Categotry Archives: General

i’ve spent like 2 days deleting pictures, putting them on eloise and labelling them (shoddily). i deleted almost half the pictures, 350ish, which still leaves an absurd amount of pictures. but i did seperate them into easily accessible smaller categories:

auckland

waiheke island

queenstown

bungee jumping

glenorchy

te anau and fjordland national park

milford sound

wanaka

haast pass

west coast

fox and franz joseph glacier

lake m-something

abel tasman national park

pancake rocks

marlborough sounds

wellington

LoTR tour and palliser seal colony

SOME people have complained that my posts don’t provide enough background or information about what i was actually doing. so i tried in the captions to sometimes provide a running commentary about the place i was in and what i was doing. but i’ll do a little summary too.

nuala and i flew into auckland where we spent a couple of days. one of those days was spent going to waiheke island which is a 35 minute boat ride nort of auckland. this island was pretty narrow in the middle so we walked from one side to the other and played on two different beaches. in auckland itself mostly what we did was shop, walk around, and go to a museum. we were sort of terrible at acclimating, we would sleep in and then totally conk out pretty early in the evening.

then we flew to queenstown which is in the south island, near the bottom. we were there for a day and a half on our own and we wandered all over town (again shopping). then, our third day there we started our tour of the south island. so we met lynette, our kiwi guide, and hugh and dya, the other people on the tour. hugh and dya are married, our age, live in north carolina now but met in high school in miami, they own their own real estate business, and are much, MUCH more grown-up than me. lynette is also married. her husband was an urak-hai in the movies and is the ski coach for the new zealand olympic team. lynette has been guiding forever for different companies and was a driver sometimes for the movies. over the next 11 days the 5 of us drove from queenstown to wellington accomplishing an amazing amount of stuff. we watched nuala bungee-jump, went horseback riding, biked down mountains, overnight cruise in a fjord, swam in a river, swam in a lake, biked down another mountain, hiked a mountain, hiked a glacier, hiked on another glacier, saw seals, saw penguins, fed horses, went to a winery, swam in the ocean, etc., etc.

at the end of the tour, nuala and i were dropped off in wellington where we spent the last few days of our trip. in wellington we, again, shopped, went to a museum, walked all over, and went on a LoTR tour which i have already written about.

it was a really full 3 weeks but i had an awesome time.

oh and also i haven’t put captions on two of the sub-categories yet. working on it though, i swear.

before i left on this trip kristen asked me if nuala was a good dancer. we were discussing how i might be “forced” to go to clubs with nuala as she is a clubbing kind of santa barbara girl. well tonight/last night, i discovered the truth. nuala is an amazing dancer. (i tried to write “teeth” there instead of “dancer”. teeth? what the fuck? i am drunk.) she moves her hips in a way no girl should. unless she is expressly issuing an invitation to her front bottom. it was awesome. i got accosted by 5 middle aged guys on a stag run, nuala got surrounded by 6 boys trying (and failing, but funnily) to skank to some good ska. the band was excellent and the dune bugs were flowing. we also tried japanese lemonade, black jacks, ice 101, and slippery nipples. what was in most of these drinks, i couldn’t tell you but they got me to dance and sing along with a whole host of songs. and compared to nuala’s glowing front bottom vacancy sign, i am a terrible dancer.

you might think that a lord of the rings tour would be heavily populated by nerds and that you would be driven around in a big tour bus. not so, my friends. our only two other companions were an old indian couple and the tour took place in a white mini-van. this is quite a joke on us. and an expensive joke at that.

david, our driver, is really just like a taxi cab driver. he took us to some LoTR filming sites–at some we didn’t even get out of the car and at the others they looked almost nothing like the scenes in the movie. rohan stronghold? filmed at a working quarry. river anduin? very low this time of year. gardens of isengard? well, there were trees. rivendell? ditto.

after these stunning examples of scenery being put to use by peter jackson in creative ways. we went to the palliser bay seal colony. this had nothing to do with LoTR. no seals in that movie, bucko. OIL (old indian lady) counted the seals. many times. over and over. because she is old.

she is also inordinately fascinated by cows in pasture. “bapi!” she yells, “take photo of cows!” and he obliges. he has been videotaping near constantly. with running commentary. completely uninteresting commentary, mind. he is no kristen, sean, or jason, after all. it is more along the lines of, “there’s a cow. he’s moving. there he goes. cow.”

