The South Island, In Good Company

After much anticipation we finally made it across the Cook Straight to get a taste of the South Island. We had the good fortune of traveling with Sarah and Danny, some good friends who are much loved by both of our kids. While Amy and I packed the bags, Sarah and Danny cooked up a fantastic meal with some native mussels and some steak from our man the butcher.

We started our journey the next day on the Interislander ferry. This is a memorable way to get from one island to the other as the views of the Queen Charlotte Sound (on the South Island) are amazing. A cargo truck managed to delay our departure by catching on fire -before it boarded the ferry, fortunately- but the Kiwis handled it with their usual aplomb and off we went.


Our initial plan was to spend the first day driving to the sunny, bohemian town of Nelson. We ran into our second and more substantive delay, though, when a massive landslide closed the motorway. Ergo, a surprisingly pleasant detour took us through beautiful wine country and left us in Havelock, the "green-shelled mussel capital of the world." There isn't much going on in Havelock aside from mussels, but everyone agreed that life's really more about the journey anyway so we drank some beer and ate some mussels and took off the next morning for Nelson.


Above: I've had worse detours.

Nelson was a really neat town. It's about as laid back a place as you'll find in Western civilization; one place we considered staying is actually "clothing optional" during certain parts of the year (sorry, the fun doesn't start until February and we didn't stay there anyway). The town is full of artists, galleries, and other relaxed folk and it boasts the best weather in NZ.

The next day we finally made our way to Abel Tasman national park. Tasman was a Dutch explorer who was the first European to visit the area which still bears his name. His employer, the Dutch East India Company (remember that one from your history class?) wasn't too thrilled with his discoveries but they should have taken a longer view of things because the area now attracts hordes of travelers.

People flock here with good reason: the park is like something plucked out of a daydream. There are loads of bays and coves where rocky cliffs open up onto sandy beaches. One of New Zealand's great walks meanders through the park; sections of rainforest replete with waterfalls alternate with stunning views of the shoreline below. If I'm sounding like a travel brochure just skip to the pics and you'll understand. You can't drive to most locations in the park but water taxis make traveling around fairly easy.


After pondering the pile of gear needed to camp with the kids we decided to cheat and had our bags dropped off at the campsite by a water taxi. The hiking was still nothing to scoff at as the children are getting pretty heavy and we had seven hours of solid hiking spread out over the two days we were there. All of our efforts paid off, though, as we found ourselves camping here with practically no one else around:


Above: if you click on the pic you can make out Amy and Sarah walking with the kids. Below: more frolicking on the beach.






After hiking another beautiful section of the track the following morning, we sadly had to part ways with the Van Ormans. They camped again that night in the park and are currently somewhere on the South Island enjoying themselves immensely. It was really great to get to spend some time with good friends in such an amazing place.




On the trip home we discovered that Amelia's previous bout of carsickness wasn't a fluke, but at least we had views like this whenever we stopped for a break:



Next up: Tahiti and Bora Bora with the Lovelaces, followed by another trip to the South Island to tap into the local trout fishing. I felt a pang of guilt while typing that, but it vanished when I thought about what the exchange rate has done to my salary.

A Rough Trip and A Good Yarn

Setting: a sports bar in downtown Welly. Kraemer and I are out with some of the guys from work, grabing a beer and watching the Wellington Lions (local rugby team) win their way into the national championship match. We're talking about which players we have man-crushes on ("Oooh, I love that dude. He really hits hard."). My buddy Suren is with us. He's a 4th generation South African of Indian descent and therefore is full of great tales about growing up in apartheid S. Africa with brown skin. He and Strewn (Kiwi guy) start swapping tales about their favorite rugby players of all time when Suren says, "Hey, remember Buck Shelford? He was a right tough bastard, eh?"

Strewn: "Oh yeah, I remember that time he got his testicle rucked out-"

Full Stop.

Kraemer and I make that face that all guys make when they hear something like this, and I ask him to repeat what he just said. Strewn says, "Oh yeah, he was really something, eh, one time he got his testicle ripped out in a ruck. He got the team doc to put it back and stitch up his scrotum and then he played the second half of the match."

I had a hard time believing this so I looked it up. It's true. Strewn left out the fact that old Buck apparently lost a couple of teeth in addition to part of his reproductive gear, but he did manage to keep playing. Yikes.

On to a less painful matter: our family trip from hell.

That's not a skirt.

