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All,

Here are the links to our two-part first installment, which also should be linked at the Friends of the Earth website by now. It’s up on Gather.com.

Part 1:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976821714

Part 2:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976821718

We just got off the Milford Track, “the best walk in the  world,” and were scheduled to hike the nearby Routeburn Track but it’s closed for avalanche danger. So we’re headed south the Catlin Mountains instead. More later.

Moving south along the Wild Coast, we saw the famous Pancake Rocks of Punakaiki, a curious limestone formation, and moved on toward Fiordland National Park for our scheduled walks in Milford Sound and Routeburn.

The Wild Coast must have been named for the size and ferocity of its waves. All up and down the coast seems like a surfer’s paradise, if not for the deadly rocks and breakers that litter the water to the horizon. (Who knows, maybe it is anyway. But we’re here in the off-season.) Waves coming in rows like battalions six or seven deep, six, seven, eight feet high, crashing into the rocky shore, sometimes right along the road, so that it seems stormy and dangerous on even the most peaceful days. It’s spring here, yes, but the beaches still seem strangely deserted.

The first installment of our Positive Vision Project for Friends of the Earth. … We’re working out the kinks with Gather.com and the FoE people and should be able to link it to here within the next few days.

CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK

“Go away, possum!” Lisa clapped her hands emphatically. “Go ‘way!”

It was late – I don’t know how late. The birds were silent. We were alone in the campground. We’d gone to sleep soon after dusk, crawling, sorely, into our one-and-a-half-man tent following a long day’s hike. After the customary tossing, turning and grumbling, we’d fallen into the usual uneasy slumber.

It was soon disturbed. In the vestibule outside Lisa’s door, where we’d stashed our food and garbage, there came a rustling – at first tentative, then more deliberate. It woke Lisa. She waited for the sound to repeat. It might have been the wind. It repeated. It wasn’t the wind. She clapped her hands as she would when addressing a dog and shouted:

“Go ‘way, possum!”

Her shout had one immediate effect: it cleared the drowse from my head instantly. It did not, however, disturb in the slightest the snooping of our marsupial marauder.

Then, on my side of the tent (where there was no food) came a brushing sound, much like a hairy rodent moving past the rain-fly. Very much like it. And another. And, at our feet, another.

We were surrounded.

It was a Blair Witch moment. All our food was imperiled. We were alone, the sole target of a hungry possum army. We had to save the victuals. (All that oatmeal, that precious, precious oatmeal … ) And stop our garbage from being spread all over the campground. But that meant leaving the safety of the tent.

Before the full weight of our situation had sunk in, Lisa had unzipped her mummy bag, unzipped her door and pulled the food inside. But the garbage had been seized.

I barely had a chance to register what was happening and she was gone. Then I heard the screams.

“What is it?”

No answer.

“Are you all right?”

Another scream. Or rather, a startledcry. “Oh!”

Lisa had gathered up our garbage, which was strewn about the camp, bits of banana peel, a salmon tin, crumpled noodle packages and granola bar wrappers. She scared the chief offender up a tree. Then she turned around.

Beady red eyes stared at her out of the darkness. Two, four, six, eight of them, shining menacingly in the dim light of her headlamp. Suddenly one of the fuzzy reprobates charged. Really it was just going for a stray wrapper, but it looked like a charge. And Lisa yelped.

Before I could get out of my sleeping bag she was back in the tent, panting, her face pale in the faint moonlight. “They’re everywhere,” she confirmed. “Possums everywhere. Big as cats.”

“If they try to take the tent, we’re doomed,” I said, marshaling my thoughts for a plan of action. None emerged. (I have no head for strategy.) All we could do was wait out the night, hoping these nocturnal nasties weren’t advanced enough to attack en masse.

It was the least restful night of our hike, possibly of our trip so far. A few hours before dawn we lapsed into sleep. By 7:30 we had to be up to prepare breakfast, pack up and hit the trail: We had to reach our first tidal crossing by low tide, at 9 a.m.

