New Zealand: Ridiculously Beautiful

Our first introduction to New Zealand was Air New Zealand's safety video. Though it initially seemed normal enough, it was soon apparent that everyone in the video, from the stewardesses to the passengers, and even the captain, were all only wearing body paint of their uniforms. Here's a shot from the video (thanks, "the internet"!):

Whew! Lest there be some confusion, this is NOT the ridiculous beauty the post's title refers to.

We spent a day in Aukland, which is sort of like a smaller Sydney, and the home of fully 2/3rds of New Zealand's population of 4 million. Then we rented a car, and drove to the town of Wellington on the south tip of the north island.

The country changed a lot during our drive, but much of it was beautiful green hillsides with grazing sheep, like these:

If you're thinking: "well, those are certainly OK, but not spectacular", you are forgetting the cumulative effect of being surrounded by them at every turn. It's a landscape that's difficult to capture in a photograph because it's too encompassing. (But we felt that we should at least try).

The other problem with a beautiful landscape that's literally everywhere is that you kind of can't take pictures of it. If we'd stopped the car to take a picture at every beautiful view, we never would have made it to Wellington!

About the roads: the largest highways we've encountered in New Zealand are small, two lane roads. These connect the cities. All the other roads--to campsites or houses out in the country--are either one lane paved, or, more often, one lane unpaved. The rest is nature.

Though we probably could have made the drive all in one day, we decided to camp overnight about half-way through in a large, flat preserve. The campsite was nothing special, but we took an excellent, long walk, in the view of some snow-dusted mountains on one side, and a cloud-topped volcano on the other:

After our night in Wellington, we drove through a stormy morning to catch the inter-islander ferry at 7:30am. Here's a shot from our car, waiting to park on board.

When we booked the ferry, my mind idly assumed it must be something like the San Francisco ferry. I imagined a nice, pleasant, and above all, calm ride. Of course, the San Francisco ferry never enters the open ocean, which is the crucial fact I was neglecting. After a very pleasant 10 minutes, the astonishingly (and pleasingly) Dutch ship captain came on the speaker to announce that, outside the bay there was "ah....a bit of swell" and that he hoped that our trip wouldn't be "too unpleasant".

There certainly was quite a bit of swell, and a large number of people on the ferry quickly became sick. You were never more than about 10 steps from a "sick bag", however, and the stewardesses circulated, handing out ice (which one was supposed to suck on) and sympathetic words in ample quantities. I had taken motion sickness pills, but they were only barely enough. Jen is naturally graced with an iron constitution.

To be continued in our next post...

Introducing: Vanuatu Exchange

The Vanuatu islands are a small collection of islands about 3.5 hours off the East coast of Australia with a population under half a million.

We had actually read about Vanuatu before starting our trip. It turns out they invented the bungee jump--only they jump of a cliff with vines tied to their feet. And they also aim to stop as close to the ground as possible. So we were very surprised that Vanuatu would re-surface for us during the trip.

Anyway, here is the website we created for Rick and Wendy: http://www.vanuatuexchange.com/

(if you see any bugs or oddities, please let us know). None of the text is ours--that's all from Wendy and Rick. But the visual design and so forth is all ours.

We actually created more than is visible at the moment. We used an open source rails storefront application called Spree; so there's actually a fully functional storefront, including the ability to purchase downloads, sitting poised to deploy behind the scenes. But since they haven't lined up any products yet, that functionality is all hidden.

We also decided that, for their purposes, a fully automated booking system was not the right solution--so instead we have a form people can fill out to get emailed with an application which they then email back to Rick and Wendy.

Jen was happy to start learning more about Adobe Illustrator for her part of the work; while Dave learned more about Rails and also about how to configure a mail server, which is something he's never done before. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.

When we were done, Rick and Wendy were kind enough to book us a surprise adventure-activity in New Zealand! (Which we're scheduled to enjoy in about 4 days from now).

Once again, I wish I could convey more about what unique people Rick and Wendy are, but you'll just have to come to dinner with us upon our return to hear the stories.

