On the right track
November 16, 2005Tussock Cottage, between Arrowtown and Queenstown, New Zealand
5:40am
Hud is the greatest child that ever escaped the mellow moist confines of a womb.
Just as he gets used to a location, we leave, and he just asks: “Will there be toys at our next home?” He then gets all swaddled up in his booster seat, surrounded by all his toys, a blanket we force on him, our transferable cold food in a soft cooler in the seat next to him, and falls asleep. When he wakes, we are at a new location, and he runs around, grin goofy and large like a thirsty puppy, asking again where the toys are. If there is none, which there is not, he asks to go on the trampoline that does exist on the lawn near the firewood. At night he sleeps in a bed conconcted from a cot mattress and lots of pillows. He truly thinks this kind of life is the life of every three-year-old. Little does he know how lucky or unlucky he is. And we are even luckier to have him. What a golden egg.
Animals highlighted the last two days in Parukanui. A couple of mornings ago, after my walk, I was hanging my blue wool socks out to dry near the perfect spider webs, and heard a rustle in the water larger then the occasional surface breaking fish. I looked over and saw the familiar wet brown sheen and whiskered nose of a seal. A seal mere feet from where I stood. It was twirling and hunting the bountiful fish in the inlet. It almost looked like he was toying with the fish, as his twirls and leaps out of the water were Sea World worthy.
I yelled out to Steph and Hud and they came running, Steph admittedly thinking I was playing a prank. We all watched as the seal leapt and spun and got his fill before moving back out the inlet and on to the wet sand to sun himself. After a good drying off, he waddled along the sand, very Chapinlesque, before plunging back into the inlet to swim out to open water.
Another wild kingdom moment here in New Zealand.
The other highlight, and this is not mine to talk about, but I will summarize, was Steph’s horse riding adventure. It was one of the things Steph said early on she wanted to do. She had never been on a horse so she diligently found a suitable company to satisfy her mild dream. I made the appropriate jokes about her excitement was due to anticipating something that big between her legs and she of course shook her head wondering who was older, her son or her husband. Hud and I came with her to the small farm up the coast, near the entrance to Otago Harbour. Two women were grooming and saddling the six horses due to ride that afternoon.
Steph was latching on to a group of five that were booked at the same time. The two horse woman were exactly that, horsewomen. They were dusty, stinky, broad shouldered, sun wrinkled, decked out in riding pants and black boots. They talked to each horse like they were humans, scratching their asses and checking their tails for poo like it was normal, which I suppose it was to them.
Hud and I left Steph and had a little father/son adventure time of our own. We went to a park and then to McDonalds, where Hud met another boy named Brooklyn. They played in the giant play land while I read the paper and ate Hud’s meal and then mine. We drove back to pick up Steph and she was sore, but beaming, explaining her initial fear of horse back riding was quickly replaced by her fear of heights as the horses climbed and then descended very large hills on very thin paths. She was happy though for satisfying one of her goals on this trip.
We drove home and began packing up. The week in Parukanui turned out to be great, especially after my initial hesitation about the rustic nature and size of the place.
The scenery surrounding the cottage has to be close to the best we have seen so far. Such raw, beautiful views that I never even conjured before arriving here. I had no idea I would be watching a tide go in and out as coastal birds of all kinds picked and mewed over the many shellfish left exposed. All with giant golden green hills in the background. And a rumbling multi-coloured train running twice a day, like the tides, to boot. All in all pretty awesome.
And now here I am. Immersed in the awesome once again. Queenstown is New Zealand’s answer to Whistler, although less like a village and more like a mini-city. It is very close to a number of ski fields for winter fun, and also serves as the adventure capital of New Zealand. Queenstown boasts you can ski dive, bungee jump from the world’s first bungee jump, and jet boat down the Shotover River all in one day. The town itself is way too busy for my liking. Too many cars and not enough stoplights. It felt dangerous as all the Range Rovers and hippy vans sped through roundabouts. We did end up booking a trip on a Jet Boat this Thursday. It’s a jet-propelled boat that speeds down the Shotover River in six inches of water doing speeds of 50 miles an hour. It comes within inches of the chasm walls and can go through level 3 rapids. It takes 25 minutes and cost a lot of money, although less because Hud turned out to be free. Our hosts here have done it and Lee, the wonderfully charming woman, told us “It feels like your going to die”
They call it Thrill Therapy. Should be interesting.
Our cottage for the next three nights is quite plush. It’s a one bedroom but not to small. All the finishing’s are beautiful including the artwork and silverware. Our hosts, Lee and Jaap, a kiwi and a Dutch, are a little bit older than us, with kids nine and 11, are very nice. We talked for a while before dinner as Hud jumped on the trampoline. After 20 years in Australia and a year in France where they ended up staying in Peter Mayle’s house while he wrote Bon Appetite, they settled here beneath the mountains in Queenstown. They run a small shuttle service company to keep them afloat. It’s nice life.
So we are here until Friday, before disappearing into our own mountain oasis on Lake Ohau.
I am already stoked about the jet boat.
Love to all,
J.
November 12, 2005
Purakanui Inlet, 20 kms outside of Dunedin, New Zealand
8:59pm
Nighttime writing. Sky is still quite bright. Wisps of grey clouds echoed with pink lay on the top the valley surrounding the inlet. The tide is on its way back, covering all the muck, the cockles, the pipi, the mussels, bringing them all back to life. I wonder if there is a difference; in eloquence, or joviality, or basic tone from writing in the morning or in the evening. I wonder even if objectivity would be available to me, or would I just cede that I am specifically an asshole at any hour of the day.
