A little window

Written in my journal while enjoying a pint at The Twisted Hop in Christchurch. A little different entry today, but nonetheless fitting:

Wild night in Christchurch...something about horse races and everyone dressed up like they are going to a wedding. "cup day?" Today I must start writing down my random philosophies on life, says Liza. So this is the start of that.

1. Setting: Indian Restaurant in Duluth, MN with Henry McKenna, while listening and pondering the bad background music.
Philosophy: I think Indian restaurants need to play bad indian music all the time because otherwise they would become bored of the good Indian music.

2. Setting: At an Indian Restaurant with Liza in Sumner, NZ eating a very mildly spiced meal in which Liza is desperately attempting to add more chilli powder out of the shaker we were given upon request.
Philosophy: Maybe the reason all NZ food lacks any sort of spice is because all the holes in the spice dispensers are too small and it would take far too long to properly spice the food.

3. Setting: Currently enjoying a pint, theorizing on my theories...
Philosophy: Clearly there is a correlation between my eating Indian food and solving previously unanswerable questions about the world. Thus more should be consumed to solve all the world's upcoming dilemnas such as "who will save the world from 2012?"
....Just thinking about indian food and instantly! IDEA! we need to skip 2012 like appartment buildings skip the 13th floor and deftly call it, "the 14th floor". We must quickly arrange the year 2012 to be called either 2013 or 2014 if you are superstitious. Thus, nostrasdamus' prediction could not possibly come true.

Romping and Roaming the South Island

After spending my first full month in New Zealand almost completely in Wanaka and nearby Hawea Flat, where Bruce and Swenja live, I headed up to Christchurch to re-unite with a great, new travel partner to join Mandy and I. After a crazy turn of events, some emails and a decisive phone call, Liza Mitchell decided to join me down here in New Zealand, and for the past two weeks the two of us have been romping and roaming around the south island.

Before leaving Bruce and Swenja's I sat down with Bruce and a large fold-out map of the south island. On said map, Bruce went systematically through all of the places where Liza and I should travel to, hike, tramp (NZ term for backpack/trek), and also climb. The old map became quickly filled with blue pen marks and my head was more importantly swarming with various ideas, plans, and Bruce's verbal directions to places I was bound to forget 5 minutes after talking with him. After this coffee meeting, post-last day of work, and a heartfelt good-bye and come visit again, I began the 6 hour drive up to Christchurch.

For the second time, my drive between Christchurch and Wanaka ended up being on an absolutely beautiful cloudless day. While a bummer since I was sitting on my butt the whole day, it was exciting due to the fact that I could see all of New Zealand's tallest mountains rise from their clearest lakes...quite a stunning drive. As with most of my drives I took my time, ate lots of food, and was frequently passed by cyclists.

The next morning I met an excited Liza at the airport and we began the journey of our touring NZ's south island. In an attempt at a nice gesture of welcome, I bought a couple chocolate bars, many bottles of variously NZ brewed beers and fermented wines, because well...I'm allowed to do that down here. Thus we had a delicious assortment of things to eat and drink for our travels...some still yet to be consumed.

This second leg of my New Zealand adventures as I see it is starkly different from my first leg. I am now in travel and explore mode versus live and work mode. Both have been rewarding and I'm confident I will get to do more of both in the future as well. For five days, Liza and I attempted the Travers-Sabine Circuit, a mountainous track taking anywhere from 5 to 7 days to complete. The hike starts following lake Rotoiti and into the Travers river valley. It then ascends the Travers pass at 1700 metres and descends the Sabine river valley back to the car park. About 3 hours into the first day we found that our planned route was going to be nearly impossible as the suggested hiking times were in fact quite accurate and not directed towards old, slow people. However, at the end of exhausted day two, we took our boots off at the upper travers hut at the base of the Travers pass ready to break until an afternoon exploration mission would tell us whether or not the pass would go, especially considering we had neither ice axes nor crampons. However, our answer quickly came in form of a helicopter. Not 5 minutes after sitting down on the porch of this hut, did a helicopter just start barreling up the valley towards the hut. At first we both exclaimed, " O cool, a helicopter!" Yet we quickly realized it was coming straight to the hut and in fact landed not 30 metres away! INCREDIBLE! Out came 2 Department of Conservation workers doing routine hut cleaning and repair checks as well as avalanche surveying and upon ignoring us for the first 10 minutes while they got themselves sorted, they informed us to not even think about attempting the pass. The other side was apparently a huge avalanche path currently with new snow. Good thing we got our answer!