Working in Rylstone

Rick and Wendy's place in Rylstone really made us feel like we were out in the country--and, indeed, we were.

They'd been gone for about a week, so they decided they'd get their horse from the paddock so it could "mow" the lawn in their backyard.

As you can see, standing in their backyard gave us a view of rolling countryside and a huge sky.

Here's Rick and Wendy retreating in the background about to start setting dinner. For our time there, Jen and I worked during the day, but we all got together for a meal in the backyard every evening where we were regaled by Rick's incomparable rambling stories.

The room where we worked gave us a beautiful view of the mountains in the distance (in one direction), and the horse in the backyard (in the other).

What were we doing? Rick and Wendy are amateur film-makers, having filmed and produced a documentary called "Think About It". You can see the webpage here: http://thinkaboutitmovie.com/

Apparently Rick made a fortune in real estate, and then lost it managing and training race horses. One day another trainer told him "You'd be better off shoveling their sh*t than training them!" This struck a chord with Rick, and so he started a business selling horse-manure as an "active mulch" to individuals in Sydney for their gardens. You can see their amazingly broken website at: http://www.kingpoo.com/Default.htm That's right--King Poo--a name Rick proudly uses constantly. We loved it.

They run their business from their other property in Terry Hills, in the Sydney suburbs. They employ several salesmen who are paid commission for being--I am not kidding--door to door poo salesmen. Danny--the 26-year-old German traveler--said he tried his hand at the business, but that it was a pretty hard-sell. He did say, however, that everyone in Sydney was universally extremely polite. People would answer their doors, would not slam them or become angry, and would actually politely converse with him and wish him well. I have to say that I have a hard time imagining that happening in any US city I know of.

We, thankfully, were not involved with King Poo. Rick and Wendy were excited to begin a new project aimed at cultural tourism to the Vanuatu islands, and they wanted our help setting up a website. This sounded right up our alley!

It turned out they had a rather ambitious vision. They wanted the website to promote a documentary film they were making about Vanuatu, provide a booking system for cultural tourism, an online storefront for art and agricultural products, as well as the ability to purchase music downloads. How'd it go? We'll tell you in the next post!

Rick and Wendy in Rylstone

Our next help-exchange host, Wendy, picked us up in Katoomba to drive us to her country house in Rylstone, Australia. Here's a google map showing where it is:



It's about three and a half hours out of Sydney, on the other side of the blue mountains. It's also close to the world's widest canyon, as proclaimed by a dilapidated billboard by the side of the road. A minute later, a small road-sign indicated one-way, unpaved road to a lookout point. Wendy commented proudly that Australia is like that--they may have the world's #1 whatever, but don't toot their own horn about it.

Within the first 10 minutes, Wendy revealed she had a theory of human nature, which we, of course, wanted to hear. In a nutshell, her theory is that external conflict is a manifestation of internal conflict. When people are not able to recognize or process conflicting or negative emotions, they will project their internal difficulties on to other people or circumstances; or they will sub-consciously seek to create situations in which it would be appropriate for them to express their feelings (e.g. they intentionally try to create drama so they can feel justified in being angry). The solution to the problem is to acknowledge one's feelings openly and directly in a safe and trusting environment, which is the first step to dealing directly with them--rather than pretending they're not there and letting one's behavior be invisibly shaped by them in undesirable ways.

This seemed a fine theory to us. I immediately thought of the character Alexei Alexandrovich from Anna Karenina. He's described as being unable to bare seeing others cry or show strong emotion. When lady solicitors come to him, they're advised never to cry because he will grow angry, shout at them, and tell them to get out because he can do nothing for him. Later in the story, it becomes clear that what he feels is pity, but is unable to recognize it, and doesn't know how to respond. He just feels an inner turmoil, and angrily tries to remove its cause. He undergoes a revelation of sorts, in which he realizes this, and for the first time clearly understands a better way to respond to the pity he feels. I also thought of how Fremont's former principal was an expert at empowering people through honest, direct, non-judgmental acknowledgement of potentially negative things.

