; this resulted in me almost losing my balance – which would have been mortifying in light of my spectator – but I managed to regain my footing with a semi-intentional flourish and turn towards the footbridge. Instead of an approving smile for my catlike reflexes, however, the woman seemed to be rather perturbed by something. What it was did not remain a mystery to me for long, as I turned my head back to look for my inch-long, tinsel-striped fly.

As the adrenaline surge from my remarkable balance move began to ebb I immediately began to notice a pinch in the loose skin directly behind my right earlobe. My first thought was a mild wave of relief – as I hadn’t even had a chance to use the fly yet and would have rued losing it outright – followed by the more jarring realization that I had no readily available way to unhook myself. After assuring the concerned pedestrian that I was, in fact, fine, I sat down a distance away from the bridge (with my left side facing the increasingly-frequented path) and considered my options. Though it was a simple thing to clip the line to the fly it became rather obvious that I was going to have to de-barb the hook before it would come out with any degree of comfort. As the wind had begun to pick up to unfishable levels anyways (and because I had forgotten my pliers at home) I decided to head for home.

It was on the train back that I realized the real problem: that even if I managed to sneak into the house without Dave seeing my stylish faux-baitfish neck accessory, I still had no fish to back up my claim of competency. Seeing no other option I did what any reasonable person would do, and stepped into the fish market on the way back. After finding a locally-caught brown trout at a reasonable price I proceeded to the checkout area as stealthily as I could. While handing over the money I inadvertently turned my head to the left as a car backfired outside, thus exposing my tinsel-clad passenger. To the cashier’s credit he didn’t ask me how I came to have hooked myself; I like to believe he knew. All he did was hand me back me change, and give me the oddest look.

This goat has nothing to do with this post. But man, look at them ears!

Of wind, wine, and why????

My life in New Zealand’s ‘windy city’ became an exercise in patience as I waited for accreditation and subsequent ability to leave my cup-stacking job for the somewhat different paced world of professional education. Though the need to inspect possible candidates before admitting them to your county’s magisterial ranks is inarguable, the reality can be somewhat enervating. As I waited for various agencies to look over my vanguard of paperwork, this all became very apparent. To this ticking clock add in an ever-decreasing amount of money available for luxuries like food and shelter, and you have a tricky recipe.

My primary goal became the avoidance of spending money at all costs. This manifested in a huge increase in my rice-related knowledge – as suddenly leftover rice became an ingredient for confections and further meals alike rather than garbage can fodder – and a continued shrinking/refining process of my body as a whole. It didn’t end with rice, either: skim milk was forged from higher test varieties via dilution, the day-old rack at the Taiwanese ‘hot bread shop’ became my new mistress, and the less beautiful produce at the already cut-rate Chinese Sunday street market became the reason to walk the 5 kilometer round trip. In was thus, in good health but ill spirits, that I watched the first of the spring rains leak in through my ill-sealed windows, and awaited sunnier times.

It wasn’t all doom, gloom, and cancerous-looking tomatoes, however. Merry times were often had amongst the dozen or so residents of the semi-decaying mountaintop fastness. As expensive as food can be, the wine – in particular – can be quite reasonably priced; any bargains encountered by one on a shopping trip would usually be shared in advance of a weekend night’s Dionysian worship. On one memorable occasion a five dollar bottle (roughly half the price of the cheapest non-fortified/hobo wine one typically buys from whence I came) was gleamingly advertised by a returning American roommate. This being somewhat astounding from a cheap alcohol standpoint my Scottish counterpart and I set off on a quest, like dipsomaniacal homing pigeons, for the mythical bottle.

It is worth noting that this was a duo comprised of two nearly penniless young men by this point famed in the house for penny-wisdom. When we were met, subsequently, by a large empty rack at the distant discount foods store with a garish five dollar tag under it, it quickly became a kind of game to determine the next cheapest potent potable possible. For almost twenty minutes we fenced back and forth the virtues of cider (he had never heard of Dicken’s brand, oddly enough), beer (discounted, but discounted again as neither wanted to carry the case of bottles back), and admitting economically sensible defeat (not really an option), before settling on the somewhat dubious prospect of boxed wine. Then it became a soul-searching quandary on the relative demerits of inexpensive red vs. equally inexpensive white wine, before a spirited dissertation on which region was likely to offer the least offensive vintage. Settling finally on a cube that proudly proclaimed provenance in Spain (central Spain, if you please!), we returned to an interestingly coloured, if “grapesy” experience.

