#25 autumn, april, and arriving in raglan

The weather becomes more and more unsettled every day. Frenetic does not even begin to cover it. I wake up just before 7, when the sun comes up, and after ten minutes of steady climbing, the wind begins. The clouds roll in, and it rains. And then the sun comes back out, and there is blue sky where thirty seconds ago there was only a thick, grey cover. And then the pea soup rolls back in. And then the wind dies down. And then I have to go to the bathroom and make a cup of tea and pretend this weather doesn’t make me crazy.

Fall! Fall in April! What a world. The nights are cold. The sun is not as strong; the everpresent fear of burning has mostly subsided, and I am back to wearing everything in my backpack most of the time: teeshirt, ice breaker, zip up sweater, down vest, two pairs of wool socks. I look like a sofa cushion.

I spent the past two weeks wwoofing at Soggy Bottom Holding, outside of Hamilton, in a place called Ngaruawahia. Nah-roo-WAH-hee-uh. Sure. After tiki-touring northland, puttering around auckland, hiking in tongariro, hitching to/recovering in whanganui over a period of three weeks, two weeks of farmstay house arrest was very much welcome. I had my own accommodation– a little sleepout overlooking the hills of the waikato. My own bathroom, kitchenette, and queen sized bed. Let me repeat that: my own queen sized bed.

No one else sleeping in the room. No creaking bunk beds. No one closing or opening the drapes at night. No fire alarm. No one waking up at 4 am to talk to their boyfriend on the phone. No bathroom down the hall. Can I get a witness?

This is what I did on the farm: helped make new stock fencing, helped rip invasive trees out of the ground, puttered around the garden (tilled beds, planted fall brassicas, pruned herbs). Spent a lot of time feeding the animals– the property was 60 acres in the hills, and they kept rare breeds of cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and ducks. I drove around on a quad bike that looked like the pope mobile, zipping around the dirt tracks with giant sacks of feed or cases of expired cheese in the back to feed to the pigs. They ate 50kgs of pig food a day. There were three or four lots of piglets while I was there, and I spent a fair amount of time giggling at piglets trying to eat slices of cheese. It was the kind of farm, though, where I gathered that giggling was frowned upon, so I only did that on days when I fed the pigs by myself.

And I spent a lot of time in the butchery, helping mince meat for sausages, pack and label sausages, and with other small odd jobs that a hapless suburbanite can do without fucking up too horribly. One day I packed all of the cuts from two sheep that were butchered… so now I can say I know the difference between shanks and fillets. Hooray?

I did a few unsavory jobs too: I had to burn a dumpster of scrap meat in the incinerator, piece by piece. I can also now say that I have fallen in a dumpster of old meat. Twice. Nice.

But I rested, relaxed, fed cheese to piglets, watched the sun rise and set while the weather was still settled, and for two weeks I was a little part of a little family on a little farm. Cue: theme to little house on the prairie. And then I left for Raglan.

#24 Ruapehu is for people who hate themselves

I went hiking last week.

so.

I am not even dead.

That is the best part of the story, but also:

I spent five days (march 29-april 3) hiking in Tongaririo national park. I started with the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, spent a day on the Tongariro Northern Circuit, and on day 2 met up with the Round the Mountain track, and I walked around Mt. Ruapehu for the remainder of the 80km jaunt.

I like hiking, but I’m a little scarred now. I’m taking a break to go wwoof for a farm that raises heritage breed animals and makes their own sausages and cures their own meats. I really would rather club a few piglets than go hiking again at the moment, so that’s perfect.

Anyway, it’s getting to the point in my trip where people are getting dewy on the phone asking me about what I’ve learned, so this week I learned this:

1. Blisters really have no size limit! They don’t really need to stop at your feet. The blister on the bottom of my right foot is deeper than Lake Taupo. I could process trout fishing permits for it.

2. Heavy food is bad food. Aluminium cans are bad and wrong and there is a reason for their not being displayed in the ‘hiking food’ section of the gas station. Those gas station employees do more hiking than you think they do.

3. Hiking 80km alone is somewhat different from driving 80km alone. There is more to worry about besides who will change the cd or how to hold the bag of chips so the driver has the best angle for eating and driving.

4. Volcanoes have some key features that distinguish them from mountains. This is important to remember, even if from far away they both look like big, giant rocks. One of those big giant rocks is full of explosive lava. The other is not. The latter is better for walking around.

5. Summer weight sleeping bags are useful for maybe one month of the year. This is not that month.

6. If the word ‘hiking’ does not appear in the name of the kind of footwear you are wearing, it is not good for hiking. See ‘hiking boots’ versus ‘sneakers’.