With our new plan we decided to spend an extra day at this high alpine hut amidst giant mountains rising all around us, and on our break day, I did an exploratory scramble up a nearby peak. I quickly saw what they were talking about with pass as my vantage point from across the valley showed tons of snow on the pass and would probably have been fine had we had crampons and ice axe, but would have had to be done early in the morning when snow pack was still hard and avalanche risk from warming snow pack was low. Hower, we didn't have those things so we were resigned to retrace our steps out (skipping the hut we stayed in the first night however due to similar avalanche risk!!!) Our final 11 hours of hiking (over 2 days) back to the car were long, wet and cold, but we made it and rewarded ourselves with a hostel bed in Nelson versus the usual car sleeping arrangment we have set up here.

We took full advantage of this hostel, cooking for nearly 4 hours an assortment of things for snack, future breakfasts, dinner, and dessert. And this particular one offered free breakfast, which we conquered quite well. Since then we have reconnected with my friend from Bruce and Swenja's Tony and Lars and their new travel companion Nicky. The past few days the five of us have been all traveling together playing lots of music and drinking good beer not to mention eating good food. Life is good indeed. Three more weeks of traveling and adventure with Liza in which we hope to attack the west coast, reconnect in Wanaka, and take the darrans by storm. Until next time...Thanks for reading!

Meeting the Locals

Every morning I wake up to the soothing sounds of president Barrack Obama's deliberate rhetoric slowly oozing out of the radio of Bruce's yamaha radio system playing Public Radio New Zealand. Upon slowly emerging out of bed, a quality I have become particularly good at completing at glacial speeds, I enter the kitchen to greet Bruce and the morning cup of coffee. A few mornings ago, I finally commented on how it feels at times odd to wake up every morning, in one of the places furthest away from the U.S. geographically speaking, and still hear so much news about the goings on of Obama and New York City and yes, the financial crisis. Bruce, having grown up on the remote western coast of New Zealand's south island, didn't seem to find it odd, but instead said I would have to realize that to everyone else around the world, the United States is kind of a big deal. It is the biggest economy in the world he said and for that everyone is focused on the place. This prod quickly evolved into the most interesting conversation I've had for quite some time. Bruce at one point commented that for a while, everyone he knew and seemingly New Zealand as a whole had sort of lost hope for the United States. He had seen the Bush administration as a form of the third reich rising to power and that the U.S. as quickly being pulled away from all of its democratic principles. You often hear how the rest of the world hates America. Now, however he spun the conversation around as to how in such a short period of time, and one momentous changing of the guards, so to speak, there is renewed confidence in the United States. Immediately I couldn't help but think back to November 4th when Obama was elected with such unanimity. I was standing in a stairwell with my good friend and house mate, Jimmy Singer in the Slocum dorm at Colorado College. We were putting up posters for our monthly synergy house potluck, and we knew the decision was soon to be announced. Suddenly we heard seemingly the whole dormitory complex erupt with screams and shouts of celebration as people bounded out of their rooms away from their television screens to celebrate Obama's victory. A gigantic party throughout campus had just begun which would culminate in a massive parade of streaking across campus later on in the evening. I couldn't help but smile and relay the story to Bruce as we stood in the new garden we were building for his house. I began thinking amidst all of the harsh criticisms that are already coming around onto the Obama administration, (myself having not spent enough time or effort to make any personal agreement or disagreement with the criticisms), I felt reassured that elsewhere in the world people again had faith in the U.S. as a leading nation even through such tough times.

On another note, my homestay here is going quite amazingly! Bruce is a highly evolved human being, one of the most intelligent I have met on my travels and he is seemingly good at everything else as well. He is an awesome builder with an equal skill for teaching as we have learned some great tricks of the trade pouring cement for a new communal garden (shared with friends) and a separate greenhouse on their property. We have learned to make boxing for cement, dig ditches for irrigation chanels, and how to install those. We have started to learn of soil fertility when we went to a local sheep sheering shed to shovel trailer loads of sheep shit to integrate into the garden to organically fix nitrogen. Also we have been hard at work eating as many eggs as possible since the chickens can't slow down their egg production and eating them is simply too hard to pass up.

