here are a few pearls of wisdom and general observations I have learned and noted down whilst on the road during the first month of our travels. i hope they inform (and maybe make you smile!):
* 98% of the names of towns in the South Island of NZ sound like distant relatives of the characters from In The Night Garden: Hokitika, Pukekura, Punakaiki, Twizel and Little Wanganui are some examples I just pulled off the map in front of me. I wasn’t even trying!
* the lyrics to the Bon Jovi song ‘Shot through the heart’ say “and you’re too blame” not “you’re too late”. makes much more sense that way actually…
* there is no polar bear at the top of the Fox Glacier. the mint packaging lied. see below- no polar bear.
* it is ok to kill anything that threatens the native treasure that is the small fat flightless bird, the kiwi. this includes possums, stoats, possums, hedgehogs, possums, rabbits, possums, and even pet dogs… but especially possums.
citizens are actually encouraged to speed up and run over these pests if they see them on the road (not the pet dogs- they get poisoned).
i personally feel sorry for the possums. they are fluffy, with wide starey eyes and have tiny little hairless people hands. i have to shut my eyes whenever we drive past a dead one on the road. this is quite bad if i am behind the wheel, because there are a lot of dead ones on the road.
children are taught of the evils of ‘the pests’ from a young age- we saw a display of posters made by local 10 year olds in Nelson. their teacher had arranged to have a selection of frozen ‘threat animals’ bought in to the school for them to sketch. they had painted them all contorted and scrunched up in death.
the kids were 10. it was quite disturbing.
* the quickest way to dry a pair of jeans after being caught in a torrential rainstorm is probably just to keep them on and let your body heat do the work.
its probably not to take them off and stuff them into the footwell and blast the heater on them. Not only does this make the rest of the car interminably hot and damp, but it is a little embarrassing when driving through small towns at slow speeds, essentially just in your pants.
* I would rather not shower at all, than use a travel towel to dry myself afterwards.
* my husband and i have very different attitudes to clothing on this trip.
i have taken the attitude that given i only have a very limited amount of clothes i can bring with me, and i have to be wearing them for 5 months straight, each individual piece must be something that i love, something that i enjoy wearing and ideally something that i will not tire of. and though comfort and practicality is of the utmost importance for my travelling wardrobe, it is also important to me to attempt to look nice wherever and whenever possible.
the husband has taken the attitude that given all of his clothes will be wrecked and falling apart after 5 months of hard travelling, he might as well bring stuff that is already pretty wrecked and falling apart. every single one of the t-shirts he has packed is a slightly ill fitting freebie from the festival we run, 2000 Trees. a huge amount of items i suggested he bring, (nothing really fancy, perhaps an Abercrombie tee here , a Gap jumper there), were rejected before we left for being ‘too smart’ and ‘too nice’- “what” I said, “you don’t want to look smart and nice for 5 months?”.
there are benefits to both attitudes I think. he will look confusingly the same in many of the photographs- with only half a dozen 2000 Trees T-shirts to wear there is inevitable repetition, whilst I have any number of combinations of outfits to differentiate between days and to prove that we haven’t just photoshopped ourselves on to various ‘Backgrounds of New Zealand’. however, i suspect that i may have gone a bit over the top with some of my clothing choices, and I may swiftly tire of handwashing the £22 pair of pants and other luxury items of clothing that I have bought along in hostel sinks….
* magpies over here are back to front. the bits that are meant to be black are white and the white bits are black. I guess it’s a southern hemisphere thing, like the water going down the plug hole the wrong way, but it keeps confusing me.
* you must be prepared for the natural world to leave you speechless at any time whilst driving New Zealand’s roads. it is not unusual to see a waterfall cascading out of a cliff at the side of the road, a massive elegant raptor hovering at head height waiting for road kill, or even a wild turkey just trotting down the centre of the road carrying an egg in its mouth (it happened. today.)
*i thought i could live without a foot file or body moisturiser. i can’t. strangely, i don’t miss having a hairdryer at all, and even on the odd occasion it is provided i often forget to use it.
* everyone who I have met who lives here is thrilled to be living here. all the native New Zealanders are so proud of their country, and all the (very many!) ex-pats we have met have been so pleased to have made it out here and been given VISAs. they all come across as utterly content and as in love with their new country as the natives. I don’t think I’ve encountered such a sense of satisfaction and fulfilment across a whole nation before. its quite lovely.
