Two weeks I had, between the Teton mountains and the unique thermal and wilderness attractions of Yellowstone.  On my own, without a car, I became dependent on the kindness of strangers.  Initially, I had my doubts.  Are Americans willing to trust?  Are they capable of being open-minded and generous?  Or are hitchhikers a species extinct – killed off by the culture of suspicion and distrust that is growing steadily in our country?  Standing at trail heads with my thumb raised high, I saw confusion, shock, discomfort.  I watched the faces driving past, some looking resolutely ahead, ignoring me, others staring unabashedly, mouths open in disbelief.  What is she doing?! I never had to wait long, though, and in each case the individuals who stopped to offer me a lift were friendly, helpful, and full of concerned goodwill.  Each of them (I caught perhaps fifteen separate rides, anywhere from two miles to eighty) expressed admiration colored heavily with concern.  “You’re pretty gutsy…but jeez, girl, you gotta watch out for those weirdos!  Aren’t you worried?  Aren’t you afraid?” asked Paul the insurance investigator.  Some, like the three old friends on their way to a funeral, told me stories of when they were my age and hitched across the whole west, from national park to park.  “But people aren’t like they used to be – be careful!”  Some were hesitant.  Three thirty-something surgeons from Texas, in Jackson for a conference, told me they would never pick up a hitchhiker, normally.  Others were excited for me.  Jason, a Gulf War vet, on vacation with his seven-year-old son, wished he could be doing what I was.  “It’s so great to meet a true adventurer!  That deserves a ride.”  Some only wanted company.  The emphysemic painter from Las Vegas was almost too wrapped up in his own affairs to ask where I wanted to be dropped off before launching into his life story.  I found it interesting that those who were open-minded enough to pick me up, still maintained a sort of blanket distrust of other people – as if they were the sole safe bet in a world full of serial killers.  Are we too large, as a country?  Are we all strangers to one another, and therefore incapable of trust?  Even I, open-minded world traveler, began in a cynical state of mind.  Not that I was fearful, but that I doubted whether my fellow Americans would be willing to lend a helping hand.  I was reassured, my faith in humanity – Americans specifically – restored, recharged.  I needed help, and got it – over and over again.

Beyond the hitchhiking, there were a few notable encounters with folks interesting, generous, and fun…

There was Jan, the German cyclist, whom I talked into joining me for a spectacular day hike in the Tetons.  Hooray for someone young!  Someone my own age!

Then there was Steve, the Hollywood paparazzi photographer.  When not taking pictures of Brittney Spears shaving her head in a barber shop (oh, yes, that was him), he volunteers as the campground manager at the Mammoth Campground, which is where I met him.  He watched me set up my tent in the freezing rain (this was the evening of the morning during which I was eating oatmeal in the bathroom) before approaching me, shyly.  “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way.  I’m not trying to hit on you, but I do have a pull out couch in my RV that you’re welcome to have, if you want it…I have two daughters about your age, and, well, I’d like to know that someone would take care of them, too.”  So, for two glorious nights I had a warm, dry, soft bed and a roof over my head, and a flat screen TV with surround sound to watch movies on.  Thank you, Steve!

“Fear and Loathing has nothing on us!” I returned.

“Except hallucinogenics.”

It’s a whole new phase of my NZ experience – Kelli Time!  It’s strange to me: here I am, back on the North Island, revisiting old haunts, recalling experiences and adventures from nearly a year and a half ago, but this time with a friend from home.  Time and place blur as we discuss Clark events while driving along the Desert Road in the central North Island.  The last time I drove this road, I was returning to Hawke’s Bay to see George for the second time.  In Napier, I point out the orchard where I lived in a shed with Anne and Kathrin, my German friends, while Kelli updates me on the lives of our Worcester friends.  …where am I?  where have I been?  It’s a crossing of cultures that is both wonderful and disorienting.  I’m showing off the country like a proud parent, wanting Kelli to see all that makes me love this place.  At the same time, I’m looking at the landscape and culture through her eyes.  I’m seeing things again, for the first time.  Things that I now take for granted, Kelli exclaims over, and I am reminded of what it was like to be here eighteen months ago, when everything was fresh and different.

