Pack Travel Part III

(This is part 3 of my holiday season South Island camping trip. For continuity, it will probably make much more sense for you to read parts 1 and 2 before reading this...or not, do whatever you want.)

As we descended from the heights of Mueller Hut, a chapter of our trip came to a close. It was palpable. Within 24 hours, we would be picking up (Dr. Dirty) Michael from the Queenstown airport. Our 4 member group to that point had a kind of equilibrium to it - Joe took pictures, Lee was the forward thinker, Keegan ever optimistic and knowledgeable of walks/hikes he wouldn't be able to go on...and I drove or something. I'm sure the others didn't think about it, but I wondered what the addition of a fifth person would do to the group dynamic - especially when that person is already pretty damn dynamic. I mean, I had just gotten used to sleeping on the ground in a small tent next to Joe and his hairy skull, and now I had to add another dude to my cramped sleeping quarters?

But before all that, we had yet another picturesque drive south to Queenstown, stopping for a much needed and delicious burrito in the town of Wanaka. The locale is also known for its large and eponymous lake, where people in the area go to get away. This was a bit confusing. For those of you who don't know, Queenstown is where everyone in NZ goes to get away. So I guess that makes Wanaka a vacation spot from tourists for locals. Anyway it's a small oasis tucked into the mountains. After a brief trot around town made mostly for digestive purposes, we went to Lake Wanaka, with it's elongated beach line, plethora of bikini-clad denizens of all ages, a random painted van or two, and a tree sitting out in the lake.

Kids will do anything for a high nowadays.

It's not just some normal tree. It's out there, like 100 meters into shallow water, just kind of growing and being a perfect foreground to the sharp background peaks. It's name is the Lone Tree, and it's the 'most photographed tree in New Zealand.' I'm not sure who monitors those statistics. Probably Google.

Joe taking picture of Lone Tree:  "Lone Man and Tree" -E Schrauben 2015, asking price $12,375

After a brief stay in Queenstown, which I'll write more about later, we picked up Michael from the airport and drove south. This was the 'free-form' portion of our trip in which we knew we wanted to see Milford Sound, but that it wouldn't happen for a few days. 

We meandered toward New Zealand's South Coast, stopping on the way to see a free glowworm cave. Clifden Caves are naturally carved into private property limestone, a (you guessed it) sheep farm, but are totally free to the public and really easy to access. Glowworms are awesome (like a truly unique sight), twinkling in seemingly uninhabitable places. In the depths of these caves, they provided an astral setting when the headlamps were switched off. Unfortunately the lack of light for proper visualizing of glowworms also means that good pictures are hard to come by, especially with a phone's camera.

Cool Beans.

Silk hanging from glowing butts. Anyway you'll have to take my word for it that they're really cool.

The road from there was unplanned; we didn't even have a place to crash for the night. Luckily for us, I'd gotten some good advice on an app that lists all of the camping spots on a map in New Zealand, with pictures and descriptions and prices and facilities. Very helpful. We settled on a free beach side camp spot. It was way way down south (46° S!) near Pahia. It's mostly meaningless, but that was definitely the most south (the southest?) we had all ever been.

The campsite itself was just a patch of grass, somewhat guarded from the ocean winds. We settled right in and made a big community pot of chili and hot dogs. We all really enjoyed eating out of the community pot together:

How quickly humans can become feral. You might not be able to see all of Michael since he's in his jungle camouflage sleep roll. 

An actual campsite fire? So rare in New Zealand. And despite the best efforts of the wind and wet wood, we were able to make a nice burn. I was clearly unimpressed.

So south and right around the longest day of the year that the sun didn't set until ~9:45 pm. You get a lot of serious thinking done over the course of an hour long sunset.

The sheen of receding tide and light.

Cheers!

Pack Travel Part II

Much of the area known as Canterbury near Christchurch is flat. Like straight-as-an-arrow highway bracketed by miles and miles of roaming sheep. For us, travelling in a rented 2005 Silver Nissan Wingroad, it's all we saw heading west from Christchurch for a solid hour. But then a transformation occurs. It's gradual at first:  a cloud-touching outline of a distant jagged peak, a steadily more windy road now meandering through rolling hills.