We met Wendy's husband, Richard, and another help-exchanger named Danny at a gas station. It's the only gas station I've ever seen where you could order cappuccino and a steak.

Richard and Wendy are like no one we have ever met before, and I actually find myself utterly unable to describe them. They've both lived amazing lives, and have very distinctive personalities. I'll definitely be able to describe them in person, but don't feel up to the task in writing.

In any case, we finished our drive to their stone cottage in Rylstone, which will be the subject of our next post...

Katoomba YHA

The budget youth-hostel accommodations in Australia and New Zealand are called "backpackers." They offer a variety of types of room, and we stayed in one in Sydney about 4 months ago en route to SE Asia. We paid something like $35 each for rickety bunk-bed spaces in a shared dorm. To their credit, the other occupants were quite respectful of sleeping hours, but it still wasn't a very comfortable accommodation for us. For some reason the entire atmosphere of the place felt tense and unhappy to me.

So, we were pleasantly surprised by the YHA in Katoomba. They also offer 4-share, 8-share, and 12-share dorm rooms, but have private rooms as well for a higher price (which is what we did). It's in a beautiful old building on the edge of town in Katoomba. Here's a shot of the outside.

It's run very much like a hostel. They give you clean linens when you check in, which you put on your bed, and strip again to put in the laundry when you leave. They also have a full kitchen and a large lounge area with sofas, and bean-bag chairs on a stage (which is occasionally used for musical performances). Here's Jen in the kitchen:

We really loved it. Because our next contact was a little late in getting back to us, we ended up staying here a few days, and the kitchen was always clean and orderly.

What we liked the most, however, was the people. There were early 20-something Germans and French (as there are everywhere here), but also elderly couples and families with children, including some on vacation from other parts of Australia. The atmosphere here is friendly and relaxed. Everyone says hello to each other and no one seems hurried, stressed, or unhappy.

The other thing that surprised us was the culinary feats of the other guests. We were expecting a youth hostel kitchen to have a lot of people making pasta, oatmeal, frozen pizzas, and other easy-to-prepare meals. Boy were we wrong. People were making steaks with mushroom sauce, breading and frying fresh fish fillets, baking cakes and creating elaborate salads. There was a friendly group from China who made a huge stack of green-onion pancakes and offered us some. Almost everyone had a bottle of wine with their meals. All this excellent cooking meant that we found some choice items in the "free shelf" of the refrigerator, which we were most appreciative of.

The only problem with the YHA is that it's too popular. Finally our next contact in Australia (whose name was Wendy) said she'd pick us up in Katoomba to drive us out to her country place. Unfortunately we hadn't booked enough nights, so they put us on the waiting list for rooms. We occupied ourselves for the day wandering around town, and relaxing in the common lounge talking to people (both of us), playing poker (Jen), and reading a book about topology (Dave). By evening it was fairly clear that we weren't going to get a room. Jen was hoping that if we just stayed in the lounge until they did their rounds at midnight, they wouldn't kick us out in the rainy night. Dave was somewhat uncomfortable about this plan, so we tried to negotiate with the staff for explicit permission to stay. We offered to pay a dorm rate to stay in the lounge all night--or to pitch our tent in their backyard. They politely but firmly told us that we were welcome to stay until 10pm, but then we had to go.

SO, at 10pm we put on our headlamps and rain jackets and hiked 40 minutes out of town to freedom-camp at a spot we'd seen earlier near the trailhead of the 6-foot track. It turned out to be a lot of fun (and free!). In the morning we packed back up and hiked back into town to be picked up by Wendy.

All in all, we had a great time at the Katoomba YHA. (And, since I'm writing this several weeks after the fact, I can also report that we've stayed in other YHA's here in New Zealand that were also quite nice. I'm in one now, in fact! But you'll have to wait for those updates...)

Camping in Katoomba - Part II

The next day (this is the 3rd), we started with several exciting small stream crossings...

