The Adventures of Newo

Annapolis is Nice

2009-06-04T19:31:00.000-07:00

I have left houston, and I am now visiting my other sister Dian in Annapolis, Maryland. She has been pestering me to visit for some time, and since my nephew (her son) Grey graduates from high school on Saturday 6 June 2009, I decided to come out. It has been great fun. Tom Hartman, Dian's boyfriend has a 20 +/- foot trawler that is great fun to take out on the water.... I better back up first.

My sister lives in downtown Annapolis, just a few blocks from the State Capital/Naval Academy/Town Dock, etc. She lives about a block from the water. Tom lives on the next street over, and he is a little bit closer to the water -- Spa Creek. And although it is called a "creek" it is hydrologically connected and the same as Annapolis Harbor and Chesapeake Bay....in other words it all looks like the same body of water. Annapolis is located on a penisula bound by the Severn River, Annapolis Harbor/Chesapeake Bay and Spa Creek. Annapolis harbor is litterally filled to brimming with some of the nicest, biggest private yatchs I have ever seen, both sail and power yatchts. The residences are tightly arranged ala old world/eastern cities, and the residences on the water proper all have docks and boats, some quite nice (and large -- your $1M yatcht parked out back of your $2M house, must be nice...).

Tom's boat is on his neighbors dock at the end of his street. I arrived on Sunday 31 May, and it was a gorgeous blue bird day. From the plane, I could see zillions of these boats out on the Bay enjoying a sunday cruise. That evening, Tom, Dian, Grey and Grey's Aunt Jane VanDeMark took Tom's boat over a couple of creeks to dinner. What fun to take your boat to the restaurant for dinner! And what a beautiful sunset.

The next day I was able to swim in Anne Arundel County's nice olympic swimming center -- the first of three days in a row of swimming (hooray!!). After a winter where i went from three pools to one to none, it was sooooooooooooooooooo wonderful to be able to swim for three days in a row in a beatutiful, HUGE swimming pool. My back was happy, and so was I!! :-)

After the swim, Tom lent me his bike, and I biked around Annapolis in full tourist mode, taking pictures of the quaint colonial architecture, the many boats and yatchts and so forth and so on. In the evening, Dian and I took her two sea kayaks down to the public floating dock at the end of the street and paddled around Spa Creek. It was so much fun! and how glorious to burn so many calories after such a disappointing winter!

On Wednesday, Elise, Camille and Alex arrived from houston. It is nice to be here with both my sisters. It got a little gray and drizzly, but we went out in Tom's boat for an evening cruise anyway. We went around the Naval Acadmey and up the Severn River to another "creek", moored to a mooring (like that one?) and had some wine, cheese and crackers. The kids loved the boat ride, and we all loved getting on the water and enjoying the beautiful green trees lining the shore. It didnt last too long, as just a few minutes after stopping for the wine and cheese hour, the sky let loose its rain, and we made a mad dash back to Annapolis. It was fun, and just a little bit wet, but not cold wet, fun wet. (Does that make sense?)

The next day (today, Thursday 4 June, as a matter of interest), Elise, Alex, Camille, Gray and I took the Metro into DC for a little patriotic tourism in the nation's capital. We walked down the mall, stopped at the Washington Monument, then went on to see the big man in his big chair (Lincoln Mem) and the Vietnam Memorial, which I have not seen in person before (so to speak).

The Vietnam Memorial is a highly effective piece of public art. I am sure you are aware of the monument, the names of America's 58,000 war dead inscribed upon black stone as it slowly descends 8 or so feet into the ground, and then ascends in a wide wedge. Symbolic of America's descent into an unwinnable war, the names on the black stones resemble the enscriptions on gravestones. Plus the dark color of the stone reminds us that Vietnam was a dark chapter in our history. There are flowers, and gifts left beneath the names of loved ones. Visitors touch the stone and the names; many take rubbings of names from the wall. In the Lincoln Memorial, there is a sign out front requesting visitors to be quiet and respect the memory of our most popular president. Not very effective as it was somewhat loud in the memorial. (For some reason the whole mall seemed to be crawling with every middle schooler in the country -- something about it being the last week of school back east?) Meanwhile, the Vietnam Memorial was silent. As we descend into the monument, the street noise goes away, and the large numbers of visitors were truly, respectfully quiet. It was touching.

After the visit to these memorials we went to the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian (both North and South America) for a really delicious, authentic (?) if expensive native american lunch. Then we explored the museum which was surprisingly good. I dont know what I expected, but it blew my expectations away. The collection of artifacts and replicas is amazing, and the study of the pre-columbian cultures was interesting. In some cases, the exhibits of particular tribes was quite frank about how much of their culture was lost during the European conquests -- some populations being only a few thousand today. Others highlighted the tribes' attempts to rebuild and keep what part of their original cultures they still have. I hope that this excellent museum helps the native americans re-connect with their native cultures, and I highly recommend this museum to anyone who visits DC.

Our timing was perfect as a steady rain began during lunch and continued into the night. We returned to Annapolis to a great dinner at Dian's with Dian's family (Grey, me, Elise and her kids) and Tom's son's and daughter's families. It was great to meet more members of his family, and they are all great people, just like Tom. Oh and Jane VanDeMark joined us as well, and it is nice to re-connect with one of the VanDeMark clan, too. (Brian returns from Uzbekistan later tonight for Grey's graduation.)

It has also been interesting to watch the unfolding Sonia Sotomayor/Obama's middle east trip unfold on TV. Everyone here goes to bed early (by 10PM, which of course is only 8 PM in CO, so it feels awfully early to night owl me) so in the late night hours, I like to switch back and forth between CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and Daily Show/Colbert.

Fox News seems more and more out of touch with reality as they continue their vitriolic attacks on Sotomayor and Obama. The reaction to both on MSNBC (left) and CNN (center) seems to be mostly positive, but to watch Hannity and Glen Beck you would believe that Obama is out of his mind, and Sotomayor is a racist. The most off-base and absurd contention is the Fox claim that Obama says that America is now a muslim nation? And Obama is not promoting democracy? Where do they get these obvious falsehoods from and do people really believe these nutheads (Hannity, Beck)? Why would Fox want Obama to fail? Why is bomibing these people and occupying their countires better than trying to work peacefully from a common understanding? Would we respond well if someone bombed and invaded us? The right-wing seems increasingly out of touch with reality and thankfully we now have leadership that is trying to bring the world back together, and undue the tremendous damage to US prestige, power and influence the previous administration has wrought. Ok enough politics, I am sure Ashley is fuming by now anyway, sorry WW but i call it like i see it.

Newo is OUT.

The Dark Lord Newo travels again

2009-05-29T15:32:00.000-07:00

Howdy yall. thats right I am in Texas. I am on a two week off season hiatus, one week in TX the second in MD.

I left the Butte on Saturday 23 May, and after the four hour layover in Denver we leave the gate on time. However, the dark clouds that hovered over the mountains while i circled concourse B unleashed their fury and we went from one runway to a second and finally off a third to arrive about a 1/2 hour late in Houston. My folks picked me up and, thank god for big cities, as I could (and did) have a extermely delicious meal (chicken chili rellenos) at Hugo's at 10 PM.

My folks are the third resident to move into this super-swanky brand-spanking-new high rise condo on Kirby at Westheimer. Its 30 stories, but each story is 12ft or so tall. My folks live on the 13th in the northeast corner -- great view of downtown, with the medical center to the right. Interesting part of town, minutes to the museums, downtown, galleria, Joel Osteen's mega church.

Since my folks have just moved in, the awesome spectacle of the 11 foot floor to ceiling windows is somewhat soured by the oodles of unpacked and somewhat unpacked boxes, and stuff kinda strewn all over everything.

I was looking forward to sleeping and swimming, and was somewhat hindered on both counts: from the balconly I can look down onto the spectacular, large pool on the club level, floor 7. Oh it was a sight for sore eyes! Tomorrow I can help my parents unpack and then swim in that delightful pool! Nope, the pools ready to go, but the condo hasnt gotten the two permits yet for the pool -- by next weekend. OK.

And, my parents have installed blinds which are transluscent, so as the sun rose over downtown, it shone right into the media room, in which I was staying. Yall will remember that dinner was over late and we got in around 11:30 -- tour an all. the 6AM morning sun came a little early for 1/4 vampire me.

So, after waking, my dad and I walked over to WHole foods for double shot of wheatgrass (hooray!) and muffins. I get myself a sticky bun. WE come back to the condo, and then it is unpack three houses worth of books and stick em into one condo's 11foot floor to ceiling bookshelf wall. So I help my folks unpack over the weekend, and visit with my sister Elise once she is off her two days of nursing shifts, see the kids (we play Risk). The kids are excited as this is their last week of school, and Camille is excited about going to Camp Cheley in Estes Park. This is the same camp that I and Cousin Grey, and the Browns went to among others. Monday night at my sisters -- perhaps I will be able to sleep in!

Nope, 7 AM sharp, the endless lawnmower and leaf blower noises as the small army of mexican garderners descend for two hours of primping the neighbor's yard. ANyway, lunch with my folks and Elise, then I am off to Corpus -- finally, I will at least be able to get into the teeny tiny twin dolphins pool!

I arrive in Corpus, get my swim on (just have to tripple or so the number of laps I swim to compensate for the small pool), and have dinner with Aunt Lou at the Yacht Club. It was kinda strange walking into Mom and Dad's condo that was empty except for two twin beds and the joinery. I wondered if it would make sense to stay in an empty condo, but Iwas so busy, I didnt have time to hang out anyway, just enough time in the condo to swim and sleep. Wednesday was touring the ranch with Jimmy and Jon (looking at dirt), lunch with Ashley Carrol (it was so great to see her again!), off to Robstown to the insurance people and FSA, helping Aunt Lou figure out her new satelite TV, meeting with Jacob Sudhoff and then swim, swim. By the time I could get to dinner it was 10PM! Thurday was equally long. I met with Joe Newcomb at 9:30 and that went until 12:15. Very interesting. A lot of developments to consider. Then it was back to the condo to collect the last remaining items and then hit the road.... except the last remaining items ended up being a whole carload and 3 hours of packing!!

On the way back to houston I stopped to take pictures of the new wind project in Odem.
Then I have the worst meal Ive ever had in Houston at this terrible Thai place in Rice Village and now I am off to 100% taquito which gets an A in the Fearless Critic.

until next time

newo out

This is the end . . . (but we save the best for last)

2008-11-29T21:16:00.000-08:00

So, as I said, I love New Zealand, and as I left Fiordland, I was sent off with two separate rainbows? Well apparently, New Zealand misses me, too. I got an email today 30 November from Earl, the guy I met at the internet place in Te Anau. and he said:

Dave,

NZ cried when you left, for 3 days straight...the gods were sad that you had gone, which means that you must come back. So 2011 it is...ha!

It rained sat, sun, and monday. We were not even able to get on the glaciers which only happens maybe 3 times a year, and a small town in the north had the worst flooding in like 26 years. It cleared for us finally on tuesday so we got a good day out on Abel TAsman, but the whole drive up the west coast was socked in and grey...so it goes.

Took a look at the blog, good stuff, you're fun to read.

Hope CO is treating you well. take care, mate. ha!

But before i go on, Ashley reminds me to disclose the tail of the "Angie Episode." I dont see it published in the blog yet, so i feel that I must do that before I forget anymore of it..... So rewind to Gili Meno, it was the third (?) night of five on Gili Meno, the sweet little island off Lombok (500 residents). Gili, you will recall, is the place that restored our faith in people in general, and redeemed Indonesia in our eyes. And we had met a local who defriended us named Bar. We were out late the previous night (or late for old geezers like myself), and we were both tired and agreed to make an early night. After our late dinner, I left Ange and Bar at the Bar for one drink before hittin the sack, and Ange was like, "yeah just one drink, and an early night for me." Since I dont drink no more, I said, see ya later, and went off to bed.

I awoke at some later hour, probably to the stench of burning rubbish from next door, and Ange wasnt home yet. I looked at the time, I dont now recall what time it was except that it seemed late for an "early evening."

I lay there in bed, and thought, "Ange is a big girl who can take care of herself. ... Just go back to sleep, dave, she is all right. ... She's traveled all over the world, and knows how to take care of herself. Dave, go to sleep! ... Where the hell is she? ... sleep, Sleep, SLEEP! ... What has happened to Ange?"

Afte a half hour or so of that, my mind is going into overdrive, and I can see Bar (who obviously rather fancied Angie) with all his buddies at his bar.... I cant re-think it....

Angie is sweet and loving and caring and happy and the world would be a much better place if there was more Angela Morgan Booths in it. (Think Bubbles from the Power Puff Girls, her alter-ego.) She easily makes new friends, because, hey, what is not to like? So Ange is also faithful, dedicated and determined, and she and Jay are, well you know, pratically married and all, and she told the reality of her situation to Bar as soon as it was clear that he really liked Angie (and was hanging around with us because of Angie) more so than me.

He and all his friends got really drunk, all 10 of his hard drinking bar buddies.... All of them enthralled with the blonde haired beauty, and .....

OK now I Can Not go back to sleep, and start thinking about what I gotta do.... Contact Dian; ask her to help get the US state department in action. There are no local police on Gili Meno. Who are the authorities....

How could I have just left her with all these drunk guys? ... Jay is going to kill me.... Andy (her brother, also lives in CB) is going to kill me....

By now, I have to go search for angie's beaten and broken body.

So Gili Meno is small. Among one of the densest populations on earth, there are only 500 people living on it. you can walk all the way around it in about 2 hours. There is only one direct path from our "bungalow resort" to the only bar on the island, which is where Bar works, and where they would be drinking. So I head down the path, just knowing that I would run into them before too long....

I get to the bar, and there is no Ange, there is no Bar .... One of the 9 or so guys (the staff at the bar/restaurant sitting around laughing and carrying on) there asks, "Can I help you?" (or the equivalent in english is my second language.) I say, "Where is Bar?" "Bar's closed." "No," i demand, "where is Bar the person?"

"Oh!... He went that way," pointing from where I had just come from. I'm like seriously getting worked up by this point, "Did he have a girl with him?"

"Yeah, yeah, ... they went that way," again pointing right up the very path I had walked down. I think I said something else to the only drunk guy who was paying any attention to me, something not nice like, "you better not be lying to me."

So, I start back up the path towards our bungalow resort in a near panic now, and decide that I need to go back along the beach. That is the other relatively direct route that they could take from the bar to our bungalow. The path parallels the beach, but in a few places there are some trees/bushes that obscure the view to the beach. It is still possible that I missed her and Bar on the beach somewhere in between bar and bungalow.

Now I am walking along the beach, headlamp in hand, its beam sweeping under the branches of the trees along the edge of the beach. I get back to our bungalow resort and think, "well, she has to be in the room." I approach our bungalow, but alas, there is no light on it (the windows are wide open as it never dips below 31 C, and we want whatever breeze may come our way), and as I get to the front porch, I can hear inside . . .

Full Panic!! It is quiet as a tomb! There is nobody in the bungalow! I let out a "What the fuck!"

I am instantly relieved when I hear Angie's voice reply, puzzled, "David?" She and Bar had indeed returned via the beach, and I indeed missed them in one of the very few spots where I could not see the beach from the trail. She had got back to the room, thought I was sleeping, and was creeping around as silent as a mouse, not turning on any light, or using her headlamp, so as not to wake me!

"Jeezus, Angie dont scare me like that," i blurt out. "You were really worried about me?" angie askes. "Yes..." then i spilled all of the nightmare scenarios of what might have been, simply because her one drink had (obviously) turned into many.

"Oh no, nothing like that... your so sweet to be worried," and other such. "No we were looking at the phosporessensse in the sea! Come look, it will make you feel better!" Obviously quite a bit more than one.

We go look at the green glow in the tide as the waves crash on the beach... It is lovely. Angie tells the story of how first off, they poured her a large one to begin with, and when she was done with it someone else had already poured her another one, etc, ad nauseum.

The next day, when Bar learned of the story, he was all, "You thought I could do what?! But Angie is such a big girl, and I am so small!" Which is true, they are probably about the same height, and she probably does out weigh him .... Ange is a burly Crested Butte Mountain Girl who can run up mountains and ski down them; plus, she's captain of the women's hockey team and a hockey referree, soo .... Why was I ever worried in the first place?

SO that is the "Angie Episode." Thanks Ashley for the good reminder!

Now, where was I? Right, I had tried and botched yet another picture perfect moment on the trip: I missed the killer avalanche on Mt Cook. (Like i missed the monkeys doin it on the side of the road, and the sweet little girl's smile from the truck/"school bus" on the ride accross Lombok.)

So Mt Cook was super cool. I arrived about 12:50, and after the hike, got lunch at the restaurant Liz recommended, and left the Park around 4 PM

As I drive towards Lake Tekapo back in New Zealand's miniature Colorado plateau-type landscape, it is very windy. The vanette is acting like it is going uphill the whole time (even though it and the gas needle drops at a steady pace. Every now and then a variable gust comes along and bats the little vannette around. Every so often I climb something that looks just like a dyke in Holland. But instead of it holding water back, it is a conveyance, a very wide ditch hauling a massive amount of the turquoise glacier melt water from the Lakes to irrigate the farms/tree farms in this central dry area of New Zealand.

So I stop in Lake Tekapo the town at the base of Lake Tekapo, another one of these enormous turquoise lake. Opposite are yet more of the impressive Southern Alps, and I get gas and take pictures. There is a cute, old, one room sized church made of stone on the shore of the lake, and further down the coast, there is a dog statue (looks a little bit like Skunkers), commemorating all those sheep dogs that helped the white man tame this dry area of New Zealand into sheep farms. But I had to wait a bit to get my picture as at the monument was David from Wellington, and unknown (he did the talking) who was a native of Christchurch. They had been overseas for a couple of years, and were re-aquainting themselves with their home country. Christchurch got a picture of himself sitting on the dog sculpture to immitate a similar picture his parents had of him as a child on the same statue. He did a really good impression of how the sheepherder talks to his dogs, "Hey, yo Queenie, hup, who-how" with a fair amount of short whistles thrown in. It was quite humorous, and made me think that this guy could easily be an actor the way his whole tone changed and how deeply he committed himself to the "sheep-cowboy" personality. They tell me that this part of New Zealand, Aorangi, is usually very hot and dry, yep a regular desert. Doesnt surprise me at all. After all it was hot today, first day I was really hot wearing a t-shirt in NZ. They hop back into their car with a cheerful, "enjoy the counry" and take off.

Anyway, as I left the shores of the Lake, I took what I hope will turn out as a great picture of the ubiquitous tour bus disgorging its contents of Japanese tourists, snapping away, for what could possibly sum up New Zealand more than tour buses full of Japanese tourists?

At this point, I am tired and realize that I will not be meeting Gen in Christchurch tonight, and decide to spend the night in Geraldine. Now that I have decided to stay in Gerladine, a new song haunts me as I climb out of the town of Lake Tekapo back onto the high, windy plane. Its the tune of Joleen again, my "happy" song in asia, (and Joleen naturally despised in Tonga), but substitute "Gerladine" for Joleen. And i am happily making up lyrics to the tune, "Geraldine, Gerladine, Geraldine, Geraldine. 98 kilometers to go, before I can take a shower." or "please have an internet cafe so i can charge it to my credit card. Because I dont have enough coin to feed to that kiosk."

So Lake Tekapo is set down low off the high, dry, brown (green only by use of copious amounts of the glacial turquoise water), windy plain, made the town pretty nice. Out of the wind there were trees, and the Lake with the Mountains behind, and obviously not very wet here at all. Not only was the landscape so very like the American west, but that town, too seemed very American. Not much to it except for several gasoline stations, and some strip malls along the highway. Unremarkable. Yep, very American it felt.

Once back up on the windswept plain, it was quite windy again, and the vanette continued its flat-feels-like-uphill-climb along the plain. The only hint that I am still in New Zealand vs the US are the different road signs, "give way" instead of "yeild" and that I am driving on the wrong side of the road. There is even wagon wheels on gates in the ranch fences. It is so windy that my closed door with windows all rolled up sounds like the tornado in the Wizard of Oz.

But before too long, as I approach the brown mountains, the landscape once again changes dramatically. I enter cloudy, mountainous terrain, and climb Burke's Pass along another "Scenic Reserve." I love that they call what i presume is public land not part of a Park or "Natural Area" a "Scenic Reserve." It is interesting that the landscape I envision as ideal for America consists of cities dense and tall like asian cities, and vast areas of undeveloped countryside as "Natural Reserves."

The pass is not long up and much further down on the back side than going up. Sure enough, that was a high plain, very much like the Colorado plateau, escept of course that it is much. much smaller. And I am now dropping down into green farms, green tree farms, more typical new zealand landscape, singing my Geraldine song (and having a lot of fun with it) and drive into Fairlee, which looks all the world like any ol' POS town in Texas like Menard or Post. Bowl me over again, New Zealand has a texan landscape, too? I have to stop and take pictures.

Geraldine, however, is a cute little town with a delightful campervan park that is set in a park with huge trees, etc. And I have a good night feeding coins into the kiosk and posting some of the blog, etc. I get a nice nights sleep, but again wake up ridiculously early and get all sad about this being my last morning in New Zealand. The two songs stuck in my head this morning is Don Henley's song about the last xyz, and Billy Joel's My Life. I take a nice shower, and leave the campervan park to find a nice place for a big, real breakfast.

As I reflect and look back at the trip, it is amazing to me how many things worked out so perfectly. The weather, incremental at best, was always seemingly perfect for my planned activity: Queen Charlotte Sound in the sun, the west coast in the sun (a very rare event I am told), Fiordland with both rain for waterfalls and in sun to see the mountaintops with fresh snow. Beautiful in Queenstown. My longest drive across country from Qtown to Geraldine was bright and clear. That landscape was so familiar that I booked across it (instead of the constant stopping and picture taking that characterized the rest of the driving) and got to spend a long time at Mt Cook, while still making it plenty close enough for my 12:00 noon vanette return.

And what a country! So many different kinds of landscapes, and they come fast and furious, one on top of the other. What great people. Charming and nice and friendly. I really, truly do love New Zealand. I really want to come back to New Zealand. I really want to do the tramps while I am able. And Kaharungi, I cant get it out of my head. That place really sunk its claws into me, and I saw just barely a tiny bit of it . . . . even after everything else, that part of the country, around Nelson still has a strong appeal to me.

And I laugh at myself, the strange evergreen trees that are all bushy and in such apparent order, because they were! Pruned up, evenly spaced tree farms. And me taking all these pictures of the "evil alien invaders" the pretty lupine and lillies that are merely the countries invasive foreign weeds!

I find an outstanding cup of chocolate and a great breakfast at a coffee shop with a lovely garden dining area out front. They have the coolest painting on the wall. A landscape with one of the sheep herder cowboys, done in a very painterly way. I track down the name of the local artist, and his web site. Look into the gallery that has two other of his paintings in the window, and leave town for the short 2 hour drive to Grant's Ascot motors in Christchurch.

I make it there without incident (stopped once for directions, "Oh you are quite close it is just back there a couple blocks, and then one block to the left.") and as they are checking me out of the vanette, Gen pulls up in her rental car.

Her trip to Stewart Island sounded at least partially successful, but she did not get to see the elusive Kiwi bird, one of the main reasons she went to Stewart Island (that and there are only 420 residents on that quite large island; it would probably take well over a week to walk all the way around it). While we spent the day in Christchurch we went into a small aquarium that also had a "kiwi house," something like a very big gerbil cage where a pair of kiwis are kept. So she did get to see these funny birds with no wings and very long beaks. They looked pretty muppet-ish, a funny squat round body on these two stubby fat legs, with a lumpy head attached to an improbably long and thin beak. No wonder they were thought to be a hoax when whites first discovered skeletons of them. But the little bugger moved very fast when he ran on those little squat legs, again the memory reminds me of the road runner cartoon.

Gen took me to the airport and I started my 27 hour return home. Christchurch to Aukland, Aukland to LA, LA to Houston. So I get to LA by 1:30Pm the same day I left Aukland, the same day I left Geraldine and saw the Kiwi ... gaining several hours for crossing the dateline. My original flight on Continental was for the next day at 11AM. After clearing customs, I went over to Continental, and tried (unsuccessfully) to fly stand-by that same day to Houston. Now that Ivan has moved to Vancouver, I dont have any friends in LA anymore, why should i spend a whole day there? The supervisor tells me the problem is that Frontier issued the ticket so Continental cant do anything with it. Plus its an eticket. So i go to frontier and they are about to send me to Houston routed thru Denver, when the current departing flight to Denver is cancelled because somebody ran into the airplane with some big piece of equipment. No room for Dave. I call over to Southwest and they want me to pay $405 for a walk-up one way ticket to Houston. Eventually the super nice Frontier ticket counter lady prints me out a paper ticket and says, "maybe Continental can do something with this ticket, because now this is like money, dont loose it!"

I take it back to Continental, and the guy I already spent 1 + 1/2 hours arguing with sees me coming, rolls his eyes, and disappears into the back room. I patiently stand in a line of one, me, and wait for a new women to finish her 42 keystrokes with long pauses in between at her computer then calls me over. I lay out the entire sob story to her (again, as this is the fourth time today). Thai cancelled my flight. They sent me back home a day early from my vacation. I am just rying to get home after 6 weeks abroad. Cant you please help me?

She checks my facts (confirmed that Thai indeed cancelled my flight tomorrow), prints me out a stand-by ticket, checks in my bags (no charges for 2 bags let alone 1), and after only 2 1/2 hours of effort, I am thru security and something like #7 on the stand-by list for a full flight to Houston that leaves at 5:30PM. I am the last person on the airplane, as they bump the guys whose seat I fill into first class. Sweet seat too, as it is the first row in economy and the wall provides something like an extra foot of space.

So now here I am in Houston, and it has been a long, happy thanksgiving week with my family -- Mom, Dad, and sister Elise all live here, with niece Camille and nephew Alex. Before t-day, Mom, Dad and I go down to corpus, rent a u-haul truck and pack up the big art pieces, and some of the more fragile/valuable items from their condo to bring back to Houston. They are officially moving from Corpus and are going to live full time in Houston. As I drive the ridiculously over-sized truck out of Corpus on wednesday, I am treated to a stunning sunset over the Aransas Wildlife Preserve. In the faling twilight the sunlight reflects on the occasionaly squiggle of the plowed rows of the rich dark earth of the coastal plain. And there are a number of raptors who come and settle atop the powerline posts along the side of the road, scanning the highway for fresh roadkill an easy supper, compliments of the 70 MPH speedlimit and us motorists. Several saunter up in a cozy-up-to-the-bar type of way, as if saying to each other, "hey george, how's the missus today?" So there is beauty everywhere on this planet, even along the flat texas coast. I wish I had my camera as I pass a big cell phone tower absolutely covered with black birds, and again later as I pass one of the few red leafed trees along the road. (Fall in south texas doesnt really have colors like elsewhere in the world. Most of the trees still have some green on them, and leafs kinda go from green to off, skipping the whole color part.)

Corpus was a big rush. I saw Aunt Lou. I talked on the phone with Ashley, and I got to visit for about 2 hours on Tuesday night with Reagan, his parents, and Alissa Brown (McCoy)-- my childhood friends from down the street. I hadnt seen Alissa since high school age, and it was a kick to meet her, her nice husband and three adorable kids. It was a night of rememberances. I also did OFP work that would normally take several days, late at night after I gave up packing things, or in quick jaunts away during the day to run necessary day-time errands. So it was a non-stop in Corpus, very tiring.

Today, 1 December, we went and looked at my parents new condo at 2727 Kirby, a 30 story residential condo building that is sah-wank. It looks to be about 3 months from completion (top two floors still need to be enclosed -- parents unit on 13 at the sheetrock stage.) Tomorrow, I return to Colorado after 8 weeks of being away. So that is the trip...alltogethernow....

Signing off for good (for now, at least)

Newo (knee-whoa) out!

Queenstown to Mt Cook

2008-11-23T13:53:00.000-08:00

As I leave Queenstown, I hope to get a picture of the cute little steamboat while sailing the lake. But alas, now that I have a camera battery charged, the steamship is moored in the harbour.

So I am getting used to driving the vanette. It is fun to drive on the left side of the road, it was a little 4 cylinder powerhouse, thanks to Grant and the boys at Ascot motors. These guys we rented the vanette from made their business out of buying old vans, and converting them into sleeper vans, and renting them to folks like us. Their hobby, however was to drive cars in races around new zealand. As a result, the vanette performed like a powerhouse! As I listened to the digital voice reorder notes from the last days of the trip, I can hear the vanette performing like a charm in the background.

It does get uncomfortable, mainly with the small amount of space between body and wheel, and the low windshield view was hard, since I had to slump for visibility. I didn't mind the straight back, and it had tons of headroom, easily more than the headroom in my new car which i bought with headroom as the #1 priority. The one thing that I never got used to, is that I constantly went to the wrong side of the vanette to get in to drive it! Once in though, it was easy to remember the left side as you drive while seated on the inside of the lane in both right and left handed driving.

So I leave Queenstown and travel out thru Gibsstons Valley, and there are wineries everywhere. Like Dave said at lunch in Queenstown: the soil here and the climate here on the east side of the Southern Alps are similar to Napa Valley in CA, hence they can and do grow nice wines in this area. The landscape is beginning to look more and more like the American west. The hillsides are now rocky, there is a big beautiful turquoise river that carves out the Kararu Gorge thru the rock. As I enter the Cromwell area, green New Zealand is giving way to brown New Zealand. This whole area all the way to Lake Pukaki is so similar to the American West, that at times I forget which country I am traveling in. Driving on the wrong sides of the car and road are the only reminders, that and the occasional different road signs.

This landscape is brown, the only green is in irrigated farms and ranches, like anywhere in the dry american southwest, with a road as straight as any in texas, fading back to brown mountains in the distance (in all directions). That is until I get closer to the Southern Alps, and then the landscape turns truly Colorado in character, with the irrigated flat planes up to the tall (taller than the front range even) snow capped Southern Alps. The differences are that the other three directions are ringed with the lower brown mountains of the interior, and the native flora consists of different species. Yes this is New Zealand's version of the colorado plateau -- desert high country. So New Zealand surprises again, as I never actually thought I'd see a NZ landscape that is so similar to the landscape I know back home.

