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The main event today was a glacier hike.  Actually, a heli-hike, since we wanted to get farther up on the glacier than we could by ice climbing in a single day.  After a short safety into, we all jumped into the helicopter than they circled us up to a couple kilometers up the Franz Josef glacier.  The hiking wasn’t strenuous, but was certainly dangerous, as the English woman who slide 20 feet down a crevasse into an icy pool of water could tell you.  I was impressed with the reaction of everyone on the trip, though:  without a speaking a word, we quickly formed a human chain and pulled her, shivering, out of the clef.  Staying true to her English roots, the first thing she did was apologize about being “too much of a trouble.”  It gave us all a laugh.  Despite our guides self-deprecating introduction (“Just a disclaimer:  I have no mountaneering experience.” “How’d you get this job?” “Like any good Kiwi, I bullshit well.”), he was actually quite a good guide, could spot terrain well, and had received extensive training.

After a couple hours of tooling around serac fields, ice tunnels, and blue ice deposits, the weather turned inclement and we had to be flown back down to the base.  We were all jubilant from the activity and scenery of the day, and settled down to soaking in some glacial-water hot pools, monopoloy, and beers with cheese and crackers.

Friday is a day of driving.  We trying to make it across and down the South Island to Franz Josef, 380km away through some winding mountain roads.  Shortly after exiting the Christchurch suburbs, we’re struck by the scenery.  It’s positively gorgeous, and as the trip evolves, continually changing.

Along the way we stop at some interesting outcroppings of rock, notice a trailhead, and scramble up the hill for some light hiking.  We find out later this location, Castle Hill, was one of the locations for Lord of the Rings filming.  I can understand why.

Just after Castle Hill we pass Cave Stream, and we make a note of it to ask some locals about it.  Perhaps we can hit it on the way back, but we also want to make sure we hit the Devil’s Punchbowl hike in Arthur’s Pass.  It’s a short hike, just a few kilometers from where we started, and worth it.

Once we hit Jacksons — a town consisting of a bar/restaurant, near as we could tell — the terrain started flattening out.  We each had some sort of meat pie, which would slowly becomes a favorite treat of ours, relaxed for a few, then hit the road again since our little four-banger wasn’t exactly a speed demon and we heard it gets slow-going further down the road due to sharp turns, narrow roads, and single-lane bridges.

I feel awkward trying to describe in words the beauty of that initial jaunt across the South Island.  I think the accompanying pictures, although they pale in comparison to the personal experience, will do far better than I ever could.  The only part which doesn’t deserve a photo is the rambunctious group of students at the Franz Josef YHA that got so drunk some of them threw up all over there rooms and the bathrooms.  Yuck.  But, we weren’t in New Zealand to hang out indoors.

We shuttle over to the airport in the morning, heading out of Australia and over to New Zealand.  The security screenings are uneventful and reasonable — you can wear your shoes.

I fall asleep on the plane with my mouth open, and Lanaea nudges me telling me I’m “eating air.”  In my stupor, I inform her that “it’s delicious.”  Such are the things that I say when half-asleep that makes here want to start a website called “stuffmyboyfriendssayswhileasleep.com”.

It’s a bit chillier in Christchurch than Melbourne, but not overly so.  We pick up our rental car, a Nissan Sunny that beeps when you reverse, and whose exterior betrays the 8K odometer reading.  I think it rolled over.

The hostel isn’t too hard to find, and we drop off our bags in most spartan of hostels we’ve seen yet.  The walls are thin, footsteps down the hallways sound like sumo on the ceiling, and there is nothing in the room save a rickety double bed — no stool, or nightstand, or trashcan, or coat hook — and strangely enough, a framed photo of a flower on the wall that looks as if it just escaped the 1970s.

It’s an odd time of day, early afternoon on a Thursday in a town that’s not overly large, and notice that most of the restaurants are closed for the period between lunch and dinner.  We end up the only customers in a Mexican joint, of all places, and settle into our first New Zealand meal of nachos.  Not what we expected, but the emptiness of the place imparted a somewhat ethereal feel to the start of our new country.

