Nelson and Abel Tasman (Feb 16-18th)

We rode off the ferry at 5am. After much argument, I finally convinced Franca to get some more sleep while I drove. My first view of the South Island were every bit as dramatic as I had been told.


I opted for the scenic route along Queen Charlotte Drive and reveled in my choice as one stunning vista after another opened up before me, from mountain peaks to lakes to rolling pastures and farms, all in under two hours and all brilliantly illuminated by the morning sun.


As we came within an hour of our destination, the need for sleep overtook me, so we pulled over onto a lookout over a verdant valley and slept for nearly two hours, awoken only by the sound of a semi rattling past.

Our hostel had no problem admitting us early, and by noon, we had settled into our charmingly rustic digs with two other travelers and seated ourselves poolside.


We walked to pick up some groceries and wandered around Nelson a bit, taking in the bohemian vibe of the place.


Then, armed with a map and a rabid thirst for our favorite libation, we set off for Nelson wine country.


We stopped at three different vineyards, my favorite of which was a small family-run operation called Brightwater. I relished every one of the vintages we tasted there, and my particular enjoyment of their sauvignon blanc, despite my usual preference for reds, motivated me to buy a bottle for my birthday dinner the following month.


Franca and I had a grand time, swishing our glasses and listening to the tales of the vintners at each stop, but after three stops, we had had our fill. I had committed to spitting out at least half of what we sampled, so as to keep my wits about me while driving, but even so, I felt the need for some sustenance. We stopped off at a local farm, picked up a bushel of fresh veggies, and indulged in some delicious homemade ice cream mixed with fresh fruit.


That night, we tucked in early. But not until we had run into my friend Peter, whom I had met in Sucre, Bolivia and again in Buenos Aires. Even halfway around the world, I still saw old friends from the travel trail!

The next day we set off for Abel Tasman, on of NZ's renowned national parks. We had made a reservation to kayak along the park's shore but decided we preferred to hike so we headed north to the most remote and least trafficked section, not realizing it would take us all morning to get there. After several stops to confirm that we STILL hadn't passed our destination, it came into view.


As usual, the trip had consisted mostly of hairpin turns on steep inclines with the road falling away perilously to the sides, but the last leg took us along the most wickedly windy roads with whole lanes cordoned off where the pavement had buckled and tumbled downy the mountainside. By the time we finally found the parking lot and got on the trail, 1pm had come and gone.


I had thought the trail consisted mostly of beachside paths and had dressed and packed accordingly, but we were in for a serious hike. My hiking sandals didn't exactly measure up to their name, and I found myself often slipping on the dry dirt and sand. We were discussing my two-day old bike wounds and how if I fell again I'd better fall on my ass and not on my face, when... I fell. I fell two more times over the course of the day, making the wound on the heel of my hand worse each time. Franca's said that Italian superstitions held that everything happens three times, so I blamed that.


Fortunately, the hike proved well worth the struggle, providing a fantastic workout and breathtaking vistas on and over multiple beaches.


The day passed quickly, despite our exertion. We chased crazy kiwi birds with our cameras, fought off giant dragon flies and thorny grasses along the overgrown trail, and almost flashed fellow hikers on half a dozen occasions while heeding nature's call. We never seemed to see anyone else except at these times! Except for one remarkably slow guy we kept overtaking after each of our swimming or sight-seeing stops, despite the fact that he never seemed to stop.


Toward the end of the day, we watched the seals play at Seal Point. The walk felt punishing from this point on, and we spent most of the last hour saying to one another, "The parking lot's gotta be just around this next bend, right?" At last, we saw familiar territory, transformed magnificently by the setting sun.


I tore my shoes off as soon as the car came into sight, popped open the trunk, and hadn't even shut it before I started devouring my half of the pasta we had prepared that morning. Lukewarm spaghetti never tasted so good.

In order to avoid driving across such treacherous terrain in near pitch darkness, we set out after only a few bites and a short conversation with two Basque guys who couldn't believe that an American even knew what Basque country was. We found a gas station just in time before running out, and made our way back toward the bottom of Abel Tasman. Having miscommunicated with our intended CouchSurfing host, we were far too tired to hunt out accommodation after a 2-hour drive, an 8-hour hike and another 2-hour drive. So we drove into the lowest part of Abel Tasman, down the seemingly longest 10k road ever, parked in the lot outside of the kayaking center, huddled under Franca's sleeping bag, admired the dazzling celestial display through the windshield, and fell asleep.

