Consider the value of a dollar. Now consider ten thousand of them. The distance between Vancouver, Canada and Auckland, New Zealand is eleven thousand kilometers. I’m going to round that down to ten thousand kilometers because I’m an international business bigwig to whom one thousand anythings is just a mere rounding error. Here’s some math:

$10,000 / 10,000km = $1 per km

I’ll leave you with that for a moment.

I’m on an airplane heading back to New Zealand. My traveling companion with whom (twice in two paragraphs) I have sat, either window or aisle, for so many miles is not here. Although my travelling muse is missing, that’s not a bad thing for our bank account considering the dollar figure I just left you with. Unlike the last trip out, there are no stolen vacations, no working the system, just business. Dollars are dollars regardless of USD, NZD or AUD. So business it is and in business I am in.

I flew trans-continental business class once before, many years ago, when I was just a young whippersnapper of a worker. A freebie from American (or United, or Continental Airlines, I can’t remember who) to build loyalty to their newly opened route from Portland to Heathrow. I was too young to appreciate it and equally too hungover to enjoy it. Now, with probably one hundred thousand air miles travelled, although mysteriously not accumulated, I get to fly business class again.

My seat reclines and then folds like an oversized origami swan, to a fully horizontal position with the touch of a button. I can do this whenever I want because in my class of travel I appear to be immune to FAA regulations and can take off at the same inclination as the plane if I wish. My TV is on an armature that pivots, pitches and yaws to the ultimate viewing angle and my stewardess ensures that at any given moment my wine glass is full and its bounty never obstructs my multi-articulated movie watching. I shall call her my stewardess not because of sexism but because of classicism. As I type, my neighbors, who I take to be an semi-elderly couple on a big splurge, have left to brush their teeth (and not to be members of the mile-high club I hope) and in their absence our stewardess has made their bed with fresh linens. That, my readers, is class. It’s class in the same way the leaving for the restroom at El Gaucho ensures a folded napkin on your seat upon your return.

I have a wine menu highlighting great New Zealand wines and a choice of entrees devised by the three top chefs in the whole of New Zealand. Champagne awaited my embarkation although I chose orange juice (from concentrate – strike one against business class) – a more sensible choice forced upon me by two rather hurried pints of beer in the bar before boarding. A four-course dinner followed, served with a tablecloth, napkin and warm artisan bread accompanied by olive oil in a small plastic bottle not unlike the small bottles of shampoo given to you in hotel bathrooms. My entrée was of restaurant quality albeit a mini-me version. Quite sensible as it turns out because in business class we don’t fart, nor do we wish to battle the urge brought on by excessive eating. [Although, as I type this, we do apparently snore] I was even offered desert wine, a luxury I have yet to appreciate but then I’m not quite forty. Disappointingly, in the modern airline industry paranoia trumps luxury and although forks and spoons were silverware, my knife was plastic. It was the runt of my flatware litter. Despite the obvious attention to detail, certain parts of the service still had that slightly chilled feel as if it had been sitting in carts in the cold store waiting for the aircraft. It’s a bizarre tactile thing, your fork is a little colder than forks normally are or the body of the glass has a chill that is leaching its way into the red wine. I don’t mean to grumble though.

I watched a movie – you get nicer headphones in business class too. I went to bed – but not before I brushed my teeth, indicating to my stewardess, in a non-verbal and subtle manner that befits my class, that I wish my bed to be made. Upon my fresh mouthed return I discovered that either my subtlety was missed or my fraudulent pretense at being upper class was discovered because my bed was still a seat and my linens nowhere to be seen. I had to do the walk of shame past the few rows of economy class to find my stewardess and ask for my bed to be created. Very humiliating. I then went to sleep, which I did until sort of didn’t, then couldn’t, then could until I shouldn’t in case I missed the gastro thrill of business class breakfast. The bed serves as a metaphor for flying business class in general: despite the linens and mini duvet thing, you’re still only lying on a stiff aircraft seat.