Shortly afterward we run into Nat and Jordan wandering around downtown Christchurch, and Jordan and I opt to have some “guy time” at a pub while the girls window shop.  We end up and Bourbon Street, where once again we were the only patrons.  The bartender, Matt, is friendly, easygoing, and funny, and gets a kick out of us referring to Speight’s Ale as “Pride of the South,” as the banner of the tap proclaims.  As the night progresses, the girls meet up with us at the bar and characters upon characters start collecting at the bar.

There’s the English Chancellor and his wife who won’t tell us their names for security purposes, but regale us with travel tales of Iceland (highly recommended) and Machu Picchu (says it’s too touristy now), among other locations.  There Warrick from Gore, New Zealand, a teacher up on vacation, relating how the truly south of the South Island live.  There’s a 23 year old kid and his girlfriend, the former of which is positively blasted and trying to convince use he’s 40.  And Ken, a master carpenter from Denver who’s just got back from a stint at the McMurdo station in Antarctica — who claims that the rumors of rampant sexual activities among the denizens, to pass the lonely cold months, are true.

The drinking goes late, all trading stories and recommendations, and on the way out we meet an extremely friendly punk that builds his own custom cycles.  Big, behemoths of cycles, using engines from trucks.  He offerred us a ride on his 302ci custom, but somehow, conversation derailed, and we ended up walking back to the hostel.

302ci Christchurch Custom

Today was a mellow day.  Mostly wandering Gertude and Smith streets in Fitzroy and Collingwood, drinking flat whites and window shopping.  I was a bit surprised when we stopped in a store named “Release the Hounds” and thought I heard Mu-ziq playing on the radio.  Turns out it was a folktronica band named “Múm”.  Since there were at least two words in that previous sentence that were new to me, I chatted with the salesman for a while, trading music recs.  (For those of you who are curious, his Múm recommendations were for “Yesterday was Dramatic — Today is OK” and “Finally we are No One”.)  The hipness of Melbourne definitely scored some points with me on that one.

Through the wanderings of the day, we did notice that there appears to be a bit of “white guilt” regarding the indigenous peoples.  Locals would completely ignore the the white panhandlers, refusing to even to make eye contact, but when an indigenous panhandler would come along, the very same people would stand, shake his hand heartily, say a blessing or two, and hand over fivers.  This wasn’t an isolated instance, either, we saw it multiple times between multiple individuals.  No judgements here, just an observation.  I know the historical treatment of indigenous Australians is as touchy as the United States’ treatment of African and Native Americans (and just about any other group depending on the point in history you wish to analyze), but these interactions we saw I’ve never even come close to witnessing the the states.  I found it quite fascinating on sociological and interpersonal levels.

After another lunch of cheese, crackers, and hummus, we set out with a goal to find Lanaea and affordable opal.  We hit just about every place that sold opals in the Melbourne CBD, most at least twice, and finally ended up back at the first one we’d walked into the day before.  And found the perfect one there.  Of course, if we’d gotten it straight off, we might always wonder if there was a better one a block away, but since we’d been everywhere, it ended up being molded by experience into “perfect.”  Funny how that works out.

Melbourne itself is kind of a funny place, come to think about it.  There’s major development all over; the CBD is a panorama of cranes.  But it’s classy, urban, and hipster counter-culture all the same, with pan-European cuisine and architecture and a deference to the local history and culture.  It’s in a country with a reputation for beer and meat in quantity, yet the prices for such things are high, the portions are small, and it’s not the best thing by far that you can eat in Melbourne.  Which is, in a way, why I fell in love with Melbourne.

