New Zealand

I do believe that I promised the link to the NZ website a while ago (okay, a very long time). Here it is. It has everyone's essays, along with lots of pictures.

I hope the link works--I can't access it due to Turkey's firewall (however, youtube now works. You would think I could read about my trip to New Zealand if I can watch youtube).

m.

Tiny Things

An excerpt from my journal, 19 July:

There seem to be two things I've done in the past few weeks: beading and writing.

I love taking small, banal insignificant and often boring things and making them--by putting them together in different patterns and shapes and galaxies and universes with different stars and worlds--into grand and grandiose creations that perhaps I sometimes take too much pride in. I love watching them come together, though. To see something in progress; to combine colors and spaces and silence, to watch and appropriately note where things seem best to fit, to be careful patterns, and to watch the creativity of years come out. But perhaps not years. My mind is filled with the words, and the maps, and "banal" is my new favorite word; I keep seeing it in the books I'm reading. Apparently, I should also be reading Joyce, in addition to those books I've currently read and/or finished.

I think this is a good descriptor of not only what I've been doing the last few weeks, but also what my summers are like: lots of (usually) tiny things that come together and make up a few months.

Kali, one of the girls I went to NZ with, finished our website. I would recommend you check it out. It has all of our pieces (essay & creative), photos, and the obligatory "meet us!" section, which isn't anywhere near as bad as most of the author descriptions on the inside cover of a novel.

As I said, this is some of what this particular summer has consisted of:

These last beads are handmade...by me (be impressed. I don't do that much). They've been drying for this past week while I've been (back) in Colorado. I can't wait to use them.

m.

Housekeeping

This will probably be the last round of New Zealand photos. I hadn't really even intended to post any more, but I took over 2,000, and...well, there are some that I like that hadn't yet had a chance to go up.

I apologize for the terrible order.

Mike & John atop Castle Rock.

Taylor, John, Taryn, & Kali (right to left) atop Castle Rock.

Castlepoint at night, taken from the lighthouse.

A bin at the Castlepoint sheep shearing station.

Sunrise at Castlepoint.

Castlepoint.

Hannah & Barry with the dogs at Barry's farm.

Auckland from the summit of Mt. Eden.

Barry's farm.

Mushrooms at Waiohene Gorge.

Castlepoint.

Kokako at Mt. Bruce.

The champagne pool in Rotorua.

Hot springs in Rotorua.

The Devil's Bath at Rotorua.

Riverbed at Putangirua Pinnacles.

Beach front near Putangirua Pinnacles.

Baby NZ fur seal.

Beaded loincloth at the Auckland museum.

Grave marker in an Auckland cemetery .

m.

fruit

It has come to my attention that not everyone knows what a kiwi looks like. And when I say "kiwi," this isn't what I mean:New Zealanders, when they call themselves Kiwis, aren't calling themselves fruit, but rather birds (personally, I'd rather be called a fruit than a bird, but hey, that's just me). The bird kiwis are much cuter:

m.

Color Analysis

Done! I'm done with my paper! (I also got my bag today!)

I've decided just to post my color analysis. It's my favorite.

There will be a house, quiet, on a quiet street of a quiet city. The porch will sag a little, and weeds will have grown up over the railing and partially pulled it down. The paint will be coming off in curling strips, showing the greying wood underneath. Inside, through the door that will be slightly ajar, the fall leaves will be lying on the carpet, although it will be difficult to tell what is carpet and what are leaves. Ivy will have grown up to the first landing, but no farther, leaving the second floor untouched, except for where the rain has blown in through the partially open windows.

The trapdoor to the attic will be just outside the master bedroom, which will have a slate-blue embroidered coverlet carelessly tossed across the foot of the bed. There won't be much in the attic, just a few cardboard boxes rotted open, spilling old clothes and sheets of paper across the unfinished floor.

There will be a journal lying in a box that has not yet completely fallen apart. It will be open, as though someone placed it there. On this undated page it will say:

The world is growing darker with every passing day. Every news report speaks of more playgrounds being mined, more nuclear weapons amassed, more scientists saying they'll never find a cure for the Red Plague. The analysts say that at least two thirds of the population have died, either from the War, or from the Plague, and they say those numbers will only increase. Some people say this is the end of the world, and others say it is the beginning of a new world--one of peace and prosperity. I cannot believe that this is anything but the end of the world--"the end" as in, when the smoke clears and dust settles, there will be on one left, and nature will pick clean the bones of our civilizations--if there is any nature left to speak of.