After our first day in Auckland during which Dr. Gonzo and I balked like spooked horses at people, traffic, stop lights, the motorway and buildings, we drove south, out of the city!  “Auckland is not New Zealand,” I explained repeatedly, and breathed easier with each kilometer of farmland I put between us and the urban scene.  Lake Taupo was the next stop, where we hid from the rain at Mulligan’s Irish Pub.  It was quiz night, and we joined up with Steve and Dave, two oil rig workers, to make “Team USANZ” and to take third place!  More rain the next morning found us a little bored, wandering the shops before heading an hour south to Turangi and the home of Lynn McGregor – a friend made on my last North Island travels.  Lynn had to work during the day, but she left the key next to the door and told us to make ourselves at home, which we did, grateful for the warm, cosy, free accommodation.  I stood in the kitchen and made tea (coffee for Kelli), while she leaned in the doorway.  “Susan, this is your life!  This is what you do…drive around…stay places…meet people…” Her tone was one of realization and respect.  I laughed, but then I had to think twice.  She’s right.  This is my life – and it’s not the norm.

On Thursday we did a “Kelli-Sized Hike” to the Tarankai Falls at the foot of Mt. Ruapehu: an active volcano!!!!! Two hours, including a small picnic stop and some fence-scaling and some standing-next-to-the-edge-of-cliffs by Ms. Blank!  This should be an advertisement: “New Zealand – release your inner adventurer!”  After another night with Lynn (yay Kiwi hospitality!), it was south along the Desert Road with stunning views of the three central volcanoes (the last time I drove the road, it was cloudy – this was fantastic!), then east to Hawke’s Bay and Napier, the Art Deco City.  Three nights spent in Napier was enough time to take in the Art Deco architecture, a couple of vineyards, a proper wine-tasting, a televised rugby match, several shops and clothing stores, the Hawke’s Bay Museum, and a fancy, dress-up dinner at the Mission Estate Winery.  The weather was beautiful and the wine divine, and I enjoyed reminiscing over my three weeks spent picking strawberries in the area.  On Monday afternoon we drove leisurely along the coast to Gisborne (the first city to see the sun) and caught up with Sandy Richmond, another friend from my last trip.  She took us out tramping across the farm to feed the new puppies and the new piggies, fed us good country tucker (home-kill lamb), and helped us wake up at six this morning to catch the (cloudy) sunrise.  Yay Kiwi hospitality!  Kelli was the chauffeur this morning – she slipped behind the wheel on the right side of the car, and piloted the (skeptical but obliging) Doc on the left side of the road, all the way into Whakatane, a gorgeous beach town in the Bay of Plenty, where winter = hot and sunny.  We’re off to the beach…

And now there is a soft gray cat in my lap.  Oh, the simple pleasures.

If I visualize this period of transition as a piece of music, then at this moment what I am hearing is the quiet reflective melody that follows a particularly powerful crescendo: The Hollyford Mission!  It was a ten day trip, through the remote wilds of Fiordland in the southwestern corner of the South Island.  Three days tramping along the beaten path of the Hollyford River valley with a few other hardy souls, three days living in a hut on the beach waiting for bad weather to clear, and four days of complete solitude on the hardest trail I’ve ever walked.  On day one, I hiked 30 km (18 miles – Huge.) and felt six of my ten toes and the bottom of my right heel develop large, swollen blisters.  On day three, I found myself caught out in a torrential downpour, complete with jagged bolts of lightning and crashing thunder, on the wrong side of a flooded river, and had to spend the night huddled between flax plants in a wet tent in a wet sleeping bag.  On day four, I waited for the eye of the storm, packed all of my (sopping wet) gear, crossed the river, and all but sprinted the last three kilometers to the Big Bay Hut.  Big Bay (as the name would suggest), is a large, rectangle-shaped bay on the northern coast of Fiordland.  It’s accessible only by helicopter, small fixed-wing planes, or a four day walk from the nearest road.  Remote.  Beautiful.  Even in the throes of the storm, the wild seas and gray, rocky beach were magic.  What a place to be stuck.

