Well, we continue.
The ferry dropped us off in Picton and a) it felt like a carribbean island airport; and b) a man from rent-a-dent (from now on RaD) was standing with a sign that read 'genevieve joy'. O RaD! How pleasently surprised we were!! Except for then the man gave us the car and walked away forgetting to leave us with the keys. O RaD! You were so close but then such an epic failure. The good news was, firstly that we were able to run after the man, locate him as he was driving away in another car, and get the keys. And secondly, our new car is SO much classier than the first one. Our North island car was a 1994 Nissan Bluebird who was a girl and light blue and we named her Belle (thanks to Wayne the RaD man in Auckland who suggested that name. Random? Yes.). Our South island car is also a Nissan. But it's from 1996 (!) and is a Sunny and is white. Sunny is his name, obviously and he has fancy things like: automatic windows, automatic locking abilities, a trunk lock, a stereo that works, oh and he doesn't feel like he's gonna literally fall apart at the slightest bump, and also he doesn't make racketty noises from the accelerator (!?? I just met 'er!!). So basically all in all: Sunny doesn't suck-- tho we do need to give him lots of encouragement when going up hills of any size because he doesn't like the incline since he can't seem to switch gears very quickly. But comparatively...he's great!
Well. We drove straight southeast to Blenheim to do a bit of recon on where i'll be working at the end of the month. The town feels cute and managable; saw the house I'll be living in, etc. Felt a bit stalkery of me but hey, i wanted to know.
The next few days saw us driving the whole eastern coast of the south island. From Blenheim we went to Kaikoura, a tiny strip of a town on the water with awesome mountains, epic scenery, some funky live music, a hostel playing a late night movie, and a stand selling mean fish and chips for cheap!
Next we drove up and around and all the way zigzagging past Christchurch, through the rain over the mountain pass and into the tiny town of Akoroa--which is the first French settlement in NZ and has street names like Rue Bulgerie. There we really went all out: staying in a hostel with sheets, out to an italian movie with a bottle of wine, dinner out! All would have been perfect except for when we got mixed up and didn't pay for the movie and almost had the NZ cops after us! But we are safe now. The next day we drove further south-- after a mad hunt for the Cookie Time factory (a cookie here in nz) with no luck, we ended up camping in a small town where we watched penguines waddle on shore after dark, cooked a dinner on our car hood using the camping stove, and found an abandoned little trampoline that all made for a great evening.
These days of constant travel were great, if not tiring as well. There's a lot of car hood cooking, tent sleeping, and makeshift plans. And that's all part of traveling, especially since we have a car and not too much of a plan so we end up planning a lot the day before we do things. Again, this is liberating and tiring at the same time. Sometimes it's awesome to be meeting new people every day, and other times it's just nice to curl up with a bottle of wine and friends, and have sheets and a shower!
But I digress perfectly. We left that next morning for Dunedin where we couchsurfed for 2 nights, explored the town and tried to make a night out on the town out of a dead Monday evening. This failed and ended in ice cream and NZ TV shows. Turns out NYC really is one of the only places you can go out any night of the week.
After all these towns and driving it felt really dire that we get some serious nature-- and nature is what we got! We happily packed our backpacks to the gills and headed out on a 3 day hike along the Milford track.
Milford is the most popular track in the country and actually you have to book your hike with the DOC and space fills up nearly a year in advance. How then did we do it?? Turns out, while they say you must hike the track and stay in these huts along the way, turns out you're allowed to camp aslong as your site is 500 meters off the track. The issue is this: most of the track is lined with this forest or, more challenging, it's in the valley of mountains, which means that there are only a few places along the hike where it's possible to get 500 meters away. We'd met some dude on our travels who'd told us a bit about how to find the spots to walk off the track and camp-- tho, he made it seem really easy to do and, well it proved to be somewhat of a challenge. It's probably good that I didn't tell people back home that we were sort of winging the hike because now we are out and safe and can look back on it and laugh since it's in the past; but at the time it was a bit scary and unknown.
We decided to look at the hike as our first solo-of-sorts camping experience in the extreme. We embraced the challenge of finding places to camp, cooking all on our own, and carrying everything on our backs. And hete's how it went down: We packed tent, stove, food, waterproof everything, sleeping bags, etc. Into our packs Sadly I learned early on that my rain coat is not a rain coat at all; rather it's only a windbreaker, posing.