The edge of the road is lined with different coloured lupines. Not just blue, but pink, purple, red, yellow and orange. I stop and get some pictures of these lupine. Of course, Lupine is not a native species and it strikes me that here, they are the weeds of the country, like the lily i took a picture of on the Queen Charlotte hike: Ann stating alarmed, "that is a weed!" Otherwise, i am hauling ass in the vanette at 110 - 120 KPH, stopping infrequently to take pictures, and arrive in Mt Cook National Park by 1PM.

This grassland landscape gives way to evergreen forests (just like back home) and a wide glacial valley with bright turquoise colored Lake Pukaki. This is the valley leading up to Mt Cook and the big mountains, and it is the location of Edoras, the Kingdom of Rohan in the Lord of the Rings movie. The turquoise color of the water, I learn comes from minerals from the rock the glacier grinds out of this valley, called "rock flour," litterally fine ground rocks, suspended in the water. The road climbs slowly and steadily to the Mt Cook National Park central village. I stop every so often to take pictures of the jaw dropping view of the Southern Alps on a near crystal clear spring day.

Now it is time for the 20 minute boardwalk to the mountain view. However, this turns into a 1 hour hike. The trail is a boardwalk for a while, but it is also a trail, very similar to a good single track trail in colorado, complete with loose rocks and all. I wish that I had changed into my hiking boots instead of wearing the flip flops (at Liz's suggestion) as i turn my ankle on a loose rock once. But it is not bad, and I make it up without any real incident.

Along the way, there are several sounds like thunder, but it is a blue bird cloudless day. This isn't thunder, it is the sound of avalanches coming down the steep mountains covered in snow and ice -- glaciers in fact. I ask people coming down if they saw the evidence of any of these dramatic noises. Most say no, one group of three people who had been staying at a hut further up the valley overnight said, "yeah, that one (the louder one) was pretty low down. Go to the top and wait, there will be more it happens all the time. It is just that ususally you hear it, turn around and see a puff of white cloud where it had occurred."

I did stay at the top for a little while, but I didn't hear or see any snow slides. As I return back to the base village, I do hear a low rumble like an airplane, but as usual, there are no airplanes flying overhead. Turning back, i see a sizeable avalanche coming down the southern face of Mt Cook! I grab the camera and take a picture, and then make a movie, but the movie is rather jerky, and I think all you really see in the still picture is what appears to be a little white cloud hugging the side of the mountain. I will post it (eventually) to Picassa, when I can get to it, hopefully sometime before Thanksgiving.

I did post a ton of pictures today 22 November from Houston, and they are in Wanaka Release, Wanaka to Queenstown, Driving to Te Anau, Milford Sound Cruise, Lake Marian, and Driving out of Fiordland. The last bit of pictures will be out soon involving the drive from Queenstown to Mt Cook to Geraldine, and the last day in Christchurch.

I will finish Mt Cook and the rest of Thursday's drive to Geraldine next time. Until then,

Newo Out

Queenstown

2008-11-22T22:10:00.000-08:00

SO! First off, I missed a part in Te Anau. I was sitting at the computer doing the blog, and a guy sits at the next computer, puts on the headsets and calls somebody over the internet (VOIP). I can tell he is an american by his accent. He does not have anything to write with, looks over and sees that i have a pen, and asks, "can I borrow your pen, mate." I said, "sure but you dont have to call me mate. I am an American, too." He laughs and said, "picked up some of the local phrases."

After his call, and while we were both working there on our respective computers, we exchange pleasantries. His name is Earl from SF who had been in Aussie and Indonesia for the last 3 or so months (explains the "mate"), diving and surfing. I asked how he could take so much time off work to have a long vacation. He said he quit his job, (Tero takes 11 months off and is going back to his job in Finland! Earl had to quit his job.) But he got a new job in Indonesia being the surf guide on a sailboat that took surfers from killer spot to killer spot by the sea. (Dont that sound an awful lot like Angie's dream job!) "dude, (he was from CA after all) how did you score that gig?" I ask. He was on the boat in Indo and the owner said he needed a good surfer to be the guide for his quests, and offered him the job! Thus extending his "take a couple of years off" by at least one more.

He was in NZ doing the same kind of tour I was, and coming to the same conclusions: Not enough time to do all the things we want to do, especially taking the long tramps (multi-day camping walks) thru the amazing parks. We both have the same solution, come back at a later date and spend enough time to do it right. I sent him my email and blog address, and since he was doing the circumnavigation of the South Island in the opposite direction that i was, I told him what he had to hit, and what he could miss on his way up the west coast, and through the north half. Who knows, maybe Earl will be part of my return-to-tramp thru NZ trip? He seemed like a cool guy, and a dependable fellow.

SO ANYWAY, On Wednesday 19 November, I get up early (too early, but once up i was up) had the last of the oatmeal, and was off to see Peggy Preston in Queenstown. I left the campsite with plenty of time to meet Peggy at her Yoga studio at 11:30 Am per the plan. As I drove away from Te Anau, I was treated to a morning rainbow! At home we only see rainbows in the afternoons, so this was fun! How special, a rainbow greeted me to Fiordland and a rainbow bid me farewell to Firodland. It also underscored how lucky I have been with the weather (as I have mentioned previously).

Retracing my path from Qtown to Te Anau, I pass thru the same landscape that I did coming here on Sunday. The "sage brushy" area is called Red Tussock Conservation area, so obviously the sage brushy things are "red tussocks" As I pass thru the area, Dan would be pleased as the radio picked up a station playing opera! That was fun while it lasted.

There was vertical rain (in blinding sunshine) with strong winds once again as I pass thru this area east of Washburn, and with the morning sun in my face, and as i leave the rain, in my rearview a beautiful rainbow lies low over the horizon (second one of the day -- gosh I love NZ). This one was big and bright and I stopped and took many pictures.

So driving thru New Zealand I have learned to keep both hands on the wheel at all times, because it is usually both very windy and very windy. (The roads have curves, and the wind howls like a banshee.) It is crazy, and unlike driving thru say, west texas where the wind is constant and you just put the wheel over a little all the time as if you were turning slightly, here the wind is so inclement that it buffets the vanette from side to side like Nick Hayes trying to get to Kate Seely's after a night of Ted's bartending!

So i get to Qtown after stopping often and taking pictures of the scenery (i am such a tourtist), and I see why the Nick's like Wanaka more than Queenstown. Wanaka (pop 3500) is laid back, and mellow. The town is smaller and less fancy/touristy than Queenstown (pop 17,000). Queenstown is more built up, busier, has traffic, parking is expensive, the shops are fancy and the restaurants are many and good. Queenstown is nice. It is very, very nice, and obviously very high dollar. Wanaka is the Crested Butte of NZ, and Queenstown is its Aspen (complete with international airport).

I was expecting it to be like Vail from the Nicks' descriptions, but it wasn't all loggy or super big ugly high-rise condos -- big, Big, BIG; it was all small and cute and NZ modern and glass. It was cuter, no buildings were very tall, the design conformed more to the hillside it was built on, as opposed to just being plunked down like a mid-rise apartment incongruous to the surrounding landscape (think Moutaineer Square in Mt CB). It was more like Europe than the US -- smaller buildings, smaller condos. Plus the foo foo all organic cafe we had juice (fresh, but out of wheatgrass), and lunch was awesome! And i had one of the best hamburgers ever in Qtown at the Fergburger. (I was craving beef, fed up with fish, pasta, lamb, fruit, nuts and oatmeal.)

So I met Peggy and was so thankful that her Yoga studio had showers (she does that hot room yoga, so naturally you are supposed to sweat, and then shower afterwards). I was able to get myself somewhat civilized before lunch with a nice, long anticipated shower. (I had been camping and hiking, etc for 3 days without shower as the blog will attest, and I stank!)

After lunch, I got a brief downtown tour as I followed Peggy around on some of her day to day errands, and then we went to her house about 14 (?) KM outside Qtown proper towards Glenarchy. What a beautiful house and setting. Up high, she had great views from the house, and the neighbor on one side was a sheep farm, the neighbor below was out of sight, and the house backed to the bush. It is typical New Zealand modern house, and it is really nice. I was so grateful to be able to stay there in a nice place before the drive cross country to Christchurch to catch the plane home.

Peggy and I chatted, hung some laundry, and did some yoga stretching while we caught up over the afternoon. She showed me some good nice new stretches for the back, neck and hamstrings as we discovered that we both attended Cheley Colorado Camps at the same time (howbout that Reagan and Grey)! -- The foot one, put your feet together and roll thru your toes -- called broken toe, also called thai goddess pose; a belt with the hamstring does the stretch more and no impact on the back; --

It is interesting that we lived in CB for such a long time together. We knew each other, but were not super close. She knows people who have lived in CB at least as long as I have, but that I do not even know, even people that live like 8 houses down from my house. It seems when I am in CB that i know EVERYONE (as Grey seems to think) since I cant run a 5 minute errand without spending 40 minutes talking to three or four dozen people along the way. But we did know a fair number of the same folks. She asked about Bernhotz (now mayor of CB and testified in front of Congress for mining reform), William Buck (now mayor of Mt CB), the Boslers, Cheese Mike (sorry, Mike, you will just never loose that knickname), the Villanuevas, Steph, and a bunch of other people I cant remember. (I am writing this in Houston trying to get it all in before I loose it all, so hey forgive an old man his failing memory, eh?) Peggy says "Hi" to all her friends in CB and will be out next August to visit everyone. She was also properly shocked with changes around town and in Mt CB (eg no more Swiss) and awed with all the people having babies!

After I unpacked my stuff from the car (to organize and pack for the airplane), Peggy and I went back to town. She had to teach yoga classes for the rest of the day, and I was off to find a pool to swim in. I follow the swimming pool signs and it takes me to Wakatipu High School which Jody told me has a great pool and is open for public use. When I got there tho, there were a zillion kids (under 12?) preparing for what is obviously a swimming competition. Typical NZers right? Here we are in ski country and they have all this rugby, soccer, cricket, tennis, mountain climbing, kayaking, surfing, biking, hikinig, bungy jumping, heli-skiing, heli-fly fishing (yep that's right Fisher people, you take a hekicopter to fly fish streams filled with enormous fish that no one else can get to!) AND here are two hundred 10 - 12 year olds about to have a swimming competition in a town of 17,000! (Did I mention that every little town in this country with a population over 500 has a skatepark?) Yep, sport fanatics the New Zealanders are! And you can tell, because everyone under 40 is fit and thin and buff -- and it sure aint their diet of beer, eggs, sausage, hash browns, fish and chips, etc that keeps them that way!!

Anyway, as I asked some of the moms if I loooked lost (they said yes), they gave me directions to the big public facility out in Frankton on (get this Joe) Joe O'Connell Drive! Out I go to a super nice swimming facility in this enormous park with fields for cricket, soccer, rugby and golf -- hmm, British influence anyone? And spend too long swimming in the huge nice pool, and soaking in the very large hot tub -- very irregularly shaped so that there were like 4 or so fairly private areas, and big enough that I could actually swim several strokes under water in it, the hot tub this is.

After the swim, I get some blogging done at Peggy's studio while I wait for her to finish her last class, but I am frustrated with picasa, as it wont work on her office computer! Everything is going to have to wait until I get back to houston to get caught up (and here i am in houston at Elise's computer writing this entry into the wee hours right now.) Note to self: get those 14 commandments of Buddha (as if Buddha would issue "comandments") from Peggy's wall hanging at the studio.

We drive back to her house and the twilight on the Lake (Qtown is also on one of these giagantic mountain lakes -- Lake Wakatipu) is simply gorgeous. I am psyched that the forcast is for sunny all over NZ for my drive to Christchurch. All in all it was a good day relaxing in the swankiness of Qtown and repacking for the airplane which I catch Friday night -- only two more days in NZ =(!!

But Queenstown doesnt end there.... That night is when the best things happened in Qtown: we chatted and talked the night away. Peggy had these good, all organic cookies that she shared with me, Jody was there, and bits of Highlander and Pulp Fiction were on the tube. Later in the night, her roomate (sorry flat mate -- Peggy has picked up some of the local lingo just as Earl had. "Its just easier, you know," they both said. "And," Peggy mentions, "they don't make fun of you. Bathroom is toilet or loo (sp?). 'What you going to take a bath in the toilet, are you?' or my roomate "what you share the same room as her do you?' etc.) Liz returns home. In typical NZ class and style, Liz welcomes me into her house (Peggy said she didnt give her any notice that a big hippie freak was going to spend the night in her house). Liz even handles with typical courtesy and non-chalance the news as Peggy relates that I hung up her knickers (underwear) on the line. "Jeez, Peggy," i say, "you didnt have to tell her that!" How embarasssing; (and in a country that is rather British proper -- the swim place had changing rooms inside the locker rooms; a mother breast feeding in public very properly kept herself fully concealed with a blanket; even Nick hayes recounted how uncomfortable he was having to be naked at Orvis hot springs, "you yanks are used to that kind of public nudity, but we NZers are not that way." I tried to explain that in parts of the US public nudity is still quite shocking, but whatever.)

Peggy gives me a letter to take to Andy Bamberg back home (SOMEONE REMIND ME WHEN I GET BACK TO CO, OK?), and calls it a night. Liz tells me that I absolutely have to stop and detour up to Mt Cook National Park to see it, since I am driving right past it. She says there is a little 20 minute boardwalk that takes you really close to the mountain, and that it is easy and i can do it in my sandles, and recomends a restaurant there to eat, and she calls it a night. I re-pack myself for the final night in NZ and the airplane, and load the van.

The clouds had broken and the sky was clear. It was one of only three clear nights in NZ. One at Franz Josef, where I took the full moon picture, one in Wanaka when I was too tired to pull out the southern night sky constellations map (plus there was too much light pollution), and this one. SO, i unpack the constellation map and spend from about 1 to 1:30 AM finding stars. How frackin cool is this? (and it was CB cold, too)

For the first time in my life, I see both the large and small magellanic clouds, they were high in the sky and clear (kew! add binoculars to the list of must take back to NZ trip items) Then starting with the easy constellations: orion, southern cross, pleides (7 sisters), to get an orientation, and identified hydrus, phoenix, eridanus, lepis, canis major and minor, taurus, pholens, but i couldn't pick out pupis, or pixus or vela. Leo should have been in the east, but it had already set, or the moon was to bright (it was about to rise), and the pleides had reached the setting horizon by the time i was done.

Plus, as I was stumbling around her back yard looking at stars I heard this strange and scary noise coming from the back bush. Now I know that NZ doesnt have any large predators, since it didnt have any native mamals either (there are not even any snakes in NZ). But this noise sounds like a growling noise or snoring, or some kind of nostril blowing noise (almost like a elk bugle in character but not tone) followed by a series of humphs or hocks, that almost sounded like a chicken clucking in a very deep voice. Had to be some kind of bird, but what is was i have no idea. Later in Christchurch I saw a short doc film about the Kiwi, and that noise from the bush outside Qtown did sound a little bit like some of the mating calls of the Kiwi. Did i actually hear the sound of a Kiwi in Queenstown? One of Gen's main reasons to go to Stewart Island was to try and see an actual wild kiwi, they are that rare and unusual of a native bird, and here I hear one in Peggy Preston's back yard? Lance (the gold miner from Hope Saddle) said that they were all over the place and not as rare as everyone says they are; "I guarantee there are at least 50 of them in this bit of bush right here. Just that no one ever sees them because they are out at night and no one is lookin."

Anyway, tomorrow comes early as Peggy has to teach at 7 AM and she is waking me before then to say goodbye and so that i can start my long drive day, and see Mt Cook and the main Southern Alps!

Until next time,

Newo Out.

Fiordland -- Te Anau

2008-11-19T23:28:00.000-08:00

((Aside, once again, I am left with no options on a computer that will not let me upload the pictures to Picasa; and no, Dan, there is no internet cafe in this little town. This means that all the rest of the picasa pictures will have to wait until i get to a real computer in Houston.))

Anyway, Monday Night 17 November, I stayed in Fiordland National Park at Cascade Creek Campground, this is north of Te Anau, and I was cold (after all the forecast was for a high of 7 C and snow). For the first time I ran the little gas heater that came with the vanette, and it worked beautifully (thank god or perhaps Grant, for that). When I woke up sure enough there is snow on the peaks, and the snow line was a few hundred feet above my camp site. It is a beautiful blue sky morning, and I took lots of pictures. I had a lazy morning since my glow worm cruise is not until the afternoon, and drove out of the Park and into Te Anau to get the camera cards cleared and put the pictures on a disk. In Te Anau, I wrote the past few entries in the blog and uploaded pictures....that was all mentioned in a previous blog entry.

As I left the park, I got many good pictures of lower fiordland without cloudy tops. This part of the park is not as dramatic as the areas further in (by the coast, eg Milford Sound), but there are still really good pictures that illustrate the verticality of the landscape. (You will eventually be able to see them on Picasa.). One place is called Mirror lakes, which are basically a few clear areas in a wetland complex right by the side of the road. I got at least one decent "mirror" picture, but there were these ducks (but they arent "ducks" they are called something else) and they were swiming in these "lakes" and diving down to eat whatever it is that they eat, and otherwise rippling the mirror effect, so.... I also saw a BIG trout, and took a picture of it, but with nothing to show scale, it just looks like a fish. Also, the tour buses arrived and disgourged their contents of endless Japanese tourists, busily snapping away pictures, so I did not stay too long.

After lunch, I went on the Te Anau Glow Worm Caves tour. If anyone comes to New Zealand, definitely DO NOT take this tour! This has to be the world's lamest tour! It is sold as a cruise on this lake to the protected island on the other side, then a small boat ride through the glow worm cave complex. It started out OK, I learned that the Lake is 60 KM long, and is the second largest lake in New Zealand and the largest on the South Island. It was created by massive glaciers that carved it out (like Milford Sound) and melting snow and rain fills the lake. The tour on the lake was pretty lame, because they drove the big boat so fast to where the glow worm cave is, that it was too cold to stay up on top and too rough for taking decent pictures of Fiordland up close on this side of the lake, which is what I wanted to do.

When we arrived at the glow worm cave area, immeditely the lot of us (there were about 60 or 70 people on this tour, mostly elderly Aussies) were swarmed by sandflies. (I got a nice bite on my neck -- still hurts, days later.) Then we were broken down into groups of 16 for the little boat, and told about the tour. We were only going to be in the very first chamber, where the glow worms are, no tour of the entire complex with its underground river and waterfalls, etc. No photos were allowed, and we were not allowed to talk for big portions of it. The entrance to the cave is about 1 meter in height, which meant that we had to stoop to get in -- great on the back, let me tell you. But that was nothing compared to the squat little bench in the small boat that we had to sit on. That truly was murder on the back. Then we got taken into the dark cave, the boat banged along the side, and we could see the little green lights of the glow worms. It reminded me of a ride at Disneyland. After all anyone can cram you onto a little boat and have tiny little green points of light on a ceiling in total darkness flick on and off. Who to say it is a little worm or electric lights on the dark ceiling?

It was interesting to know that the cave is only 12,000 years old (young for caves) and that it is layered limestone and sandstone. The glowworms spooge gobs of sticky stuff that look like droplets of water from the ceiling, and then they turn on their green glow to attract insects. As the insects are attracted to the light in the darkness, they bungle into the spit-created lines of sticky glue. Once prey is caught, the glowworms turn off their glow, and snack on their prey. The brighter the glow, the hungier they are. They eat whatever bug they catch be it moth, sandfly or whatever. They will often knock their neighbor glowworms off, or even eat their neighbor glow worms if they feel like they are being crowded. I also learned that the little buggers turn into a flying insect that looks like a mosguito, but has no poker (nor any digestive system). Their only function in this stage of their short 10 - 12 month long life is to reproduce like mad during the 48 or so hours that they are in their flying bug stage. They then die of exhaustion and starvation. But you could learn all that on the Discovery Channell, and save yourself the $60 NZ and a whole afternoon of your precious NZ vacation! (Take the Doubtful Sound cruise instead.) About the only interesting thing is that you could imagine that these flickering green lights may be the constellations you may see on an alien planet....but my imagination is good enough that I did not need to waste the day on this cruise! It was definitely the biggest disappointment of my trip to New Zealand

The best part of the whole day was walking along the lake shore line back in Te Anau. It was a glorious sunny day, and the Lake was blue and all the mountains in Fiordland were in full view (these are the same mountains that appeared from the cloud bank as I drove in on Sunday). I really liked Te Anau. It was peaceful and serene. The shoreline is all one big long park with a nice walk along it and beautiful mature trees and etc. The town is small, only about 1200 or so residents, but it obviously fills up in summertime for tourists -- most of the buildings along the shoreline (across the street from the water-side park) were hotels or backpackers (hostels).

It was one of those places that I thought that I could retire too. Of course this could be that I was there on that one awesome day, and the rest of the time it is cold and rainy, sort of like when people visit Corpus on those nice days in February when the wind isnt blowing and the bay is all still and blue, then they move there and by August they are like, "why the frack did I move here!!" Or it could be like my grandfather who was raised in Kansas ("like hell on earth: the hottest place in the summer and the coldest place in winter."), and when he reached the age of reason, he moved south. He thought that Corpus was the greatest climate ever except for those rare ice storms when he would say, "I did not move far enough south." Of course in Te Anau the scenario would mean that it would get too hot for someone? because it wasnt cold enough? (Now the lady on the tour said that it rained twice as much on the Fiordland Park side of the Lake than in town ... that might not mean a lot when it rains 4 - 8 meters a year in Fiordland! Of course, another of the tour chicks said, "oh, looks like we arent going to hit it," in a regretful way. "hit what?" i ask, and she replies "it was supposed to get to 20 C today.") So if someone wanted to live in the coldest place ever, they should just live in Gunnison (or Antartica!) and be done with it!

They also told us about how they are trying to rescue some of the indigenous birds, by taking the eggs and raising them to adolescence in captivity and then placing them on small islands in NZ that are free of the stouts and possums that eat the eggs, hoping to regenerate the species on these small islands naturally after that point.

Another great thing about Te Anau (and Wanaka), is that the far side of the Lake is all protected, (like in Wanaka, but not in Queenstown), which is super nice, because that means you are never looking across the water at somebody else's house/compound...just the natural beauty of Fiordland (in Te Anau) or Mt Aspiring Nat Park (in Wanaka).

So again, after uploading a zillion pictures and bloging, I rush out to the first DOC campsite towards the park. (It is more fun to stay in these rustic campgrounds than in the developed campervan parks -- much more like camping out, except that there is an outhouse and picnic tables, etc.) It is called Murry Creek, and is on the shore of the Lake Te Anau. Now seeing as it was so pleasant in Town on the Lake, I was surprised to find it blowing a hurricane at this campsite. The windchill was enough to make me sit inside the van for the first time and cook my little meal of instant miso soup, salad and canned Thai coconut curry with the end of the pasta.

The best thing about it blowing a hurricane outside is it kept the damn sandflies away. you know that may be the number one most undesireable feature about New Zealand as opposed to the winding, bumpy roads. I told you about the sandflies in the Monroe Beach walk post (i think), and on the still blue bird morning at Cascade Creek (this morning), I decided to stay in the van and make my breakfast, as there were about 20 of the little bastards clinging to the outside of the windows. That was a good move, for as soon as i opened one of the doors and hopped out, they all swarmed into the vanette. Before I drove away, I spent a few minutes hunting them down and killing them all. The return of Dave the mighty sandfly hunter! They are realtively easy to kill, especially when you can trap them against a window. And though it may be bad dharma to kill other living beings, I kill sandlfies and mosquitoes without any remorse, Dharma be damned!

But I do love New Zealand, and I loved Te Anau. I definitely want to visit Fiordland again, do a cruise (at least the long doubtful sound cruise) and some of the multi-day tramps in the Park here. The only thing that I dont like about it are the damn Sand FLies!!

So tomorrow (wednesday 19 November) I am off back to Queenstown to see the actual town and hang out with Peggy for a day -- getting me closer to Christchurch which I fly out of on Friday (21 November) night!! Ah the end of my New Zealand trip is in site -- boo hoo! =( !!

Until next time, Newo Out.

Lake Marian Hike

2008-11-18T23:22:00.000-08:00

So this is still Monday 17 November...

On the drive out of Fiordland and Milford Sound, I took many pictures (sorry for the delay in uploading, but this computer wont do it...but soon ... might be later this week, or even once i get home, but the photos will come), and I stopped to take a hike up to Lake Marian. Now the expected time to do this hike is 3 - 4 hours, and I stopped at the carpark at 4:30PM. I was just going to go to the "viewing platform" which is part of the trail that is a boardwalk on the side of a stream...or river. The water is falling quickly down the steep valley it has carved, and there is a ton of water. You will be able to see plants growing on giant boulders in the stream, there is that much rainfall in Fiordland. (I think i already mentioned it, but 8 meters of rain a year falls on these mountains.) The edge of the trail is sheer in some places, covered with ferns and mosses, and dripping with water like a decorative fountain (except of course this is all natural).

I, however, was feeling like a good walk, and I saw a sign that said 1 hr 30 minutes, and assuming that was the there and back time, I went for it. So up the first really, really steep 1/2 KM or so, I saw some of the guys from my boat cruise on their way down. I asked them, "how much further?" They replied, "you are much closer to the beginning than the end," so i decided that I better haul ass, since I had to still find me a campsite, make dinner, etc., all hopefully before nightfall/twilight which lingers until 9:30PM or so in the southern hemisphere springtime.

So haul ass I did. Gone is the nice buffed out, wide trail that you have seen in pictures of Queen Charlotte Tramp, etc, replaced by a single track trail very similar to the one down from Mt. Arthur to Flora Hut. Except this one is steeper, and not as slick. It was interesting, the rocks, all covered with moss and such were not slick at all, it is the roots and the mud that is sooo slick. The tree roots are the worst. In some places, it is so steep that one step to the next is a grunt and groan and stretch to get to. I pass about 6 other people from my cruise on the way up, who are on the way down. (I had stayed in Milford for lunch, to book a glow worm cruise for tomorrow in Te Anau, and to give my camera's failing battery another good charge.)

I got to the top in less than an hour, hauling ass like I did. I feel good, my stomach muscles are pumping and my back feels ok, not 100%, but nothing like the Mt Arthur hike. Way to go Dave!

I stay at the top for about 15 minutes, snapped a few pictures, and head down. I knew that going down was going to take me longer than going up, that is just the way it is with my back. To give you an idea of how steep it was, my ears kept popping (both on the way up and on the way down, like i was on an airplane), and there were six separate times that i went backwards on all fours going down. I also caught a good bird song on the digital recorder.... It all came from one tiny little bird, that I think is the bell bird. I also caught a nice picture of the giant, indegenous Pigeon. I surprised myself with how well I felt coming down -- I kept on thinking, tall, steady, strong, as i came down, and the theme song of Superman kept playing in my mind! (Take that Wonder Wad!!) I was down at the car park before 7PM, making my round trip 2 1/2 hours!! All in all the hike to Lake Marian was an enormous success, I was very proud of myself for doing it all so well and quickly. I was pumped and feeling good as I head towards my camp site.

The first camp site, Lake Gunn, was pretty crowded so I went to the next one at the other end of the Lake and camped there. Made dinner, ate, cleaned up, and was in bed and OUT as the late dusk settled in!

Until next time,

Newo Out.

Fiordland -- Milford Sound

2008-11-17T21:19:00.000-08:00

So approaching Te-Anau it looks like it is this rolling green countryside, the trees are starting up again, and in the distance there are clouds. Then I realize that in the clouds there are the big, steep mountains of Fiordland. I hope the pictures I took turn out, because it is a sight to behold.

I was supposed to be at Milford Sound by 7PM, but the lunch with Peggy and friends went 3 hours, so I stopped in Te Anua to make sure that they would hold my spot for the vanette. (In Nelson we had a reso, but when we got there at 9, they were like, "Oh, sorry, full up, first come first serve." That turned out pretty ok since I met Aljosha at the place we ended up. But in Milford, there is only 1 place to stay in a camper van; when you see the pictures you will understand why.)

As I approach the entrance to Fiordland National Park (part of a World Heritage Area, which means severe restrictions, limited resource extraction, etc.) it is raining, of course, (it rains 360 days a year in Milford -- 8 meters of rain yes RAIN, a year), I have entered the clouds that I saw out on the "plains," there is one little patch of sunshine, and it creates a rainbow. (I know massive run-on sentence; kinda like fiordland tho; I'll make up for it with a bunch of little sentences.) First is is a partial rainbow. Then it becomes two partial rainbows. Then it becomes a full rainbow with a second partial. If this isnt a good sign of things to come, I dont know what is! (And it is ... story to come.)

I enter the park, and I am back to rainforest beauty. More trees draped in green moss, but somehow it is different....different moss? or just more of it? So far Fiordland does not disappoint. Even tho it is raining, the views are amazing and mysterious (as the tops of the mountains are all covered in cloud). The vertical rise of these mountains is incredible. They rise hundreds, probably thousands of meters in just a few. I mean, the landscape here is nearly truly vertical. I hope the pictures turn out, and convey how truly vertical it is.

There is a sign that says I have crossed 45 degrees south (i am traveling north now, so that puts Te Anau further south than 45 degrees). As I pass Lower Hollyford I get to a OMG series of waterfalls. I had heard that when it rains here, water comes cascading off these mountains and creates a zillion waterfalls, and now I am seeing it with my own eyes!!

And the further in I go, the more extreme the landscape becomes. There are frickin waterfalls everywhere, cascading down these sheer mountain sides (I would call them cliffs, but they are covered in green -- trees and all.) The water is falling for thousands of feet often in a single fall, and I am driving down the road, leaning way over the wheel, looking up with my mouth wide open. This is the most incredible landscape I have ever seen in my life!

