Songs in my head this morning.  It's hard to get them out when you're walking. I stayed at Bay and Christine's house for the last three days.  Ate out mnay times.  Went kayaking with Christine in the Bay.  People often compare Wellington to San Francisco.  They are both compact cities and are cooler than places around it.  I don't have a very detailed map of this area, but I will be OK.  It's tararua forest, a ways North of Wellington, the capital, where life continues as normal.  I have a cell phone now.  IT cost 100 NZ and comes with pre-paid air time.  IT's about as close as you can get to a disposable cell phone.  Just in case I break a leg or something, I can call the paramedics.  It doesn't work in this valley.  I will have to climb up to a ridge if I break my leg, I guess.  I've seen a few people come by this morning.  I'm near the trailhead.  Last night some guy came by with a flashlight, but I didn't say anything to him.It was dark, and I turned my flashlight off and sort of hid behind a bush and watched him run by.  Strange reaction, hmm?  I saw a possum last night.  He was a cute little guy.  Kiwis hate possums because there are way too many of them.  They were introduced in the 1800's in an attempt to create a fur industry in New Zealand.  It worked, sort of.  This morning, the sun came up and turned the dew into steam -- a real Kodak moment.  I walked for about four hours, then left my pack and searched around for another 45 minutes to find this cabin I'm staying in.  It's called Sayer's hut, and its really cool.  It's convered with signs outside, and inside it smells like smoke and wood.  There's another hut about a quarter mile away across the Waiohine river and it's nicer, but I wanted to be alone.  There were even a couple kiwis staying there, with which I had pleasant conversation.  The older one told a story about one of the tracks I'm going to do next in the South Island.  There are plently of candles in this hut, so I can write for as long as I like.  I even made a fire to dry my boots and clothes.  I saw a three legged dog today, running with his master.  One of the legs was broken or maimed in some way.  It was still running around left and right ahead of the guy, sniffing stuff like nothing was wrong.  I find the idea of losing my legs terrifying.  I wrote a little story, based on my hiking experiences, plus Tim O'brien, Starcraft, and Aliens.  You can read it if you want.
	A couple of things occurred to me today: The first is that time is meaningless, except for day and night, and the seasons, provided you're patient enough.  Next what I'm doing is trading my mental burden for a physical one.  When I put on this big ol' pack, I can forget about my apartment that is too small, annoying housemates, bills, boring job, streets, cities, houses, people.  Everything is Ok now because everything is temporary.  I'm only passing through.  I even enjoy crappy towns like Lower Hutt, NZ because I'm moving through them.  I'm the living embodiment of the old saying "This Too, Shall Pass" or, if you prefer, "It's Only Temporary." I've had some crazy dreams lately, involving my parents, friends, strange towns, religious cults.  I need to think them through some.
	7 May
	Queen Charlotte trail, South Island
	I haven't written much lately.  I've been hiking a lot without much daylight to spare.  It's May in New Zealand, so I imagine it's something like Washington State in fall -- The sun goes down around 5:30, and you'll get about another half-hour of light, depending on conditions.  By 6, it starts to get hard to see, out in these mountains.  If you are at all prone to hallucination, that's when they'll begin.  I imagined I saw a black cat last night which, while not so scary under normal circumstances, was particularaly disturbing to me in the woods.  I stayed at a shelter near bay of many coves.  The shelter is like a cabin without a forth wall; like a stage with a ceiling.  It's been raining since three this morning,and I am glad to have a roof over my head, even if in the walls that support it are many tiny encapsulated bodies of various dead insects, some of them large.  My cell phone worked very well.  I could see the lights from Wellington in the clouds, maybe forty miles away.
	LOTR note -- Non-family-members are not allowed inside Weta FX, the company that is doing the special effects for the movie.  All visitors have to sign an NDA anyway, so even if I got inside I wouldn't be able to tell you anything without going to jail.  I might be able to get a t-shirt.  I saw bright and red lights coming from the row of warehouses that hold the sets for the miniature sequences and all sorts of other sets.  The warehouses and offices for Weta FX are in the middle of a valley, surrounded by houses.  Most of the people in those houses work for Weta.  Next door to the Weta offices is a ice cream factory.  Weta is trying to buy out the factory so they can expand further.  I saw a big chunk of castle near lower hutt which is going to be helm's deep.  In addition, John Ryhes-Davies does very well as Gimli the Dwarf.  Liv Tyler and Elijah Wood live close by, as does director Peter Jackson.  It's weird to hear them referred to by their first names. -- ENDNOTE
	While driking a cup of coffee after about 5 days of hiking in the woods, I can't help but get a warm fuzzy feeling that everything is going to be all right.  Iaving coffee at 5 pm is pushing my coffee window, but like I said before, I'm in a different time zone 19 hours ahead of my old one, so the rule doesn't seem to apply.  I'm back in scenic Picton, at The Dog and Frog cafe.  Soon I'll be back in Wellington, then Queenstown, Auckland, and San Francisco, CA, USA.  There's a woman and a child a couple of tables away, and I can't tell what language they're talking in.  Maybe it's Maori.  It's fascinating.
