The Great New Zealand Road Trip: Christchurch

It is a shocking video. Taken from a closed-circuit security camera outside of an artist’s studio in downtown Christchurch, the first 20 seconds show a normal city street - a delivery truck turns the corner, people haphazardly jaywalk, talk on their cellphones, and generally go about their business. Then, the earth moves, and you feel like you’ve been thrown into a shaky handi-cam horror movie with no warning. The street rolls in waves towards the camera. A crack suddenly appears in the sidewalk and splinters outward into a gaping mouth. A man ducks into the doorway of a warehouse only to have the entire building collapse in a cloud of dust and rubble around him. People run into the center of the street, the confusion evident on their faces. Just as quickly as it started, it’s over. The people gathered in the street run off, searching out loved ones, or answers. The man from the doorway emerges from the wreckage like some Hollywood hero and walks off down the street as if this were a normal occurrence in his life. And you, the spectator, realize that you’ve been staring slack-jawed at this silent movie, merely imagining the rumblings and the sounds of sirens and the screams, when all you can really hear is the soundtrack of Christchurch, the constant thrumming of heavy machinery and the crunch of rubble being moved. 

Search and Rescue tagging on a building that hasn't been touched since the quake

This video played on a loop at the museum in the city center that was dedicated to the earthquake of February 22, 2011. New Zealand in general, and Christchurch in particular, have weathered their fair share of earthquakes - the whole country rests on a massive fault line with a propensity for trembling, leading early Europeans to nickname it ‘The Shaky Isles.’ Their modern history is peppered with earthquakes of varying magnitudes - one previous quake had managed to knock the steeple off of Christchurch Cathedral, although it was dutifully reattached later. In September of 2010, a massive earthquake hit just outside of Christchurch, decimating a number of homes, and giving rise to floods of ‘liquefaction’, which, as far as I could understand, is basically liquid mud that shoots and oozes out of the ground and consumes streets, cars, and slow-moving animals. Amazingly, there were no fatalities, and while people were scared and battered, they displayed remarkable resilience in getting themselves, and the community, back on its feet. Unfortunately, the earthquake had caused extreme structural damage to a lot of buildings, which, combined with some very lax building codes and a bunch of bureaucratic nonsense that I am not remotely qualified to speak about, meant that when the February 22 earthquake hit, buildings in the city center started collapsing like doll houses.185 people were killed. It is one of the deadliest peacetime disasters to ever hit New Zealand.

In the aftermath, search and rescue crews from dozens of countries landed in Christchurch to help with recovery efforts. Some people fled the city, and those remaining began a very slow process of determining how to move forward. Three years later, the city is still a symphony of demolition noises, and every Christchurchian (I am sure that is not the technical term) has an opinion on government management, or lack thereof, of insurance funds and the rebuilding process, but to an outside eye, the city has found a remarkable balance between honoring the past and embracing the future. Apart from the slew of half-destroyed buildings dotting the urban landscape, there are numerous memorials to the earthquake scattered around the city, interspersed with temporary structures and clever uses of public space that seem to make the most of being a city in transition. 

I had two whirlwind days of touristing in Christchurch, and now writing about it I keep feeling compelled to fall into a pompous Travel-Section-of-the-New-York-Times voice - ‘a simply charming little cafe in the post-Industrial style’, ‘an excellently curated museum which is a must-see for enthusiasts of Maori culture’ and so on. So please bear with me while I take you on a little tourist jaunt and I will attempt to leave my professor-voice at home.

It rained the entire time I was in Christchurch, giving everything a very gloomy British feel that, while not actively bothering me, didn’t necessarily incline me to outdoor activities, so I skipped the botanical gardens and headed for the Canterbury Museum, which, all joking aside, really did have a fascinating exhibit on Maori history and culture, and also sported a reconstructed Victorian-era street, complete with stores that you could walk into and explore, and a taxidermy horse that bore a sign begging adults to not sit on it under any circumstances, which made me wonder how many stuffed horses they had lost to bros taking selfies. The most compelling part of the museum, however, was a special exhibit of police photography from the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Japanese rescue workers bow as a body bag on a stretcher is carried out of the rubble. Rescue dogs disappear into caverns of exploded concrete and bent rebar. Crushed cars are marked with a spray-painted letter ‘C’ to indicate that they are all clear. Excavating machinery appears to bow its head in a moment of silence as it pauses in clearing the wreckage. A house, the roof half-collapsed into the living room, has ‘We’re ok’ spray painted on the outside in huge neon letters. It was beautifully put-together, a dark room with spotlights picking out each of the photos on a black wall, the better for every individual picture to hit you with maximum impact. 

Sufficiently sobered, I walked past the Christchurch Cathedral, which was split open by the quake and now sits, exposed and eerie, behind a high security fence. A tunnel of flowering plants leads up to the gate, where you can look through and see the ravaged innards of the beautiful neo-Gothic church. A few blocks away, standing proudly in the middle of an empty lot, is the Cardboard Cathedral, which was designed by a Japanese architect in the wake of the earthquake. True to its name, much of it is made of huge tubes of cardboard, supported by steel and local wood; it is also, one might note, built to very exacting earthquake codes. It’s actually a wonder to behold, light and airy, with a comforting hardware-store smell; I never would have imagined cardboard could be so lovely. For a city, like Christchurch, that was built around a cathedral, where the structure was so much more than a religious symbol, but rather came to represent the city as a whole, this ‘Transitional Cathedral’ seems to be an important part of the healing process. Across the street from the Cardboard Cathedral is another empty lot, this one filled with 185 unique chairs, each painted white and facing toward the site where the CTV building collapsed, causing more than half of the deaths associated with the earthquake. It is a haunting memorial.

Significantly less somber is the Container Mall, which is about the most whimsical use of ugly metal boxes I have ever seen. With all the construction and demolition occurring around Christchurch, the city is liberally dotted with shipping containers, those huge metal rectangles painted offensive colors and frequently used as surrogate dumpsters. Some ingenious soul decided to stack a whole bunch of these on top of each other, outfit the exterior with some tables and chairs, and offer the containers up as mall space. I never thought I would describe a mall as charming, but the Container Mall is, in fact, quite lovable. It speaks to a willingness to accept the current situation without being broken by it, and to have a little fun while seeing what the future holds. So it was that I could sip a coffee in a little metal box cafe across a patio from another little metal box containing a lululemon store, under another little metal box containing New Zealand souvenirs. I almost could have believed I was in any other cafe, except that every time the door slammed, the entire container shook, which, in a town recovering from a devastating earthquake, seems like a bit of a sick joke. 

