Subject: Date: Thu, 4 May 2000 05:19:23 -0700 (PDT) From: "Devin L. Vagt" To: devin@chump.com NZ I'm in the LA terminal for flights to New Zealand, and people already look less American. They look pasty. I keep telling myself that I'm in LA, I'm still in LA, because I really can't tell. This place is unfamiliar to me. I could be there already. It's all different faces, different food, different air. My flight was delayed, and when we landed one of the stewardesses said "some of our passengers have international connections, so if you would be kind enough to let them out first so they can catch their flight ..." The people in my aisle were nice enough to let me jump out of my window seat and leave quick, but my pessimism assures me that no way could everyone getting up in the front of the line had to catch a flight. I had a pleasant conversation with a woman in SF. She noticed me sewing up my backpack with floss. I noticed her working on her palm pilot. She is in sales. It turns out she was playing solitaire the whole time. There is no clock in this restaurant and I lost my watch. This makes me about as nervous as I can be on Vicadin. I'm getting into the backpacker/traveller mindset already, I went to the bathroom and when I looked at the sink I thought "free water." Finally! A woman that looks like Rachael Hunter! The woman taking boarding passes asks us to not rush the gate and reminds us that the plane will not leave until we're all on it. I want to cheer. I'm seated not on the aisle, but one seat in. Still better than a window seat. Having a window seat on a flight like this is like playing "mastermind." The prize is successfully getting to go to the bathroom when you want to. The two guys on my right are canauks from Vancouver. Luckily, I don't need to interact with them, only with the guy on my left, the guy between me and the aisle. The stewards wear the yellow flotation vest and mime inflation styles. I'm pretty sure we're dead if the plane goes down. Anyone who has watched the news lately knows this. It's a 13 hour trip. I can only imagine how I'm going to feel when this flight is over. I am going to have to deal with the metric system being all up in my face all the time. I got an idea: stick something into the ground, maybe at the beach, and measure out a kilometre and walk. Then, look back at the stick and look real hard. Eventually, I should absorb the kilometre-ness of it. I'm in the Auckland airport now, it's 7:15 am. I think it's 11:15 am in SF, 19 April '00. I need a map and a ride into the city. And I need some of this weight gone. Customs helped a little with that -- they confiscated a container of honey and a head of garlic, about half a pound. NZ part 2, 19 Apr '00 Some things you should know about New Zealand: the paper money has clear plastic sections in it that you can see through. The coins come in denominations up to $2. Also the conversation rate is such that one American dollar gets you just about two New Zealand dollars. So that $8.95 sewing kit really only cost me $4.47. Never mind that a stay at any hotel would yield me the same thing, for free. Next, I spent a couple of hours trying to find a cheap-ass casio watch to replace the one I lost. This was a difficult thing for me, in Auckland. Finally I found a store that sold the type of watch I was looking for. The woman who ran the shop spoke just about no English and knew less that I do about digital watches. So I hung out in this tiny watch and luggage shop looking for a watch with an alarm and figuring out the operating systems on the various watches. I paid 39 New Zealand dollars (how much is that in American, kids?) for a watch called "LAtitude." It had the loudest alarm of all the watches. I have to get up at 8 am (God only knows what time it is in San Francisco, where my body evidentally believes itself to be, still) to take a ferry to the Great Barrier Island. Incidentally, if you need any detailed maps of New Zealand, "Auckland Map Centre", just off Queens on Wyndham, is excellent. I managed to replace my garlic and honey as well as get a litre of soy milk, something I was sure I wouldn't be able to find around here. Soy milk is fairly popular here I guess and easy to find. It's happy hour for another ten minutes at the bar in the hostel I'm staying at (Auckland Central Backpackers), pints are only five dollars! MZ part 3, 20 Apr '00 I'm on a ferry to Great Barrier Island today. I had to run this morning to catch it. The motors were going and they were just about to pull away when I showed up, carrying about 45 pounds of stuff. It's a four hour trip. Six groups of people brought cars with them. I talked with a woman and her two sons. They are from Wellington. According to her, it's colder and drier down there. They brought their car with them and they've rented a house on the island. I'm probably going to try to scam some kitchen time off them. Why? I bought gas for my camp stove yesterday, without checking to make sure it was the right kind, and it wasn't. The two outdoor stores(Bivouac and Katmandhu) open at 930 and 9; too late for me to get the gas AND catch the ferry. So I wentto the dairy (corner store) and bought just about everything that looked good and required no cooking. I have too much food, too much of everything. I am obsessed with object's weight, and, to a lesser extent, their volume. According to the woman, shit is busier lately(my words) because it's the Easter holiday. By next Wednesday (six days from now) things will thin out. I had my first New Zealand coffee todayt on the ferry.I just stood their with my empty paper cup. The guy serving the "coffee" had to tell me about three times before I figure out what was going on: instant coffee. I was having instant coffee. I haven't had instant since 1991. I mixed it with some cocoa powder I had and it tasted OK. "You'll get a strong cup" the guy said. He is obviously a retsam. Being on the ocean is fun. I can see the coromandel peninsula, waiheke island, and little barrier island. According to this New Zealand man, waiheke island is currently hosting a jazz festival. Cars aren't allowed on the island, but everyone has them anyway. When the police come out to the island, it takes them about 2 hours (they take the ferry like everybody else), the captain radios ahead and everyone has two hours to hide their car and any other illegal stuff they have. It sounds like a cool place to live to me. It's warm and humid again today -- even with the wind and sea spray I'm cool with a t-shirt. I got a food idea -- maybe I can soak my cook-food and it will become edible after a while, without the stove. I'm going to try an experiment. There will be many cookies, biscuits, digestives, etc. in my future. NZ part 4 My tent is not waterproof. I found this out last night. I had been hiking for about five hours and it was well after dark when I reacked Whangaparapara hut. A hut is basically just a shack out in the woods, with a sink, table, maybe a wood stove and some propane burners if you're lucky, and some bunks. Not Whangaparapara -- it burned to the ground about a month ago. I did not know until I arrived on the spot. What I found was a big black square where the hut used to be, plus the woodstove, which survived the fire completely fine. A british couple hoined me not long after I got there -- Paul and Liz. They are so English -- they said "proper" about four times each and when I left them the next morning, they were rationing out their tea to make it last 3 more days exactly. But the tent -- at about 11pm last night it started to rain very gently, a rain that made me think of Leonardo DiCaprio, for some reason. I set up the tent for rain and got back inside. Little driplets slowly formed and landed on my face; very distressing. The tent kept me dry enough, though I spent about an hour trying to figure out how wet I was going to become. Tonight I pitch my tent under a tree. My experiment worked: couscous + cold water = food in about five minutes. With honey and dried apricots it's pretty good. I hiked about six hours today. I also got my ferry bumped up from tomorrow @ 9am (not do-able, it's landing in Tryphena about 46 km away) to Monday @ 4 pm, 3 days from now. There are no mosquitos on this island, that I can find. I attribute this to the fac tthat I have yet to see a mammal besides people and dogs. A giant swarm of insects has formed over my belingings while I have been writing this. Note about map reading: keep the map open to the region you think you are currently in. If it's raining, keep it in a ziplock bag. Also, junctions that look like 4-way intersections may in fact be two 3-way intersections maybe 100 yards from each other. Lastly, don't worry too much about the map getting thrashed: most likely in a few days you'll be somewhere else and you won't give a shit what condition that map is in. Today is Good Friday. I discovered this means alchohol cannot be sold on this day. I felt like an asshole for trying to get drunk of a day when the kiwis are supposed to be all respectful.