The next morning, we awoke at 7am, drove to a nearby campsite, where I used the pay-with-coins shower, and drove back to the kayaking center. After a brief demonstration, the staff drove us to the beach, helped us into our vessel, and off we went.


We took a little while to find our rhythm together, but once we had, we decided to break off from the crowd and head first to the island across the water, where we could enjoy our lunch free from the crowds. But as we detached our rubber skirts and attempted to climb out, Franca misheard me saying I was getting out as SHE should get out, we tipped the kayak, and into the water I went, stupidly having just taken my Iphone out of the dry bag. Whatever. It was old and almost dead anyway.


Afterward a tasty lunch and a nap on the beach, we climbed back in and headed out. I seriously enjoyed kayaking, particularly because Franca had wanted me to drive, so I got to control the rudder with pedals.


We went to the opposite side of the island to watch the seals sunbathe.


One dove into the water and swam right under our kayak.


Afterward we headed back across to one of the beaches on the mainland, where I found a whole colony of mussels growing on the rocks.


We took another nap, realized we only had an hour to make it back to the embarkation point, got back in, and hightailed it back. Our return proved comical, as the shore looked entirely different with the turn of the tides, and we confused two of the beaches, almost running aground. Much to the amusement of the other kayakers passing by, we had to get ourselves out by using our oars as poles along the bottom.


We returned to our previous hostel in Nelson for the night and fell asleep early, completely exhausted.

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Location:Nelson, New Zealand

Taupo and Wellington... featuring the Infamous Bike Crash (Feb 12-15th)

As Noelle, Franca, and I started down the road from Coromandel to Rotorua, the sky turned gray and ugly. You might think the drive would have been boring and monotonous, but not with my girls. We chatted about everything from politics to cooking; we coined "chicks over dicks" as a response to the phrase "bros over hos"; Noelle advised me on my travels in Asia, and I did the same for her for South America. We laughed at Franca's inability to decipher the Kiwi accent after a glass of wine, and my misinterpretation of their slang all-purpose response "Sweet as" as "Sweet ass." The weather may have been bleak and I may have made Noelle's life flash before her eyes as I nearly side-swiped a tractor, but we rolled along happily.

When we arrived in the primarily Maori town of Rotorua, the combination of the foul weather and the equally foul smell of the sulphurous geysers throughout the town motivated us to pass on to Taupo, where we stayed the night. We spent the night chatting, reminiscing, and lamenting Noelle's imminent departure. At 2am, we took her to her bus and tearfully bid her farewell.

The next morning, Franca and I decided to forego the Tongarino Crossing, reputedly the best one-day hike in the world, because the folks at the Department of Conservation (DOC) advised us that we wouldn't be able to see anything anyway. Instead, we headed directly to Wellington, passing through the pastures of amber grasses that I'm fairly certain were used as Rohan in LOTR.



Neither of us fell in love with our hostel in Wellington, which was large and impersonal and made socializing difficult. They also charged exorbitant fees for internet, so we chose to head down to the waterside for sunset and to use the free internet there.


Strange sculptures and installations dotted the harbor side. Looking at one particularly puzzling piece, I asked "What the hell is that?" Franca shrugged. "Art." My adoration of her was growing by the minute.


Later, we cooked our first meal without Noelle, and I was delighted to discover that Franca had been hiding her own culinary talents. She started my cooking tutorial that very evening. Much fun, but we missed our little Spaniard.


The next day, the sky was gray again, but we decided to make the best of it and take the famous Welly cable car to the promontory above the city. The beautifully restored old car let us off at the top of the hill at the entrance to the botanical gardens through which we wandered.


The gardens were nice enough, but the rich and heady smells outshone the blooms themselves.


We spent the afternoon conversing and meandering at a leisurely pace. I remarked on my fascination with Franca's German pronunciation of "v". She always said "willage", which I understood, but I couldn't wrap my head around her saying "wivid." "Why don't you say 'wiwid?" I asked laughing. For her part, Franca was amused to no end by my constant need to reapply sunblock.


The most remarkable thing to happen that evening was our discovery of a note in our kitchen locker that said simply, "Broke ya code." We were baffled; the lock had been put back in place and nothing appeared to be missing. Clearly some people just have too much time on their hands.

For our last day on the North Island, we decided to rent a pair of bikes and ride around the waterside, depute the fact that the weather hadn't improved. The bike path wound for several kilometers along the docks, bays and beaches of Wellington.


We stopped at a store which I'd like to call "We'll Make Anything Out of Sheepskin." This place looked like one of those crazy tourist traps you always see in American road trip movies, but the goods were truly of high quality. I'm not sure I've felt anything so soft as the sheepskin rug atop a pile of such hides.


Eventually we reached the end of the traversable road, from which point we could see the CBD opposite us. We took a moment's break and headed back from whence we came, with Franca in the lead.

We had gone about two-thirds of the way when the bikeway and walkway, which had merged earlier, split again. I thought Franca was taking the wrong path, but I didn't see how it mattered.

It mattered.

The path took a hard turn, blindly splitting into two levels around the bend. Franca fortunately happened to come around the turn in such a way that she remained safely on the upper level. I wasn't so lucky. As I took the turn, my wheels teetered on the very edge of the top level for only a second or two before they slipped off to the bottom. You know that moment, which is really only a split second, when you know exactly what's going to happen and there's not a damn thing you can do about it? Franca says that she remembers thinking, "Hmmm, this is kind of dangerous. I hope she doesn't..." Cue crashing noise.

My legs hit first, scraping the pavement. I had put my hands out to protect my face, tearing them up in the process, but I hit the ground with such force that I skidded forward onto my face anyway. My handlebars dug into my right knee, ensuring that my disfigurement wasn't all one-sided.


I felt a burn, but jumped quickly to my feet, by which time I could already see my left cheek swelling out of the corner of my eye. I almost asked Franca how bad I looked, but her wincing made the question unnecessary. I lightened the mood substantially by asking, almost immediately and in all seriousness, if she thought my wounds would heal in three weeks, before I would see James in Australia. Clearly, my priorities were in order.


We waited a few minutes before remounting the bikes and pedaling gingerly back to the hostel, walking the bikes the last few blocks with passersby gawking at my appearance openly. A Japanese tourist even snapped my picture.

When I had cleaned my wounds, I moved the car again and stopped in to McDonald's to use the internet. I had already taken to walking in a cowed stance with my head down to avoid stares, but this approach motivated the manager of the Mickey D's to inquire as to whether or not I was being beaten. I thought it was pretty nice of him, actually.

Later that night, we made dinner and as I prepared dessert beside a German guy in the room beside ours, he asked to get a look. I lifted my face toward him, and he replied with a creepy grin, "I can't believe that's all it took to get closer." Ew. See again, the picture above of me looking like Quasimodo.

We had planned to meet up with some CouchSurfers, but I was so sore and we had to get to the ferry by 1am, so we opted to watch some crappy movies and play an impromptu game of "Name That Country" with other hostelers. Midnight rolled around, and we packed up the car and headed to the ferry pier.

When I had ordered the tickets, I had used a 10% discount that I had heard about, but for which you needed a membership card for a national hosteling organization to which I did not belong. I pretended to have left my card behind at the hostel, blaming my negligence on the hoopla surrounding my crash. I pointed to my wounds, pathetically. They had to be good for something, dammit. The sweet, smiling ticket agent sympathetically let us pass, and I felt terribly guilty immediately.

Karma, however, had a sense of humor. We had been sitting on the ferry dock for nearly an hour, with only a few minutes to go before we were due to drive aboard when the battery died. Panicked, we started tapping the windows of every car in our vicinity asking for assistance, much to the annoyance of sleeping passengers inside. We found someone with jumper cables, but his car stood too far from ours. The driver beside us begrudgingly allowed us to use his car, and between our jumper cable guy and the pack of bikers just in front of us, we got the car running again just in time.

We availed ourselves of the free hot cocoa, wrapped ourselves up in Franca's sleeping bag, laid out across a couple of chairs, and settled in for a few hours of poor-quality sleep.


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Location:Wellington, New Zealand

Coromandel (Feb 9-11th)

After trading in my cheap local rental car for a more expensive but still cheap, will-be-returned-to-another-city car, I returned to James's to grab my stuff and say bye, picked up the girls, and began the coastal drive up the Coromandel peninsula.


I discovered on this route that I really didn't understand the whole Kiwi "give way to the right" driving rule, so I decided to simply play it safe and always give way when unsure, frustrating more than one of my fellow drivers along the way. I also discovered the reason my rental car looked like someone had thrown bags of coins against it. PEBBLES! Apparently every stretch of road south of Auckland is strewn with them. When I had picked up the car, the agent had told me to note any scratches on the agreement's illustration. "Are you kidding me?", I asked, to which he responded by grabbing the pen out of my hand and jabbing the page repeatedly, until the car in the drawing looked as covered in freckles as I am.