And found large termite (?) mounds...

And an awesome stick bug!

On our hike in the Grosse Valley, Jen had seen a Wallaby while Dave was off going to the bathroom. Dave was just starting to reconcile himself with the fact that he may leave Australia without ever seeing a wallaby, when we saw a whole family of them!

We had actually arrived at our 3rd night's camping spot quite early in the day, and it was like pitching our tent in the wallaby exhibit of the zoo. It was in a lovely meadow that had about 8 or 10 wallaby who stayed quietly grazing for the rest of the day!

You can't really see very well from the photos, but wallaby are a lot less cuddly than I had been imagining. I suppose the only kangaroos and wallaby's I've really seen are cartoon depictions of them, which tend to make them a little rounder and less muscular than they actually are. In person, their legs, of course, are quite muscular, but their front leg muscles are also ridiculously large in proportion to their head, making them look like stunted alien boxers.

Since we had so much extra time, we went on a long day hike during which we saw a grey kangaroo. He's significantly smaller than the "big reds" you can sometimes see along the roads, but also quite different from the wallaby.

The next morning it was a relatively short walk to the Jeanolan caves. We saw many nice webs....

And Jen was sharp-eyed enough to spot this leaf bug.

The caves themselves were interesting, but we've seen a lot of caves and after 3 nice days by ourselves it was a jarring transition to face the bus loads of people coming to see the caves.

At 3pm, it started to pour right before we caught our pre-booked bus back 78km along the road to Katoomba.

Oh! I almost forgot to mention that we saw a lyre bird (though we didn't get a picture of it). We had read about it a little bit before the trip, and it was hard to see how large a bird it is from the google images available--but in person it turned out to be quite a large and beautiful bird.

All in all, the landscape in the Grosse Valley was slightly better, but we saw a ton of wildlife on the six foot track that definitely made it worth it.

Camping in Katoomba - Part I

The six foot track was made in the 1880's as a bridle track through the Megalong valley from Katoomba to the Jenolan caves. It's only 45km and used as the track for a marathon every year, but Jen and I wanted to stretch out our time until our next HelpX rendezvous, so we decided to spend 4 days and 3 nights on the trail.

When we set out hiking about 5 km along the highway out of Katoomba to reach the trail head it was still quite foggy. Here we are a few minutes down the trail.

The lookdown over the Megalong valley was almost too foggy to see anything. Almost, but not quite.

Here's Jen looking over it.

And here is the exact same view about 45 seconds later.

The walk down into the valley was incredibly.....tall. And beautiful.

From the first hour of walking we thought that the environment would be similar to that of our first hike.

But soon the sky cleared and we found ourselves walking through rolling pasture land.

When we got to our campsite for the first night, we were disappointed to discover that it had road access and there were several families car camping. They were very friendly and had great kids, though, so we weren't so grumpy after all. Here's Jen with our excellent dinner of polenta with cheese and peanuts!

The next day we met an elderly man who was running the entire trail in 10 hours (or that was his plan). He seemed to be in excellent shape and we were very impressed.

A few hours later we got to this precarious bridge. The bridge is actually for use when the river is too high for the lower crossing, but it was so cool we decided to use it anyway.

On the other side of the river, we found a nice place to eat lunch. Dave's hair was getting kind of long, and he didn't get it together to get a cheap haircut in Vietnam, so we decided that the forest was a great place to cut Dave's hair. And our lunch spot was also a very nice haircut location. It looked great!

A little further along, we saw this awesome reptile try and climb up a tree.

The day was blue an beautiful as we reached almost the top of our climb. Here's the trail seemingly descending, though there will be another steep ascent soon afterwards for us.

This was the greenest tree I'd ever seen (the photo has not be altered in any way).
Our camping spot for the 2nd night was in this beautiful meadow. It was protected from the main trail by high bushes and had a perfect spot in the river for bathing. It was also far from any roads, so we were quite happy.

Our adventures continue in part II....