So day one: starts with a ferry to the beginning of the track. We were late (duh) and nearly got left behind. Started hiking It starts to rain-- oh! You're only a windbreaker!-- by evening we've made it to the first hut where other hikers were staying (dry) and the hut warden offers us his floor to sleep on if we pay $90 each. Ha! So we head back out onto the torrential rain and turn off the path 40 pacess after the boulder on the left, etc etc and..... Well you must picture this right because it's so good: gen and me covered in waterproof gear ( in my case I'm now wearing a large trash bag over my 'raincoat') carrying 50lbs packs, dirty and cold, shoving our bodies through a forest so dense that the ground cover comes up to our necks. It's like ploughing thru a wall. Trying to find a spot a) 500 meters off the track and b) large enough to pitch the tent. After nearly an hour of searching and as the day light begins to fade, we decide we need to be a bit more invasive--branches are broken, ferns smushed, the tent is erected, and we're now huddled over our pot of ramen noodles wearing soaked clothes hoping we don't get esten by some unknown animal. Luckily NZ has absolutely no animals besides sheep and orcs, so in the wild beast department we were quite safe.
Actually. That's all I have time to write at the moment. The rest will have to come later.
Xoxo
SB
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Friday, March 05, 2010
O my lord
I write this from the inter-islander ferry as we cross from the north to the south island. We've just left Wellington after three days of relaxing and comfortable city exploring while we were staying with a girl who graduated from Columbia that we found on couchsurfing. Ah what a small world we live in!
I feel its time for a run down of the fun and crazy, and impossibly exciting, advenuters we've been having so far in NZ.
Raglan was a blast with surfing and swimming, communal cooking and sleeping in a train caboose, no one wears shoes and no one seems to do much except have fun and be tan and enjoy the beauty of the sea. Enticing, i know, but we had to keep moving--adventures were ahead! so we dropped some friends (those seem to be instantaneous around here) off in Hamilton, went grocery shopping at a Cosco-like place where people still didn't wear shoes and went on our way south towards the Waitomo Caves.
Fast forward to Gen and me standing waist-deep in frigid water 65meters underground, floating on inner tubes down this river deep inside a cave, swimming around underground in full wetsuits and headlamps looking at glow worms above us and hoping eels weren't eating our bums. That was the caves. Followed by free bagels and hot soup and more bagels and more soup! and off we were again! This time heading for the tiny and unknown town of National Park.
Once there-- and really we're talking about maybe 4 stores in a row, that's the town-- we found a campsite along this pretty little stream with a handful of other campers like us.
Next morning we head off to the beginning of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing where we promtly met Eva (German) and Alistor (Canadian) who were planning to hike that day as well. We schemed up a great plan with these two: instead of paying $35 a head to take the bus at the of the treck back to our cars, we four decided to leave one car at either end and do a kind of carpooling. Save $$, make friends! We had a blast and ended up hiking the whole day with them! The two of them proved to be formidable hikers, tho their jeans and converse sneakers might have suggested otherwise initially. Gsm and I, of course, are dorked out in super hiking boots and rain gear (just in case!)....and of course they beat us up. Which made us feel only slightly silly.
The area we were hiking in is really barren and is full of old volcanoes and dried lava. It's really steep and a hard, but amazing hike that takes all day, 20km in all. Actually, and importantly, the mountain we hiked around is Mt Doom in the lord of the rings (LOTR ROTK, that's for you O). So we're hiking in Mordor basically is what I'm saying, but meanwhile we're high enough up that you can see way out to rolling hills and in the distance Lake Taupo and some epic mountains. Damn cool.
What's next..?? Oh we finished the hike and recamped and were about to eat our tiny stove-made dinner when we realized the car wouldn't start. The 'dent' part of 'rent-a-dent' was coming to full fruition. Only a little panicking and some Israeli girls driving us to cell service and I'm talking to THE friendliest man I have ever spoken to from AA. Which, so perfectly, here is the auto service company like AAA in the US. Anyway, we wait and this AA guy pulls up to our campsite in a full mechanic suit, asks me to show him the problem and....of course the car works. So he leaves and we feel embarressed and awkward but cool! Car still works.
