Zealantics picture spectacular!!

Kia Ora and Hello!

Well, the time in New Zealand is winding down, as you might have guessed if you've been following the frequency of the posts.  In fact, there is only one more post to write...but that post is not this post.  This post is dedicated to showing some of my favourite pictures I've captured this year; the idea is to write a few words on each snap...but I might write a lot, or just a couple.  Inconsistency! 
And.....go!

This was the first picture I took upon arrival in New Zealand.  Looking at it brings me back to the strange mindset I was in at the time: no plans, nowhere to live, and no sleep for the last 30+ hours.

The first thing I did was charge off to the war memorial museum (much better than Te Papa in my opinion) to check out some Pasifika/Maori culture, which led me to this dimly-lit wooden house.  As we all padded around shoeless I remember thinking that they could carve BC's people under the table..but I guess it's just a stylistic difference.  The man meditating at the bottom of the pole seemed content.

Soon I was off to Paihia to see the storied Northland region, replete with tree ferns and mangrove swamps.  I made certain to hold the camera with two hands as I leaned off the boardwalk; it wouldn't have done to drop it less than two weeks into the trip.

Perhaps the most flattering picture of Upoko Manor that I ever took, taken from the time in which I didn't despise being there yet.  Much to the contrary: I was excited to be out of the transient lifestyle necessitated by hostel life.  Bedbugs, boxed wine, and precipitous weight loss were in the offing..the present was simple joy drawn from food stability and a room of my own to sleep in.

It seemed like this bush, directly outside my window at the Manor, never stopped flowering.  Despite this, I never really saw it being frequented by bees.  This was right before it got punishingly cold in 'the house that insulation forgot'.

This was the fun side of the great cold snap that came in not long after I moved into the Manor.  Apparently it was the first time it had snowed there in 40 years...note the still defiantly-flowering bush.

Wellington, on a good day, has a lot to recommend it.  It's when the wind became freshening, rather than unbearably grating.

Here we see a west coast Canadian and a Scot enjoying a sporting event in their natural habitat: the rain.  Canada was even in the lead for about 40 seconds in this game vs. the mighty All Blacks!

I tried on a number of occasions to capture Wellington's downtown at night from the top of Mt. Victoria...this was my favourite of those attempts.  The heads you see were there for the Guy Fawkes fireworks.

Here we see the home distillery set up by an American at Upoko Manor.  At that time there wasn't much to do if there wasn't a rugby game on to watch, so watching hooch get made passed for entertainment.  Well, unless Stenchomort showed up...then it was time to go hide.

I found myself walking down this road in blasting sunlight (with a 40+ pound bag!) while hitching to Nelson after first arriving on the south island.  It was the kind of day where the odd patch on the back of your hand that you didn't screen up would get an amusing sunburn.  It took a couple miles, but soon two English ladies spirited me to the next crossroads.

I think this is my favourite shot from my time on the Abel Tasman coast track.  This was taken a few hours into the walk, when the weather was unbelievable...at least compared to how it ended up - wind, rain, and incredulous looks from me at anyone who was starting the walk from the opposite direction.

I hitched down the entire west coast of the south island...and on review kind of liked this picture the most.  I mean glaciers, rivers, forests....we've all seen those.  But what the hell is going on in this sign? Beware of oddly square ruts if you're biking (it was in the middle of a flat parking lot)?  Watch out for flying mid-crash bikers?  The west coast could be mysterious.

This picture summed up the prevalent young male fashion in Alexandra, where I spent my Christmas having beers in a backyard pool and trying to get a mild sunburn for novelty's sake.  Suffice to say, I succeeded... unlike this guy's sartorial instincts when he went for this look.  Note the sheep shearing contest tanktop sponsored by one of the cheapo beer companies.

Not every snap was of happy-go-lucky material.  This is approximately what Christchurch looked like when I visited, a scant year or so AFTER the earthquake.  Maybe the Kiwis will break out some shovels or something one of these months...it was very weird.

Compare and contrast the smoking ruins of Christchurch with the ultra-opulent neighbourhood I moved into after a slight homeless departure back up in Auckland.  I think this was my favourite of all of the gates.

I spent an afternoon on the banks of the Turangi river waiting for a school group to raft their way down to where I was, and passed the time by making weird little rock towers with my one functional arm (my other arm being in a sling and necessitating nausea-inducing painkillers at the time).

I enlarged this photo so that you can see what I regarded as the height of a weird culture amongst Maori/Pasifika guys in New Zealand: wearing completely arbitrary NHL/NBA team gear.  Many were the Vancouver Grizzlies hats worn by guys with names like Mahi, Loketi, and Matasulueva...but this custom sleeveless jeanjacket with a huge Anaheim Ducks logo sewed onto the back was easily the best I saw.

I'll close with one of the last photos taken, while seeing the Flight of the Conchords at Auckland Town Hall.  The way the light was hitting his shiny square box hat..breathtaking.

Only one more entry to go, and then it's off to the airport for me.  Bigger and better things await!  Exotic adventures!  Less poverty!

Of trips, traipsing, and yet more trips

Time has a way of accelerating when uncertainties shrink into the background noise of your life: once a bearable job is acquired and you have enough pairs of socks/underwear, it’s pretty easy to let autopilot take over.  So it was for some time in my Auckland existence.  There were the usual kinds of ups and downs that everyone traffics in, regardless of how mindlessly chipper they manage to appear when you bump into them at the grocery store, but my life had acquired a new buffer force (a solid job).  As a result the lowest I got during this time was around the time my hockey team made an inglorious exit from the playoffs…I shrugged, had an imitation Heineken beer (the highest profile NZ beers are invariably Heineken knockoffs), and got on with my life.

 When an opportunity to get out of town while simultaneously still getting paid arose, therefore, you can imagine my enthusiasm in taking it.  When the schoolboys are in 4th form (grade 9) they are given the chance to go down for a weeklong stay at the school’s private ski lodge in order to hike the Tongariro crossing (arguably the most famous day-hike in the world), spelunk some nearby limestone-y depths, and white-water raft to their hearts’ content.  Each trip has space to two staff members to go along (at slightly more than their usual wage), and essentially perform a bit of crowd control while getting to lounge in the lodge spa/be catered to/do all the activities noted above for free.  Fantastic, I thought.