More about Bruce, he was in the newspaper this week for his recent climbing expedition to Pakistan, where himself and three other New Zealand climbers climbed an unclimbed subpeak of K7 in the Himalayas. The climb was an incredible cone of sheer granite rising two thousand metres from base (around 5000 metres already) to peak. I have been working with a friend I met on my travels here named Tony, a fun-loving, very musically inclined and personable new-found buddy of mine from Nova Scotia. Bruce, a new friend Lars (another traveler from Germany), and I have been introducing Tony to climbing as we all share a similar passion. Personally I have been attempting to get climbing often and improve me abilities in the wake of Bruce's prowess. I am becoming much more confident in my climbing and look to go to the big mountains soon and do some longer climbs in the Darrans outside of Milford sound. If you are curious I suggest google-ing some photos of the Darran mountain range...pretty incredible.

Our other host, Swenja, is an equally incredible person with a clear love and passion for life that she always brings to the dinner table or conversation. I look forward to getting to know her more since she has been gone this whole previous week on a yoga retreat for instructors on the Sunshine Coast of Australia. She runs a yoga practice out of a studio Bruce built for her, 50 feet from the front door of their home. I've got another week and a half here, and it will be tough to leave as they make me feel so comfortable and at home. Yet, I'm sure I will be back in and out before my time in NZ (N zed... zee is not a letter here..it is zed). That is enough to fill in the gaps of my past week here...hopefully some photos will accompany although it takes a long time on this application...come on google get it together!

Falling into Place

Sometimes you just sit back and marvel when out of nowhere, a few things just come into place. The last week and specifically last few days have seen lots of this. I started off arriving in Wanaka, completely excited after a gorgeous drive from Christchurch eight days ago. I checked in at a hostel and spent the next few days just living. I did cool things don't get me wrong, but things hadn't settled yet completely. I went skiing, looked into the local climbing and met some people to climb with, and socialised with the hostel scene, spending lots of time with a few of them. Then I went to the climbing spot again a few days later and ran into one couple climbing, but they were content and I could tell they weren't looking for a third. On my own, I scrambled around a bit, set up an anchor at one point and climbed one route on my own, belaying myself by atc and prussik combination.

However, somewhat deflated after the attempt I sat in the parking lot with a peanut butter and nutella tortilla and thought I should get out of the hostels and meet the locals instead of snowboarders and travelers into their own things. So, I signed up to WWOOF, which is a network of farmers, worldwide who will take in willing workers to work at their houses doing whatever work there is to be done. Signing up enables you to contact the hosts and look at their bios. One bio, was of Bruce and Swenja, living right outside Wanaka with organic gardening and free range chickens, and they were climbers...possibly a good combination of my academic interests and outdoor pursuits.

Shot them an email, the next day I was sitting down to coffee with them and a friend from the hostel who is joining me WWOOFing. Climbers they ARE! Bruce sets many of the routes locally and has done much in the Darrans, the premier alpine climbing area in New Zealand. His name is in many of the guidebooks as having the first ascent of several routes and Swenja is not far behind. They are awesome people and have graciously accepted me into their home in return for a few hours of work a day. Plus Bruce and I went and explored some of the climbing areas of Wanaka today as he literally knows every route and who set it. That is only the surface of some of the amazing things that have fallen into place this last week, yet this post is already long and mostly a rant of "and then"s. But it is what I'm doing.

Hope all is well on other fronts! Much love!

A couple of many

They Graze their animals!

Recently, I have been toiling with the struggle that relatively few, (but increasingly more) consumers have with their food choices. Reading The Omnivore's Dilemna, I have found myself less and less able to justify the way Americans grow and eat food. On the other side of things, I am a lover in the first degree of all food, meat included. Upon arriving in New Zealand despite the huge carbon footprint of a trans-global flight, I was relieved to find that nearly every field is seen spotted with cattle and sheep. After my first drive through the more rural areas I got so excited as to try all this good, natural (in the true sense of the word natural) food. I ended up buying tons of food for my time here, bulk rice, pasta, and beans for trips to the mountains, but also lots of fresh vegetables and yes, meat--lamb and apricot burgers and beef, bacon, and tomato sausages. These two packages of meat turned out to be one of the more daunting tasks of late as keeping your food out of the back of a car does not bode well for long-term preservation. So, for the past three of four days I have been on the routine of cooking two borderline gigantic meals, one for breakfast, the other for dinner to simply get through all the meat and vegies. It has recieved some odd glances from the other hostel-go-ers probably thinking, "those fucking americans and their meat" while shaking their heads. Tip for the supermarket next time, although the food is not injected with corn, reducing intake is still an important tenet to having less of an impact.

Mandy and Me

Just got back from two days up in the mountains with Mandy, the good ol' car that I was able to track down. Met some cool people from Alaska and Arthurs pass, NZ at the race. Got to pay for internet everywhere you go, so I'm gonna run. RUN!