Back to basic math:

10,000km / $10,000 = pretty spendy.

The Queen Mary II is substantially cheaper and you get six days of business class. However, flying business does take up one whole row of seats and it is about 3 times the price of a regular, full price economy ticket. I would never spend $10K of my own money so I’m not sure how my unethical brain won out over the normally incorruptible dominant side. But if the inventory of my life’s moral dilemmas contains only the distant feeling of guilt from spending $10,000 of my employers’ billion dollar revenues then I would have cause to celebrate upon my expiration. (Those keen observers of human psychology will have just noted my ham-fisted justification of this morally dubious act as just a mere delay tactic in the hope it will probably all come out in the wash at the moment when I am actually forced to reconcile my life’s actions)

Assessing the merits of such an excessive travel experience is an interesting mathematical equation that probably looks a little like this:

Ticket $ * need / entitlement * (sense there of)

—————————————————————–         *  angle of seat recline

wine * chanpagne / (orange juice – from concentrate)

Here some more complex math, a formula that even our best mathematicians can’t solve:

life = 1

I have a suntan. I also haven’t shaved for nearly two weeks. Both feel good although the former didn’t feel quite so good at first and the latter is starting to itch so probably won’t feel quite so good for much longer. We leave tomorrow. No doubt my skin is looking forward to that more than the rest of my body. I can hear and see the surf from our little caravan situated in the garden of the hostel we’re staying at in Opotiki. Our friends from Seattle, Kurt and Lisa have joined us. They are on the start of a seven month sabbatical in NZ and coincidences in this small world being what they insist on being, we were able to meet up and enjoy a few days together. They are settling in well to their new adventure and I have stopped baby-sitting them. They didn’t really need me to do that but I can’t help myself. I’m always meddling in other people’s ability to think for themselves.

I think K&L are quite bonkers. I think they think the same. Currently, in a dog pound in the quarantined section of Auckland sits not only their Australian Sheppard, Ransom but their rather aging mixed-meat kitty cat Gracie. In just a few days Scooby Doo will come to life when their little Toyota Town-Ace van becomes the Mystery Machine and Kurt (Shaggy), Lisa (Daphine), Ransom (Scooby) and Gracie (Thelma) head around the North Island to be those meddling kids. Hannah Barbera always implied that Scooby was perfectly house trained, could probably use a bidet and prefers Charmain softness to toilet paper made from a recycled paper product. K&L have to find somewhere in the van to put a litter tray and Gracie has to learn to poop at 100km/h on winding country roads. She’ll have a month in which to master this new skill before they settle in Nelson but in the meantime all four of them will be living out of and sleeping in the van/litter tray. Much hilarity is sure to ensue.

In my last piece I bemoaned the fine sport of surfing. Today I sea-kayaked which is somewhat like surfing only more comfortable. One sits in a special kayak and paddles out through the surf to the quieter waters. Turn the thing around, paddle hard and ride the wave all the way to a shuddering halt on the sand. It’s terrific fun but mainly because little effort is really involved and sitting in the calm waters is reminiscent of taking to a rowboat on a lake whilst sipping a fine chardonnay. I did tip over a few times though so best not take out the fine crystal.

New Zealand sounds idyllic I know, but it is not without its cultural struggles. As you may know, the semi-native Maori have done better than most indigenous peoples in wresting equality and some semblance of their culture back from The Crown. Pocket battles still rage however, especially in the renaming of towns from the anglicized versions given to them in the late 1800’s. In Maori, most towns that have a “W” in their name are spelled with a “Wh” and pronounced “fha”. Apparently the Victorians had a problem with this and either took the “h” away or stubbornly refused to change their pronunciation from a hard “W”.  All this useless information only serves to make the following anecdote barely understandable and whether it is at all amusing remains to be seen:

So, there we were, in the car, tuning into the local (they are all local) radio station when the news report broke into the somewhat sporadic music selection to announce that the town council of W(h)anga-something-or-other had just reached a long awaited and long fought for decision on the correct cultural spelling of their town.