By the time we reached Lakes Tekapo and Pukaki right in the center of the South Island, we were lulled into the seemingly steady and irresistible pull of the mountains now suddenly drawn so near. A slight curve over a rise and we immediately snapped out of our pacified state. Carved from ancient glaciers and made larger by the human installment of local dams, these lakes provide utterly stunning foreground for the nearby mountains. 

This type of water, which we encountered several times that day, always turns heads. It's color is magnificently blue, the type of blue I want people to think my eyes look. But up close, the water is clear, crystal clear, and frigid to the touch. After a night of camping amid sandflies and dust, the cold water is a brutally effective way to both wake up and feel remarkably cleaner.

Unperturbed and stretching into the distance. Incidentally, great rock skipping locale.

Joe approves.

That night we spent in the wonderfully named Twizel at a holiday park with showers! The lakes above sit just to the south of Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. And the next night, that was our destination. From Twizel it was a beautiful and pleasant drive up past Lake Pukaki, into the valley below the mountain range:

What could he possibly have made us stop for in this desolate valley...

Oh, that.

After settling Keegan in to his camping spot for the night, we started on our overnight track. The goal for the day/night was a 3-3.5 hour hike directly up the side of a mountain across from Mount Cook, gaining roughly 1000 meters during the climb. This would be accomplished with heavy overnight packs, the destination being a hut at the summit where we bunk down for the night. The first 1.5 hours of the hike consisted of just going up stairs, roughly 2200 of them - great butt workout. The next hour was a scramble up a very crudely marked path consisting of clambering and scrabbling and drabbling (okay now I'm just making up words) over alpine tuft/rock mixtures, boulder fields, and even some patches of snow. And then we got to do it all again (though downwards) on the descent the next day. 

I like to think I take pictures with a story in mind, a classic 5 act structure providing an intro, crescendo, climax, decrescendo, and resolution. Here are my pictures to tell this story:

Intro. Three smiling fools before their bodies turn to hardened and sweat-soaked machines.

Crescendo or rising action (see what I did there?). Lee and Joe lag on the last snow/ice field. C'mon guys we're so close!

Climax or summit. See we actually went there.

I'll pause here to describe the view from the hut, since pictures will not do it justice. Or maybe Joe's pictures will, but I don't have access to those yet. Sitting on the deck of Mueller Hut, the view in a solid 270 degree arc spanning west to east consists of mountains, all over 2000 meters in height. It's...well, spectacular. The hut view made me feel both big and small: because of their immensity, the mountains seem extremely close, as if one could reach out and dust off some hanging snow drift. Yet every 20 to 30 minutes a deep rumbling, almost thunderous, sound from one of the plethora of peaks would sweep down to the hut. These were avalanches, a result of the summer New Zealand sun beating down on these lofty peaks. Small though they were, they imbued me with a feeling of insignificance that only mountains and a clear night sky can create. Not a lot of words were exchanged during these long sits.

The only way to show you what I was looking at and that I was there. #reverseselfie

Early the next morning I scampered up nearby Mt. Ollivier to get the hut and a tiny full moon together. Fog makes image blurry. Good morning world!

Decrescendo or falling action (but no actual falling). Same snow field as day before, 8 am start. Cold and dewy. 

Resolution? We didn't get injured (too badly, Lee fell through some snow) or die. As we like to say at the end of a hike, 'Alive!'

Cheers!

Bonus:  This wild man and his wild hair gained some water weight on the descent from Mueller Hut:

Is he that photogenic or do I just really like pictures of him? Both.

Pack Travel Part I

Hello readers (mostly just me and my dad)! It's been about a month since my last post. Rest assured, I did some travelling over the holidays. This time I even changed islands, from the North Island to the South Island of New Zealand. The next couple of posts will chronicle the highlights from two weeks of camping, hiking, driving, drinking/partying, and community meals. We were a group of 5 determined travelling companions...a fellowship if you will - two long time and great friends, Dr. Michael Spoelstra and Joseph A. Katarsky, and my wonderful sister Lee and her husband-to-be, Keegan Peters.