After a bit of R&R at my lovely hosts’ home (I was allegedly WWOOF-ing, but my hosts let me get away with being completely useless for anything except sightseeing), I finished my tourist sojourn with the Antarctic Center, which was a bit like a small, cold SeaWorld. Christchurch is considered the gateway to the Antarctic, even though it is still well over a thousand miles away, and the center provides a wonderful and accessible history of the early expeditions, as well as information on the research being done there now. Really though, I just wanted to see more penguins. The center serves as a home for a bunch of disabled blue penguins (the tiny, adorable kind), who, through injury or birth defect, would not be able to survive in the wild. There was the little female who loved to swim, but had a gimpy wing, so in order to avoid swimming in circles would coast back and forth along the glass wall and eyeball the spectators. There was another female who hated the water, and could only be lured in by the promise of food, which she would grab and gobble, and promptly haul ass back to the shore to exuberantly scream at the trainers. And there was the plucky old blind broad with Alzheimer’s (because apparently penguins can get Alzheimer’s too), who had a one-legged companion that helped her find her way around. I watched the penguins for so long that I think people started to wonder who this weird redhead was laughing to herself. 

The Antarctic Center also sported a room where you could ‘experience an Antarctic storm!’ I’ll try anything, so I kitted up in the big down jacket and boot covers they gave me and stepped into a frozen diorama. A well-constructed igloo squatted in one corner. Real snow covered the ground. A big thermometer on the wall told me that it was 0 degrees Celsius, and then the ‘storm’ began. It was an impressive sound and light display, and the temperature dropped down to about -15 degrees Celsius, accompanied by giant fans kicking up some windchill. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was voluntarily subjecting myself to something I have to deal with every winter anyway; if I want to be cold and wind-battered, I can manage very well by myself in January, thank you very much. A better gimmick was the Hagglunds ride. A Hagglunds, as far as I can tell, is a Hummer on steroids, and a much more effective method of negotiating frozen tundras than dogs and sleds. The center had built an obstacle course for their Hagglunds, and so we got to ride along while the driver told dad-jokes and drove us over 6-foot wide crevasses, up and down increasingly steep hills and finally down a near-vertical hill into a lake, because the Hagglunds is also amphibious. I am not even remotely ashamed to admit that I felt like Indiana Jones, and it took all my willpower to not shout, ‘Again! Again!’, the second it was over. I don’t know how that driver got her gig, but she may have managed to find one of the coolest jobs in the world. It never occurred to me that I wanted to go to Antarctica before, but if it means riding in the Schwarzenegger of Hummers and playing with penguins, I’m ready to put on 47 layers of clothing and sign up. 

The Great New Zealand Road Trip: Kilometers 451 - 1200

I am unbelievably disappointed in myself. I have seen some truly incredible vistas while I’ve been in New Zealand - soaring mountains, deserted black-sand beaches, towering waterfalls, mist-shrouded fjords - and do you know what goes through my head every time? Wow, that sure looks like Lord of the Rings. That incredible rock formation? Totally Lord of the Rings. Those ancient trees reaching trembling arms towards the sky? Lord of the Rings. Those murky forests hiding dark secrets? Ok, maybe those are a bit more Hobbit, but still. I have years of education behind me, a fairly active imagination, and a voracious appetite for books, and the only way for me to process New Zealand is to compare it to Tolkien via Peter Jackson. I feel this is an utter failure of imagination on my part. Also, I am consistently chagrined that I have seen neither a dragon, nor an Ent. New Zealand, you are not holding up your end of the bargain. As absurd-looking as your sheep are, they do not live up to my mythological expectations. They do, however, provide me with an endless source of amusement, as I ‘baaa’ at them as I drive past. I am so very lucky that other drivers are not privy to what is happening inside my car, because I would probably be certified. I apparently am incapable of driving in silence for long periods of time, and given that radio seemed to be all but non-existent along the west coast, I had to resort to singing whatever songs I could come up with a cappella, which limited me to nursery rhymes, christmas carols and snippets of songs that I wish I had forgotten at the end of the ‘90s. Chalk that up to my first bit of learning these last few days - I need to increase my song repertoire, or be doomed to sing “Baa Baa Black Sheep” in a variety of accents for the rest of my days. 

Baaaaa

Other valuable life lessons and interesting tidbits I picked up in the last 1000 kilometers:

1) I watch too much Law and Order: SVU. I was on a gorgeous hike in the town of Okarito (‘town’ here may be a bit of a stretch, I believe it has a population of 35, all living along one little street winding through the wetlands), following an old tramping route that used to lead to goldfields along an isolated shore. The trail stretched along a forested ridge, overlooking the surf, and I’d spent the first half of the 10 kilometer hike having an argument with my lungs. I think they’re drama queens; they think they’re delicate blossoms that should be allowed to sit on a couch and eat bon-bons. I eventually won the argument - as soon as they realized that we (that is, my lungs and I) would not be stopping the hike and sitting by the side of the trail waiting for someone to rescue us, they promptly stopped whining and started doing their job. This victory put a new spring in my step, and I almost jogged around the corner and into a dark, overgrown, canopied section of track. The path had apparently veered away from the edge of the cliff, which had been providing ample sunlight and glimpses of crashing waves and glittering sea through the trees, and into a little gully. Objectively, it was gorgeous, all twisting trees and thick brush and the musty smell of damp earth. Subjectively, I assumed I was about to die. This is how I know I am losing my child-like sense of wonder - I wasn’t scared of a troll or werewolf running out of the bush, which was probably a more logical fear, but rather started wondering who would play me on the inevitable Law and Order interpretation. I started counting the ‘dumb-girl’ mistakes I had made, the kind of mistakes that would make me want to throw a shoe at the screen if this were a horror movie - no one knew where I was, no one expected to hear from me in the next few days, I had no cell phone service. This, I told myself, is how women disappear on vacation. Never mind that I was in one of the safest countries in the world, a country with some of the lowest violent crime stats on earth, ranked as one of the most peaceful countries behind only Iceland, where people are so rare that you’re too excited about seeing another human to think about ways to screw them over. All I knew was it was dark in this part of the woods, and dark equals bad. So I did what any self-respecting New Yorker would do, and talked to myself until the trail took a sudden turn and opened up to the sea and the sky and the sun and all the forces of light. I scampered down to a completely deserted black sand beach, where the tide was so high that the water rushed over the dunes to feed a lazy lagoon and the waves threatened to pull trees down from the cliffs. In the distance, I could see the Southern Alps, like cold and distant judges. I sat on a rock and ate an apple. I played chicken with the waves. I crossed a shaky suspension bridge that looked like it didn’t enjoy people walking on it. I never once thought about SVU and the things that go bump in the forest. But on the return trip to town, when the path took that dark turn, I decided I would be better off running, because I may like to think I am a big, tough adventurer, but I am apparently still afraid of the dark. 