I waited out the weather for two and a half days, and could have easily let myself forget the outside world and simply stay.  There were three surfers stranded with me for the first day, waiting for a break in the clouds so that their airplane could land on the beach and take them home.  Before they left they introduced me to our neighbor, a hunter named Aussie Bob, who was spending a few weeks in his private hut a kilometer further down the beach.  When the surfers finally soared away, it was just Bob and me and the beach and the wind and rain.  Bob was perhaps fifty years old, a sheep-shearer, and for 17 years had been hunting the coast and hills of northern Fiordland.  I wished, repeatedly, that I had a tape recorder to capture the stories he shared.  A genuine, multi-faceted individual, a true man of the land who could gauge deer’s bloodlines from the shape of the antlers of the stags he’d killed.  He described himself as a redneck, but he was the most open-minded and accepting redneck I’ve ever met.  “Different strokes for different folks,” he’d say as he shook his head over the lifestyles of the various people he’s met in his long and varied life.  He wasn’t sure what to make of me at first: a young woman on her own in the absolute last frontier of the NZ bush, confident of my abilities yet responsible and aware of the risks of the back country and the measures needed to counter them.  I walked down the beach to his hut the first night to listen to the weather forecast on his mountain radio, and stayed to chat over a can of beer.  As he listened to my stories of Antarctica and past tramping experience, I could see his respect for my independence grow at the same time as he sought to protect me.  Bob sent me home with flour and yeast to bake bread in my hut’s camp oven, and the next afternoon showed up with fresh venison back steaks (the nicest part of the animal) wrapped in a plastic bag.  These I cooked in a curry, using the ingredients that the surfers had left behind.  Venison curry and fresh bread baked on a wood stove in a little hut on the beach in Fiordland in NZ.  I’m not sure that cuisine gets any better than that.

For two days, life took on a simplicity and a peace that I would find difficult to recapture.  In the mornings, I stoked the fire, got it roaring, with a kettle on top of the stove for tea, then ventured out to the beach to check the weather and gather more driftwood to feed the fire.  The water would be hot when I got back, and Bob would pop in and join me for a cuppa while spinning yarns about his work and his misadventures as a young, redneck Aussie visiting New Zealand for the first time.  After tea I’d have a wash at the faucet behind the hut, sweep out the sand, mix up a batch of bread dough to rise, then sit and read and watch the birds, fantails, wax-eyes and tomtits, swoop and dive outside the window.  Eventually the rain stopped and I could go for walks on the beach, taking pictures and collecting shells.  In the evenings I’d walk over to Bob’s hut to catch the weather and listen to his stories.  I’d inevitably show up barefoot (it was warm enough, and it was easier than putting on wet hiking boots), which would make Bob shake his head.  ”You’re a tough bitch, aren’t you?” he said, in a tone of deep respect and admiration.  The night before I left, three of Bob’s hunting mates arrived by fixed-wing plane, and he invited me to come over for a roast (wild boar, pumpkin, kumara).  There I sat, smack in the middle of a kiwi hunting “man’s weekend”…how did I get here?  I marveled.

The rest of the trip was along the Pyke River valley: tough going.  This was a track that sought to break me.  It had already sent blisters, lightning, wind, rain, floods.  The second half tried to turn me back with fallen trees, mud, lakes, suffocating bush, thorns, vines, roots, slips, trips, falls, cuts, and bruises.  It thrashed me good, and then dared me to keep going – and I did.  Yet my memories are tinged with a glowing sort of magic.  I saw no one.  Red deer grazed along the sides of the rivers, and stags roared terrifyingly in the bush.  A NZ falcon swooped down from its lofty perch to examine me close up.  At one side creek, I balked at the murky orange water of questionable depth and the half-submerged tree stumps that poked out ominously.  Instead of walking through it, I took a gamble on a fallen tree that conveniently bridged the 8-foot creek.  It was narrow and smooth.  Too narrow and smooth.  So much for my dry sleeping bag and my mobile phone!  The next day I walked around Lake Wilmot, a small lake made nearly impassable by windfalls – it took me four hours to cover one kilometer.  Next was the Black Swamp, where I had to leap between tiny tussock mounds to avoid the sucking, stinking mud that at one point swallowed both of my legs up to my groin.  On the last day, I walked five kilometers through Lake Alabaster (yes, I had to walk IN the lake), climbing over slippery rocks and fallen trees, staring tiredly through my raincoat hood (it was raining again) at the waterfalls pouring down the cliffs on the other side of the lake.  Like the creature from the Black Lagoon, I rose from the lake at the end of the day, trudged wetly across the beach to the hut, and stood solidly on the porch.  I turned and surveyed the length of the lake I’d just conquered, and cheered.  The Hollyford – Pyke/Big Bay Mission: DONE!!  Satisfaction supreme.