*  *  *

One thing becomes immediately apparent when traveling in a group - everything takes a little bit longer. This probably is pretty obvious. For me flying alone, I have no patience for the minor setbacks in an airport that I'm causing:  a mistyped booking reference number, a belt that was forgotten to be removed, a checked bag that is half a pound over weight. 

So now imagine me traveling in a pack, albeit a group with quite a bit of travel experience. And now add that one of those group members is very recently physically disabled, and that he's (normally) the most helpful, mobile, and punctual member of the travel team. This is the scenario I faced on our way down to the South Island. Keegan, not more than 26 hours earlier, had learned that his right foot was broken - a result of a lost Kung Fu battle in Macau ("But you should have seen the other guy"), a 16 ton pagoda crumbling down onto his foot in Hong Kong, or...just falling off a narrow street curb. Whichever you want to believe. In any case it was a bummer and presented us with a number of relative difficulties. The most nagging of these being that we all felt bad for him on several levels, and because there was a collective guilt circulating related to being able to properly experience the trip versus his crippled lifestyle, only able to look on forlornly. He's a champ, and my experience is that the group wants what's best for everyone. In this case it meant Keegan hopping along as best he could while we experienced the trip we had all originally planned and wanted.

Luggage cart used as a walker. Action shot!

Four of us began the trip:  me, Lee, Keegan, and Joe; Michael would fly in and meet us 4 days in. The trip began with a Christmas Day flight into Christchurch.

Obligatory airplane sunset picture.

After navigating our way to the hostel in Christchurch late at night, we all slept very well because 1) it was Christmas Day evening, meaning nothing was happening in Christchurch, 2) it's Christchurch, which is known mostly for its earthquakes and not much else, and 3) we all knew that we'd be sleeping in tents and on hard ground for the next ~10 nights, so hostel bunk beds seemed pretty cushy. 

The next morning began with me having to go back to the airport to pick up our rental car, and then we immediately hightailed it out of town. Perhaps I'm being a little too harsh with Christchurch, but it did feel pretty sad and desolate save for the random street art (children avert your eyes):

Side of a dilapidated building.

We drove northwest toward Arthur's Pass, which was nice. But the highlight of the day was undoubtedly Castle Hill, or as I like to call it, my ideal playground. I'll let the next several pictures do the talking:

Enter the Labyrinth. RIP Bowie.

Prepare yourself for at least 20 more of these 'Joe is staring into the distance' or 'Joe is really into photography' pictures in coming posts.

Photos do not capture the scale and vastness, but you get the idea.

Oh, there he is again. Wonder what he's thinking...

"This is my house now. I live here."

Surprise!

A climbing paradise, for all ages and skill levels.

One more for good measure.

That night we camped out for the first time in a Department of Conservation free campsite by beautiful Lake Pearson. As I slapped the first sandfly from leg, enjoyed my first propane-fueled community pot meal of pasta and tomatoes and sundry vegetables, and laid down to my first night of sleep on hard ground, I knew that many more feelings of being uncomfortable, awestruck, dirty, relaxed, and just generally in good company were to come.

Cheers!

This wine evokes a taste of...grapes

This past weekend, I went on a group wine tour on Waiheke Island, a paradise just a 35 minute ferry ride northeast from Auckland.

Goodbye Auckland.

Hello island life.

Waiheke has 33 wineries/vineyards dotted around its culture of beaches, no traffic lights, intermittent farmland, and a fast-growing property market. It confusingly feels exclusive, yet totally accessible; it's an intermingling of rolling and rocky hills (think northern Italy), sparse though commercial beach front (Oregon coast), and rural simplicity (Michigan or Wisconsin or Iowa or take your pick. Just don't pick Ohio). There's something about Kiwis, people from an island nation, getting really excited about going to another (still smaller) island that is endearing. If nothing else, it enables one to pretend to be a sommelier for a day.

This was my first wine tour. What comes to mind when you think of a wine tour?  