I pass thru Homer Tunnel, the darkest, foggiest, wettest tunnel I have ever gone through, and the other side is waterfall city. This landscape is insane. It is literally insane. On the other side of the tunnel I find the steepest, widiest, downward road EVER, in waterfall city. I am way looking forward to tomorrow's cruise of Milford Sound.

I arrive at Milford Sound Lodge, and they have closed, but the harried looking staff is still busy working behind the closed gate at reception. I tell them I have a reservation for my vanette, and they kindly and politely roll the gate back up, take my money, and tell me I am in site 16. I walk over to site 16 to find no site 16. And there are three cars already parked there. taking up all the available space (presumably for campers who are staying in 17). I just tuck myself into the side of the carpark next to the bush, make myself a dinner of instant oatmeal, re-arrange the van -- make the bed (the bedding just got thrown in in our haste to make the lunch in Queenstown) and fall asleep.

It was delightful sleeping to the sound of the falling rain, and i get a nice restful sleep alone in the van where I can stretch cornerwise over the whole bed (at last my feet dont hang off the edge! Those of you who are tall can relate to what it means regarding back pain to have feet hanging off the edge of a bed.) The rain woke me up a few times in the middle of the night. It was amazing how much rain was coming down at those times. That bodes well for the cruise as waterfalls ought to be in abundance.

I awoke to sunshine cutting through broken clouds, but it turns grey after all. I head to the cruise after a breakfast that was the same as last night's dinner. The cruise guide on the small boat/extra time cruise, confirms that yesterday's 33 millimeters of rain per hour (!) will make today's cruise extra special, even if we cant see the top of Mitre Peak (tallest mountain in the world, if you start where it does way down at the bottom of the Sound.) Most of the waterfalls I will see, he tells me, wont be here in 48 hours. Also, the wind is not blowing 100 knots like it was yesterday, so god smiles on me and my trip, again!

The Sound averages 320 meters deep, and only 300 - 400 meters across. It is 70 meters deep at its shallowest, and only 8 nautical miles long. At one point, they brought us in our 120 foot or so boat right under one of the waterfalls that was 80 meters high (not the tallest one). It is wet and cold. Of course it is raining and the wind is blowing, if not 100 knots, still a good breeze. I am wearing every layer I brought, and once again think that I shoulda brought long underwear. ...... 60 or so cruise boats (big ones, like the Love Boat) visit in the summertime, and fill up the Sound.

So in a valley by Mitre peak, there are many species that only exist in this one valley, including 3 kinds of geckos and some lizards, and others. The 8 meters of rain per year in Milford Sound makes this rainforest the fastest regenerating rainforest in the world. After all, in winter they have avalanches that come straight down, ripping the trees, that cling to the sides off, exposing bare rock. The lichen acts as a glue, however, and because of all the rainfall, the rain forest can recover quickly.

The mouth of the sound is the narrowest point, and the swells off the sea pitch the boat rather robustly. It is fun (Ange would have loved it.) Our guide tells us a story that Cptn Cook came into the Sound, and that the Mauri (sp?) the native polynesians thought that the guys rowing the boat were aliens with eyes in the backs of their heads. They came out and killed the rowers. Cook then decided this wasnt a place he wanted to stay, and left New Zealand.

One of the big falls in the pictures (so many pictures I filled up all my cards on this trip to Fiordland in 3 short days) is palisade falls. It is 112 meters high -- a 55 story building (or something like that, it is still a little hard to follow the accent of the guide over the loudspeaker). Then we come to the tallest waterfall in the Sound that falls off the smallest mountain in Milford Sound, the Lion or Mt Milford or something like that. It is 700 meters tall! The first, wide waterfall in all the pictures generated all the electricity for the "Town" of Milford Falls.

The town consists of a small fleet of crayfishers, a small fleet of tour boats, a bar/cafe, one hotel, and one lodge -- that is it, no gas, no store, nothing else. Out tour guide told us that the road (the only way in or out) closed last winter for four days and there were only two things to do: watch tv or go to the bar.

So I left Milford Sound and stopped at every possible stop to take pictures (filling up the cards) and at one of the places, just past the Homer Tunnel, there is a giant car park before a very short nature walk. Now I undoubtedly timed this with all the tour busses (most people bus in from Te Anau or Queenstown for the 1hr 45 min boat ride, and return the same day.) The car park is completely blocked by the 40 or so tour busses as Japanese tourist take pictures of the indigenous green parrots that are looking for a free handout. So I park on the side of the road (perilous given the terrain), and before I even get 5 minutes into my walk, the car park is totally empty!

So on another stop I took a longer walk to Lake Marian, but I am thru uploading pictures (thru Monroe Beach Walk -- that's Mt Arthur, Hope Saddle, West Coast, Franz and Fox Glaciers, Pancake Rocks, and the beach), and that is the real time eater (that and all this writing!) At any rate, it is coming on 8PM and I need to go get tonight's campsite and make dinner before it gets dark, (which it does at like 9:15 or so).

So until next time,

NEWO OUT

Wanaka to Queenstown

2008-11-17T15:45:00.000-08:00

SO after a day swimming, laundering and blogging, we left Wanaka with Nick Frame and Nick Hayes both (Aussie and Kiwi Nicks) and traveled over the highest road in New Zealand to Queenstown (Codorona Pass). On the way, Nick Hayes traveled with us in the Vanette, so we had time to catch up with him on the way over. One of the things that he reminded me of was that he was at the very first birthday camping out party at the cabin/Chateau Angelique! That would've been 2001 (we thought). He also showed me a wicked splinter that is under one of his nails -- I think that made the picasa site, so that is a splinter(!) under his nail, ouch! The landscape in Queenstown is similar to Wanaka, it seems more like the western US than the other parts of New Zealand have.

<> there was something here inside these <> marks, but apparently Google decided to delete it all.

We went to a very nice restaurant at a winery just outside the town and had lunch with Peggy Preston, her mom, and some of her friends, most of whom had a Crested Butte connection: the four of us (Gen, me, Nick and Nick), Jody (Peggy's boyfriend), Karina (a Canadian with no CB connection), Dave (lived in CB in the late 90s) and his wife Vicky. There were lots of questions about Scott Carr, Kate Seeley (of course), Kochevers....Nick Hayes recounted a story about Ted pouring heavy drinks late one night at Kochevars and how he bounced off of one snow bank and then the other zig-zagging across the street trying to get back to Kate's (its a 2 block walk for you non-CBers).

Dave also remembered Blake and Anette, Angie and Scott Wallis too. Many stories were had and shared. He had a joke about women in CB (after I shared my. "the town is filled with Peter Pan's and Wendy's -- or CB where the men are boys, and the women are men"): What do you call a hot tub filled with CB women? "Gorilla's in the Mist." (Not my joke, dont kill me for re-telling it!) Peggy asked about Ruta, Mark and Erika. I got to tell her that Mark and Erika are pregnant! She Says congrats Mark and Erika! More was discussed about CB including what has changed, what is the same, etc.

The Queenstown area has about 17,000 year-round residents, so it is much larger than Wanaka at about 3,500 (which is why the Nicks like Wanaka better, I suppose). Karina, as a Canadian, said that it was relatively easy to get citizenship, although there is a process. She has a job, and her employer keeps re-newing her work visa and is sponsoring her for her full residency/citizenship. She says that because so many NZers are departing the country for greener ($) pastures, mostly to Australia, there is a need for workers in NZ. This is why there are so many worker/visa college aged (mostly europeans) here, like Aljosha in Nelson. The Nicks explained that anyone can own property here regardless of citizenship, so it seems that if you have a skill you need, are willing to work lower paying jobs, or are financially self-sufficient, New Zealand will welcome you with open arms.

Dave and Vicky want to trade houses with people around the world, and since they live in NZ they have a lot of offers. I sweetened my offer (CB alone is a big plus as he along with the Nicks all want to go back to CB) by saying my house comes with a gourmet chef, so Phil you gotta stick around and not move in with Cathy Benson!

Dave is a ski guide in the winter (i got the idea that was the bustling heli-skiing business) and had a property maintenance business in the summer called "Lawn Enforcement." Dave described how nice it was to live in New Zealand, especially in Wanaka or Queenstown (or any where on the drier side of the mountains) because the snow falls up high, but it remains nice/temperate in the valley floors. Unlike CB which has 2 seasons (covered and uncovered), they got to experience four real seasons, yet with these amazing mountains so close (not to mention the lakes, etc.) Also, apparently, January 2 is a holiday, too, so you get two days to recover from the hangover! "Kiwis are smart that way," said Karina.

So I left Queenstown in the rain, and just after Kingston (just 39 Km away, at the far end of Lake Wakatipu) it got sunny, just to show you how changeable the weather is. (Of course as i made the note in my digital recorder, it started to rain -- in the sunshine.) Gen said it would be kind of sage-brushy-ish here and it is. The countryside has turned to green grass with brown bushes (?) or are they just brown big grasses? Some of the brush here looks like mesquite -- again New Zealand shows great variety in ecosystems/weather. So I am traveling through this landscape, just short of Te Anau and it is sunny, blue bird -- hard shadows on the tour bus in front of me, but it is raining (?!) hard enough for me to have my windshield wipers on continuously. There are clouds in the sky, but nothing over head -- where is this rain coming from? Just further illustrates the point.

Until next time,

Newo Out

Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers and the trip over Haast Pass to Wanaka22222

2008-11-14T21:20:00.000-08:00

Friday the 14^th of November: So we slept very well in the peaceful and quiet Glacier Motor Home Park in Franz Josef. It is a cool grey morning, and the clouds are back, which I think makes New Zealand more interesting – that mysterious quality. We had a very slow breakfast at a restaurant that had very slow service. Over breakfast, the Breakfast show on NZ TV was on and the same news anchor who had visited Wasilla and knocked on Sarah Palin neighbor’s door, mentioned that he would have loved to hear the awkward silence at the Obama and Bush meeting at the White House. And in the bathroom at the restaurant, there was a condom vending machine that someone had written “insert baby for refund” on it. Ah NZ humour. (This AM at the very helpful Info Site – an actual building with actual people, not a web site – in Wanaka, the lady mentioned with a totally straight face that perhaps I should just swim in the lake when I said that a 50 degree pool was a little cold for swimming. That same dry, satirical humour.)

I emailed back and forth with Lynn about my return travel plans (we are only four hours behind CB time, the day before), and then we head up to the Franz Joseph Glacier. After a short walk we come to the viewing area at the glacier. You cannot get too close to it, and it is receding as one might expect (global warming and all), but there is an excellent view. I don’t know if I have ever seen a real glacier, as the last one disappeared from Colorado some time ago. It is a gorgeous sight and you will see the pictures. What I find interesting is that the glacier is not so much white, as one might expect, but rather it is blue. I have heard that about glacier’s from other people (Ivan for one), but there is something about seeing it with your own eyes. One can walk on to the Glacier, but that would have taken quite a bit of time. When I return, walking on Franz Josef will definitely be on the agenda.

The other thing I have noticed about NZ, is that we have not run into many American tourists, but there are tons of Germans (with some Swiss thrown in perhaps) and Japanese tourists. You cant go anywhere here without running into tons of Germans and Japanese.

So we leave Franz Josef and head towards Fox Glacier a bit further down the road. The road is cut into the steep hillsides, and there are steep walls along the road – cliff faces. In Colorado, these would be bare rock, but in New Zealand, along the wet west coast the almost vertical rock face is covered in green moss, and ferns. This gives the cliff face a soft appearance (and touch), and makes for a nice aesthetic: a fuzzy blanket of green.

Driving into Fox Glacier Town, it seems much larger, older (70s style houses and buildings) and less cute than Franz Josef. Franz Josef’s setting is more intimate, the valley walls are closer, and it seems much newer with modern buildings.

The Glacier, however is in a more dramatic valley and we can get closer to it than the viewing area at Franz Josef. It has a classic U shaped glacier carved valley, with one side being a tall sheer cliff. The vertical from valley floor to the top of the valley is huge. It seems like thousands a vertical feet to the top, and right above the car park is a long waterfall. Its OMG views again. The water flowing off the glacier is the first that is not clear. It is rather greenish in tint, a grey-green that also reflects the color of the rock and (surprise) the glacier itself has the same greenish hue. The air is full of helicopter noise (at both glaciers) as helicopter tours are obviously very popular.

This landscape is clearly in motion here, as there is a small almost constant rockfall from the rockpile next to a pond in the picture. No one is walking on this rockpile, but stones roll down it as if there were. Some of the pictures I took shows the clear mountain water coming from the valley side meeting the green water of the glacier.

So we left Fox Glacier and went on down the road. Just before the small town of Haast (250 souls) we took the Monroe Beach Walk. This was a spectacular walk through the western coastal rainforest to a small beach that has a fiordland crested penguin colony at the point. We aren’t allowed to get too close to them, but Gen and I did see two of the cute little fellas first coming out of the water, and then going in. I tried to get pictures of them, but they might not show up as much more than a small black dot against the rocks. These penguins are known for their long yellowish-orange eyebrows.

Speaking of rocks the rocks on the beach have some very interesting patterns on them – see the pictures.

On the way in, Gen has a picture of me hugging a truly gigantic Rimu (or is it a Rata or was it the kaharakia – there were all of these kinds, and it was not sure which of the tall trees were. There are many native varieties of tall, native trees.) It was all covered with moss, and it was very soft to the touch. (yep I’m officially a tree hugger now.) These trees are really huge, they aren’t always very tall, but some were very tall, maybe 50 maybe 75 feet, perhaps 100 feet tall, and some had many branches almost like an oak, but not quite. We also saw the Kotukutuku (a deciduous) tree with the pinkish paper like bark, which is the largest fuschia in the world. There were also Kiekie vines and ferns all throughout this forest.

On this walk we crossed a short suspension bridge over a creek. It was really fun because the whole thing sways as you walk across it. It is sort of like trying to get your sea legs under you to try and keep going. It made us laugh.

Once again we have marvel at how lucky we are with the weather. Not too hot, not too cold, not too rainy, not too sunny, although we have had all those conditions. Perhaps this is a good time to visit NZ after all – not too many tourists, and the bugs are not too bad. But speaking of bugs, there are mosquitoes and the nasty sand flies that just wont leave you alone. Sand flies are small biting black flies. They hurt pretty bad when they bite, and worse, the reaction is quite severe. At the beach I got bit quite a few times (and killed several of the little buggers), and the next morning one of the bites on the knuckle of my hand has swollen up so bad it looks like (and feels like) I have hit a wall or something with my fist – all from just one little bite from one little fly. Gen says that in February they can be especially bad, and the book says that they are going to be real bad in Milford Sound.

Back in the rainforest going back to the car, there is a peculiar musty/musky smell in the air….I couldn’t place it, that is the best I can do to describe it. Very unusual. I also took a closeup picture of the “droopy tree” which I think is the Rimu. (But I might be wrong – I will check this later) and sure enough it is a needle tree, an evergreen, (I thought it was a deciduous tree so it may not be the rimu) oh well. I really like it because it is so very unusual.

Also on the way out, there is a funny tree that had a very thin trunk with large holes or pointed arches in it. I had not seen a tree like this so I took pictures. Upon looking at it in profile, it may be that the “thin trunk” is actually a moss or some other growth on an otherwise normal tree. Again, what do I know? It was cool looking though. I also took a good soundbite of the interesting and unusual bird song, including this one bird that made popping noises. I’ll keep that on the digital voice recorder to remind me of the song. (Although the "popping noises" are too low to make out on the DVR.)

It is funny how things happen kind of randomly, we were just driving by and saw the sign by the road, and decided to stop and go look at it and it turned out to be one of the more interesting short walks we have done.

Once back in the car, there were many sand flies that followed us in. I was the mighty sandfly hunter as I mercilessly killed all seven of them with cries of “Die, sandfly die!” to Gen’s laughter.

So New Zealand does not stop. We left Haas, and crossed the very wide Haas River, and started up the pass. Before too long – minutes maybe? -- the grey sky broke into sunny blue sky and huge snow covered peaks rose from the valley precipitously. We are now in the Mt Aspiring National Park, which extends to Wanaka, more than 100 km away. I snapped a lot of pictures of many of these mountains. These mountains rise so steeply and so high from the Haas River floor (there are dramatic cascading waterfalls), that they are super impressive and are very hard to capture in one picture. I can see up up up to tree line, and then up to the tops of snow covered mountains…so incredibly beautiful.

The water in the Haas River is (of course) incredibly clear – it is in New Zealand after all. We stopped at a particularly impressive series of rapids by the side of the road and snapped pictures, I don’t know if they will actually do it justice, as Gen says, have you ever seen that color in a river? I have to admit that I have not…kind of like the aquamarine/green of a Carribean Sea.

As we move further into the interior, and gain altitude, incredibly the air temperature gets warmer and warmer. By the time we are in Wanaka, everyone is wearing shorts and t-shirts. We met up with Nick Frame there, and he said it was 26 C today in Wanaka. I figured it would be colder as we rose in altitude and traveled closer to the south pole, but the opposite is true.

About 50 KM before Wanaka, we are traveling down a relatively wide valley with jagged brand new mountains along the western side. We hit the beginning of Lake Wanaka. We stop at a rest stop that I have lost the name of forever as the POS FGDMFPOS blog has erased who knows how much of the original story and would not let me get it back (ctrl Z did not work, saving the post under a different name did not work, nothing FGDMFPOS worked and it is now gone forever), and I took pictures up the short side of the Lake. The picutres will show you decent wave action and a long amount of Lake looking up the short way from the unknown rest stop. I was trying to describe to you how big these lakes in NZ are. They are huge, many many a snow covered mountain follows it along one side. A bunch of snow falls here as well. To capture the idea of how much snow falls and how tall these mountains are, I have some remnanat of the last sentence the POSGDMF blog didn't delete into lost non-existence forever, about a "ski area there operates all year around," on the tall volcano on the North Island -- that much snow fell on that very tall mountain. (FGDMFPOS Blog!!!). (

Still before arriving at Wanaka at the opposite end of Lake Wanaka, the highway crosses over one ridge to show another of these huge lakes, Lake Hawea, just one short (but tall) ridge line separates Lake Wanaka from Lake Hawea. There are about 20 huge lakes like this in New Zealand.

As we are approaching Wanaka, New Zealand surprises again. Unlike the mountains of the north and west, the landscape here is much more like Colorado. The air is drier, the mountains don’t rise so steeply as the valley floor is higher (although they are still quite dramatic). Gone is the green drapery all over the trees and all the ferns and mosses. The trees are “regular” looking evergreens, and they are occasional, and the landscape is more grasses and brush. Obviously we are on the drier side of the Southern Alps range, even though the sea is probably not even 50 KM away as the bird flies. So the climate is now different, very much like home. Nick Frame will later tell me that it does not rain that much or snow that much here, even though it snows quite a bit in the Southern Alps and on the three small ski areas that are located here in Wanaka.

We arrive in Wanaka on the southern shore of the Lake, a very pretty town of 3500 that looks like a tourist town. The mountains make an impressive view over the big, blue Lake. We meet Nick Frame and have a great meal. Afterwards, we head out to a campground just outside of town in Albert Town and fall to sleep rather quickly.

Until Next Time

Newo Out

Wanaka

2008-11-14T21:03:00.000-08:00

Saturday November 15, 2008

So we arrived in Wanaka last night and had dinner with Nick Frame (Aussie Nick or Evil Nick for you CBers), and he is doing well.

Last night I slept poorly in the vanette, woke up from bad nightmares of betrayal and loss, the sandfly bite on my hand made my whole arm feel all swolen. Tried to get back to sleep, but couldn't, so I got out of bed with the dawn, read some in the book, wrote a postcard and planned my remaining trip. Gen is off to Stewart Island, and I am off to Milford Sound.

Gen slept in while I was doing some planning. The wind was blowing quite strongly, and while I was letting her sleep in (that was the plan), I put on my fleece to keep warm. On my way to the outhouse for a pee, I pass another one of the campers, she is wearing a bikini! So I am in my fleece and she is wearing bikini! Go Figure.

Last night at dinner, we were sitting outside, but I got cold as the sun went down and asked to go inside to eat. Nick had to give me a little shit, "Aren't you guys from Crested Butte? Its warm out here!" But he relented to my shivering and we went inside.

Gen woke up soon thereafter, and I desperately wanted a swim, so we went into Wanaka and stopped at the isite (I explained what an i-site is in yesterday's blog). Also, we have been meaning to splurge on a nice hotel to give us a break from the vanette, and since we have decided to go separate ways tomorrow, this is the night to do it. The super helpful isite consultant tells me that the public pool would only be open late in the day tomorow, and our schedule requires us to leave Wanaka early in the day. She books us a night's stay at a nice little apartment/hotel. For $150NZ (about $85US) we have a one bedroom apartment, with a garage for the vanette, and in the garage, a washer and dryer, with two pools, one heated. I took a swim in the "heated" pool. It was chilly enough to make me SWIM! These NZers and their sense of temperature is way screwed up -- it could not have been more than 75 F in that pool!

Afterwards it was work on the blog, do laundry, unpack the vanette, and re-organize ourselves for the remaining trip.

At about 3:30 PM, Nick came by, and we went on a little tour of outer Wanaka, and he showed us the very nice house that he and Nick Hayes (Kiwi Nick or Good Nick for you CBers) had built and are marketing as a high end retreat called "Release" (www.releasenz.com). It is super nice, has amazing views, and is the place you should stay if you come to Wanaka. See the views of the lake and Mt Aspiring Mountain Range soon to be posted on the picasa site.

Later that night we went to Indian Food at a take-away spot and caught the movie at Cinema Paradiso. It is a fun little theatre for a fun little town. There are a variety of seating options, including old style theatre seats, couches, even an old vw bug (yep there inside the theatre). No two rows of seating were the same. The movie was a french film called "Paris" with Juliette Binoche in an ensemble cast of fine actors. It was a story about love and living life. A fitting end to tonight, and a good start for tomorrow.

Until next time,

Newo Out.

The West Coast of New Zealand

2008-11-13T01:53:00.000-08:00

So today I had to deal with some travel screw ups. I decided that I was going to pull an Angie, Let me explain, Angie delayed her return to Thailand for a day, giving herself just one day in Thailand so that we could spend an extra day on Gili Meno in Indonesia. Likewise, I realized that I was running out of New Zealand time and was probably going to miss Milford Sound. So today I changed my return to New Zealand to arrive about 10 hours before I depart Thailand for the USA. Rick was not going to be in Thailand when I was returning, and Methet and the kids were leaving a day before I did, so I did not see any reason for me to be back in Thailand. So I contacted Qantas and changed my return to the 21^st giving me two extra days in New Zealand which will give me time to get to Fiordland, and to take the not to be missed boat tour of Milford Sound.

We then left Westport, a little too late to catch the Pancake Rocks in Punakaiki at high tide. But we had a glorious blue bird day to see the west coast of the South Island, and that was nice. Usually, as I understand it, the west coast is very, very wet as it seems that the weather generally comes in from the west – at least the few times I have seen a radar of New Zealand, the weather was coming from the west, however, a guy at the Hope Saddle rest area, where we camped two nights ago said that the weather rolls off the sea from any direction in New Zealand.

The western slope is rugged and rocky, with beautiful rock outcroppings being pounded by the waves of the Tasman Sea. It was beautiful. We stopped a few times and took some nice pictures (eventually they will be on picasa). We got to the Pancake Rocks in the early afternoon and they were interesting. (again pictures will follow eventually) The tide was still high enough that I got some good movies of the surf spraying out the blowholes in the Rocks (although not like the postcard picture) and making rainbows in the sunshine. It was a small area and the track was a wide asphalt path. There were many tourists here, and so it had a very touristy feel to it. They had a good walking exhibit about some of the plants, including the cabbage tree and New Zealand flax, so that was interesting to read and see the example planted by the track. We finished the tour and picture taking, and did some shopping.

When the stars are out at night, I can’t make out any of the constellations, except for orion, cassiopia, and perseus, (they are all upside down, like the moon). Oh, and I have picked out the southern cross. But today at the DOC gift store at the pancake rocks I bought a star guide for the southern hemisphere. It is under the light now so as to make it glow in the dark as the stars come out later tonight. The constellations are all different so it will be fun to pick out some new ones.

Since it was 2PM, we decided to have lunch there at the café. I noticed an internet kiosk, and thought, I need to check the email (I asked Dan Jones to do some things for me today as I was having trouble with one of my credit cards), and lo and behold an email from my travel agent back home…. Thai has cancelled my flight home and rebooked me on a flight that leaves that evening from Bangkok. That means, I miss my connection to Houston, and also that there are no other flights to Houston that late from LA that I can make. So now I have to spend a night in LA and wait to go to Houston the next day! That means that I will leave New Zealand, travel for 14 hours to Bangkok, wait 22 hours in Bangkok, fly 15 hours to LA, spend the night in LA and then get to Houston the next morning… so its going to take me 4 days to get from New Zealand to Houston?! I rifle off some emails to Lynn and hope that she can work some magic so that I don’t have to spend two nights in two different cities and zig zag across the planet to get back.

Now we are way behind schedule so we race across the west coast to get here to Franz Josef, so that we can make it to Wanaka by tomorrow night to see Nick Frame. On the way we stop in Greymouth (largest city on the west coast, I think, at something like 13,000) to buy some AAA batteries for my digital voice recorder and head lamp, and we walk into a New Zealand version of a Super wal-mart. Now outside it has been warming steadily since we’ve arrived, and it is all pretty spring green and flowering, etc., and we walk into this store and they are playing Frosty the Snowman, and Jingle Bells and things like that. It is just funny to think that it is the holiday season in late spring/early summer, but it is!

The west coast ride is interesting, but from Greymouth to Ross it is the most boring landscape I have seen so far in New Zealand, that is to say, it is gorgeous and green: farms and the large variety of trees and every so often one of the numerous short, wide, crystal clear rivers that New Zealand has, but it is not as vertical as the rest of New Zealand. Every now and then a fantastic view of the Southern Alps opens up on the eastern side, but they are in the far distance, which means like the view of the Rockies from Aurora on a clear day (not very far at all)….still beautiful, but relatively boring.

Now at this point in the trip I am lying down in the back of the vanette. That is one of the beautiful things about the vanette, when my back bothers me, I can lie down in the back while Gen drives. Now the roads in New Zealand are one of the least attractive features of the country. For one they twist and turn a lot. And today that is not bothering me at all. What is killing me are the numerous compressions. The landscape is rather volatile as this is an island of mountains formed by two tectonic plates colliding as the chap at the Nelson Lakes hike explained, so the landscape is moving, and the roads are not in the best of shape. We seem to be hitting a compression about once every 300 meters or so, and it is taking its toll.

And I thought there wasn’t much to put in the blog tonight.

Then we come across something uniquely New Zealand…something you would never, ever find in the states….A one lane bridge (I’ve told you about them), but this one is also a railway bridge! So the main west coast highway becomes a one lane bridge with a train track going right down the middle of it! In front of us now, a big tour bus is on the train track waiting for the traffic coming across the bridge to clear the bridge before it and we go across this bridge. (I took pictures!)

But then the landscape changes back to New Zealand verticality, the road comes closer to the Southern Alps, and I am mister shutterbug in the car again. We don’t stop too much, because we need to get to Franz Josef tonight, and I want to get there so I can get out of the car, eat, get the blog done and get some sleep tonight!

Passing Ross we return to the steep green room of a typical New Zealand landscape – moss and ferns and huge trees covered in green drapery, steep slopes that get so much moisture that they are also covered in green. By Whaitaha it is very, very beautiful. We then pass through Harihari, which looks like a really cool little hamlet. It has a lot of flat (for New Zealand not nearly as wide as South Park or the San Luis valley– not by a long shot!), and of course it is all super green. The Southern Alps are right there, and the mountains in front of the Southern Alps are steep and covered in rain forest type vegetation – it reminds me of Hawaii, just colder.

Tonight we are staying in Franz Josef under a tall snow covered mountain on the western side of the Southern Alps near the Franz Josef glacier. This is a newer, very nice camper van park that was recently hewn out of the rainforest. It is nice, peaceful, and thankfully dry. Not many amenities – no kitchen and no internet/tv lounge, but that is ok. It beats the hell out of the crowded and rather grim Holiday Park Camping area in Westport. That had a communal kitchen with rows of two burner electric cooktops, but I had to try three to find one that worked. It had a tv room/internet kiosk room, but only lit by this one low wattage light bulb, so that I wore my headlamp as I composed last night’s blog. Here on the other hand, we have power at our site and I am standing outside the van (better than sitting in the awful chairs of the place last night, which is what crippled me today) typing away on Genevieve’s computer listening to the pleasant, but somewhat muted (compared to the northern part of the Island) birdsong in the fading twilight. We also have a lamp that puts out a good amount of light, so this is working fine. (The lesson is to not stop at campervan parks that do not rate any stars in Jason's Guide book. An invaluable and free publication available all over the South Island.)

Genevieve likes Westport, a town of about 4500 in the northern West coast of New Zealand which has an area population of 6,000. Westport is a little grim, but also has some charm. It is a coal mining town that has some counter-cultural types moving in and making it an interesting smorgasborg. Sound familiar? (Crested Butte). No wonder Genevieve likes it.

Westport is basically on the far side of Kahurangi Park and it took us a few day to get around to it from Nelson (with hikes, of course, but that gives you an idea of the size.) Kahurangi National Park covers 452,000 hectares (1,116,916 acres!) and is the second largest of New Zealand’s 14 national parks. It covers most of the northwest corner of the south island. I really liked that park, and definitely want to spend some time exploring it when I come back to New Zealand. It seems to have a lot of variety in landscapes and is home of the famous Heaphy Track – a four/five day walk.

I also thought I would put in some general observations about New Zealand tonight, like how great the apples are. Good new Zealand Macintosh and fiji apples. Also, there are lots of deer being raised on some of the farms, Gen tells me that when you order Elk or Deer in a restaurant in the US what you are really eating is New Zealand Red Deer – a cross between an Elk and a Deer. Also the walking/bike paths that occur occationally along the side of the road, are not str8. They are usually very curvey, and not because the road is curvey, it seems that it is just for aesthetics.