Of course I couldn’t keep up this economic self-flagellation for very long: much less so in the face of constant international sporting events being held in town. The Rugby World Cup was in full swing at this time, which led to a delicate plan being hatched. For some time I had put my flirtatious bet on an endearing Kiwi gal who worked at the bank on rent-paying day. Having garnered the knowledge of her love of the national game, along with two tickets to the upcoming in-town match between Canada and the mighty All Blacks, I set upon acquiring myself a date (other than the back-up of my frugal Scottish sommelier).

An unusually hot spring day met me as I went to the bank, tickets (and rent) in hand. Upon arrival, however, I found that I was missing a crucial bit of account information that would allow me to pay the said rent. Back, then, across kilometers of town and steep, sun-bathed mountainside to collect the information, and thence again to the bank: all in the short time before I knew she was to be off for the weekend and thus beyond my inquisitorial reach. Finally I returned with minutes to spare before closing (and a subsequent question regarding my not having paid rent that week by my slumlord), and posed my question after having handed over my weekly stipend and some small talk.

The answer was no – as she was out of town that weekend visiting friends – with an accompanying subtext of no – as experience has taught me to realise with some ease. Somewhat crestfallen at the failure of my economic brashness, I nonetheless sat with mild self-deprecation and a smile while awaiting my crucial receipt. Time, as is its wont, passed; I found a new breed of cold anxiety sweat introducing itself to the hotter mountain-bred variety on my spine as the wait stretched out an unusual minute, and then another. The announcement that her computer had seized up in some intractable way strained my affability, though by no means prevented some suitable chat as the moment stretched like not enough spandex. Her neighbour teller seemingly saved the day as she quickly re-ran the transaction on her machine, though by this point the talk had turned to the upcoming playoff matches of the World Cup tournament. As the neighbour asked me cheerily if I was going to see any games this weekend (having been out of earshot for my earlier shoot-down) I managed an equally cheery affirmative, all the while hearing manic “GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE”-style exclamations echo through my brain’s desire circuits. The spandex seemed taut to breaking.

I found myself laughing – perhaps in an attempt not to begin sobbing or self-combusting – as the transaction’s success was finally announced via a happy hum from the receipt printer. As is natural with unexpected mirth the neighbour teller asked what, in fact, was so funny. The only answer that presented itself was an amiably stammered “m..my life” as I collected my glorious slip of paper and fled the bank, back in the direction of the land of the cheap.

Of beds, bugs, and bad behaviour.

Sleep, and by which I mean deep and worry-free slumber, is obviously critical for one’s perfect physical and mental health. It’s rather like oxygen, or crucial transcripts you accidentally left on another continent: you only really realize when they are not there all of a sudden. When you are forced to get up early to shoot off to some job or class you really aren’t that interested in you feel the lack of perfect sleep in a visceral way, as the day crawls by your unimpressed visage only to repeat itself anew with the next ring of the alarm.

But what, then, if you have nothing to wake up for, but still are incapable of getting satisfying slumber? I found myself in this situation as I began my life in Wellington. My primary goal was a bit of menial job-hunting to help support my raging food addiction (if I don’t get something to eat at least once every day I stumble through life listless, pains shooting through my stomach) which, as you know, is one of the more depressing things an overqualified university graduate can do. Dauntless, I would hand out resumes and run errands in town every day. While it is true that I eventually found weekend work in a local Irish pub, the main effect of this long process was that I began to shrink.

Having to run up and down a hill taller by far than any of the town’s skyscrapers, as it turns out, is a calorie burner. Carrying every weighty morsel of sustenance needed to stop the hunger pangs (the first step is admitting you have a problem) up the slope becomes almost a zero-sum game, as you sweat into your t-shirt with aplomb. I could only assume at this point that my skin was irritated by all this exertion and unusual sweating, as I began to break out in odd places. Not one to be afraid of a zit, however, I simply doubled down on my soapy showers and continued on with my job-seeking life.

