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.