On our way out of the Bark Bay camp we ran into Lew one last time. I mentioned our experience of the night before, expecting some sort of surprise, as there were no signs warning campers to protect their food from four-legged bandits.

“Oh sure,” Lew said matter-of-factly. “Possums. You would see lots of them hereabouts. Lots of possum trouble around here.” He gave us a big toothy smile to send us on our way.

***

The rest of our hike was blessed by unseasonably warm weather, without a drop of rain. Not until we were in the process of boarding the water taxi that took us back to Melba at the trailhead in Marahau did we see any kind of inclemency, any high winds, any dark clouds. It was a perfect hike.

We were lucky in more than just the weather. Our third night, at the campground in Awaroa, was also spent in uninterrupted privacy – besides the nonstop pelt of sandflies on our tent roof, a sound like sprinkling rain. We had no further possum trouble after our Bark Bay night of terror.

Our last tidal crossing, at the often-tricky Awaroa Inlet, went flawlessly. We tramped over muddy forest tracks and serene beaches, beaches without footprints beside sun-smeared bays, twinkling with whitecaps, sprays of mist hovering across the water’s surface. (Greene, describing Africa: “The long fingers of the palm leaves quite still which in the smallest suspicion of a breeze begin to play like fingers on a piano.” Here it was the same, until the last day, when the winds picked up, threatening gale.) Then, suddenly, we were done. Totaranui loomed up abruptly, just as we got into the Day Four rhythm.

A day after we left the track the big storm came down off the highlands and lashed the coast with whipping curtains of rain.

So ended the first of our three Great Walks. Up next, after some 10 days moving south along the west coast of the South Island: the Milford and Routeburn tracks, back-to-back. Eight days of cold, probably wet, wilderness, some of the best in the world. It will be early in the season. We can hardly expect the kind of good fortune we had on Abel Tasman.

Abel Tasman was a Dutchman, an explorer and the first white man to see New Zealand. Zeeland is one of the old names for Holland. Abel Tasman never set foot on the soil here. His ship, anchored off the northern coast of the South Island, was approached by curious Maori in December of 1642, and after some predictable miscommunication and misunderstanding, there was even more predictable bloodshed. Abel Tasman sailed away never to return.

Tasman also discovered Fiji. He didn’t get off the ship there, either.

The part of New Zealand that Tasman saw but didn’t touch is where we recently spent four days. It’s hard to imagine seeing this coastline and not feeling compelled to reach it. These days it’s one of the most popular hikes in the country, a “Great Walk” that stretches some 51 kilometers northward from Maranau to Wainui Bay. While North Korea was being rebuked by the world and the Tigers were shelling Oakland to move closer to their first World Series in 22 years, we threw 35 pounds of camping gear and food on our backs and headed for the woods. It was the right decision.

Abel Tasman National Park comprises 15,000 hectares (one hectare = 2.47 acres) of second-growth forest that has been a protected area since 1942, the 300th anniversary of Tasman’s abbreviated visit. Before that it was the province of the timber conglomerate. Had it not been for the work of one woman, Perrine Moncrieff, the park may never have been established, and one of New Zealand’s – and the world’s – best places would likely have become just another denuded monument to industry rapine.

Every step we took in the park made us gladder for Moncrieff’s efforts. We are not alone in our views. It’s obvious, when you first step foot on the track here, that this is a well-visited place – the country’s most-visited park, according to the literature. The path is smooth (we hiked ¾ of it in sandals), the signage ample, and even at the end of the supposedly slow season (mid-October) we saw plenty of visitors. The campgrounds are staffed and well-groomed –grass cut, leaves raked, no sign of garbage. The toilets even have little magnetic counters on the doors to determine when they’ve serviced enough trampers and need to be refurbished.

All very British, really. Efficient. Orderly.