Life went on as the snows passed and I began to perfect the fine art of picking up empty beer glasses for negligible remuneration. I was still leaking money overall, but at least I had a job to do, and one that happily required me to wear a long-sleeved shirt. This was a semi-crucial detail, it turned out, as I was continuing to break out in sometimes spectacularly itchy fashion – even on non-traditional sweat areas like my forearms and, most annoyingly, between my fingers. By this point I had ruled out anything fungal or bacterial as I had been scrupulously cleaning both myself and the sheets/blankets, but had come upon a slightly more sinister possibility in my internet research. I resolved upon an experiment.

I’ve never been the kind of person who can fall asleep during a movie…in fact I’ve always privately marvelled as childhood friends/college roommates often actually put on something to fall asleep to. The low-rent lullaby effect has always been lost on me, as any stimulus stands a fair chance of drawing my ever-waking attention. Knowing this, I put on a lengthy comedic podcast (my other addiction), turned off the lights, and retired to bed around midnight – though not before rigging my light switch’s dimmer up with a string I kept near to hand.

I lay completely still for over an hour in the dark trying to focus only on aural stimuli, rather than physical, as the crucial part of the experiment. This is a difficult feat at any time for me, a naturally fidgety type, but I persevered in the name of dogged inquiry. As the show ended I sharply brought the dimmer up to blinding light level and, after a moment’s visual adjustment, took in my immediate surrounds.

Unlike the aforementioned Mick Jagger I did get some satisfaction, though in a way I never hope to again for the rest of my life. Happily sitting in the inside bend of my left elbow was an insect; well, sitting doesn’t quite describe what it was doing, fully. I was in the arresting process of being subtly consumed by the said insect, a process I’ll fully admit I reacted to with excessive force. Jumping up to the mirror in my room I found another engaged similarly just below my right ear, and after a frantic and unrepeatable dance of self-flagellation (he had another friend on my left shoulder blade) I let out a string of obscenities both lengthy and inventive. I tore the mattress off its frame/box spring combination unit and gave it a lengthy inspection, then began to repeat the process with the bed frame itself. This lamentable piece of furniture, I’ve since found out, was acquired on the cheap right before my arrival, as the room’s previous occupant had his own bed set. Alas.

I had found the source of my ‘skin condition’ in the form of a revolting multitudinous conglomeration within the strangely antiquated bed base which, after a few moments of frenzied activity, soon found itself flying off the back deck and crashing down three stories into the bushes below. My remarkable weight loss was further contextualized as I watched it arc down into the darkness, and after a thorough sweep of every crevice in my now maliciously-aspected room turned up a number more maleficent tenants (which I’ll admit met some cruel and unusual ends) I could finally sleep, though now with the certain knowledge of what hidden terrors awaited my inattention.

In the end I was left to sleep on the floor, with occasional red-marked visits, for some time until a new bed frame arrived to elevate me. After the simple application (taken from an internet message board concerning night time scorpions in west Texas) of water-filled metal cans to the bottoms of the bed legs I was finally able to slumber and wake up more full of vim and vigour than I left the last day with. It is, after all, remarkable what solid and worry-free sleep will do for your physical and mental health: as surely as an oxygen-deprived pearl diver returning to the surface, I began to feel better immediately. I recommend blissful sleep to any who haven’t yet tried it.

Of Wellington, winter, and Whanau.

I had it firmly in mind that I was due some party time on this trip by the time I had reached Wellington. After all, the journey thusfar had been an exercise in sightseeing and responsible budgeted trips to the supermarket, and little else: Wellington was to be ennui’s Waterloo. Imagine, if you will, my disappointment when my German germs refused to vacate for days. I booked into the giant mega-chain party hostel in fine spirits, if poor health, and proceeded to do very little for days apart from listening to the ever-present Germans prattle on about Anschluss and Lebensraum (one assumes) and blowing my nose.

The trouble was that despite my still present desire to see as many sights as possible, I was almost completely bereft of energy. After two days I had decided that Wellington would be a nice city to at least stop over in while I did the laborious accreditation process involved with teaching in New Zealand – which indeed was my plan to avoid starvation and homelessness – and to experience some more settled social time; after two nights I had decided that any more time spent in hostels was likely to grind my health down to a pitiable stump.