Remember that family trip from your childhood that went completely awry? For me it was a road trip to Hana (a city in Hawaii). Ask anyone in my family about it and they'll fill you in. Anyway, I was on the other end of one of these about two weeks ago. It seemed simple on paper; one of the best rock climbing spots in NZ is just across Wellington harbor and it's located on a beach. I figured that we could all cram into the car, drive about 40 minutes, hike another 15 along the beach (crossing a small stream), and the kids could play in the sand while Kraemer and I climbed.

I'll sum it up from there as quickly as possible (deep breath): Amelia and Amy got carsick and Amelia puked about 2 minutes before we reached the parking lot and then the stream turned out to be about 8 feet deep where we wanted to cross and I got soaked looking for a better spot to cross and then Amelia peed in her pants and had to wear my boxer shorts (the only thing still dry) and Quinn ate a lot of sand and we never made it to the rocks and then Quinn got carsick and puked on the way home and by then I'd run out of things with which to clean up puke because everything was already covered in puke or pee.

The good news is that everyone, including the kids, maintained a Pollyana-grade cheery attitude throughout the whole ordeal and it really turned into something quite funny.

Quinn finally stopped crapping gravel about a week later, and Amelia seems to have a rather rosy recollection of the trip. Someone at school asked her what she had been up to over the weekend. "I went to the beach," she beamed, "and I got to throw up."

Editor's note: The frequency of blog postings shows no signs of increasing any time soon, unfortunately; our friends Sarah and Danny have arrived and we're heading to the South Island this weekend to tramp through Abel Tasman park. I've been hoarding vacation time and I'm taking the whole month of January off, so that adds up to 40+ days of vacation between now and February. I'll post when I can!

I Come Bearing Grits

You may have noticed that I haven't posted much lately. As it happens, the temperature outside and the amount of time I spend blogging are inversely proportional. Go figure.

We haven't taken any significant trips in the last few weeks, but one night we did take Amelia out on a special after-bedtime trip to the botanical garden to check out some glow worms. These are really neat critters which glow a beautiful blue-green color in order to attract other insects before trapping them in sticky, dangling threads:


(picture courtesy of someone affiliated with the Australian Government)

The next major development was the arrival of my brother Kraemer. He landed a few days ago and brought four pounds of grits with him. This is important because Kiwis no hablan los grits and that means that Amelia's Favorite Breakfast Food of All Time has been conspicuously absent for a while now. Here's Kraemer allowing Quinn to check out his computer:


Of course, the weather turned absolutely beautiful the day Kraemer arrived and it hasn't changed since. I have been hoarding vacation time and we're starting to make a list of fun things to do over the next several months; spots to surf, places to hike, etc. Good times ahead.

I can't think of a segue for this, so here's a pic of the kids walking some stuffed animals:

Last, but certainly not least, Quinn turned one today. Amelia helped Amy bake a cake and Quinn generally seemed to enjoy himself. He's starting to make attempts to communicate; his cutest stunt is to say "Hi Hi" whenever Amy answers the phone.

Kaitoke

We hopped in the car last Sunday and headed about 40 minutes north of Wellington to visit Kaitoke national park. Kaitoke is widely advertised as being the setting for Rivendell, the city of the elves in The Lord of the Rings. I promise we planned to visit the park before I knew this (aside: the LOTR tourism is embarrasingly huge here. I liked the movies, too, but you wouldn't believe the people who flock here just to check out where the movie was filmed). This area is also where Wellington gets its drinking water, which explains why it tastes so good.

The park had a lot of older trees, some dating back a thousand years or so to the time when moa roamed the land. This leads me to present your bit of NZ paleontology for the day: NZ originally separated from Gondwana about 85 million years ago and subsequently developed a completely unique set of flora and fauna which resemble that of Gondwana more closely than anywhere else on earth. That's why the plants and trees here look like drawings from dinosaur books (viz. tree ferns). There were no mammals; large, flightless birds took over the role of major land predators. When humans arrived about a thousand years back, they found this quite amusing. They clubbed the moa to death and ate them for dinner and now there are only a few species of flightless birds here which you can find in a few remote and heavily protected locations.

Here's Amy hanging out in front of one of a very old tree with a very long name:


The forests here are dark, cool, and completely covered in moss and lichen. When you combine this with the prehistoric flora, it makes for a very unique hike.