7. My favorite things to think about if I am hiking with someone else: the next meal, the pretty things we’re walking by, how nice it feels to be outside, how much I like walking quietly in the woods, how enjoyable it is to be alive, etc.

8. My favorite things to think about if I am hiking alone: falling off a cliff, getting lost, hypothermia, running out of water, avalanches, poisonous spiders, choking on my lunch, being swept away in a failed river crossing, the abominable snowman: fact or fiction, etc.

9. Things that are nice: pillows, soap, electric kettles, not hiking.

Auckland?

Today I spent $10 on groceries, $11 on a movie ticket, and $5.50 on an ice cream soda. Vanilla with club, a dollar extra for the club. The movie was part of the world cinema showcase; I feel more worldly now.

The subject of my emails this week has been “what am i doing in auckland?”. Mostly, I am catching up on emails. Auckland is a good place to catch up on email. So is christchurch. Both are unpleasant and manky wannabes, but they both have big libraries with free internet. Also, Christchurch has a nice art gallery.

I came here to drop Kristina off at the airport. She left for Tasmania a few days ago, and I am traveling alone again. Traveling with her the second time around was painful– we both really wanted to have someone else to share all the burdens of traveling with, and not much else. We spent most of the time eating and complaining. I felt fat and tired, and now I am still in Auckland.

Originally I was headed down to Tongariro, to walk the Round The Mountain Circuit. It’s a good time of year– before the winter, after the crowds, and I am feeling like a real hiker now, so a six day trip on my own sounds more fun than terrifying. I was having some kind of internal struggle about whether or not I should work afterwards, so my plans were to head back up to Kerikeri to pick mandarins, but I was feeling ambivalent and whiny about it all. And then I was going to apply to grad school and get a haircut and call my brother and do my taxes and catch up on two months of correspondence festering in my inbox, but on the way from northland to auckland I broke my glasses, so none of that happened.

The only thing that happened was me paying for four more nights in my piddly hostel in ponsonby so I could go to the optometrist. Surprisingly, Ponsonby has a few optometrists sprinkled amongst the swank restaurants and fancy pants dress shops (the kind that don’t have any clothes in them), and to make a painfully boring story short, two days later I am the happy owner of trial contact lenses. Some souvenir.

I thought I would have to wait all week. I imagined myself extending my stay over and over again, paying for one more night at a time. I imagined digging around for a phone book, calling every eye doctor in it, not being able to get an appointment until next week, then waiting two weeks for my oddball prescription to be filled by some pharmacy in malaysia, and then paying $600 for the pleasure. But infrastructure works in mysterious ways here, and within 28 hours at the mighty cost of $60, I’m all set for the road again. The only question now, is where next?

#22 weather report

I used to read the NY Times online but I haven’t really done that lately. For awhile I was living with families who were public radio junkies, but I haven’t done much of that recently, either. And yes, I am living on the beach, on an island, and the closest landmass is Australia but there are other people around here who do have half a clue about the world, so there really isn’t any excuse except the fact that i kind of enjoy living in my little south pacific bubble. Sometimes I think that the world could go kaput and most of New Zealand wouldn’t notice or care. Maybe there would be a collective heart attack in auckland, but it kind of seems like most people here would look up for a second and go ‘nuclear holocaust?’ and then go back to moving stock gates. The world news section here is thin, and reads more like perez hilton’s blog castoffs then actual news. I am not sure if one actually has to think about the rest of the world if one lives so far away from the rest of it.

One of the best things about living here is listening to the forecast on the radio. Watching it on the news is also acceptable, but the radio is better. They do the forecast for the entire country. It takes less than 5 minutes. They go from south to north and they cover the whole country, and then they throw in the chatham islands too, and you know the weather for the entire country. They go the same way every time, and its kind of nice to hear the lady on the radio pronounce Taupo and Whangarei and all of the other places that I’m only comfortable naming when I’ve been drinking.

Hearing people talk about the weather here is also a novelty. People here don’t say “oh, it’ll rain tomorrow” or “hey, looks like the sun is coming out”. They say things like “ah, that northwesterly’s moved in” or “looks like that low pressure system is stuck and that southwesterly’s passing through”. Systems, fronts, pressure systems. Its like everyone here took a class in meteorology. The radio forecast is a little more highbrow here, and they bang it out at least six times a day. People are obsessed with when it will stop being rainy, or windy, or cold– that time is generally right now. It lasts for month, and then they go back to 9 months of waiting for the 4pm or the 6pm or the 10pm weather to tell them that pretty soon that southerly low pressure is coming right through again.