So it was that I began to enquire after rooms advertised in various formats throughout the city, with an initial remarkable lack of success: when I at last got in to be shown a place it was the most dismal cinderblock student housing imaginable. Eschewing that abode for ‘the field’ I returned to my street beat, eventually finding purchase with an old lady who, after an odd public interview process, brought me up to her rental abode. It was ugly, boxy, incredibly dated in terms of décor, and newly carpeted: I of course took the room at once.

At last I had a mailing address, and a place to base my further explorations of the Wellington area. I also had a host of attendant in-house problems, most pressing at the time seeming to be my lack of clothing: I had put the vast majority of my accoutrements into storage in Auckland in a well-meaning but short-sighted effort to ease my travel around the country. Lamenting this decision somewhat I quickly jetted back to Auckland, soon to experience something entirely different.

The crux of the problem that soon arose was my optimism soon after my initial NZ arrival. One of my first planned expenses was some camping gear, to be used on the ill-fated Northland venture; part of this purchase was a canister of fuel for my stove, which of course I never got to use. After realizing that I would never be able to fly back to Wellington with what amounts to a pressurized bomb in my baggage, I convinced myself by a combined assault of economics (I was unemployed) and mathematics (flying is more expensive than public transport) that taking the bus back to Wellington was a good idea. I certainly didn’t want to throw away my wonderful unused fuel, or pay for the extra baggage I would have flying back for that matter, and thought I would be able to see lots of the country on the slow road back. In a way, I was right on the last count, but not how I had anticipated.

I made my way to the back of the bus (which as you’ll remember is where all cool kids must sit), and settled in for the ride. While it is true that I saw more sheep fields and rolling hills than is strictly necessary for one lifetime, what I saw inside the bus was more illuminating. As people got on and off during the 11 (ELEVEN) hour ride back to Wellington, it became more and more obvious that I was something of an anomaly as a white person sitting at the back of the bus amongst what I quickly realized were all of the Maori in the coach. Once I realized what kind of quiet racism was occurring I decided to be an inverse Rosa Parks, and returned to the back after every rest stop; after all when had I had the chance to hear spoken colloquial Maori amongst families before?

I know I was something of a curiosity to the kids around me with my fresh fruit and 800+ page novel: healthy eating and voluminous reading apparently marked me out as “fancy” to one boy, who joyfully informed me of this fact. All in all it was a fascinatingly different bus riding experience, listening to the voices - most notably one rotund woman’s, who sounded eerily like Jabba the Hutt with emphysema as she worked through the dominantly consonant language alongside her pack of cigarettes – and looking out over the plateau south of Lake Taupo as the sun set. Alas that the last 5 hours of the ride was in featureless and interminable darkness; suffice to say Wellington was a welcome arrival.

So it was that I climbed the mountain – as atop a mountain my abode abided – back to my place of rest with 50lb suitcase unhappily held abreast, dodging descending mountain bikers and an urge to simply perish on the spot. I started my accreditation process, filled my pantry, and huddled by my burnt hair-smelling space heater as the cold weather buffeted the house. The view through the single pane windows (and sound through the insulation-less walls) of the most significant and lengthy winter storm system to hit town in over forty years was magnificent in some ways, and incredibly demoralising in others. The reality of my having moved to New Zealand in the middle of the winter began to set in, as my down-comforted bed became a warm refuge. At least I had the ability to make more ‘real’ food, catch up on correspondence, and have a room entirely to myself so that I might sleep peacefully. As Mick Jagger once said, however, you can’t always get what you want; a completely unexpected need was about to present itself.

Of drops, disease, and domesticity.

There are times in life when one begins to truly regret avoiding all the fatal accidents that could have happened up to that point in one’s career. As I pushed through the fronds back towards the feeble path that had led me to the Paihia summit this thought struck me, and I was forced to debate whether my current situation was one of those times. The rain was falling like the backdrop to a Vietnam war movie, and would have obscured vision even if I hadn’t been wearing my glasses. As it was the path itself quickly became obscured first by the droplets loitering a half inch in front of my eyes, and subsequently by the small creek that it became as the rainwater found its path of least resistance.