• A single bead of sweat forming on the nape of your neck as you burn to a crisp under a blazing sun
• The parched back of your throat as your try to form the phrase 'dark blackberry aroma and smoked cedar palate'
• The fact that the desiccation in your throat comes not so much from the heat as the lip-smacking dryness of your last Cabernet Franc
• The pinch of your sunglasses as they slide down your sweat- and sunblock-greased nose
• Mental gymnastics to convince yourself that this sixth Syrah had a more peppery aftertaste than the first, second, or third, but that the fourth was still the best (or was it the fifth?)
• The omnidirectional rolling green vineyards that don't so much scream 'fresh and outdoors' but whisper plainly, 'aridity'
• The glare of a morning and midday sun that melts into a desultory hazy glow after 15 tastings

Waiheke had all that and much more.

I could spend time describing the wine in detail, or at least the wineries and their differences in tastes/practices/sizes/locations/etc. But it's unlikely I would do any of it justice. Luckily, I did take pictures (as did Rhiannon, with her superior camera).

I can't help but think how cool it would be to have a vineyard maze, similar to a corn maze but with more drunk.

Three consecutive and fast-paced wine tastings can make you forget your surroundings. The irony is the wine makes the greens more green and the blues more blue. I'll let the scenery do the talking:

Am I too young to plan my retirement here?

Out the shuttle window. Our shuttle driver, an adorable old Kiwi named Graham, was probably between descriptions of multi-million dollar homes when we stopped here.

Actually an island in the southern hemisphere, or just Napa Valley?

After much wine and bumpy rides in undulating landscape, topped off with duck and risotto and gelato, there's only one thing the human body craves, nay, needs - a beach nap. We took a quick stroll down to Oneroa bay:

Turn this into a pastel painting and you have basically every Thomas Kinkade work ever.

Prime location to close eyes, contemplate meaning of life, and develop midday wine tour hangover.

Finally the day came to a close. This meant a pleasant stroll back to the ferry terminal, where even the drabness of public transportation became a late afternoon seaside spectacle:

Tranquil. Tranquilo. Tranquille. Whatever language you want to use, it's still damn peaceful.

Cheers!

It's all relative

I've gotten pretty bad at taking pictures (some would argue I've never been a good photographer), mostly due to indolence. So bear with me, this will be a thoroughly link-embedded post.

If there's anything that travelling (and entering my late-20s, I'm such a sage now) has taught me, it's that relatives are typical, while absolutes are scarce. I would guess this thinking was formed when I took a Modern Physics course some 7 years ago, and then solidified later in Quantum Mechanics. A solid year and a half of physics is spent learning that a set number of equations and their derivatives govern the motion of the universe, and that by simple application one can explain the world and all of space around us. These absolutes led to many important advances in human knowledge and thereby technology, industry, and extensive life-improvement. But (wait, ahh, what?) no, they aren't absolutes; there's a mind-bending caveat:  move fast enough and time and space become relative, dilating and contracting respectively...oof. Not only did this make me scratch my head, it also turned me into a skeptical (and probably annoying) SOB.

Plainly that's a literal and pedantic example of relativism. Position and time can make things relative in other more anecdotal ways as well. For instance, we've just entered December. For me, this time of year has always meant the arrival of winter and snow. Brace yourselves, Winter is Coming, and for a lot of you in the northern hemisphere, it's already arrived. I usually have mixed feelings about the implication of winter's impending arrival - desultorily shuffling in layers of warm clothes from the front door to the bus stop (con), reading by a crackling fireplace in pajama pants that are not only acceptable but necessary (pro), replacing normal dietary foods with anything that is hot and liquid (pro going in, con coming out...), the brief reflective warmth from a morning sun glistening off the layer of fresh fallen snow (pro), losing what little tan the summer sun left on my pale skin due to the mostly overcast and brusque days (con). In brief it's a toss-up between this and this...¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Holiday season 2012. Pajamas and resulting smile for confirmation of the previous paragraph.

Hey look, an adorable picture of a hedgehog in its native habitat (the front yard of my flat). This photo has nothing to do with the theme of this post.