In the past month, the weather has alternated between unrelenting getting-cancer-right-NOW sunshine and grey, humid, patchy rain. It rained hard for two days– I was hiking the Nydia Track as it poured and poured and poured. I had to be happy because everyone was in a drought and there’s a huge fire risk and they needed the rain, but I was hurling myself along the track in foggy, soaked glasses unable to see the sharp, slippery rocks in front of me. The two day hike wound through depressing heavily-logged areas and a cow pasture. My rain coat quit after a couple hours. I was soaked in sweat from going uphill, and soaked in rain from being an idiot who hikes in bad weather. After four hours I stopped to eat lunch in the rain. I sat under a palm tree with minimal shelter and shoved spoonfuls of wet peanut butter and crackers in my mouth. Rain ran down my face and into my mouth, tasting like sunblock (always the optimist) and sweat and mud, from having fallen down twice already. I ate half a whittaker’s dark block as i stood in the downpour, getting improbably wetter. I was wearing shorts, black socks, and trail running shoes that made sloshing noises as I walked.

The weather was better later in the week, but it took a little while for me to notice. After three days of walking in and out of saddles in wet boots, all I thought was ‘I hate this island i hate this island i hate this oh, look, its sunny. that’s pretty.’

I found myself on Maud Island for a week, which is a pretty improbable place to be, as far as places in new zealand go. The island is a protected, predator free reserve for a few fragile populations of birds, insects, and frogs. There is no landing permitted unless you go through the Dept Of Conservation (DoC), who occasionally arrange volunteer work trips. Through a funny chain of events I got on a trip and forgot all about my hiking disaster the minute we got on our private DoC water taxi to Maud. Funny how an hour of sunshine on a ferry through the sounds can make you forget three days of sheer hell. Boy I like boats.

The weather was not actually that much better on Maud– it rained for an entire afternoon and was often grey, but we stayed in a lodge on the island (with hot water! and pillows! and daytime tv!) and the rangers didn’t make us work in the rain. The other volunteers and I planted native trees– ngaio trees, which the ngaio weevil will eventually come and live in. We reset traplines, meaning we put new bait in traps that catch rats and stoats and wekas when they find their way onto the island. We went fishing. We went hiking. We went sea kayaking.

Maud is home to six breeding pairs of takehe. Takehe sort of look like they were invented for Sesame Street. They are large, docile, curious, funny colored, and if they are scared they waddle away and everyone laughs. They look like grossly overfed ducks, only they are blue, and they have red feet and red beaks. The beaks are pelican shaped. Docility and curiosity don’t really bode well for population growth, so there are very few left. Maud has no rats or stoats or wildlife snatchers so the birds are free to run around and be the idiosyncratic, gentle tubby things that they are.

One of the rangers had a homemade boat– a bathtub in a wooden frame buoyed by four pontoons. On our last afternoon together, the volunteers decided we needed to get the bathtub on the water. Enter aforementioned afternoon of rain. It took four of us to launch it and drag it out again, by which point a downpour had settled in on us. We paddled around the bay in the bathtub anyway, though paddle is a generous term. More like we sat in the bathtub and held paddles and we sort of moved. Standing on the top of the wooden frame, in my soaked teeshirt, shorts, and life jacket, completely wet and outside once again but enjoying myself far more and imitating a punter, I asked if anyone knew a good sea shanty. One volunteer, an Austrian woman, immediately broke out into ‘what would you do with a drunken sailor’. When we returned to the lodge we were frozen and soaked but pleased with our voyage, and one of the rangers lit a fire and baked us lemon scones. We made nachos for dinner and then everyone went on a night walk to look at giant weta and frogs.

The weather back in Paekak has been fine; I have been here for a week, with general intentions of being far away from the south island and close to people who like me. This weekend I am headed back very far north (seriously, i doubt anyone has undertaken a more epileptic tour of new zealand) to wwoof Great Barrier Island and possibly reunite with my epic german traveling partner in crime, and then maybe the south island and i will reconcile. If the weather settles.

#21 unstoppable forces

I took the bus for the first time in months yesterday. I booked an Atomic Shuttle from Greymouth to Nelson– it cost $40 NZD, it picked me up at my hostel, it stopped for a long lunch break, and then it dropped me off at my hostel in Nelson. I did not have to hitch hike, look at a map, stand on the side of the road, or enjoy the feeling of running out of water/food/needing to pee in the middle of nowhere.