I stood, a touch forlornly, under the meager foliage of a Kauri tree just off the path and considered my options. Following the path would mean a quick-ish escape from the increasingly dangerous rainforest (from time to time a miscellaneous branch would be knocked off a tree by the force of the rain) but would semi-irretrievably soak my hiking boots, which in a hostel-living situation is basically a Gordian knot. I chose instead to do a little amateur orienteering and strike across a more hilly and direct region back to the school road trailhead, which was probably the better choice in the end as I saved my boots – if at some personal expense.

I arrived back at the hostel ‘wet as’, as the Kiwis would say, and immediately put on a strip show in my room for the sympathetic German roommates en route to blanketing my body heat back up to acceptable levels. Thus began my great traveling sickness for this trip, as my immuno-depressed corpse sucked up all their delightful Deutschland antigens with delight. I extended my stay and concentrated on futile recovery efforts while the crazy storms continued apace outside my slightly leaky window; eventually I judged that the storms had abated (they hadn’t) and that I was on the mend (I wasn’t), and once more hefted my sizable backpack for a good old fashioned hitchhiking experience.

Rounding the southbound crest heading out of town and reaching a beachside stretch of the highway just as the monsoon revisited, I put out my thumb. I did this with some mild trepidation, being a solo traveller, but with the secure knowledge that I was essentially a plague bearer at this point and that any motorway murderer would at least be hit by Dougezuma’s revenge. In the event the longest I stood forced-grinning beside the highway that day was about 15 minutes, as a succession of displaced Australians cheerfully brought me all the way to my intended destination: the city of Whangarei. I had previously visited this city on the bus north just long enough to begin my annoyed relationship with globetrotting Germans, so another visit was clearly in order to flesh out my opinion of the town.

If only I could flush away my entire experience instead. My destination was a hostel outside of town whose claim to fame was proximity to a series of caves in which you can see various species of glow worms; I simply underestimated how far out of town it truly was. Well, the last part is untrue: I knew I would have to walk for about an hour and a half to get there, but not what the mental effects of doing that journey in a monsoon would be. I arrived drenched as could be expected of anyone stupid enough to be out and about, to the great humour of the affable hostel manager. He outfitted me with caving gear much as one might give board games to kamikaze pilots, and watched my departure and almost instant return with a certain grim amusement. The cave mouths, you see, had all essentially become rivers completely unnavigable by anyone with any degree of sense. Thus it was that I abandoned the reason I had endured the grimmest walk in recent memory, and retired to my Balinesian-furnished room to dry clothes and count regrets.

Finding myself at leisure the next day while waiting for the bus, I toured Whangarei in a kind of listless, influenza-influenced haze. It has a certain joyless, utilitarian character (at least in the middle of winter), shaken up only by the ever present signs in restaurant/pub fronts declaring their establishments to be gang-free zones. Suddenly the odd proliferation of neck tattoos amongst the young male population began to make more and more sense, though thankfully my resemblance to Typhoid Mary’s grizzled brother kept them at bay. I was going back to Auckland (making a mental note to avoid Whangarei in the future at all costs) to rest, recuperate, and inundate myself with delicious foods in order to combat the rain-fed illness given me by my futile Northland quest.

It is probably well that I took the days I did to heal, because by the time I decided to further indulge my wanderlust I felt…exactly the same. One can only assume how much worse I might have been, given another couple of days dodging catfish as they swam across the roads. Having vacated Auckland only some 5 nights previous, however, I had little interest in further wasting time there… no, I was bound for the capital city of Wellington – very much the Victoria to Vancouver for those who know British Columbia – to further continue my quest for a place to plant roots in Aotearoa’s fertile volcanic soil. A cheap domestic flight later (a single hour with free nonstop in-flight serenade by the 2 year old seated behind me – at no extra cost!) I stepped first out of the airport door, and second with some rapidity in the direction my toque had suddenly decided to fly. It seems that some stereotypes are there for a very good reason; thus was my entrance into ‘Windy Welly’.

Of perception, perseverance, and precipitation.