 So it was I found myself on a bus full of excited punk kids winding through the hill country on the west side of lake Taupo en route to the hamlet of Ohakune, where the lodge is located and (perhaps more famously) the carrot capital of New Zealand – which in true NZ style is celebrated with a 30 foot high metal carrot on the outskirts of town.  After a few hours of hill and curve-induced nausea due to NZ’s reliance on building up old country roads rather than making nice straight highways, we spilled out of the bus to unpack and meet the lodge’s outdoor instructors.  They were both young guys equally nice, in an inane kind of way, who immediately set the boys doing a series of near-impossible tasks involving ropes/wood/swearing as a way to suss out who should be group leaders while standing inside a heated porch.  As our charges went through their paces in the surprisingly cold alpine air (I had thoroughly adapted to the sub-tropical Auckland climate by this time), they wistfully informed us that the camp’s caving quotient had to be regrettably canceled due to flooding in the cave area.  It was a slight disappointment, but nothing to sink my spirits; I was happy to have gotten out of Auckland, regardless of activity, and would be happy enough with the epic hike and rafting expeditions to come.

 A couple days of preparatory dayhikes and telling the boys to be quiet/listen to the instructors later, the instructors had a bit of unwelcome news.  As the boys were off washing up/getting ready for dinner the other teacher from AGS and I discovered, to our mild annoyance, that despite the weather being glorious we weren’t going to be able to do the famed Tongariro crossing.  The group was, apparently, too large to walk along a well-defined path for 8 hours…but not to worry, as some other mountainous walk would be found.  My crest assumed its natural fallen position (my drawing card now essentially having vanished), though not in an outwardly-visible way so as not to tip the boys off.  There was about an hour before that night’s massive dinner – to carb the boys up for a walk they weren’t quite going to take – which meant it was time for the nightly touch rugby competition.
 One of the only things that people know about the Kiwi population is their love of rugby, which isn’t an exaggeration at all.  They all grow up playing it, in one format or another, and thus are all mostly quite awesome at it by the time they are 13/14 years old.  The boys badgered me into playing on one of the teams (the other teacher was a bit more older/fragile so it fell to me), which proceeded to unfold in predictable fashion: I kept getting thoroughly faked out/passed around by the stars of the opposing teams while barely keeping up my own part on offense when it came to distributing the ball.  My high moment came when I craftily used some low-hanging branches as a screen and ran, unopposed, into the undefined “end zone” area…and then apparently a bit further.  By the time I touched the ball down I was apparently past the end of the zone (helpfully unmarked by any line/laid down garment/etc), and thus not scoring a try.  “Ah well,” thought I, as my team rotated out to await our next turn.

 Dinner was about 15 minutes away by this point, which got me to thinking I could beg off in some faux-administrative capacity.  This, I was told by the boys, was unacceptable, and so I stayed on for one more round of play; truth be told I was starting to ‘get it’ a bit more, which was leading to better plays/defence and the occasional long run out the back of the end zone, so I only semi-reluctantly agreed to play one more cycle.  The boys were loving having a teacher in play at any rate, and that it was one you could outfox with even a modicum of rugby acumen was just that much better.
 They also had found a juicy target to aim kickoffs to, and kickoff they did time and again.  One such kick wobbled in a bit low as I moved forward to take it, hitting the ground right in front of my outstretched low hands.  I managed to bring it up but not my diving momentum, which sent me sprawling forwards as I do most things: awkwardly.  If there is nothing to run into this just means an embarrassing flop onto the grass and likely turnover, after which you dust yourself off and get back to your line; when there is, however, something to run into (in this case a Samoan teen), the standard move – which I performed beautifully – is to collide with an overdeveloped calf and break your collarbone.  I walked off the field in some duress to a waiting icepack, and proceeded to experience shock for the first time: I sweated, shivered, tingled, and felt nauseous while I reflected on my 28-year run of not breaking a major bone.

 The upshot of this was I didn’t have to go on the underwhelming nature hike the next day.  The downshot (if that’s a word) is that I was also never going to go white-water rafting on the way back to civilization during the camp’s last day.  I contented myself with studying Japanese while making the best rock stacks I could using my one fully functional arm, and piled the boys back onto the bus after their big splash with a tinge of regret and a fuzz of painkillers I’d garnered after a doctor had examined me for 45 seconds in order to confirm my asymmetrical clavicles.
 The boys unironically began to sing a complete round of ’99 bottles of beer on the wall’ as we left the rafting access road, a process only interrupted by loudly yelling “Baaaahtya!!!”, the name of one of the 7th form leadership boys that had come on the trip, like so many brainless gulls.  I exchanged a knowing nod with the other AGS staff member as we plugged into our ipods and endured a long-feeling ride back to Auckland.  On arrival I piled everything I had brought onto my right (uninjured) shoulder and made my way back across the street battered, broken, and a little bit defeated.  Ah well, nothing an imitation Heineken couldn’t halfway fix.

                                                    This picture makes me think of UTV

Of support, snacks, and snappy dressing

There is a distinct flavour to working in the field of learning support, which is a notion which was brought down to me as I listened to a remarkably incompatible piano solo. Duke (if I’m giving him a fake name, I’m giving him a cool one damnit) was in his form’s music class, all of whom were happily composing away using garage band on the fancy Macs in the (music department’s own) computer lab; their assignment was to create a standard 12 bar blues progression and use it as a base for a solo improvised section given a set of notes to use. Duke and I had taken what seemed like an inordinate amount of time selecting pleasing drum/guitar/bass loops, which had put him in a position to be both funky AND fresh. At this point I got him set up to record and set off to help his compatriot from learning support, King (why not?), who I could tell was getting a little frustrated with the user interface by the escalating inadvertent E.T. impression he was doing – which is one of the more endearing quirks of any of the department’s usual suspects, in all honesty. With King safely jamming away – having a string quintet launch into life with a midi keyboard-stroke is pretty impressive, after all – I came back to listen to what Duke had produced over the painstakingly produced Spector-esque wall of sound.

I knew something interesting was going on when I realised that Duke had played something at approximately 3 times the tempo of our blues jam arrangement. The end result of Duke’s keyboard throw-down was actually a jaunty classical-sounding piano tune (Allegra, it might be called? Something that brought allergy medicine to mind), which was played at lightning speed and keyboard-punishing strike-weight. There was something pleasingly surreal to the entire situation, and I found myself smiling and giggling a bit to myself as I listened to the last bit of the audio madness that had been crafted. When Duke saw this he too began to laugh, and soon King and the rest of the boys nearby were enjoying the kind of contagious laughter that only sugar-fueled young teens seem to produce. It only increased in volume when, mid-chortle, Duke took on a sudden serious expression and said that “you should get a mouth operation…NOW!!” before returning to the stepped-up merriment in the music class. Learning support is an interesting department.