[Cut to news reader]:

“John Smith, chairman of the town council said this was the hard decision he has ever had to make.”

[Cut to field recording of John Smith, chairman of the town council]:

“This was the hardest decision I have ever had to make.”

[Cut back to news reader]

And the verdict? They have decided that the town of W(h)anga-something-or-other can be officially spelled Wanga-something-or-other or Whanga-something-or-other.

This story illustrates two main facets of global travel. Firstly, cultural imperialism is hard to quash. Because the British got their far reaching fingers on these small islands first means the British trait of reiterating the bloody obvious only to come to a decision that placates everybody and pleases nobody instead of leaving the status quo that at least pleased somebody, prevailed. We should, however, be content with that minor quibble for when America’s cultural empire crumbles the world will be left only with a global obesity of bad food, guns, violence and reality television.

Oh yes – the second facet of global travel – local news stories are hard to transcribe into blog entries without boring your reader.

For me there is one travel event that says “I’m heading home” and that’s the reading of the Skymall catalog. I just finished my last perusal for a while as we jet back to Jet City. Could I resist the urge to purchase a palm reading device that promoted itself as “the latest in ancient technology”, a team logo’d football helmet for my dog and any number of devices that would secretly record my business meetings via video enabled sunglasses, pens and paperweights? (Question: does anyone still use a paperweight – when was the last time someone in your office opened a window and your carefully arranged stack of memorandums took flight from a freak gust of wind?) Skymall represents America in all its gory glory. The excess, the commercialism, the innovation,  the snake-oil, the entrepreneurial drive and the utter uselessness of most things in our life. When I travel, if people should ask me what America is really like I say it’s just like you see in the movies and every stereotype you hear about is true. If you stop to consider the breadth of the American movie experience from indie flicks to major productions and the range of every American you know from cab drivers to gun-toting freaks you realize that America is a stylized, hyper-realized pastiche of itself and everything it exports in its popular culture is true. New Zealand is not that. It is many things but not as many things. It is neither better nor worse, just different. I will tire of America one day and when I do, I’ll live somewhere else and that’s when I’ll stop reading the Skymall catalog.

There you have it. Another 10,000 miles flown and several thousand biased words written on the world in general. Thanks for flying with us – we realize you have a choice and we appreciated your patronage but please remember that your nearest emergency exit may be behind you.

It’s been too long since my fingers put those two words and one punctuation character together. This is a macro blog of a micro trip. But we are back. Back on the road, back in hostels and back in New Zealand. Things are different. Not NZ, that appears to be pretty much intact. But we’re different – circumstances are different. For the record, for posterity and to clear the air of any pretense, I’m here in NZ sucking on the teat of corporate America; sent down under (almost) to sell my company’s wares to corporate New Zealand. In return for the subsidized pleasures of an industrialized road warrior, I/we get a subsidized vacation back to a country we love. I refuse to bore you with the economics of this trip – suffice to say that it actually saved us no money at all but rather financed a luxury beyond a point we would have spent anyway. A last minute plane ticket for Sarah equals the price of two reasonably advanced bookings and three nights of expense account excesses in a major metropolitan city would have been beyond the depth of my wallet or indeed, the willingness of my thrifty fingers to delve in anywhere near to it. To atone for these sins, I sit writing this in our sparse, non-en-suite room in the Raglan Backpacker’s Hostel (albeit on a rather nice MacBook Pro).