Still, it was terrible. I thought it would be a nice opportunity to sleep through a day, a seven hour snooze from the west coast back up north. I was wrong. I forgot about buses and the way the windows don’t open and the air conditioning is artificial and you’re either freezing or sweating and the couple in front of you is practically having sex in their seats and you just sit there and wait and wait and wait and if you try to read a book you get motion sickness and it never ever ends.

There aren’t very many highways here, compared to at home, so the route crossed back over a dozen places Kristina and I had traveled through over the past two weeks.

That’s right! This story now involves another person. Enter: Kristina. German. Mid 30′s. We shared a dorm room in a hostel in Wellington. She was traveling alone, had a pair of stinky hiking boots strapped to her pack, and a Zadie Smith novel on her bed. Clearly it made perfect sense to go on a weeklong hiking trip together.

The atomic shuttle drove through Stoke, and Inangahua Junction, and Westport, and that one side road 40k out of Nelson– all places we ended up while hitching to Nelson Lakes National Park. In Stoke we ate creamed doughnuts and turned down a ride from four blissed out kids too high to ask us where we were going. In Inangahua Junction we both contemplated peeing on the road. We got picked up by a guy who was drinking Red Bull and driving to his Dad’s funeral. In Westport we ate vegetarian pizza– it came with frozen peas and corn and carrot bits on it.

It took us 7 hours to hitch hike the 150km drive from Nelson to Nelson Lakes. It was a terrible day– we ran out of water, and the only food we had between us was a bag of trail mix with only the peanuts and raisins left in it. 3/4 of the way there, at Kawatiri Junction, we discovered the reality of sandflies. We ran around in circles trying to beat them off of us– we threw on our raincoats and long pants as quickly as we could, and we stood there in 90 degree sunshine fully covered. When we finally made it to St. Arnaud, we laughed and cried outside the hostel. We ate fish and chips and took a last shower before our week in the woods began.

We walked the Travers-Sabine circuit through Nelson Lakes– an 80km tramp that crosses the saddle of Mt. Travers at 1780 metres. I discovered that my fancy pants ‘trail running’ shoes aint got nothin on hiking boots, and I also discovered the miracle of hiking poles. Fifteen blisters, two lakes, and one good cry later, we made it through to the other side. We couldn’t stand next to each other, though, because we smelled so bad. We could barely stand next to ourselves. At the end of the track, we hitchhiked back to St. Arnaud– we got a ride with an american who knew someone I knew back home. We drove with the windows all the way down.

On our one post hike night together, we ate a kilo of cheese and a loaf of bread and a box of pasta with sauce and a few chocolate bars. We showered, we did our laundry, we tried to figure out what the hell we were each going to do next. I planned to head north to spend too much money on a kayak trip in Abel Tasman; Kristina booked a hostel in Punakaiki for a few nights.

As we sat with our petrol station-catered dinner, she looked up between mouthfuls of carbohydrate and said “one thing i would really like to do is rent a car and drive around the west coast for a week. but i don’t know who i would go with, and i don’t want to go alone. i don’t think i’ll have time to do it.”

i chewed a little more, and thought about it. I didn’t actually have any plans. “I could do that.”, I thought out loud. “Why not? We can figure out driving on the left side of the road.”

And so the next day we found ourselves canceling our hostel bookings and hitching to Greymouth, the bustling epicenter of the west coast (population 14,000), to rent a car. At the I-site (the tourist booking place they have in every town), our charms and tales wooed the booking agent, who told us about a smaller, local car rental company with a better deal than anything we could get in town. Fifteen minutes later, we held the keys to a Nissan Sunny.

We backtracked for a day to camp on the free beach campsite in Westport. We spent an hour driving around Greymouth before heading out, teaching ourselves to drive on the left side of the road. After a few spins around the parking lot, we were ready, and besides one tiny slip up involving a traffic circle and a seal colony, the most interesting thing about driving on the left side of the road was not really very interesting at all.

We spent one terrible night in Punakaiki, and one great night in the mountains up at Arthur’s Pass. We climbed to Bealey Spur for 360 degree views of the mountains around us. We camped next to the funniest hut I have ever seen– a 90 year old “historic” shed, we ate instant mashed potatoes and cous cous and chocolate.

We wandered around Geraldine trying to figure out why everyone else was so excited (maybe the replica of the bayeux tapestry? maybe the world’s largest knitted jersey? maybe not?). We camped one night in Methven– we drank lattes in a cafe that was also an antique shop. When the proprieter found out that I was from New York, she put on a cd of new york piano love songs. We tried on costume jewelry and read our books and drank our coffee and missed New York. Or at least, I hope kristina missed new york, but she has never been there.