24 April, 2007

(A real time update: Kelli and I are in Taupo, in the middle of the North Island, and all is well.  More to come as the (mis)adventures continue!)

A week of sunshine followed by two weeks of pouring rain saw me doing my best to help Susan out around the Dreamhouse.  Washing windows, edging gardens, cooking meals, vacuuming, dusting, mowing lawns, hauling wood, etc.  The rain cleared for a weekend, just long enough for the whole family to travel south to Hokitika for the world-famous Wildfoods Festival.  It’s an annual event on the Coast that draws up to 30,000 visitors from both NZ and around the world and celebrates the – ahem – wilder side of West Coast cuisine.  By way of example, I present a list of the delicacies that I, personally, consumed: venison, wild mushrooms, crickets (they were in peanut butter truffles, so they tasted okay, but when I was still picking legs out of my mouth a half hour later, I had to rate the crickets as the nastiest thing of the day), snails, homemade ice cream with organic strawberries, kava (a traditional beverage from Fiji), corn on the cob, kangaroo, crocodile (tastes like chicken), elderflower champagne, worms (chopped up and served in chocolate truffles), punga (native ferns), possum, horse (that one I could have done without), and huhu grubs (fat, white wood-boring critters that taste like nuts when roasted).  It was a day for daring and for strong stomachs.  I met up with Andre and Genevieve, two of my favorite Ice people, and spent the night with them out on the beach, relishing the opportunity to enjoy their company in the real world.  More rain…I visited Geoffrey’s gold mining claim and fell on my bum in the mud.  I also got to watch the whole mining process, do a bit of panning for myself, and actually hold raw nuggets of gold in my hand.  We escaped the rain for another weekend, this time across the Alps to Christchurch to watch the Crusaders (the local professional rugby team) bash the Bulls, a team from South Africa.

All in all, I spent a refreshing, fun (if a bit wet) three and a half weeks with Geoffrey, Susan and Navare.  It was longer than I’d planned to stay, but I’d mapped out a 9-day hike through the main divide of the Southern Alps, and couldn’t attempt it til the rains quit, as it involved numerous river crossings and fairly rugged, un-marked terrain.  Just as I was beginning to think I’d have to scrap the whole thing and move on, the rains cleared, and I was off.  Nine days… The idea for the trip originated with Lumir, and it was a doozie: gorgeous river valleys, tempting tall peaks, pristine lakes, natural hot springs, and two challenging mountain passes in the very heart of the Alps.  Definitely the road less traveled by.  For the first four days I was completely alone.  There wasn’t a soul living or breathing for miles…just me.  It was an incredible, empowering experience, having to use a map and compass to find a safe route, having to problem solve and navigate and take complete responsibility for every aspect of the trip.  The first night out, I slept next to the Waiheke River in a bivouac that I constructed out of a large blue tarp and a length of rope.  I woke during the night, rolled onto my back, and stared directly up into the clear, starry sky: wow.  I waded up one river, crested the first pass (the Amuri), and spent four days wandering the river valleys of the eastern Alps.  I camped next to Lake Sumner and was almost carried away, bivouac and all, by sandflies (wicked, demon biting insects that travel in gangs of millions) but was rescued by a kind, retired schoolteacher-turned-fisherman-and-violin-maker who loaned me an extra tent for the night.  He also shared his wife’s homemade cake with me and in the morning, wouldn’t let me leave until l’d sat and had a cup of tea with him.  Love, love, love this Kiwi generosity.  On the second to last day of the trip, I stood on top of the Harpers Pass (936 meters – approx 3,000 ft.) after a long, extremely difficult morning’s climb, and felt my soul absolutely fill to bursting with triumph – I had done it!!  Nine days in the back country, completely self-sufficient, learning, growing, and loving every minute.  It was a bit anti-climatic then, when I came down from the pass and had to stay put in a hut, a mere sixteen kilometers from the end of the trip and civilization, waiting for two whole extra days because of a wicked rainstorm and flooded rivers.  Two days, alone in a hut, reading, playing solitaire, watching the rain, doing jumping jacks, stoking the fire, and staving off the stir-crazies by working on the 1,000 piece jigsaw that some kind, blessed soul had left behind.  It was a relaxing way to end the trip, if a bit boring.  Eleven days later (nine days tramping, two days sitting), I strode out of the bush and made my way back to the Dreamhouse on the hill, stinking, filthy, but revived.