Back to business. And business it was. Our potential customer was nice enough. Business like, formal, professional and quite insistent their million or so dollars be well spent. I reciprocated with being equally as business like (I did not put my feet upon the conference room table as I am want to do at home), formal (I wore a suit and tie when nobody else did), professional (I resisted the urge to be 100% honest 100% of the time) whilst gamely trying to convince them I was the kind of guy you would want to give a million or so dollars to. As a sidebar, it’s not actually my job to do the aforementioned as I live behind the perma-shield of being a technician – eccentric semi-genius and utterly incapable of understanding the value of dollar. However, I am but a man. By 2pm on the final day of meetings I started to watch the clock. Talk about SLA’s, PDA’s and TLA’s irritated my ear drums and my eyes stung from excessive dry marker usage in the desperate attempts to characterize technically complex concepts with irregularly drawn red boxes connected via wobbly green lines. It was time to go.

We rented a car. It was cheap – It is crap. Last time here we did the same thing. We’ve grown up and so has our cheapy rental. It has electric windows and a/c. Both appear to be working. It drifts to the left on roads. This could be because it’s old and has done many tired budget miles or it could also do it because it knows I don’t drive on the left as often I used to. Actually, the rental company probably alters the vehicle to drift left especially for their American customers. I paid an extra $10 a day for CDW – I’m getting old and worrisome.

We’re in Raglan – I mentioned that before I know but Raglan is a small surfing town that attracts the kind of backpacker that come for a weekend and stay all summer. We are not kids anymore, neither are we backpackers. This is a vacation away from what we are as much as what we do. They are young and I have grey hair. They are noisy in their bravado and surf bragging and I hope they will calm down before bedtime. I used to be them – I miss it sometimes. I thank them for letting me stay at their hostel for a few nights.

Although we may not necessarily belong here, we do belong everywhere. We both love the road, it doesn’t matter the budget especially when we are safe in knowledge that all hardships are temporary. Bourgeois backpackers – that’s us. I don’t care – I’ve been to more places than most and I’ve been doing this since I was 18 years old. I don’t have a lot to prove anymore except to myself. My inability to sit still whilst buying an expensive and somewhat stationary house proves I obviously am not at peace with my wanderlust. I am terrible at being honest with myself. I don’t even think that statement was necessarily true, that’s how bad I am at it.

A girl checked into the hostel after us yesterday. She was concerned about the $3 discrepancy between her Lonely Planet write-up and the actual cost of a bed in a shared room. We spent $30 on pizza last night. We are both in agreement that traveling with some money is better. Having said all that, just being with fellow travelers is rejuvenating even if we have little in common being both old and on regular vacation. I can’t be bothered to offer my bona-fides: “Yeah, we did 57,000 miles over ’07 and ‘08” sounds so pretentious.

New Zealand is beautiful. Astoundingly so. Still.

I don’t like to backtrack. I refuse to visit somewhere more than once because the world is big and our time on it is very small. The world is small and our impact on it is very big. Think about that too. Go book a plane ticket to somewhere strange but don’t forget to offset your carbon footprint.  I’m very happy to be back here. Nostalgia is a feeling I don’t have much time for in my grinchy heart but I am nostalgic for NZ. We were such greenbacks even though we had more miles under our belt then than most (there I go again with the pretention). India really is the traveler’s fulcrum point – nothing is the same after that. Travelling usually involves a constant level of stress. Even in the most westernized of places, busses must be caught, hostel rooms booked and possessions safeguarded. My lack of that feeling is a little strange to me and probably means the car will breakdown or somebody will steal my yuppie MacBook.

Even stranger is my writing this blog. As you have no doubt realized, I don’t really have anything to say. Tales of our adventurous antics (we borrowed a couple of bikes today and cycled to the beach) sound positively mundane and keen observations of local customs (the shops close generally between 4.30pm and 5pm, although one or two will stay open as late as 6pm) are somewhat moribund. Christmas, however, is quite bizarre in the sun. It’s not very festive but then I’ve been hyper-commercialized by Thanksgiving appearing to start before Halloween and Christmas following a mere six hours after that. Perhaps this is how they do it in normal places around the world. I read the local Raglan newspaper today (published weekly, eight pages, large font).  In their op-ed feature, a local writer opined on the loss of niceness at Christmas by shop staff and shoppers alike. He proposes we call it Nicemas. He was entirely Grinch-like in his berating of this country’s commercial approach to Christmas. He was really quite scathing in tone and word and not at all the person I would elect to be the founder of Nicemas. In other news, eight middle aged couples learned to dance to rock’n’roll music, efficiently and enjoyably taught by a former resident who has just moved back after 20 years of being away (previous place of residence unlisted but the reader was left to assume it was a large city – perhaps Hamilton, 60km up the road).