This is so different from what I remember as a child. There were, of course, wars and diseases, and there was always some crackpot yelling about the end of the world being upon us from some streetcorner, but things were normal--although the world we have now is what Charles and Sophie thought "normal" was. The things Mina and I grew up with, the things we lost, they didn't know you could lose.

I'm tired of being mad at Mina. She just didn't want the Endless injection. She didn't know it would be her fault Charles and Sophie died too. It seems impossible, though, in this house. Our house. Some nights I think I can hear them, even though the dead are everywhere. So I'm leaving. My badge doesn't give me the access it used to, but I know enough back doors and unscrupulous people to travel.

Carey's smuggling me into New Zealand first, the north island. I don't know where I'll go beyond that, or after that, but New Zealand seems like as good a place as any to start. I don't know what I'll do, either. All I know is that now, every insignificant thing has become arresting, and every arresting thing reminds me to pray for hope, even though I know there is nothing left to hope for.

The haphazardly piled sheets of paper will all be written in the same steady hand and blue ink that will fade to a greyish blue. Near the back of the attic, in one of the boxes closest to the little faceted round window will be three pages that were once rubber banded together, but it will long since have become brittle and snapped. This is what they will say:

Terraced hills between Auckland and the national park

The green of cool summer sunrises, when there is no spectacular color change, simply the slow shift from black through every shade of blue it's too painful to name. The summer morning when you receive the phone call, letting you know they're gone--dead, or no longer care, and it breaks your heart not to cry, but it breaks your heart to cry even more, and no matter what you do, the fragments of what used to move your blood fall through the cracks in your fingers between your feet. They bloom there, in great white blossoms that smell of rain and heartache, and you want to scatter them to the wind, but the green stem against your calloused fingertips is too elegant to bear. The brown of the summer afternoon you were riding your bike without training wheels, the one that whistled and flapped up and down the block, because that was as far as you were allowed to go. You fell, as you were trying to ride up over the curb, because your older, wiser friend who lived next door last year told you it was easy. Your knee hurt, so you limped home, only to discover the front door and garage locked, and you were too short to reach the latch on the fence. So you sat on the bottom front step, and only then did you discover your elbow had been badly skinned--at least that's what you believed--with pebbles caught in your red-rimmed flesh, stuck against your childhood nails.

Sky just outside of Masterton, fall day

Blue:

You woke up early, before the sun rose, when the world was still encased in its blackblueblack shell and dressed quickly against the mist. The wooden boards were cool against your bare feet, but you didn't bother to put shoes on as you crept past your parent's bed and into the dark soil surrounding your home. You could hear your brother in the lambing shed, trying to quiet their newborn cries, as you fetched your well-loved basket from childhood.

On the top of the hill, you paused to watch the sunrise, with its playful yellows dancing over the land's edge, like your baby sister used to do, before the winter's hard frost found her lungs. Each blade of grass was illuminated, edge first, as the wind bent it towards the town. You turned just in time to see the spires of Paris light up, watched the shadows run and snap. You were still watching it as you made your way to the south side of the hill, until you had to look away as you pushed through the bushes. The small, red berries peered out at you under their heart-shaped leaves. Kneeling, you picked one, and then six, and then twenty-nine, and then you lost count, even though you had barely covered the bottom of your basket. As you quickly tucked fabric up about your knees, the wind caught your sleeves and puffed them up like clouds. By the time the sun had reached the height of your elbow, you straightened, unable to fit the strawberry in your hand into the basket, so you put it in your mouth, sucking sunshine and youth and ease from it.