The main problem, from a writer’s perspective, is that I can’t seem to describe it without extensive use of similes. Composition-wise, it is about as ethnically diverse as a South African yacht club – fresh from my recent stint in the land of the fiery sun (the south/being homeless), I was easily the darkest complexion at the coffee break table. Similarly it is about as youthful as those wraparound cataract sunglasses you often see at the cheaper malls – though at least they could be used to look at young women while you walk around town: there was to be no such luck for my day-to-day existence. The ladies (actually quite wonderful and nice one and all, I will emphatically say) I work with come from the time before you could name your child after a wind, emotion, or excerpt from a dyslexic spelling test….every day I happily sat down for coffee with some combination of Moira/Tracy/Janine/Janet/Deborah/Eunice with a dusting of Debbie/Geraldine and/or Phyllis, and was quite pleased to do so.

For a start it led me into conversations I never imagined I would be part of. On one memorable occasion a full 25-minute coffee break was taken up by an animated breakdown of stapler preferences in terms of weight, colour, durability, and capacity; my contribution – asking which of their favourite stapler models could shoot staples with the highest speed and accuracy – led to a good natured series of titters at my expense. It was, apparently, something that the ladies had never thought to include in their surprisingly technical breakdowns. I put my coffee mug into the dishwasher after carefully opening the spring-loaded door directly into my shin, and set off for class.

I hopped into my temperamental time machine and made my way to the end of the term, coasting to a temporal stop just in time to attend the much-ballyhooed ‘Headmaster’s shout’. This was a wondrous opportunity to eat as much ‘fuzh and chups’ and you responsibly could, all the while absorbing a perpetually-refreshing glass of many imported beer varieties, and it was fantastic. In fact, I was excited enough about this prospect that I had gone home for lunch hours before the party (as is my wont) and had adorned myself with a tie (as was my want) so that I would have something to loosen up. The vast majority of the largely 50 and up staff had never seen me due to my somewhat limited circle of movement (I don’t need to help the ‘A’ kids, you see), and so it was that I came to be speculatively eyed as I moved from fish to fish. Soon a stream of introductions began to seek me out – as a young fit new male teacher – with a series of requests to do clubs, trips, and (I suspect) one of those introducing himself. My protective cloud of Learning Support hens had flown the coop some hours previous, and I was suddenly free range and fair game – or so it would seem.

ZEALANTICS LIVE! episode the seventh

Hello.

I have yet to write my work-related opus, so in the meantime I will suffice with throwing this video up for all of you to enjoy. I recommend that you enlarge it/max it, as there be subtitles!
Know it, love it, じゃ　また！

ZEALANTICS LIVE! episode the sixth

Hi and hello blog fans. Completely obvious secret time: all of the entries on this blog up to this point were about events/antics that took place in the past, but no more! My desire to put something out each week has finally caught the blog up to my current day.

Usually I like to have a text entry to go along with every ZEALANTICS LIVE episode, but as a thousand words on me going to work and the grocery store wouldn't scintillate - presumably - I am going to suffice by putting up the episode with only this disclaimer.

It's all real now, people!

Know it. Love it. ZEALANTICS LIVE!!

Of subbing, supinity, and the sublime

I began life in my new place with an enthusiasm I hadn’t felt since the blazing hot late August of 2001, when I moved into my first dorm room at Malaspina U.C. Laundry was done (even folded and put away for the first time since Alexandra! Like a real boy!), I stocked the fridge and cupboards, and I prepared each night for the next morning’s theoretical subbing work. A normal rhythm returned to my nomadic lifestyle and my health, somewhat sapped by weeks of living outside in the exhaust-y CBD and running a constant sleep debt, returned to me. I even hosted a few different friends I’d made in various places in my NZ travels, replete as I now was with floor space. Aside from my friends’ snoring – and why exactly they all had to be snorers I am not sure – I had a comfortable existence, and my own doggedness to thank for it.

There was one problem, however: I had been told that the prime time to receive calls from the subbing agency was just after 6 in the morning- when the agencies themselves tended to get calls from the understaffed schools for relievers. I went to bed each night sure that my phone was charged and that it was close to hand, but found myself waking up unmolested by the ringtone at around 8:30AM each day. The first few days this happened I looked at it as a reprieve of sorts... one which would let me be at leisure in my glorious new place and accompanying neighbourhood (Auckland Domain – my erstwhile home – being up the road afforded additional ‘points’ to my location). I got to know some of my neighbours as well, though the Governor-General (who lives about 200 meters away) was away on business during the block function I attended. A certain unease, however, began to manifest as time went on and I remained employed only in theory.

In essence, my first thought of each weekday became ‘damnit’, as my waking up at a comfortable hour obviously meant I hadn’t been called. While I was quite happy overall in my new abode, the fact that most mornings started with a tinge of economic unease started to wear after a couple weeks’ idle time. During this time my landlady would occasionally ask, as we companionably worked in the backyard garden (I had been tasked with stewardship of a dozen or so tomato plants), whether I was getting any calls – to which I had to half-sullenly say ‘no’. While I was still riding the pecuniary wave of my savvy homelessness, the time to improve my financial prospects was clearly nigh.

As difficult as it may be to understand for those that know me best, I had finally tired of free time. I resolved to offer whatever services – in a voluntary and thus irresistible capacity – I could to the incredibly prestigious institution I lived directly across the street from: Auckland Grammar School. I had admired it from afar (alas that ‘anear’ isn’t really a word, applicable though it might be here) as the kind of school I might have enjoyed in my youth: all boys (reducing distraction), all in mandatory uniforms (reducing anxiety re: ‘what to wear?’), and all ‘bourgeois as’, as the Kiwis might say. Thus it was that I cast out an email, adding yet another item to my list of ‘things to wait for’. Just as I had hoped, I wouldn’t have long to wait.

A few short days later I found myself ushered into the office of one of the Deputy Headmasters (doesn’t that just sound better than Vice Principal?) and thence around the school. In a word, I would describe the experience as astonishing; having attended and then taught at a series of adequate, if utilitarian, institutions back in Canada, I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw. The main hall, replete with aged hardwoods and artisanal brick construction, soars to a 3-storey height (at least... I admit to a lack of skill in estimation) which accommodates every boy (some 2,500) each day for assembly; it more closely resembles a church than the gyms I sat through endless assemblies in in my youth, but only started the tour.

