North Island Substantially Complete
Wellington,
New Zealand
Sunday, March 2, 2008
First, I'd like to thank everyone who expressed their concerns about my diet. I have reduced my average daily peanut consumption to less than 20g per day. It's been a while since I wrote, mostly because internet is so expensive, so first I'll do a brief summary of what I've done since Tauranga.
I went to a town called Rotorua, and when I arrived I didn't have good feelings about the place. Nothing was blatantly wrong with it, but something inside me told me that this wasn't a good place to be. I'm not sure if it was because the place reeked of tourism and lacked local flavor or because some of the people looked really sketchy, but something told me to get out of there. I spent one night in a hostel themed after the Wild West and left. One of my bunkmates, a Japanese guy named Masahiro, was going the same way as me so we ended up going to Taupo together.
Now, places like Taupo are why I came to NZ. It has a pretty laid-back vibe, great scenery, and great activities. Taupo apparently is the busiest skydiving site in the world, and I decided to do a 12,000 ft skydive on the day I arrived. I was the last one on board the plane, which meant I was right next to the door and the first one out. It was a pretty cool feeling during the freefall, but it didn't make my stomach churn the way I thought it would. Also, the fact that my glasses were mashed against my face underneath the goggles took away from the experience a little bit. Next time, I'll be going from 15,000 ft and without glasses. Masahiro jumped as well, and he did a bungy jump on the same day. I decided not to have too much fun for one day, so I may do a bungy on the South Island. The next day we hiked the Tongariro Crossing, which is widely considered to be the best one-day hike in NZ. It was 11 miles up and down mountainsides, and there were some pretty awesome scenes. There were old volcanoes, craters, steaming rocks, and blue lakes, among other things.
Next, we went to a town called Napier on the east coast. This is considered to be the art deco capital of the country and some say, the world. Before I got there I thought, 'Who really cares about art deco architecture?' Then I arrived, and I understood. There are two main streets filled with art deco buildings, and they just look great. It makes me want to live in an art deco building in the future. We went to the National Aquarium, which was pretty small and not very exciting except for the kiwi bird exhibit. The kiwi is the national bird of NZ, and it looks like a brown, furry football with orange legs and a long, skinny, orange beak. That was pretty interesting and made it worth the admission price.
Masahiro and I split ways after Napier. He went to Palmerston North, and I went to Wellington, the national capital. To be quite honest, life on the road can get lonely sometimes. Before meeting Masahiro, I spent a lot of time reading. I had already finished two books by the time I met him. Touring with him was even a little difficult because of the huge language barrier. At one point, we were sitting in a bar with a pen, paper, and electronic dictionary. We both could use only simple sentences because that was all he could produce or understand. It was cool, though, and only frustrating at certain times. One time we decided to split a 6-pack of sausages at the supermarket and he kept repeating the fact that he was going to cook them that night. After a while, I began to think he was going to cook all of them, three for him and three for me. So at dinnertime, I decided to make some potatoes and cut some fruit for the two of us, and then I realized he had only cooked his sausage and wasn't going to cook mine. In my head I thought, 'Dude, where's my sausage?' I decided to share my food with him anyway because there was no way I could finish all the potatoes and my sausage.
At this point, I feel like a retiree sometimes. I take public transportation everywhere (usually with a decent number of seniors on the buses), cook meals with a lot of effort and attention (because there's nothing else to really put a lot of effort into), worry every so often whether or not I'll run out of money, and read books that I otherwise wouldn't have read at busier times in my life. Right now I'm reading John Steinbeck's East of Eden, and I'm able to consume at least 40 pages at a time. This is pretty remarkable for me, since I'm not normally into classics. But given enough free time and a lack of distractions, the mind can do remarkable things. Well, I can't think of anything else to write about for now, but I'll be posting pictures in the near future so until my next post...