Purple berries at Waiohene Gorge

The purple of holidays, and of the never-ending universe, and of Simon & Garfunkel singing with an acoustic guitar. The holiday party where the color of the champagne makes your nose tingle, and the hostess greeted you at the door with bronze bells about her wrists. The Grecian columns holding up the room are the whitewhite of a void, but are wrapped with garland; the piano's slender notes wander about the guests, making conversation, but finding no lover. The never-ending universe you may catch a glimpse of as you stand, face parallel to the ground, staring at the Milky Way that arcs from one end of your soul to the other. The final moment when the sun dips below the horizon, leaving everyday supernatural shades in its wake, and the music swirling between your ears is Simon & Garfunkel, and an acoustic guitar.

White star mushroom at Waiohene Gorge

The white of childhood raindrops. Lying on your back, midday, on the soft grey wood of the porch attached to your friend's relative's cabin near the lake in Nowhere. Watching the raindrops fall what could be up from the indentations in the tin roof in strings of pearls. You could catch one, but you know that as soon as that reflecting pearl lands in your hand, the world will shatter over the edge of your skin, so you simply let them fall, over and over and over again. Watching each tiny world encased in such a fragile medium flash by your face, you become dizzy, and briefly, you're forced to wonder why the adults aren't out here with you, for you might as well be dancing to the fairy's lute that keeps time with the pattering on the lake.

Sunrise reflection on the water at Castlepoint

The pink-purple of functions, and old cribbage boards, and coffee, and beads.

Multi-variable calculus functions, ones written in pencil on unlined paper, triple integrals to find the flow of water through a kidney bean; the xs and ys and zs long and spiky, a style you've only developed in this past month. The cribbage board the two of you found in an antique shop when you were on vacation. It was the off-season, winter at the beach, so Main Street was deserted as you two shivered between shops, until you ducked into a tiny one with books piled high in the windows under the yellowing chandelier. In the back room, alone in a cardboard box, you found a worn cribbage board, and, on the way back home on the train later that week, you turned it over and over in your hands. You caught the early bus to school, before the sun came up, and so had time to sit before classes began. Cradling the thick ceramic mug to warm your fingers, you watched the grey light slowly illuminate the crosswalk. A collection of movements formed in the back of your head; a dance of streetlights and crosswalks, of grays and cold mornings, a dance you will teach when class begins. A wicker basket, just about the size of your father's head, filled with loose seed beads, a bright, luminescent green, like a playground of a spring morning before the mist has cleared away.

Sky noon at Castlepoint

Blue:

You own a tiny gallery at the start of a dead-end alley. An acquaintance from your friend's Christmas part painted silver swirls over the entire door you'd painted olive green earlier the week before. There was faceted glass in the door, so you kept that, but you had to replace the windows with their rotting white frames. Once, you though about putting in bamboo floors, but instead, you just took a sander to the wood, and then a chisel, to copy the swirls in the door, and then the sander again, so no one got splinters from the edges. You did this after you painted the walls light grey, so that all of the paint spatters would be gone.

There isn't much in your gallery. It moves quickly, so everyone wants you to have more, but you rather like it this way. Today, you have a steel sculpture, nearly seven feet high on its concrete base, mottled with holes that could each fit an egg. There's an abstract oil painting with browns and tans in great horizontal brushstrokes from one end of the canvas to the other. Your newest piece is a photograph of blurred hands scattering pink and white confetti across the cloudless sky. Your favorite piece, though, hangs in the back over your bare antique desk. Almost everyone who walks into your gallery wants it, but you won't sell it to anyone. It's a round mobile with fourteen tin birds painted muted colors flying in endless circles, bobbing in the occasional sunshine and casting long shadows across the floor.

Red wine found in a deserted winery

The redorange that came about the day you were sailing to the new world, a place you'd never heard of, where the apples were gold and spiderwebs of spun diamonds and grass blades of silk. The man in a dull yellow coat and brown vest came to the door of your wooden home and poured sunshine down your throat until it dribbled out your tear ducts. Your entire family found the carved mahogany ship at the end of the harbor, unmoving in the bobbing water with sails made of purple smoke. Eighteen days after you'd lost sight of land, Poseidon raised a storm, and, for the first time, the wood beneath your feet pitched. You watched from your tiny window, your family clutching at your legs, as the squid rose up to meet you, his tentacles playing with the ship, each one thicker than your eldest son's body, even thicker than he was tall. Its flesh was the same color as the inside of your daughter's mouth, the same color you saw every time she tried to wrap her tiny mouth around a honeycomb. As you were knocked from side to side, the breaking glass fresh between your ears, you saw the squid painting blood on the mast as you sailed to this new world.