Next morning we head to the start of our canoeing adventure. We arrive with zero minutes to even think about what we are about to do or what we might need while canoeing down thus river in the absolute middle of nowhere for three days. Throw our stuff into plastic barrels, throw ourselves into the boat and we're off! And on our own.
But of course there's always kiwis on this kind of adventure too. Families on vacation, couples sticking to themselves, and then also the group of 7 twenty-somethings who are celebrating a birthday excursion and have with them 4 coolers of food and beer, a BBQer, at least a fair amount of illegal substances, and lots of nudity. They were great-- invadors of other canoes, pirates wearing purple earmuffs, with an inflatable swan with sexy eyes tied to the back of one canoe, swimming along behind for all three days. They were generous with their beer and food, friendly and just fun to be around--- tho quite loud at night.
Anyway the canoe trip was awesome. We were so far in the wilderness, it was so remote and so quiet of man-made sounds, tho noisy noisy with forest sounds! Canoeing felt like an alternate universe where suddenly our purpose was only to make it to the next camp site, and all the planning and worrying about emails or phone calls or work issues later, just didn't exist for that time. Quite fantastic!
So that took us to 6 days without a real shower, smelling rather foul and generally pooped. we drove, first to where Gen will be working later in Martinborough, and then to Wellington, dropped off the car and packed in to Hannah's house ( from CS) with her 4 musician-sorts flatmates.
Wellington was really awesome-- it feels a lot like San Fram because it's right on the water with a bay and it's super windy and so nice and sunny, tons of waterfront walkways and loads of cafes and a really great beer garden. CSing with Hannah was just perfectly what makes couchsurfing so great. We got a floor to crash on, a kitchen and house to use and instant friends. In exchange we cooked everyone dinner two nights and by the end of our stay really felt that we'd crossed over from just using their floor to sleep on, to actually being good freinds with a fantastic group of kiwis! Sweet-as! (best expression. Used constantly here. As in: this view out the front of the ferry that I'm looking at right now, out to the mountains of the south island, is sweet-as!)
And now?? Well we'll pick up a new car and head south along the eastern coast of the south island then over west to do lots of tramping around giant mountains and glaciers, then finally back north by march 22nd to start working at the winery!!
Will keep on keeping on...per usual. Love the no shoes culture here-- I fit right in, love how everyone really is totally friendly and relaxed, ready to help and so generous with what they have. Not to mention how stunningly gorgeous every inch of this country seems so far to be!
All my love from the sun that I'm sitting in as I write this,
SB
I feel its time for a run down of the fun and crazy, and impossibly exciting, advenuters we've been having so far in NZ.
Raglan was a blast with surfing and swimming, communal cooking and sleeping in a train caboose, no one wears shoes and no one seems to do much except have fun and be tan and enjoy the beauty of the sea. Enticing, i know, but we had to keep moving--adventures were ahead! so we dropped some friends (those seem to be instantaneous around here) off in Hamilton, went grocery shopping at a Cosco-like place where people still didn't wear shoes and went on our way south towards the Waitomo Caves.
Fast forward to Gen and me standing waist-deep in frigid water 65meters underground, floating on inner tubes down this river deep inside a cave, swimming around underground in full wetsuits and headlamps looking at glow worms above us and hoping eels weren't eating our bums. That was the caves. Followed by free bagels and hot soup and more bagels and more soup! and off we were again! This time heading for the tiny and unknown town of National Park.
Once there-- and really we're talking about maybe 4 stores in a row, that's the town-- we found a campsite along this pretty little stream with a handful of other campers like us.
Next morning we head off to the beginning of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing where we promtly met Eva (German) and Alistor (Canadian) who were planning to hike that day as well. We schemed up a great plan with these two: instead of paying $35 a head to take the bus at the of the treck back to our cars, we four decided to leave one car at either end and do a kind of carpooling. Save $$, make friends! We had a blast and ended up hiking the whole day with them! The two of them proved to be formidable hikers, tho their jeans and converse sneakers might have suggested otherwise initially. Gsm and I, of course, are dorked out in super hiking boots and rain gear (just in case!)....and of course they beat us up. Which made us feel only slightly silly.