One afternoon we stopped in Wanaka. We rented bicycles from Thunderbikes and cycled around Lake Wanaka for three hours. We stopped for milkshakes and then we stopped again where the lake becomes the Clutha river, and we watched the blue turn into green and flow downriver for awhile. We stumbled around a grocery store afterwards trying to figure out what to make for dinner. That night we stayed at the best hostel in the middle of nowhere– a $18 bed 10k outside of Omarama with a host who spoke terrible German (but tried to translate everything for Kristina, who was reading Zadie Smith in english, and who could not keep from giggling as he tried to tell her about the way the washing machine worked in his rudimentary german).

We spent a forgettable night in Haast. See? Forgotten.

The highways were terrific and terrible. There were very few cars, which was great, but ‘highway’ is kind of a looser term here. We crossed at least 30 one lane bridges, made at least a dozen 15km/hr turns, and crossed several stretches of unsealed road. Highway Schmiway. We drove along a big, exposed coast, through the southern alps (twice!), over a few flat stretches in canterbury, and back through the hills of central otago. We stopped in Springfield and took a picture with their Simpson’s replica doughnut.

We returned the car, spent a night repacking and doing more laundry and eating more chocolate and playing one last round of scrabble, and then we parted ways in the morning. For the first time in two weeks it is raining, and i am by myself, back in Nelson, trying to figure out what to do next.

#21 a one petrol station kind of town

For the past six days I have been hiking in Nelson Lakes National Park. I have now showered, washed my clothes, eaten (cheese, crackers, ice cream), and made plans for what I’m up to in the next few days (heading to motueka to kayak at abel tasman). I am not dead. I am in St. Arnaud, trying to not walk. Repeat, not dead.

#20 that two hours after the doors open before the concert starts

Doors open for the Neko Case show at 8.

I leave the YHA at 7:20 to give myself plenty of time to walk over to the venue on Cuba street and get an okay spot in line. I don’t mind waiting outside for a half hour. I am not exactly on a tight schedule.

The venue is the San Francisco Bath House, which turns out to be a black door. A black, locked door next to a malaysian restaurant. The malaysian restaurant is open and has people inside of it. The San Francisco Bath House does not. I check the posters outside. It is definitely the right day. It is definitely the right time. And doors definitely open in twenty minutes. And there is definitely no one lined up outside to get in.

I do what I always do in situations that are perfectly normal for other people but that I myself find excruciatingly awkward: I run away.

I run until I find a coffee shop where I order a juice, because I am seriously not getting enough beta carotene (not that much beta carotene in gelato) and I sip it and read the newspaper until 7:58. At which point, I am pleasingly done with my juice and am exactly on time for the show. I think, there better be some damn people standing outside now because the last thing i want is more carrot juice.

But there are some people: there is a bustling, rowdy crowd of four women, loitering in their i-got-to-boogie shoes. At 8:05, they open the doors. We have grown to a crowd of 8.

The San Francisco Bath House, I find, is about the size of a bathtub (which is all that would really fit above a malaysian restaurant). A delightful bathtub, with a stage full of guitars and banjos and a slide guitar, and a very nice full bar, but essentially a bathtub. The discotheque at Oberlin, where I spent many Wednesday nights eating dollar slices and drinking dollar pbr, was far more impressive. It had birdcages.

Oh, I remembered. That’s right. There are not that many people here. In New Zealand. Which is where I am. Which is why this club is so small. Okey doke.

As I am getting over that, while I am feeling rather pleasant about the fact that Neko Case is about to sing me a lot of songs in this tiny bathtub cum basement cum bar bathhouse, I remember that I am at a concert. All by myself.

I am almost always alone here on my travels in new zealand, but it is often less obvious, and it is not typically that awkward. I am not typically standing alone in the middle of an otherwise-unoccupied dance floor in a club. But there I was, in my trail running shoes and my traveling pants with all of the zippers and pockets. I look like a tool, I thought. i look like i got lost on my way to seventh grade. I should run away or get very drunk. And I thought a lot of other things as well.

I stood at the bar for a little while with my drink, studying the menu and the shelves, trying to look busy and occupied and totally. cool. I did that until 8:35, when I looked around at the still-empty room and noticed that the other 30 people all came in couples. Fifteen little pairs of dorky middle aged men in polo shirts their wives picked out, all with glasses of white wine or Steinys, talking about their busy and fulfilling lives and how much they enjoy alt country, etc. They all stared at me, I thought, but they were the kind of bland people whose staring you don’t mind, even if you normally, like me, are so self conscious you always think people are staring at you.