Tonight we met a woman and her son on an after dinner walk. Dinner was steak and broccoli and French fries. No beer. No wine. The woman was large beneath the equator, so big the fat looked fake, and her son’s head was very round, the perfect compass circle. She did have beautifully clear blue eyes. She was American, from Denver, moved here a year and half ago with her musician husband. Never been here before, just up and left, could not afford the reconnaissance visit. Now, as she put it, they have found the perfect spot here on Parukanui Inlet. Her son is seven and goes to a semiprivate school. They invited us over tomorrow so Hud could play with some new toys. He was into it, so we will go after breakfast.
“I went on a train,” Hud randomly boasted to the woman from his swing made from an old car tire.
Which we all did, yesterday, and all had a good time doing so. The train is a tourist train traveling 48 kilometers from Dunedin to Parangaki on tracks and trains the Dunedin city council purchased years ago after the line was shut down. Tauri Gorge Railway was reasonably priced for a four hour round trip which made our son very very happy.
Every kid at every different age goes through stages of what they truly dig in regards to toys and life periphery. For a long time now, Hud’s really been into trains. It started with Thomas and his set back home, and has not faded since, tracks and trains being the first things he picks up in Duplo, or Lego, or any cheap rip off in dollar stores that work for four or five seconds before snapping in half. He also points out all the train tracks on our extended road trips, and if we are lucky enough to see an actual train, like we do on occasion here at the cottage, it’s basically a manic medley of announcements of he saw a train, a train, there’s a train, did you see the train, I can see a train,..etc. So when we confirmed our little journey, he was needless to say, a little excited. The anticipation itself was wonderful.
The actual journey was stunning as well. Following a river at the bottom of a gorge basically the entire time, crossing it on viaducts built 150 years ago, by Chinese and New Zealand men on horses. The engineering behind it all was mind-boggling. The pictures only do it mild justice. What we were able to capture pretty well was Hud’s happiness and wonder for at least the journey out to Parangaki. Two hours is about the maximum time on one subject for a three year old. On the way back, flirting with random blue haired women was the subject of choice. For him, not me.
Again, in our specific car, we had to be the youngest by at least 25 years. We did manage to come away basically unscathed by idle chatter, although Hud managed to woo a couple of comments from some of the elderly patrons and their flesh coloured hearing aids. There was a loud woman from somewhere in the US south who kept us all up to date on her sleeping patterns and her general laziness about her trip to New Zealand. It seems like a long way to come to be lazy, although I question myself about the same subject on occasion. I just do it in the mirror or silently in my brain like normal people.
After the train pulled into the station and we disembarked, Hud remarked immediately and politely that he would like to go on another train. I tussled his hair and admired his insatiability. We drove home. That was yesterday.
I just remembered that I am missing a day. The day we went to Dunedin to investigate tourist options, including the train. Steph and I ended up not getting along to well again, probably travel day residue. The only real highlight was the creepy transsexual in the second hand bookstore where I purchased two new books. The fact that she (I use that pronoun loosely) was a transsexual was not creepy, although I will admit to some mild shivers, it was the fact she was sitting there, not sifting through titles or browsing in any way. Steph and I concluded she was there staring out the window in defiance, as the other half of the bookstore was a Christian library/book store. It was like she was waiting to be kicked out, so she could play the blasphemic martyr card and run screaming into traffic.
I kept on waiting for her to sneak up behind me and whisper in my ear with painted lips covering stubble:
“I can smell your testicles.”
Thus leaving me with the only option of pulling a tall bookshelf on top of my welcoming, cringing body.
So. Today. Today was a farmer’s market in the morning in a steady downpour of rain. We bought a chewy stick of bread, really creamy brie cheese, fresh tomatoes the size of well, testicles, a brownie, homemade hummus and a small a bag of organic carrots. This was the lunch we were going to eat after visiting New Zealand’s only castle, Larnach Castle, located on the Otago Peninsula, a mere 15 minutes outside of Dunedin.
William Lonarch, a British descendant born in Australia, built the castle in 1867 after falling in love with land easy to fall in love with. After years of troubled times and troubled marriages, the Barker Family purchased the castle in 1967 and began restoring it to its former glory. The castle itself was not huge, but still interesting, especially since they roped off none of the rooms, and all the furniture and accouterments remain alive and available in their opulence. They only drag was the request not to take photos for restoration and security reasons. The first I understand, the latter I do not.
The grounds and gardens of the castle was what I enjoyed, furthering my theory that this trip has aged me about thirty years. I even started wearing my pants just below my nipples. It’s just more comfortable.
We ate our picnic in the car as rain still fell quite heavy. Our next goal was to drive to the end of the peninsula, not far really, and geographically the right thing to do. Hud fell asleep quickly and we reached the end, and found two sleeping sea lions. We are definitely not in Kansas anymore.
We drove to the other side of the Peninsula, now actually seeking out sea lions, and took our groggy son on shoulders to Allan’s Beach, a secluded spot ten minutes from a parking area in the middle of a forest smack dab in the middle of nowhere.
No luck. No seals or sea lions and it was pissing and windy but for some reason it still was a cool place to be. Probably the closest to the Antarctic I will ever get in my life. Especially since we are skipping Invercargill.
So an interesting couple of days. Three more sleeps until we are on the road again to Queenstown.
Wow. It’s almost ten o’ clock. Way past my bedtime.
Love to all,
J.
posted by Jason @ 2:41 PM
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