We awoke in the morning intending to check out the Queen Victoria Market, of which we’ve heard so much.  Downtown Melbourne is very walkable, in spite of the free trolleys that start a little too late and end a little too early.  When we arrived, some booths were still setting up, but it was almost in full swing.  I was initially disappointed — it’s essentially a big swap meet, although if it’s the largest it’s only slightly bigger than Kobe’s Swap Meet in San Diego (albeit covered), and contained much of the same or similar items if you substitute “Australia” for “San Diego” on the various t-shirts and trinkets.  I picked up some coasters as memorabilia, while Lanaea browsed for some gifts for those back home.  We did meet one interesting local, a man selling authentic (I have no way to know, although there was a grizzled old aborigine hunched down hard at work on items soon to be on sale), who also spoke a bit of his walkabout experiences.  Wether patter for the tourists who are looking for a boomerang or not, I can’t say, but he was certainly pleasant and provided a break in the monotony of made-in-china handbags and fridge magnets.

Everything changes when we hit the food area.  It was like the largest farmers’ market I’ve ever seen; you could get just about anything.  The fish men were out every ten feet, pitching the quality and value of their edibles with loud, practiced voices, as if working a carnival crowd.  It was far more interesting to browse here than outside.

The sight of all the delicious food got our stomachs grumbling, so we retired outside of sandwiches with the pigeons, then set off to the CBD to see if we could find a reasonably priced opal for Lanaea.  Unfortunately, we discovered we had impeccable taste in opals, and the ones that caught our eyes, even if quite small, were frequently had three or four zeroes on their price tags.

The afternoon called for chores, and it turns out that finding grocery stores and laundromats can be a bit more difficult that we anticipated.  There just don’t seem to be that many of them around, at least in downtown.  The only reason I mention it was because of the drunk old man who wandered into the minuscule laundromat we’d managed to find, sloshing around whisky and spilling it on the floors and some other people’s clean clothes.  Apparently, I looked to be a friendly chap in desperate need of advice, and he latched on to me, alternating between mumbling and shouting barely comprehensible phrases.  At one point, he’s staring directly in my face, stating and re-stating that “you must look them in the eyes and don’t answer, it’s the only way!”  I though this a nice semantic trick to play on someone while attempting to invade their personal space, but felt he couldn’t legitimately get angry with him if I did just that (and more stable legal ground, if we tried something, since we was starting to get a bit close for comfort), so I just stared him directly in the eyes and gave him the hardest look I had. He paused, asked for money, but when I said nothing, he smiled, offered me some whisky which I wordlessly declined, then turned and went stumbling out the door.

Immediately after he left, local just finishing his drying cycle asked me “Do you know him?”  At which point I became a little concerned with the quality of my personal appearance.  A glance in the mirror told me there’s no way it looked like we hung in the same social circles, so this comment actually confused me more than the drunkard’s ramblings.

Three days worth of clean laundry in hand, we hit up some bad chinese for dinner (avoid “City BBQ in Melbourne”!) before washing it down with some gelato in the park and prepping for the Brunswick Street pub crawl we’d planned with Natalie and Jordan.  Brunswick St cuts through the heart of Fitzroy, a hip enclave just outside the CBD.  Plenty of bars, cheap restaurants, cafes, art galleries, independent fashion designers, etc.  At night, most of these weren’t open, but the bars were in full swing.  We started at a lively beer hall (featuring free commuter bikes to ride around the various bars) for some good local beer, hit the Black Pearl for some ridiculously expensive and elaborate mixed concoctions (although it had great decor and atmosphere and I once again found an awesome local belgian-style brew), and then to the communist themed Bar Open, where it appeared some sort of film was being played upstairs.  After a beer or two more, and pictures taken in front of the various murals featuring communist leaders adorning the walls, we hiked back to the CBD for a final brew at the Elephant and Wheelbarrow before heading home.  (Incidentally, for those playing along at home, most “hotels” appear to not actually be hotels, but “bars.”  Forewarned is forearmed.)   All in all, much more “crawl” than “pub”, which may very well be my speed these days, and a nice last night with Nat and Jordan before we meet up with them in New Zealand.