Skin of a Maori woman currently unaffected by the Plague

Dusty brown. The fine-grained particles that fly up and around your neck and head in a tiny whirlwind, when you're standing all alone in the desert of every non-named wilderness. Your eyelids are bruised, inside and out, as are the very tips of your fingers, just there by the nail. The jangle of silver etched bangles, a bit thicker than most, each one with a different linear design. The melody your mother used to sing you to sleep. She'd hold you in the machine-carved yew rocking chair and rock for what felt like hours at the upper story window before a scene all lit up by the harvest moon. The picture you found in the museum basement. You were looking for something else, an obscure Vermeer, when you were prying crates apart. The one you found, though, was an oil painting thick with brushstrokes and history and strong winds, turned about in its frame, so only the time-loved back showed out from the gold-trimmed carved frame. You turned it over, and there found a lovely daughter collecting wheat, her head bowed in its white cap against the three o'clock sun; you stared at if for only a few minutes before replacing the nails in the box and returning it to the cobweb-laden corner.

m.

Ruby Slippers

I'm home.

Well, home, minus my checked bag. But more of that later.

Here are some of the photos from Rororua. Although I love Brandon (my camera) dearly, the pictures don't quite do some of the colors justice.

This is Mt. Ruapehu (at least I think it is), the north island's tallest mountain. Our bus driver on the way to Rotorua stopped so we could get some pictures. I'm glad he did; it's hard to get pictures like this through the dirty window of a moving bus.

All in all, I'm glad to be home. It's nice to not be moving every few days, and to have properly washed clothes, and to be able to flick the turn signal up on a car to indicate I'm turning right instead of left (although it's strange to sit on the driver's side as the passenger).

I think, though, in a few days, I'm going to start missing it. Three and a half weeks is more than enough time to fall in love with a place, and I most thoroughly have.

The flight home was uneventful...that is, until we got to LAX. They couldn't seem to get the hold open to get out our checked bags. So, after waiting for two hours, they let us go through customs without them, assuring us that they'd "take care of things." No one seemed to know anything, so I headed over to the Verizon counter to check in for my LAX-->SeaTac flight.

An interesting bit of information: Verizon and Quantas have no security agreement. Therefore, I absolutely had to have my bag if I didn't want it to stay in LA once they managed to get it off.

I headed back to international arrivals to get my bag that still wasn't off the plane to stand in a line that wrapped halfway back to customs. Mind you, this is after 20+ hours with no sleep whatsoever, twelve of those hours on a plane, three of them in Auckland's airport, and two of them in LAX waiting for my bag--and I still have to catch a connecting flight.

Thanks to a very kind security officer who started helping the end of the line, I was able to get my paperwork filled out. He promised another counter would book me on a different flight so I could have my bag. After a miscommunication at that counter, I was told to return to the line I'd just left, because the one I was at didn't deal in bags at all. The woman must have seen that I was about to start crying (or yelling--it probably looked like I could do either), she checked with the baggage counter. Thankfully, the form I filled out means Quantas will deliver my checked bag to my doorstep when they actually get it off the plane (along with the bags of all 356 other passengers on that particular 747), so I no longer needed to worry about it.

Needless to say, I felt much like dancing on my way back to the Verizon counter--although I could also have just fallen asleep.

A few housekeeping things:

1. A more complete collection of photos is up here. It is by no means the complete album; I took well over 2,000 pictures. Some of the files are corrupted (at least, I think that's why they're not appearing). I'll get to it...eventually. My apologies if you can't get to them. Kali (one of the girls on the trip) is working on a webpage that will have lots and lots of photos that all of us took. I'll post the link when it's up.

2. I'll be putting up my essays when I finish them. They're due tomorrow at midnight....and that's what I should be doing right now. Emphasis on should.

3. Just because I'm home doesn't mean I'm going to abandon this blog. I'll be in Turkey for all of next school year--there'll be something over there that's worth talking about, I'm sure.

m.