Abel Tasman did not entirely escape what’s known as “the milling era.” Many acres were lost: most of the park is second-growth, with very few large, old trees remaining: kiekie, supplejack, black and hard beech predominate, and some old stands of kanuka and manuka remain. (I don’t know these trees by sight, aside from the beech and kiekie, but the guidebook is very detailed. Admit it, for a second there you were impressed.) I can say firsthand that the terrain is unpredictable, ranging from subtropical to desertine. Long precipitous ravines of vine-wrapped forest – dark, wet and cool – give way starkly to coarse scrub and an almost western-U.S. dryness: hot, sandy, knuckles of thorny root reaching up from the loamy soil: a profusion of sunlight baking fields of thorny brush. Great outcroppings of lichen-covered granite jut into the trail, which winds in places like a terrace around mountainous humps, before leading steeply down the rolling rock to secluded beaches.

The fauna is equally diverse: The birdcalls were beyond us but on our own we were able to identify wood pigeons, kingfishers and quail, of course tui (very common: resembles a magpie but trills sweetly), and what I’m pretty sure was a New Zealand falcon. As well as gannets and seagulls on the beaches. And ducks, lots of ducks.

Seals – big, brown, blubbery seals – cavorted in estuaries and rivers in several areas of the park. They tell you to stay at least 20 meters from seals when they’re on land, because it’s not their natural environment and they get jittery and may charge. A charging seal is more problematic than it sounds. In water, though, they’re always playful. Lisa, standing on a suspension footbridge 30 meters overhead, recorded a group (pack? herd?) as they sunned their sleek fat bodies on the rocks. For a while they seemed to play a game with the falling leaves, batting at them with their rubbery flippers. Seal language sounds like angry coughing.

They say there are no native predators in New Zealand, but they’re wrong. They lie. I speak here of the dreaded sand fly. It didn’t take long for us to get acquainted with this evil bug.

No more ravenous creature exists under the sun or moon. On this hike we actually longed for mosquitoes (mozzies, in the local parlance), we were so weary of the ubiquitous sand fly. Mosquito bites, after all, stop itching after a few minutes. A sand fly can bite you and you’ll be scratching the same red welt two weeks later. They look harmless, about a quarter the size of a normal housefly, but sand flies attack in swarms and are undeterred by all but the most potent bug sprays. They are near impossible to kill by swatting. I got lucky and killed a few of them with point-blank shots of repellent. I enjoyed watching the little bloodsuckers writhe in agony before expiring: payment, in part, for the sins of their cousins. I wish I’d killed more, and I’m not sorry.

Ask a ranger and he or she will tell you the biggest problem in New Zealand’s parks is not sand flies, but possums. All along the track we spotted small, oblong cages marked “Predator Control” and designed to capture the possum, an invasive rodent much villainized by Kiwis. Seems they raid nests and garbage cans, and deprive birds of food. Some Aussie is said to have illegally imported them in 1837 or thereabouts, and now they number in the millions and can’t be eradicated. Even as New Zealand tries, they celebrate the effort by putting possums on postcards.

No word on the success of the effort, but none of the boxes we saw was occupied.

Later, we learned firsthand just how big the possum problem is in this country.

In the meantime, we thought we’d discovered a bigger problem. Our first night we camped at Anchorage, the park’s largest campground, and were quickly surrounded by a group of twenty kayaking Americans who stayed up late into the night, drinking and talking and seemingly encouraged in their rowdiness by their guide, a young Kiwi woman with a voice like a rooster. She spoke only in capital letters. I used to live with a guy like that, in college. Exclamation points at the end of every sentence: I WENT TO THE STORE AND BOUGHT SOME MILK! RIGHT ON!

Not good. But we weren’t going to be killjoys. It happens, we said, no big deal. Let it slide. But we were a little worried that it be the norm on this trip.

Our second night couldn’t have been more different. At a place called Bark Bay we were all alone. Campsites for eighty and we had the place to ourselves.

I asked Bark Bay’s ranger (they may call them something else here, don’t know) if it was unusual to have so much elbow room.

“Nothing’s unusual,” he said with the air of a country philosopher. His name was Lew. “It’s early in the season.”

“I only ask because last night we were at Anchorage and we had a large party of kayakers and they were up late – ”

“How late were they up?” he asked pointedly.

“Oh, only till about 10:30, 11 – ”

“And they were noisy?”

“Yes.”

“And they kept you awake?”

“For a while, yes, but – ”

“Were they on a guided tour?”

“Yes. But ” – I laughed a bit, nervously – “she, the guide that is, was the loudest one.”

He fixed me with a hard, inquisitive look. “Young woman? Short, lots of pep?”

“That’s the one.” I noticed suddenly that he was writing all this down. “But listen, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble – ”

“No trouble. But we’ve had this problem with them before. I know just who you’re talking about.” Lew finished his note-taking. “Now listen” – and he looked very seriously at me – “people come out here to get away from that sort of thing. I want you to have a nice, quiet night tonight. Sleep well. All right? Cheers.”

And off he went to make sure the bathrooms were well-stocked with toilet paper. I never got to tell him before we left in the morning that we would have slept perfectly well – if not for trouble of an altogether inhuman nature. Trouble that as much as he might like to, Lew couldn’t have done much to help us with.

Trouble the whole nation of New Zealand has struggled with.

Possum trouble.

TO BE CONTINUED

Hey everyone, just wanted to drop a note to let you know you can now view our New Zealand North Island pics by clicking here or by clicking on the photos on the right hand column in the blog. Enjoy! More photo brilliance with the South Island as our subject coming soon.

 P.S. If you haven’t already checked out our other amazing pictures, click here.

Okay, all right, here’s my first blog post. I can’t help that Marc, with all his writer’s pretensions, is an unabashed computer hog.

And despite what you all may think, I am still alive.

And I’ve been keeping notes. So I have to go back a bit and talk about Fiji. Fiji: the land where shoulders are sexy, the beer is warm and the showers are cold. But other than that, it’s paradise. Marc has already filled you in on most of our adventures so far, but here are a few tidbits I thought I’d add.

In my first few moments in Fiji I learned my first world travel lesson (especially for the visually challenged). I forgot my glasses in my checked luggage, which, to my dismay, stayed an extra day in L.A., and having taken out my contacts during the 11-hour flight to Nadi I spent my first day in Fiji blind as a bat.

After regaining our bags and my eyesight (God bless Air New Zealand), we headed off to the Yasawa Islands, a backpackers haven, and some much-needed unplugging from our hypercharged D.C. lives. At Mantaray Island Resort, many fruity drinks were imbibed and, despite my pathological fear of sharks, I had my first experience swimming in a coral reef.

After some trepidation (and figuring out how to use a snorkel and mask without inhaling massive quantities of saltwater and tiny reef fish), I set out. The water was crystal clear down to 30 feet, the coral is still healthy for the most part, and the variety of fish of every color, shape and size was truly astounding. There were stripy neon yellow and blue fish; schools of little, iridescent blue fish that suddenly turned yellow with the change of light; giant clams; a long-snouted, yard-long fish the shape of a walking stick; even a fish that flapped its fins up and down so that it looked like it was flying. And the coral! The colors ranged from red to yellow, blue and gray. Some were shaped like giant brains (remember the movie Cocoon? they were just like those … only I don’t think there were any glowing, fountain-of-youth-spewing aliens inside), and others like shelves or elk horns. We glided over it with our sea kayaks watching the fish of every sort watch us. And then there was the manta ray.

The special thing about this particular island we were staying on is that it was next to a virtual highway for that gentle giant of the deep—the manta ray. We happened to be visiting during the right season, when streams of nutrients brought in the krill, which the manta rays funnel into their mouths with flaps of skin that act like the paddles of a pinball machine. When they are sighted moving through the bay, the locals bang a large hollow tree—a kind of Fijian drum they once used to call warriors, now mostly used to call tourists to mealtime—to summon everyone to the boats.

With Pavlovian zeal, I answered the call and ran to the boat with snorkel and mask.

Several boatloads of us piled in and after taking our names (to later call roll to avoid abandoning us to our fate in the middle of the Pacific—see the movie Open Water), we were off at top speed. We jetted farther and farther and the water went from a shallow turquoise to a deep navy blue. Suddenly the pilots spotted our quarry and we were instructed to don our gear and plunge into the deep. Suddenly I was immersed in water too deep to see the bottom, surrounded by a dozen other thrashing humans turned clumsy aquatic creatures.

The adrenaline kicked in and I forgot this was my second day ever swimming in the ocean. Also I figured if there were sharks, chances are they would nab one of the other tourists first. The fatter ones were good candidates. Anyway, our guide called out “Manta ray!” and we swam in a school in that direction.

There it was, about 20 feet below us: a huge, black ray the width of a minivan, serenely coasting through the blue waters. Floating and swimming above it, I felt serene as well, despite a leaky mask and the fact that I had been deposited in the middle of the ocean with no instruction or experience. It was, truly, one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.

After what seemed like hours following our aquatic friend, one by one we flopped back into the waiting boat, glowing with glee. We were the few, the proud, the manta ray swimmers.

___________________________

Fiji gave us our fair share of culture shock. As I mentioned earlier, for women, baring of the shoulders, as well as the knees, is considered quite provocative. Hence I spent my time there – except of course the time I spent on the beach in turisto land – swaddled in my sulu (sarong) and tucked away in heavier tops. Marc also had a change of wardrobe during our visit to a local village—donning a sulu (skirt) as a sign of respect to the local chief. Tee-hee!

(No photographic evidence exists of this alleged event. – Marc)

(Drat! – Lisa)

Aside from the change in attire, Fiji was a wonderful country. The people are friendly, the environment relatively pristine, and the society in general pretty darned sustainable. Most food is locally produced and organic and delicious. More than eighty percent of the land is still owned by native clans, and most people still live traditionally. If the apocalypse hit tomorrow, this little corner of the Pacific would still be doing all right.

So maybe I’ll move here—depending on the outcome of the next election. Put that way, I’m not sure whom I want to win in November. J

So there it is – I finally posted to my own blog. At this rate, you’ll get my thoughts on New Zealand once we’ve been in Australia for three weeks.

Until then. . .Bula, vinaka vaka levu, adios and aloha!

I may be on the other side of the world, but when my baseball team is in the World Series, I know about it. We just got off the Abel Tasman track, one of New Zealand’s Great Walks, and I beelined to a computer to catch the last few pitches of Game Four. And Magglio Ordonez wins it in the bottom of the ninth with a three-run homer. GO TIGERS! And just in time for my birthday … 🙂

More on Abel Tasman later. In the meantime, I’ve got to get to a town with some proper sports bars.

^{I forgot to mention something about Stu, our English friend, in the last post. He cheats at pool. That’s right: He’s a stand-up guy in every other way that I can tell, but he’s a dirty stinking brazen pool cheat and I want him to know that I know it.}

^{Our last night in Raglan, we played a little stick in the town’s chief watering hole. Halfway through the first game, Stu starts in with these crazy European rules that he pretends to assume I know. Such as: after a scratch, the other player gets two shots. If he makes the first he still gets two more! If a player misses the ball he’s shooting at, his opponent gets two shots for that, too! But that wasn’t the worst of it: Stu also insisted, all the more forcefully in the face of my incredulity, that slop counts! In other words, as long as he hits the ball he’s aiming for, he gets another turn in the event that any one of his balls is pocketed.}

^{“That’s the way they play all over the world, my friend,” Stu insisted smarmily. “I can’t believe you’ve never heard of it.”}

^{“You swine! Can’t stand losing to an American, huh? A little national inferiority complex, eh? You think just because of that accent of yours, I’ll buy any ridiculous lie you tell.” I bought it. (There’s something about that accent.) But the joke was on him: I still won.}

Stu, you should know, America always wins. USA! USA!

***

But enough jingoism. In Rotorua I looked up international pool rules and found out Stu wasn’t cheating. I would have emailed him an apology but my eyes were constantly watering from all the sulfur in the air.

Rotorua is one of the country’s most active thermal areas and the smell of escaping gas is a continuous olfactory reminder. Hot springs and pools are everywhere. Geysers (pronounced geezers by these strange people) are very active here too. Many spas in this area are internationally renowned for their use of the waters and mud: Lisa visited perhaps the most famous, the Polynesian Spa, for a little well-deserved pampering. We also went to a Maori concert and two days later the performers went on strike. They were good; I say give them a raise.

After a couple days in beautiful Rotorua we headed south, with a brief stopover at Craters of the Moon, another quite active thermal area that doesn’t strain under the heavy visitation of so many other sites on the North Island’s chief travel corridors.

Craters of the Moon was a revelation. Everywhere, like a battlefield, tendrils of mist rose like smoke out of vents in the fern and bramble. Occasional sprigs and branches and whole plants were bleached white by the poison their roots had tapped. Craters and fumaroles hissed and spit boiling water and steam; in one noisy spot a huge rent in the hillside belched with the sound of a jet: the sound of massively displaced air: a constant sibilance. The smell of sulfur pervaded the whole rolling plain.

Always there is not enough time. We rush through the park and move on to Taupo, where we find that the hike we’d planned, through the Tongariro wilderness, is impossible without crampons and ice picks because of a recent cold snap. So we drive instead down to Napier, “the art deco capital of New Zealand,” to wrap up work on the first installment of our worldwide project (of which more later). And then on to Wellington, the capital, to polish up and email the damn thing.

***

“How easily a habit in strange surroundings takes on the character of a magical charm. Against what? Melancholy perhaps or ennui.” – Graham Greene

In our last few days on the North Island, Lisa and I compiled some observations about this trip, general thoughts on long-term travel and specific thoughts about wonderful, perplexing New Zealand.

The biggest difficulty in this kind of travel is not the regular encounters with the strange and new. After the first few days you settle into that as a kind of peculiar normalcy. To adapt you establish routines: morning coffee, followed by journal notes, a long drive, an afternoon walk or hike, wine with dinner, a long read before bed. The difficulty comes when the routine is interrupted, even by scheduled events: long-planned hikes, unexpectedly finding television coverage of the baseball playoffs, icy paths in the mountains impassable to all but the doughty hikers with crampons and picks. When routine amid the alien is defenestrated you are doubly adrift. “The wings of melancholia flick at me … ” Depression can set in. The limbs become unaccountably weary. A curious phenomenon that must be rode out.

After six weeks we’re starting to get the hang of this. But even the worst travel malaise couldn’t detract or wholly distract from our enjoyment of this beautiful, somewhat odd country. A million little details flash by every day, every hour, sometimes completely foreign, more often just different enough from our realm of experience to seize our attention, to prompt a constant, a habitual focusing and re-focusing. Like the fact that groups of teenagers here can be seen gathered on street corners, not smoking cigarettes and spray-painting walls, but feverishly playing yo-yo. This country is in the grip of a love affair with rugby that’s akin to our love of football, only more rabid – the most placid retiree is not immune to Rugby Fever – and yet less so, less serious, gentler. All the bars are (mercifully) non-smoking, and many (most) contain slot machines: but gambling isn’t considered a social disease, or maybe they just don’t worry about it as much as we do in the States. Here they call slot machines “pokies” – because you poke dollar coins into them. Clever, huh. There are no dollar bills, only dollar coins. They also have two-dollar coins. Nice and weighty. The Queen adorns both: a younger version going back to 1990: the older face, with sagging jowls, starting sometime in the late ‘90s.

Kiwis are not a litigious people. They bungy, they sky-dive, they jet-boat against the current on whitewater rapids: they risk life and limb as a matter of course and never require the signing of a waiver. They laugh at Americans’ inclination to sue. Differences are physical, too. We’ve gotten adept at spotting the locals – the Kiwi face, gait, mode of dress (chiefly black and pink in the cities) – and distinguishing them from the Brits, Aussies and other Americans. (Of the international set, Germans are the most obvious.) Kiwis always smile. I don’t think we’ve met a single grumpy one.