I stood there with my hands in my pockets, trying to find a posture that was nonchalant and disaffected, even though I personally will never be either of those things. It was excruciating. I stared at the empty dance floor and the empty area right underneath the microphone, where Neko would stand. I need to stand right there. I should be in the front. I should just go stand there right now. I’m always afraid to be the first person to do anything. Shit.

At 8:45, I decided that if I did not go stand in the front, that I would be so angry that I would kick myself all the way across the south island. I paid 52 damn dollars for this damn ticket and she’s from my country and I’m five feet tall and I have all her albums and I’m always too afraid to go to things like concerts alone so i better get to stand in the damn front.

So I did. I stood there and stood there and stood there, while nothing happened, and then through the tepid opening act, and again until Neko Case came on– at 10:30. I just stood there. For two hours. While they set up, all of the roadies asked me how the standing was going. Even the tepid opening act asked me how I was doing before they began. We all smiled and laughed at me.

And then, finally, as my legs were about to give up and go home, the stage door opened and Neko came out with her too-cool-for-school entourage. It was the last night of their tour– they looked half dead, and the first half of the show was pretty uninspired. but the audience felt their pain, and we clapped and clapped and clapped– everyone seemed so grateful that they made it all the way to wellington, and the energy picked up. neko’s voice is better than the grand canyon. it is like watching someone posessed, this little person with this great big voice. but that is what everyone who has ever been to a neko case concert says about her: tiny, red, holyshitwhatavoice. these people, they do not lie.

they played an extra long encore– neko said they’d just play until it was time to go back to the airport. they played a bunch of songs that weren’t on their setlist, which I know, because the sound guy who watched me stand in front of the microphone for two hours, gave me the setlist after the show. No one has ever given me a setlist before. It was kind of exciting. I put it in my journal. Maybe I will carry it with me the next time I’m afraid to do something alone. Or maybe next time I’ll be so brazen that I’ll throw my bra on stage. Or something.

#19 expatriates

from january 20th

The train is probably the only un-lovely thing about Paekakariki. The train is almost never running on time, and it is occasionally not running, and it is sometimes running on bus replacements. Sometimes they cancel the trains while you’re standing on the platform at 5:50 wondering where the 5:40 is.

Paekak itself (pie-cock) feels a lot like a little old grandmother; shrunk to the size of a large fig, carrying mints in her pocketbook, wearing a hand knit sweater with a duck on it. It is wonderful and dear. It smells like musty lemons and menthols, but you let that go. It is just that lovely.

The bad side of town is lovely. That is where I live. The bad side of Paekakariki. This is the anatomy of the bad side: There are a couple of cars on cement blocks. There are children running around and their teeth have not been brushed. There are single mothers. Hide your children.

I have been staying with an American family in a house that has a half acre of garden space. I have puttered around the garden for a week, watering, weeding, planting, mulching, and pruning. My reward for this is that I get to live with people who understand yiddish slang and satisfy my until-now-insatiable craving for subtle irony and mexican food.

The other reward is that if you live in Paekak, you live next door to the beach. If you live on the bad side of town, you can probably piss on the shore from where you live. My hosts live on a little hill, four minutes ambling distance from the water. The water is the Tasman Sea. You stand on the beach and you can see the northern shores of the south island, and kapiti island looming close in the distance, and you can pretend to see australia when you play in the waves. On the busiest days with the best weather there are maybe 30 people playing in the water. It is sandy, shelly, perfect, and generally empty. Also, there are lifeguards. Repeat: bad side.

The bad side of town is great for morale. Cement blocks and hooligans aside, my host does not boil her vegetables. She does not drink gumboot tea six times a day. She streams this american life off her computer and into the speakers in her kitchen while she cooks. We talk about Kiwis and how they boil all of their vegetables and listen to terrible radio programs. We talk about how people here are like 100 watt bulbs and we are 500 watt bulbs. Sometimes people here seem emotionally dead inside– we talk about how that manifests and why, and how uncomfortable it makes us feel when we are referred to as those loud americans. I told her about my last hosts, and how they told me I ate too much and I came from a culture of takers and americans were ‘like big friendly puppies’. We ate rice and beans and guacamole and salsa verde and proclaimed fuck that noise.