Anyway, that is tonight’s blog. Tune in next time for the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers and the trip over Haast Pass to Wanaka.

Until then, Newo out

Hiking Mt Robert in Nelson Lakes National Park

2008-11-12T05:05:00.001-08:00

Title: Hiking Mt Robert in Nelson Lakes National Park

So the next morning I awake (as I seem to every morning) at 7:30 AM and I am a bit disappointed to see that the grey room has closed in again. Yes we are in the cloud again, and even though we are “inland” – Hope Saddle approximately equidistant from the north, west and east coasts – the grey misting cloud that makes everything drip has the distinct smell of the sea. So, I decide to let Gen sleep while I read in my book. After all what is the hurry? Go hike in the mist at Nelson Lakes? To see nothing? Besides, Gen is obviously sleeping soundly and she deserves her rest!

About 8:30 Gen wakes, and we make the hot water for oatmeal and coffee (our two respective breakfasts). While we are doing our morning re-arranging of the van (at night all the bags move to the front two seats to make room for our sleeping area, it is a vanette and not a van, after all), an older fellow pulls up in an absolutely beautiful, obviously well taken care of 1976 Toyota Landcruiser with a snorkel. I say, “what a beautiful jeep! I bet that will take you places.” He smiles, and says, “You know what is the best thing about her?” and honks the horn, and it makes this old granny type of honk! He then pops the hood and shows me the Nissan diesel engine in it, and says that it will run no matter where you take it, and tells me that he has had it in such deep water that the interior of the car has flooded out. “Can’t stop a good diesel engine,” he says. So this starts another about ½ hour long conversation, where he shares with Genevieve a bunch of information about the various plants around the car park, “Now this is a flax plant, you can eat the fruit at the very center of it.” And “Oh I guarantee there are kiwi (birds) in this bit of brush right here.” And, “It is easy to live cheaply in New Zealand. You cant walk but a mile into the bush without running into a deer or a pig or something you can shoot and eat, and if you stay away from the touristy areas, the water is clean enough to drink right out of the creek.”

His name is Lance, lives in Nelson, and stops here as a matter of habit to stretch his legs while driving between Nelson and the gold mine he works at 6 days at a stretch somewhere on the west coast. “Six days on, six days off, 12 hours a day…. I can drive any of their machines, so I never know what I’m going to do.”

We found it ironic that he deplored the small amount of garbage at the rest stop, while he worked in a modern gold strip mine! “We went in there where the old fellas had made shafts, and we are taking out the whole mountain. We are about a kilometer in diameter and at about 200 meters deep. The deeper we go, the richer the find. About $3.5 million/day, they are making….So much gold you can just pick it up off the ground and see it in your hands, but don’t put your hand in your pockets! Instant dismissal, that is. Gold on the cab floor, gold in all the machinery, gold along the roads, gold everywhere.” He also shared his disdain for foreign tourists, as we shared Genevieve’s coffee with him, “Oh that’s good coffee, that is.” He continued, “I’d say don’t let any of them in, throwing their garbage about, but you gotta take the good with the bad. I love it here, lived here all my life, seems only fair to share it with them, too.” Another interesting character.

And on sharing his love of the land, he shared this little tidbit, “Best thing about New Zealand is that nothing here is trying to kill ya. In Aussie, everything is trying to bite ya, here, everything wants to know ya.” And recounted (for we have seen it with our own eyes) how the Weka "will come right up and eat the shoes off your feet."

He was a wealth of information, like Ann was on the Queen Charlotte hike, just a little bit different info. He told us that they had found a female Tuatara, a native lizard that had been thought to be extinct except for the specimens in captivity. He also told me that only 1 million people live on the South Island (or something like one person per 100 sq km), and that there were whole huge parts of the Island that have never been explored by whites. So Genevieve’s hope to see a Moa (a huge flightless bird, bigger than an ostrich), was confirmed by Lance, “I am sure there is some of them somewhere, we just haven’t found them yet.” It was kind of re-assuring after finally figuring out that all these big evergreens with their lower branches all pruned up, growing in nice tidy rows along most of the highways are all actually tree farms, that there was still lots of unexplored New Zealand outside the great National Parks. He also informed Genevieve that you can eat the Mountain Cabbage tree’s soft parts too, that is why they are called cabbage trees.

So we collected our things and headed for Nelson Lakes National Park. After all, the weather may be bad, but if we say in Colorado, if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute, from my observations the New Zealand equivalent has got to be, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a second.” The weather here is THAT changeable.

At the Mt Robert Car park in Nelson Lakes National Park, we met yet another great NZ character also filled with fascinating facts. Apparently, all the landscape near the Park is only 3 to 5 million years old, as we were at or near a fault line between the Australia Plate and the Pacific Plate. He warned us to be on the lookout for the indigenous Green Parrot, called the Kea, as it will eat anything and everything. “It’ll eat your car if you let it. Its true, ask the rental car people. Dang bird eats the windshield wipers, and the rubber off the tires.” He also expressed his disappointment at new farms that were encroaching on the bush of the Park.

The weather started to look as if it might clear again, just like the previous day, so we started up the Mt Robert trail above Lake Rotoiti. Unfortunately, Genevieve’s camera’s battery died, too. Which means we have very few pictures of this day hike. The day did indeed turn spectacular. And this lake that we are climbing above is HUGE, yet it is small compared to the many other large lakes on the New Zealand South Island Map, which makes me start to grasp the amount of fresh water this island is blessed with. So we have seen many rivers and creeks, and the rivers can get VERY wide. Plus all these lakes? Holy crap, that is a LOT of fresh (and crystal clear) water. The guy at the bottom (sorry didn’t catch his name) said something about a meter of rain a day, “makes New Zealand, New Zealand.”

So this is a nice hike, but it was a little disappointing as the terrain was the most similar to Colorado as I have seen so far. Not that it wasn’t drop dead gorgeous (it was) just that if you are in New Zealand for a short trip, there are other place to go that are more exotic.

So in the treed areas of this hike, the same green moss and ferns and trees as on Mt Arthur are in abundance, and the ground is wet like a sponge (obviously why the trees grow where they do.) Where the track was out in the open, it was hard like any trail in Colorado.

So as we climbed Mt Robert, it kept looking like we would get into the cloud. But as we climbed the mist cleared before us….Again our luck with the weather and conditions continues to hold. We did get into the cloud, and again, the temperature change is dramatic (much colder). We were again in the grey room, and the views, which were starting to open, closed up around us tight. But by the time we got to the top, the view out the back was stunning…. More snow covered peaks in the distance with lower not snow covered peaks forming the valley edge above the lake to our left.

As we sat on the top and had our lunch, the blue-bird day came out in force. My god! The Views were stupendous up here! To the west it was Mountains, with mountains behind them, and then more mountains, and yet another range – five or six ranges, one behind the other to the horizon! And below us to the northwest a beautiful green farm filled valley, with the Owen range towering above it, and to the east/northeast, more green valley to Blenheim in the distance. And to the north smaller, round green mountains covered in trees (tree farms maybe) they called those mountains “Knobs” but mountains they would be called in the US, for mountains they are!

I decided to walk to the edge of Christie’s ridge before heading down the trail to see what was around the ridge in front of us (behind Mt Robert). We were well above tree line here, and the valley below seemed much further down vertically than any back home in Colorado (I am sure it was). I walked to the edge to look down upon the blue, blue waters of the top of Lake Rotiri and the meandering stream that fed it in the valley floor so far below. And even though it was dirt and rock on Christie's Ridge, it wasn’t hard ground. I left visible footprints as I sank a quarter inch into the soft, rocky ground! It was delightful on my back to walk on this soft ground, like walking on a thick foam pad. It was so soft, that when I went back out, I felt a need to rather meticulously follow my same footprints out. After all I come from the tradition of “leave only footprints, take only pictures.”

It was worth the ½ hour trip, as even more, incredibly impressive snow covered peaks revealed themselves around the rocky ridge (that made one of the few pictures). One further back, and three or four closer in (the big one must be Angelus), closer to that obscuring ridge. It was spectacular, gorgeous. There is a very distinct tree line at just the same elevation along the valley wall opposite. God I wished I had more pictures from this hike!

As I started my descent, a glider (sailplane?) came gliding overhead silently, so close I could make out its call numbers, TH 4408. He is gaining altitude in this breeze off the shoulder of Mt Robert.

Ah New Zealand! Alpine mountains and tundra (or is it just short grasses?) above green, green trees and valleys; clouds…. Mountains everywhere! So many mountains I can see from here, and I can only see such a very small part of the South Island – the north part of the South Island. I can only imagine (or actually can’t imagine) what awaits in the week ahead.

Another big difference between here and home is that there is always quite a bit of birdsong in the air all the time: morning, day, night, even up here above tree line. And there is no, or virtually no air traffic. That one helicopter, there is another off in the distance – a tour perhaps? The New Zealander pointed out the only jet trail I have seen so far at the beginning of today’s hike...obviously a large annoyance to him. What a difference to hiking in Colorado where there is air traffic constantly! One of the things that stands in my memory as an exceptional experience was the quiet in those few days after 9/11 when all air traffic was grounded. Here that is the norm. Another delightful thing about New Zealand -- no or very little air traffic.

So we came down the mountain and it is only 4:45PM. How did that happen? The loop was supposed to be 5 hours, and we went well above the loop to the top of the mountain, and we left at 5 to Noon. This is the first time we have been substantially ahead of the estimated time for the hike. (usually we are about 20% over) And we had a leisurely lunch. We decided to get a head start on the west coast trip by driving the 100 or so KM to Westport on the coast to spend the night; after all I am supposed to get on a plane in seven days. Seven days!! So much to do in seven days.

Now 100 KM seems like it would not be too far, but wait, remember the six or so ranges of mountains I saw to the west from Mt Robert? Yes, it tooks us about 2:15 to cover those 100 km! Windy, Windy roads. Many curves, steep grades (much steeper than in the US) and one lane bridges, one lane road cuts…. The sheer verticality of New Zealand is impressive. I used to think that Colorado had vertical, but New Zealand puts us to shame. Wherever I look, it is vertical. Up or down the side of the trail…seemingly any trail is a double black fall line. Up or down off the side of the road it is often sheer hundreds of feet. If there are flat valleys, there are always mountains not too far away rising to the sky.

One thing about the misty clouds that so far have dominated the weather on this trip is that it lent a good deal of mystery and drama to the landscape. But today it is a bluebird day, I can see the tops of all the mountains which is a little anticlimactic. We pass the Owen Valley and crossed the Owen River, there is of course a great dramatic view of Mt Owen at the top of the valley, but alas our batteries are dead.

Another thing is that the amount and variety of trees in this country is truly amazing. I do not know them all, and I am no expert on trees, but jeez, we got like what, three kinds of trees in CO? Evergreen, Aspen, Cottonwood (even if there are a few varieties of evergreen). But here … there are dozens of very different types of trees (and I only count evergreen once here too.)

On this ride, it just doesn’t stop. We are following this canyon, with its vertical, but oh so green, sides, and wide crystal clear river. And when I think we are going to get through it all and see the sea, no…. More mountains, mountains, mountains.

And on this main highway between Murchison and Westport there is a spot where there is a sheer cliff to the river below -- the Buller Gorge following the Buller River. They have chiseled out one narrow lane out of the cliff for about 200 meters or so that the cliff looks kind of like a mushroom in profile. That is how they did it. No blasting a hole for the two lane highway through the cliff. They just treat it as one of the many one way bridges. One way yields to the other side and if someone is already on the one lane part of the road, you just have to stop and wait until they come through. Luckily there are so few people and vehicles on the road. A little bit further on they have done it again, but this time, it is a segment that includes about 3 or 4 hairpin turns in it! There is no way to see if anyone is on-coming! Their answer is to lower the speed limit to 15 KPH figuring, I guess, that you would have enough time to stop if you drive slow, instead of having an accident.

So we make it to Westport and we find a Campground where we can have a kitchen and showers and internet. What is funny is that I have been the cook (no Phil in New Zealand). I have been preparing our nightly meals. Last night I made some yummy sausages and mashed Kumara -- a sweet potato type of root vegetable, just not as sweet as a sweet potato (phil would be proud at how much butter I put in the mashers). It was good if I say so myself. Tonight, however, I started what has been our typical evening meal of pasta, broccoli (BEM, Ange!), tuna fish in some kind of canned sauce, but tomight, Genevieve finished it, and did all the dishes too, so that I could work here on the blog on her laptop. Sweet Genevieve!

But now I have caught up on the blog, and it is 2AM (again) and I am posting and I am going to bed, for tomorrow, I try to call Qantas to change my departure so that I will have time for the “Cannot Miss” Milford Sound ferry ride. After all, Rick wont be in Thailand during my two days there before coming home, and Methet leaves after just one day. I might miss my other Thai friend, but he had a chance when I was there at the beginning. So I if I can change my ticket, I am doing it. I had hoped to do it tonight on the internet, but no I have to call the local Qantas office….Problem is a big town on the west coast has a population of 13,000. Doubt they have a Qantas office. So I gotta figure out how to call Christchurch in the AM.

So until next time

Newo out,

Mt Arthur

2008-11-12T05:03:00.000-08:00

Title: Mt Arthur.

Aside: Most of these blog entries are in a rough draft form, please bear with that. I don’t have the time to devote too much to review and making it all purty, but I WILL when I get back to the US and I am in Texas. I will edit the blog, post descriptions on the Picasa web album pictures, and do all that kind of thing then, while suffering from the jet lag.

Anyway, after the last posting the night before in Nelson, I met a german guy named Aljosha from Berlin. He was staying at the same backpackers (a hostel) we stayed at. He was an interesting fella who could tell a good story. He had been in Bali recently too, and he shared a very funny story about his return from Bali to Sydney. He had met up with some kind Balinese who gave him a tour of their island for the price of their petrol, and then invited him to dinner. When they asked him if he liked his meals spicy, he said yes, thinking spicy in a German sort of way, which of course is not very spicy. He said he ate two of these green bean looking things and that his mouth did not stop burning for 5 days! This meal with the Indonesian locals took place on his last night on Bali, and on his return trip to Sydney, he said he threw up something like seven times on the airplane! This made the Aussie’s a little nervous that perhaps he was bringing some kind of biohazard into their country, so when his plane landed, they quarantined the WHOLE AIRPLANE! And these guys came on board in full yellow biohazard gear, and the flight attendants all pointed at him, “he’s the one.” So they checked him out, but he was ok, it was just his stomach couldn’t handle that spicy Indonesian meal.

We talked a lot into the night (he was quite the talker), and I showed him CB on Google Earth and he showed me his favorite parts of Berlin, too. He was in New Zealand on a 12 month work visa, and then was going to fly to LA giving himself seven weeks to get to and fly home from Montreal. I said, "hey stop by Crested Butte on the way, I’ve got a guest room you can stay in." He said he might, and we exchanged email addresses and he said that he would let me know, one way or the other when he got to the states. I don’t usually just offer my guest room to total strangers, but he had a good feel about him, so why not?

So we made it out of Nelson a little late, but we made it to the Flora Saddle Carpark at 930 meters above sea level (Nelson was at sea level) in about 2 and ½ hours, arriving just before the day got dark. We drove up to Motueka (where Genevieve had lived on a farm for two weeks last time she was in New Zealand milking goats and making cheese, etc.), and turned up the Motueka River Valley, then headed off the main road and climbed up an incredibly steep gravel road past green New Zealand farms with sheep. Up, up, up and into the Kahurangi National Park where we planned to hike Mt Arthur the next day. It had been raining in Nelson, but it had stopped before we left, but it was still a very grey, low hanging cloudy day. As we went up this road, we got into the cloud, and it felt like cloud, misty wet and cold. It gave everything a mysterious quality, and the ever-present birdsong….

The sounds here, coming from the bush are very interesting. They are mostly bird noises, and I have described some of them before … the pleasant bird songs from the Queen Charlotte Track hike. None of the sounds are like the screaming we heard from the forest in Ubud (a monkey Ange and I finally concluded), or the constant cock crows of Tonga or Indonesia – those were harsh sounds. Here the sounds are all harmonious, soft, pleasant to listen to, never harsh. In Flora Saddle I heard a sound that sounded like a wet fart, or like some large fluttering of big birds. Genevieve tells me that there are really large pigeons, native to New Zealand called Kereou that are like the size of a chicken or even bigger, and they make very loud whooshing noises as they fly. That is what she thought I heard, she says that they are very loud when they fly. There are so many birds here, the Tui and the Bellbird and the Weka and so on, and all together they make up the majority of the sounds we hear coming from the bush.

So we are in Flora Saddle and the cloudy mist breaks every now and then to reveal a 3/4 moon, the strange upside down moon of the southern hemisphere (which is funny because it is the first time I can look at the moon and actually see the “man in the moon” – only in the upside down moon). This is a good sign as we plan on hiking Mt Arthur tomorrow, and we are praying for a break in the weather. (As you recall from my last entry, we spent the day in Nelson while it rained and I had my back adjusted by the chiropractor.)

It is still kind of spooky here at night as we are all alone with two vacant cars in the carpark way up at 930 meters above sea level. It is cool, but not as cold as that first night when it snowed just a few hundred feet above our camping spot on the beach. Everything is wet and dripping from the light, misting rain of the day, there are big puddles in the carpark and everything is wet. I heard a big spooky noise off in the darkness of the bush, something large falling from a tree, coupled with the foreign birdsong that continues even into night. And even though I know that there are no poisonous anything, and there are no large predators here, it still gives me a small fright.

But this has been the best night so far in New Zealand, because Genevieve has finally opened up and came out of this shell that she has been in since that first night in Tonga, and started to tell me about Antarctica. She has told me more about Antarctica, tonight than she has ever told me. Special things about why she likes it there so much. All I have heard before tonight is that it is the coldest, driest, harshest place on earth, and if you look at pictures of McMurdo on the web, it looks like a town made out of airplane hangars. How can such a place be such a fascination to her? Tonight she told me revealing items about living there that made me understand why it was so special. I cannot bring myself to repeat any of the things in such a public forum as this, since I have been chastised again and again not to talk about Antarctica. Ask her yourself (if you dare) and she will tell you (if she wants to). The things she described not only made me understand why she liked it so much, but also roused enough interest that I want to go there as well. And it touched me that she felt that she could share this with me.

The next morning (November 11 – the 10^th in the US) started out very promising as sunshine peeked thru the cracks in the vanette’s curtains, so I woke up thinking good, sunshine the weather had broke. Turns out that the sun was shining in between cloud layers, one below our position that undoubtedly meant that Nelson and Motueka were still grey, and the cloud layer above us, so that by 8 AM or so, it was a grey day again. Oh well, we were here to go into the Kahurangi National Park even if barely into it. I am not sure how big this park is, but it is frickin BIG … it takes most people something like 4 -5 days to cross it by foot, and our planned day hike to the top of Mt Arthur was just barely nicking the outside edge according to the map of the park. This park map also lists something like 12 different mountain ranges within the park! Clearly, I could spend a month or so in the Nelson area and still have places to explore in Abel Tasman and Kahurangi National Parks.

So off we start on our day hike. Now it was wet, it was really wet. It was not raining or anything, it was just a grey misty/cloudy day, but the ground was like walking on a big sponge. (It reminded me of that scene in Empire Strikes Back when they are inside the giant space worm’s stomach in the asteroid.) Every step was a squish, squish, squish. There is green everywhere – the ground is covered in moss, the trees are covered in moss, tiny ferns and tiny mushrooms. The big trees had green draped all over them. (Pictures will eventually show up in Picasa.) This hike started off great, my back felt good, if a bit sore from the adjustment, and the landscape is a feast to the eyes – very different from anything I have experienced in the US whether Colorado or the pacific northwest.

So I walk for a good hour to 90 minutes snapping pictures like mad, then I get up on the ridge and the giant beech tree green forest gives way to smaller trees that are bare except for what looks like an aloe plant on the top of them. (I’ll figure out the name of them eventually.) So I then come across snow in small patches along the side of the trail, or in a sink hole along the trail. The track is still very wet and muddy, and we are still not to the Mt Arthur Hut, which is like a 1/3, maybe half the way up the mountain. The sun is starting to come in and out in patches through the grey sky.

We get to the hut, and its time to decide what to do. Looking further up the trail (when the clouds part enough to see further up the trail) we see a mountain (not the top) that has a lot of snow on it. Two New Zealanders showed up at the bottom while we were having our breakfast. They, too, were going to climb Mt Arthur, they set off in shorts (of course – those hardy New Zealanders have been mostly wearing shorts since I have arrived – its spring doncha know), but taking with them ice picks and crampons. Then another pair of NZers show up (yes wearing shorts, of course) they came up a different path, from the Flora Hut (not at the Flora Saddle). They said that they were sure the guys ahead of us were going to need the ice picks, but probably not the crampons. On top of everything, I had left one of my made-for-my-(favorite)-pack water bottles in Nelson, and I was adamant that we return for it. (My fanny pack as anyone in CB will know is completely unbalanced with only one of these bottles.) So with all of these factors, we decided to make a loop out of the hike and go up just a little more to a false summit, take in what view we could, then go down the other track, see the Flora hut then up and back to the carpark. We figured that would take us out by 2 PM, back to Nelson by 4 PM and then make our way to Nelson Lakes National Park which is our planned hike for the next day. This suited us fine, and turned out to be a good choice. For one, we were not prepared for the snow at the summit, and for two, this would allow us to return to Nelson, but not screw up the near term schedule.

So we went up to the false summit, and our luck continues to hold, meaning on our days off, the weather sucks, when we go hiking, the weather is awesome, or in this case decent. While on this false top, the clouds did lift (mostly) and we could take in the view into the park proper. OMG! It was stunning. Miles and miles and miles of untouched wilderness, with spectacular mountains in the two directions we could see into the Park. And of course, we could only see just this one enormous area that is just the tiniest bit of this huge Park. No roads, no houses, just snow covered peaks over greeeeeen forests. We made our early lunch there and left the little peak at about 11:30PM. (Lots of pictures still to come.) I was a little emotional as I left the top, I am not sure why, I suppose the shear enormity and beauty of this place touched me. Plus I am disappointed in myself that my bone-headed forgetfulness cut short our first peak attempt. But I did resolve myself at that point to come back to NZ sometime and stay long enough to do it right! I want to explore this Park! And I want to see the Abel Tasman (where they filmed the wood elf scenes in the Lord of the Rings), which is one of the NZers favorite of all their 14 national parks. So I am putting it out there now to all y’all . . . I am targeting January and February of 2010 or 2011 for a 8 week tour with multi-night tramps (as they call it) on the South Island of NZ. Any of you wanna come, let me know. I am starting to plan for it as soon as I get back!

Starting down the route to the Flora Hut, the track was especially wet and muddy. In fact it must have been the wettest muddiest hike I have ever done. To make matters worse, the descent was STEEP through the trees, and I mean like staircase (ladder? – well at least in a few places, where I literally went backwards) steep. I am slipping and sliding down this trail, and going SLOW. At first it is funny, but soon pain replaces fun, and by the fifth or so major slip on the wet roots of the trees (hidden by a layer of last falls leaves), makes it not too much fun anymore. It is so wet that not only is the ground wet, but even if I grab what looks to be a dry part of a tree to help me keep my balance, it too is sopping wet – like a sponge. Luckily, skiing reflexes take over, and I just start to go with the slips and slides, instead of tweaking my back with each one. And also luckily, I did not fall, and I had ibuprofen on me, that all helps. And again, what looks like solid ground, is like a sponge. Sometimes I step on what looks like the most solid part of the trail only to get a sense that I am going to fall into some kind of hole, as if it wasn’t ground but quicksand (tho the deepest I ever really go is about 1 ½”). Soon enough, my boots are as grey as the muddy ground, and the bottom ¼ of my pants are a pretty good mess, too. It is really good that this trail is well marked with red triangles on the trees (it is not the wide track that most of these trails in NZ seem to be), because in many places it is hard to tell what is trail and what is plain old forest floor, even for me, accustomed as I am in picking out game trails while bushwacking (“hunting grouse”) with Kraig in CB.

Somwhere near the bottom, the sound of a helicopter invades the squeely chimes of the birdsong, and I think, “huh, a helicopter tour.” As I get toward the bottom, where the Flora hut ought to be, it is clear that the helicopter is at the hut. Just before getting to the Hut, the chopper takes off and heads away. Genevieve is waiting for me at the bottom and she tells me it is the DOC (Dept of Conservation) people who were unloading things. While I am resting after that hellish decent, the ‘copter returns, flies right over head and lands in the small amount of open space here on the valley floor next to the hut. The DOC guys unload items, load other items (and a dog), one of them gets in and heads back into the park (down the valley) from where it had just come from. (Gen took a cool video of it with her camera.) This helicopter continues to do this as we walk out, obviously ferrying supplies from the carpark to the Hut to points beyond.

We start up the trail back to the car park. By now, the cloud cover has broken completely and it is a stunning blue-bird day. We are now walking past a beautiful crystal clear stream, with the occasional small waterfall. It is like all the water I have seen in NZ – salt or fresh, it does not seem to matter – so incredibly clear, every detail of the streambed is clearly visible, as if there was no water there at all. As we walk up this road (it’s a road, although nobody but the DOC is allowed to drive on it), the moss covered sidecut is weeping with water that is draining out of the forested hill above.

On our way, a gorgeous blonde woman who also showed up while we were breakfasting, and took off into the Park on her mountain bike, came upon me. She stopped and got off her bike and started up a conversation. Seems like everywhere I go, the New Zealanders stop and talk. They genuinely seem interested and are so very polite. We pass a couple of Wekas and she asks me if I know what birds those are. I say, they are wekas, I think. She seems somewhat impressed as apparently most tourists think they are the reclusive Kiwi birds. She asks about my plans, and I tell her we are on our way to Nelson Lakes and then down the west coast. “Be sure to stop at the Pancake Rocks.” About the 20^th time I have heard that I have to stop at them, and it has long been part of the plan.

She tells me a great tale about having to sneak around the guy at the Flora Hut. Apparently there is some confusion as to mountain bikers being allowed in the park or not. She thinks that they are allowed on this road, but not allowed on any of the tracks or trails. She said that she road her bike down this road, and then hiked up to this other hut further in the park (probably about double –or more – the mileage Gen and I just did). Anyway, she confides that she hopes there aren’t any DOC guys at the carpark. I ask if she will get a ticket for having the bike. She said, “No, just a good jabbering.” Or something like that – typical Kiwi attitude. For example, there is no law (I don’t think) about having your seat belt fastened, its just you want to because then you wont die in an accident, but if you want to die, go ahead, don’t wear your seat belt. Or like the guy who we hired the vanette from (Grant): didn’t need the CC number to hold the reservation, just wanted to be sure we HAD a credit card.

Anyway, we get to the vanette about 2PM; head into Nelson; my water bottle is still at the internet place. I pick it up; we check email, and as I step outside while Gen is online, there is Aljosha across the street. I walk over and say, “hi.” And he says, “hey I thought you were leaving!” “We did, but I left this here, so we came back for it. Off to Nelson Lakes next though.” He looks a little forlorn and says, “I’ll get there too, one of these days.” Gen comes out gets to meet Aljosha who tells her another story about not being able to find a shirt that fits him in this country – something about his neck is too wide for how narrow the rest of his body is, and the shirts he finds are either ridiculously big or way too small. Gen confirms the “he’s a really good guy” feeling I had the night before, and tells him he has to stop by CB next June, we say goodbye and pick up some more groceries. As we drive between Nelson and it's bedroom community of Richmond, we get stuck in the same afternoon rush hour traffic as we did the day before! (There even is a sign by the side of the road saying, “PM Queues” as if we didn’t know we were stuck in the afternoon rush!)

We head towards Nelson Lakes, and stop at a lookout spot the DOC info office had told us about called Hope Saddle just in time for the weather to break in all directions, and we can take in a splendid evening view (sunset being about 8PM in the southern spring, with long twilight). Included in the view is Mt Owen, Mt. Arthur, the mountains around Nelson Lake, and far in the distance, some of the Southern Alps! The spot was off the highway somewhat (up a dirt road), it had a bathroom, so we decided to spend the night there…why not? We are living out of the vanette after all, and we are just 35 KM from Nelson Lakes. There is also a flat grassy area that sure looks like an inviting place to pitch a tent, AND there is no sign here telling us that we cannot camp here (many other places are very specific in their signage). The cold grey clouds rolled in during the fading twilight, and it looks like rain (or misting) again. What is very similar to home is that when the sun is out it feels hot – the blue bird hike of today was warm in a t-shirt – but when the sun goes down, or the clouds roll in, it gets cold, and fast.

Tune in next time for the Nelson Lake day…. coming up real soon.

Newo-out

Traveling from Picton to Nelson and Nelson

2008-11-09T18:11:00.000-08:00

So we left Picton on Sunday 9 November and head for Nelson. We stopped at Cullen's Point to do a short one hour walk along the coast of the point. Again, New Zealand is never what I expect it to be. I expected this to be like the other penisula we hiked, which was flat. Instead it is down a steep inlcine, and a traverse, slightly upwards back up and around the penisula to where we parked the vanette. It is a cool and cloudy day, but not cold like it has been. I can hike in my t-shirt and not feel cold.

The little track starts out rather disapointing after yesterday's spectacular hike, but it gets better and better as we go around the point. Also, I am able to get a picture of the beetle's anus -- the hairs coming out of a tree.

I am also happy with the breakthough in the pool and the rush of the end of yesterday's hike as it helps me get through this hike. Tomorrow, monday, i will track down a chiropractor in Nelson and get my hip knocked back in place.

So the "book" Lonely Planet -- the ultimate guide book says that you can do one island or the other in two weeks, and the whole country in a month if you are rushed. They recommend 4 weeks for each island though to get the feel. What i have realized is that I could spend two weeks just in the Marlborough Sound, and probably at least a month in Nelson and still have things to do. And I still have not seen the west coast, the southern alps, and fjordland. All places that I want to see. So I realize that to do NZ right, you need like 4 - 6 months, really.

