Life Between Naps

seriously people, although it was really funny, and unopened, that is just gross! but let me tell you, these free gear things are awesome. i no longer buy eggs or milk, there always seems to be some in the free food box. among the more interesting items i have found have been pork and mushroom balls, full cans of stove fuel, and a 6-pack of beer. although i am pretty sure i just stole 6 beers because seriously, who leaves 6 premium beers behind?

apparently, jumping off a gondola and falling 440 feet takes 8 full seconds. press play, ok?

i talked to the canadiens i met on the milford today. they told me that the texans went bungee jumping; apparently the people who hook the bungee up to your ankles switched up vincent’s number in line, #55, with his weight, 75kg. he was at the ledge about to jump when the guy realized there was no way he only weighed 55kg and pulled him back. apparently they rig the cord depending on the persons weight so that each person falls the advertised height. the guy told him he almost became a pancake…

so i don’t know if i have told you people this, but ever since i arrived in new zealand i have been wearing the same 3 t-shirts, 1 pair of convertible synthetic short/pants, and 1 pair of booty shorts. it really hasn’t been a problem since i have been moving around so much and not going out, but after 2 months, i really was getting tired of wearing the the stuff that i hike in to church. so i finally broke down and bought some jeans and a dress shirt, all for only $16 at the salvation army woot! oh god it is so nice to wear cotton pants after being in synthetic this whole time. anyways my new sense of fashion obviously paid off because i met james from england and his buddy g from brazil. they informed me that they would be jumping the nevis bungee the next morning, and that it was the tallest jump in the world. i didn’t need much more information than that and quickly signed up for the $240 potentially assisted suicide.

the ride up to the top of the canyon was pretty funny, with the driver playing such hits on his ipod as “jump” and “vertigo”. the actual jump was probably the most intense thing i have ever done, even more so than skydiving. for one, you have to actually jump yourself, rather than have some guy strapped onto you push you out the plane. the height is also another nasty factor, we were in a 15′x15′ cube, attached to a few cables, swaying in the wind 500′ or so above a foot of water… and that was the crazy thing, when you are looking out of an airplane it is not as scary as looking off of the relatively much shorter height for some reason. anyways, the video pretty much tells the rest of the story, basically the guy says 1..2..3..jump! i did a half-assed fall/slip/dive off the platform, and let out one long f bomb that lasted about 30 seconds. money well spent!

apparently if you are a girl from europe you must have your eyebrow pierced, have your hair dyed blonde, and have a huge collection of worldly looking scarves to protect you from the driving sand and intense heat of barren queenstown. if you are a guy you simply replace the scarf with dreadlocks or capris, but not both(this is very important!) of course, a good pair of crocs are always handy in a knife fight around here. eww.

queenstown is still a really nice place, and in addition to frisbee golf, i saw pirates lawn bowling the other day! there have been three things that have been annoying me lately though. the first is book prices, though this isn’t unique to queenstown, i feel like complaining about it here. a normal paperback book cost $20-$25 in this godless country. yes, you read that correctly, luckily most of the hostels have book exchange programs letting me check out stuff i would have never come across otherwise like the most excellent east, west(check out the short story ‘at the auction of the ruby slippers’). my other gripes are a bit intertwined, this is a tourist town in the purest sense. the main street is nothing but bungee jumping/skydiving/rafting/whateverextremesportyouwant store fronts trying to push their stuff to the hordes of tourist clambering off the buses everyday…many of whom are here for no more than a day or two to bungee or sky dive and will then leave without ever looking past the starbucks to the impressive southern divide and all of it’s awesome walks within an hours drive. all of the tourist make for a really expensive place to use as a temporary home in between tramps, the best damn ice cream in the world was $4 a cone when i arrived 2 weeks ago, it is now $5, due to summer tourist pricing. yikes.

day 1: i can hear music playing somewhere, strange since we are 4 or 5 hours from an electrical outlet. when i round the corner is see the hut warden cleaning a toilet while listening to ‘purple rain’ on his ipod hooked up to some speakers. awesome.

so i did a new walk, the routeburn through to the caples valley, then back to queenstown via ferry. thanksgiving happened to fall on the second day of the trip, and as you can see, i did pretty well for myself considering i had one pot to cook with! the 4 or 5 other americans in the hut all seemed pretty jealous when i broke out the big guns on turkey day. a half pound of turkey breast, full plate of mashed potatoes and gravy, two biscuits, carrot cake, and my flask of maker’s mark. luckily for me i got two thanksgivings this year, the first being right before i left, and BEHOLD, the awesome might of the carne asada burrito!! oh man, what a journey, between the $4.50 for a stalk of cilantro, and the $45 spent on everything else this was the most expensive 4 burritos i have ever made. but oh were they worth it, basically one glass of horchata short of a fiesta. easily the best food i have had since korea, and the most homely thing i have experienced since the banana pancakes dad made me the day i left!