2) It is possible to get your tongue stuck to something cold. While A Christmas Story had led me to believe this was possible, I had never really had the opportunity to test it out, because I think you instantly die if you touch your tongue to anything in New York City. A little backstory (not on sticking my tongue to things, but on where I was when making the attempt to stick my tongue to something): I was on a glacier. ‘On’ is a little misleading, I was technically on a small off-shoot of the main glacier, like a pinky toe sticking out of a bathtub. The group I was with had already hiked up the glacial valley, carved by the movement of Fox Glacier over thousands of years (fun fact - Fox Glacier can move up to 7 meters a day, which to me seems to be a very unnerving pace for a giant wall of frozen water; also, I think we should reconsider ‘a glacial pace’ meaning slow-moving, as, at 7 meters a day, that glacier is moving significantly faster than some people I know). The valley was all grey rock and ice-blue streams, with towering cliffs standing sentinel at the entrance. The scale of everything was so massive that it became visual noise unless another human being was in the frame for reference. Other hiking groups looked like tiny bipedal grains of sand beneath the immensity of the valley walls. We crossed a couple of streams and rivers, one by raft and more by hopping across the rocks, hoping we didn’t fall in. Then we strapped on crampons and penguin marched out onto the ice, everyone stiffly bent into various postures that suggested balance, looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame learning to ice skate. We climbed up the glacial pinky toe and surveyed the majesty of the rest of the glacier, stretching away in the loving embrace of the granite walls; then, being tourists, we took roughly one million photos. Our guide, in a shocking example of unfounded trust, let us pose with her ice axe. After being pelted by ice chips as a 4’-nothing Malaysian grandmother demonstrated her ice-chopping abilities for a photo op, I decided that I wanted to be different. I had already, at my guide’s suggestion, sampled the water running in one of the streams, which was lovely and pure and sweet and very very cold, and sucked on one of the ice chips, which was shockingly dense and initially quite dry. So I thought, why not try for the infamous ‘tongue-stuck-to-ice’ photo? I knew it would amuse my dad. It didn’t actually occur to me that my tongue could get stuck; on some level I thought that could only happen with metal. However, I am here to assure you that it can happen with ice, if it’s cold and dry enough. I like to think that Fox Glacier will remember making out with me, as momentary as it may have been, for a long time. 

3) New Zealand is bad at naming things. It’s probably for the best that they’ve stuck with so many Maori names, because they obviously can’t be trusted to name things on their own. Case in point, Milford Sound, and all the other gorgeous sounds that line the southwest coast below the extant glaciers. A ‘sound’, as it turns out, is a stream-carved valley that leads into the sea, whereas a ‘fjord’ is glacier-carved. By the time they named Milford Sound, they had realized their mistake, as that part of the shore was all formed by glacial activity, but being of good British stock, they refused to own up to it and insisted on finishing it off in ‘sound’ style. To compensate, they named the entire area ‘Fiordland.’ Unfortunately, they had neglected to ask how to properly spell ‘fjord’, so to this day they are the laughing stock of countries that have fjords, which sounds much worse than it is, given that, outside of Norway, no one really knows or cares what a fjord is anyway. Regardless of what you call it, Milford Sound is stunning, the kind of beauty that I have trouble describing without swearing. I drove to Milford from the tiny and charming town of Te Anau on a day pouring with rain, where the mountain faces were laced with waterfalls that wouldn’t exist within an hour of the end of the storm. The road, while ostensibly paved, had so much grit, gravel, and rocky byproduct strewn across it that it made me thankful I had paid for full coverage insurance on my rent-a-dent. I discovered that I hate tunnels, or at the very least, hate tunnels that appear to have been blasted out of the rock roughly 15 minutes before one has to drive through them and seem to be held up through a combination of Lincoln Logs and luck. But it was worth it to emerge into a valley ringed with waterfalls, where the sound of the rushing water was loud enough to muffle my stunning rendition of ‘Part of Your World.’ The Sound itself I navigated by sea kayak, with a few other hardy souls; between the rain and the spray, we were soaking wet, rather cold, and decidedly having a better time than the people stuck on big tourist ferries. Because of the weather, a layer of mist had fallen over the sound, cutting visibility of the lofty peaks but thoroughly enhancing the mythos. All that was missing was some new-age pan flutes and I would have felt like I was in an Enya music video. Waterfalls that originated amongst the clouds crashed into the Sound around us, trees dangled precariously from the granite walls, and rocks in a myriad of colors sparkled beneath the shockingly clear, turquoise water. Our guide handed out cups and we drank from the waterfalls (much harder than it sounds, it required one person in each two-person kayak to paddle like all hell straight at a waterfall, which is actively trying to knock you out of your boat, while the other person leans over with a cup in hand as far as possible without capsizing the boat in near Arctic waters; that said, the water tasted marvelous). We even cavorted with a little fur seal, who would dive under our boats only to surface and rub his little seal face with his paws before taking off in a series of barrel-rolls. In true New Zealand fashion, however, the fur seal is not in fact a seal, but a sea lion. I’ll let this one slide though, because either way, he was adorable.

