![]() ![]() This was in the midst of my coach tour from Queenstown to Auckland, just outside Abel Tasman National Park. With an archly raised eyebrow and a subtle bulging of the eye, Ffion invited me to go on. ![]() ‘Oh yes, we hypnotised one.’ I said, and realised this was a story that I’d neglected to write into my diary, never told anyone of, and completely forgotten until now. In any case, I was complaining of this excess of anecdote to my friend Ffion recently, and she cut through my pontificating by asking me to tell her a story about a chicken. ![]() And there were beers cooling in the stream, and the scent of wood shavings on the forest air, the geothermal pools were hot and the lakes were cold,there were kisses by moonlight, shooting stars and new constellations, seals swimming the the rivers and kea clowning for scraps, and a beautiful woman did a hula dance in an apartment by the sea. I flew gliders higher and for longer than I ever had before, leaped from planes and the top of skyscrapers, guided kayaks over wide, deep lakes, ascended sheer walls of blue ice and pitted rock, and plunged gasping into lakes, oceans, rivers and waterfalls. I attempted to make things more interesting by summarising my month and a half in New Zealand in a few sentences of Dickensian length and complexity, but since they’re a little too rhetorical to recite by heart, I mostly copy them into letters, Facebook statuses and blogs:įrom the streets of Christchurch, where life and culture thrives even among the rubble and dead hulks of its earthquake-stricken centre to the star-brilliant skies above the blackness of Lake Tekapo to the mist-shrouded bulk of Mt Cook, waterfalls pouring down its cheeks in angry cataracts all down the jagged line of the southern alps, past the icy lakes of Wanaka and Wakatipu and into the sheer mountains and impenetrable rainforests of Fiordland, bridged by a single stoney track beneath which the clear Routeburn flows through valley and gorge, I ventured then turning northward along the dangerous, ever-sounding shores of the west coast, where the glaciers sink slowly backwards into the mountains and the sea foams and spouts like a tempestuous geyser among the tortured and labyrinthine rocks to the golden sand of Abel Tasman, where western eyes first glimpsed the young country, and paths lead through waist-deep tidal bays to the farther shore to the vine groves of Marlborough and thence to the verdurous pastures and rainbow-haunted skies of North Island: the snowy crater and steaming volcanic lake of Ruapehu the redwood forests and bubbling mud pits of Rotorua, and the deep azure mineral pools in which ferns silver and decay up past Hobbiton and the black water caves of Waitomo to the northern capes and islands where the country began where the great kauri, taller even than redwoods, pierce the canopy then south once more to volcano-spotted Auckland, spanning the peninsula from the Pacific to the Tasman Sea: such were my travels in New Zealand. The trouble with any long period away is that it includes such a variety and wide range of incidents, anecdotes, encounters and adventures that it’s nigh impossible to provide a short, cogent answer to a question as simple as ‘How did you find New Zealand?’ apart from the utterly banal (‘I liked it, thanks.’) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |