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The last full day in Christchurch.  We awoke to a fire alarm in the hotel, quickly grabbed the netbooks and camera, and went out for coffee.  We did some shopping for friends and family, and explored some more, although the mood was distinctly less elated than before.  Neither of us wanted to leave New Zealand, much less end our vacation.  With some regret, I started writing down recommendations for back home:  ”Three Boys” (either Pilsner or Wheat) beers from New Zealand, the “Two Brothers” beer from Australia, which is what I had at the Black Pearl in Melbourne, and a band call Korpiklanni.

It seems too soon to be preparing to go home.  We have a quick stopover in Sydney, then back to LAX and the “real world.”

I’m looking forward to the next trip.  Eastern Europe?  Iceland?  Southeast Asia?  Japan?  Belize?

Today is more wandering around Christchurch.  Poplar Lanes, Litchfield Lanes, Sol Square, the Botanical Gardens, and the Wednesday Market on the Cathedral Square.  Lunch is at the Vespa Room — the pizza is good, the Montieth Pilsner isn’t bad, and the music takes me back:  old Cure, Amy Winehouse, and New Order.  (If you’re wondering why we eat at bars so frequently when we eat out, it’s because we end up eating at odd times, and with the exception of bars, restaurants tend to be open for only short spans of time:  breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner, and are closed in between.)  We do some souvenir shopping, but most of the day is spent relaxing and just absorbing the local relaxed flavor.

I do notice, however, a surprising but perhaps not unexpected number of people on crutches.  At least several people per day.  Christchurch!  Crutchchurch!  Christcrutch?  Must be all the “extreme” activities available here.  But no one seems to complain, even the people on crutches.  Oh yeah, personal responsibility again.  Cool.

Since Akaroa is in a volcanic crater, we take the far on a tour around the the rim to check out the scenery.  It’s quite breathtaking, for two reasons:  it’s beautiful, and the road is a narrow two-lane road without guardrails, above cliffs, down which locals drive incredibly fast.  Lanaea was actually on “going over the edge warning” duty.

Back in Christchurch, we drop off the car and take the city bus back into town.  There’s been a lot of travel and activities lately, so plan for a mellow day walking the city.  Downtown Christchurch is actually quite small, and by the time we leave, we’ll have walked just about every avenue and alley there is.  Make sure you stop by Litchfield Lanes and Sol Square for some cool little restaurants, bars, and cafes.

In the evening, we eat at the Bodhi Tree again.  We end up seated at a table with a couple, Luke and David, who give great travel recommendation (everyone here seems to have great recs — with the exception of Oxford on Avon.)  They are emphatic that in Brisbane, we should check out Stradbroke Island, for at least 3 days, and stay and Pt Lookup.  They say it’s still relatively undiscovered, but should get there quick.  Dinner is delightful, conversation good, and the day mellow.  It gives me a chance to reflect on quirks and differences between the US and Australia and New Zealand together.

One of the first things to notice is that there’s a distinct lack of presence of police and police cars.  It was several days before I even saw and officer, much less a police vehicle, and could probably count on one hand the total number..  And as mentioned before, there’s a distinct penchant for El Camino’s over pickup trucks.  In New Zealand, there’s also a prevalence of extremely tall (20+ feet) square hedges.  Oh, and 1414 AM is an awesome radio station, but that’s not a difference or oddity.  It’s just cool.

I’m up at 4 AM to drop Nat and Jordan off at the airport.  For some reason, I’ve been waking up earlier and earlier despite being on vacation.  I think I know I’m going to miss New Zealand, and want to soak up as much as I can.  Despite that, I know we’re doing to be driving a bit again, so I head back to the hotels for a few more hours sleep.

Lanaea and I check out of the hotel and drive off toward Sumner and a beach called Taylor’s Mistake that Tamara had recommended.  We’re planning on a much more mellow day after yesterday, mostly just exploring.  In Sumner, we climb about Cave Rock (a small rock, but again, you can go underneath it in low tide and splash about the water.)  After a breakfast at a local cafe that could very be beachside in Pacific or Hermosa Beach, we head over the hill to Taylor’s Mistake.  It’s a small semi-secluded beach.  There’s dogs running freely and it’s next to empty.  Near the end of the beach, we run into a Welsh couple (Phil and Sandy) who visited New Zealand once 20 years ago, and when they came back, they came back for good.  They now live here permanently and run 4×4 tours across the South Island.  And like any good Welshman, he has a ton of stories, never stops telling them, and uses the word “luxury” as if he were auditioning for Montys Python’s “Four Welshman” skit.  They also had good advice for Akaroa, where we’d be staying the night tonight.

We eventually take up our driving again at a mellow pace, enjoying the scenery.  We’re headed for Akaroa now, sort of a French-style outpost sitting at the bottom of a volcanic crater that is now a bay.  We check into a hostel called “Ches La Mer” that is right out of classic Euro-backpacker lore. Essentially a converted house, filled mostly with a younger, philosophically oriented crowd, and a lovely well-tended backyard with tables, grills, and a fountain.  On Phil’s advice, we head down to get some of “the best fush and chups in New Zealand.”  I can’t argue with him; definitely the best fish and chips I’ve ever had.

We pick up some beer and snacks on the way back to the hostel and find a loose gathering in the backyard.  Everyone is good natured and social, although a bit more mature than the kids in Bondi Beach.  Philosophy and travel are consistent topics.  There’s Ross from D.C., Josh from Devon, Seth from Wisconsin (the last two being sailors), Teodora from Romania by way of Germany and London, as well as some others I can’t recall.

Teodora was a bit older than the rest, although younger than myself, and had worked from Merrill Lynch in London, and was laid off during downsizing.  She decided to travel for a few months, returned to London and realized “there’s nothing for me here,” so took off to travel again.  That was nine months previous.  She has no plans on stopping, although when she talked of home in Transylvania, you could tell she missed it.  When we mentioned Bucharest was on our list, she heartily recommended staying there only a short time, then getting out of it as soon as possible and hitting the countryside.  Sounds good to me.

Ross was the most philosophical one of the crowd.  Extremely nice, engaged in the world, searching and seeking.  It reminded me of how youth finds it impossible to see youth; how much that is new is actually only new to you — although I suppose that’s definition of “new” in a non-dualistic sense.  We chatted for a bit, but I think I inadvertently went over their his and the others’ head for a bit — not because I’m smarter than them, but because I’d already ready most of the tracts, essays, and philosophy books that they still had on their to-read lists.  When you start talking about the implications of unprovably-true or un-disprovably-false classifications from meta-systems anologies of Godel’s number theory to the finite amount of matter in the world, and how this applies the including the reader’s own meta-narrative in Zen and the Art of Motorcylce Maintenance which actually meshes with Pragmatist ethics despite the apparent differences, and that such classifications could actually describe the “lack of adequate proof” aspect of apparent but incorrect assertion of Pragmatist moral relativity … well, I had fun, and Ross got the title of a couple new books to read.  Hopefully I didn’t sound like too much of an ass, but I still loves me some philosophy talks over beer.

On the lighter side, there was a German girl there would had never seen a goose.  Have you ever tried to describe a goose to someone that’s never seen one?  Harder than it would first appear.  My best answer:  ”a cross between a duck and a giraffe.”  I don’t think that helped to clear things up.  Oh, and her comment to Seth:  ”People must spit in your face all the time.”  Only after everyone stopped laughing was she able to state that it’s because “Seth” is so difficult to pronounce for Germans.

I awoke before anyone else, early, around  5 AM or so, and decided to see what New Zealand sunrises looked like.  There was just the slightest suggestion that dawn was coming as I wandered about the small town of Franz Josef.  As the sky gradually lightened, invisible birds, and presumably other animals, began their morning symphony, quickly expanding from a few simple chirps to calls and shrieks I’ve never even heard recorded on a soundtrack before.  It was the auditory equivalent of seeing a parrot for the first time, when one has only seen a dove.

I wandered around town until dawn broke and the calls began to quiet.  It is still one of the most ethereal and memorable experiences of the trip for me.

The rest of the group is up shortly thereafter, as our plan is to drive back to Christchurch that day, and see if we have time to climb Cave Stream and do a ropes course before the day is out.  Cave Stream is as it sounds:  a 1km or so hike inside a cave with a stream.  It’s pitch black and slow going, apparently.  And, as we found out the day before from a local, much more dangerous than it appears.  There’s no gates, locks, supervisions, waivers, etc — just a sign post warning you that it’s dangerous.  As in, several people have died doing it within the last year.  (This is one thing I love about New Zealand:  you are responsible for your own stupidity.)  The locals inform us it’s not difficult, but that it’s not just a walk through a cave: you’re bouldering up through water that’s between waist and neck deep depending on snowmelt, and the water is consistently quite cold.  We agree we’ll at least check out the first part of it on the way back, even though we don’t have the gear for it.  Perhaps we can get a little cave time in before it gets deep.

It’s a quiet ride on the way back; most of the car is asleep, and rain starts to spatter the windshield.  The roads are slippery and winding.  The scenery is blunted from the grayness of the clouds.  The wisps and fingers of clouds begin to envelop us we rise into the mountains; we begin to weave in and out fog banks.  At Otira, I pull over for some photos.