At anyrate, we arrive at Nelson and check out the DOC office to see what we can do in our two days in Abel Tasman, Kahurangi and Nelson Lakes Park. They confirm my suspicions that you need about a month at least to look at these places in anything remotely like detail, so I knock Abel Tasman off the list, and we plan for two hikes one in Karangahui and the other in Nelson Lakes. This trip will have to be a taste of New Zealand, and I resign myself to that without trying to do it all too fast.

Monday is the windy and rainy day that was forecast, so I spend the day getting the blog up and running, finding my outstanding (as it turns out) Chiropractor, thank you Dr. Sally Dawson, and I get all my photos up on the picasa site. We are off to spend the night closer to the start of tomorrow's planned mountain top hike, and I pray the weather breaks like it is supposed to do for the next two days of walking around New Zealand Mountains.

Nelson, I wont forget you, you are a very cool city of 85,000 (again it feels like a city and not a town), and if you are ever here on a budget stay at Tasman Bay Backpackers -- it is the best!

Until Next Time,

Newo Out

Hiking Queen Charlotte Sound pt 2

2008-11-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

So a little more than half way thru and Ann and I caught up with Genevieve, and we continued together to the end of the track. Now we had seen quite a few of a flightless bird indigenous to New Zealand called a weka (pronounced whack-ah). They are about the size of a house cat, with red eyes and brown body. Several had their chicks with them and they were aggressively searching for scraps from us -- even pecking at Ann's shoes and trying to get at our bags.

Just after meeting up with Gen, Ann's keen eyes picked out a black bird with a white balloon at its throat. This is a tui, another indigenous bird to New Zealand. We watched it hopping about one of the beech trees, it was searching for a bark beetle, another item we would not have noticed without Ann. These beetles are scale insects that live under the bark, and her anal tube sticks out of the tree and looks like a hair on the outside of the tree with a little blob of sugar at the end. These are the female beatles, and they use the sweet sap at the end to attract males (i think). These beetles have the longest anal tubes of any organism on the planet, and the tui and introduced wasps or bees feed on the sugary part. Ann actually tasted some, then Gen did, ... Do i dare eat something that actually comes out of a bug's butt? They did, so I felt compelled to do it too, it tastes like sugar. So yes i ate something excreted from the ass of an insect! Who would have thought that all the hairs covering the tree were actually the anal tubes of insects living under the bark.

We came across another huge native hardwood tree called a tia, Ann thought, and Ann thought it was left because it was not a strait tree, as the timber is quite excellent for building. Gen thought there was enough wood in this one tree to build a whole house, Ann thought so as well. It made us reflect having just seen the anal tubes of the beetle, of the amazing diversity in size of organisms on the planet, from the smallest single cell organisms to the mighty red wood trees and blue whales. We saw under a bunch of the bark beetle hairs, a whole group of plants called a sundew, which are insect-eaters. They get their nutrition by digesting small insects that get stuck on some sticky sweet sap the plant produces.

How wonderful it was to be walking and observing all of these natural wonders! We conclude that to not be curious about the world in which we live, people end up rushing about worrying about unimportant things, while the world passes one by. Gen's example was the bikers who have such a narrow focus on the trail, that they missed all the things Ann pointed out to us. Ann's was the loss of value of her house in the past year or so. My example was how half my stock portfolio's value disappeared while I traveled across the ocean to come on this trip. At first I was worried that one, I could no longer afford the trip I am on, and two, that I now dont have enough money to build the new house in CB next year. But here i am on this trip, and by god I am going to enjoy it while I can!

We somehow got on the subject of the Lord of the Rings movies and how they were filmed here in NZ, and I knew that some of the areas were being kept as tourist attractions. Ann knew that Hobbiton was in the middle of the north island around Hamilton, but that it was otherwise a more boring part of New Zealand, and that some of the silver beech elf forest scenes were filmed in Abel Tasman park near Nelson, where we are headed for tomorrow.

We saw a larger version of the green hood orchid later on the track, and then we saw a bell bird as well and another tui. But while we were in Endeavor Inlet and knew that it wasn't too much further to Ferneaux Lodge, we began to wonder how much further it was and the time. Ann had been on a few of these boat/hikes before and wasn't too worried about the time frame, but we had been going slowly looking at all the fascinating things Ann was pointing out, laughing and carrying on. Checking the time we found it to be 4Pm and right about then we came across a sign saying Ferneaux Lodge 25 minutes...oops.

Now, we had been quite stringently warned to be at the Lodge by 4 PM because the mail ferry had a schedule to keep, and they indicated that they would not wait very long for us. So we picked up the pace, moving quicker up the inlet. This was one of the places that there were a series of houses together. We saw one woman sitting on a bench in her yard, and asked, "is Ferneaux Lodge really 25 minutes away?" And her response was, "Well not at that pace it isn't." In the few gaps in the bush where a view to the top of the inlet was possible I had not seen our boat at any of the four or so piers, so we all felt ok, but still hurried.

Turns out we arrived at Furneaux Lodge about five or ten minutes before the ferry arrived, so had enough time to pee and sit for a second. Furneaux is very nice with idyllic manicured lawn down to the aquamarine clear waters of the Sound.

We board the ferry and head back to Picton now enjoying the incredible beauty of the Sound in afternoon sun, and head back to our little NZ trailer park/hostel for showers, dinner, and a good nights sleep!

Until next time,

Newo out.

Hiking Queen Charlotte Sound pt 1

2008-11-08T11:58:00.000-08:00

So we boarded the cat and set off thru the crystal clear waters of Queen Charlotte Sound. It was gorgeous, simply OMG mind-blowingly gorgeous … sunny skies with a few puffy clouds … we couldn't have asked for a better day.

On the way (it was a tour boat for some, transportation for others, and mail boat on the side), our captain, a fourth generation QCS boat captain, stopped for us to see some dusky dolphins swimming in the sound and pointed out a fish farm that raised salmon, up to 100,000 fish per pen I think he said. The fish farm had a problem with seals getting in and eating lots of their crop. They with the Dept of Ag arranged for the seals to be transported 200 KM south to Kaikoura (the place we had spent our first night in the camper van -- the Vanette), and re-located there. However, the very next day, the seals had returned to the fish farm! They swam the 200 KM to get back to the easy food in one day! And they somehow knew how to get back to the same place, isnt that wild?

On the boat there were about eight who were taking the tour boat part, an English woman named Ann -- more on her later, and a group of three guys and two gals from England who were mountain biking the entire 71 km of the track, one way. They were doing this in three days with the catamaran portering their belongings between their overnight stays. There are many different places to stay along the track, including tent sites, huts, and even resort hotels, some, like Forneuax Lodge probably rate 3 or so stars in Michelin. This, it seems, is how most people experience NZ's extensive system of well developed trails in their many, very large natural parks. They call it tramping. Now going by mountain bike seems like a good idea since they can travel over a long distance in a shorter time frame, except that (as Ann would later point out on the hike) they are going so fast and focusing just on the trail, they miss many of the wonderful details of the natural beauty that we were to notice.

After about an hour and a half sail, we arrived in Ship's Cove and our hike began. There is a memorial to Captain Cook who discovered New Zealand at the bottom at Ship's Cove. The hike started on a very steep uphill to a saddle in between Ship's Cove and Resolution Bay, then it wound around Resolution Bay and cut over to Endeavor Inlet, where we were picked up by the same catamaran at Fernaux Lodge, a total distance of about 15 KM. It was a good thing that it was a steep beginning as steep climbs help me get into good positioning with my back. Plus with the breakthrough in the pool in Thailand, when I concentrate I can feel myself utilizing the gluteous without using my hyperactive pirformis muscle, but it takes quite a bit of focus as my pirformis has been working for my gluts for so long. I also know that I am working properly as the pain decreases, and I can feel the correct stomach muscles working as well.

Anyway, the landscape is wonderfully beautiful -- stunning, easily matching or exceeding the stories of how insanely beautiful I have always heard New Zealand to be from others. There are large fern trees along with beech and evergreen as well as many other native species of tree I have never seen before. It is lush and very densely green, and the Sound as I mentioned before is clear, gorgeous green to aquamarine to brilliant blue water. (There will be TONS of pictures on picasa before too much longer!) And as I have noticed so far everywhere in New Zealand -- it is very scarcely populated. When it is rural here, it is very rural. For example there are homes -- little cabins, some of which are super nice – along the Sound, but not many. They are probably mostly if not entirely accessed by boat, sometimes they come in clusters of maybe six or twelve, sometimes they are solitary. There are whole “towns” that make the country map of New Zealand that consist of maybe a dozen or two homes and little else.

The track on this first bit is muddy and slippery -- a brown clay -- and it has been raining quite a bit, the previous few days. However, there are the footfalls of those who come before that make nice steps in the steep climb. Also the steepness underscores that I am at (or near) sea level as at home a trail up a mountain this steep would be about eight steps up followed by about a 30 second break just to breathe. Here however, I can just keep on trudging up to the top. Plus being at sea level, the landscape is obviously wet -- there are ferns and green moss over everything. And the smells, the air is humid and alive -- rich with oxygen with all the greenery around.

I expected New Zealand to be similar to the Pacific Northwest or maybe like the mountains of colorado, but this part is nothing like home not dry nor dusty at all. There are many varieties of plants I have never seen before and even the evergreen trees have a different shape than the trees of the US -- they are more fuller, almost bushy here. About the only thing that is the same as the northwest is the amount of humidity in the air, and the emerald green quality of the flora. No, New Zealand is distinctly its own, and it is amazingly beautiful. So far, on a per square kilometer basis, this has to be the most beautiful country on the entire planet; i don't think i have passed thru any part of this country that does not have some strikingly beautiful natural characteristic.

And the sounds (not the water, but the noises) ... the landscape is quite vertical, so there is the sound of falling water every so often. And the bird calls are very melodious ... one sounds like a penny whistle as Genevieve calls it, and the variety of different bird song is amazing. The personal logs of the sailors under Cook's command noted that the songbirds here where most pleasing to the ear, and I have to say that I agree. (Quite unlike the screams of monkeys in Indonesia, or the constant cock-a-doodle-dos of roosters interrupting the peace of Tonga.)

I understand that there are no native mammals in New Zealand, so a lot of that eco-niche was filled with many species of exotic bird, and with introduced birds, the birdsong in the bush is naturally quite varied. If you see me in person, I am keeping (probably forever) a sample of the sounds from Ship's Cove on my digital voice recorder. Plus I took a video on the camera that captures some of the sounds.

The track itself is quite wide however, two people can easily walk side by side -- about as wide as a bicycle path in a park in the US eg the bike path from CB to Mt CB or the Rio Grande Trail in Aspen, the trail in Cole Park in Corpus, etc.

The topography of the Sound is very much like the mountains of home in terms of heights and vertical climb of mountains above sea level to heights and vertical climbs of mountains above the valley floors, except that here it meets the sea with dense, lush greenery – bush they call it -- not tropical, but very green. And the view into the distance is amazing, I am not sure if my pictures will capture the ridgeline after ridgeline after ridgeline that one can actually see while on this hike or cruising the Sound. For example from various vantages up this first hill (and there is a picture of it) one can see the North Island in the distance.

And the waters that I have seen so far are all so clear. The sea water is clear (we can see the dusky dolphins as they are swimming under water, under our boat), the boats look like they are floating on air versus water, it is that clear...one can easily see for dozens of meters into the sea. And the surface waters are soooo clear as well, streams look clean enough to drink, more so than in Colorado, or so it seems to me on this hike.

So we are given time estimates for how long to take on this hike, and we have found so far that unlike the US where time estimates on hikes are geared to the very slow pace of fat, lazy americans (I can pretty much do any hike in any US National Park in about half the time estimate), here it is geared to active, fit New Zealanders. So when they say, one hour, it takes me at least one hour. We are given five hours to hike this 15 KM bit of the track, and while we did lolly gag a little -- i took a bazillion pictures, for example, and with Ann -- still too come -- we did slow down and look at a lot of stuff, we ended up arriving about 25 minutes behind schedule. But we didnt take very many long breaks. Lunch was rather rushed, and after lunch we were always well behind the time frames in the rare sign.

So, I have mentioned Ann, and now I need to talk about her. On the boat, she is just one of the other passengers, however on the track, I started to walk with her somewhere in the Resolution Bay part or about a third or so into the hike. She is a conservationist from the southwest of England -- around Bath. Her job entails trying to convince governments that they should be conserving their natural resources -- an uphill and frustrating battle it seems. She explains that she is constantly having to connect it to economic terms. For example, flooding is an expensive proposition in terms of the loss of property values, the costs of re-building after floods, etc, as Katrina aptly demonstrates. However, maintaining and restoring natural wetlands are a natural form of flood control and are infinitely more cost-effective than building and maintaining dykes, dams or runoff structures, etc.

Now Ann's expertise is on English natural forms and processes -- flora and fauna of England, but she is an intelligent and curious human being so she has naturally learned quite a bit about New Zealand's unique flora and fauna. She pointed out four different species of orchid for example (two of which I would have thought was just some grass -- both called "green-hooded" orchid), four or so species of fern (silver fern, the national fern of New Zealand -- the back side is silvery -- "ponga" or saithea taepotha (she knew the latin/scientific names) or, momuka or fekia something or another, with the black scales and the fronds all curled up like a shepard's crook, and bilmy ferns -- itty bitty ones, are one cell thick, so you could see your finger through them), two species of native tree -- long droopy leaves is a Remu, , and two species of beech. So tramping along with her was a delightful learning experience. And her enthusiasm for finding and pointing out these items was infectious, and made the hike so much more than simply enjoying the natural beauty. And she is a fellow swimmer, too.

We also had interesting conversations like the politics of Obama and the hope he represents for people all over the world. Again Obama so far has been universally desired by non-American citizens, even by the New Zealanders who just changed from Labour to a more conservative party simply because change is desired .... or the Lady at the campervan park in Picton who thought Obama will be an American President who can actually lead the world, as opposed to our current president whom did not seem to care a fig about what anyone else in the world thought....

ASIDE: Universally among non-Americans they dislike Bush and the Iraq War, and I have only come across one couple -- an American and his wife who had lived in the middle east, Iran under the shaw, who felt otherwise. They were on my flight to Tonga and they felt with some relevant experience that Bush's extreme reaction was necessary to keep the Arabs in line, and credited that with the fact that there has not been another major terrorist attack against America or Americans -- the other targets have been British -- the tube bombings in London, and Australians -- the nightclub in Bali.

She had taught in an Iranian school and somehow, the kids all got the same grade on the first several tests, all high As. How did they cheat like that? She wondered. And when she made it so that they couldn't cheat, she came under pressure from the school, from the parents, from the government to let the well connected students who actually failed get a passing grade. They both attached this scenario with other experiences they had living in Iran to a cultural trait of the arab world in general. That if you let them get away with shit, if you appease them too much (as they fear Obama will, but he seems like he would be hawkish enough to me) then the Arab world will take and take and take. So Bush at least slapped them hard enough to know that they better not screw around with us Americans because we will fuck you up! I don’t know many other people, with the notable exception of several close friends and business associates in Texas who think that W was a very good president at all. Perhaps or perhaps not.... it is all history now, and history will decide hindsight being 20/20 after all. As Stan Lee would say, 'Nuff Said, so... ASIDE OVER --

Back to Ann and I, we had conversations about the future of the world. She pointed out that the earth is expected to continue as a living planet for about another 4 and 1/2 billion years or so, but that we as a species are not likely to last very long considering a universal scale. Homo sapiens as a species after all is very, very young compared to other species on the planet, and we are in the midst of one of the largest extinction events the planet has ever seen. So it is not likely that we will last much longer. She agreed with my point of view that we will quickly make this planet uninhabitable for mammals, but then the insects will take over, and that is simply the natural order of things.

So in between her pointing out this or that plant or bird or whatever, we talked about how humans are currently fighting over oil, but soon we will be fighting over fresh water supplies, after that we will fight over clean productive farm land, and then we will fight about regular old land simply for space as there will be environmental refugees from rising sea levels, etc.. So she is predicting that the 21st century will be one of strife as everyone in the world (Asians, Africans) strive to obtain a western lifestyle.

So another interesting factoid is that these collection of Sounds known collectively as the Marlborough Sounds (all created by erosion versus glaciers) in this, the small northeast corner of the South Island, accounts for 20% of all the coastline of the entire country. This is because of how the shoreline is so convoluted, and there are many islands, etc. I bought a map, which i will take home, so anyone who sees me can look at that too.

At the overlook coming over the rise, our first look into Endeavour Inlet, we caught up with Genevieve, and after that the three of us continued on over the last 1/2 of the hike.

But now it is late and i am tired and must sleep before starting tomorrow's adventure.

So until next time,

Newo Out.

Picton -- Queen Charlote's Sound

2008-11-08T11:28:00.000-08:00

So we arrived at Picton a mere 30 minutes after we left Blenheim, and again, New Zealand surprises. I expected Picton to be like the ferry terminal on Lombok, simply because it is the ferry terminus connecting the South and North Islands... industrial, not very nice, an inexpensive place. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Picton is in an idyllic setting, a quaint picture perfect little tourist town nestled along the steep green hills of New Zealand abutting the crystal clear green and blue waters of Queen Charlotte's Sound. The place is perhaps the size of Crested Butte, and obviouisly chosen as the ferry terminus for its protected, if small, harbor. And the wealth associated with the area is evident with the many fine, and some quite large yachts in the small slip area. There was also a very fancy small floatplane with a single engine above a Star Trek starship-like sleek body.

Once here, we scouted out the place. We were too late to check with the local DOC/info office to see about hiking opportunities, but again the friendliness of the local populace showed itself as a New Zealander suggested a ride on the mail boat around the Sound to get a nice tour of its natural features. We checked in with one of the local boat charters concerning this and also were informed as to the possibility of taking a boat to do the far section of the four day Queen Charlotte Sound Track, with a same afternoon pick-up. We decided to do that the next day and went in search of a place to spend the night in our little camper van.

We had such luck finding a free spot in the previous spot Kaikoura, that we tried an Irish pub to see if the locals could tell us of a good spot to go. (There are not many places to park the van for free as tourists have been abusing the New Zealand landscape for some years, and signage is quite clear where it is not permitted to simply park and sleep on the side of the road.) They told us there were very few (the charter people had said their are none, with a bit of a nose in the air attitude), and suggested one about 8 KM outside of town that had a great view of the Sound, "Don't go to the bottom carpark, but you can park on the upper one."

We went out of town along a winding road, and came to the obvious point they had described. Sure enought the off- the highway (if you can call it a highway, more like a paved country road) spot had a lovely picknick table and the "No Campervan Parking or Camping" sign. The upper spot was simply a pull-off on the road. We considered it for a while as we watched a glorious sunset, but ruled it out as completely inappropriate. There were several very fine houses whose driveway was basically the road down to the nice lower spot, and one just across the road that overlooked this little pull-out.

We decided to bite the bullet and pay the fee to spend the night in the Town's modest campervan and camping park. It turned out to be a good move and we stayed here for two nights, as we had access to showers, laundry, and a lounge/kitchen area with refrigerator -- think the CB hostel room pared down a bit, and you've got it. This way we could spend the next day on our boat ride/15 KM day hike of the track, come home to a shower and nice spacious place to enjoy our dinner. And it did turn out that lovely.

The first morning we awoke to a gorgeous crystal clear sunny day, had our breakfast, packed our day packs for the hike, and walked the short distance to the ferry boat terminal/waterfront of the Town and got on our very nice powered catamaran touring boat/mail boat and wisked off into the incredibly beautiful Queen Charlotte Sound to our wonderous day hike. As we waited to depart, I asked one of the charter crew if they knew if the weather would hold for the day. He informed me that it is supposed to be nice all this weekend, but that it was going to turn again on Monday, and added in the charming NZ way, "you cracked it."

I will tell you about the truly awesome hike next post.

Until then, Newo-out

New Zealand by Camper Van Day 1

2008-11-06T19:27:00.001-08:00

So we got our camper van, we bought some groceries, we picked up the rest of Gen's items at the American Antartic Center, and off we go. Our first night's goal is Picton and Queen Charlotte Sound. WE dont make it... but not because of anything bad, but because it is just soo good!

The road is very western. It is nothing like driving around in Thailand or Indonesia. There are rules of the road that people observe. There are speed limits that people observe. People stay in their lanes, the lane lines mean this is a lane, there aren't scooters and motorcycles cutting around traffic. Hell, there aint much traffic! The landscape is sort of a mix of europe -- small fields filled with sheep or cows or goats or deer defined by hedge rows, or nice neat lines of trees. in other words, manicured countryside -- and America -- not very populated, low homes that are similar to rural american homes, etc.

We started up the highway traveling up the Canterbury plain -- mountains on the left, sea to the right, and I am snapping pictures of the mountains (still covered in a good amount of snow-- they look like the mountains of home). It is all very spring green, and unlike the regimented 12 hour day in the tropics, the days are long -- it is spring.

After a while, I am like, lets go look at the coast. So we take a detour down a "tourist drive" to "Gore's Bay" Now if I want to retire in New Zealand this would be a good choice. The mountains come right down to the coast, and the town is teeny tiny -- makes CB look like a sprawling metropolis. Above the town we passed an inviting gateway that said "Ëlliot's Garden" we go in and it looks like someone's private home (and a super nice home it is with gorgeous views of the pacific from up high on the hill), but there is a box with a slot in it with a sign, "donations welcome". It looks to be about 3 acres or so in size above the bluff/cliff to the sea, but who knows how far down the cliff it goes -- it is hundreds of feet above the ocean, yet right on the coast.

Quite a bit of the three acres is a steep sided, wide bottom gulley planted with the most beautiful flowering plants, trees, short cropped grasses, etc., with a bog/retained water feature or two. It is idyllic, the birds are singing merrily, a well groomed long haired cat comes up and welcomes us. It is nice to get out of the car and enjoy this quiet garden -- I have never seen an "english garden" but i imagine that this is what it is like. This is what I was wanting... out of the city, beautiful pastoral setting, the scent of flowers in bloom, peace, relaxation -- nice. We leave a donation and a note, and continue on.

Later we take another detour off the main highway to Claverly, and it is not so scenic. Claverly show as another town on the map, but it consists of about 9 houses along the coast, along with some farms on a rather flatter portion of the coast.

We then get to Kaikoura and stop in South bay and we get out of the car and take a little walk out this peninsula to a place that one might see (and Gen's friends had seen a few days earlier) sperm whales, dolphins, seals, etc. We see seals, red-billed gulls, cows (there are farms that we cross on this walk on the peninsula), but no whales. There is a great breeze (gale?) coming off the sea and it is cold and grey. It is cold, the windchill is a big factor. I am wearing basically every layer I brought, including rain gear. It does indeed rain on us, and even hail. But not too hard, and we get back to the car about 2 hours after we left it. We then drove around to the other side to the town proper -- about 3500 residents, and have a splendidly good seafood meal. Wondering if we should go back to the campground we passed or if there is another place to park our minivan (we were a little worried about protocol as Trudy had warned about campervan tourists who stay in the wrong places, dumping their greywater tanks just wherever, and peeing all over peoples front yards, etc. -- so we were wondering what to do). Anyway, I decide to ask the wait staff at the restaurant if there was another place we can park overnight up the coast since that is the way we are heading. they recomend a place to turn off on a "sandy beach"about 20 KM north and we can get off the highway and have the sea, and etc. We went about 20 KM and backtracked a little until we did happen upon the place they must have been talking about. We only found it because it is the only place on the road where the sea wasn't just right on the highway, and we could drive back aways to a spot. We pass another campervan and a tent, so we know this is going to be Kosher. The piece de la resistance is an outhouse, and we know this has to be the place.

We set ourselves up for the night, and bang it storms on us. It rains off and on overnight, but morning is gorgeous. The mountains are very close and there is new snow on them just a few hundred vertical feet above sea level... it all melts off in the morning sunshine. We are having our breakfast while a group of four guys in their 20s or 30s pull up and get this . . . go surfing! Here i am wishing i had brought long underwear and these Kiwis are surfing in the 3 - 4 foot surf! granted with wetsuits, but still, they are jumping up and down to get warm before going in and running down the beach i am sure to stay warm before getting into what must be pretty damn near ice cold water. These Kiwis are frickin crazy! They are all very good surfers, and we finish our breakfast, and pack up the van while watching them surf.

We are now still heading for Pitcon, and have stopped in Blenheim where I am now pretty caught up on pictures and blog... so maybe we make Picton for tonight, and then tomorrow?????

until next time

Newo out.

New Zealand at last!

2008-11-06T17:12:00.000-08:00

So after all this traveling in the tropics. After the heat and mosquitoes and salty showers and sleepless nights, I was REALLY looking forward to a night in Aukland in a quiet western hotel with fresh water to drink from the tap and a shower with decent water pressure.

We arrived on the main Tongan island at about 4:45 in the afternoon, and went into town to meet up with Joleen, Megan, and Kevin. Gen had hoped to shop in their main marketplace, but it had shut down by the time we got there. I had a small world moment seeing Tero on the street, and we had a delightfully delicious meal at the "French Cafe and Internet"place, where I did a bunch of blog catching up, and then off to the airport for our 10:30 PM departure to Aukland.

Our taxi driver was a wealth of information. He explained that about 75,000 Tongans still lived in Tonga, and that most tongans actually resided in the USA -- they could make better money, have a higher standard of living and better support their extended family on tonga itself. He kept pointing out these quite nice houses as we drove into town, owned by Tongans who resided in Salt Lake, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or New York, etc. Apparently quite a few of them even serve in the US military and fought in Iraq, etc. A regular tour on the ride into town.

Anyway, we arrived in Aukland at 1:20 AM. I was unable to sleep on the airplane (as usual with my back being the way it is, I just cant get comfortable unless I get fully prone -- hard to do in economy class.) But the Aukland airport is a breeze to get through. i was thru imigration, customs, and in my hotel room by 2:00 AM! Hooray, sleep until 10, then some breakfast, re-packing, a long shower, some internet, and meet Gen at the airport for our 2PM flight to Christchurch, but . . .

I couldn't sleep. . . . It was too peaceful, too quiet, too cold! At 3 Am i gave up and took some meds to make me sleep. Unfortunately I had nightmares all night long, and woke up well before 10AM to the maids knocking on the doors across the hall with their cheerful warning of "good morning!" to any would-be occupant. I try to get back to sleep, but alas, no go.

Since I had got so little sleep and had taken drugs the night before I was sort of in a dazed stupor, as I stumbled thru all my morning tasks. I couldnt get the internet to work right, I needed to check in on banks, credit cards, etc, to make sure that everything was working smoothly while i was away. The CC sites wouldn't register on the hotel's computers due to "security protocols." And i had asked the desk at the hotel to make sure that I was on the 12:30 shuttle to the airport just to make sure that I made the flight, only to find that I somehow missed the 12:30 shuttle. The hotel people assured me that the 1 PM shuttle will still be plenty of time to get on the flight to Christchurch and they were right, after all I already had my eticket.

However, at the airport, Gen was not waiting where we had agreed to meet (she had stayed with the Antarticans where she had left her bags, just as I stayed at the hotel were I had left my bags). Luckily the airport was fantastically designed to avoid queues. All i had to do was scan my eticket, get my bag tags, put them on the baggage belt, and off to the gate. However, when i went to pay, my credit card wouldn't go thru. The super polite Air New Zealand attendant, said, "that's strange it never does that. Try it again." After a few attempts, I was like, "öh Jeez, here I go again." About then, Gen showed up and got her bag onto the belt just fine and dandy, just like it is supposed to work, while I was paying the extra baggage fee at the counter and getting my bags onto the belt. We went thru security incredibly smoothly, and within a few more minutes were at the gate waiting with plenty of time before the plane was to depart. (Note to all US airports and airport designers: copy Aukland's plan, it is truly convenience via airport design.)

So we made it to Christchurch without incident, and started researching camper vans vs a car and staying in hotels. Many visitors to New Zealand travel around in Camper Vans and pay a small fee to use the common rooms of a Campervan Park or Backpackers (the NZ term for a hostel). The Camper vans we enquired about were a bit more expensive than Genevieve had heard, and cars were also pricing out kind of high -- although both were cheap by american standards, given the exchange rate of .625ish. After getting a ride to one of the companies by this delightful woman, Trudy (In fact all the people in New Zealand that I have met so far are genuinely nice. They seem to truly want to help you, and are genuinely warm people.), we caught a bus into the city centre and found ourselves a lovely place to stay called "Livingspace. We checked some email, I sent Gabe from Aspen who is supposed to be in New Zealand this november an email shout, I further researching the campervan options, and Gen checked in with her Antartican friends.

She got an email received in her inbox 45 minutes before saying that the people just coming off the ice and the people just going on the ice were all meeting at "the Bog" (see pictures!), an Irish Pub about 3 blocks from our hotel. So off we go and sure enough, in a short three block walk, the cry goes up, "Oh my god, Genevieve!"and a happy, happy reunion of ice people is underway.

So I have been in the tropics, right? But DAMN it is cold here in New Zealand! I was expecting it to be like Coloradoish in May, but it is more like Crested Butte in April! It has snowed and hailed on us in Christchurch.

ASIDE -- FAST FORWARD A COUPLE OF DAYS -- I found out today that this is not typical weather for this time of year. We got gas at a cafe/gas station and the lady there (perhaps she is in her forties) countered my question of "when does it get warm?" with, "what i want to know is when will it finally stop raining?"

She said that when she was a little girl it was hot from September thru March, but now it has been staying wetter and colder during the spring and summer months. That info jives with what I researched on the web which indicated that it should be warmer here now, and it jives with what Gen told me as she warned me that it could still be quite cold in NZ in November, unfortunately, Gen has been right. -- END ASIDE.