It may also interest you to know that the myth of the toilet water flushing in the other direction is, as far as New Zealand is concerned, just that: a myth. Toilet water doesn’t flush in the other direction: it goes straight down.

I could go on. I think I will. Despite voluminous reports to the contrary, New Zealand is a nation with a proud tradition not just of excellent wine but of fine, hoppy beer also. Speight’s is the best example, an instant favorite. Monteith’s (Black or Original) and Tui are good brews, too. Of course the wine is good, even great: we’ve experimented with several vintages from the Marlborough and Hawke’s Bay areas and found that while the chardonnays and sauvignon blancs are justly renowned, the pinots noir and cabs are surprisingly consistently strong. Which brings us, naturally, to the food. Though New Zealand’s climate is suggestive of a sunnier Ireland, the former’s cuisine thankfully bears little similarity to the latter’s. I think the soil must be better here, or at least they’ve learned the virtues of salt. In one way they’ve borrowed from Eire’s national menu, but even that the Kiwis have improved: the Big Breakfast: still two sunnyside eggs, toast, sliced tomato, huge slabs of bacon and a thick tube of dubious sausage. But here it all boasts real flavor, tasting as good as it looks, unlike its forerunner. The Irish – I love them, but they manage somehow to make bacon bland. Also Kiwis forego the baked beans, which frankly (ha) have no place at the breakfast table anyway.

To what else can I apply my culinary prejudices? NZ needs to work on its candy bars. Snickers is widely available but in some narrow, nougat-less form I find distressingly inadequate. (I was therefore drawn to, but subsequently disappointed by, the “Nougat Honey Log.” Likewise the “Peanut Slab”.) Kiwis seem determined to wrap most of their chocolate in fruit, or vice versa, or else dilute it into milky, air-filled bite-size bon bons. Awful. Same with the tendency, adopted from the Brits and Irish, to substitute black currants for grapes in jam and candy. I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but black currant sucks. Gimme grape anyday. (Grapes at the grocers’ cost NZ$8.99 per kg or more. A travesty. I suppose they’re all needed for wine production.) I will reserve some praise for New Zealand’s coffee, which is redolent of the Turkish: every café and bakery offers “short blacks” (two shots of thick, creamy espresso), “long blacks” (same, with hot water), and “flat whites” (cappuccino, basically), all of which are strong and delicious.

As you can see, we’re acclimatizing in these adverse conditions. It could be worse: they could, like Fiji, not allow beer on the ferries. Not sure how I survived that trip.

Anyway now it’s on to nature. You’re getting all this rambling longwinded-ness because it will be some time before we write again, and then mostly to describe flowers and grains of sand and that sort of hogwash.

We’re leaving the citified north to spend our time hiking in New Zealand’s remote areas, taking helicopters to the tops of glaciers, and jumping out of airplanes.

Ha! Just kidding, parental types. We’re not going to do that much hiking.

So I’ve given up waiting for Lisa to post. Too many things going on, and soon (again) we’ll be in the Wilderness.

We arrived in Auckland nearly three weeks ago now. Auckland is much like Ann Arbor rolled into Seattle. It has AA’s youthful feel and café culture and Seattle’s crisp, wet weather (at least in spring). We took to it immediately.

It took us a couple days to settle in and find the best restaurants, the best ways around the city, the best shops and bars. Of the latter, we very early on discovered a nice Irish pub on Vulcan Street – the Kiwi equivalent of Pearl Street, for you Boulderites – where the bartender had an actual brogue and the crowd was just the right mix of docile and volatile, and we’d just taken our first sips of Speight’s – a fine New Zealand brew from the South Island – when the jukebox shattered our reverie in the cruelest way: by playing “Freebird.” Of our regular readers (ha!) only Jake Sherlock and Dustin Bleizeffer, probably, can understand the exquisite agony of that moment.

We’d gone halfway around the world to sit in the Buckhorn.