The trip would have been entirely pleasant were it not for the bizarrely out-of-character aggression of New Zealand drivers. I swear, Kiwis are the nicest people in the world until you put them behind the wheel; then they transform into Mad Max. I considered 5 kphs over the speed limit to be an acceptable pace; you would have thought I was a blue hair going 20 kphs under, the way those behind me would whip around to pass me when the opportunity arose, honking irritably as they went. (Most roads in NZ have only one lane in each direction, with passing lanes every 5 kilometers or so.) I grant that Irwin-- we named the car after my sloth-like landlord back in Jersey-- had some trouble with hills, and when faced with them, we DID sometimes fall to 20 kphs under as I tapped the dashboard encouragingly, willing Irwin to make it to the crest. But given the sheer number of clunkers puttering about the NZ roadways, I would have thought other drivers were used to this phenomenon by now.

After a long slog up and down any number of twists and turns, my steerage of which prompted Noelle to utter a phrase never before spoken: "Lin, you're a really good driver, we pulled into the town of Matarangi around 4pm. A local CouchSurfer I had contacted ages ago had kindly agreed to host all three of us for the night. He'd left the door open for us, so we dropped our stuff off in the room he had set up for us, and we took a walk on the beach.


Scott had gotten home while we were out, and his friend Neville arrived from a 26-mile bike ride shortly thereafter so we watched the sunset and got to know each other over the first of many bottles of wine we'd share over the next few nights.


The guys grilled and Noelle put together a big ol' salad, and we chowed down. Franca complimented Scott on his cooking, saying that she didn't normally care for lamb. "That's because it's steak." The laughs kept coming as the wine flowed. Franca and I danced and sang along with one of Scott's many excellent playlists as we did the dishes, and looked up to find the other three laughing hysterically at us through the window. Eventually everyone slunk off to bed, but I think I can safely say that everyone had had a damn good night.


The next morning, Scott headed off to work, Neville to another bike ride, and the girls and I to see the sites, starting with the stunning Cathedral Cove.


A picturesque walk across a lush green bluff took us down to two small beaches connected by a natural tunnel.


We went through to the far side.


Scott had lent us a beach umbrella, so we laid out like spokes on a wheel with our heads under the shade and our bodies in the sun.


While Noelle and Franca slumbered, I wandered down the beach to take in the view of the astounding sandstone formations jutting out of the water.


I ducked back through the tunnel to the other side to explore and found a seagull perched atop yet another massive monolith at the water's edge.


I climbed up onto the rock wall along one side and watched the waves roll onto shore for a good half an hour, totally at peace.


When I got back to the girls, we decided to pack it up and head to Hot Water Beach. On the ride back, the girls laughed heartily at me for mooing out the window at what turned out to be a buffalo.


We got to Hot Water Beach a bit late and found it crowded with both tourists and locals digging pits into which piping hot water would bubble from below.


We found a spot, went to work with our rented shovels, and settled in. We only lasted half an hour, since our little nook was right next to the absolute hottest spot and every few minutes the heat would overpower us.


As we left the beach, we watched a lifeguard rescue a couple who had been taken out too far by the rip tide. Once we felt sure they were safe, Franca used the opportunity to get her BayWatch on.


That night, we picked up a few more bottles of wine to share with our host, and we started cooking again.


Dinner flew by and soon Franca and I were getting funky in the kitchen again.


Noelle and the guys threw darts while we washed the dishes. When Franca and I emerged, we joined the game, and, on an absolute fluke, I hit the best shot of the game.


One of Scott's fellow volunteer fireman had convinced Franca and Noelle to get up before dawn the next morning to go out on his boat for their fishing competition. I vehemently declined the offer and slept in, woke up, did some yoga, and watched Scott gut and clean his winning catch for our dinner that night.


Noelle took a nap while Franca and I had beers with Scott and his buddy's at the firehouse across the street. They entertained us with bawdy jokes and travel stories and had us rolling when they told us Scott's nickname: "Elephant Trunk."

And then Scott took us to a wake. That's not a typo. He took us to a wake. A traditional Swiss wake for a neighbor. It was largely a celebratory affair, leavened by some tears, and scored by those gigantic horns they use in the Ricola commercials. After that bizarre interlude, we enjoyed yet more wine, music, and our last dinner with Scotty.


The next morning we cleaned the kitchen and slipped out while he still slept, leaving a note thanking him for the amazing time we'd had at his place.

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Location:Maratangi, Coromandel, New Zealand