It is a dusty, surreal feeling to arrive at a long-awaited airport. Regardless of your reason for travelling it is the last, and perhaps most crucial, step in your journey, as you must do a series of official and decidedly correct actions lest you find yourself sequestered behind closed doors with a set of unfriendly latex gloves…or so the modern cosmopolitan horror story goes. In truth clearing New Zealand customs must be a simply task, as I (being almost 34 hours into a wakeful state streak) was able to navigate the many legal lines and the biohazard department, to boot. Or, more accurately, because of my boots, which had more of a Canadian dirt patina than is generally acceptable.

I handed my boots over – with a share of sympathy as I had been wearing them for over a day at this point and they weren’t hyacinths to begin with – with some trepidation as to whether I would ever see them again; the same trepidation, in fact, that had me nervously reporting the over-the-counter antihistamines I had in my first aid kit duly to the customs officer. Happily the response was the same in both cases: a cheery Kiwi said “ok mate, glad you told us” and didn’t come down on me with authoritative weight. In the case of the boots the man promptly came back, having washed them for the convenience of all involved; clearly this was a more laid-back process than I had come to dread. A short wait while concerned persons unpacked/inspected and returned my tent to me later, I was on my own in the vastly distant country I had yearned for while watching snow fall onto the well-dressed dogs of my erstwhile abode.

What a panoply of possibilities! All of which felt distinctly beyond my abilities as I cheerlessly paid 16$ (all prices in NZ dollars unless specified) for a bus into town, and discovered the downside to my having left most day-to-day planning to be dealt with on a day-by-day basis. The first non-official interaction I had with a New Zealander was a somewhat harrowing one, because I had almost no idea what was being said for the first few attempts at communication. You see, I had encountered the other part of the Kiwi accent experience: the people who do not in fact sound at all like anything you’ve ever heard. The driver was, I later deduced, a Maori man who in all likelihood didn’t start with English, and thus had an inimitable and baffling cadence and inflection to his speech. After being waved abruptly towards the interior of the bus (with a significantly less impressive looking bankroll), I sat in a state of mild defeat: wasn’t this to be effortless touring? Shouldn’t I have lasted all the way into my first hour of habitation without feeling stupid? I reluctantly tumbled from the bus at the stop I had guessed closest to my chosen destination, a hostel in the shadow of Auckland’s Mt. Eden.

After a few miles’ walk toting 70+lbs spread between a backpack and a suitcase, pausing ineffectually at every intersection to ensure the counter-intuitive traffic wasn’t about to pre-empt my New Zealand experience, I found myself paying double for my own hermitage so that I might collapse unmolested by nasty tourists. I had resolved to avoid the worst of the jetlag by remaining awake until it at least became dark outside, and set acquiring groceries as an achievable, feel-good goal for my first ‘day’.

I set off feeling exhausted and simultaneously refreshed, as I was deliriously fatigued but nonetheless doing my first job after my “go to New Zealand” directive: getting ready to feed my face. A short walk later I was in a Kiwi grocery store, replete with novel brands (‘Gaytime’ ice cream sugar cones and ‘Fagg’ coffee leap to mind), products, and a large variety of potent potables – which I could feel calling to me from the future. As it was I toured the entire store at length only to buy peanut butter, bananas and bread, which was to comprise the best part of my diet for quite some time. A stagger back through a rain squall later, I was dead to the world.

My next days were spent in a torrent of logistics, tourism, and precipitation and after I had taken in the Sky Tower and the excellent war memorial museum, my two main destinations, my thoughts began to turn towards escape. It was thus, on my 3rd morning, that I set off for the Northland of New Zealand, a photogenic place of sand and fun and one where I hoped to
craftily camp using my laboriously toted gear. Waving a fond farewell to the undead seeming manager at my hostel – both the first Canadian and genuinely unpleasant person I met in NZ – I set off to find a spot to hitch up the Northern motorway. I was quite excited by this prospect, as I had been hemorrhaging money at every turn to this point, and duly followed my map to the junction to find myself… 40 feet below where I needed to be (an overpass which, I discovered later, I couldn’t have hitched on if I wanted). Stinging from this inglorious start to my hitchhiking career I slumped to a new hostel. A Michael Caine doppelganger/manager scoffed lightly at my recounting of logistical failure, and pointed me towards the bus, quite rightly.

