It has been a busy month here in Kiwiland. If you happen to like doing things - preferably things that remind you of how transient and delicate a thing life, and particularly your body, is - New Zealand is indeed a little slice of heaven. No wonder they call it godzone (ie - god's own country). Which is rather more boastful than the average kiwi style: the national attitude seems to be laid back, resourceful and cheerfully interested in what's happening on the rest of the planet - appreciative of what they've got without arrogance. Though pretty much every invention you can think of apparently was done first by a Kiwi who just never marketed it... Or so they say.
It's a young-feeling country, rocky mountains as yet uneroded, rolling hills with a barely decent skein of grass covering the visible stone structure below, like a glorified tellytubbie land. The small towns have an aura of 1950s suburban america - they all feel safe, one broad street of unpretentious shops, with milkbars and tearooms abounding. Everything's made easy for the traveller - helpful visitor information centres and hostels in every town, which can tell you about pretty much any corner of the country you'd like to go. And, of course, adrenaline sports abounding.
So first stop was Queenstown, probably adventure sports capital of the world. Dribbling slightly, I ticked off all the things there I wanted to do - and realised it'd cost 2000 dollars or so. So I scaled my ambitions down slightly, and just did a couple of the things which were unique to the place. Riverboarding was one - there are only a couple of rivers in the world with decent rapids which aren't so rocky you'll crease yourself. The sport is: you hold for dear life onto a bodyboard and go with the flow. Which sounds simple, but that river boiled and frothed with grade 4 (grade 6 is death) whirlpools and standing waves and crosscurrents so you're whirled around and upsidedown and inside out and ducked and splatted and blinded and kick desparately to avoid the currents trying to push you against a cliff, and even more desparately when you get to the point of flow where everything's going in a different direction so you actually end up staying still in the water as everything rushes against you from every which way. Fun! Also did a bungy jump - Queenstown is the home of the commercial sport, and there were 3 to choose from: the original (a mere 36 metres, but of historic interest); the big one (118 metres, but just a hop if you've done the world's tallest bungy in South Africa - Blaucrantz river, 211 metres - so I didn't bother with that jump). And The Ledge, which is only 47 metres drop - but is cunningly placed 400 metres above Queenstown, and you fall straight into rocks and pines spearing upwards, and all beautiful all around. So I chose to do that one, and rattling good stuff it was: knowing the drop was relatively small doesn't help at all when you're up on the ledge, looking down a long long way down to the town, wondering, as usual, why the f*ck am I doing this? I don't have to; I could back out.. Oh, hell, I can't back out now... Oh, shit, I'm all buckled up now and what if I can't do it... and this jump was one where you have to take a running jump off the ledge, or so they order, and in some ways it's easier because you can just think, well, I'll just do a little run - and then it's too late, you can't stop, and you fall off the edge just as you feared, and it always feels like a long long long way down to those spikes - but finally, after a quick eternity, the rebound kicks in, and your innards might still be trailing some 30 metres behind you but you know it's not long now - and I looked out over Queenstown as I flew up a hundred feet with my arms spread out to catch all of the life buzzing in every cell of my body, and discovered a double rainbow blessing the town, lake and mountains - and a free sideportion of shooting stars in front of my eyes, to boot.
Queenstown is pretty good. Yeah, it's tourist hellhole: everyone who goes to New Zealand goes there - sometimes, it seems, all simultanaeously. But the town itself is pretty, in a spectacularly beautiful setting, with a lakeside beach and giant park hard by the centre. Lots of traveller pubs, and happy hour offers going through from 5 to 12 if you know how to move around them; I was fairly flutered by the time I got to the last pub/club which had a fatal attraction: a surfing machine. Mercifully padded with a mass of inflatable plastic, like a bouncy castle, and boy did we bounce as we flew off the pitching board in all directions. There was one guy there who was natural at it: no matter how fast it pitched, he could stay on, change position, even jump - he told me he'd never even surfed before, so guess it's just an innate talent. For the rest of us, I managed to stay on for 10 seconds - and that was doing pretty good. I'd planned on skydiving there, had made an appointment for 5.30, weather was perfect all day, they reassured me at 4.30 that they were still diving - but when I went there at 5, though the weather didn't seem to have changed, apparently it was now too windy. So, in a huff, off I went to Fox Glacier. I decided against doing the iceclimbing and helihikes on offer, having walked on ice before (it gets pretty cold in London in winter...), and just went for a wander up to the front of the blue ice. Nice.
And then rapidly up the West Coast - that's the Wild West Coast to you, stranger. It rained - roads washed away, people dying in flooding - and I found my brand new tent wasn't waterproof. The coastline is much famed for its natural beauty - hills and greenstuff and beaches - but I was feeling damp and immune to any wonders of nature but the sun. Stopped in Greymouth - which sounds like a synonym for a boring person, and lived up to its name, but had the saving grace of a nice hostel (waiting for the tent and stuff to dry out) and $3 all-u-can-eat dinner of sausages and salad. Paused in Punakaiki or Pancake Rocks, so called because the rocks look like stacked pancakes, but I'm not sure what the Maori version means, presumably something else since pancakes aren't really a Maori thing. Maori food seems to consist of hangi, where you steam things in the ground in volcanic areas, so they taste of sulphur - an acquired taste, but according to one lady I met, the first time she had normal steamed lamb, she cried and demanded 'normal' sulphur steamed meat. Anyway. And on to Westport, a place of extremely discreet charms (they sure as hell eluded me, anyway).