	SECOND LOTR note -- bay was freaking out a little bit at dinner the day I came in.  He's doing faces for monsters in the movie, including Gollum.  He found out that day that the work he's doing isn't going to be the guide for the final product, it is going to BE the final product; what the audience will see when they watch the movie a year and a half from now.  He's a little nervous about it.  Christine works part-time finding housing for new recruits from overseas.  Everyone is super-specialized.  Bay makes faces, just faces.  Someone else makes the head, some other guy paints the textures that will form the skin of the monster.  bay makes faces at himself in the mirror all day and tweaks the computer modelled faces on his screen until them mimic him perfectly.  His workstation is filled with real-life Gollum heads that stare back with expressions frozen.  Next door, people work on costumes and prosthetics for the live action sequences.  There are rows and rows of Orc outfits, armor, weapons, and various other props  for helping people look bigger or smaller, older or younger.  --END NOTE
	The dog and Frog is done up very nicey with lots of watercolor paintings on walls a pastel color I can't quite figure out.  The menu is colored chald on a chaldboard, with every N turned backwards -- hip.  The speakers, though, are the cheap fake-woodgrain type that everyone's had at one time or another -- about as old as the music coming out of them.  REO speedwagon, Rod Stewart play as I'm trying to find an N on this menu that isn't turned backwards.  Damn, they didn't miss one.  A white box on the wall next to me with a blinking red light just ejected a little puff of something.  Time to get going.  When I was last in Picton five days ago, I took a walk around; I had about an hour before my boat left for the trail.  It's a small town, and I soon got to the back end of it.  There is a railway that runs through town and then South up into the hills, all the way to the bottom of the island, I guess.  My boat would be leaving soon, but I had this crazy idea to just forget about that and start walking along this railroad track.  I stood on the the gravel next to the rails for a while, looking down a ways to where it disappread around a corner, then to where it showed up again a ways farther down. I kept looking.  Train tracks do that to me sometimes.  I see some, out in the country somewhere, and I just have to walk down them for a while.  I have to go.  I walk back down to the water to catch my boat.  They'll be other tracks. ( Read "The Body" by Stephen King if you like railroad tracks.  It's in a collection "Different Seasons.")
	The ferry from the North Island to the South is an hour and 45 minutes on the fast and three hours on the slow.  I'm on the slow.  There's a movie theatre on board.  There's so much space that the trip seems to go by very quickly -- it's the same forces at work that make a ~5 hour sardine-can flight in coach seem to take 10.  The ferry is floor after floor of tables, chairs, bars, food courts, video games and slot machines.  There is an Irish girl on board who I thought positively beautiful until it occurred to me that she looks just like a female version of my old roommate.  I'm not ready for that.  Another woman came through a moment ago, that looked strangely like Alanis Morisette.  There she is again.  This time she's wiping down tables.  Apparently there is a crisis in Sierra Leone.
	Fellow Americans, let me tell you this: After seeing many pure-blooded New Zealanders, I implore you to be proud of your European-Mutt heritage.  You may think yourself plain-looking or even ugly, but it could be worse.  You could look like someone from "Doctor Who".  Alanis Morisette girl clears the garbage off another table.  In America, we have chicano culture, hip-hop culture, yes even canadian culture in there with our "mainstream" culture, ensuring some system of checks of balances.  Here, there is only the Mairo culture, and to a lesser extent, a Southeast asian culture for Mainstream New Zealand to contend with.  From what I can tell, they are sadly outmatched.  New Zealand is a member of the commonwealth and it shows.  Here, you can truly be as white as you want to be.  It sounds dumb, buy America's power is cultural power, it's true.  Diversity exists encouraged or not.
	I'm on a plane to Queenstown in the far South of New Zealand today.  They confiscated the tank from my camp stove at the airport.  I couldn't take the tank on the flight with me and they wouldn't let me dump it out (there was about an ounce of gas left in it.)  "It's against the code", an airline guy told me, "to dump the fuel.  Even if we let you , the tank would have to be treated."
	"Treated?" I asked.  He backed up a bit.
