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.
19.1.12
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!
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!
12.1.12
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.
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.
4.1.12
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.
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.
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.
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.
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