4) Penguins are far cuter than they have any right to be. To add to the list of things that New Zealand allows that I can’t imagine ever happening in the States, I spent an hour on a bit of beautiful coast near the southern tip of the South Island, watching Yellow-Eyed Penguins come in for the night. We were able to walk right down onto the shore, the only provision being that we please not get within 10 meters of the penguins, as was politely requested by the informative signs. Not only could we be down on the same level as the penguins, but what we were walking on was not rock, as it seemed at first glance, but actually the remnants of an ancient, fossilized forest, as attested by rocks in the form of tree stumps and fallen trunks. A few other tourists and I gathered near sunset and huddled quietly on the timber-rocks, watching as tiny penguins with bright yellow eyes rocketed out of the surf like little missiles and plopped to their feet on the edge of the outcropping. After preening for a while like small feathered supermodels, they waddle-hopped into the bush behind us. I’m not normally a big bird proponent, but there is something so easy to anthropomorphize about penguins - the way they shuffle along reminds me of how I must look after working out too hard and realizing I can’t bend my legs. While I’m on the subject of birds, New Zealand is something of an avian paradise. There are only 2 native mammal species on land, both of which are bats, but somewhere around a gazillion native birds (that’s a conservative estimate). Unfortunately, a fair amount are now extinct, including the Moa, an answer to Australia’s emu, and the bloody enormous Haast Eagle, with its 3-meter wingspan, which hunted it. Others, like the Kakapo (go ahead and laugh, I did) are teetering on the brink. The Kakapo (I’ll wait) is a particularly sorry bird - it is a large, flightless, tree-climbing parrot, which breeds, on average, every 3 years, and has a habit of freezing when threatened. The Maori used to hunt them by walking through the forest and shaking the trees; the Kakapo would fall out and freeze, I suppose somehow assuming that the hunter would think it was just a huge, feathered nut that had fallen to the ground. These poor buggers seem to be an obvious example of Darwinian evolution going horribly wrong, and much respect to New Zealand for making an attempt to save these creatures which seem to have less of a survival instinct than the dodo.

5) Kiwis are proud to let their freak-flag fly. Want to cover your front yard in a towering maze of teapots? Go for it; New Zealand will help you turn your obsession into a tourist attraction. Want to cover your entire house with polished paua shells (what we would call abalone), interspersed with other bits of Kiwiana (the official term for anything proudly indicative of New Zealand, which apparently includes flip-flops and a wooden ducky)? Knock yourself out; when you die, your living room will be transplanted into one of the national museums. Want to pretend that it’s still the Victorian era, and ride through cobbled streets on your penny-farthing bicycle? New Zealand has a town just for you, Oamaru, where you can hang out with other people who prefer 1914 to 2014 (full disclosure - I loved historic Oamaru, with its crooked streets and old-timey stores complete with classic advertisements and goods. Almost everywhere I walked into smelled wonderfully like my grandmother’s attic, and if it had been summer, I could, in fact, have rented a penny-farthing bike and cycled peacefully through the streets, assuming I could manage to ride one without falling head over bustle. Oamaru is also the home to the Steam Punk Museum, which feels a bit like walking around in Tim Burton’s fever dream.) I suppose this is the logical extension of taking a bunch of Brits and sticking them on an island thousands of miles from anywhere, where their personal quirks can metastasize into full-blown, delightful oddities. 

Thanks Steam Punk, now I'm going to have nightmares.

6) Kiwis have a fathomless faith in human ability and a decidedly non litigious society. Alternatively, they may just be completely mad. While I have pointed out a few things that I have been allowed to do that genuinely surprised me, the most shocking, bar none, was being allowed to make a knife. A very genuine, very sharp, hunting knife. In the process of making this knife, I was allowed near a forge, a belt-sander, various saws, a machine capable of punching holes in steel, and, perhaps most dangerously, very strong glue. I am proud to say that I continue to have all my fingers and various other extremities, and did not land myself in Kiwi prison; apparently, you cannot sue someone for an accident-caused injury, however, had I accidentally stabbed someone, I absolutely would have gone to jail for Grievous Bodily Harm. At least I wouldn’t have been financially liable. The man running the workshop was a crazy old coot named Steve, who, along with his wife Robyn, made sure that we didn’t re-enact a Quentin Tarantino film. Steve also managed to smooth out our mistakes and ensure that our knives didn’t end up looking like third-grade science fair projects, whilst giving the impression that we were all master craftsmen without any need of help. At the beginning of the day, as I watched my hunk of steel go into the fire, I felt like Hephaestus, and imagined myself swinging my hammer down gloriously, shaping metal as easily as I would shape dough. I pulled my steel out, set it on the anvil, gave it a mighty whack, and realized that I had made exactly zero impression on the glowing metal. A couple more whacks, and my arm was certainly hurting, but the steel looked fresh as a daisy. I battered it for ten more minutes, at the end of which I’m fairly certain my nascent knife was laughing at me. Steve fixed the metal with a well-placed whack or two and fixed my ego with a well-placed compliment or seven. After that, it was a process of sanding and polishing and shaping, hacking out bits of wood to use for the handle and trying not to glue my fingers together. In the down-time, we practiced throwing axes and ninja stars. Sadly, I think ‘assassin’ is probably not going to be a viable line of employment for me. At the end of the day, no one had stabbed anyone, and eleven of us were the proud owners of hand-made knives - I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think I will name mine Lucy and use her as a toothpick, or possibly to hunt cockroaches.

Perhaps my favorite moment of the last 1000 kilometers, however, was one of perfect stillness. I had walked to a little pool near the base of Franz Josef Glacier, about 10 minutes down a winding path through the trees. I have never before felt like I was encroaching on a natural place, but coming around the last bend of the path I felt myself moving slowly and breathing quietly. The image of the black pool, surrounded by frost and reflecting a mirror-image of the glacier and the crystal blue sky, seemed so delicately beautiful, so tenuous, I was afraid that I might startle it into non-existence if I moved too quickly. Peter’s Pool is slowly being consumed by the surrounding vegetation, and sometime in the next generation or two it will disappear completely into the wetlands. But for this moment, it was heaven.

The Great New Zealand Road Trip: Kilometers 0 - 450

My one night in Sydney, between getting off the Indian-Pacific and flying to Christchurch, I scrubbed my boots with a toothbrush. Not my tooth-brush, thank god, but a toothbrush donated by one of my roomies at the hostel. If you have never attempted to scrub cow shit and mud off of hiking boots with a toothbrush, allow me to recommend it as an exercise in persistence and gag-reflex control. At a certain point, I decided that I had had enough, tossed the toothbrush in the garbage, and tied my minty-fresh boots to my backpack. New Zealand can just deal with it, I thought. And New Zealand did deal with it, by detaining me, confiscating my boots, tent, gardening gloves, and gardening hat and taking them into a back room to do unspeakable things to them. After a thorough search of my bag to make sure I wasn’t trying to smuggle any other illegal dirt over the border, they returned my violated belongings to me - my tent still can’t look me in the eye. But on the plus side, they were very very nice while they did all this, so it was really hard to feel even remotely put out. Welcome to New Zealand!

Death's Corner. That's the actual name.

