"The pot" at pancake rocks.

My instructor in Hollyhock told me to make sure I hit the West Coast while I’m in New Zealand. “It’s like going back in time,” he said. I misunderstood. I thought he meant it’s like going back to the turn of the century, with old-style farmhouses and dirt roads.

Once I arrived, it became clear what he meant. It’s like going back a hundred million years. The coasts are rugged and dramatic, like you’ve reached the edge of the world. Everywhere are towering, misty cliffs, bulging with ferns. The whole place looks like Jurassic Park.

In the hostel in Punakaiki, I met an American girl. Upon exchanging the typical backpacker questions — Where have you been so far? Where are you going next? — we discovered that we had booked the exact same buses and accommodations for the next four or five days. So we traveled together from Punakaiki to Franz Josef to Queenstown, before parting ways.

Punakaiki’s only attraction is the bizarre and unique “Pancake rocks.” A little-understood sedimentary process left its coastal rocks looking like towering stacks of pancakes (or cheese slices, or cold cuts.) The surrounding area is beautiful though, with plenty of “end of the world” beaches and rainforest trails. After three days there, my companion and I motored south to Franz Josef and checked in to the YHA.

Franz Josef glacier is one of the West Coast’s biggest tourist draws, because it is one of the few locations where a glacier travels through a rainforest. The coast gets pounded with rain year-round, giving it a lush, ferny, prehistoric look. Both of us were too cheap to take an organized tour — which would allow us to hike on the glacier — so we opted instead to climb a neighboring mountain, from which we would have grand views of the ice field. “Alex Knob” is 1100 vertical meters of rainforest, root steps, and cliff-edge trails. It was the longest of the day hikes in the area (8 hours return) so we packed some food and set out early in the morning, a bit smug about the money we’d saved.

Hiking through a rainforest was another item on my life list, and it didn’t disappoint.

Pictures of Punakaiki and our Franz Josef hike are below, in that order.

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In February, my mom came out to visit me for three weeks. After I finished the Milford Track, we met in Queenstown. From there we traveled up through New Zealand, stopping in Hokitika, Christchurch, Kaikoura, Wellington, Wanganui, New Plymouth, Hamilton, Cambridge and finally Auckland.

I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures, but here are some of the decent ones. It was good to see someone from home. We enjoyed many restaurants, parks, flat whites and ice creams.

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One of the gazillions of rows of kiwifruit in the Bay of Plenty. They currently retail for 7.99 a kg.

Well I’ve been in Te Puke picking kiwis for almost two weeks now. The work is difficult and the hours are terrible, but I have income. It feels good not to be in “slow bleed” mode — I can actually plan further travels now.

At work I go across the vines down the endless aisles of kiwifruit. I pick about two hundred kiwis per basket, and fill a basket about every five minutes. By the end of the day I will have filled about eight large bins myself, for which I get paid about fifteen dollars each, and which will each sell in stores for about eight hundred dollars. I am a pawn in this equation, but willingly.

The work is tedious and physical. We have to keep our speed up or we get singled out and eventually fired. Our group is actually quite good and our positions are quite secure, but there is always the thought of falling behind. Whenever I start to gripe internally about the thanklessness of this work, I think of history’s slaves. Instead of getting razzed for being slow, they got whipped. And there was no paycheck, no worker’s rights, and no possibility of resigning. I can’t imagine.

I’m staying at a hostel with a few dozen other seasonal workers. Most of us are backpackers stopping for a few months to replenish the coffers. I’ve made friends already, and since I’ll be here for a few months there is a sense of stability here I haven’t had since I left. I can actually buy groceries in bulk.

New Plans

Well I’ve been in New Zealand for four months now, and I’ve traveled North, South, East and West. There are only a few places I want to go that I haven’t been, so when I’m done working I will start a new country.

Australia didn’t really appeal to me when I conceived this New Zealand trip. In comparison, it just seemed more expensive, hotter, more spread out and less diverse geographically. There was too much in New Zealand to see.

But now I’ve done the rounds in NZ, and I’m really excited about hopping over to Oz. I want a fresh country to explore. Most of the travelers I’ve met have just come from Australia, and they rave about it. Something clicked about two weeks ago and I suddenly I want to visit really bad. I figure I’ll go at the beginning of June, spend three or four weeks traveling up the east coast, and then come back to Auckland.

I had originally planned to spend a year away all together, but that would mean I’d be returning to Canada in November, just in time for the darkness and depression of winter. The thought fills me with dread, and I don’t want to be miserable when I get home. I want to look forward to the gorgeous Canadian summer, so I’ll be coming home sometime around the beginning of July.