I was ushered through a series of massive outbuildings to meet various people (head of Music, head of Supply teaching, head of Learning Support, and so on in dizzying array), pausing for a moment to enjoy both of the huge gymnasiums, various athletic fields, and heated outdoor swimming pool (think about that- I believe it was of the 50m variety, about 8-12 lanes) before my tour was cut short by a passing rain squall. In the end I was brought back to the starkly well-appointed administrative wing to receive the description and paperwork relating to the place they wanted to put me: a teacher aide/foot soldier in the Learning Support department. As if to sweeten the deal I was told that if I were to do well in my voluntary trial, I would be in a strong position to be upgraded to a paid version of the same job when a number of aides left to go back to university in a couple weeks. A few more handshakes and forced smiles (my being quite overwhelmed at this point) later, I was out the mahogany front door and back across the street to my palatial basement abode. 3 days later I would be going to work at the single most prestigious public school in New Zealand with a decent probability of gaining a paid position that would make my rent/bill anxiety vanish like so much caviar at a school wine-tasting function, and I had my own initiative to thank for it.

Starting to become kind of a theme, that is.

Of resignation, resumes, and resurrection

Leaving the ‘occupy Auckland’ site with my new Canadian acquaintance, I had to admit a certain sense of relief. With barely a look cast back over my shoulder (to ascertain that all the campers, in fact, lacked any sense of protest or conviction) I left in the company of my new Nova Scotian pal, Henry. After a brief coffee and mutual congratulation on avoiding hostel fees AND arrest for the last few days we parted ways with a plan to meet up later for some beers in the sun: I had to get to my storage to exchange my ‘night’ and ‘day’ backpack fillers, and he had some serious jazz flute busking to do. A few hours and accompanying bottle-caps later we were in fine spirits as we sat next to the University of Auckland doing some bird-watching and getting blasted by the sun’s rays (alas, my skin was not up to the standard of his weathered maritime hide.. as experience dictated). We left in high – and slightly pink – spirits for our camping destination: a strangely-placed dog exercise park near the highway far, far removed from anyone’s ability to really bring their dogs to it.

Naturally we had the spot (a little nook obscured on three sides by bush) to ourselves and were pleased to luxuriate after setting up; not even the equally-surprised huge Samoan man who crashed into the midst of our campsite (in no conversational mood, giving rise to questions about his need for such impressively-calved haste) could put us off our good cheer. Waking up – a touch blearily – we were happy to note that we hadn’t been robbed of our gear OR lives during the night, and so we set off chirpily, skirting the ancient Chinese man would was enjoying his sunrise Tai Chi next to the increasingly loud freeway.

The next few days followed a set pattern, wherein I would range the city looking at different potential places for me to live in a non-nomadic mode while simultaneously waiting to hear from the teacher recruitment agency that runs the supply racket in Auckland; at some point Henry and I would meet up and wend our way to the dog park and camp out (thankfully without any further incidents), chat about our days, then hit reset the next morning. A few days later Henry left to travel the south island, leaving me to continue my endless walk over the concrete miles of Auckland – as one of the wealthiest and best-equipped homeless people around – in solo mode; this worked well enough until the weather took a turn for the worse, which can mean a solid week of clouds and rain in this geographic niche. Alas, I was soon to have one of the lowest moments in my New Zealand adventures.

I had recently been in to view a very appealing studio place in the stinking rich neighbourhood of Epsom, and had come out of the meet and greet with high hopes. I was eminently ready to end my shifty tenure in Auckland’s parks (it being less fun and more nervy when you are going solo), which by this point had meant my bedding down in an out-of-the-way spot in the old Jewish graveyard near the Grafton bridge. The moment I realized that my urban camping was over came when (in reminiscent fashion) I heard a crunching coming towards my bush-shielded tent one night at about 10pm. It was baffling that anyone would be in that unassuming corner of the woods at that time, and immediately started up the adrenaline sweat on my forehead. My first thought was ‘why the hell is anyone here right now? It’s so damn far away from anyone, and there’s no way you could have seen my camp’; my second thought was exactly the same, but with a bit more of a ‘worried Jewish comedian’ tone to it all, which of course changes the meaning entirely and brings my own folly into sharp focus. In the end I just waited 20 minutes after the person went away and went to sleep: I’m a big boy, after all. I was just waiting for a ‘big boy’ place to live to present itself, the decision over my favourite locale to be handed down via text message the next day, apparently.

So it was that I walked back to my storage unit, just moments ahead of the arrival of a visible veil of precipitation – the kind that only a subtropical climate can hit you with. It was a three-storey concrete megalith of a place, one where you could (conveniently for my current desire to avoid getting soaked) conceivably while away some time reading a book/charging your devices. As I had no pressing concern beyond getting the decision as to whether I had a place to live in – the rental market being very competitive in Auckland – I sat down in the eerie hallway of the top floor to wait it out. It occurred to me, as I listened to the rain lash the corrugated metal roof above me, that things weren’t really breaking my way in New Zealand when it came to employment prospects or, indeed, anything. The agency still hadn’t gotten back to me, I hadn’t garnered as much as an interview for a teaching position, and I was currently without a stable/non-terrifying place to live…and there was no immediate sign that any of these problems were about to fix themselves. When my phone spat out the message that I had been second place in the race for the ritzy abode I wasn’t even surprised: I just balled up the intractable Sudoku puzzle I had been working on and threw it down the hall with a tailwind of remarkably blue language to propel it.

I booked into a hostel for the first time in over two weeks, and decided that I needed some time off of fretting endlessly. When I had been living in Alexandra there had been a series of movies that came through theatres that I had wanted to see but couldn’t due to the lack of a cinema (in the cultural capital of Central Otago, no less). They by this point had come and gone, but I decided to bear out the impulse anyways and found my way to a local multiplex. Picking out the grimmest/most violent looking one available (David Fincher’s ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), I popped into the grocery store nearby and bought a few cans of beer in order to try to force a good time upon myself. After filling up on German goodness I swept into the theatre and proceeded to have a great/immersive time, so much so that my walk back to the hostel was actually undertaken in fine emotional form. I resolved to call the agency tomorrow, and that if things didn’t get moving with them in a more or less immediate fashion I would leave New Zealand by the end of next month. I had reached a point of semi-nihilistic uncaring as to whether it was going to ‘work’ for me here in New Zealand, and went to sleep with traces of self-righteousness still evident.

The next day I took my breakfast and walked towards town full of purpose and, admittedly, a little annoyance: the agency had said they would get back to me as soon as they got my information, which they had received 9 days previous. I called them fully prepared to give them a rather salty piece of my mind, listening to the phone ring with a Tyler Durden-esque tinge about my mindset. To the disappointment of my indignant/petulant impulses, however, I was told to come in the following day at noon to fill out the paperwork/interview/etc. – in essence to be part of the team. I of course immediately became sweetness and light, and spent the rest of my day with an alien feeling of optimism tugging at the edges of my insular funk. When my phone rang and I was offered the ritzy place I had looked at after the ‘winner’ had elected to instead go travel with some friend, my mild surprise became much more powerful and intoxicating. I took it on the spot, and returned to my reading with the vagrant weight lifted from my brow.