The next morning, bright and early-ish, I set out, with a rough map, a slightly broken GPS, and a vague idea of where I was going on my Great, If A Little Short, New Zealand Road Trip. The good news is that I have become very comfortable with driving on the left, so much so that I’m not sure I’m going to remember how to drive in the States. The bad news? New Zealand is committed to being the most terrifying place I have ever been behind the wheel of a car. My first day’s goal was to drive Arthur’s Pass, which goes up through the Southern Alps before descending to the ‘wild’ west coast. This, in hindsight, may have been a poor choice. Kiwis, as far as I can tell, like their roads as twisty as possible, the better to pretend that they are in The Italian Job. Get up into the mountains, and not only do these roads twist like a dancing snake but they also bob up and down and veer along sheer cliffs and dizzying precipices. Kiwis also appear to not believe in guard rails, so there is usually nothing between you and car pancake. Throw in confusing or missing road signs, more grit than I have ever felt in a road, and occasional rockfalls, and I think it’s a miracle I didn’t just turn around and head right back to Christchurch, where I might get swallowed up in an earthquake, but at least I couldn’t fall off of a mountain. Instead, I navigated these roads as best I could, stopping frequently to let death-seeking kiwis zoom past me (obviously, their driving classes involve some kind of Advanced Cornering workshop, because I still can’t fathom how they took some of those turns at the speeds they did; I saw road signs advising 15km/hr around some of these bends, which I think is roughly walking speed, and these lunatics were zooming merrily down at 100 km/hr. I can only assume they were all making ‘zoom zoom’ noises with their mouths while they went). I was not assisted in any of this by the fact that my car, try as it might, could barely exceed 80 km/hr on the downhill stretches, and probably weighed only slightly more than my backpack. I was concerned that a strong gust of wind would blow me off the road, or that one of the mountain parrots that landed on the roof whenever I stopped would get the idea to pick the whole car up and fly off with it. 

To quote a Kiwi I met, "They may be native, but they're still a bloody pest."

The difficulty of driving Kiwi-side is further compounded by New Zealand itself. I suppose you could say New Zealand is pretty. It would probably not be inaccurate to say that every 5 minutes I almost swerved off the road because something breath-taking appeared in front of me. I mean that literally, by the time I reached my destination that first night, hours after I should have because I kept stopping to take pictures, I was gasping from beauty. Never mind the soaring mountains, which rise up majestic and aloof above Christchurch, only to descend into supple rolling hills and soft green valleys on the west coast side, like Tilda Swinton suddenly turning into Scarlet Johannson, and never mind the rocky crags and icy lakes, and tiny towns nestled between the peaks; even if you can get through all of that without feeling like you’ve been transported into some land out of a fairy tale, the sea then rises up in front of you, as you’re still negotiating the final twists and turns of the foothills. This is, perhaps, the American in me, but there was something just utterly astonishing about turning a mountainous corner and having the ocean open up in front of me - I could still see snow-covered peaks in my rearview mirror, what on earth did the sea think it was doing that close to craggy summits! To compound it, the sun happened to be setting over the ocean as it came into view, creating this sun-gilded landscape of rich green fields, wind-swept trees, and iron grey beaches. I believe I actually started swearing at New Zealand at that point, because do you know what there was on this perfect stretch of land, this gem nuzzled between mountains and beach? Cows. And sheep. An occasional alpaca. Surveying the ocean, chewing their cud, and just generally not appreciating that they were in a paddock in probably one of the most beautiful spots in the world. In that moment, I was almost offended - I mean, what had those cows done to deserve that view - but in hindsight I think this is a huge part of New Zealand’s charm. It just doesn’t know how stunning it is; all the other countries must hate it for not even having to try. 

Just to really finish off this mental picture, you have to know that these are not normal cows. These are like half-breed yetis, venturing down from the mountains. They’re roughly the size of a ute, and covered in thick, luscious fluff that makes them look like they just had a perm. They also, apparently, are part mountain goat, because I frequently saw them halfway up a rock wall, happily eating whatever it is that grows on a rock wall. The sheep, likewise, are so absurdly fluffy and wooly that it seems like someone stuck their tiny black heads on as an after thought, presumably because giant walking yarn balls can’t feed themselves. 

After venting my anger at the privileged barnyard animals, and successfully managing to stay on the road and not swerve off while staring at the jade fields and amber sea, I finally pulled in to one of the most charming hostels I have ever seen. It was a two-story wood cabin, that smelled delightfully of wood smoke and mothballs. Perfect, I thought. The proprietress showed me my room, and then the lovely communal kitchen that felt like home, with quirky art and little jars with tea and coffee and a bin for food scraps to be fed to the chickens. There was even an old wood-burning stove, crackling merrily away, and a bunch of hot-water bottles hanging on pegs. Charming! Or, you know, a necessity, as I found out that night, when the temperature plummeted and I realized that no one in New Zealand appears to believe in central heating. I ended up sandwiching myself between 3 hot water bottles and stealing the quilt off the other bed in my room (there was no one in it, I promise), a situation which actually kept me fairly warm, but made getting up in the morning, when I could see my breath creating frost sculptures in the air, a wee bit unpleasant. Until I became more accustomed to the cold, I trudged around New Zealand looking vaguely homeless - I didn’t really have clothing suited to the weather, so I compensated by putting on everything I owned, and some things, in a variety of sizes, that I had borrowed, until it looked like I had rolled around in a laundry bin for a bit and then just walked away with whatever stuck to my body. I never quite got to the point of wearing socks on my hands, mostly because by this point my socks resembled a 5-year-old rag abandoned at the back of a veterinary hospital, but I compensated by walking around with my hands stuck in my armpits like a bad Saturday Night Live parody. 

Hokitika Gorge. Can you find the unicorns?

However, as soon as I started wandering around the next day, I didn’t care if I was freezing - in fact, I probably would have happily sacrificed a finger to New Zealand if it would have made her happy. There’s only so long that it’s interesting to read someone else rhapsodizing about how beautiful a place is, so suffice it to say that New Zealand made me wish I was a painter, or a poet, because there would be no other way to capture the unadulterated joy of that landscape. While I know that I have gotten significantly sappier as I’ve gotten older, I don’t know that a landscape has ever made me tear up before, but New Zealand did, with ease. That first day, among other stops, I visited the Hokitika Gorge, which looked like the kind of place where unicorns should bathe and fairies should sleep on flower petals. I didn’t want to leave, because it didn’t seem possible that such a place could actually exist; I was afraid I would try to look back and it would be gone, or at least covered in graffiti and strewn with litter. I found this constantly amazing, everywhere I’ve been in New Zealand - they basically let you go wherever you want, and no one seems to abuse this privilege. There are very few fences or gates, DO NOT ENTER signs or glass walls preventing you from cavorting on those mythic rocks. Just try not to hurt yourself. Perhaps some of this is because everything is in the middle of nowhere, so they figure very few people will actually figure out how to get there, let alone manage to do anything completely stupid. The road to the Hokitika Gorge meandered its way through farmland, across paddocks, around people’s yards; occasionally there would be a small, hand-painted sign telling you that you were still heading in the right direction, and you just had to hope that they weren’t leading you out into the middle of nowhere to feed you to the cows. Maybe that’s why their bovines were so big, because they were fed with gullible tourists. I decided I didn’t care, because the farmland was beautiful, damp and deep green, with picturesque fences and barns of weathered wood covered in moss. If I had to be fed to a cow, at least I would know if was for a good cause.