I do love the travel experience, but I have a growing yearning to get back to regular life. I want to build my blog. I want to resume learning French. I want to see my friends again. I want to begin the rest of my life. I feel like I’ve been delaying a lot of parts of my life that I want to develop. I’ll be 30 (!) this year and I feel a strong enthusiasm about returning to Canada with new eyes. I appreciate Canada more than ever, having been away from it for five months.

I also want to plan my next trip

Just a quick note to keep you posted on where I’m at.

My last update, the Milford Track, took place at the end of January.

Brimming with gratitude and love for life, I met my mother in Queenstown February 1. She was due to fly out of Auckland February 21st, so we spend the next three weeks traveling through the country, back up to the big city.

We had a great time and it was so good to see her.

Sometime around the middle of the month, a big black cloud descended on me. With my budget running on fumes, and my mother’s visit coming to an end, I knew that soon I would need to find some income. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that my fascinating, life-changing, liberating, four-month expedition — one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had — was over. It was like I could feel my heart grinding to a halt.

I became irritable and ungrateful, and descended into a nasty funk. Job searching is a trying experience at the best of times for me, and this was definitely not the best of times. All thoughts of possibility and curiosity evaporated. It was around this time I discovered I am much more of a pessimist than an optimist.

So I spent a week getting organized, because I figured clarity would lead to ease. I wanted to go about the job search from a place of clarity and confidence.

Well I did achieve clarity, in terms of having all of my affairs in order. Written down, planned, accounted for. I had never been so organized. But I did not achieve confidence. Not at all.

I didn’t want to do it. Everything felt all wrong. I tried to work up confidence and intention every morning, but I ended up doing anything but actually contacting employers. Time and money ticked by, with nothing giving.

A few days ago, I decided to forget the idea of finding surveying work in Auckland. I couldn’t see it happening. I wouldn’t let it happen.

Maybe it was some intuitive resistance, maybe it was just my crippling allergy to job-searching, but I decided to try something else.

So I’m skipping town. I will go to the Bay of Plenty and join the legions of seasonal workers in the kiwifruit industry. I booked a bus and a bed and tomorrow morning I hit the road.

It feels good to get outta Dodge. I was rotting here in Auckland.

I’ll spend three months down there doing physical work, replenishing the coffers, then hit the road again. I have covered a lot of ground in New Zealand, but there are a few places I still want to see.

For the first time in a while, I feel relaxed and playful.

I think I’ve also decided just to use this blog as a travel journal, in addition to an occasional photo album, instead of going through the whole song and dance of finding post images and all that. Feels good. Nice and casual.

And now we’re up to date.

Both New Zealand and Thailand are rich with flowers, and I’ve been snapping photos of them all along the way.

I’ve taken hundreds of pictures of flowers and small plants on my trip. Here are some of the best ones. I left out trees because the gallery would have been too big. I’ll do those later.

Enjoy.

Click on any thumbnail to begin looking. Scroll through them with the arrows at the bottom of the image. If you click on the photo the gallery will close.

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The crown jewel in my New Zealand plans was to knock off one of my Life List items, a famous 53km hike called the Milford Track.

The three-day hike is exalted with superlatives by almost everyone. Rudyard Kipling most famously called it, “The finest walk in the world.” I’m not sure how he could be so sure of that, but it must have impressed him enough that he’d make such a bold and unprovable statement.

New Zealand’s Department of Conservation enforces a strict limit on the number of people allowed on the track. Only 40 people per day may begin the track. Understandably, a lot of people want to do it, so aspiring trekkers must book months in advance to be able to go. I booked last July, and the earliest time I could get was the end of January this year.

There are three backcountry huts along the track where the trampers sleep. All walkers must pack all their own food and carry all their own equipment. They must be prepared for the copious amounts of rain Fiordland experiences. Hikers are warned that they may have to ford waist-deep streams and get soaked to the bone. There are over fifty avalanche runs that cross the track, sheer cliffs, jagged rocks, and mountain parrots that will try to steal your boots at night.

Both ends of the track are only accessible by boat. At about noon on January 29, forty of us climbed off the boat and started our march.

I’ll just say I will never forget the three days that followed. The story will be in the photos and their captions.

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Observation deck at Te Papa

Ok. When I last left off, I had just left Napier. To give you some perspective on the dates, that was December 14th. After a lovely five-hour busride (with one stop for a delicious kebab) we swung into the nation’s capital, Wellington.