It’s overly simplistic to say that an episode of binge-drinking before going to see a movie changed my life in New Zealand, but there is a certain validity to that assertion. In a country without normal norms regarding communication I needed to take a more active role to get what I wanted, as it turned out. That it had to be fueled by pilsner and me getting my nose out of joint is perhaps unfortunate, but in the end I found myself with some employment coming up and a great place to live. I bid the streets adieu and begun preparations to move in to my first solely-held place to live ever, replete with the funds I had withheld from the grim Auckland hostels and a new sense of purpose in New Zealand: I put my plan to flee the country on hold.

The view from..............the dog park

Of hubris, horror, and homelessness

As I lay on my cheap foam bunk in the hostel the night after I returned my rental car, I found myself thinking about money – or more specifically my general lack thereof. The bed in the hostel cost me $30 for the night which I didn’t overly mind paying as I somewhat desperately needed a shower (along with a night not spent in the foetal position in the back of a Toyota), but it wouldn’t be a great economic solution going forwards; that is to say I could afford going the hostel route for the foreseeable future, but I would have to become gainfully employed in my chosen field within a very small window or face the reality of running out of funds entirely. The final nail in the hostel coffin came the next morning when I was hastened out of my bunk earlier than memory dictated this place did its evictions, summer policies of course being different than the mid-winter in which I had previously stayed. Clearly this more expensive and less friendly service wasn’t for me.

By this time I had secured a storage space for the vast majority of my belongings, to which I hastened in order to drop off all items non-essential for my day’s activity: scouting a suitably surreptitious spot where I might while away a night in a tent without attracting any undue scrutiny. After a bit of map study I decided to look within the bounds of the Auckland Domain – the oldest, biggest, and most naturally forested park in the city – as it was suitably far away from the downtown core, and big enough to make a nightly patrol of any kind unfeasible. Indeed, I was not the only one to reach this conclusion, as I actually came across a series of other people who were – in all likelihood – going to do the same thing as I: they were universally young, somewhere on the scruffiness continuum, and carrying large filled hiking backpacks around the more back-woods tracks in the park. At one point I took a somewhat worn looking departure from a trail and stumbled almost on top of a Scottish guy who was just then unpacking his gear for the evening; after a hushed yet humorous conversation I set out again to find my refuge, more heartened with this elusive kind of company than I had been previous to its confirmation in my mind.

In the end I found a visually secluded flat space near where the park is bordered by the train tracks, and somewhat tentatively set about my first urban camping experience. To my mild surprise absolutely nothing bad happened, other than the occasional diesel train’s remarkable operating volume and a series of nighttime animals (likely either nocturnal birds, hedgehogs, or both) that made alternating spitting-cat and electric kettle coming-to-boil noises from time to time. When I woke up the next morning all continued to be well, and I packed up my tent with a certain bravado and the knowledge that the $30 it would have cost me to stay in a hostel was still mine: I had my temporary solution for waiting until the school season started.

I kept on coming back to my spot for a few nights, and indeed came to quite enjoy living craftily in a well-manicured park on the verge of the downtown area. Around five or six I would retire to the park from my daily perambulation around Auckland (doing errands and scouting where to eventually look for a real place to live) with some combination of groceries prepared for my dinner. By this point there would invariably be some variety of local sports going on worth watching on the park’s main playing fields – which in the New Zealand summer means cricket with a light dusting of soccer – so I could sit down, make myself some tea using my handy stove, and enjoy an eminently civilized evening decoding semi-obscure English sports. It was an interesting window into what old age is probably going to be like for me, without any kind of physical complaints slowing me down; it was, in a word, relaxing.

It was not to last, however. Some few nights later while inside my tent preparing to sleep I was rather surprised to hear a violent crashing coming through the vegetative screen surrounding my grotto campsite, complete with swearing and metal clanking sounds reminiscent of ski poles or microphone stands being carried inexpertly. As I was very much alone and solely clad in my underwear I chose to remain silent, rather than hailing my night-time visitor, and simply crouched motionless, waiting for them to leave. The person didn’t throw any words in the direction of the tent but I did hear the telltale electronic ‘beepbeep’ of a camera of some kind being used. The person then retreated in equally noisy fashion through the woods leaving me in a sudden night-sweat, considering my options. After a moment of indecision I immediately began packing up my bag, getting dressed, and breaking down my tent (all, counter-productively enough, at the same time), and a few hurried/sweaty moments later I was rather actively fleeing the scene of my singular ‘occupy the park’-style campout towards the more communal one in one of the main downtown parks.

View of the new inadvertent basecamp. Pretty in tents.

A view out the window

I arrived sometime after 10pm to a largely asleep camp of ‘occupy Aucklanders’, which was just as well as I had zero intention of starting a book club, and re-organised myself a sleeping solution on the verge of their small tent city. I remained there for a few days, or at least long enough to discover the real reason why the people who were there were camped out: they didn’t want to pay for, or couldn’t afford, hostel fees. It’s entirely possible that a handful of the occupiers were interested in global economic equality or somesuch…but not a certainty. Laying down to sleep one night I heard another tent arriving to be ‘occupied’ by a young guy who was apparently borrowing it from his female friend; the conversation around this was essentially the following:

“all right, thanks for letting me borrow it!”
“whatever you bum, haha…..don’t go bringing any trashy chicks into it, haha”
“oh, I won’t….pause….haha!”

There were no speeches given, no rallies held that were actually attended by the campers, and no proselytizing of passers-by. I found the experience immensely gratifying from an ironic perspective: in the name of defeating ‘evil’ capitalism, the people at this occupy site were saving boatloads of money – presumably to be used on buying sweet, sweet material goods. For my part, I at least kept the listening-to of my evil corporate ipod to within the tent…but that is about as far as anyone went.

After I got up on my third morning, earlier than my surrounding party-campers as a rule, I walked to the park bathrooms with a certain bemusement in my mind and my bag on my back (as yet another rule I would completely pack up before I left the tent at all in the morning). This turned out to be a brilliant idea, if I do say so myself, and a flotilla of security staff was descending on the camp as I made my way back in the direction of town; before you get too imaginative, however, remember that this is New Zealand. A ‘vacate in half an hour’ notice was given, and like the corporate lackeys we were, we all dispersed. I left alongside another Canadian that had joined the impromptu campout, in the direction of downtown and, no doubt, more questionable CBD adventures.