At any rate, we had quite a fun night with the horde of 12 or so people from the ice, including Andre who those in CB may remember from Gen's pig roast party some years back (or was it 4th of July?). Anyway he was the guy roasting antelope. There was also Jen, Mahesh and Leslie (?), "grantees"or scientists (also known as beekers, and fucking scientists by the support people) and the rest of the folks were support: Andre a fire fighter, John a garbage collector, Joe the plumber (literally her name is Joe!). We had a lovely Thai meal (quite authentic, even gave me the runs for a day), and decided to watch the US election returns the next day at the Bog.

Over dinner, I had a grand time talking with the scientists about their climate change research (for unlike Gen, Joleen, Megan and Kevin) all of these Antarticans were willing to talk about experiences on the ice. Jen was the scientist and Leslie and Mahesh are her graduate student helpers. Seems the ozone hole is still quite a big problem.

Mahesh was a very interesting person, an Indian national getting his doctorate at U Wyoming. I had a great time talking with him about India, the US and cultural differences/changes in both the East and the West. He told me that in India, even in just the time he has been studying in the US, that changes there are HUGE. That the country is in rapid westernization mode, and that in the two years between visits he couldnt believe the changes. Sounded a lot like my observations of Bangkok ... east being replaced with west. For Mahesh it was the change in the cinema: movies used to be interesting, and there were "classes" of tickets, from nicer air conditioned spaces to the cheap seats. The last time he was in India (he can only afford to travel back home once every two years), all the movies were replaced with western style multi-screen complexes, no more cheap seats it was all western priced, which meant Indian expensive.

The next morning found a rainy COLD morning, that broke into a beautiful sunny day and I took many a nice picture (see picasa!) of the city centre. Now Christchurch is a nice city, and I am duly impressed with the NZers and this city. The cathedral square is quiet and it is the center of town -- traffic is routed to keep it quiet. The City has a population of 350,000, and offers many cultural activities. A wonderful arts center, ballet, symphony, an incredible botanical garden, etc. Plus it is a city, meaning it is compact, has tall buildings, sophisticated restaurants, is easy to get around. You can walk it and find everything you need within the city centre, including grocery stores. There is chess in the Cathedral square, people were reading shakespeare to whomever wanted to listen in the square, also musicians playing in the square, etc., there are wonderful parks everywhere, the river is landscaped and a nice place to hang out at lunchtime, so forth and so on. It is also an international city. In the day i spent going around buying a (cheap) wool hat, wool scarf, wool socks, wool gloves (etc -- did i mention that it is cold?) I heard Japanese, Arabic, Hindu, Thai, German, French, Russian, some Scandanavian language (or two), Chinese (i think), among other languages being spoken by folks in the city on this one day. To say that i am impressed by the quality of this small city is an understatement. Can you picture an American city of this size that boasts the same cultural amenities, with an equivalent international flair? Sure as shit aint Corpus Christi (same relative size) -- no offense to you Corpus Christians!

At any rate, at breakfast, Gen had learned of a place that would rent a camper van (think a VW vanagan, just smaller and made in japan) for the rates she was expecting, $29Kiwi (about US$19/day -- cheaper than the rental cars we were looking at, Although we will have other costs like finding bathrooms, paying to hook up to electricity, buying showers, or whatever, but with the cost savings, we can get a hotel every now and then for some of those issues, etc.). We gave Grant at Ascot rentals a call and reserved the van for the next day pick up. Grant just wanted to make sure we had licenses, a credit card (didnt take the number to hold it -- can you imagine?), and said he would pick us up the next AM and get us on the way.

So the van has a camp stove, a "chiller"(not quite a dorm fridge, little bit more than a cooler), a gas heater, and two little benches that make a bed in the back, me and Gen's home and transportation in one as we tour the South Island of New Zealand for the next two weeks.

So after reserving the van, off we go to watch President-Elect Barack Obama win his election at the Bog. (oh how fun it is just to say that -- sorry to all my McCain supporter friends). We watched it on the NZ news channel, which was good (and funny). The Anchor had traveled to Palin's hometown and sent a report filled with dry, english humor...think monty python covers the US election. He knocked on her neighbors door to try and get the real scoop. He made fun of the "bustling metropolis"of wassilla (sp?) (it looked like any other boring US city with strip malls and not much charm). He went to the coffee shop and ordered Sarah's regular coffee -- "Boy that's sweet! But I guess that's a good thing in a vice president." Also made a comment about how everyone else was in a very big American car at the coffee hut (as it was a drive-thru -- he had walked up to it) and that he better move before he got ran over. "Ëveryone in america drives in cars you know." They talked about the Tina Fey sketches and how this election perhaps more than any other was just made for satire. (This is the news coverage, you understand.)

Another guy, Jeremy Wells, did a story about the republican convention and he interviewed the delegation from Texas and it was all about, "dont mess with a Texas women, because she is probably packing." "what does that mean?" "Means she's carrying a gun sweetie. We love our guns in Texas, I got 12 shot guns, 8 pistols, 14 rifles," etc. One guy was a state legislature and he told the Kiwi reporter that he was going to be wearing his concealed weapon on the floor of the house as he went into session to vote on immigration issues because, "those people are scary and dangerous." Also, the legislator explained with pride to the Kiwi reporter about the "make my day law." The Kiwi guy couldn't quite get his head around, "You can just shoot anyone you like who ealks into your house?" Same kiwi reporter/satirist is doing a follow up program later this week about politics in America called "Babies, Guns, and Jesus." What a hoot!

Besides the satire, the covereage was good, if a bit overly focused on the presidential campaign. They had two really smart commentators, one the former Kiwi ambasador to the US, I never caught the other guys name or occupation, and anytime anything of interest happened in the election they switched to coverage from CNN or ABC.

At about 5:30 PM local time, the election was decided and the coverage stopped so I didnt get to see either concession or victory speeches, and it took until today (friday Nov 7) to find out that Udall won in CO and the other important local election results (THANKS DAN JONES!) Yay hap, yay paula, yay school bond.

That evening the ice people who did not ship out already got together for a victory toast of champagne and celebration dinner. I partook of the festivities as this is indeed a ground breaker (Kai a black new yorker who works for Raytheon) was beside herself about how now the race barrier has been broken, ANYONE really can be president. She was a very interesting person and I hung with her into the night as she is headed to Thailand for her post-ice vacation and I gave her a bit of a Thai primer (Sawadee Kah, Cup Coon Cah, Ka Toa Kah, Mai Pen Rai, etc) and a little bit about what to expect, how to say "sorry" (just say it in english and put your hands together in front of you -- they arent going to expect much because you are a foreigner; they are going to be super nice and polite; if you are ever in distress or need help, you will get more assistance than you probably want; dont put your feet up on a chair or anything; never spit in public; be careful about showing too much skin in public). Anyway, towards the end of the night we concluded that November 4, 2008 just may be the day that Martin Luther King's dream came true.

Anyway tomorrow (which is actually yesterday) we get our campervan and off we go to explore!

until next time

NEWO out,

Peace, Love, Obama!

Mele Tonga ... 2

2008-11-06T16:43:00.000-08:00

So sleeping in our little shack/bungalow was delightful compared to Fifita's guesthouse in town. The heat gets one up by 7:30, and the mosquitos were hard to take, but that was as bad as it got. Also unfortunate, was that the water system was tied to the island's well, so like Gili Meno it was very salty. This made it hard to deal with ... another salty sea swim, followed by a salty shower. In addition, the water system to the house was irregular at best -- it would work, it wouldnt work. During my one of two showers there, I had got all soapy only to find no water once i needed a rinse. This was solved rather delighfully however as there was a bucket of rain water in the bathroom as a back up to the unreliable water system, so i actually got a fresh water rinse and managed to get all the salt off anyway!

Sunday's the whole place shuts down, and besides church (and a big noontime feast) the Tongans are forced into a literal " day of rest". As I reported last time, the Antarticans had failed to secure their return tickets off of the small Island back to Tonga tapu in order to make our return. Luckily, our hostess spent many an hour on Saturday talking to the airline's local agent in Tongan pleading our case, and left us with hope that maybe they would bring in the big airplane on the first trip of the day in order to take them back in time to meet the plane to Aukland. Apparently there were quite a few other fellow travelers who were in the same boat.

As a back up, the four of them were all going to take the Saturday "slow boat" back to Tonga's main island, leaving at 6 PM on Saturday and arriving in Tonga tapu sometime around 8 hours later. However, when the ferry had not shown up by nightfall, well, that was now no longer an option, as the ferry, too, was unable to sail on the day of rest.

Also, since there was no internet or phone service allowed on sunday, there was no way to contact the airline in NZ (whom also were not allowed to fly) in order to make a change within the required 24 hour prior notice period.... As a result there was little to do on sunday, but hope for the best, drink our conserved water (no stores being open on a sunday), lay about the beach, swim in the empty sea (of humans at least -- yep, not allowed to swim or fish), and read. I did quite a bit of snorkeling off our beach and there were isolated coral heads to look at. I saw a couple of lobsters and some of the basketball sized deep blue starfish kept things interesting.

Luckily Monday morning, the good news came that the airline was indeed sending the large airplane and everyone was going to be able to make it out alright!! We thanked our hostess profusely, settled the bill, and left for the airport in order to physically buy the tickets and be on our way. Joleen, Megan and Kevin were on the 12:30 flight, and Gen was put on my 4:15 flight.

So while at the airport waiting for our flight, there were a group of Tongan kids doing what kids do ... climbing fences, screaming, and otherwise running around causing havoc. So kids are kids, but the Tongan kids seemed more well behaved than usual. For example, the little boy at Mele Tonga was a great help to our hostess, he would climb up onto the cistern to haul up by hand the rain water that was needed for cooking and drinking. He also was deeply involved in fixing the pipes that kept coming apart at the seams (they weren't glued -- which is why the water was so on again off again.) He did do little boy things too, like playing with the machete hacking away at the trees for no real reason, and he kept throwing another piece of metal around as if it were a throwing knife, and Gen and Joleen caught him trying to peek at them while they were taking showers -- but hey isnt that what 12 year old boys do?

Anyway, the "screams"of these kids in the airport were truly remarkable. They were harmonious little twitterings that remarkably simulated the noises of the birds of the island, so that as opposed to just being plain obnoxious, they were interesting to listen too (and loud enough to be obnoxious). Clearly their parents thought it was just plain obnoxious and told them to be quiet, once, which they did. This example, combined with all the singing in the churches, shows that these Tongans are tremendous vocalists, and have relatively well behaved kids . . . .Thai kids on the other hand run wild and everyone, from parents to strangers let them get away with it!

until next time

Newo Out

Meals at Mele Tonga

2008-11-06T16:01:00.000-08:00

The private beachside bungalow place was called Mele Tonga. The deal was dinner and breakfast plus lodging, but no lunch. We were on our own for lunch.... I have explained this before, but let's talk about what we ate. The first night we had a truly delightful fresh (and fried -- everything was pretty much deep or stir fried, as I have also already explained), chicken (which actually seemed baked or something), very fatty pork rib, casava and a local leafy green vegetable (a lot like chard) stir-fried in butter and onions, fried bananas and watermelon. Now i had learned from Tero that the Tongans don't actually eat with their guests. He had been invited to a Tongan house for a typical Tongan meal and they served him a huge amount of food -- four tuna steaks, a whole chicken, and so forth, and the entire family sat there and watched him eat it (or as much as he could possibly eat).

Now it was our turn. Genevieve and i easily ate all of the fish, we had one of the 15 pieces of casava apiece, a good bit of the fried banana. I made a big effort as to make a good impression on our hostess, and did manage to eat quite a bit of the chicken, and we nailed the greens, too. We both took a stab at the pork, and made enough of a good show to impress our hostess. She did indeed sit there and watch us eat, but not any of the rest of the family. She didn't eat any of the big food, but she did have some of the watermelon, while we ate. We were allowed to save some of the watermellon which made for a good snack over the next few days. Otherwise she threw everything we didn't eat out to the pigs in the yard.

The second night, the other Antarticans joined us, but the food was a little less grand. Gone was the excellent fresh fish, but we had more fatty pork ribs, top ramen noodles, fried bananas (every night these were included), an excellent yellow curry dish with a bony flesh (that we figured finally had to have been pig's knuckles), green bananas which were grey and had a strange texture -- but with salt they seemed a little bit like potatoes, and young coconuts as a beverage. This made it hard on Megan and Joleen who are vegetarians/piscetarians whom did not/could not eat much of the food. So I again made a big effort to eat a lot (after all it was clear that this was our food and whatever we didnt finish simply got thrown out -- or rather fed to the pig.

That second night I was doing good until i got to a point where i had a bad textural episode with the green bananas. I tried to take a piece of the pork, somehow thinking that the flavour would help me get the thing down. However, it made it worse, and Genenvieve, who noticed me gagging asked if I was ok -- she thought i was possibly choking. After almost heaving the whole meal up (which would've been a cultural and hospitable disaster), she recognized what was happenning and took several steps back. I chugged some coconut juice to try and wash it all down. Of course this did not work either as the combination of the three flavors in my mouth was truly getting ghastly. Genevieve's eyes went wide, and she wisely backed further away from me. I resigned myself to fishing out the fatty pig flesh with my fingers and forced my self to swallow the remaining items. Disaster averted. However it was a mad gobble of ramen noodles with curry sauce in order to get the flavor removed, and phew... the dinner was done.

The third night, I approached the meal with a little less vigor. It consisted of roughly the same menu items, except this time there was an excellent deep fried chicken. The poor vegetarians, basically only had ramen noodles to eat for the two dinners they stayed at Mele Tonga.

Until next time.... Newo Out

Mele Tonga

2008-11-04T21:11:00.000-08:00

So we found a new place to stay at called Mele Tonga guesthouse and checked in that Friday. This was a lady's house (not so nice) with her young daughter Ana, her 11 or 12 year old nephew Nae Ata (the man about the place -- who was either living with her for 4 months, or had been living for her since he was 4 months old, couldnt tell which: Gen thought the former, I heard the latter.). She seemed to be a widow, because in the Lonely Planet the place was run by a Mr. and Mrs. however, she had the nephew who would do the manly things, like hauling water out of the cistern when the city line broke (which it did virtually every ten minutes during our three night stay).

So our bungalow was a blue shack by the sea. Compared to Lifita's (i spelled it wrong in the last blog post, but you can see pictures now!) the place was heaven! It was quiet, it was private (being us and the family.) We had a private beach, ah.... On day two (saturday 1 November -- I am back to knowing the dates!), the others went again to get their flights from Ha'apai to Tonga tapu on monday so that we can all make the flight from Tonga to Aukland Monday night arriving Tuesday 4 november in Aukland at 1:20 AM; I dont know why there was a problem the day before, but there was, so I decide to hang out and relax, seeing as I am on vacation.

So i am reading my book in the AM shade and cool for Tonga (seems cool to me compared to Indonesia), and a local fellow comes up to me named Stanley, and offers me a young coconut. Now, for those of you that don't know young cocunut juice is delicious, and very good for you, a factoid I informed the Antaricans too many times until it became one of our inside jokes. Plus, the deal with our hostess was room and board. She made us breakfast and dinner, but we were on our own for lunch, which since we were now out of town meant no lunch. That was fine as dinner was enormous every night (breakfast consitsted of fried doughy biscuits with jam).

Anyway, when stanley offered me young coconut, i thought "hurray, lunch!" He chops it open for me (if anyone has seen Cast Away with Tom Hanks, those are young coconuts, so they ARE very hard to get into). And I ask him "how do i get the fleshy coconut out of the hole he gave me without a spoon?" No problem, Stanley makes me a Tongan spoon, which involves him hacking off a tree branch and whittling it down with his machete so that one end has a curved side and a flat side sort of "spoon" shaped. He shows me how you use the spoon edge to cut one side of a slice of cocunut flesh and then the other side, then use the spoon to peel the flesh off of the hard shell and into the coconut center. Fishing out the slice of coconut from the juice inside and voila, tasty snack!

So i am sitting there enjoying my snack and beverage in one, when the others return ... with bad news. The plane is sold out, no tickets available. This is a near disaster as it is the only way to make the return plane to Aukland. But our hostess calls the airline people and begs and begs on our behalf. She returns with news that on Monday there may be a chance that they will bring in the "big plane" in the morning, and we can all get on it. Why do we have to wait until monday when it is saturday you may ask? Arent there flights on sunday, too? No, because the Tongans, by law, cannot do any work on Sunday, and i do mean ANY work, no labor, no service, no restaurants, no taxis, no airplanes, no NOTHING. They are not even allowed to swim in the sea, or fish, or farm, or anything. They can only go to church (which seems to have services about five times a day every day -- 4 AM, 6 AM, 12 noon, 6 PM and 10 PM -- judging by the bells and the singing , as previously described). So there is nothing to it but to wait and relax as best we can on sunday and pray that we get out on Monday and all make it safe and sound to Aukland!

Until next time, Newo out

Tonga pt 3

2008-11-04T19:26:00.000-08:00

So before the hell night began, I had a very good night. As we checked in to Fafifta's there was a blond guy with piercing blue eyes with whom I started a conversation. His name was Tero and he was from Finland. Apparently, tonga is a big destinatino for Finns as a popular travel show featured it some years ago. Tero is a 31 year old software engineer in the middle of an 11 month long vacation(!) Can you imagine? 11 months, AND he gets to go back to his same job! Apparently he had been with his company for 8 or 9 years and had accumulated a lot of vacation time (they get 1 & 1/2 month of vacation time a year in Finland. Somethings the euros just do better than Americans.)

Anyway, Andrew the barister from England had just taught Tero how to play chess, and when he saw me he wanted to play a game. Now I like chess, but I do not get many chances to play it as about the only american i know who will play chess is Dan Jones. So i said, "sure," and we played two very interesting games of chess. Interesting in that virtually every move I made surprised him, and every move he made surprised me. I ended up winning both games, which gave me a better record than his games with Andrew. Andrew, who was on our dive and gave some suggestions as to where i might have seen a shark or two (i didnt -- at least not on the dive trip.) Any rate, a challenge from Andrew left me dissapointed as a chess champ since he was a much better player (although still interesting/unexpected moves). Andrew played a classic game of wearing me down to the point that i simply gave up. But it was a lovely evening and great conversation. Its one of the things about traveling abroad that is so intersting -- meeting all sorts of people from all over the planet, and finding out that we are all human beings after all. Plus, my interest in chess is re-kindled, so when io get back home, Dan Jones, expect a challenge!

In the course of the evening, Andrew gave me some good advice about where to go and what to not miss while in New Zealand as he had been there recently. Advice i have since heard from other travelers, I will surely take it, and I will be in New Zealand soon.

Anyway, after the hell night, Tero was waiting at breakfast when i returned from my walk. He too did not look like he had got a very restful sleep, although his particular gripe was with a rooster just outside his room. Over breakfast we talked about saunas, since he is a Finn and I have a sauna.

Apparently, a proper temperature for a sauna is 75 - 80 deg C (which is way hotter than any electric American sauna is allowed to get!) I also learned that the world championship of saunaing is held every year in finland with the saunas set to 100 deg C -- the boiling point of water!!!! The idea is the person who stays in the longest without passing out is the winner -- the record is about 7 minutes. Apparently Tero's natinal pride was somewhat hurt as some Russian has been the world champion for a number of years running! We also talked about how one is supposed to sauna for about 20 minutes at 75 C, then roll in the snow or jump into a frozen lake, etc, staying out long enough to get cool again. So this winter, you gotta stay out longer all you panzy-ass americans!

Another small world moment occured when days later as we were heading to New Zealand, i ran into Tero on the street in Nuku Alofa on Tongatapu -- the big city on the big island of Tonga. (Total population of the entire kingdom is only 75,000, so it aint that big of a place). Still it was fun to see him at the end of Tonga and say, "goodbye, thanks for the Chess game."

So the day after the night from hell at Fafita's, Gen and I were like "we are out of here!" The other three americans all choose to stay another night at Fafitas as it was the weekend and they were afraid that any other decent place would be all full. This brings up some of what I mean by the cultural differences between global east and west. We americans had to have a plan...kevin jolene, and megan had to stay at fafitas because they had to have shelter for the night. Gen and I were more like, if we have to sleep on the beach, then so be it (plus the beach i scoped the night before would've been a good, isolated beach to sleep on, if it came to that).

Another example of the east-west culture shock was in the Sydney airport while i was writing those blogs, i was aware of the time issue and did not let anyone wait more than two minutes for the free internet access places. But, oh the looks i would get from some of those people! having come from the east where 4PM might mean 6 PM, it was strange. I mean really, two minutes is not going to make or break anyone making an airplane if they have time to check their email. But no, plan, stress, hustle, move. Or as Tero put it, "In Helsinki it used to be that people would have time to chat on the street if you saw them, but in the past few months, it has turned into, hey how is it going? -- Cant talk, too busy." That was part of why he was taking an 11 month vacation to get away from that too busy too busyness that his world had turned into. So while we may have "better quality of life" Is it really true? I mean take Bar in Indonesia. He had his job at the restaurant/bar on Gili Meno. He had to work what 3 hours a day, and sure, he was poor economically, but he had time to just chill for most of his day/life. Meeting interesting people, etc.

The eastern attitude, what happens, happens, oh well, its ok, just go with the flow. Sometimes I think I like the eastern way of life better than the western one, but I have mortgages. I just lost half my savings in the stock crash while flying over the ocean, I have worries and concerns.... I am a westener. But that is also probably why i like living in CB so much ... despite all of its short comings it still has that, hey chill out and relax and enjoy the view kinda attitude. So since i live in the west, i might as well stay in CB.

The Tongans were similar in attitude to the eastern mode of thought (or i suppose a polynesian mode of thought): They, like the indonesians, wanted to engage in small talk, they were VERY laid back. They worked little, could gain their sustenance from the small amounts of farming, and from the sea. They chilled. It was wild how even people i meant only once in passing the next time i saw them, they were like, "Hey David, how is it going?" Or the one of two taxi guys, tom, who I rode with once, remembered me, and he must taxi around how many western guys in a day? I was floored. But then I did engage in the small talk, and he was the one that told me that the Tongans like conversing. I didn't remember most of these people the second time I met them, but there they were, remembering me all right! And true while Ha'apai, the island we were on was way off the tourist track, there were still plenty of tourists, and yachters who were around the island, so I couldnt be THAT memorable, could I?

Anywho, I chilled at Mariners while Gen, Kevin, Megan and Joleen went to get their return tickets, and Gen was going to check out another place to stay. When they returned, Gen had a good report about a bungalow on a small, private beach that we could stay. No air con or fan, but again, this place still seemed cool at 28 C vs Indo at 31C, so I was like, "great lets do it"

I am going to take a break now and get some pictures up on the picassa site since i am here in Christchurch at a REAL internet cafe and you can see some pictures! I will continue Tonga with stories from Mele Tonga, the guesthouse Gen had procured.

until next time,

Newo Out

Tonga pt 2 night from hell

2008-11-04T16:45:00.000-08:00

Side note to start -- the last blog I said how Gen and her friends were "stressed" about finances, that isnt actually the case... It was more that they had a certain way of spending money... divide things up and everyone pays there fair share. This was different from how I had been traveling. Somebody pays, and we catch up with it later (or not). After all, Rick would treat us with all sorts of perks -- use of the car and driver (together with tolls that he refused our re-payment), Even Bar would buy us random items -- a drink here or there, etc. So it was different when I paid for the rooms at the Bunglaow resort, and they all fairly had to immediately pay me their share of the bill right away. I had interfered with their modus operandi and messed up how they were going to pay that with a credit card vs. cash etc. So "stressed about finances" really wasnt accurate.

The islands of Tonga are all flat, coral islands without volcano mountains. I mentioned the excellent swimming and the snorkeling.

One of the things that Tonga is known for is that humpback whales come here to breed, birth their young and train them to swim, before heading back out into the ocean. They sell tours where you get to "swim with the whales" and this is one of the things I wanted to do, but it turns out that the season was just over and the whales have already moved out -- just missed it!

So after the wonderful dive/snorkeling trip, we were off to find new lodgings as the nice bungalow resort was filled for the remaining time we were on Tonga. So we went back into town and stayed at Fafita's Guesthouse which was above the one and only restaurant/bar -- Mariner's Cafe.

I would not receommend this place to anyone. While they tried to keep it clean, and it was superficially clean, it was rather dirty. Wall edges had ages of grime along them. Cockroaches came out at night, i swear that a rat (or two) scampered first up the hall to the kitchen then down the hall just past the door sometime during the night -- i thought i could see it under the large crack under the door. Also, the place had walls about the thickness of a piece of paper, so I could here Kevin and jolene in the next room whispering (or talking quietly, not exactly what they said, but ...) And this was the nicest and cleanest of the guesthouses in the Town.

So starts the night from hell. I woke up numerous times to various sounds. For one, the Tongans seem to go to bed around 11 PM and wake up at 4 AM. During the night there were the women in the kitchen jabbering on until 11. Then a group of other tongan men (who were guests) had a little party, then there was some pigs squealing, then a dog fight broke out in the middle of the night. At about 3 AM I woke up for good to the sound of one of the Tongan guests snoring quite loudly. I decided to get up at that point and see what was what. The Tongan was staying in the room across the hall, but it sounded like he was in our room. Then I heard drums beating in the distance... real heart of darkness kind of stuff. This gave way to church bells going off all over the town, followed by this incredible beautiful music. It sounded like african music, but with a polynesian flair. That's the best i can describe it. Truly remarkable harmonizing of human voices. And of course, roosters ... seemingly hundreds of them crowing all around. It was quite a din.

At this point, i knew i was not going to get back to sleep, and so I went off on a walk, to search for the source of the music. (It turns out it was a good choice not to try to sleep anymore as Gen told me the noises of the rest of the night ... someone pounding on the doors of the rooms looking for Anna, followed by the pre-breakfast sweep, sweep, sweep of the "maid" doing the halls, and of course the non-stop rooster/pig/dog/human's talking, that started at about the 4 AM hour.

Anyway, I follow the sounds of the singing to one of this tiny village's 8-12 churches. I think I have described how the Tongans, like many native culutres, first struggled with a crippling alcholholism problem and resolved it by "turning to Jesus". A far better opiate for the masses I say. Anywho the singing from this church was beautiful as i said and so loud! There couldnt have been more than 20 people in this church but i was mesmerized by the sounds. And indeed, it looked as if most of this town was up and about in the pre-dawn darkness. I saw the southern cross and orion in the night sky.

I wandered all thru the little town (pictures are coming I promise) which was somewhat smaller than Crested Butte, and as churches let out around 5:30 - 6AM I asked if I could get to the eastern shore of the island, as I could hear the waves crashing on that side -- the opposite side from the big protected lagoon. They said, yep just follow this road it will get there. So off I walk down this dirt road, that i had shied away from in the darker hours cause it looked spooky, but in the pre-dawn light it was OK.

I arrived at the far end, perhaps 1/2 KM from the town's edge, to a glorious sun rise (no pictures I am afraid, but it was great). I then noticed a side road and went and saw one of the many cemetaries on the island on the sun-rise side of the island, including one expecially grand, covered by a roof and with a nice marble headstone for a minister of the Tongan government for the island of Ha'apai, the Island I am on.

I returned to the guest house in time for breakfast at 7:30 AM, and saw as the Tongan guests (the noisy ones) departed looking about as pleasant as hungover and up and away by 7 AM people look. The tongans in general are huge people, physically, and I figured out why as the cuisine consists of bread, fried bread, fried meats, fried fish, fried vegetables, fried .... you get the point, and this includes both deep fried and pan fried.

Anyway, my time is running out and i want to post this before i get kicked off, so

until next time, newo- out

Tonga part 1

2008-11-02T21:02:00.000-08:00

So, for one it is not very hot, and for two, compared to Asia, this place is quiet and uninhabited... which it is.

And here I am at MAriner's Cafe with Gen and her four friends, Kevin, Megan and of course Joleen (sorry if i misspell that Jo Jo). They are drinking beers, I get some lunch and begin to unwind and relax. Besides how cool it is (the Antarticans all think that it is hot -- side note, Gen and her friends have just finished a stint at McMurdo doing various things, I can say no more and have already broken a trust just by saying that they are from Antartica. )

Anywho the first thing to strike me is how expensive things are, bottled water for US$3? burger and fries for $7 - 9?! (remember we were living on what $10 for two days in Indo, living fairly well too). Anyway, it is time to find the accomodation for the night and the first accomodation is very nice (even if it is NZ$65 per room per night -- about $40 US.) And wasnt it ooh so nice to sleep in a nice comfortable western bed in a quiet western hotel (Aukland) and upscale carribeamn style bungalow (Tonga' 1st resort). Fresh (from rain water), "real" (not low flow) showers; free water to drink (again rain water), a delightfull cafe right on the ocean with a delightful view and lovely breeze, and on a nice swimming beach too.

In fact all of Tonga is a nice swimming beach -- low coral islands with huge protected lagoons. No current, not much of a surf (off the barrier reef) and unlike Gili Meno where the reef was close to the island and then it fell off precipitously into the deep blue deep with a VERY strong current ("dont go too far off the island or you will be swept into the Indian Ocean," i was warned by Bar on Gili Meno). Here I could swim VERY far out and still see the sandy bottom in about 20 or 30 feet of water. Awesome swimming! So while they chilled at the cafe waiting for the owner to check us in, I grab my mask and snorkel and head out to the beach for some floating/swimming -- my back was being rather persistent by now after the long travel from Indo.

I swam out, thinking I will eventually find a coral head and i did, but it was fairly small and not as nice as the huge amount of sea life I saw at Gili meno, but i saw a few rays, and another one of these bright blue starfish that i had also seen at Meno, So i was content to swim for about an hour or so in the lovely Tongan green waters.

But the other really shocking thing to me was getting off of "asian mode" and onto "american mode." Gen and her friends seemed very "american" to me after laid back Asia. They were concerned about lodging. They had schedules, they had agendas, they were obsessed with finances, they had secrets, they had patterns of behavior i just wasn't used to. I was used to, "hey it will work itself out" (which it always seemed to do), chill out and relax -- which was also a Tongan trait, but minus the hecticness of a million people surrounding you basically all the time -- does any of that make sense? Its like Eastern and Western cultures are both screwed up in the same ways but differently. After all in the west 4 PM means 4 PM. In the East 4 PM might mean 6 PM or 8 PM, what Rick, Blake and Annete call "asian time". As i have told these guys too many times (i am sure i am annoying them with the "in Asia it would be like this" and "you guys are so very American").