One more thing:

We should have planned our dates a bit differently. This is what we missed, by two days, in Wellington. Click for a larger version to read the actor's names.

(Yes, that is Waiting for Godot with Ian Makellen that we missed by three days.)

Auckland...again...and lots of writing...

Three more days. I don't know how I feel about this. I'm excited to go home, but I've fallen in love with New Zealand; the people, the colors, the places, the smells, the stars, the mountains, the sunrises and sets....

I'm glad, though, to be out of Rotorua. It was the most tourist-y place we've gone, although we did get to go to the hot springs. It didn't smell as bad as Yellowstone, and the colors were more intense. I'll put up photos when I get a chance.
We got back to Auckland today, and we have one more full day before we head back. As much as I'd like to spend more time exploring, I need to finish my essay before we get on the plane to come home. Or should. This means that I'll be finding a cafe tomorrow and holing up there until I get the blasted thing done.
On the other hand, I just have a bit more of light editing to do on my second piece (the color one). I'll post that when I've finished it tomorrow (probably; it may be a bit later), and...I don't know about my segmented essay yet. I'll decide when I'm done. If I'm ever done....

m.

They serve coffee in bowls here.

Well, large coffees.

I've found a place where there's wifi--a bagel shop called Wholly Bagels--so I can post some of the photos I took at Castle Point.

This is the view we had a 30-second walk out of our back door. We couldn't see the lighthouse from inside the bunk house, but we could see the water.

Notice the moon? I took this around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. The moon would rise around 1 or 2, and then go down around 1 or 2 in the morning.

I think this is the best photo I have to show what the reef/lighthouse looked like. The reef is the inverted-comma looking thing in the middle, and there was another outcropping you can't see that almost made it a lagoon (well, you can see the edge of the other part, but it just looks like part of the rock unless you know exactly what you're looking for). If you follow the narrow part of the reef off to the left, that's where the lighthouse is. If you look at the water, it looks kind of like a cursive E. The upper section of sand would get flooded at high tide, cutting you off.

This is the rock we climbed (the far left here is the other side of the reef--this photo would go to the right of the panoramic). To try and put it into perspective, the flat part of the tiny point about 1/3 in from the right could hold 4 people--at least--lying down. If you didn't care about falling to your death, that is.

The path was just about this steep for the entire climb up the rock.

Again, perspective: the three people would be about the size of the tiny bumps just to the right of the path in the picture before (follow the path all the way to the edge, and there are two small bumps).

m.

Rain, rain, a lighthouse, and more rain.

After five days (I think--I'm losing track of all exact dates and days of the week) in Castlepoint, we're back in Wellington. We'll spend two days here, and then head up to Rotarua for the hot springs and four days, and then we're off to Auckland for two days, and then home. It's all very depressing. I like it here (in case you couldn't already tell).
Castlepoint was beautiful. There wasn't much to do--the town has a permanent population of 20--but it was nice to have time to write the essays that we need to. The internet connection here doesn't allow me to upload photos, so I'll just have to wait until we're at a place where there's wifi. Until then:
There's a lighthouse at Castlepoint, and you have to cross a stretch of beach to get there, so at high tide, you can get stuck on what becomes a tiny reef island (it's a lot easier if you can see it in photos). We went up the first night, and it was so clear you could see the Milky Way. We went up plenty more times at varying times of day and in all different kinds of weather; we also climbed Castle Rock--it's high, and the wind was intense. We've got pictures of people leaning into the wind at almost a 45 degree angle. Again, photos to come.
We also went up to Mt. Bruce, where we got to see the native birdlife. They're all pretty (not like you can tell in all of my pictures), except for the kiwi. They're just cute.
Other than that, we really just sat around and worked on our essays. Okay, so we didn't do that as much as it sounds like, but from dinner on, there were always at least two people working. The days were usually devoted to hiking, watching the sunrises, and drying out from doing the first two. We got a proper Southerly, and it was cold. There was lots of rain--cold rain--blowing at obscene angles, so even if you were in rain gear, you got wet. Wet and cold. The best wet and cold I've ever experienced.
Tomorrow we're on our own to explore Wellington. My current plans contain: the botanical garden, Te Papa (again--it's the museum here, and we went the day we left for Masterton), Old St. Paul's, and Wellington Cathedral; all weather-willing. There's rain here, too, although it's not blowing at too bad of angles.

m.

foodstuffs

We leave for Castlepoint early(ish) tomorrow morning, and it's decently late (well, 11:00, but that's late for us now), so I'll make this short. Maybe.