ZEALANTICS LIVE! episode the fifth

I hopped onto my bus with a certain jaunty aplomb the morning I left Alexandra, and was soon (soon-esque?) bound for the North Island once more; only a couple of stops (in Dunedin and Christchurch) stood between me and the glorious free accommodation I had organised for my Wellington return. A mere 18 hours of public transport later – cleverly spread over three days mind you – and I would be back at Upoko manor.

Dunedin was a model transplanted Scottish metropolis, complete with rain, clouds, and hordes of people eager to take your money: the haggis festival and/or Robbie Burns statues don’t keep themselves up, after all. My experience there was perforce limited due to my travel schedule, but I couldn’t help the feeling that I wasn’t missing much. Besides, I had my visit to New Zealand’s ‘earthquake city’ to look forward to with a certain childish apprehension.

My goal in Christchurch was to reconnoiter with my American erstwhile roommates (yes, they of the homemade still and semi-permanent party time approach) in order to avoid paying for a hostel. This was accomplished via a needlessly complicated route chosen on my part, which while hot and pointless at least gave me a visual tour of the Christchurch CBD. The short explanation is that it looks more than a little bit like a level from a post-apocalyptic FPS game, even a year after the big shakeup: homes and businesses alike stand abandoned and spray-painted with a series of codes (one assumes relating to their impending demolition). The childish part of you wonders what being in such an earthquake would feel like – you can’t help it – as you make your way through the city; by the time I arrived at the Americans’ place I was a little depressed by the sheer magnitude of it all.

My travel schedule dictated once more that I had to be up very early to make it back to the bus depot, so my celebrations with the Yankees were necessarily brief: a box of beers and a mild burn from their stove later (fun fact: they had no refrigerator. Think about that.) I was upstairs to sleep on the floor of their room. I laid down my head, in fact, just in time for the pounding music of the downstairs house-party to kick in… this of course didn’t bother me too much, as I knew that the people downstairs were having a great time (another fun fact: they were mostly on LSD) and I’m not ‘anti-fun’ guy. I slumbered fitfully on the hard carpet until approximately 3:27 AM, when things got a little strange.

I found myself being kicked/jostled awake, and a large burst of hooting/hollering came from the living room downstairs. Flicking on the light I was surprised to find that nobody else was in the room, and that I had an instantaneous mystery on my hands. I say instantaneous, of course, because Dave the distillation expert quickly came running up the stairs screaming “DUDE DID YOU FEEL THAT EARTHQUAKE? OH MY GOD MAN! SWEET! THAT WAS THE BEST EARTHQUAKE EVER! AAAAAA!”. Christchurch, apparently, had decided not to disappoint the childish corner of my mind from earlier that day, and had dropped a 5.0 magnitude quake on my somnolent form. As my heartbeat began to slow down (to a continuous chorus of ‘oh maaaan! Duuuude!’ from downstairs) I slowly began to approximate normal sleep; alas that I had to get up less than two hours later to walk through the moonscape of the inner city back to the bus.

I bid a bleary adieu to the Americans (who hadn’t gone to bed yet) just before 6AM and bustled myself further north. The bus system in New Zealand is interesting in that there is surely some kind of racket between the drivers and the café owners they stop near on rest breaks. You never really have much of a choice as to where you can overpay for your tea and sandwich – you just suffer along while the driver high-fives the owner and collects free coffee and snacks. In the coastal town of Kaikoura my resolve to not participate in this scam faded enough for me to order a tea to go from the nicely named ‘Why Not?’ café, which led to the following conversation between sleep-deprived me and an airily brainless cashier:

“Hello! Can I have a tea in a to-go cup please?”

“Of course! Milk and sugar?”
“Yes please, both”
(pause)

“So…you want two sugars”
“No no, both milk AND sugar”
(pause)

“So, do you want milk as well?”

A short eternity of weak tea and wave-induced nausea later, I made my glorious return to Wellington, there to stay until I could wrangle a deal on a rental car and get all my belongings up to Auckland. The drive north took seven and a half hours (I did it in one push as a kind of bizarre systemic test), and was suitably arresting as it was all on the wrong side of the road. Nonetheless I made it up to the metropolis – though too late to book into a hostel for the night. The back seat of the rental car served well enough as a bed for the night (and had that ‘you’ve arrived in life!’ kind of feel that I obviously needed at this point), and the next day I rid myself of the vehicle and stepped into the reality of paying summer fares for city hostels. Clearly, this wasn’t something I could happily do for very long…and so I didn’t. An interesting new phase of my NZ travels began not with a bang, but a rustle.

Of the south, sun, and sartorial inelegance

I spent about a month living in one of the most rural areas in New Zealand (in a town which trumpets itself as the cultural capital of the region yet has no theatre, cinema, or sport available to watch), and found it an interesting study on social paralysis. By this I do not mean that the townsfolk were mired in some 1940’s-era mom/pop era (though available media supports this hypothesis), but that the people of Central Otago, by and large, are completely content with their lives; whether or not this is an acceptable way to go through life is, of course, up to one’s individual profligacies, but there was an undeniable time-machine effect to living in the sunny south central of New Zealand.

Central Otago is obviously aware of the modern world, but chooses to wave a well-tanned hand in its general direction with a sense of earthy disdain for such elitists. This begun to be pointed out to me when I revealed my upcoming plan to move north to the comparative megalopolis of Auckland in order to find teaching work at the end of the month: an almost universal ‘huh’ emitted from the cracked lips of the locals, along with a begrudging agreement that the jobs were, in fact, to be found there. Alexandra as a whole is actually quite aware of international pressures – it being a huge net exporter of fruit and thus in contact with others as a matter of course – and in fact delights in finding new ways to extract money from any visitors/foreign workers that fall into its net. Backpacker hostels are able to wage an escalating price war during the picking season, as those just arriving in town don’t yet have the connections necessary to move into some poly-national conglomerate of a house (as I did). Similarly free internet access (a reliable fixture in public libraries nationwide) is shunned in favour of a series of improbable businesses charging for the privilege: this episode is actually being uploaded for you from the seating area of the only restaurant I’ve ever come across that specializes in both pizza and Thai food (imaginatively called ‘Pizza Thai’). The world has, in fact, come to the extreme south of New Zealand.