But what is shocking is how emotional i get at the smallest little things .. the transition from the west to the east seems easy to me, but the transition from the east back to the west seems much harder to deal with ... on an emotional level ... if this makes any sense at all.

The next day, we were off to a dive shop. Megan and Kevin were divers and me and Joleen wanted to snorkel. So despite my gulping at what seemed to be an extreme cost, we had a grand time snorkeling and diving. We went out on a catamaran sail boat (unfortunately under power as the wind was too light), and we did some truly delightful snorkeling. The locations were more geared to the divers.

Among the other guests was an Englishman named Andrew (who also was staying at the nice bungalow resort). and an American couple who was living Angie's dream -- retired and going around the world by boat -- a 43 foot cat they bought new for about $120K 13 years ago (today's model about $200K), put in a charter co in the BVI for five years, then sold the house to pay the balloon and off they went.

They spent the first three years doing the Carribean, northern South America, then thru the canal, then the west coast of South America for a while, before making the Pacisic crossings: first to Easter Island, then Pitcairn, and then French Polynesia, and on to New Zealand... The longest passage was 23 days, usually it is 11 or 13 days. They are taking their time doing a circumnavigation of the Pacific so will eventually hit Japan, Alaska, the pacific NW of Canada and US, moving down the US and Mexican coasts, central america, south america, and then crossing back to NZ and then moving on to Asia and the Indian ocean. "After all we are here (in the pacific), so might as well do it right as we go." Seven years total so far.

They were a wealth of info about the cruising life. Gail and Dave from minnesota, tho they claim residency in Houston -- no income tax. . Cant really be done below $20K/year including living expenses and the maintenance... plus occasionall exceptional items -- $40K for new motors every 10, 15 years. $7 - 10K for sails every 10 or so, depedning how much you sail vs. motor. Plus they added lots of solar, etc. They are doing it the way i would want to do it. Mostly sailing, taking my time, living the dream!!! OOh angie you would be jealous!!! And boy did it make me want to do it too!!

Anyway, it was fun swiming in the current over the sea mount of the second dive in a decent current -- as close as i have gotten to my infinity pool! And there was a huge school of fish at the leading edge of the seamount to swim into and be surrounded by these glimmering blue and silver fish -- dont know what kind they were. Anyway, a truly delighful day.

Until next time, Newo -out!!

traveling

2008-11-02T20:07:00.000-08:00

The ferry is in sight of the port on Bali, but like the trip over, we were too early, so we came to a complete stop. The captain came on and said something in indonesian. I happened to be talking with Dyce at the time and since he spoke a little Indo, i asked him what the story was. He said he didnt follow all of it, but something to the effect that we were early and it wouldn't be long. now we had waited almost an hour and a half at the Lombok side, so my faith was a little shaken. Plus the Danes had said that they waited almost 3 1/2 hours at the port on the Lombok sid, so I was a little concerned about my flight, although the agents who had arranged this trip said that I had plenty of time to get to my 9 PM flight, (which is what I told them even though the flight actually left at 10PM). Anyway, about 1/2 hour later we came into the port on Bali and off we went. Now when one of these ferries arrives at a port, the porters and musicians and vendors start immediately boarding the ferry like pirates boarding a captive ship. It was the same here, but Ange and i fended off the porters with the simple but firm command of "no" and "no rupiah."

The other westerners that were on the travel/tour were assembled at the port and we were grouped by company. Then our company guys says, "ok, go that way" and he takes off on a scooter. We all follow on foot and before too long its obvious that every one is following me, although I lost site of where our "guide" had gone and was just walking in the general direction of where we had been dropped off from the Taxi from ubud on the way over. We all did make it to the right place, and those of us who were heading to Denpassar and Kuta, and me (the only airport goer) was loaded onto one mini-bus, albeit a larger one. So here we are about seventeen people with too many bags, surf boards and the like loaded into a mini bus that had normal seating for 13. Angie had to sit cross legged on her bag, and one of my bags had to rest on my lap. Now it is hot, mind you, and there are grumbles as one might expect from westerners promised one thing and dealing with another.

Thankfully tho, our driver was a maniac out of hell, so we went fast and we passed many many other vehicles (including the mini-bus that had Dyce on it -- they seemed to be going slow, since his tour left well before ours) as we crossed Bali towards Denpassar/Kuta. When we got to Denpassar we took the most interesting circuitous route easily doubling back on the direction that we had come from (the sun doesnt lie about direction), altho i am sure that this was the most direct way to where the two local women who were on the bus wanted to go. They were dropped off at the door of their destination, so imagine my surprise when we finally get to the airport, Angie and I are dropped off at the entrance to the airport, not inside the airport mind you, not at the departure drop off area at the terminal, but at the end of the road that leads to the airport. The driver motioned that the airport was "thata way" and off he sped to Kuta.

So Angie and i with all our bags walk the kilometer or so to the actual denpassar international departure terminal, and I have to go thru the first of the three security checkpoints before i can even check in, and with my airport departure tax in hand, i left Angie, thankful that indeed I had made it in plenty of time to get on my airplane.

So, another side note to travelers to Indonesia. Dont trust someone who is someone else's "friend" as the "friendly" travel agent charged me a very large amount for the flight from Bali to Aukland, probably almost double what Lynn (my CB travel agent) would have charged me. She explained that it was on Qantas a premium airline and therefore more expensive. However, at the airport it was soon obvious that this was not "Qantas" but a discount airline called "Jet Star". So how was my very expensive flight on Qantas actually a discount airline ticket? And why did I pay so much ... ah yes the travel agent was that guy's "friend."

Anyway, I board the airplane with every Australian with a new born, and my overnight flight to Sydney began. Needless to say, a flight that starts at 10:30PM and arrives at 6Am albeit three time zones later is gonna have some cranky babies on it. Thankfully there were only about 2 dozen crying babies within about 3 rows of me on the 767, and i managed perhaps two hours of sleep. The good thing about being ripped off on the fare was that at least it had included all the extrasa that the discount airline normally charges for -- i got a blanket and they fed me breakfast.

There I am in Sydney and I have now officially left the global east and I am in the global west. Now in the east, things are crowded and crazy and unexpected, but airline travel is remarkably smooth and easy. In the west tho, it is uptight, rule bound, difficult, and fraught with delays. I find out in Sydney as I was bumped from my original flight, and re-booked on an actual Qantas airline flight, that before I can enter NZ, i must have a ticket out of the country, or immmigration simply wont let me in. Thankfully, i had my ticket to Tonga the next day, so a one night stay was OK with NZ officials. however, what I didnt understand until the next morning was that Air New Zealand will not check me in to their flight to Tonga without a printed copy of my eticket returning from Tonga to NZ. Apparently Tonga has the same rule as NZ about people coming in without travel plans that include leaving their country -- a type of immigration control, no doubt. Now I have not heard of this in the west, and even tho I had the code, my eticket number, etc. Air NewZealand needed the computer printed version of the same thing. My return from Tonga is from a different airline than Air New Zealand so they said "go down there and maybe they will print you out a copy" Good thing that i arrived 2+hours early for my flight!!

Off I go to Pacific Blue, wait in line, and ask for a copy of my itenerary so that I can check in the Air New Zealand flight. "We cant give you that. " Why not? "We dont have tickets we have etickets, you have to get it printed out off your email." (The airport has internet access, but not access attached to a printer.) I ask if they have a computer that i can access my email and print the eticket. they said "sure, follow me." So back i go into their offices. "What is your email account?" It is daveincb@yahoo... "Oh, we cant access Yahoo, sorry tough luck." Huh? what do you mean? Yahoo is blocked on their office computers for the reason you can guess, everyone would futz around on the internet instead of working while at work.

So, back I go to Air New Zealand, and butt right to the front of the line and say to the lady who was helping me, "they wont print one out," I report. "Try our guest services desk they may help you." So off i go to Air NZ's guest services desk, and low and behold the answer they give -- no yahoo is blocked on our computers too. "But you have a ticket, I see it here in the system, go down there and demand that you get a copy of it, it is simply ridiculous that they wont give you a ticket from their own airline."

So back to Pacific Blue who is like, "no, you are screwed sorry." May I speak to your supervisor. The supervisor gets the story and says that they can print out the same info that I had on a hand written piece of paper, the eticket number, the booking code, the times and dates of the flights. Give me your passport and I will be right back. now i have just come from the east where giving your passport to ANYONE is THE cardinal sin of all sins, so i ask if i can go with her She protests at first but then relents. We go and she prints it out, but it is a little to faint on the dot matrix printer to read. Not to worry she will go next door and get a better print out. Off she goes with my passport in hand. At this point with about 20 minutes left until my flight is scheduled to depart i just have to laugh until i cry that "I am going to miss Genevieve in Tonga because they are out of ink in their printer!"

Minutes later she reurns with a print out that does not look official or off the internet or nothing, with all the same info that I had and already provided to Air NZ that they could already see in their system. Anyway, to Air NZ i go, and again straight to the front to the same girl who looks dubiously at my printout but relents to my pleadings and checks me in. Rushing thru security, and imigration, i arrive at my gate right as boarding is supposed to start, only ... no airplane! (Passengers but no airplane). The aircraft is late and has a mechanical problem. Oh great my connection in Tonga is a scant 1 hr 30 min, and we are late! But not to worry the Air NZ people had told me the night before (when i confirmed my flight from the hotel which had a printer attached to its yahoo friendly computer -- if only i had known!) that I only needed 45 minutes in Tonga.

Amongst the travelers were many who were experieinced Tonga travelers... oh immigration in Tonga is easy, the island hoppers are always late, it wont matter it'll all be cool. OK. then the horror stories, "but I have arrived at the island hopper with a paid ticket in my hand an hour early only to have been told that i am bumped from the airplane"... yikes!

Long story shorter, Tonga is as easy (and very similar to) any number of Carribean airports, immigration was about 3 minutes long (vs th 1 hr and 1/2 for Bali) and zipping over to the domestic terminal took all told about 10- 15 minutes from the time Air NZ landed, so on the plane to Ha'apai I am!

So i had not heard from genevieve about my arrival time email. I thought it was 3 PM but it turned out to actually be 12;30 PM. So i wasnt too surprised when there was no Viever at the airport to greet me... Oh well, I took a taxi "into town" and I will simply look until I find her. How big can this island be anyway? So I start asking folks, "do you know an american girl named "genevieve"? Which might seem silly except that EVERYBODY on this island that i met once remebered my name thereafter, and everytime i saw them anywhere they were like, "hi david how are you today?" -- the tongan people are super friendly and Ha'apai with 4,000 residents felt very much like an island version of Crested Butte.

Back to the search. Since she hadnt heard about "genevieve" i figure, next check my email since that is the way i am communicating with everyone these days. So I ask Anna-tia the onwer of the shop that the taxi let me off at, where is the internet cafe? She points down the street and off I go. Now it is the hotest part of the day and it is sunny, BUT tonga is just within the tropical zone and I was amazed when the pilot of the airplane said it was a warm 28 degrees C. Wow, how cool it is here! I was used to the low in Indo being about 31 degrees C, so it did indeed feel cool in the blazing mid day sun. I am walking down the street and I see a westerner turn the next corner wearing a big straw hat. She walks towards me and her body language changes -- does she recognize me? Is that Geneveieve? Then I hear that distinctive laugh, and shout, "was it that easy?" to her and she says, "yep. It was that easy."

until next time, newo-out

The interesting ferry from Lombok to Bali

2008-11-02T16:28:00.000-08:00

So on the ferry the danes from our minibus, Resmus and (i cant remember his name and my memory failed me -- emem that is)! Anyway they scored the best seat on the ferry -- the only one with a small table under some shelter. They played a swedish card game for most of the time. The location is a bit noisy and smoky being by one of the two deisel stacks, but we stored our stuff there as well and made that our base for the 4 1/2 hour trip. -- note to future travlers, buy the "first class" cabin once on the ferry or bring a bleacher pad with you -- also a travel umbrella is excellent protection both from rain and from sun.

I also met Christine from Grenobal France who lives in australia now and, Dyce from Amsterdam who also came over from Gili Meno. Dyce was a young guy and was only on Meno for 1 day -- in which time he saw 25 sea turtles! (they had an aggressive turtle re-introduction program after the El nino of 2005 killed all their reefs and sent most of the marine life packing -- the base of their dive tourism business.) I saw 5 sea turtles in my 3 days of good snorkleing, and Ange didnt see any! Anyway, Meno was too boring for him, and he was heading for nightlife in Kuta -- the very city I detested!

Standing at one point on the breezy side of the ferry, these four indonesians approached me and shyly introduced themselves and started to talk with me -- Erdine from Sengigi on Lombok, his brother Ahmed, and friend O-mah-dean (pronounced, who knows how you spelled it!) and unnamed other. I might of been a little nervous to be surrounded by these guys, escpet that they are so small and smiled and were inquisitive, and friendly, not aggressive like the porters. Plus, i probably outweighed the four of them put together!! Anyway, their english was very bad, and it was very hard to communicate with them.. i got that they worked in factories sewing t-shirts and blue jeans, and that they were traveling to Bali to work like this for 2 months earnining about 800,000 rupiah just so that they could bring half of it back to their families on Lombok. 400,000 rupiah is about $35-40, and "family" would mean the large extended family.

Anyway, i couldn't get why they came up to talk to me until it all came together. There were these two indo women i passed occasionally as i paced from one side of the ferry to the other looking for the coolest, breeziest spot outside of the deisel fumes. Everytime I passsed them, they talked to each other, the pretty one would look embarrased and hit her friend quite hard on the shoulder. Her freind came up to these boys and tried to tell them something. They would then say that I should call the shy friend over to me. Well it turns out that I was the targeted husband for the pretty girl, that she liked me, and wanted me to marry her -- a common theme in Asia to bag the rich westerner and thus elevate the whole family out of tremendous poverty. Once i relaized what was up, it was trouble as I had been far too friendly to everyone, giving them the wrong impression. So, then I tried to hide from the woman's friend, but she would find me, showing me texts on her phone, "Devid, I lake you, you are gud". I enlisted Angie to act as my girlfriend in front of them, and then i never saw them again (who knows where they hid on that boat!)

At one point, I had to go to the bathroom. Thank god it was just to pee. The men's bathroom was the most atrocious thing I have ever seen in my life! There were no unrinals, men simply came into the bathroom and peed on the wall. The urine all (eventually) found its way down a hole along the side of the room. There were two asian style toilets for pooping, but no toilet paper, or water for that matter to wash hands or bum after a poo. It DID smell as bad as you are probably imagining, and i dont really want to think what the centimeter or so of liquid on the floor was, but ..... Sorry to gross you out....

ASIDE: i gotta figure a way to the airport as my taxi guy just drove past me with a car load, and .... i have to be on this plane!! (aside from Tonga)

until next time, newo-out

Traveling to New Zealand

2008-11-02T16:01:00.000-08:00

OK, the trip from hell begins!

We left Gili Meno on Monday morning to get to my flight to Australia which leaves Monday night. It arrived early on Tuesday morning, then I get to Aukland by Tuesday evening, to get to Tonga on Wednesday afternoon! That is a lot of traveling!

So there will be pictures, eventually on the picasa site, and one of the pictures you will see donkey carts -- one of the methods of transport in Indonesia (the roads are about 15% cars & minivans, 5% bigger trucks -- dump trucks, big busses, about 60% scooters or motorcycles and the rest donkey carts.) Anyway, there is a picture of donkey carts in the mud at the large city on Lombok, and the picture doesnt really capture the smells. And you may be surprised, but the smell isnt necessarily "bad" (or maybe I am just very de-sensitized by now). Anywho, it did NOT smell like a barn, or like donkey shit per-se. It was a combination of smells, donkey shit, mud, moisture, spices, flowers, with the ever-present smell of burning deisel. So it is not what one would expect a donkey cart stand to neccessarily smell like.

So we had a nice four person ride across Lombok in a minivan, comfortable by Indo standards, we shared the van with two guys from Denmark, and they napped while Ange and I observed the changing landscape. For example, the very mountainous island is covered in lush green tropical forests. Because unlike the very dry low Gili Meno, Lombok is wet and lush. Monkeys are occasionally seen along the road (including one pair that was involved in copulating, which got a big laugh from me, our driver, Angie and the awake Dane! -- unfortunately the picture didnt take!)

Also, once thru the forest we come to flatter land, and let me also stress that there are a lot of people here, so that very often along the treck we see not just traffic on the very narrow (by US standards) roads, but also stands of people selling all sorts of things along the roadside. Anytime we stop we get accosted by people trying to sell us all sorts of things from the side of the road... newspapers in about 7 different languages, beads, touristy trinkets, etc. These seem to be the equivalent of Indonesian entreprneurs. Even including guys with guitars and other instruments, who come up (to the cars stopped at the traffic light) and sing a bit of song, waiting for a hand out. If one is not forthcoming, then off to the next car, and on and on. I got a picture of one guy, and he was actually quite good.

So the city on lombok, probably holds 4 million or so people, but occupies an area perhaps half the size of Corpus Chrisit, Texas. With a 4 story height limit, to say that it is crowded is understating it quite a bit. There are Mosques everywhere -- sort of like Churches in Oklahoma, and quite a bit of new Mosque construction too -- including a blue domed one (see the picture eventually!). So when it isnt full-on urban crowded, the landscape quickly gives way to agricultural use -- bananas, tapioca, casava, cocunut trees, tobacco, coffee along with the ubiquitous rice terraces.

Often a smile goes a long way. I drive by and i smile, i often give a smile to someone, child or adult, and i get a smile back, a bigger smile then leads to another bigger smile in return, and often ends up with the two of us, random indonesian and myself, laughing together.

Naturally it rained as we traveled across this small amount of Lombok, and that was nice since it was cooller when it rained.... did i mention how hot it is at the equator?

Anyway, i know i told the story of the ferry dock, so next it will be the story of the ferry and the rest of the trip to aukland!

until next time -- newo out.

Gili Meno 4

2008-11-02T15:43:00.000-08:00

So our last day on Gili Meno was truly delightful. After the emotional night of before with the whole angie episode (did that make it in the previous blog? -- someone tell me because if it doesnt, i can add it as "the angie episode").

At any rate, the last day on Gili Meno ... Angie got a really nice black pearl necklace and matching earrings set in silver for something stupid like $15 US and then we (Angie, Bar and I) went to the far side of the Island to a resort called Sunset Gecko, which is our favorite resort on this small island. If anyone else ever comes here, this is the place to stay. There is excellent snorkeling right off the beach and the resort has FRESH water showers even if it is a shared bathroom situation. To be green, and prudent, they re-use the shower water to water the garden, so you have to use their biodegradable soap. It is a great sunset spot and the food is tasty and not too expensive.

In fact it is amazing how far an american dollar goes in indonesia. We had just a few for our last day on Gili Meno and for the travel back to the airport the next day. We arranged our transportation before we left the main island, Lombok, so that was ok. We had a great meal .... and this may be in the previous post, so I will return to the last day.

We walked back through the interior of the island (taking many pictures of the island's village, mosque, etc.) to get back to our resort in time for packing and then dinner. I had a truly glorious massage from the lady at the beach cafe next door to the resort. Everyone here seems to be a massage thearapist. Anyway, it was a $10 one hour massage, although it could have been about $6 (which was the original offer, but we didn't have the rupiah in the budget for it, and she would take my $10 bill.) She did quite a number on my neck and upper back, which definitely helped the long hard day of travel the next day.

We then had a delighful dinner, packed and the next day we were off on the trek to the airport on Denpassar.

To sum up Gili Meno, we arrived on wednesday, Bob and Liz visited on Thursday, we went to visit them on Gili Trabahar on friday, changed Angie's return so that we could stay here on Meno all day on sunday. Lazed about on Saturday at Sunset Gecko, watching the sunset there. Had a delightful, truly inexpensive meal at the "cheap" restaurant on the beach on our way back, and then the last glorious day on Gili Meno as described above. I hope I covered all those items in the blog, again let me know if I didnt and I will fill in some more detail later. I have been stranded on the low-tech island of Hapa'ai in Tonga for the past weekish, so there is a lot of blog material to get in, and i am trying to get it before i get to NZ and do some more traveling....

anyway until next time, newo out.

Gili Meno Pt3

2008-10-27T16:06:00.000-07:00

(Aside for you star watchers, I also saw Cassiopia which in the southern hemisphere is an "M" and not a "W")

We laughed ourselves to sleep that night ... ah Gili Meno.

The next day was another hard day of lying around, swimming in the sea, etc. As Angie said, the Gili's have renewed our sense of Indonesia being a decent place to be. Angie was just sick of people always trying to take advantage of us, demanding an unfair price for items (120,000 for bracelets when two stalls down for the same items, the old woman offered them for 20,000). SO Meno has renewed our sense that humans are still decent, even in Indonesia. For example, meeting Bar who became a friend, someone we felt as comfortable with as any of our good friends back home. .... there is probably more Meno, but I jump to yesterday, which started my long trek to try and get to Genevieve (I will get there i am sure). We had to leave Meno at 7:30 AM to catch the boat back to LomBok and back to the Ferry port on the other side (well not quite the other side). Anyway, it was a delightful drive and there were the smells again, but that will wait ... At the

ferry dock it was again, attack of the porters, and people selling us fruit, peanuts, snacks for the ferry, etc. And I did not have any rupiah left, and Ange had it all and we had our transport covered, with about 75,000 for meals until my plane (which departed at 10PM from Denpassar on the other side of Bali). Well as i have said they are desperate, but I was now Gili Meno mellow and having some fun. This one guy had bannas and pineapples (both of the small aisan variety).

And all I had were Thai Baht, so I was trying to convince him to sell me two pineapples for 20 baht
(about 2/3 of a dollar). He grabbed that bill, gave me two pineapples so fast and was gone! I thought, wow what a great deal! and now we have fresh fruit for the 4 hour ferry! along with Angie's 10K nasi campur -- white rice with cocunut, tempeh, and stir fried vegies, wrapped in a pyramid of brown paper -- a really nice meal as it turned out. Well about 10 minutes later the guy returned with his boss
who said that I had ripped the guy off by offering him worthless Thai money!!!!! What a hoot, I ripped off the rip off artist!! Anyway, he fairly insisted that i take my 20 baht bill back and i gave him the fruit back. One of his many competitors sold us honey dew melon AND two pineapples for half the cost (in rupiah) about 2 seconds later so we still had our fruit! Anyway, on the boat (because these guys board the ferry as you arrive like
pirates boarding the ship of spoils when the ferry arrives, and stay on as long as they can b4 the ferry leaves) he was trying to separate me from my two dollar bill as american dollars are good money anywhere in the world.
I was still trying to convice him that the fancier looking 100 baht bill was worth enough for his entire plate of fruit -- somehow the math never seemmed to sink in. Anyway, I didnt buy anything else from him, but it sure was fun turning the situation around on them!

Gotta go catch my plane to Aukland

until next time -- newo out./

Gili Meno pt2

2008-10-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

Ok, back to that glorious second day, glorious because it rained>

So the 4 westerners suddenly became alive with the temperature drop and the cool fresh water rinse (since, of course, Bob and Liz's well water is also terribly soft.) We were laughing and playing in the rain, letting it wash the salt water off of us, while Bar sat sullen and cross-armed under the shelter of the roof. After all he did not join us for the cool dip in the seas after our long sweaty, dusty hike -- these islands are dry, since we are near the middle of the dry season. While we were playing in the rain like the young local kids (about 800 or so people lived on Tra-la-la). They reminded me of when we were kids and we would play in the mudpuddles on "dead end street"
growing u p in Corpus. (I am sure Ashley will remember the time someone drove by extra fast and drenched the two of us head to toe in the large puddle across from the Crumbleys (sp?). )

Anyway, Liz had made some delicious cookies and we had enjoyed them after my "shower" and the rain just didnt stop! The street started to flow like a muddy river (Bob said he had never seen that) and eventually we had to walk to our 4PM boat while it poured and lightening cracked. The street eventually overflowed onto the beach which eventually broke its "banks"(it was flat and sandy near the beach side dirt road, before falling to the sea) as we walked to the "bus boat" for our ride back to Meno. But oh how glorious it was to be so clean!

For you see that night before, I had been so hot and so salty that it was all i could do to get to sleep. And angie came in later than I -- around 11:30 or so after hanging and talking to Bar at his bar (bu-dum-pah). She woke me up, and I couldnt get back to sleep.... For one thing, everyone here burns their garabge -- and not together but individually, and that night the smoke from the neighbors was blowing directly into the room and the fan (no ac) which normally was a delight, was blowing the smoky air on me, and it felt like I could not NOT get clean -- slaty and smoky, YUCK! Anyway, after about an hour of tossing and turning, I went out to the beach and looked at Orion strangely up-side down as Gen said the constellations look in the southern hemisphere and saw two long shooting stars, before heading back thru the smoke line (about 3 meters from our door) and finally fell back to sleep. Keep in mind they do the laundry in the salty water too, and at $15/night with breakfast, there is no daily maid service -- so salty me in salty sheets for multi-nights = yucky gross!

gonna let someone else in again .... But we just laughed the whole rest of that night as we were clean and it was cool (after the rain) and so pleasant!!!

Gili Meno pt1

2008-10-27T14:35:00.000-07:00

So you know something is wrong when no one tells you the same story on how to get to a place or how long it takes. We were told about four different stories on how to get to the small (4km around), flat coral isaland of Gili Meno off of Lombok. Travel time estimates ranged from 4 hours to 10 hours. Who could know that when we departed from Ubud at 6:45 AM on Tuesday it would be almost 34 hours before we reached our destination, and you could still see Bali from the Island! (As i told ange, we could have traveled around the world in less time.)

So the "slow boat" left Bali and after a 4 1/2 hour crossing, we thought OK, we can still make the last boat to Gili Meno which departs from another corner of Lombok from the ferry terminal at 5PM. However, we waited in the harbor of Lombar for almost1 1/2 hours while the dock cleared from another ferry and we had to spend the night on Lombok.

So now I know something about Indonesia, if someone says to you, "its ok, he's my friend, he will be ok, he can get you there on time," ...dont believe it. Also, dont let anyone ever carry your bags, anywhere, even if it looks like they are part of the hotel, or the tour group that organized your travel
plans, since they wont be any way connected, and no matter how short a distance they carry your bags, and no matter how much you didnt need them to carry them, they will still insit that you pay them about $1/bag (which in Indonesia is a small fortune.).

The next day we made it to Gili Meno at long last, and I stayed with the bags near the harbour while Ange went looking for habitation for a few nights. (the pasasge from Lombok to Gili meno is by small boat, think of the long-tail bots that take you to Rai-Lai in Thailand -- roughly a 30-40 ft metal hulled boat powered by a very small outboard.)

This island was the start of "vacation for real", so we wanted to do it right. Ange came back after going up and down the beach looking for a good, not too expensive place to stay, and she brought a local in tow. Right away he offered to carry our bags, and we were very forceful is saying "NO, we can manage, thank you!" He wondered why we didnt want his help, and we explained that we had enough of "porters" and their aggressive demands for money for servcies not requested nor required. (beside we are on a budget as this small island has no atm or proper bank exchange.) He explained that he was not a porter and was not going to charge us for helping with the bags...which turned out to be true.

Now we really, really liked Gili Meno. It may not have been the "greatest snorkeling ever" as it was one time billed, but the snorkelling was excellent. No, we liked it because there were only 500 permanent residents and they were all chill, kind and nice people. No longer was the constant call of "hey boss" for us to buy whatever tourist junk people were selling. Gili Meno is the Crested Butte of Indonesia. Relaxed, laid back, no hurries, no worries (after a few days we could even leave our bungalow room unlocked all day without worry that anything would happen to our stuff. -- nothing ever did.)

Now the guy who helped us out that first day turned into a friend, and near constant companion as he hung out with us when he wasnt working, and was chill and had the inside know-all. His name is Bar and he was kinda sweet on angie. He introduced us to many of the locals,
pointed out the better snorkeling areas (although all the way around this island the snorkeling
was excellent.)

((NOTE to reader -- sorry for any and all misspellings, but I never have enough time to write this blog, and never have time to re-read any of it, as i am trying to get it all down in public places.... i did not bring my computer, which is a good thing because my bags are heavy enough, and i wouldve just lost it by now as i have seemed to have lost most everything else of value, except money, passport, tickets -x-x- knock on wood. Yep, gone are my favorite sunglasses, ipod, earplugs -- ok earplugs may not be that valuable, but if you just flew over night on the "everyone must
take their baby to bali" express -- you may think earplugs are rather valuable.)

OK, enough of the side track. It didnt take long chilling on the gorgeous white sand beach of gili meno before the relative stress of super populated Bali, where every local sees every white person as a walking ATM. And since the terrorist bombings, and subsequent drop in tourism, every local is also super desparate to extract SOME amount of money from the walking ATMs. Keep in mind there are 4.5 million people on Bali, and Indonesia is the third most populous country in the world.

So by day two, we felt like we had been there for a very long time, and were full tilt into relax mode. On day two, Liz Brown and her beau Bob the australian (both of CB fame) paddled over from the neighboring, slightly larger Gili, (it has a hill and nightclubs, etc.) Gili Trabarhan (or something like that). They hung out with us for the day, then paddled the kilometer or so acroos back to their island...they own a small bungalow hotel on that island, where Cricket (also of CB fame) stays whenever she comes over to Asia.

So on day 3, Bar, Angie and I decide that we will go and spend the day exploring Gili Trabaharan, or as Bar says us westerners should call it, "Gili T" or "Gili Tra-la-la". So we take the island hoppper ferry -- same small type of boat that is common here (there WILL be pictures on Picasa ... someday). For 21,000 rupiah (thats about $2.50 for both Ange and I there and back), but it leaves at 9AM and returns at 4PM, so the day it is!

That turns out to be one of the best days, and its one of the best days becasue ... (drum roll please) ... it rained.