The next day I trundled for four hours through a succession of pastoral land and primeval looking tree-fern forests, with a brief stopover in the exceedingly grim Whangarei (where a German passenger took it upon himself to get briefly lost en route to the bathroom), to the northern resort town of Paihia. Now, Paihia is wonderfully scenically situated (the gateway to the gilded ‘Bay of Islands’ region), and a decent place for a series of daylong ambles, but it is not, apparently, a place one can camp in the winter. After a day’s adventure through a mangrove forest/water walk under temperate skies on the Paruru falls track, and accompanying horrible walk back to town along a highway, an amazing series of storms settled in to lash the coastline as if for some heinous misdeed. My magical idea of camping immediately went out the window, though explorations were still in order.

There is a path at the end of the road that the school is on (prosaically named school road) that leads up into the mountains behind Paihia for some distance: it is actually possible, if one is feeling particularly perky, to go onwards through bush to the next town over. This was clearly a walk for me, thought I, as I climbed slope after slope for a distance of some 4-5km back into what can only be described as ‘the bush’. Accompanied by the nodding tree-ferns and a bird that sounded unerringly like R2D2 of ‘Star Wars’ fame, I reached a final summit and was rewarded by an amazing vista of the Bay of Islands region. While chewing on my daily sandwich, however, I was somewhat perturbed to note that each time I looked back towards the northeast, there were less islands to be seen. After discounting the possibility of the islands going submarine in an overwrought attempt to fool me for inscrutable purposes, and watching a few closer islands blip into invisibility, I struck upon what was actually happening. I finished my lunch quickly as the rain began and pushed back into the forest, R2D2 chiding my lack of forethought.

Of motivation, mobilization, and self-immolation.

Being afflicted by a general malaise, admittedly somewhat of my own inadvertent devising, I resolved to do something different. It wasn’t as though I was particularly solvent financially, being in the pocket of the student loans folks for something on the order of a new low-end BMW, but rather that I thought I should take said fiscal irresponsibility on tour.

It seems to me that the time to go overseas is when you are either young, and unencumbered by legions of bastard children, or old and able to get off of work while your bastard children toil in adult-type ways. This labels me as a family man – which I’m quite happily not yet – but in reality is just my way of justifying the eminently unjustifiable. I resolved to go abroad before I go for a broad. I just didn’t know where to… though a series of destinations quickly came to the fore.

I first thought of Japan, to be accomplished in the role of an assistant language teacher for their famous JET program. Why not me, a language teacher, thought I as I posted my overly complicated application, replete with great letters of reference and a stylishly written statement of intent. As it turns out perhaps ‘why me’ would have been a better question, as the JET setters seemed to have scant interest in employing an actual teacher; I wish them joy of their philosophy graduates, incidentally. At any rate I was back to square one, with the added disadvantage in terms of morale of living in a disused family house in the wilds of the Comox valley. This is the fabled ‘no country for young men’, where the number of tracksuits to be seen was only to be surpassed by the number of ill-trained small dogs. Clearly I had to think of a new plan and fast, before I was irrevocably drawn in to the land of rain, latent racism, and geriatric socialites. It wasn’t long before I had come up with a destination to work out my wanderlust upon, coming in the form of a set of islands not dissimilar to those I was to leave.

New Zealand. Sheep, cricket, healthy distaste for Australia, and an obsessive preoccupation with rugby. The perfect blend of distance and familiarity for a lanky coastal boy with latent anglophile leanings; English-language tourism with the distinct omnipresent chance of being inundated by volcanic flow. Why not, then? Onto the plane I went, replete with my craftily-acquired extra legroom and a doubly hospitable tall gin and tonic. Surely comfort in transit was to be mine, I optimistically thought.

Would that it were: New Zealand, you see, is rather far away. It doesn’t really matter your point of origin: you will end up wishing you weren’t in your seat anymore. When I discovered that plugging in my headphones would summarily short out the high technology involved in my video screen, I’ll admit to breathing a sigh of enervated disbelief. It struck me at the time as being a rather useful feature of the audio/visual experience (that audio half) which it seemed, alas, was not to be mine this day. However, one must always be ready to make their own fun.