Every Kiwi does trekking, and I'd bought a tent and - now it had dried out - knew how to use it. So ho for the Abel Tasman, most popular track in the galaxy or therabouts. Started walking. One hour later, the thunderstorm broke. Onwards seemed like a good idea, so that's where I went, thanking the gods that I'd just bought a bright yellow ponch and there was no-one around to see me. The rain politely paused when I got to the campsite, and I tied the poncho over the tent in an attempt to keep the rest of the night's rain out. Anyway, waking up the next morning with my feet in a puddle - again - wasn't so bad, for outside! the sun shone! the sky was blue, ditto the sea, opposite my mood, and walking for 30 km with 15 kg on my back seemed like a dashed good idea, oddly enough. So it was all very picturesque, but when I got to the 2/3 point of the track, the remainder was still blocked from floods, so I had to about-face and retreat. Ho hum. It's funny how those short downhills turn into massively long uphills, isn't it?
And over to Picton, and across the channel to the North Island. Wellington was pretty humdrum, and still wet, so I got a lift with some girls in the hostel up to Napier, where life transmogrified into clear skies and pure Art Deco lines: beautiful place. I felt oddly as if I was in a Burt Baccarach album (wrong era, right feeling). And got another lift from other hostel people to Lake Taupo, where I did a SKY DIVE!!! - not something to be written in small letters, or unaccompanied by exclamation marks. Man, it was good. 4 kilometers up - or 12000 feet for them as don't like foreign rulers - and 45 seconds of freefall. You don't have a choice: your tandem instructor is strapped tight to your back and he pushes you into place and out the door almost before you've had time to boggle at how bloody far away the ground is. And then it's just falling, 200 kilometers an hour, wind roaring straight up through your body, half supporting and half sieving; ground zooming in; I screamed my head off and couldn't even hear myself, I'd left my voice behind so quickly.. finally, the chute is out, a sickening lurch and then - peace: gently floating towards the ground, stillness, just gliding through the zephyrs as easy as a gull. Bliss. And time to reflect, and look around: glacial blue lake, plains, mountains, all small and remote. Bliss.
And on to Rotorua next - it stinks. Sulphur fumes everywhere. They say you get used to it after a few hours: they lie. Wandered around one of the many strange mineral areas - rocks covered in yellow crystals of sulphur, wide plains of mica, streaks of every colour of the rainbow, sinister gloopily burping mud. It also has the highest commercially sledged waterfall in the world - 7 meters! I decided to do the combo, along the grade 5 rapids - rafting in the morning, sledging in the afternoon. Rafting was good - a big inflatable raft, 8 of us in it, screamed directions in our ear - forward! back up! NOOOOOW!!!!!!!!! - and at the bottom of falls, turn around and stick the nose back into the frothing base and soak the people up front (me). But sledging was far more fun: small plastic rigid floating devices a few feet long - big enough so you can haul yourself forward and get yr tender bits out of the way of the rocks below - most of the time at least. And going down the river thus means you have to look out for yourself, swim like bedamned to hit the angles they tell you, or else end up in a recirc or boil or some such nasty things. At the bottom of each waterfall (there were 3), you need a death grip on the sidebars to stop the sledge from being torn away from you, and you MUST dive into the bottom vertically - hit it flat and you'll end up in the recirculation, from which there is no escape. The guides were good - there were 3 of them to 6 of us, pausing every few minutes in the slow moving sides to tell us where to go next, and more importantly, where not to go, and ready to swim after you if you went where you shouldn't - but that didn't make it much easier 10 feet from the waterfall top, clinging onto the rock and waiting for your turn to try and make it to the right point on the other side so you could get through the drop okay. Maybe they exaggerated the dangers: I wasn't testing.
And up to Auckland for a very boozy night with my former workmate from London, Gavin. Left some stuff in his place, and move up to the Northlands: not a place of spectacular beauty - just a long 90 mile beach (actually 64 miles, but it took 3 days of oxcarts which were reckoned to do 30 miles a day so they assumed 90 miles. They forgot about the hours of delay due to tides...), sand and dunes and wild wind. I liked it. Did a tour of the beach - I think it's my first organised bus tour since Vietnam: I really overdosed on them there - it was okay: tobogganed down the dunes a few hundred feet high (down was grand, it was the up bit that was a problem. Soft sands are bloody awful to walk in..) and dutifully admired the scenery at all the relevant points. Nice, but I really preferred going for 3 - 4 hour long walks along the beach by myself, which is what I did every night: a good place if you feel like a bit of solitude and wilderness, without feeling you're following the guidebook. No pub in the place, even. I also did some blokarting there - otherwise known as landsailing, blokarts is the brand name for some small light zippy models which are really excellent fun, I loved the sport. I'd always thought nothing could beat sailing and windsurfing for that style of buzz - but blokarts are great; they go at up to 90 kph (well, when used by pros anyway), which feels really wicked when your ass is only a few inches off the ground; rapid response to everything you do, and you don't get wet or swallow salt when you capsize (though I did get an admiring round of applause from the entire beach when I did a high speed tilt a bit too far and ended up in a mess - you only bark your shins though, being strapped in.)
And back via Auckland for another boozy night (bless Gavin, who always had to work the next day) and then on to Coromandel peninsula. Very pictursquee place; based myself in Whatianga, planning to do some kayaking but conditions did not permit so wandered down to the famous Hot Water Beach, where you have 2 hot springs and one cold flowing under the sands; you dig a hole and let the waters fill it, digging deeper on whichever side you want for more or less heat. Pleasant enough, and surreal to see all the middle aged / elderly people earnestly digging holes in the sand with little spades and sitting in sandy puddles.
And that's pretty much it, really. Tomorrow - no, tonight, in 4 hours - I fly to Oz again, to Cairns. End of New Zealand for now, but think I'll be back.