In the other direction from the beach is a series of walking trails. Up and down, past horses and sheep and rolling hills of native plants, recent restoration projects, a creek, and a gradient that leads up and over to an expansive view of the shoreline. Today we walked with my host dog through the park and back along the beach. It was 90 degrees in the sun and I took my shoes off and walked with my feet in the water. We threw sticks into the water for the dog to chase. We wandered homeward through the other end of the park, past the new bike path and over a bridged stream and back through the gate and into the garden, where I pruned ornamentals until my hands ached from grasping the secateurs.

The bad side of town is a great place to sit and stay awhile. We rented movies. I cooked dinner twice. We baked bread, we drank tea, we talked about how we’ve ended up in Paekak (me as a wandering jew lost in the wairarapa and she as a permanent resident and ex-sanfranciscan). I’ve slept hours and hours and hours in a queen sized bed that doesn’t have a bunk above it with a german tramper sleeping in it.

I am visible. I am wanted. I am culturally relevant. All of the history I bring with me, all of my little hopes and dreams for my trip, my experiences, my education, and the pretty and ugly little parts of me that I packed up in my bag are all out on the table here. Its like I am a painting or an archaeological dig, and I am finally being looked at by someone who studies art or bones. It is nice to feel visible in that kind of way. I am a little brighter here. I am less like a trinket or an exotic object, and I am more like a friendly reminder of home, a reminder that other parts of the world still exist. Tomorrow I leave again for Wellington, en route to Nelson, a little bigger, a little louder, a little badder.

#18 attacking the windmills

from 7-9 January

Things that are good:

the bucket of boiling water on my lap. trail mix. the cell phone reception. all of the layers i am wearing. my chocolate almond slab victory bar. getting to the top. the will to survive! my journal. water. and it is not really that cold. I keep telling myself that last part.

I did it. This hike was long and for the last hour I had to climb, scramble ass up over tree roots and rocks and then when I reached the top ledge it began to rain and the wind picked up and I almost blew over and all of my stuff got soaked and I almost lost my new raincoat trying to put it own in the sudden wind and rain, but I am not even dead.

Okay, it is really cold here. I had not thought about all of my things getting wet. And how much less warm they would be when they were wet. Mike asked me if I wanted to take a thermos and a little pot and some teabags with me, and I said that I wasn’t a tea drinker. He laughed at me and told me to suit myself, and I thought well, I’m just not part of the commonwealth– I don’t need hot drinks six times a day to survive. Right now if I had a hot drink I would marry it. Instead I have this makeshift hottie on my lap– I took the bucket full of coal next to the hut fireplace and emptied it, boiled water in it, and now the bucket is on my lap. It is steamy and I will be wet and later regret it, but now I can sit without shivering and I am able to write, so I can write about trying not to crave hot tea and soup, which is what everyone else staying in Powell hut tonight is currently consuming.

There are people here in shorts and jandals, which is reassuring, because it means that it is definitely not cold enough to die here– I just think that it is, because I am weak willed and ill dressed. There are two men even walking around in rugby shorts. People here wear rugby shorts the way americans wear basketball shorts– except that rugby shorts are cut just below you’re ass and they’re made out of canvas and i can’t imagine why anyone would choose to wear them if they were not actually playing rugby.

My dinner will be an english muffin and a can of tuna and two Advil. Everyone else is better prepared than me and I feel stupid, but i like hiking. Staying alive is fun, especially when you succeed.

There are fifteen other people in the hut– 3 men are traveling together. A grandson, his son, and his son, who is maybe 9, and is running around in a giant pullover fleece and an oversized wool stocking cap. There are two trampers from the czech republic, a couple. The girl doesn’t talk, but the boy is talking to a man in rugby shorts about their travels. A group of girls on a field trip are sitting over in their sleeping bags, giggling about something and complaining about their freeze dried camping meals. A man is asleep in a sleeping bag that looks a lot warmer and cozier than mine. And I am sitting at the table with a giant steel bucket on my lap, with steam billowing in my face, wearing every single item of clothing I brought with me plus two rugby socks I found in the hut when I arrived. We are puttering and eating and staring out the windows at the gigantic view. We are 1400 metres up, looking down at the surrounding mountains and the flat, flat wairarapa in the late afternoon half sun. The clouds roll in and out, totally obscuring the view one minute, and pulling back the curtain the next, so clearly you can see every single house. Kind of like playing peekaboo with the titans.