That night, after my day of adventure, which was rounded out with a hike around a forest-buried lake and a tree-top walk among the branches of giant Rimu and Kahikatea trees, I swung by a glowworm glen near the hostel. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I wasn’t prepared for a tiny pitch-black hole amongst the trees with a small sign that simply said ‘Glowworms’ with an arrow. I trudged in with my flashlight, keeping it pointed at the ground, and was rewarded with thousands of tiny glowworm stars twinkling on the walls. However, I was apparently feeling a little jumpy, perhaps all that time spent thinking that crazy Kiwis were going to try to feed me to their livestock, and as I turned around to head back to the car, I saw something looming over my shoulder. My heart tried to make a run for it, and I snapped back around with a little yelp, playing my flashlight over the poor defenseless glowworms until I realized that what I had seen was not a vampire, a rapist, or a giant spider-monster, but had in fact been…my braid. Swinging behind my head. Because I am Kate, the Hair Heroine, the Battler of Braids. I think maybe it’s time for a haircut. 

Glowworm Glen - what a tourist trap looks like in NZ

I Like Trains: The Indian-Pacific

I made a very grave mistake my second night (of three) on the Indian-Pacific Railroad, which was whisking me (slowly, a gentle whisk) from Perth to Sydney. I had too many glasses of wine. I refuse to say that I was drunk, because I think by normal, two-feet-planted-shakily-on-the-ground drinking standards, I was not too bad off; however, when your entire world is constantly in motion, your standard for drunk changes. I should have known something was wrong when it didn’t feel like the train was moving anymore, when I walked back to my room and thought, ‘Golly, my balance is improving, guess I’m getting my sea legs!’, when in actuality I was probably bouncing down the corridor like a loosed pinball. Needless to say, being hungover on a train was not an experience that I would care to relive, although I will say that there was something wonderful about the knowledge that I had nowhere to go, no place I had to be, no commitments I had to keep up. I could just lay in my little berth and stare out the window and wish, fervently and unrealistically, that the world would stop moving. 

Loungin' in the lounge car

Apart from this brush with inebriation (which I maintain was not my fault - 1) it was an open bar, which just requires you, at some point or another, to take advantage of that and 2) how can you walk away when an older gent is telling you the sweetest and most heart-breaking love story you’ve ever heard? Answer - you can’t. You just keep drinking with him.), I cannot recommend a long train journey enough, if you’re of the disposition to find joy in staring out windows and reading and chatting with septua- and octogenarians. Happily, I am of such a disposition, so my three days on the Indian-Pacific were a completely blissful taste of what I hope to be like when I’m 80 - that is, a classy old broad riding trains and drinking just enough wine and maybe flirting with the 30-year-old porters. The train itself was gorgeous, all gleaming wood and sparkling brass, with upholstery that occasionally made you wonder if it had been redecorated since the ‘70s. I had originally planned to ride in the equivalent of coach, which would have involved spending my 3 days in, more or less, an airplane seat. Luckily, my beautiful parents convinced me that this was a horrible idea, and so I found myself in Gold Class, which just sounds so horribly swanky. After coming off of Lyndon Station, I found myself somewhat concerned about what I could wear that was worthy of Gold Class status - if I wrapped a slightly battered sarong around my shoulders, could I pretend it was a shawl?

Yeah, I took a mirror selfie. I'm not ashamed.

My berth (I’m trying to use train lingo, but truthfully, I have no idea if that’s the correct term or not; let’s just pretend it is shall we?) was a wonder to behold. When I first walked in it was in its ‘daytime’ configuration - one-person bench seat, a small table, and a little stool. There was a tiny vanity tucked into a corner, with a stainless steel washbasin that folded down (I have to confess, this was one of my favorite parts of the compartment - it was just so damn clever!) and a skinny little half-closet with two very skinny little hangers. And of course, there was a window that took up almost the entire wall opposite the door. The whole room was perfectly comfortable, and roughly the size of a double bed. Where, I wondered, would the bed actually come from? And where would it go? I never saw the bed-making process in action, because I preferred to believe in the magic of it (magic created by porters, I am aware). I would return from dinner to find my bed pulled down, slotted perfectly between the closet and the vanity, with a chocolate on my pillow. Honestly, I would have slept on a concrete slab as long as they kept putting chocolates on it; it doesn’t take much to convince me that you are running one classy establishment. Luckily, this bed was far from a concrete slab; it was a veritable nest of comfort. During breakfast, my bed would just as magically disappear into the wall. Sadly, this time they did not leave me chocolates. 

Sink!

No sink!

Truthfully though, I didn’t need the chocolates, because the main purpose of the trip appeared to be to stuff as much food into us as physically possible. I would have loved to have seen what the kitchen looked like on that train, because they were turning out some truly impressive meals. Breakfast was only two courses, but lunch and dinner were both three course meals, with cream-laden desserts. We had a swanky dining car, complete with chandeliers and beautiful table cloths and settings, which provided some entertainment when we went through the bumpy stretch of track that straddles the Blue Mountains, as people desperately tried to keep their plates from forming a suicide pack with the cutlery and jumping to the floor. Each meal was a bit like a round of dining roulette - you never knew who you would be seated with. Shockingly, this never really became awkward; I sat next to some people who I absolutely loved chatting with, and some with whom it was a bit more trying, but if ever the conversation completely lagged, the train itself provided ample fodder for opinion. The biggest complaint people seemed to lodge was that they had trouble sleeping, but I found it sublime. Blame it on my parents driving me around to lull me to sleep when I was a baby, but I have trouble keeping my eyes open in any moving vehicle, particularly trains. Give me a comfy bed and no responsibilities, and I probably could have simply slept the 3 days on the train away. My only regret is that I didn’t realize sooner that I could sleep with the blinds up (because who, exactly, is going to be peeping in the window of a moving train? If you have an actual answer to that question, please don’t tell me, because I imagine it will really creep me out); only on my last night did it occur to me to keep them up, and I was rewarded with a view of an impossibly starry sky while I dozed off.