Fortunately, the next track was “Like a Rolling Stone,” at least partially rescuing the evening. And that’s for the best, because Auckland deserves better in this blog. It’s a great city. For one, I’ve never heard The White Stripes in a bank. I’ve never seen so many cafes crammed into one city block. I love how the traffic lights allow pedestrians to go diagonally. The whole town is young and hip, energetic and upbeat. They’re also very pale, they need to get some more sun. I worry for these Kiwis.

But our chief object in Auckland was not to admire its young people, adorable as they are. In fact we had very material needs. We needed a car. Specifically, a van. So on our second day we headed for the Backpackers’ Car Market, where hippies unload their crappy vehicles on each other, and after two days of negotiations and inspections came away with our prize: Melba.

Melba is a 1989 Mitsubishi Sportpac. She has almost 300,000 kilometers under her belt. She looks like a big, grey toaster with wheels (hence the name). She doesn’t have much on the hills but I got her up to 113 kph on the Auckland Motorway before she started to come apart. We love Melba, and fervently hope she holds out two more months before we unload her on some dumb hippie.

So we got our van, hooked up the iPod, cranked up the Dead and hit the road screaming. No – literally, screaming. Nobody told these people you’re supposed to drive on the right side of the road. Also someone screwed up and put the steering wheel on the wrong side of the van. Miraculously I didn’t hit anyone or thing, even though I kept mistaking the windshield wipers for the turn signal.

Once free of the city we had few problems. Apparently nobody lives in the countryside of New Zealand. Four million Kiwis and they’re all crammed into Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton and a few other towns. Our first visit was to the Kauri forests on the west coast of the North Island, which took us about two hours to reach. We’ve been told it’s possible to cover the distance from Cape Reinga at the very north of the North to Wellington in under eight hours. Good news: less driving means more hiking, etc.

The Kauri trees once covered all of New Zealand but are now confined to a few copses here and there, and one large forest in the west, our destination. They are impressive. We saw a couple that were 2,000 years old, wide around as a redwood, with springs of gummy sap and broccoli-shaped crowns. On a four-hour hike into the heart of the forest we met only a handful of people.

From there we headed north to the Bay of Islands and the town of Paihia. To get around we hired passage on The Excitor, a superspeed boat that got up to 45 knots (whatever that means), but all I remember of the trip was the loss of sensation in my face from the cold. Not to complain: When we stopped, the views were stunning. It was a beautiful day, sunny and unseasonably warm (as we were repeatedly told). We had a few hours’ layover on tiny, green Urupukapuka Island, the top of which we summited for a complete command of Otahei Bay and the surrounding 50 miles. At the island’s resort – named for Zane Grey, writer of Riders of the Purple Sage, who once visited there – they served cold Speight’s, a just reward for our labors.

Not satisfied that we had fully tested poor Melba, we then drove some 350 km down to the Coromandel Peninsula on the North Island’s eastern side. We had mostly gloomy weather but got in a good daylong hike at Cathedral Cove near Hot Water Beach, a place where, at low tide, you can dig your own hot tub in the sand and relax in the thermally heated water that seeps in.

Continuing our zig-zag pattern, we left Coromandel (too soon) to visit Raglan, a small surfing community on the western coast, where we stayed with Stu and Becks, a lovely English couple we’d met in Fiji. She’s a doctor and he’s a layabout. They’ve relocated to Raglan for six months while she works in the hospital there. After haranguing them for two days about their silly quirks of language (programme; colour; cosy; “zed”; connexion; draught; naming people Nigel or Neville), we took pity and left them to head for Rotorua, the adventure capital of New Zealand – and perhaps the world. Which is the reason for the Reader Poll that was mostly ignored by our imaginary readers: Rotorua is where they perfected bungy and concrete luge and all the crazy things that have caused apoplexy in our relatives at the prospect of us doing. But the Reader Poll did not garner much interest, so we’re not sure whether we have to honor (I mean, honour) it.

We’ll leave you now so you can regret not voting in it. I hope you’re happy.