the track itself was super nice, and although i sat in queenstown for a few days for rain to pass(which of course never came), it was well worth the wait. from the crossing at harris saddle you could see all the way down the hollyford valley to martin’s bay and the tasman sea. pretty damn beautiful and really neat to see a previous walk from a different perspective, about a 3,000′ difference in elevation. the huts were a different story, it was basically what i thought the milford was going to be like… 49 other people in a hut and a million people walking both ways, there was even a construction crew at the first hut, power tools and all. luckily it was only two days until we got off the great walk and onto the basically empty caples track. with it came a huge change in scenery, in one day we went from an alpine crossing and beech forest to valley farmland and a riverside track(see what i did there with words!!??). a really pleasant change even thought the river, considered to be one of the best in NZ, was fly fishing only.

day 2: met some random girl, we asked each other the normal, polite traveler questions: where are you from, where have you been, where are you going, blahblahblah? she mentioned some place to the east and told me I MUST go swim with the dolphins as it was the experience of a lifetime. dolphins!? i have seen penguins jumping from rock to rock lady! i quietly thought to myself if i was in new zealand or some sort of bizzaro sea world.

along the way i met some pretty awesome people. first were the obligatory kiwis, who had been to yosemite they told me. but their trip was a different one. it was a classical affirmation of everything right and true and decent… oh wait, wrong story. they were nuts, and apparently took a st bernard into the park, disguised him with sunglasses and a sun hat to get through the gates then recounted their evening of trying to keep him quiet while the bear outside ravaged their campsite. haha. there were the aussies, a group of 6 women getting away from their husbands. they were pretty awesome because not only did they offer me sunblock(thanks mom, now they are all doing it!), but they also made fresh bread every night. seriously, they brought dough and yeast, let it rise, then baked freakin’ bread on a backpacking stove, brilliant. finally, there was the lake mackenzie hut warden, Clive. he gets one of my rare, ‘you are so awesome i am going to capitalize your name’ awards because, well, he is awesome. you see, some of these huts have wardens that stay to make sure everything is in good shape and check that everyone is paying their fees. they usually give a very boring speech at night concerning fire safety and housekeeping procedures.

Clive wasn’t having any of that nonsense. his 30 minute long speech, which i have aptly named ‘tiger country’, after he explained to us that, ‘you gotta be careful, it’s tiger country out there, well not really, but there might be a moose’, was some of the funniest stuff i have ever heard. he went on to tell us to keep the doors closed at night because, “well about a month ago we had a large woman staying with us, and by large i mean to say that i think she was wearing a car cover for a parka. well, this woman got up in the middle of the night to use the toilet(we do let them do that out here), on her way out she left the door open. well on the way back to her bunk she closed the door, to keep the possums out of course, and made her way to her bed. when she got to bed she was not alone, a big gray possum had snuck into her bed, by christ they’re cheeky! well she started hootin’ and hollerin’ and ran to my bunk and started knocking on my door. i remember it very clearly because when i went to bed the moon was out, and when i opened the door it had disappeared like a lunar eclipse, then i noticed she was standing there…” oh god, all that to tell us to keep the door closed, awesome.

day 4: the lonely planet tramping guide(i have come to realize the horrible irony of the book title) says to be careful on the caples because there are cows. ze germans in the hut start to theorize why and ultimately come to the conclusion that if the cows are not milked they instinctively seek out humans to get the job done. if there are enough of them present, you could get trampled.

my last night on the track was spent with 3 germans and an austrian, who was elated to hear that i was from california because of our supreme governator overlord. he was instantly labeled as the ‘talkatronic-3000′ for his incessant rambling about absolutely nothing with exactly enough time in between thoughts for a quick breath, quickly cutting off any attempt at a two-way conversation. i quickly busied myself reading a magazine and drinking a maker’s mark/milo/melted chocolate drink of awesomeness, learning that wrigley requires 53 square miles of farmland to grow the mint it uses for chewing gum. much more amazing then whatever ‘the radio you can’t turn off’ was saying.

a little camera haiku i wrote after trying unsuccessfully to get a pretty picture in low light:

scenic lake, prime shot

shutter snaps, foreground washed out

damn you iso

that was about it for that trip. i found out that the doc lost my intentions form, so if i had gotten lost nobody would have known except people in california who would think i od’ed on ice cream haha. friday i leave with a friend i met for the rees-dart track, hopefully the weather holds up so we can see the glacier, they have said it will rain for the last 6 days and it has been pretty nice every day, the weathermen are forecasting rain the next 4, so who knows. the weather here is so weird.

hope everyone had a happy turkey day!