While sleeping on a train is heavenly, waking life on a train is a recipe for slapstick comedy. I frequently felt like I was in a farcical reimagining of Murder on the Orient Express. The train hallways themselves were the image of another time, all twisting corridors and warm, dim light, and the hush of carpeted footsteps. But then you put people into the mix, and it become a dance of absurdity. We all lurched around like zombies with an inner-ear disorder, one hand braced against the wall, the other clutching at the air as if maybe we could convince it with a good grope to turn solid and give us a little support in this rocking environment. Two people most certainly could not pass each other in those narrow hallways, so people would resort to trying to squeeze into open doorways, frequently stumbling into the middle of someone’s card game, or nap, or conversation, or would have to attempt to back up to the end of the corridor. Each car ended in two doors, which meant that to pass from car to car you had to shimmy through a series of four doors, which all held very strong opinions on whether they wanted to open or not. Given that we tended to travel in packs before and after meals, this led to conga-lines of people snaking through the corridors, rushing to hit the narrow stretches before a conga-line came from the opposite direction, initiating a very polite conga-battle. These on-going negotiations were further complicated by the physical impediments that some of the good folks with me were subject to; all I can say is, I definitely saw a cane wielded as a weapon, although this wasn’t particularly effective, as the narrow corridor prevented a good follow-through on the swing, so the lovely lady had to be content with using it like a cattle prod. There was another woman whom I only saw in the lounge car (because yes, we had a lounge car, with a full bar, and it was bloody beautiful), I assume because she couldn’t actually fit down the hallways. No judgement - after a few of those meals, I wasn’t convinced I would fit down the hallway, let alone through the door to my room, which, when the bed was down, opened to about a 30 degree angle before sticking fast on said bed. 

However, I rarely ventured out of my room, except at feeding times (I kept telling myself I would skip a meal, but the food was just so damn good that it seemed a shame to miss an opportunity to eat it); I was perfectly content to just watch the world go past my movable hotel room, as I came to think of it. There’s something stunning about a train journey, about seeing the earth change around you. With commercial planes, the pleasure of the journey is lost - you’re not anywhere, really, when you’re in a plane, and even the sensation of flying is lost, because you are so disconnected from the world. But on a train, it is all about journey, about scenery rushing past, about day falling into night. In some strange way, traveling by train felt more like flying than flying does, I think because I could sense the thrill of movement. We operated on ‘train time’, which effectively meant that we ignored the time zone we were in until it suited the conductor, when an announcement would be made and we would all, presumably, synchronize our watches (although my phone didn’t seem to understand this game). I loved this idea, as if we were in our own little bubble, and the world outside was just a movie put on for our entertainment. There was an inter-train music network, with six different stations to choose from - I found the big band/standards/swing station (it seemed only fitting) and tried to pretend that I was a glamorous and mysterious woman with a dark past. More than once, I danced in the very small space in my room available for this activity - this destroyed any hope I had of being glamorous or mysterious, as the only way to make my attempts at dancing more comical is to put them in a tiny, moving, confined space. I was more successful at showering on the train (who didn’t fall down? This girl!), which I was much more amused by than I probably had any right to be. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the shower - it was a nice shower, good water pressure, pretty roomy - but I couldn’t get over the fact that I was showering in a moving vehicle. I just wished they had put a window in there, and piped in the big band music; I never would have left. 

Thanks Cook.

We did have occasional off-train excursions, of which my favorite, hands down, was to Cook, a little town in the Nullarbor (Latin for ‘no trees’, and aptly named). Cook exists solely to resupply the trains that come through. It used to be much bigger, but now boasts 5 residents. 5. The next closest towns are many hundreds of kilometers away. The town used to be big enough to have a school, a hotel, and other assorted buildings, which have now all fallen into a state of disrepair; in short, Cook is just this side of a ghost town. We had half-an-hour to wander around, and I promptly stuck my head into the old school (don’t picture a school, picture two largish rooms stacked on top of each other) and was utterly not disappointed. Old farming equipment rusted on top of broken desks, tattered posters hung in shreds from the walls, and someone had spray painted GHOST across one wall. As I poked a little further and wandered past a mound of books mouldering in a corner, I found an animal carcass, mostly skeleton but with enough fur hanging on to give it maximum horror-effect. I am not too proud to admit that my courage started to wane a bit at that point, and I decided the train sounded really good again. We also wandered a bit around Kalgoorlie and Broken Hill, the gold and silver capitals of Australia, respectively, where I saw open-cut mining pits so big that they looked like something out of a James Bond movie, where the super villain is creating a super hole to extract super uranium, or something like that (assume it’s one of the bad Bond movies). The bus driver in Kalgoorlie also helpfully pointed out the two brothels still in operation, one of which even gave historic tours! Sadly, we didn’t have time to stop.

Super-uranium super-bulldozer

But back to that hangover. When I wasn’t chowing down that day in the dining car (because even a hangover wasn’t going to keep me from that delicious food, plus I had a lunch date with two lovely gents from New Zealand), I was mostly curled up in my berth alternately snoozing and watching the low scrub and red earth of the desert roll past. But just before sunset I roused myself, made a cup of tea, and was treated to a spectacular show outside my window. We were just pulling out of the high outback (the Indian-Pacific track, at one point, goes 460-some-odd kilometers without a turn or bump, the longest straight stretch of track in the world), but the terrain still provided a fairly unobstructed view of the sky. As the sun set out the left-hand side of my window, night fell on the right, giving the impression that night wasn’t a temporal phenomenon, but rather a place, a locality that we were pulling into. Dusk never really happened, but rather the sun went down in orange flames and then night pulled a blue curtain over the bush and the Milky Way came to life above us. It was stunning. I meant to tell my new friends about it at dinner, but I became distracted by the most perfect ratatouille, and by the time they rolled out the lavender panna cotta, I’d decided that that sunset was just for me anyway.

Perth: A Quick Reflection

I immediately decided that I liked Perth; unfortunately, I proceeded to not spend enough time there to confirm or refute this decision. An evening before heading to Noggerup, a day before heading to Exmouth, an evening after returning from Lyndon - this is all I had. Not really a fair amount of time to make a decision on a city. In the interest of fairness, however (I mean, I wrote about Brisbane, I have to write about Perth), here are the, albeit brief, impressions that I had of Perth.