I had a four-night booking at the Wellington YHA, a six-floor monster of a hostel, with cavernous kitchens and common areas. When I arrived, in my room was a Swiss girl and two middle-aged Canadians from Lethbridge.

Home?

Wellington has particular interest for me because it is the city I had chosen to eventually settle in at some point during my trip. I arrived in the city knowing it may very well be “home” for me for a while.

This NZ trip is taking on a different form than I initially pictured. My throwaway stop in Thailand (which mushroomed into a proper four-week tour of the country) set a new tone for the trip. Whereas before I pictured simply transplanting myself to a city in NZ to dig in and work for a year, soon enough I found myself in the middle of a three- or four-month trek across two countries. If it were financially feasible, I’d be happy to keep myself mobile the entire year, stopping here and there to do some casual work to replenish the coffers.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do. I haven’t tested the job-market waters in Wellington yet (or in Auckland for that matter) so I don’t know if I’m going to find career-relating work and live a static, professional, citydwelling existence, or a seat-of-the-pants, busriding, fruitpicking, vagabond sojourn for the whole year. Either will suit, I think, I just have to make sure I leave a sizable cash cushion in case my experiment doesn’t work at first.

One of my favorite parts of traveling is my initial wander around the city the evening I arrive. Just outside the hostel, several streets were closed off and a crowd was gathering. I picked my way through the crowd to discover a genuine red-carpet ceremony with a parade of clean, photogenic people walking to a fancy theatre. It turns out it was the premier of Peter Jackson’s new film The Lovely Bones.

I found the crowd to be more interesting than the unfamiliar carpet-walkers.

I lost interest in the premier hubbub, went for ice cream (stracciatella and espresso) and continued to wander. I found Wellington to be a highly beautified city, with public art and flora everywhere. It’s clean and compact, and has a human warmth to it that is conspicuously absent in Auckland.

Welly is, for better or worse, incurably trendy. Clean-cut thirtysomethings in ties and powersuits swarm the cafés at midday and midafternoon. There is a strong arty vibe, which I consider a good thing, and I sensed there was some good live music simmering somewhere in the city but I didn’t go looking. I spent my days gathering supplies and tying up some loose ends (it seems this process never ends) and eating ice cream.

Welly is known for its wind. So is Winnipeg, my hometown, but I was not prepared for the sort of rude, persistent blasting I experienced all five of the days I spent in Wellington. It howls through the buildings and makes shady areas chilly, even on a warm, sunny day. It almost felt like a dealbreaker; I don’t know if I want to live in a city where I have to contend with such an obnoxious natural phenomenon every day.

Everything else about Wellington, I liked. It has a strong arts and music scene, it isn’t overly metropolitan like Auckland, and the city itself is small enough to walk everywhere if you’ve got the time.

Because of demand, I had, months earlier, booked accommodation at the huts along the Abel Tasman Coastal Track for December 23-26, so I had to get a move on. On December 18 I set sail for the South Island.

Photos:

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Yes, I know I am very much behind. This took place a month ago. But as you can see, I’ve got a shiny new photo plugin working (I hope) so things should be back underway. Lots of pictures on the way, and not many words. -D.

I’ve gotten quite behind. I will attempt to bring you up to date over the coming week or two, but I’ve come to a few resolutions.

As I explained on Raptitude, the logistics of running a blog from the road make it much more difficult than at home, even though I don’t have a full-time job taking up my time. Now I’ve got two blogs, and I’m really struggling to keep them both consistent. Raptitude is my priority, and I’d rather make sure I keep to my two-article per week schedule there, than divide my efforts and end up with two blogs that are behind.

I’ve also  found I don’t particularly enjoy writing about my trip when all I’m doing is describing what I did or saw. I don’t think it makes for particularly good reading, and I don’t want to commit the kind of substantial hours I do for Raptitude to include some sort of angle or insight in these posts. To be honest, I have found writing for DGK to be a rather obnoxious obligation, and I don’t want it to be like that. I want it to be fun to both write and read.

So from now on, I will not continue an event-by-event narrative. I will only write about events that are especially interesting. The bulk of DGK will be photographs, with much of the story revealed in captions. You won’t miss the adventure, you just won’t have to read these tedious travelogues I’ve felt compelled to write for each place I visit.

As well, I am not going to try to integrate the pictures with the words anymore. It adds an additional layer of complexity to keeping DGK up to date and it is one of the primary reasons it’s so behind. So it will generally be words, then pictures, and the captions should sort it all out. That will allow me to do almost everything offline, which will help a lot. To do online work I have to walk a few kilometers to a café and then it costs me 4-5 dollars per hour.