I wish I could surf. It looks fun for all of 25 seconds. The rest of it seems like an aquatic nightmare. This town is big for surfing due to its, well, big surf. It was also featured in a seminal surf movie from the 1960’s called An Endless Summer. To Raglan’s credit, I haven’t seen one t-shirt emblazoned with the movie’s logo. In Urban Outfitters on Broadway in Seattle they recently received another large shipment of light blue T’s sporting such logo. That’s ironic. The ocean was cold today. That’s reason 23 why I won’t surf. I wish I could though but I’m just not that kind of guy. Even if I could physically do it, there’s something about the culture that I intrinsically wouldn’t be able to grasp. I would always be like the little guy on Fantasy Island, forever in the company of strapping, good looking perfect specimens of youth that say the right things and make the right moves. I have never been particularly cool and surfing would act as a constant reminder of my high school era insistence that Buddy Holly was the best music I ever heard whilst my schoolmates were listening to Duran Duran and INXS.

On a related note – I brought the all-plastic Diana camera with me again on these travels. It captures the world beautifully. It reminds me that my own observations are just as inaccurate, soft around the edges, light streaked and imperfect. I think I look cool using that camera but I probably look like Buddy Holly. Several people have stopped to ask me about it but my explanation falls on befuddled ears. We live in a digital age – analogue crappiness has been supplanted by the iPhone (which also produces crappy images but on a different level). I would love to post images and show you what I’ve been photographing but I have to wait until I get home, get down to the lab, have the film processed, scan the negative, crop, color correct, post-process and upload. By then you won’t care anymore – oh well.

New Zealand smells great. There’s humidity in the air that catches the miniscule smells emanating from the leaves of the sub-tropical fauna and is pushed along by an insistent salt-laden ocean breeze. It’s great for the sinuses. Fruit and vegetables also taste better and they appear to be cheaper. Makes you wonder how such a small country can produce so and the mighty America still pulls its chicken apart with machines. Dining out is EXPENSIVE with small portions yet high quality. That’s another blow to these here American psyches – we just don’t deal well with that concept. We should learn to. It would be better for all concerned. Restaurant service has generally not improved since our last trip. We have been the willing recipients of two separate rounds of free beers due to service inadequacies beyond our control. Perhaps I should start a restaurant exchange program like they have for school children – the Kiwi cooks could show the Americans how to produce perfectly balanced and portion controlled meals whilst the Americans could show the Kiwis how to take a simple fucking order. I joke. The expletive was uncalled for. I’m sorry for that but I respectfully refuse to use the backspace key.

I suppose that’s enough for now. I’m not sure why I’m writing this. My audience is long gone since our last world tour and I certainly don’t do this for any cathartic reasons. I’ll probably post this up on the blog, feel satisfied for five minutes and then casually but intentionally email my friends and family that it’s there. Or, I’ll probably have Sarah post it on her Facebook page. She has more friends than I do and they care about what she does. I could even tweet this monster but it would probably bring down the twittersphere with its girthy and gritty realism. However you have just digested this, please be kind and remember that I crave your attention and accolades.