- Damn, this city looks like San Diego. I know I’ve mentioned similarities between Australia and San Diego before, but Perth was pretty astonishing. The relationship to the ocean, the architectural styles, the sense of growth and development, the burgeoning music and arts scene, all felt so familiar. It was shockingly simple to stare out the window of the bus and watch the palm trees zip past and convince myself that I was back in Southern California. Perth is considered one of the most isolated cities in the world, so I’m not sure what that designation says about San Diego, its ‘sister city’; maybe SD is just really good at making friends with the loner?

- Damn, this street is cool. My first night in Perth, I got off a late-ish flight and, as I was good and ravenous, asked the nice man behind the metal grate at the hostel (my hostel was not in a great area, I gathered, either that or the staff couldn’t be trusted to not maul the backpackers) if there was somewhere he recommended for dinner. He looked at me blankly and said that everything would be closed. It was just before 9:00. I assured him I wasn’t picky, pub food was completely fine, but no, apparently even pubs wouldn’t be serving food at that time; Perth, he informed me, likes to eat early. He gave me a map and pointed me in the direction of a ‘good area’ with an air of hopelessness. I trekked over a bridge and suddenly spied brightly lit, colorful trees off to my left. We all know, at this point, that I am a huge sucker for Australia’s penchant for glow-in-the-dark trees. Turning down this mall (in the traditional, not American sense - it was a walking-only street), I could hear loud, classy American voices; this is rare, not the loud and American part, but the classy part. Moving past my neon trees, I spied an outdoor movie screen in front of me, placed at the front of a small amphitheater, concrete steps happily covered in bean-bag cushions and cushy-looking lounge chairs. There were even a few food carts! I plopped down and kept waiting for one of the guards milling around to ask me for a ticket, or pick me out as a tourist and force me away from the free entertainment, but I was left in peace to enjoy my veggie burger and watch Double Indemnity, surrounded by twinkling trees. When the movie ended, much to my delight, they projected a cartoon of a crackling fireplace, with figures leaping and dancing through the flames, while playing classic jazz music. A well-dressed couple in front of me sipped on coffees while their kids juggled and hula-hooped at the base of the steps. I noticed two theatres to my left, and a library and a museum to my right. This, I decided, is probably the best street ever designed. 

- Damn, that’s some good damn theatre. I was lucky enough to see 2 shows while I was in Perth. The first was young, energetic and delightfully experimental; the second was perhaps the best piece of theatre I’ve seen in Australia. The first show, Uncle Jack, was a new play from an established Perth playwright, mixing together a post-WWII PTSD drama with a coming-of-age story. It was in a tiny little black box theatre with limited props and just two actors. It was passionate, enthusiastic, and very Australian - I left feeling almost stoned from the joy of creation that simply swam off of the stage. Alternatively, I may have been a little high from asphyxiating on the red dirt that they were kicking up with abandon (this was before going to Lyndon, so I was still a dust virgin). Before the show started, the gent sitting next to me struck up a conversation. As it turns out, he was an actor, currently in rehearsal for a production of As You Like It, at the State Theatre, right next door. When I returned from Lyndon, he graciously gave me a ticket. I am not a theatre critic, and I won’t force a theatre review on an unsuspecting audience, so suffice it to say that this was the best production of AYLI I have ever seen, and on my top-ten list of best Shakespeare productions I have had the pleasure to watch. Also, the State Theatre of Western Australia is a simply beautiful structure, all glass and mirrors on the outside, and all wood inside the theatre. Going to the state theatre is obviously a posh night out in Perth - I was in my ‘nice’ outfit, and still felt painfully conspicuous, like I had ‘filthy backpacker’ tattooed across my forehead. It probably didn’t help that I had just gotten back from Lyndon, and I was paranoid that the smell of cow dung was clinging to me like those squiggly lines of smell around a cartoon character. No one gave me a dirty look though, so either Australians are very polite (I don’t buy it), or it was all in my head.

- Damn, that’s what patriotism is supposed to look like. I was lucky enough to be in Perth for ANZAC day, which is a day of memorial for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps that served in World War I, particularly at Gallipoli. In some strange rush of enthusiasm, I decided to get up in time to watch the dawn ceremony in King’s Park. The problem, as I see it, with a dawn ceremony, is it requires you to be up and about before dawn; so here I was, stranger in a strange land, wandering the streets in the darkness of 5am, trying to figure out where King’s Park was - I mean, it’s bigger than Central Park (take that New York), how hard could it be to find? I eventually saw a man in a crisp white military uniform of some sort, and decided that he seemed a good person to follow; as we climbed up a hill, presumably towards the park, I started to notice more and more people on what had previously been the deserted streets. By the time I had entered the park and was walking down a beautiful esplanade lined in towering white-barked trees, I was part of a flood of people, a nearly silent river of humanity sweeping towards the memorial. I don’t know why I had expected the ceremony to be somewhat poorly attended - I suppose I granted the same degree of laziness and a distaste for early mornings to the entire population of Perth that I have myself. As it was, I was part of a crowd of nearly 40,000 that stood, in more or less perfect silence, and watched a very simple, but very moving ceremony - many wreaths were laid, bagpipes and trumpets were played (including my new favorite bugle call, Last Post), the Australian and New Zealand national anthems were sung by sweet-voiced children, and the meaning of ANZAC day was addressed in a short and effective speech. All the while, the sun rose over the city of Perth, which was laid out beneath us. After the ceremony, everyone dispersed around the park and proceeded to lay out picnics and blankets, pull out frisbees and bikes and rugby balls, and just generally enjoy the sunshine. Which leads me to…

- Damn, that’s a nice park. It’s huge. I’ve stayed in towns smaller than that park. I spent an entire lazy day just wandering around King’s Park, alternately exploring the native flora or lying on a sarong watching the world go by, and I know that I only saw the tiniest fraction of it. There are beautiful gardens laid out that showcase the plants and trees of different regions of Australia, and the world, there’s a treetop walkway, and streams and lakes, and towering Boab and Eucalyptus trees. Should you get bored looking at trees (sacrilege!), the park is built on a hill, so you have all of the city of Perth and its harbors upon which to gaze. It’s better than Central Park; there, I said it, and I won’t take it back!

There are so many parts of Perth that I didn’t get to explore - Rottnest Island, Fremantle, really anything outside of the CBD. Perth, I’m sorry I short-changed you; next time, I promise to pay more attention to you, so as not too add to your isolation complex.