Once we get on the other side of Arthur’s Pass and begin to downhill grade, the car is beginning to wake up.  We pull off at Cave Stream and hike down to one of the openings.  About 10 feet inside the cave, the path drops about 6-8 feet down through a rushing, albeit small, waterfall.  The water is quite chilly, and we definitely don’t have the gear for this.  We fool around, exploring and taking photos, getting excited for the day.  It’s still relatively early, and we’re halfway back to Christchurch.  We trailrun back up the hill and down to the other end of the cave, but we can’t even see the entrance.  We’d have to creek slosh for a ways just to get there.  Sadly, we abandon Cave Stream and haul ass to Christchurch.  I take to opportunity to relinquish the driver’s seat and pass out for an hour.

We arrive in the suburbs of Christchurch around 1 PM; I’m exciting by this because I’ve recharged my batteries, and there’s a ropes course Natalie had found that closes at 5 PM and is somewhere just northwest of the city.  Normally, we’d have no problem going the remaining distance in an hour, but that’s before we realized that there are apparently no urban planners in the city.  Street names changes every couple of blocks, seemingly arbitrarily.  And not because you have transitioned between districts or suburbs (that we could tell).  Without exaggerating:  we would be on a street for three, perhaps five block, before we’d realize that it had changed names, and realized that the next turn we were looking for may or may not be called what the map claimed, since the map didn’t list every (or even most) name changes along the line designating the street.  Seriously?

With some luck and a bit of backtracking, we make it to “Adrenaline Forest” a bit after 2 PM.  I run up to check the hours, and they say we still have time even though we’re after their official “last start” time:  most people take 2-3 hours to get through all the courses if they’re good, 4 hours if they’ve never worked on ropes before.  Jordan, Nat, and I drop the $35 NZ each (about $27 US!), while Nae graciously offers to take photos of us.  Once again I was impressed with the culture of personal responsibility in NZ:  we didn’t have to sign a waiver, the training was quick and to the point (“here’s how to check your harness,” “always have at least one carabiner clipped at any given time”, etc), after which they let us have our run of the park. They don’t coddle us, guide us, or give advice unless asked.  Awesome.

We finish all six courses in just over 2 hours; the sixth is by far the coolest.  You end up about 20m (65 ft) in the trees, which is high enough that the platforms and ropes sway.  My arms we’re definitely burnt after were finished — both from exercise and a bit of rope burn.

It’s about this time I realize that all I’ve had to eat all day is an energy bar, and that I’m not the only on that’s hungry.  We’re staying at Hotel So, a JetBlue of hospitality:  small, nicer and cheaper than a hostel, but every little thing costs extra.  Want your room cleaned, sheets changed, or a fresh towel?  All that’s extra.  Since we had our own bathroom, though, we could do laundry at our leisure and ended up saving money.

Through the course of the day, we’d been asking locals for recommendations for dinner that night.  Several suggested “Oxford on Avon,” which sounded like a nice splurge for our last group dinner.  It turns out that “Oxford on Avon,” is a buffet, and a horrible one at that.  Cold food, tasted horrible, and was way too expensive.  So bad, in fact, we left our plates there and asked for our money back.  I’ve never done that before (thankfully, Nat did it for us.)

Someone, I think Nae, consulted a guidebook and found a relatively cheap and highly recommended Burmese place called the “Bodhi Tree.”  It took a bit of wandering to find (unsurprisingly, we had to ask for directions, and the girl working a local clothing store knew “Myanmar” but not “Burma” — am I that old?)  This turned out to be absolutely incredible:  small but packed, which extremely friendly servers with great recommendations, and the chef wandering about and saying hello.  I’ve been looking for solid Burmese food ever since.  If you make it there, try the Tea Party, the Blue Beans, the Mushrooms, and the beef dishes.  Fantastic!  In fact, so good, we would return again later in the trip — the only restaurant on the trip good enough to visit twice.

We finished with drinks across the street at Cafe Valentino and chatted with Tamara the Canadian bartender.  She had great recommendations for food, some good local belgian-style micro-brews, as well as places to visit.  As well as just being a damn cool person that filled us in on her perspective of of living in New Zealand as a non-native.  A drink or two later, moving toward the hotel, we stop by Bourbon St to say hello to Matt.  Ken from McMurdy is there again, completely hammered, so much so that he doesn’t remember us at all.  After ordering another drink, Matt asks “have you checked your bank account lately?”  Definitely not good when your bartending is asking you that.

Exhausted and full, we retire for the night.  It already seems like the next day.