Down here in the southern hemisphere, summer has arrived. I sleep with my windows open every night, wear shorts whenever I can, and don't have to compromise my fashion (ha, yeah right) for layers of strictly functional body-warming clothes. And in New Zealand, the summer sun is special - that is, dangerous. Here we have a lovely (human-induced) ozone layer hole of sunshine. Seriously, read that NASA article, "The ozone is so thin in this part of the world that the weather report on the nightly news includes five-minute sunburn alerts." If my math is correct, that translates to a 30 second sunburn for my freckled redheaded friends. I can only imagine the horror.

[All this potential for quick and painful sunburns leads me to this sidebar PSA: wear sunblock.  Yes it can be greasy/oily on application and can make your skin sticky (annoyingly attractive to bits of sand), and sometimes the smell isn't even that great. But what's a bit of discomfort now relative (see what I did there?) to shaving skin and time from your life?]

So everything is relative - even the things as absolute as my fettered understanding of when and what seasons are, or the (seeming) immutability of the sun.

Cheers!

Bonus. A few other relatives:

• Time zones:  I find these super fascinating. They were originally introduced in the mid 1880s as a way to standardize shipping and industrial trade, but now are often political and confusing. Look at this map. China spans 5 geographic time zones, but chooses to put everyone (1.4 billion people!) on the same time. Some regions/cities even have half or quarter time zones. Weird.
• Thanksgiving:  Though not actually a holiday here, with enough obdurate Americans and their desire to eat and drink to excess, anything is possible. I had both a Thanksgiving dinner with Rhiannon and flatmates and a Sunday Thanksgiving picnic hosted by my American coworker, Renee. Some things were different - instead of turkey, lamb and BBQ chicken and sausages were served, and instead of backyard football, it was touch rugby.

Throwing a ball backward to move forward is confusing. Also if the goal is to not get touched, I have failed miserably (lower right). I also want to point out how insanely smiley everyone is here.

But the important things remained the same - thanks was still given, though in a big circle of mostly strangers and ambiguous thanks,

Speech!

and my desserts were traditional and highly butter-infused.

Sweet potato (here called kumara) bake and homemade molasses pumpkin pie, both with brown sugar - pecan topping. Nom nom.

Signs

New places and cultures present implants with a number of potential confusing, terrifying and/or embarrassing situations that require explanation:  language (or just terribly mangled accents), cultural norms, driving on the WRONG side of the road, coffee consumption levels, having hermit crabs as pets (this is an admittedly Midwestern thing, but has not stopped being funny for people I tell here), strangely shaped and colored foods...the list seems endless.

Signs (street, construction, hiking, and everything in between) are a constant reminder of these slight but stark dissimilarities in culture. Because people are inherently pretty dumb and need information force fed to them, signs have to be as uncomplicated as possible. Simple illustrations, few words, and bright colors often suffice.

Perhaps what I'm about to present will only be of interest to my American readers who don't experience and interact with these signs on a daily basis. Presented below are several examples of signs that I've gathered that made me AC (audibly chuckle, new more-tempered replacement for LOL?).

On the sidewalk outside of a train station:

How many of you knew what 'busking' was?

No ambiguity in New Zealand street signs:

@schroeder.dan says, "...but what happened to poor Beatrice when she went that way?"

Construction signs always get their point across succinctly:

Just one lonely shoveling dude. 

"Surprise! Trucks"

When on a hike here, signs for navigation are pretty scarce. You'll often see something like "MacCLAREN TRACK 4 HOURS," with a wooden arrow pointing in an enigmatic direction. But advisory signs are plentiful, and can be pretty perspicuous,

'DANGER, brought to you by Auckland City Council.'

or vague,

Spoiler:  a certain smart and swinish character from Lord of the Flies met his fate this way.

or both,

Landslide, whee!

or just too thorough.

So, like, don't move?

And finally, the funniest and most unexpected, are the signs reminding people to use basic toilet etiquette:

A little sad this wasn't a complete limerick.

Yes, a repeat picture from a previous post. Still hilarious to me.

My good friend, Ricardo, who has traveled parts of SE Asia, tells me the above sign is necessary. This is because toilets are designed for squatting. He even provided an extremely helpful picture/diagram of this lovely bathroom procedure:

No caption necessary.

Cheers!