Kia Ora,

Dave

(Kia Ora means hello – I’ve no idea what goodbye is)

Dave:
1) Roundabouts
2) Free book exchange in hostels
3) Hearing cricket scores on the radio
4) Not seeing the ocean nearly everyday
5) Kath and Kim (on 3)

Ultimate Top Five Things We Won’t Miss
Sarah:
1) Sharing a kitchen
2) People who do not say “Excuse me” before pushing you out the way in stores and on the sidewalk
3) Having flip flops be the dressiest shoes I own
4) Paying $6 for bread and oil in restaurants
5) Having the toilet be in a separate building from the bedroom.

Dave:
1) Restaurant service
2) Having my fleece be my only form of sweater
3) Sharing a kitchen
4) Kiwis talking through movies
5) Beer only comes in a half pint

Ultimate Top Five Things We’ve Done
Sarah:
1) Skydiving
2) Michael Stipe saying he loves me and dedicating Nightswimming to me
3) Flying in a helicopter
4) Zippy’s Chocolate Cake
5) Everything that happened in Nelson including: Saturday market and swimming holes

Dave:
1) Swimming with Dolphins
2) Skydive
3) Macs Brewery tour on my birthday
4) Whitewater rafting
5) Crashing the surf
** Please note: Michael Stipe did not talk to Sarah – she’s having delusions….

Ultimate Top Five Songs Everywhere and Everybody in New Zealand Loves But We Now Hate
1) Wild World – Cat Stevens
2) Hotel California – Eagles
3) Living on a Prayer / Dead of Alive – Bon Jovi
4) Song Sung Blue – Neil Diamond
5) Everything by Donovan Frankenreiter (A Jack Johnson clone)
6) Everything by Jack Johnson (A Donovan Frankenreiter clone)

Ultimate Top Five Reasons We Love Seattle Even More
1) Going down the pub with our friends
2) Quantum
3) Decent restaurant service and prices (especially breakfast/brunch)
4) Darby (our cat)
5) Living in a city

Don’t forget to check out our first gallery and our second gallery and our third gallery and our forth gallery and our fifth gallery and our sixth gallery and our seventh gallery and our eighth gallery and our ninth gallery and our tenth gallery and our eleventh gallery and all our extreme sports mad stuff.

Well, that’s it. It’s just six hours before we climb aboard the plane and head home. We’ll arrive in Seattle before we left Auckland although I’m sure it will feel as though we left NZ a week ago. In just short of both 90 days and 9000 kilometers I think we’ve just about completed everything. In fact, so much we’re having trouble remembering one town from another and one mountain from another. Here’s some interesting facts for you:

Number of kilometers driven: 8955
NZ$ spent on gas: 810
NZ$ spent on beer and wine: 675
Number of waterfalls seen: 21
Kilograms of supermarket muesli consumed: 12
Number of hours of internet cafe time bought: 25
Number of times “Hotel California” was heard in pubs, shops, cafes and on the radio: 2376
Number of sandfly bites: 65 bites per leg per person (plus assorted assaults on other body parts)
Number of photos taken: 1210
Number of photos in our galleries: 822
Therefore: Number of photos you were spared looking through: 388 (say “thank you”)

the facts go on and on…. look out for out ultimate top five lists in upcoming posts.

What did we learn? What did we discover? Well, that’s for a separate conversation. Lots to talk about over beers and campfires. In the meantime here’s more pictures.

See you in Seattle!!

Don’t forget to check out our first gallery and our second gallery and our third gallery and our forth gallery and our fifth gallery and our sixth gallery and our seventh gallery and our eighth gallery and our ninth gallery and our tenth gallery and our eleventh gallery and all our extreme sports mad stuff.

Who here either recognizes this meal or, for a bonus point, has actually had this exact plate of goodies:

1. 1 burnt bbq’ed sausage
2. 1 peice of burnt steak
3. rice with curry powder and raisins
4. mix-your-own coleslaw (raw coleslaw veggies and a dollop of mayo on the side)

I said to David at a backpacker bbq, “what a funny meal”. He said, “this is such a typical British bbq meal. I’ve had the exact thing many times.”

Mmm, yum.