The last few days have contained a lot of "here & there" type things--and, unfortunately, it takes a fair amount of driving to get from "here" to "there," so I know the inside of our vans pretty well.

1. Bush tramping was spectacular. There are over 150 kinds of ferns here, and I believe it. There are some that look like palm trees. I've been trying to figure out a way to describe the bush here, but the best I can come up with is a combination of Point Defiance, the Hoh, and Hawaii (but that's still missing something). We hiked in a couple of different places, and, at the first, we had to cross a gorge to do any sort of real tramping. On a suspension bridge. Did I mention I hate heights? Yes, it was worth it, but I had a few moments of feeling like my tonsils had dropped to my hips.

2. We toured Barry Kempton's farm (he's a friend of Brian's) and got to see his dogs round up the sheep. I love the sheep. I obviously did not grow up on a farm.

3. After the farm, we went wine tasting (and I learned there's a reason New Zealand is known for its whites and not its reds) and then stopped at Schoc Chocolate. Forget Swiss chocolate. Schoc has all different kinds of really unique chocolate, from rose to smoked paprika to white lemon (the chocolate is white) to sea salt to my personal favorite, Earl Grey.

4. We got the chance to visit a Marae, which is the meeting place for the Maori. I'm not exactly sure how to describe it, beyond maybe...enlightening? but that's the wrong word. It was one of those "this is a really old place" (not the Marae itself, but the culture and the country).

5. Last night, we went to a reading of two NZ authors, Charlotte Grimshaw and Paula Morris. And I, of course, bought a book. But I haven't finished it yet!

6. Tonight, we went to a one-man show called "The World's a Stage" that was a reflection (an on-stage essay, almost) of Shakespeare's works. He did it all (Hamlet, Lady M., Mercutio, Lear, Falstaff...), and he did it all very, very well.

7. And, lastly: everything I ate today was wonderful (hence the title). Coffee in the morning (they've got great coffee here). Lunch was sushi (tuna, salmon, and crab). Dinner was fish & chips (and the strips were massive--longer than my hand). Some kind of white fish (whatever was caught this morning) with a magical batter.

And, around 3-ish, I had gelato. Kiwi gelato. And I do believe that is all I need say on that.

m.

Color Analysis .1

Since this is a writing course, we have some writing assignments due. One of them is entirely up to us, and I've decided to do a color analysis. One of the things that's struck me is the intensity of some of the colors, and all of the subtle differences (I don't think I've ever seen more shades of green in my entire life). I just invented the term "color analysis," but my goal is to impart the essence of the color by connecting it to something that describes it without...describing it.

Terraced Hills

Green, brown: base.

The green of cool summer sunrises, when there is no spectacular color change, simply the slow shift from black through every shade of blue it's too painful to name. The summer morning when you receive the phone call, letting you know that they're gone--dead, or no longer care, and it breaks your heart not to cry, but it breaks your heart to cry even more, and no matter what you do, the fragments of what used to move your blood fall through the cracks in your fingers, to the ground between your feet. They bloom there, in great white blossoms that smell of rain and heartache, and you want to scatter them to the wind, but, but the green stem against your fingertips is too elegant to bear.

The brown of the summer afternoon you were riding your bike without training wheels, the one that whistled and flapped up and down the block, because that was as far as you were allowed to go. You fell, as you were trying to ride up over the curb, because your older, wiser friend who lived next door last year said it was easy. Your knee hurt, so you limped home, only to discover the front door and garage locked, and you were too short to reach the latch on the fence. So you sit on the bottom front step, and only then do you discover your elbow has been badly skinned--at least that's what you believe--with pebbles caught in your red-rimmed flesh, stuck against your childhood nails.

m.