Look to your left, perhaps, and notice the vaguely Asian woman as she crosses herself thrice during a fit of take-off agitation. Note that her screen works just fine and that she is soon off to sleep with the help of the Justin Bieber movie, which gives you a genuinely new experience: jealously relating to being able to hear, and thus fully experience, Justin Bieber. Well, you weren’t about to get drawn into that adolescent love-fest anyway, were you? Cast eyes to the right, then, to an equally asleep Englishman, whose arms seem to spasm like an electroshock therapy patient’s from time to time; disappointment follows when after devising and carrying out a semi-extensive graphing project you discover that there is actually no discernable pattern to his individual turbulence. At least, you ruefully declare, that half an hour felt vaguely scientific.

I check back in, in the first-person sense, after some 4 hours and one cold dinner of indeterminate pasta… salad, I suppose it rightly should be called. The Justin Bieber movie was of course fine, albeit with (perhaps because of?) the lack of audio: his dancing and/or drumming skills certainly impress after 22 hours of gritty wakefulness. The other more dialogue or plot-ridden movies seem an impossibility, and are abandoned for podcasts and staring off into space. In essence I am a deaf person in a world of white noise and inadvertent/unpredictable left elbows to the short ribs. I was left with either re-reading the in-flight magazine’s article on Hawaiian cowboys and their professional roots (Mexicans, as it turns out), or pondering inventive ways to self-immolate without leaving my seat over the next six hours. The latter seemed the more inviting possibility for the next 400 minutes or so.

I managed to survive this flight despite my own best seat-bound efforts. Perhaps my biggest problem, when it comes time for a 39-hour travelling day, as indeed it was, is a remarkable inability to sleep on a long plane ride. The excitement of it all subverts even sleeping pills of dubious provenance, though they lend a surreal tinge to the cutaways of the Bieb’s silently shrieking/face-clawing fans, and keep me pondering an armrest-mate’s nervous private hayride into the wee hours. Eventually, and a touch impossibly-seeming during hours 6 and 7 of the admittedly long-range flight from Los Angeles (which, we must remember, replaces a multi-month passage in a ship), I arrived in Fiji, just before 5AM local time and two days after I had departed.

My limited experience with Fiji leads me to believe that it must be a very hot place: disembarking at 4:45AM into what I imagine the inside of a black cat’s lungs run temperature-wise on an average Canadian summer day will give one that impression. Additionally, English must be a widely-spoken language, I deduced from the erstwhile-grim paramilitary airport guard’s huge gap-toothed smile upon seeing my bewilderment and noiselessly mouthed mild obscenity. Beyond that, and the bleary observation that the quartet of guitarists who cheerily played us through the customs lines must have oddly skewed internal clocks, all I can truly remember is that “BULA!” must mean welcome, and that vacationing Australians are, by and large, large.

The Aussies must simply adore the USA, at least on some subconscious level. In so many ways they are the US to New Zealand’s Canada, but perhaps most so in terms of tourist size. I saw khaki shorts straining to contain steak-fed legs that usually, though not always, suggested athletic prowess of days gone by. If their prosperous obese differ in terms of route to their size 48 Dockers, however, they made up for it with an affinity for distinctly ‘American’ names: Montana’s taking of Carolina’s doll was a vociferous issue, and Dallas, bless him, seemed entirely uninterested in things other than smashing his rolling suitcase into younger Tallahassee’s. It’s possible that one of those names wasn’t actually overheard (sleep being in short supply), but a definite theme was omnipresent – along with a healthy decibel base. At any rate, let’s leave the Australian character assassination for another time: I wasn’t a scant 3 hours away from visiting their country, after all.

The Kiwis don’t seem much different at first glance. Their traveling representatives match the Aussies in brood size if not in waistband, and share an affinity for starting families at a younger age. Those I saw seemed to favour Socratic reasoning with their children rather than a more direct/smack-y approach, and to speak at a distinctly lower volume than their feistier neighbours. Noting this decibel deficit duly into my burgeoning accent interpretation program my brain was slowly developing, I boarded my final flight of the day in a strange fugue state. After 30+ hours of consecutive soul-sapping travel, I was finally ready to visit Aotearoa, the ‘land of the long white cloud’.