Don’t forget to check out our first gallery and our second gallery and our third gallery and our forth gallery and our fifth gallery and our sixth gallery and our seventh gallery and all our extreme sports mad stuff.

We’ve been heading south and south and south. We’ve been to the most southerly part of the south island, then headed north to the south pole.

In the southern hemisphere south doesn’t mean more warmth. The further south we headed the worse the weather became. All the way down the west coast the weather is affected by a mountain range just a few kilometers from the ocean so it does nothing but rain, then you get a little break in Queenstown only to pick up the crappy weather as you head towards the armpit of New Zealand, the depressing town of Invercargil.

In one way Invercargil should be marveled because it’s founders had the ambition to design a flat town laid out in a grid with wide streets and grand Victorian building facades. Engravings on the facades proudly exclaim the businesses that owned them and the buildings are named after important people of the time. And then people just stopped coming to town and the buildings now lie in a state of Victorian decay. Dirty crumbling plaster and rusting ornaments adorn these once proud buildings as they sit on those massive but almost deserted streets. It’s all very depressing and we were glad to only be staying for a night. We went to the movies – that was about all there was to do!!

Next we headed to The Catlins where we found Slope Point, the most southerly part of the southern island. We saw some more bloody waterfalls and took a walk in field with a bunch of sheep. Please note. Sheep look cute at one end and completely lack any form of personal hygiene at the other.

Next we went to Dunedin. Surprisingly this was better than we expected. Here we found the best “alternative” area of all the cities we’d visited. The street we stayed on was like Seattle’s Broadway/The Ave/Fremont. Record stores, cheap eats, funky shopping etc. Strange this little city beats Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch for being hip and cool. We took a creepy night time tour around all of Dunedin’s murder and ghost spots. It was refreshing to hear doom and gloom!!

Next we turned north and headed to the south pole. Well, actually we went to the Antarctic Research Center in Christchurch. Here we learned all about the cool scientific work that goes on in the south pole and how they get the people and equipment there. We even went into this snow chamber where they turn on massive fans so visitors can feel what a minus 25 degree Celsius Antarctic wind storm feels like. It’s cold let me tell you.

Next was a visit to the Christchurch speedway. That was fun. Loud cars zooming around a muddy track whilst the redneck population of the area drank bad beer through the gaps in their teeth. We were covered in mud and partially deaf at the end of the evening but it was $15 well spent and I’m certain we were the only tourists there.

Now we’re in Kaikoura and killing an hour before we swim with the dolphins. Whether the dolphins want to swim with us remains to be seen.

Don’t forget to check out our first gallery and our second gallery and our third gallery and our forth gallery and our fifth gallery and our sixth gallery and our seventh gallery and all our extreme sports mad stuff.

Then we drove to see some glaciers that are only a few miles from the coast but it was colder than winter in Seattle. Here’s Sarah looking cold:

Then everything suddenly looked like this and we were back in shorts and t-shirts:

Last Monday we stayed in a crappy little town called Greymouth, yesterday they had a 120mph tornado. 25 houses blew away and some guy’s subaru found itself 50 meters from where it started on it’s roof. We have no pictues of this because, fortunately, we were about 300 kms away. Even the kiwis don’t know what’s up with the weather and its their country!!

Don’t forget to check out our first gallery and our second gallery and our third gallery and our forth gallery and our fifth gallery and our sixth gallery and our seventh gallery and all our extreme sports mad stuff.

For those who have not been glued to their maps, Queenstown is way down south of the way down south island. Everything here is about extreme outdoors: bungy jumping (and it’s eight derivatives), parachuting, parasailing (and it’s three derivatives), canyoning, jet boating, off-road motorbikes and quads, 4wd off road jeeps, rafting, river surfing etc etc. The list goes on and on and on.