nuala and i just climbed up 258 stairs to the palliser lighthouse. OIL followed us. we took 5 minutes, she took like 20. the whole time i was squeaking in panic, “don’t die! don’t die!” later we found out she is 63, has diabetes, and had a stroke last year. if she had asked glacier guide troy if she might climb the stairs he would have said, “well, you could, but you’ll die.” this being troy’s all-purpose phrase for any situation on the glacier.

in addition to her litany of ailments, we also learned that, in contrast, these stairs didn’t have monkeys that would pull your pants off like the stairs in malaysia. OIL seems quite overwrought with malaysia and monkeys.

as she began her ponderous descent, i was at least able to temper my squeakings of “don’t die!” with a ready shrug and the consolation of, “at least there’s no monkeys.”

at the winery, bapi proclaimed with authority, “i will test the wine and my wife will test the water.” now here is a man who needs a swift kick in the balls.

in an effort to prove that i don’t hate kristen. or find anything funny about hating her.

while here i find myself constantly bringing up kristen in conversations. i’ll be trying to explain something we once did or her reaction to something similar. i look in stores and say, either to nuala or to myself, kristen would like that, should we buy that for kristen?

even more irritatingly telling in my devotion to kristen is a mannerism i didn’t even realize i was using of hers. licking delightedly at my banana chocolate chip ice cream in nelson two days ago i was moaning, ‘sooooo good.’ and hugh commented on how he was thinking of picking up my way of saying it. saying what?, i asked in confusion. he copied my ‘soooo good.’ holy crap, i thought, i’ve been copying kristen copying homestar runner. i now find myself catching it on the end of the ‘ood’ that i’m saying it again. i say it all the time. about all sorts of different things. and every time i curse kristen’s name a little. but it’s not with hate, mind, it’s with murderous fondness.

teaching hugh how to play poker last night in wanaka was pretty wicked good times. he finds almost everything i say to be absoultely hilarious. being on this trip is making me feel much, much funnier than i really have any right to. i mentioned as much to nuala when we walked back to the hotel tonight–passing the sheep (which i pet and named harold), loitering in the cemetary reading gravestones and being morbid, and feeding apples to the horse i named randall (he drooled great big gobs of juicy apple slobber on me while trying to eat my shirt). she said i really am funny. in comparsion, i argued, to sean and kristen however i am glow-worm poo. and not the exciting jason raver variety. just the small glowing pinprick as compared to the raging fire infernos.

so it’ll be a shock coming back to the bay area and not having people constantly tell me how intelligent and hilarious i am. hard to go back to being drab and predictable. i really need to move out of the bay area. nuala had the right idea there.

i became a love mistress on the ice.

it is insane the number of things we do in ONE DAY here. on the 27th we rode helicopters, hiked on a glacier, swam in a lake, kayaked on a lake, went shopping, had a BBQ, and looked at glowworms (it’s their poo!). the day before we biked down a mountain, walked to a waterfall, swam in a river, hiked up to a glacier, hiked back to the hotel, pet a sheep, hung out in a cemetary, and fed a horse. so far today we’ve hiked around pancake rocks, hiked to a seal colony, fed many horses, fed seagulls, shopped, had ice cream, and are about to kayak in the abel tasman national park on the ocean. tomorrow we’re going swimming with seals. which includes a 4 hour boat ride, other swimming, and a hike back along the beach.

back to the love mistress thing. on the glacier day while waiting for the helicopter we were making jokes. i promised a burlesque show up on the ice and they could throw dollar coins at me and start an avalanche. stupid country with no dollar bills. once up there, troy let me hold his ax. also named troy. hugh and i hung out for pictures in the heart shaped ice tunnel and he nicknamed me his love mistress. later he threw his water shoe at my head and gave me a black eye. the physical abuse i’m sustaining as a love mistress is a trifle undesirable. but the fun i am having is undeniable.

post office rock.

the most brilliant thing ever. even more brilliant than the possums.

milford’s first post office was this tiny rock out at the mouth of the milford sound where the tasmian sea is. on this rock is a big tree with some thick branches. the people of milford (and their attendant sand flies) hung a rum barrel on the tree and would put the mail in it. a white flag was then raised and passing ships that knew the signal would stop and sift through the mail. if any were addressed to a location they were heading it would be taken along and posted.

a rum barrel on a tree full of letters that maybe would never get sent. how cool is that?

and penguins swimming under it. penguins! grah! so adorable!