I’m also going to try to find a new photo plugin, so I don’t have to do the pictures manually. The first plugin I tried gave me nothing but problems.

I’d rather spend my writing time keeping Raptitude consistently updated than sink more time into DGK. This is good for the reader too I think, because that means DGK will probably be updated more often and stay more current, and there will be more pictures. But I’ve got to work out a few bugs first.

If these new resolutions don’t make the whole process much more streamlined, I will have to take more drastic measures. I had a post about Wellington ready to go today, but I’m having technical problems here at the café and I don’t have the time to sort them out. So it will get updated when it gets updated and I can’t really do much else about it.

So we’ll see what happens, I’m just letting you know what the deal is.

I had time for one destination between Taupo and Wellington. During the planning stages of my trip, I’d heard little about Napier except for its reputation for wine, so I wasn’t particularly drawn to it.

When I found out my chosen bus line (the cheap and efficient Naked Bus) didn’t go from Taupo to the west coast without some serious backtracking, I decided Napier was my best bet.

Napier has a very distinct character, and the history behind it is interesting. The city was devastated by a massive earthquake in 1931. Nearly all of its European-style brick buildings were shaken to pieces. With the world in the grips of the Great Depression, Napier suddenly had a lot of construction projects on its hands.

The rebuilding effort brought the community together and gave it a spirit of progress it had never experienced. They chose the roaring twenties style of Art Deco, to commemorate its new-found vitality and modernness. Much of the city looks like the set of a gangster movie.

I stayed at the Criterion Art Deco, a 1930s hotel converted to a hostel. It was like stepping back in time.

I only had two nights and one full day to spend there, and I wish I’d had more. The weather was beautiful. Both evenings, my hostel comrades and I sat on the balcony, drank wine and watched two incredible sunsets. I wonder if they get them every day in Napier.

I tried to pack as much in my day as possible. I began with a guided walking tour, then I set out on my own. I visited the National Aquarium, which was great, but struck me as a little too small to be “National.” I walked around taking pictures, and found as much beauty of the botanical kind as the architectural.

Napier went too quickly. Three nights is about the minimum to really see some portion of a city, two was more of a tease than anything. So two quick nights and I was off to the nation’s capital.

This is part two of a two part post. Part one is here.

As I took the final few steps to the top, I was rewarded with grand views in every direction…

Looking back at Mt. Doom's summit

Over the summit, blue lake in the distance, and a vast lava spill in the foreground.

…but what really stunned me were the famous Emerald Lakes on the plateau below. I descended to the thin strip between their shores, slightly hypnotized. To my surprise, they weren’t mirages and did not disappear as I approached.

The Emerald Lakes

The shore of the big lake

I sat on a rock between them for some time. It was difficult to leave such a magical little spot, but I still had a good ten kilometres left. The trail took me across another immense crater, and up to the shores of Blue Lake.

Crossing an even bigger crater, looking back at the peaks. You can see what a massive eruption it must have been to blast the top off the mountain.

Blue lake

From there, I began my long, long descent of the mountain. Here the vegetation suddenly came back into the picture, much of it a Christmasy blend of green and white mosses with red alpine scrub. The rocks, too, were colorful and interesting.

The windward side was thick with this white and green moss

The views over Lake Taupo were unreal.

The beginning of the way down

After a long, zig-zaggy descent, I arrived at a tiny Department of Conservtion hut, rested for a minute, and then continued the long, long, descent down the trail. Walking on a downslope for miles is really taxing on the knees, as well as the toes, which become wedged further into your shoe with each step.

The lovely vistas continued, though. I crossed streams and waterfalls, steam vents and rock steps, snapping pictures the whole way. By the end of the day I would have 228 photographs.

Without warning, the alpine fields gave way to a lush, ferned forest.

I followed the trail, down, down, down, until I was sure I must be below sea level. Then I went down, down down some more. By this time I was a sunburned zombie, and I eventually stumbled out into a parking lot and dropped myself onto a bench to wait for the bus.

***

It was an unforgettable experience, and I’d do it again. Don’t pass it up if you’re ever in New Zealand. Make sure it’s a nice day though. The following day, I told an excited dorm-mate of mine all about it and showed him my pictures. Just a few hours ago he returned and said it was terrible. Clouds enveloped the whole mountain all day, and they ran into 100kph+ winds. He said he couldn’t see to the next trail marker the whole way, and only 15 out of 100 people made it to the end.