	"Well, it would have to be cleaned."  While I understand the airline's position, I can't help but see irony in this situation:  The plane I'm on will burn thousands of pounds of fuel during its trip to Queenstown, and just about all of that goes into the air.  Scientists can tell if something up at the North pole happened recently or not by checking for a layer of jet fuel residue.  This residue covers everything.  If you ever stand behind a car that has just started up in New Zealand, you can tell right away that they let out about ten times as much stuff in the exhaust as they do in the United States.  The smell reminds me of when I was a kid in the summer, watching my dad try to start our old lawnmower.  But I could not dump an ounce of gasoline down the airport's drain.  I was pissed.  I was about ready to drink that gas.  I didn't.  I gave in and gave them the bottle.  At least they let me keep the regulator and the rest of the stove.  I take no chances and hide the bottle of orange fanta I bought inside my backpack along with my muffin and croissant.  On the plane, a steward sees me eating the muffin and says "I hope you brought enough for everyone."  I say " You want some? " He chuckles, tilts his head back a notch while doing so, and leaves.  I hide away the rest of my non-airline, store-bought food.  Now I remember why I was dreading this flight.  The fact of the airplanes going really fast somehow makes everything else go fast as well.  The things we make turn around and re-make us, sometimes.  Also, you can never just go somewhere once you get to the airport.  Airports are always several miles from the cities they were designed to serve.  This is a necessity, I know, but it means you have to arrange for transport to and from your plane, in addition to the transport on the plane itself.  The airline coffee is not powerful enough to make everything OK today, like it did yesterday.  If you were here, gentle reader, you might say these words to me, but since you're not, I'll have to say them myself.  Life goes on.
	Good morning.  It's 11th of May, 1012 AM.  I am finally doing to tourist thing.  A boat ride across Lake Manapuri, a bus ride through a tunnel and another boat ride out through Doubtful Sound to the ocean.  I have to do nothing today, just look and eat.  The bus driver emphasized the abundance of toilets we would be experiencing today; it's that kind of cruise.  At last I'm a real tourist.  Everyone I talked to told me I need to get down here, so here I am.  I'm checking out the fashion on the other tourists.  It's fun.  Sometimes they really look like they're from some place far away, sometimes they look like they're from the eighties, and sometimes they look just like the people you know.  Then they open their mouths and out comes Swedish.  A petition was passed around the 70's to protest the government plan to raise the level of this lake about 30 meters.  They got 260,000 signatures, which is a damn lot, if you consider that there are about four million people in New Zealand right now, even less 30 years ago.  1/16th of the population, or 6.25%, signed the petition.  All of this is pre-internet, of course.  The mountains are very steep and rocky around here, and there is a phenomenon known as a tree-avalanche, or treevalanche, that happens here.  There's almost no soil on these rocky mountains, so the trees push their roots into every crach and weave them in with those of the other trees and bushes.  When a tree gets to big, it falls over, down the side of the mountain, taking everything around it down with it.  I would pay to see that.  The day's over and I'm on a bus to Queenstown.  I saw some dolphins in the water of Doubtful Sound.  I've been sight-seeing for a full day; 9 to 5, with an hour for lunch.  A woman sitting in front of me gives the child next to her cap-fulls of water from a Pepsi bottle.  I can only describe her ethnicity as 'asian.'  After a few capfulls, he seems satisfied.  My time here is almost up.  Four more flights, two more days and a pile of taxis and buses sit between me and San Francisco, my home for the next few weeks.
	I'm leaving New Zealand tomorrow.  I checked into a new hostel today, a little ways out of the main downtown area.  It's a strange place.  The room I'm sleeping in has three other beds and it's FULL of stuff -- books, hairdryers, posters, stuff hanging from the ceiling, hats, calendars, a refrigerator, magazines, library books.  The woman who runs the place introduces me to Dan, a guy who is already living in the room I'm assigned.  He's looking at himself in a mirror someone placed in the fireplace which sits in the corner.  I leave my stuff and walk into town.  When I get back later that night, the place is full of people.  A guy laughs at me when I try my key in the wrong door.  There are two girls with him and they giggle.  Apparently it's evident to all of them that I couldn't possibly be at the right room.  They are right, my room is one door down.  This tim there's a girl in the room.  She asks me which bed I've taken.  I point to the one with my stuff next to it.  She conceals an exasperated expression.  "Did I take your bed?" I ask.
	"Well, yeah, but no, since I was gone for a day", she says.  I took her bed.
	"Do you want it back?  I just picked it because it's on the bottom."
	"No, I'll just take this one here, it's OK."
	"Ok."
	Dan, the guy I met before, comes back and asks me if "we can trust you with our stuff."
	"Trust me to do what, not steal it?"
	"Yeah", he says.
	"Sure, but I'm going to sleep pretty soon, though.  I'll do the best I can."