The extreme south of New Zealand, however, seems to have been content with how things were in 1990 or so, by my estimation. Perhaps the most fun way this is shown is in the most popular – by far – hairstyle among boys and young men (up until about age 26 or so): the crazy rat-tail/semi-mullet. Particularly good specimens of this cut have been seen in the wilds of the grocery store, where everyone sees everyone between 3 and 6pm, in the form of bleached blond, green-dyed, or the rarer dreadlock version; the best time for rat-tail sighting, however, was the New Years’ family street party at the next town over (Clyde), which resembled nothing so much as the backstage area for a theatrical production of ‘An American Tale’. If it were just an idiosyncratic haircut, though, I could easily dismiss it as an isolated fad and not one related to the onset of the 90’s.

The rat-tail might fall out of fashion for grown men around the time, say, you have your second child, but one statement remains forever young amongst the rural southern New Zealander man: the heavy-metal t-shirt. Admittedly this must be somewhat the product of the limited section of bands that look at New Zealand as a high-enough profile place to tour (or at least profitable enough, which points to a vicious cycle if you think about it), but even taking that into account the sheer percentage of young men to be found sporting almost universally black Pantera, Megadeth, Disturbed, Metallica, or Iron Maiden shirts – to name a few favourites – can be staggering at times. While I can be convicted as a musical elitist of sorts, I am not to be denied my amazement at how common these shirts (normally to be found on only the most meth-addicted of facially-pierced headbangers back in ‘the real world’) were in this dusty corner of the cultural world. Most remarkably I saw a professional of some kind – demarcated by his need to wear a collared dress shirt and matching tie to his office – whose Guns ‘N Roses shirt’s tour logo/dates were clearly visible through the back of his white striped shirt. Southern Kiwis, obviously, love to rock out.

This phenomena, however, comes to an abrupt end about the time one’s third child (children being more common than melanoma-free skin in the sun-blasted south) stumbles into the pyramid of soup cans at the Pak N Save. A grace period of about a decade is ushered in, in which dress and demeanor becomes approximately that of the modern world, which leaves little to satirize. The omnipresent biker-style wire/flame/chain tattoos merely peek out from the sleeves of faded polo shirts branded with the local brewery’s logo, rather than being unstoppable white-trash showpieces, and profanities dip down to being only 20-30% of the total words spoken in public. Once this era ends, however, a glorious new one begins.

Yes, here we have the final stage of southern men’s casual/professional attire: the short shorts, high socks, and work boots look. When I first came to New Zealand I imagined this to be the sole province of Australian sheep-shearers, but I was demonstrably wrong. After the age of 50 or so this is how men are seen, usually with a reddish sheen acquired while building up a rock boundary wall over the course of an afternoon and a case of Speight’s gold medal ale. The rat-tail may be a forgotten item of the past by this point, but the careless disregard of modern mores regarding appearance is still fully evident; Central Otago is nothing if not consistent.

In this way, rural New Zealand is a heartening kind of place. It exists in its own universe of style and substance, where the number of acres of trees or heads of sheep you have is much more important than the shade of blue your jeans are or the relative hairlessness of your female legs. It’s unfair to say that time has forgotten Central Otago; rather, time has blown over it like so much dust after a summer with only the merest sprinklings of cultural rain. Everyone has dirt under their nails, a twenty in their pocket, and 5 in their stomach; there are worse ways and places to spend a month abroad.I’ll leave you with a joke taken from a local convenience store’s specials board, in lieu of their actually offering any discounts of any kind to us filthy foreigners:

How do you make a cat go woof? Pour petrol on it!
And……scene!

ZEALANTICS LIVE! episode the fourth

Central Otago, the region in which my adoptive town (village?) of Alexandra is to be found, is a hot and dusty kind of place during the summer. This can lead to your wanting to sluice away from the mortal plane of existence like the many drops of sweat you lose per minute during the middle of the day; it also leads to the perennial bumper crops of succulent stone-fruit that keep the region economically afloat. The one thing the heat will definitely lead to is a wish you were somewhere more lively, as everyone and everything slows down to siesta levels on a daily basis before closing up shop laughably early. Alexandra became my home during the stickiest part of the New Zealand summer.

I stepped out of the passenger side of my ride into town, retrieved my pack, and spun to face the old man that had more or less appeared out of nowhere, his one eye a well of experience and sun damage. After a moment’s stunned silence and a lack of commentary from me, he asked me what my plans were in town; after I relayed them he advised I go talk to “Rob’s” to get a job, to which I gave thanks and a half-salute as I walked down the road into town proper. A short two hour meander through poorly marked streets in the deathly heat of the day later, I sat down in my room at the hostel (which was actually a vaguely converted garage without insect screening) and began to cool down. The news that these lodgings, however charming in their Spartan mosquito-chic décor, were only to be available to me for two nights came as a slight blow, though I have learned to wait for things to work out on this trip.

A short two days of walking from orchard office to office in 30+ celcius heat later I found myself shuffled off to a house with 9 South Americans (combination Chilean and Uruguayan), cheaper rent, and above all a pool/bbq combination backyard. Things were once again picking up…so it was even with the picking as I soon landed a job denuding innocent trees of their cherries, and thus somewhat cheerlessly found myself waking up at 5AM in order to eat as much as possible before riding the 10km out of town to the orchard on a ‘house’ bike with a perpetually flat-ish back tire. It was a challenge even before I got to work.

Working in an orchard is an interesting way to slowly kill yourself for minimal profits. It reminded me of my summers spent painting houses on Vancouver Island, with a couple of added caveats: if you mess up a ladder placement you will probably destroy a tree that has been purpose-grown for twenty years or more (rather than scratching an exterior wall or, as in one memorable occasion, sending yourself plummeting down onto a fence from a high height), and your supervisor is a stout and very angry Kiwi woman (rather than a skinny Dutch guy who also sells drugs for a living). The workers on an orchard in New Zealand tend to be overwhelmingly South American or German, unsurprisingly as there is never any shortage of either group no matter where you go in the country, which tends to work out well enough; the way to tell, incidentally, when things weren’t coming along according to schedule is that a SWAT team of very fit African men will suddenly be summoned from some other mysterious orchard vocation to make up the slack. The moral of the story is that orchard owners must make a fantastic amount of money in years where their crops don’t fail for some reason: as a friend told me before I left, “it’s hard work, but at least there’s no money”.

That’s not to say I didn’t like the work in general, as it offered me a once in a lifetime opportunity to brush up on my Spanish swearing, but it could be bruisingly (word chosen deliberately) difficult at the best of times. It turned out that I got paid just about one NZ dollar for each kilogram of cherries I picked – which actually is a great number of cherries if you think about it – that in turn can be purchased at the fruit stand/grocery store for 16 (sixteen) times the price, if you are so inclined. It shouldn’t surprise that there was no such thing as an employee discount, therefore, and it is important to remember that you always think you are going to be fired as it is nearly impossible to pick as much per day as they ask of you. As a result you are constantly hustling/sweating/cursing/bashing your way through the day, after which time you can ride back 10km on a borrowed bicycle/helmet combo that would have been the hottest look in 1981. It was, in fact, the best of times.