Now you may think "huh?" so let me explain. While it is great to be relaxing on the beach, swimming in the sea, etc. It is still HOT (the low at night is something like 31 C), and swimming in the sea is the way to get cool. BUT, this is a tiny remote island, and unlike the large main islands, this island gets its "water" from a well. Imagine what well water on a tiny island would be like? If you guessed "salty" you were right! Water so soft it makes Chapman Ranch water seem Rocky Mountain hard!!

So after two + days, a fresh water rinse was TOO nice for words!! While all the locals (Bar for example) found it too cold and were kinda glum, the four of us (ange, Me, Liz and Bob) reveled in the long cool rinse of wonderful fresh water. I even took the opportunity to actually borrow soap and do a real honest to God open air shower (in surf shorts, as they frown on nudity in this muslim country -- it is muslim here, it was hindu on Bali -- both frown on nudity, so . . .)

That morning we took a hike up the hill of Gili T and checked out the island and the old Japanese WWII gun emplacement/bunkers, so the rain was delightful after a dry and dusty walk. After a while of the constant rain, the air no longer smelled salty or like the sea. Instead, it smelled to me like a rainforest, and to angie it smelled like flowers.... one of those things that is hard to convey about Asia, the smells.

But right now there is a queue forming for the internet, and i will take a break and sign off for someone else to take a turn. So until next time Newo Out.

Ubud

2008-10-27T14:13:00.002-07:00

So after a long hiatus on the blog, i am finnally at a place where I can post something so here it goes:

So the last few days in Kuta were pretty fun. Ange and i took a trip across the penisula to a fancy seafood place where you pick out your seafood, then they grill it for you. The tables were on the beach itself, so it was
fun to watch the waves roll in and crash on the beach with your toes in the sand. It was also nice to see more of the island and get away from the Kuta area. There was a traveling four or so piece band that went along the beach playing songs for tips along the way, sort of like the mariachi
singers in a mexican restaurant in texas. They came up to our table and played, "Lady in Red" probably because Angie was wearing a red skirt. After asking us where we were from, Colorado, they played a John Denver song. We were impressed with their repertoire of songs, but they suffered from what Ange and I call "Id-nigh oker" disease. You see when we were in Guadeloupe (French Carribean) years ago, we were at a bar where a guitar player (think Tyler Hansen at the Princess) played the Steve Miller song, where the refrain ends "your a mignight toker" but being a french speaker, he did not quite catch that bit of english, and everytime he would sing, "Id-nigh oker" which made us laugh. These guys were the same but on a slightly higher scale... they didnt know
most of the words and simply made sounds that were very close. That is part of the reason I cannot recall the exact John Denver song they played, as too many of the "lyrics" were just sounds.

We finally left the touristy trap town of Kuta on Bali and went to the interior town of Ubud. Where Ange wanted to do the last of her buying. Ubud was much nicer, it was there that i was able to upload some pictures. More of that to come when I can get to it.

The place in Kuta was right in the middle of the action, but located in an interior of a "block" if you could call it that which meant it was a reasonably quiet place to stay in the heart of it all -- a little paradise of green and flowers, etc. The place in Ubud was truly quiet -- or if not quiet at least rural in character. Located about 1/2 a km from the busier (but not as hectic as Kuta) town center, it was really green, and complete with the sounds of the jungle at night and the crowing of roosters in the morning. It had a beautiful pool, a nice bathroom and all the guest rooms were made of stone. Ubud was nice. It was cooler than Kuta, the food was all good, and the place was the nicest place we stay at in Indonesia.

It seems that I have written all this before, but I cannot find the posting on my blog, which leads me to think "what happened to it?" At any rate I have a lot to write, and I will publish this one and move on. We were in Ubud for two days and then we were off to Gili Meno, a small island off of Lombok the next large island in the Indonesian archipelago.

until next time,

newo out.

the end of Kuta

2008-10-19T21:13:00.000-07:00

On Friday 17 (?) Oct, the breeze finally kicked back in, so the heat was tempered by it. It is still super hot though. I arranged a tour guide to take me around to some other parts of Bali to see some temples while Angie does her last shopping day in Kuta tomorrow (Saturday). Then i went to meet Angie for lunch at the Aromas cafe, after which I spent the rest of the day relaxing while Angie shopped. I read in the book, then went to the beach to do a little swimming. Kuta is a surfing destination, so the beach features 4 feet or higher waves. It was fun swimming in them, sort of like a water park. Before I got the hang of going thru the wave under water, I would get spun around and tossed and turned. On one, which i thought had to be a double wave, i got all turned upside down and was swimming down instead of up, but touching the bottom orients one's self pretty good, and luckily I didn't drown! (It really wasnt that close so don't worry mom!)

On the tour on Saturday, I learned some fun facts about Bali from Made (which means the 2nd born -- so first names or casual names, apparently, go something like, "1st Born Son" "2nd born son," etc.) the tour guide: there are 3.5 million people or so living on this island, and it has 4,000 km of coastline, so it aint small. I had arranged for a "temple tour" that didnt really turn out that way. The first stop was an actual temple that was cool to look at. It was called Pemerintah Kabupaten Badung, it was nice, and had a grassy area in front and behind, so it felt very park-like as opposed to the rest of the island which was either urban or ag land.

It was a nice, calm, serene break from the busy, crowded Kuta city. We werent allowed inside the actual temple, but there wasnt any actual "inside" any way. It was all open air surrounded by a short stone wall, and then a moat with a grassy area to the pavers of the inner courtyard/temple. On one side there were pagodas, with multi-storied thatched roof features, so these are like multiple roofs on top of each "temple" lesser numbered roofs leading to the most numbered roof system in the middle. (see pictures!). Facing them are raised platforms, where presumably somebody prays. There are offerings fruit, rice, flowers, incense, sometimes a cigarette or money placed on the wall. They make these offerings pretty much everywhere in Bali -- the hotel had some of these walled "temple" areas where they made offerings in the morning and evening. On the sidewalks in front of shops (so you have to watch your step) there would be these offerings on a plate of folded banana leaves. Also, along the beach there would be the occasional offering (to the surf god, I presume). The natives also made water offerings every now and then, sometimes by splashing water in front of the store, other times by splashing it on the roof above.

Anyway the Temple pictures will show how humid and hot it is here, there is green moss growing on the stone carvings, pavers, steps, just about anything (the hotel in Ubud had the green moss everywhere -- see pictures). The garden like atmosphere of this temple was highlighted by the sweet fragrance of many flowering trees and shrubs. Again, a nice break from the beach city of Kuta. On one side there is a bell tower with wooden bells (and very narrow stairs) which got you further into the breeze and provided a nice overview of the area.

The next stop was supposed to be a rainforest with monkeys tour. It actually was a small wooded area with quite a few rather aggressive monkeys surrounded by a larger touristy stall shop area. My driver passed me off to a very small woman who guided me thru the "monkey forest" which consisted of buying some peanuts to feed to the monkeys, and after the brief tour she brought me back to her stall where she rather firmly insisted that i buy something, so i did. Can you say "tourist trap?"

The next stop was also a "tourist trap" there was a temple out on a rock not far off the coast which you could not get to, and werent allowed into anyway. The legend has it that this old Hindu monk showed up to convert the balinese from monotheism to hinduism, and when the rulers of the area challenged him, he showed the strength of the new religion and won the hearts and minds, if you will, of the locals by picking up the gigantic rock and flinging it into the sea. So the Balinese were converted to Hinduism and built a temple on this rock outcropping.

The temple area was flanked on one side by a fancy golf resort, and in front of it was an even larger and more fancy bunch of tourist stalls selling yet more crap. (Including a Polo store... Ralph Lauren at this holy Hindu site!) The other "temple" at this site was about the size of the "temple" at the hotel, while the shopping area was about 2 acres in size. Again, can you say "tourist trap"? In fact it was more interesting to see the rice patties stacked up along the edge of ravines, or just about anywhere where there wasn't developed city, than to have gone on the "Temple Tour." But i just enjoyed getting out of Kuta and seeing more of the island of Bali.

The next day we hung out at the beach for a while, had one last meal at the vegetarian restaurant/juice bar (Aromas see pictures) and then left Kuta for Ubud. This is a much nicer place to be, not nearly as crowded and our hotel here is a beautiful, quiet oasis just outside of the city center. From the street it looks like a small gate, and not very much more, but it went very deep into the lot and backed up to a very deep ravine all surrounded by lush tropical forest. It is a quiet little oasis not too far (a small walk from) the city center. There is a lovely pool, and it is a very interesting layout with many stone "towers." (Think three stone rooms stacked on top of each other with very narrow stairs climbing the outside of the building to each room.) The pool is at the end of the deep set lot, above the ravine. Looking down the ravine there were obviously more rooms, so i decided to go down the stairs and see just how far down this hotel goes. Would you believe there were four stories of rooms (again one room per story) going down the ravine under the pool? Across the ravine, there is jungle. It is nice, very green, and besides the loud noises from the jungle, peaceful.

The hotel also has a good restaurant according to the Lonely Planet, so when we learned that they were doing dinner that night, we jumped on it. It was good, too. They had a buffet of about fifteen different balinese dishes, and we tried all of them. The smoked duck was a real standout. Also we sat at a ten-top table with other guests of the hotel, and had quite am interesting little dinner party. There was Georg a Dane who lived in Thailand with his Thai wife and son, Jordan. Clarissa, an art reviewer from Singapore, and a newlywed couple Aaron and Paula from Vancouver. All in all a very delightful evening.

There was a terrific storm that first night at the hotel in Ubud. I haven't seen/heard(?) such heavy rain since the flash flood in San Antonio in my Trinity days -- the one that flooded uphill like a tide coming in, complete with "strobe lightening." This storm was very similar, big thunder, heavy rain, and of course that is why everything here is so lush and green and covered with mossy growth. Today (Monday Oct 20) we shopped Ubud and Angie got her final items. We then had a delightful massage, and I found this internet place where i could FINALLY upload some pictures. (it took forever, so i only did a select few) Look for more when i can find a better connection. OK! We have to go get freshened up before dinner, and tomorrow we head for Gili Meno!

Until next time, NEWO out!

Goodbye Thailand...hello Bali!

2008-10-16T06:53:00.000-07:00

Alright, here it goes and not all good this time...

So it turns out that i left my sunglasses at the bowling alley, and that was that, they are gone. But thanks to my wonderful friends and family, I was able to get new ones in Bangkok before leaving the country and heading for Bali, which is good since it has been very sunny here.

On Monday we slept in, then went to have a tasty snack/lunch at one of the roadside snack shacks that are everywhere here. Noodles with pork balls and some great chicken sate. Then we went to town where Methet and Angie got facials and I had a lovely, long (two hours) massage. After that we picked the kids up from school, then I got into the pool while Methet and Angie played tennis.

If there was one good thing about loosing my sunglasses on sunday, it happened during my swim. For one, I was really mad at myself to loose the sunglasses so I took it out on the pool water by swimming particularly hard and fast. Also, because of going bowling, i had tweaked my left buttock a little (Lyn and Shelly will know my issues with the good ol' pirformis muscle.) So while swimming the little bugger was acting up... but breakthru! I finally figured out how to engage the gluteous without getting the pirformis also (pain being an excellent motivator) -- a struggle i have been dealing with for six or so years -- trying to separate the two -- and for at least the rest of that night the pirformis was still and pain was no more!!

Tuesday it was back to Bangkok for Angie's last minute shopping and my dental appointment. The dentist office was a large place and I had one of the best and quickest cleanings ever. During the consultation, the dentist did not recommend having the work i was thinking of doing, but of course they would do whatever i wanted them to do. BUT they needed more time than my planned return to Bangkok allowed to get everything all done, so I have decided to skip that. (Also the cost savings was not a great as i anticipated, so if i have issues in the future its back to Dr. Anderson in gunny.)

Then we went on an excursion to replace the lost sunglasses. We went to one place and they said, one week, which didnt work because i was leaving the next day, but place number two agreed (after some haggling) to do it in about two hours.

While waiting for the glasses to be ready, two of Methet's friends who live in Bangkok and are also Philipinos met us at a restaurant where got a bite to eat. They were lively company and really funny, which was just what i needed at the time since i was a bit down on myself for loosing my favorite sunglasses.

By the time we finally got back to Pattaya, Rick, Methet, Angie and i had a most delightful and delicious Thai dinner at this really cool restaturant that was on a hill, almost a cliff overlooking a not quite crescent beach below with the towers of Pattaya city in the distance and nearer condo towers along the beach. The restaurant was all open air, like a lot of things here in tropical asia (including this internet cafe), and had dining areas that stepped down the hill towards the sea. What a delightful farewell dinner from Thailand. Rick and Methet are such wonderful hosts, and I look forward to seeing them and the kids when i get back from New Zealand.

Then it was back to the Truscott's house for packing. And I finaly got to sleep around midnight. 4 AM came awful early (which is when we had to leave for the airport for the trip to Bali), but the flights were delighful -- now i know why singapore airlines is considered one of the worlds best. And we arrived without incident in Bali.

After the very long imigration line (a little over an hour) we made it thru customs in about 15 seconds, and here we were (or rather are). And we made it to the hotel that Angie had stayed in before in Kuta where she is doing some more buying. It was quite a bit more run-down than Angie remembered and there is a doorway with a balinese stand-alone wooden post and lentil affair -- those in CB can see examples of this type of carved wood with some of the pieces Blake has at Mabuhay. Now the balinese are typically short/small asian persons, and I must of hit my head on the darn thing about three times before figuring it out. They said it would be a little noisy in our room, and noisy it was! The dog started the occasional bark at around 4(?) in the AM and Angie found the clinking bell on his collar the most annoying. By 6 or so the place was a buz with the ladies next door (about 2 meters next door) getting their day started. But for about $12/night with airconditioning, what does one expect? So we decided to change hotels to one that is much quieter, nicer and with a bigger pool.

(Quick aside, one of those things you dont really remember in hindsight, but is definitely an issue when you are here: In the US cigarette smoking is practically penalized by death these days, no more smoking in public spaces not even bars, or even near doors to public places in CO at least. Well not so here. The Balinese smoke a clove type cigarette and the aussie/euro crowd, well they are smokers too, and smoking is permitted everywhere, in the restaurants, etc. For examle, I am sitting here writing this blog for oh about an hur, and here walks in some white guy... he's german by the language on the screen... who has to choose the computer right next to me even though the whole place is empty. He immediately lights up a cigarette and starts to chain smoke.. he is on number two in his 15th minute here. Another aside, on Sunday we ate at a Japanese Sobu restaurant on Sunday with the truscotts, and Rick mentioned that he felt a little out of place since we didn't bring their dog with us. Sure enough, virtually every other table had a little yippy dog at it.)

Now I arrive in this country not speaking a lick of Indonesian, but they speak fairly good english (it must be all the aussie tourists that come here for the surfing and heat?) But that is ok, because Angie who has been here often (fifth time) speaks about as much Indonesian as I speak Thai which was sort of our arrangement, I lead in Thailand, she in Bali (although with Methet being our guide most of the time, I think i got the better end of that deal). It seems to me that the Balinese, at least the ones i have met so far, and admittedly Kuta is a bit on the tourist trap side of things, speak better english than even the Thai (english is an official language there), so coping with the language barrier has been very easy so far.

The balinese people are very nice, and outgoing, they like to engage in conversation, which I learn in the Lonely Planet book is one of their cultural idiosyncrasies = the need(?) to engage in small talk. I find that if I pause and take the time to converse just a little bit, I get a very pleasant smiling, engaging conversation, and often learn something too. They seem to very much appreciate it as their typical interaction with the Australian tourists seems to be the cold shoulder. Admittedly the initial contact is hey buy this chachi, or can i get you a taxi, "Hey Boss, you need transport?" It just goes to show that a little smile, and some small talk can turn what might be an exhausting exercise in "quit pestering me" into a pleasant little chat.

So I am worried about not hearing from Genevieve to firm up my travel plans, since I am supposed to meet her in about ten days from now. You know you've got good freinds when you put out the call via email to our common friends to see if anyone knows if she is off the ice (left Antartica) or not, and within that day you get the message, that she is. And, as if she heard me calling psychicly that day, here at last is the email from Gen that I have been waiting so impatiently for. It is so nice to hear how happy she is to be free of the instituional life, in fact I will share some of the email with you just so you know how great it is to here it (yo followers in CB, stop by the PO and remind Adele to check out my blog):

Hi Honey!!I'm in christchurch enjoying the warmth, smells, and foods of the real world.I'm traveling with my good pal Jolene to Tonga on the 20th. We have a house on Vava'u until the 26th.We'll then make our way to Hapa'ai. I'll fly back to Auckland early morning on the 4th. That's it for plans. I'm kind of just going day to day enjoying the non-institutionalised life! It sure is grand, isn't it!!! So, let's meet in Hapa'ai around the 28th - give or take a day for Tongan time. Try to get a flight back to Auckland for the 3rd or 4th. We can then go from there. There are a few places on the North Island that I want to go and some friends that I want to see but for the most part, it will be fun renting a car and just exploring. I think I'll be flying out of Christchurch back to Denver around the 19th or 20th, but I'm not sure yet (I have to talk to the Raytheon travel folks today or tomorrow.)Yea!!!! I love New Zealand and want to stay here. I love it, I love it. Depending on how things go, we can visit Nick Frame in Wanaka. Do you remember him?Give Ange a big hug for me and apologize that I'm slow with my responses. And then remember to take deep breaths and have a good time.

It is hot here in Bali. Ange swears it is not hotter than Thailand, but I swear it is. I found out what it is though, in Thailand there was a breeze, or lots of fans, or it rained often. Or if it did not rain, the cloud cover cooled Thailand down. In Kuta, there has been no breeze. Speaking with one of the Balinese who was selling kites on the beach. (By the way it is a lovely beach, wide with soft reddish yellow sand, and the ocean water is quite cool, just the thing for the afternoon swim/cool down.) And remembering that even though I did not want a kite, i talked with him a while... where are you from ... Colorado in the USA ... california, no colorado -- i draw a map of the USA in the sand, pont out california and texas, then the square of Colorado -- Oh in the middle ... yes it is very mountainous and high ... i live at 3000 meters and it is already cold and snowing there ... etc. He is very engaged and seems quite interested in the conversation. That leads to him commenting on how very hot it has been. He thought it was at least 3 or 4 degrees celcius hotter than usual because of the lack of breeze. All i know is that i feel like i am in a sauna, no matter what activity I am engaged in, even if it is just sitting at a table for dinner, or walking down the street, or negotiating for a tour, or whatever. Yes even now in the internet cafe inhaling the second hand smoke from the German guy, with a fan blowing above, my shirt sticks to me like a teenybopper wet t-shirt contest, and sweat stands in large beads on my forehead, occasionally running into my eyes.

But this is what I wanted, right? escape from the cold at home? On the positive side of the heat, with the heat, my back is so completely relaxed, that i am having very few issues with it. So even while, i find it sweltering beyond belief, that is very big upside.

--- oh dear there goes cigarette number three! Hey i bet Phillip Morris stock is a great buy now with the recent down turn! They will undoubtedly still sell their cigarettes to everyone else in the world even if the US is anti-cigarette nazi world, no longer like the scenes of the Good Night and Good Luck Clooney movie. ---

Last night (thursday) we ate at a restaurant that was run by an aussie coupl. We choose it because it had a lot of people in it, many more so than the comparable restaurants down the street, and we figured, hey its crowded it must be good. And it was good. But unlike Thailand where virtually anywhere you eat it is going to be good, Bali is a hit or miss, mostly miss, kinda place (so far). The one wonderful exception is the great vegetarian restaurant/juice bar (Aromas) where i can get shots of wheat grass and some of the most interesting and delightful fruit juices i have ever tasted. Yum; real, whole food. But i digress: The aussie's restaurant. We noticed that there seemed to be a bunch of people at the other tables looking at stacks and stacks of obviously pirated DVDs, games, CDs or whatever. Then we noticed that the guy who was selling these pirated DVDs is wearing a local police uniform! Is that rich or what? The cops are the ones pushing the stolen goods onto the australian tourists!

I do not really like Kuta, it is a city, it is too hot, too crowded with too many white tourists, and too much traffic, etc. The only good thing has been to relax, read some in the book, hang out in the pool, walk around on the very nice beach, splash in the cool ocean. So it is nice to relax a little, but i can deal with less cigarettes, less deisel fumes, etc. Ange is almost done, so we will be leaving sunday for a couple other places for her buying, and then off to the Gili islands which is supposed to be some of the best snorkeling in the world. It will be nice to get out of the "city" even tho this is nothing like Bangkok which is a mostly modern first world city in the year 2008.

JEEZUS cigarette number five!!! I have to post and sign off.

Until next time,

Newo Out.

finally, a new post from Thailand!

2008-10-12T08:56:00.000-07:00

Well,

We made it to Thailand all fine and dandy. (I am traveling with my friend Angie Booth who is doing some buying for her shop back in the butte.) The drive to Denver was gorgeous, new snow on the mountains and a crystal clear fall day. I have pictures I will try to post to Picasa, but one step at a time, (since this is new and when I go to the blog spot here in thailand, the text on the page is all in thai, which is kinda hard for me to read and figure out which one is the sign-in, but I digress, and obviously, i figured it out.)

The plane ride was fine, and i did sleep most of it, so the jet lag hasnt been too bad (for once). Walking off the plane at the Bangkok airport, there is that instant realization that your not in kansas anymore. For one, it is warm and humid, plus there is that spicy scent in the air. Then, of course, the anouncements are in a foreign language and displays and what not in the airport are in the distinctive curved thai architectural style with thai color schemes versus the cold, crisp lines in a western airport.

(Of course not all the unusual smells are pleasant as the sewer lines are not deep and tend to vent into the sidewalk atmosphere pretty much everywhere in the city.)

We are staying here at Rick and Methet Truscott's fine new house in Pattaya, about an hour and a half south of Bangkok. It is a combination of closed rooms (bedrooms where they can run air conditioning, office, dining room) and open rooms (living room, den) since being in the tropics, it never gets cold here and heating is not an issue. Their old house now serves as the guest house and kitchen and is just a few feet from the beautiful new house. Their three kids, Missah, Qino and Caleb are all doing well and seem the same to me in the two years since I have seen them. We arrived in the early AM, so once we were here it was off to the beach for lunch... nothing like thai food in thailand... and we would have taken a dip in the gulf, but a storm blew in, so no swim. And that is also why this blog has taken so long, and will be so long ... trouble with the internet due to the weather that we have been having here (it is rainy season).

So Friday, Methet, Angie and I went into Bangkok and did some shopping. Strange for a mountain boy to say, but it almost felt like coming home driving and walking around in crowded Bangkok, still my favorite city. Methet had to go to the US embassy for Missah's passport re-newal, and Ange and i got our tickets to Bali arranged and tried to go to my favorite spa for some massage and pampering, only to find it torn down! In fact, many things have changed in Bangkok since I was here three years ago, many an old building is gone and many a new shiny skyscraper has sprouted. Many of the old shopping malls on the main shopping street crammed full of tiny stall-like shops where all manner of inexpensive goods could be had are completely gone. they are being replaced with swanky new, modern air-conditioned western style malls... where did all the el-cheapo venders that Blake and Anette used to shop at go? Enough were still around for Ange to find some good stuff tho.

After wandering around in what was left of the crammed vendor "malls" we wandered over to Siam Paragon a new super fancy mall, across the street from what used to be the one fancy mall, Gaysorn, on the shopping mecca street. It is also right next door to Siam Center, which Glo knew back in the day when she was in Bangkok. I doubt Glo would recognize Bangkok today, as Siam Center was THE fancy mall then, it is now the been-remodeled-a-dozen-times-but-still on the low-end side of the "mall" spectrum in a town that has lots of "malls."

We saw a western style rock show out on the new wide plaza on the street at Siam Paragon ( a nice change from the narrow side-walk space for the foot traffic and ever-present street vendors that used to crowd the street). And there was a demonstration of a traditional Thai dance inside the Siam Paragon (see pictures at Picasa). We ate at a nice thai restaurant in Paragon and Methet got some grocercies in the new swank grocery store inside -- think Central Market for you texans or one of the new, big Whole Foods (without the whole). My Thai friend Tony (who is unfortuantely busy working all this week) stopped by while we were there and said hello. It was good to see him, and he said he might be able to come visit us for a few days while we are in Bali. I hope so since a ten minute visit seems far too short.

There are things in Thailand that are just very different from the west. For example, they dont have just a few wires on the poles as in the west; here it seems that if someone needs a new service, they simply put up a new wire. As a result, the concrete (wood wouldnt last very long in the tropical climate) poles dont have five or six lines on them, they have thirty or forty (Angie thinks eighty) wires strung along. And we saw some people instaling yet another wire at one point.

Or the utter lack of enforcement on the highway lends an autobahn type of feel... sort of. For example, they have posted speed limits, but no enforcement, so Rick's driver basically drives as fast as possible all the time... 90 MPH in a 80 KPH zone passing semi's like they are standing still is a typical example. And they have lines on the road just like at home, dashed yellow lines for passing zones, solid yellow lines for do not pass zones, white dashed lines denoting lanes, solid white lines for a shoulder, but that seems to be merely advisory. Many a time (at high speeds,mind you) on a two lane highway we will pass slower vehicles (trucks, busses) in a do not pass zone while there are oncoming vehicles. People just scoot over enough to let us by (whichever way they may be traveling). And no one ever lays on the horn. If there is enough room, drivers take it and go. I tried to memorilaize the practice with some short movies on my camera, but I dont think they worked out too well, very bouncy roads at 140+KPH for one.

Also different from the west (and something I find refreshing) the Thais dont separate their rich and poor people. For example a fancy high rise apartment building in the swankiest neighborhood in town has a corrugated tin shanty right next to it. Also, the streets are always crowded with people. Besides pedestrians, there are street vendors everywhere selling everything from clothing to pirated DVDs to grilled food. This has a way of cluttering up the very limited sidewalk space.

Saturday (11 October) Angie and I went to the Weekend Market -- an open air market -- for more buying, and Ange made some good scores. Methet tells us that it too is about to be no more; the site is slated for high end condo development. So yet another low cost shopping experieince is about to go away. After a hot and sweaty day of that, we came back to the Truscott house for a delightful party. About 18 or so of their friends (with many a kid) came over for dinner, drinking, a little pool playin and otherwise socializing. Mostly foreigners, some with Thai wives ... friends mostly centered around the kids English based international school. As a result there were a number of Brits, a retired American named Dave (with whom I had quite an interesting conversation) a Frenchman from Strausbourg, a Swiss, etc. Dave had extensive international business experience and gave Angie a bunch of really good advice on her business. Leaning quite to the right politically it was interesting to hear him voice his support for Obama in the upcoming election because "Obama is the right guy with the right message for what our country needs right now." It seemed that most of the people who cared about our upcoming election in this small slice of the ex-pat community residing in Pattaya was hopeful for an Obama victory. (Just as the mostly republican American ex-pat community I met in Bangkok four years ago was hopeful for a Kerry victory when i was here in 2004.)

There was also quite a bit of concern about the turmoils in the economy, and having just arrived from the USA they wanted to know if it was as bad back home as it seems. One of the Brits who worked for GE was quite certain that the market had severly undervalued that Company's stock. But enough politics and business talk. They were a delightful group of people, and it was a great party, even if the electricity did go out twice for extended periods due to the lightening in the area -- party by candlelight in the open air house listening to the frogs chirpping and squeaking made it feel like a camp-out party ala Chateau Angelique.

This morning we woke up for the Sunday morning bowling get together some of these people (and the Truscott's) seem to engage in on a semi(?) regular basis. That was fun. Then the whole truscott clan, Ange and I went into Bangkok. Ange and Methet went back to the weekend market for some more, and I went with Rick and the kids on his errand for a new lense for his camera. It was good to spend time with Rick as I wont have much more time to see him this trip as the work week will eat up a lot of the time remaining during our stay in Thailand. (I'll be back here in November before returning to the USA.) Rick and Methet are such great people and very good friends. They are wonderful hosts, and it is good just hanging with them and the kids.

After picking up the ladies we had a delicious japanese dinner in bangkok, and then back to Pattaya. As we got close to their home, a small village along the way had a bunch of bright lights, and there was a bunch of smoke in the air. Earlier we had been diverted off the main road and thru the town because a movie was being shot, so we thought. "Hey, lets stop and see the shooting." Methet had heard that it was a Johnny Depp movie, and wanted to see. Turns out it was a Claude Van Damme movie, and we watched a few minutes of the shooting with the muscle man himself. What we saw might end up as a few seconds in the final film, but if you see a new Van Damme movie that has a scene or two at the "Eagle's Nest" bar at night, we were there! That was fun.

Anyway. I just needed to catch up on the blog, and let everyone know that I am here, safe and sound, and having a smashing good time. Tomorrow I hope to get to the dental clinic for a cleaning and consultation regarding the other three quarter of my mouth. (replacing the old fillings at a cost savings that provides some justification for the small fortune of the airplane fare cost is the goal -- sorry Dr. Anderson!) Then perhaps a little relaxation will be in order before we head to Bali on Wednesday AM. We've only been here a few days, but it already feels like I've been here forever...again a strange kind of homecoming feeling... the Thai people are in so many ways so very warm and nice....

The flickering lights are making me nervous about the power lasting long enough for me to upload the blog, so until next time

Newo out.

2008-10-06T22:16:00.000-07:00

phew finally packed... long day, but tomorrow is ... another long day. we leave CB at 9AM do some shopping in Denver, park at Stapleton, bus to DIA, leave for LA at 6PM leave LA at 11PM and arrive Thursday in Bangkok at 6:40 AM!

next post . . . Thailand

Newo out.

Welcome

2008-10-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

this is my real first posting. Thanks to Dan Jones who is the greatest of ever. He got this blog for me in 19 minutes.

It is raining today in CB where it is cold, cold, cold. Soon I will be in the warm tropics of Thailand, Bali and Tonga!

Thanks dan,

Ne-wo out.