The hut sleeps 32– it is a big building at the top of the mountain. Half the building is sleeping berths, with the same mattresses they have at the homeless shelters I’ve volunteered at. Except the homeless shelters had blankets. You could wind up here and probably still die of exposure if it were the middle of winter. There’s a fireplace, though, with wood and coal, and there are gas cookers, so you’d probably be okay if you didn’t panic and lose your mind, which hypothermia can make you do. When I get down from here I’m going to eat a giant bowl of pasta.

jan 8–

I love this hut. I love this bed. I love hiking. There is nothing like 7 hours of hiking to make you love things.

I hurt. I love hurting. I love thinking that I am dying, that if I take another step, I am going to knaw my feet off at the shoe in order to survive, every muscle screaming good lord woman stop louder and louder and louder, across the final swing bridge until I don’t even realize that I’m standing in front of my hut for the night. That I have made it, and I can take my shoes and my giant backpack off. Here we are. Atiwhakatu hut.

The hike should not have been as long as it was, except the trails weren’t well market and I missed the turnoff and hiked all the way back to the trailhead before realizing that I should have turned off an hour and a half back. This hut is new, though, and once I found the trail it was mercifully easy, and 3 hours over the river and through the woods, I made it. I wish someone else were here to experience this with me. Its like finding the little house in the big woods. All I need is laura ingalls curing me some salt pork and I would die of happiness.

the trail was beautiful, but I had bad blisters and bad knees from coming down from mt holdsworth (because i am a wimp!). The lower trail follwed the river the whole time– it wound up and down and around through the forest, over little foot bridges and big, swinging suspension bridges that i would not have crossed if my bed for the night had not been beyond them. posting a notice that says “warning: weight limit 1 hiker” is not the way to entice someone to cross a swing bridge over a waterfall.

Right after I arrived, the czech couple from last night arrived from the other direction– they had gone about the trail the right way, and they were exhausted too. We camped out together in the hut. They were nearly as ill prepared as I was and I did not envy their hardboiled egg and tomato sandwiches. They told me all about their travels, through bolivia and tierra del fuego, getting stranded in the australian outback, and their plans for their next destination, singapore. The girl told me her name– sharka!

We talked about the foods we miss, and I told them about a few of my favorite foods, but mostly I waxed on about chocolate peanut butter ice cream. How luscious it is, the perfect and holy union of flavor. There is nothing better, I said, then chocolate and peanut butter.

I stopped because they were laughing at me, and I couldn’t tell if I was getting lost in translation. Okay, then what food do you miss, I said?

They started by talking about dumplings, but they talked in such a way that I thought I was listening to a great epic about wars and battles and lovers, because they were so fiery and in love with their czech food and they just kept talking and talking about all of the different ways dumplings are made and then the meats that go with them. And, oh, the sauces! they said, and then they had to go back to the beginning and start over because they had forgotten to tell me about all of the sauces. When they were done talking, there were a few words short of tears, and everyone was glad to be done with dinner. We are all sitting in our beds now, too tired to move, waiting for the sun to go down. We are all hiking out in the morning.

Jan 9–

I made it! I am at the clearing before the trailhead. I can hear the parking lot. Final inventory: one pulled groin muscle, five blisters, very sore knees, four advil consumed (or maybe 6?), no photos due to camera fail, last victory chocolate bar inhaled, and if i never eat tuna on an english muffin again it won’t be too soon.

Things I will bring next time: thermos. hot pot. tea bags/instant cocoa. toilet paper. more exciting food options.

The sun is out now, and I am sitting on a bench in the sun, the back of my neck is probably burning. Whatever. I hiked all by myself for three days, what’s a little cancer? My bag feels easier to lift now, my calves are hard as rocks, I can climb 1400 metres in a day, I have looked down upon the wairarapa! I can’t really walk anymore, but I am antsy for my next hiking trip. I am going to hike the queen charlotte track… as soon as I can go up and down the stairs again.

#17 recurring themes

from january 2

I have been having the same dream.

I am driving a car. Sometimes on the right side of the road, sometimes on the left. The steering wheel switches sides too. Sometimes the wheel is on the left and I am driving on the left. Sometimes both are on the right. And sometimes I am driving a kiwi style car in America, or it is a place that is like america, but its here, and everything is mixed up.

In the dream I’m telling myself that I’m a terrible driver and I’m often on the wrong side of the road, but I can’t manage to stay in the correct lane. I make wild turns trying to go in the right direction, and I almost hit car after car after car as I try to park and turn around. Sometimes I am going somewhere, and I almost kill myself and wreck the car on my way, because I forget to steer, and then I forget to care that I’m driving incorrectly.