* it is possible to model a massive dog the size of a warehouse out of corrugated iron
* it feels like a very safe place- we were told by one woman we met in Renwick of a time she went away for a long weekend with her husband. on their return she asked him if he had the house keys, and they realised neither of them did. His response was ‘Well they are probably still in the door then.’ which they were. they had been gone 5 days, left the house unlocked, keys in the front door, and in the drive her BMW was also unlocked with the keys in the ignition. the best bit of the story was that a DHL man had delivered a package whilst they were away, and carefully opened the door, slid the package into the hall left a little note and shut the door behind him. we regularly see teeny kids cycling along the pavement on their own, and cars left unlocked at the side of the road, windows and sometimes boots left open. it just doesn’t feel like the sort of place where the community would accept that trust being abused.
* Tim Tam’s really are just like Penguin biscuits. just the same- not sure what all the fuss is about!
* it is possible to train a magpie to talk. we met a pet one with clipped wings that lived in a garden opposite our hostel in Kaikoura. It said ‘hello’, ‘hi’ and did police siren noises (though we haven’t heard any police sirens since we got here, so I’m not sure where it learned that!).
* 100km per hour is a limit and not a target (especially in a car like Grover).
* we have seen several shoe fences as we have driven around the islands- basically, someone just leaves a pair of shoes on a fence, and then other people start to do the same thing, until several months or years later there is just a fence running along the side of the road, covered with old pairs of shoes.
we have seen a few variations on this theme- also a welly tree, and a gum tree (yes, lots of used gum all on the branch of one tree, gross but strangely colourful and artistic at the same time!), and possibly a bicycle fence. this last one could have just been a crap bike hire place with no sign outside, but all the bikes were positively archaic, so I like to tell myself it was a bike fence.* a newly shorn NZ sheep is a truly pathetic sight. they seem to take less care over here than in the UK- we have seen many looking dejectedly out of from under their lop-sided hair cuts, seemingly aware of how crap the shearing work on their body is, and they are very sad to look at.
* nothing can make my heart soar and my voice go squeaky quite like the sight of a troop of very young lambies frolicking, gambolling and chasing each other round a green field in the NZ spring sunshine. apart from perhaps a herd of very young fluffy eared calves doing the same- either has much the same effect on me.
sometimes we have to stop the car so i can get out and say hello.
* someone thought it would be a good idea to name their drinking venue ‘The Puke Pub’.
* there is a town called Barrytown. I hope everyone there is called Barry. there is also a place called Chasland. I hope everyone there is called Chas. there is even a town called Herbert. what kind of idiot has that name….
* there are so many creeks and rivers here that they seem to have run out of inspiration. I have driven over ‘Trickle No 1’ and ‘Trickle No 2’, and also ‘Random Creek’.
* unless you like the sensation of freezing water sloshing around your feet and between your toes for 4 hours do not attempt to climb a glacier on a rainy day.
* my hygiene standards are surprising me- you would be amazed what a short period of time it takes for me to go from ‘I’ve worn that top from 11am to 5pm today, oh no, it must go in the wash’ to ‘well, those socks probably can only have 3 days wear in them, and I took them off at bedtime, so that’s only really 1 ½…. they’ll go another 2 days’.
* i heart Powerade (but only the blue one)
I have loved almost every minute of my time in New Zealand, but it does feel like I’m ready to move on now. it is without a doubt a fantastic and stunning country, and I can comprehend so clearly why so many people come over to visit and fall in love with it. the natural landscape is breathtaking, the opportunity to explore and get back to the wild is seemingly unlimited and the people seem to be universally friendly. however, at times i have found the space, emptiness and quiet almost unnerving. there are areas where you can drive for a couple of hours, and see just a couple of empty looking houses and no other vehicles on the road. wherever we have been staying we have found that everything shuts down early- we are often the last people in restaurants at 10pm, everyone is heading to bed in the hostels at 10pm, and when we walk down the streets in the evening (and sometimes in the day too!) there is often no-one else to be seen. whenever we’ve been near a TV we have tried to catch the national news, and the headlines are more often than not delightfully quaint and of the ‘a cat got stuck up a tree… but we got it down again’ variety. it makes a fantastic change from the ‘a kid stabbed another kid over a mobile phone’ type of headlines we have got ourselves used to waking up to in recent years.
i guess that several years of living in the metropolis of London may have left me with a distorted view of what life should be like. by the time we left I knew that London was not the city for me to settle down in- too busy, too tiring, too angry and too threatening- but actually after just a month in NZ I have realised that the opposite end of the spectrum is not quite right for me either. it is beautiful and peaceful, i’ve certainly found it very relaxing and i’ve loved getting back to nature. but i am looking forward to a change of scene, and now feels like the right time to move on from this gentle country of epic landscapes.
I’m not sure exactly what Australia will bring- it is pretty much an unknown entity to me, excluding the information i have gleaned from a few years spent watching ‘Neighbours’ in my early teens- but i am excited to be seeing a new country, and ready for what the next couple of weeks will hold.
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