Amelia has been worrying about me lately because I apparently get too close to the edge of cliffs for her liking. Here we are next to a small dropoff, as she keeps a close eye on the situation.


After the main hike, we walked the 10 minutes from the parking lot to the site where Rivendell was set. It was nice, but a bit underwhelming given the surrounding scenery.


I'll leave you with a picture of Quinn, who thinks it quite mundane to take pictures with a closed mouth:

We're not gonna take it...

I've had the chance to listen to some Kiwi radio by now and I've found it to be an interesting smorgasbord of sound. The 80's evidently made their mark here in NZ because I've been treated to more than my fair share of old school rock and I've learned something about myself in the process. For example: I hereby confess that I like many of Bon Jovi's songs. There, I said it. When they were first popular, I was rocking to Guns N' Roses, dude, and I wouldn't have admitted that I liked this guy for a million bucks.

Other blasts from the past: remember the theme song to "The Greatest American Hero?" Heard that bad boy on the radio the other day. Twisted Sister is still as catchy as it was back in '84, and Phil Collins holds his own but only in small doses.

Re: modern music; they really like Coldplay. As in really, really like it. Hit the "scan" button on the radio and you'll probably just switch from one Coldplay song to another. This is a very effective form of torture and I often prefer to simply drive in silence rather than being Colplayed into oblivion.

On a very positive note (for me, anyway), they are also infatuated with The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica. Incidentally, all of the above music can be found on the same radio station.

Editor's note: please pardon the dearth of postings. We haven't been up to much lately. Should the weather hold, we'll spend a day this weekend hiking in the spot where Rivendell (from The Lord of the Rings) was set.

Eau de Zoo

It turns out that people weren't lying when they told us that the weather was unusually nasty when we first arrived. It's clearly improved in the last few weeks and while it's not rare to get clouds and drizzle, we're no longer surprised by nice weather. We had another beautiful weekend, so we headed to the Wellington zoo. The zoo wasn't huge but it was well done and quite worth the trip.

The highlight of the day was an up-close encounter with the giraffes. These are one of Amelia's favorite animals and we both got to feed them. Amelia loved this but did not appreciate the smell, as you can see (It's not immediately obvious, but there's a giraffe behind the fence in the following pic.)


Other highlights included spotting a kiwi (bigger than expected, with a body the size of a volleyball) as well as seeing a few animals we'd never heard of such as a sun bear. Quinn had a particular affinity for the zebra, as demonstrated below:

Oh, and it's official, if unrelated to the zoo trip: the boy is walking now. It took him about a week to figure out and he can now make it across the room unassisted. His favorite hobby has become pushing things across the floor, so it's easier to keep him occupied. Pics to follow at some point.

All Blacks v Wallabies: a Haiku

Collisions and pain
Cleats dig into my kidneys
Victory is ours!


Well, the Boys in Black pulled off a big one the other night. With their 28-24 win over Australia's national team (the Wallabies), the All Blacks managed to win both the Tri-Nations and Bledisloe cups. The Tri-Nations is a yearly competition between South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Since these countries are traditional rugby powerhouses, the Tri-Nations is a big deal.

The Bledisloe is a bragging-rights trophy (a familiar concept to college football fans: think Paul Bunyan's Axe, the Golden Boot, etc) which changes hands between Australia and NZ on those occasions when the Aussies actually manage to beat NZ more than once in a year.

The match itself was phenomenal and completely lived up to its billing as the biggest match of the season. The Aussies dominated us during the first half, scoring tries just before and just after halftime to take a 17-7 lead. After that, the fantastically aggressive Kiwis poured on 21 unanswered points for a thrilling come-from-behind victory. It wasn't a match for the squeamish; more than one guy ended up looking like our man Rodney So'Oialo (above).

Unfortunately, rugby season is drawing to a close. I'm hoping to catch a live match when the local team (the Wellington Lions) plays here in a few weeks. Amy is quite distraught that rugby will be over soon, but I've consoled her by pointing out that college football is just getting started.

In an unexpected but welcome turn of events, I've discovered that ESPN actually broadcasts great college football games overseas (unlike back home, where the major networks get the good stuff). Next weekend's game: LSU v Auburn. I'm actually going to get the Tiger game live, even if that means I'm watching it on Sunday.

AB captain Robby Deans, left, and Rodney So'Oialo. Deans is half Jedi and half Pit Bull.

Photos from: www.rugbyheaven.co.nz