So now: freshly showered, clothing laundered and hiking boots dried, I’m off.   Last night Susan and Navare and I had a farewell marshmallow roast in the gia (a Mongolian dwelling, like a yurt…yes, they’ve got a yurt as well as a boat on their property.  They’re a pretty unique family.), and this morning Navare presented me with a piece of a possum jawbone for good luck.  It’s hanging from Dr. Gonzo’s rear view mirror, along with a piece of shell that Jenny gave me before I left Methven.  Ahhh, it’s good to be on the road again.  I’ve got three weeks before Kelli gets here, and way, way too many things to try and fit into that time.  Oh well.  A full life is a good life.  I’m back to the internet cafe scene, which means less time for emails and website updates.  With any luck I’ll be in the mountains most of the time anyway.  I’m a month and a half away from the Ice, and a month and a half away from home.  I’m at the balancing point, ready to make the most of the downward journey.  Let’s go have some fun!!

A brief recap of the past weeks…
I spent six days out in the mountains with Lumir, hiking all the way up the Rakaia River, learning to route-find and cross rivers.  We had exquisitely hot weather, which he complained about and I reveled in.  I found myself to be in pretty wretched shape after six months of inactivity, but it felt wonderful to be out and about, getting sunburned and dirty, living on cous cous and porridge.  I could feel the Ice just melting off me.  We climbed a glacier and ate breakfast one morning on the top of a mountain at the head of the Rakaia valley.  Gorgeous!!  It rained our last day – the first rain I’d seen in six months – and we arrived back at Jenny’s wet, cold, tired and muddy.  I got to spend some quality time catching up with Jenny (the woman I was working for before leaving for Antarctica) and helping Lumir pack 50 kilos worth of photo equipment, clothing, and hiking gear into a 32 kilo luggage limit.  Then it was back to Christchurch…Lumir’s last night was spent on the Banks Peninsula, out on a sagging jetty.  We drank, and toasted each other, and slept curled up together in Dr. Gonzo, only to wake at 3:30 AM to make the long, foggy drive back to the city to get him to the airport on time.  It was sad to see him go…

It was odd to be in Christchurch.  Too many people, too much traffic – and too many people from the Ice.  It was odd, how we all seemed to feel this lack of interest in each other.  Suddenly we had nothing to talk about, and wanted only to move on, out of the city to where we didn’t know anybody.  I did get to catch up with Mike and Stephen, though, friends from Tekapo and the Godley, which was a very fun blast from the past.  I was quite happy to leave the city, though, this past Thursday, and head over to the West Coast, where the Jacobs have been keeping me busy with art festivals in town, badminton, and a night of fishing out at the beach under a full moon during which I managed to catch my first shark, despite initially casting my hooks onto the sand next to me…

This place (the green, lush, alive place) is the perfect antidote to the Ice.  NZ’s West Coast is my favorite.  Beaches, mountains, rain forest – the Anti-Ice.  I’m loving it.  I’m missing Lumir, and I’m still feeling a bit off balance in this warm, bright world, but every day I wake up to the sunlight streaming through the porthole next to my bed, and the chattering of cicadas in the palms outside, and I hear the ocean and I close my eyes and imagine that I’m floating…