Of course there were good times as well, as we all got to experience a sweltering antipodean Christmas from our perches next to the pool (after a 5th application of sunblock, of course). In one remarkably criminal touch of panache some of the Chilean boys snuck off (smart money is on ‘drunk’) in the middle of the night to a local farm and appropriated a lamb, coming back just before I got up to go to work; I know this because I walked in on them dressing the unfortunate ungulate, which they had hanging from a garage rafter, when I collected my bike at 5:30AM. Alexandra taught me a lot about where our food comes from (turns out it’s South Americans)… and wouldn’t you know it, but the boys shared ‘their’ lamb with all, after cooking it over a wheelbarrow of flame for some hours the next night. It was a glorious night of drinks, fun, joking in different languages, and nearly universal food poisoning: the vegetarian, predictably, was fine. Showoff.

ZEALANTICS LIVE! episode the third

After descending from the glacier, Jonathan and I set off to find free accommodation – something eminently more possible if you have a car, as it turns out. A short drive from the village at Fox Glacier took us to Gillespie bay’s free (FREE! ZERO COST!) campsite, which hugely pleased me, as there were no fees attached to my sleeping there. Feeling quite lucky to be attached to a generous guy and his car, I set up camp wholly content with the state of my hitch hiking travels down the West Coast: things were looking up!

When I brought my eyeline back down from its skyward gaze, however, I began to realise why this campsite wasn’t one that the department of conservation demands money for. For a start the only local point of interest was an old miner’s cemetery (there having been a sizable gold rush down most of the coast at some point in the dusty past), which was over an hour’s walk from the campsite. This held limited interest for me as I had summarily exhausted myself taking the hardest possible path up to the Franz Josef glacier, so I gave it a mental pass and set about preparing my dinner. As I did this, however, the real problem with the campsite started to become apparent.

Sandflies are a part of life in New Zealand. In almost every area of the country you can count on experiencing them at one time or another – as they are sort of weather dependent – and once they have found you there is very little you can do. Unlike their more savvy blood-sucking kin the mosquito the sandfly possesses no sophisticated extracting straw, but rather gnashes and saws their way into your yielding flesh rather like a vulture approaches roadkill. Don’t take my word for it, however; here is Captain James Cook’s journal entry from the first of May, 1773:

“The most mischievous animal here is the small black sandfly which are exceeding numerous … wherever they light they cause a swelling and such intolerable itching that it is not possible to refrain from scratching and at last ends in ulcers like the small Pox.”


So it was that the sandflies descended upon us at Gillespie in droves as the afternoon luxuriated into evening. There was no escape, and no amount of insect repellant could save us; in the end we congregated on the sandy beach itself, where – mercifully – the sandflies were only bad, not incredibly/mind-bendingly bad. It was at this point that Jonathan christened them ‘all terrain flies’, as truly it doesn’t matter where you are… we retired to our tents in something approaching poor spirits, much to the dismay of my earlier happiness over saving twenty dollars by staying there.

The morning brought no relief, as sandflies are actually most active – in my opinion – in the morning. If you didn’t notice them biting you, however, it wouldn’t be a huge problem, but the opposite is astoundingly true: a sandfly bite feels rather exactly like someone is holding a lit match up against your skin. While they are pretty easy to kill once they alight, they have the devilish ingenuity to assault your ankles and calves as much as they can (the better to stay away from your murderous hands), which leaves you doing a very awkward dance as you hastily pack up your tent in the morning. I found myself retreating from time to time to the camp’s outhouse which, while not being the greatest smelling place in the world, would give me an opportunity to de-fray my nerves for a minute or two before rushing pack to complete my packing. I returned to my increasingly frantic work, leaving my de-poled and nicely laid out tent to dry out, and to roll up last. When I started to do this, however, I probably came the closest to killing myself as I have so far in life: as I rolled the tent the flies would come shooting up off of it (where I guess they were drinking some condensation…or just waiting for me to come back) directly into my face. They flew into my ears, up my nose, and between my eyes and my glasses in hellish numbers as I rolled my tent up – I do believe that one of my biggest accomplishments in life was to not scream in frustration and panic, as I didn’t want to wake the surrounding still-sleeping campers. I simply let out a stifled whimper or two as I entered a bizarre twilight zone of discomfort and self-pity. We left the campsite after holding a darkly-manic sandfly genocide in the car for those that either followed us or rode us in. It was an experience.

West side of Southern Alps

Leaving the ‘free’ camp behind us in a string of curses, both English and Hebrew, we returned to the road south. While we waited for our bites to start the inevitable “intolerable itching” (thank you, Captain Cook), however, we were treated to easily the most picturesque highway I have ever been on. The road through Mt. Aspiring National Park is an absolute crushing wonder; it brings you up to and over the mountainous divide that characterises the south island, all the while treating you to vistas of impossibly blue glacial rivers and a complete colour palette change, from luxurious green to dun yellows and brown, as you enter the rain shadow of the southern alps. All I could think at the time was that this would be absolutely world-famous if it were in North America, and all I could do was watch. We camped on the shore of lake Hawea after driving down a road cluttered by antisocial sheep and cattle, and spent our evening in quiet contemplative activity: Jonathan practicing on his acoustic guitar, and I continuing my streak of failure when it comes to catching trout.

East side of Southern Alps

The next day we descended from the mountains to Queenstown, a veritable jewel on the shores of lake Wakatipu and my stated goal for my West Coast hitch hiking trip. It is a remarkable town very reminiscent of the Whistler/Blackcomb complex, and blessed by great weather during our visit. Jonathan and I did laundry, ate, drank, and ineffectively tried to pick up girls at the beach together as we lived out the last couple of days of our travel supergroup. When it came time to part ways it was with a certain flavour of manly regard, a strong handshake, and a declaration on my part of “until next time”. If my trip continues in this manner, I will have friends that I need to revisit all over the world. That is, after all, one of the best reasons I can think of for leaving the house.

With a twinge of regret I left glorious Queenstown, as my goal in coming south wasn’t to bleed money in a tourist trap – beautiful though it may be. No, I was bound Eastward to the central Otago region, a hub of agriculture in general and stonefruit production in particular. The school season was over and I needed to economically exist until the next one began: it was time for me to put on some sunscreen, my beach-found hat, a dash of humility, and to go to the farm. Hefting my bag once more I walked out of town, and breathed a sigh of rustic enjoyment.