Tuesday, February 17, 2009

New Zealand in a Paua Shell

I know you're all overwhelmed by my non-stop blogging. I apologize for the inconsistency, though I must admit that it will probably get worse for the next little while. Bianca and I are getting on a plane to Kathmandu in a few hours, and we'll be on trail for a few weeks.

I just got back from New Zealand, and thought I'd share excerpts from a couple of emails I wrote during (or about) my stay. I only saw the southern half of the south island, but it was wicked. If you've ever thought about visiting New Zealand, do it. You can stay with me, because I'll be living there. 

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Having an absolutely fabulous time. Bianca's mom Pauline picked me up from the airport at 1:00am, and I stayed 3 nights at their place in Methven (nights of the 30th, 31st, and 1st). Methven is a small town that thrives in the winter with ski season, and just has one Main St. that stretches about 2 blocks. Really cute. While I was there they took me fishing in a jet boat up the Rakaia river. The water was turquoise blue like the carribean, and fresh. Mountains rose up all around us, so I climbed Mt. Summers. From the top I could see clear across the country. On my way down the mountain a thick cloud front came in. I was level with the top of the clouds, and it was possibly the coolest thing I've seen on a hike. The edge of the clouds came charging over the ridge in front of me like an army up to no good, and fingery wisps of cloud swept through every valley and trough as if it was searching, and going to pick up anyone in it's path and toss them away. Suddenly I was wrapped in a musky eerie fog. It was great.
Pete and Pauline taught me how to drive standard (and on the left side of the road!), and I only stalled about a dozen times (I need practice...). They also took me to a birthday party on a dairy farm, and to a couple of the local pubs. They put me on a train headed for the west coast early in the morning and sent me with a truck load of food. Such great people.
 
The train ride from Christchurch to Greymouth on the west coast goes through the mountains and Arthur's Pass. Beautiful 4 hr trip. From Greymouth I caught a bus north to Punakaiki where I stayed last night. I'm still there actually, just waiting for the bus down to Greymouth. Yesterday I walked around the pancake rocks and blowholes on the coast, walked the grey/black sand beach, and hiked in the rainforest of paparoa national park. This country is phenomenal. I could stay here for a long time. You would love it. I feel like a wind up toy- I get off a buss or train, and there's always something to do, somewhere to hike, something to see. I'm going to spend the night in Greymouth tonight, then head to Franz Joseph to hike the Fox Glacier.

New Zealand is the land of contradictions. Rain forests grow beside glaciers. Rain forests also turn directly into deciduous forests (like there is a definitive line that you can stand on both sides of at once) for no apparent reason. Birds have no wings. The rivers are turquoise blue like the tropics, but they are fresh water. In the salt water fiords there can be anywhere from 0 to 8 meters of fresh water sitting on top of the salt water because it rains SO much there. It is the one place I've ever seen where the sky was saturated with water, but the rain wasn't angry. It was gentle, heavy, soaking rain. But the effect was absolutely violent. It's as if the land collected each benign individual droplet of water in a glacier carved crater, and churned them all together, mixing, and spilling, and pissing them off, then violently throwing them off the edges of cliffs. Hundreds of new waterfalls were born on the one day that I was paddling in Doubtful Sound (misnomer) because of the volume of water that was being processed. The water was escaping from the rock faces via the root systems of mosses so that it looked like someone had buried a fire hose in the side of the cliff under the moss, and turned it on full blast. Water was launching off of peaks and turning into mist whereby it was blown 30 feet across the face until it hit rock once more and became another waterfall careening down the side of the peak. In other places that mist just blended back into the thick dripping clouds that blanketed the fiords.

There are 30 million sheep in New Zealand, and just over 4 million people. Yet sheep farming is on the decline, and dairy farming is gaining speed. Why? Because Asians want more protein. 

Queenstown is the adrenaline center of the world. You can do anything- sky diving, jet boating, bungy jumping, paragliding, kite boarding...the list goes on. It is expensive, and the tourists that stay there are around to scare themselves silly during the day, and drink it off at night. Holy pub scene batman. But the town is beautifully set on a lake that is surrounded by mountains and fruit trees. I spent an entire afternoon in a chair on the side of a hill knitting a merino wool scarf and eating plums and apples off the tree. When I did finally get up to do the token bungy jump, it was so windy that once strapped in the guy tells me that I go when he counts down, or not at all. So I waddled to the precipitous edge of a platform suspended 200 m in the air on a high wire that stretched across 2 peaks, and threw myself off of the perfectly stable structure when he said go like a lemming taking one for the team. 

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