There are four types of retail establishment in this fairly large town: the booking office for all your extreme outdoor activities, the outdoor store where one may purchase equipment for the extreme outdoor activities, the T-shirt shop where one can buy a T-shirt saying you did the extreme outdoor activity and the bar where one goes to celebrate the completion of the extreme outdoor activity. That’s it… it’s a fairly succinct economy.

So today we went quad biking (or ATV’s for the americans amongst us). ATV’s (or quad bikes for the non-americans amongst us) are 250cc four wheel drive motorcycles. We were bussed out to the middle of beautiful nowhere, given ten minutes instruction and then hit the trail. Off roading up hill and down valley through mud, rivers and gullies all in the name of wondering if the end of your life was near. Its a blast and Sarah proved herself to be a 4wd vixen. Nothing can stop this girl when she want to cross a river or drive through four foot of mud. Not wanting to be upstaged the author nearly tipped his quad bike off a bridge into the raging torrent below (ok, ok, it was a little stream but I would have got really wet).

Upon our return we supported the Queenstown economy further by going for a few beers to celebrate our near brush with the brush. Pictures will follow at the next upload point.

Don’t forget to check out our first gallery and our second gallery and our third gallery and our forth gallery and our fifth gallery and our sixth gallery and our seventh gallery and all our extreme sports mad stuff.

The best plan we made for this whole adventure was renting this house and staying put in a small foreign town for 5 weeks.

When you isolate yourself entirely from your normal environment – take yourself out of your own home, your own tv, your phone ringing, go without your own friends or family – cool things start to happen. You get past the normal niceness of a two week vacation to the beach. You reach a kind of clear head that none of us have probably had since we were kids totally taking summer vacation for granted. David has been writing songs, I’ve been drawing and painting, we’ve been cooking these really incredible dinners and having really cool conversations. We’re still doing touristy stuff and looking around shops and stuff – but literally half the time we’ve been in this town we’ve done nothing. Really nothing but sit in that lovely tree house which totally allows us to do things we’re too tired or can’t be bothered to do at home when we have a spare hour or two. We fully realize that this is rare and will go away as soon as we step back into a city with 4 million people. It is really no wonder that writers and artists take themselves away to mountain cabins or isolated beaches to just be. I highly recommend it. Based on our findings, it takes an adult with a normal amount of built-up stress at least 2 months to rid themselves of it. Sounds impossible to the American work ethic but it’s not, people. Can we inspire just one person to do this, too??

When not doing nothing, here are some other cool things we’ve done:

1. Abel Tasmen National Park. Whatever you dream turquoise water, white sand beaches and tropical forest to look like – this is it. We did a full day kayaking up to a beach where we slept for a night and then hiked a full day further up the coast. Awesome.

2. Farewell Spit. Basically a 10 mile sandbar that stretches out into the ocean. On the northern tip of the southern island. Since they’ve turned it into a bird sanctuary it’s impossible for grubby tourists to traverse it on their own. You have to pay to go on a tour which we agreed to do since a 10 mile sand bar sounded cool to us. Little did we know that the median age on these tours is about 75. We totally blew their statistical data the day we went. The woman behind us had to repeat every single thing the guide said to her deaf husband – loudly. The couple across the aisle had something terrible in their lungs they had to cough up for 4 hours straight not to mention the elephant call they blew into their cotton hankerchiefs. Most of the bus had support socks pulled to their knees and the women were growing hair where they shouldn’t. Still, the sandbar was lovely and we got to play on really cool sand dunes. And we got cool pictures!

We leave Nelson bright and early Monday morning, March 7th. Our route will take us down the west coast where we will leave the sun and warm for quite a while. First stop: the town of Greymouth just for a night as we make our way to Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers.

Our little seafoam Corolla is all gassed up and we’re ready to go. More from the road!
Love,
Your favorite travelers,
Sarah & Dave

Don’t forget to check out our first gallery and our second gallery and our third gallery and our forth gallery and our fifth gallery and our sixth gallery and all our extreme sports mad stuff.