	That's fine with him.  He turns on a desk lamp, turns off the main light, and leaves.  I start re-organizing my backpack to accomodate the stuff I bought today.  He comes in a few minutes and asks if I've been tramping, reminds me that there are showers here I can use.  "Yeah, I'm going to do that in the morning", I tell him.  "You can wash your clothes, too.  You're back in civilization now, man", he reminds me, "and you're living with girls, man."  I feel like slapping him.  Instead, I say "Hmm."  He leaves.  I put the food I don't want in the communal area of the kitchen (it's huge, packed with food) and go back to my room and roll out my sleeping bag.  Dan comes back again and gets a guitar that's been sitting on his bed.  An Irish girl comes in and starts looking for something in a pile of stuff on top of one of the closets in the room. I make small talk for a minute, then mention how I've noticed there seem to be a lot of long-term residents here.  "It's strange", I say, then, to amend I add "well not so much strange as unusual."
	"Yeah", she starts, "it makes sense if you think about it.  A lot of people are travelling in asia and then they come over here and work for a while to fund their travels.  You can make a better wage here than you could other places."  She sounds defensive.  I get the impression that she's one of those people she's talking about and I've asked the wrong question.  "Does that answer your question a little bit, then?"
	"Yeah, thanks."
	She's apparently found what she was looking for and leaves.  I look around the room and think about the situation some more.  I notice more stuff -- little shelves full of products, beer cans, folding chairs, a little stereo, a power strip.  This hostel has a lot of people that are doing just what she described, it seems.  Ther emust be other hostels in other cities as well, thousands of people living in this peculiar way.  I must seem like such the dilettante to them ,travelling for one little month and running back home again.  This place is strange.  I feel like I've stumbled upon a society like the one in "The Beach", only instead of paradise-y Thailand it's Auckland, NZ and instead of growing weed they do temp jobs, office work, whatever.  From the other room I hear a tv; it's "Celebrity Deathmatch."  I don't want to stay here any longer than I have to.  I'm leaving tomorrow morning.
	I woke up at 330 AM from weird dreams to a loud and scary fire alarm.  I grabbed a few things and went outside.  Some guy was smoking a cigarette. I talked with him a little, drank some water, walked around.  People were laughing, talking, wishing each other good morning.  I went back to my room.  I put my stuff back and layed down.For a few minutes I wondered if I was going to burn or not.  I fell asleep and slept until 730, when I was awaken by a conversation.  An Irish girl from next door was talking with one from my room.  She was an hour late for something.  They talked for a few seconds, promised to see each other tonight.  I lay there after she left, and felt different about this place.  These people's situation seemed a little more fragile to me.  It felt less like a club, more like a college dorm.  I got up a little while after that and took a shower, went into town to take a walk and have breakfast.  I had a good breakfast at a cafe and read an article about the ineffectiveness of NATO bombing of Kosovo( actual number of kills of tanks, guns, etc. found to be 1/5 to 1/10 of US claimed kills; victory had more to do with CIVILIAN bombing of power stations and other infrastructure.  Also, the Serbs made fake bridges out of polyethylene sheet [grocery bags] and other decoys which were repeatedly bombed by NATO.)  I got back to the hostel and packed my stuff in the hallway, so as not to disturb the sleeping Irish girls more than necessary.  I went into my office to drop of the key, and there was Dan.  I made small talk to him for a minute and left.
	Something bothered me about the the explanation the Irish girl gave me last night, but it took me a night to figure it out: how the hell were these people getting decent work in New Zealand, a place where unemployment is high and it's almost impossible for a foreigner to get a job?  This puzzled me for a few minutes, then I got it -- commonwealth countries.  If you're English, Irish, Australian, or possibly Faulkland Islander, you can get a job in New Zealand as easy as a New Zealander.  Another reason I would never be a part of that hostel club.
	The airport situation was crazy, it's best if I don't go into it.  All I will say is that it was way too full of people, and New Zealand charges you $20 to leave the country.  God help anyone trying to get out without $20 or a valid credit card.  I made it through and I'm on my way to LA at 613 mph.  I can find nothing wrong with this flight, except that the man in fornt of me has pushed his chair all the way back, and keeps trying to push it back further.  He is from florida and looks more than a little like Boris Yeltsin.  United may or may not have a vegetarian meal for me.  My mood is unassailable.  I don't recommend reading "Nausea" by Sartre while in an enclosed space, such as an international flight; you will probably go crazy.  Since I'm in an aisle seat, and lightly medicated, and it's the only book I brought, I'm chancing it.  The old guy tries to push his seat back again. The soda cart comes by.  He tries it again, and then again.