Path of the Dead

Some photos from the train ride:

Today, I can say for certain that I have arrived in New Zealand. Masterton isn't the middle of nowhere, but it's not a huge city (only about 8,000 people). It's all rolling country and massive, snow-capped mist-shrouded mountains and tiny trickling streams that have worn away great gorges.

Yesterday, we met Brian, a pastor who worked here about 15 years ago (he'll be with us until we go back to Wellington in a couple of weeks), and he introduced us to Colin and Jenny, a British couple who have been here for over 30 years. They are, I believe, some of the most friendly people I've ever met. They had us over for dinner last night and gave us the natural history of NZ; the high points being:

1. The only mammal here before the Europeans came was a kind of bat, so all of the birds became flightless (the kiwi, we have decided, is a feathered pear with a beak).

2. Rabbits: one of the most destructive things ever introduced here.

3. There are 4 million people here, and 75 million sheep.

4. The bush used to be so thick that the stretch called 40 Mile Bush needed lanterns along the cleared path at midday.

5. Southerlies (winds from the south) are evil: they blow off Antarctica and keep going until they hit the southern part of the North Island.

Today, we drove to the coast with Colin and Jenny to see some of the more spectacular parts of the area. On the way, we stopped to see Cook Strait. We could kind of see the South Island, but it was a bit foggy.

Then it was on to the wildlife.

New Zealand Fur Seals (of the baby variety):

They weren't afraid of us at all. A couple got so close to some people that they could have petted them. There weren't any adults in the general area, so we didn't need to worry about being mauled by a seal (although that would be quite the story).

On our way back, we stopped at Putangirua Pinnacles, which are spectacular in their own right, but also happened to be our first movie set here: it's where Jackson shot the Path of the Dead for Return of the King.

Tomorrow should be interesting: we're taking a hike through the bush. From what I've seen (which has been cleared of all of the really big trees), it's all really, really thick. Brian also told us to prepare for "cold" and "muddy." The word "wet" may have also occurred. I can't wait.

m.

Wellington

We arrived in Wellington around 6:30 last night, after what was supposed to be a 12-hour train ride but ended up being a 6-hour train ride and a 6-hour bus ride. It really didn't make much of a difference to me, but then again, I'm tiny and can fit just about anywhere, unlike Mike, who's well over six feet and has difficulty fitting into some cars.
The scenery was beautiful, especially after we got out of Auckland--it started looking like the New Zealand photos/footage I've seen (no Hobbit holes, though. That's on the northern tip of the island, and tentatively on the schedule for later). Unfortunately, I can't put up photos, since I'm not on my laptop, but I took some rather good pictures for travleing at 50-100 KPH. There was a mountain, and lots of sheep.
We're leaving in about two hours for Masterton, which we're hoping is more like the scenery we passed on the way here, and less like the cities--they're interesting, but there isn't a terrible lot to delineate them from any other city anywhere else in the world (except for the modern architecture. They have every city I've ever seen beat hands down for the number of modern buildings). On the other hand, being out in the middle of a possible nowhere does mean I'm not as likely to have internet connection, so please just bear with me. I'll do everything I can.

m.

Auckland

I love to walk. This is a good thing. A very good thing.

The past two days, we have walked everywhere in this city. Yesterday, we wandered the downtown and wharf, and eventually came across a restaurant that had the best lamb I've ever tasted (sorry, Granny; if it's any consolation, we were hungry). Eventually, we found ourselves in Albert Park, where we saw some of the largest trees any of us have ever seen (they remind me of Old Man Willow from The Fellowship of the Ring).

On the other side of Albert Park is the University of Auckland. It's a beautiful campus. And, of course, the plant life is incredible.

Today, we took an early(ish) morning hike up Mt. Eden, and we could see the entire city from the edge of the crater (smackdab in the middle of the mountain).

We then continued to the Auckland Museum, which has more wood carvings than I knew existed in the entire world.

Already, I feel like I have a decent handle on this city. It's well laid-out, and there are enough landmarks to remember where to turn. And the people here are really nice.

Although I really like Auckland, there isn't much here that's too terribly different from some American cities (it reminds me a bit of Portland). I can't wait to head out to Wellington tomorrow, and then to Masterton, since we'll be more "out in the middle of nowhere."

m.