The area we were hiking in is really barren and is full of old volcanoes and dried lava. It's really steep and a hard, but amazing hike that takes all day, 20km in all. Actually, and importantly, the mountain we hiked around is Mt Doom in the lord of the rings (LOTR ROTK, that's for you O). So we're hiking in Mordor basically is what I'm saying, but meanwhile we're high enough up that you can see way out to rolling hills and in the distance Lake Taupo and some epic mountains. Damn cool.
What's next..?? Oh we finished the hike and recamped and were about to eat our tiny stove-made dinner when we realized the car wouldn't start. The 'dent' part of 'rent-a-dent' was coming to full fruition. Only a little panicking and some Israeli girls driving us to cell service and I'm talking to THE friendliest man I have ever spoken to from AA. Which, so perfectly, here is the auto service company like AAA in the US. Anyway, we wait and this AA guy pulls up to our campsite in a full mechanic suit, asks me to show him the problem and....of course the car works. So he leaves and we feel embarressed and awkward but cool! Car still works.
Next morning we head to the start of our canoeing adventure. We arrive with zero minutes to even think about what we are about to do or what we might need while canoeing down thus river in the absolute middle of nowhere for three days. Throw our stuff into plastic barrels, throw ourselves into the boat and we're off! And on our own.
But of course there's always kiwis on this kind of adventure too. Families on vacation, couples sticking to themselves, and then also the group of 7 twenty-somethings who are celebrating a birthday excursion and have with them 4 coolers of food and beer, a BBQer, at least a fair amount of illegal substances, and lots of nudity. They were great-- invadors of other canoes, pirates wearing purple earmuffs, with an inflatable swan with sexy eyes tied to the back of one canoe, swimming along behind for all three days. They were generous with their beer and food, friendly and just fun to be around--- tho quite loud at night.
Anyway the canoe trip was awesome. We were so far in the wilderness, it was so remote and so quiet of man-made sounds, tho noisy noisy with forest sounds! Canoeing felt like an alternate universe where suddenly our purpose was only to make it to the next camp site, and all the planning and worrying about emails or phone calls or work issues later, just didn't exist for that time. Quite fantastic!
So that took us to 6 days without a real shower, smelling rather foul and generally pooped. we drove, first to where Gen will be working later in Martinborough, and then to Wellington, dropped off the car and packed in to Hannah's house ( from CS) with her 4 musician-sorts flatmates.
Wellington was really awesome-- it feels a lot like San Fram because it's right on the water with a bay and it's super windy and so nice and sunny, tons of waterfront walkways and loads of cafes and a really great beer garden. CSing with Hannah was just perfectly what makes couchsurfing so great. We got a floor to crash on, a kitchen and house to use and instant friends. In exchange we cooked everyone dinner two nights and by the end of our stay really felt that we'd crossed over from just using their floor to sleep on, to actually being good freinds with a fantastic group of kiwis! Sweet-as! (best expression. Used constantly here. As in: this view out the front of the ferry that I'm looking at right now, out to the mountains of the south island, is sweet-as!)
And now?? Well we'll pick up a new car and head south along the eastern coast of the south island then over west to do lots of tramping around giant mountains and glaciers, then finally back north by march 22nd to start working at the winery!!
Will keep on keeping on...per usual. Love the no shoes culture here-- I fit right in, love how everyone really is totally friendly and relaxed, ready to help and so generous with what they have. Not to mention how stunningly gorgeous every inch of this country seems so far to be!
All my love from the sun that I'm sitting in as I write this,
SB
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
ALIVE and well (and pale) in new Zealand!
I just wrote a blog about what we've been doing and the program crashed on my ithingy. oh well. i am alive. in new zealand. here's the short version of what we've done so far,
-Flight with free wine!
-renting our car from 'rent a dent'. no joke that's what the company is called. !
-driving on the wrong side of the road. terrifying.
-arriving in raglan. A great surf town. adorable. no one appears to wear shoes.
-staying at solscape an eco-backpackers hostel on the top of this mountain-y hill overlooking the whole beach. it has little train cars that we stay in and a communal kitchen and lots of international travelers. my kind of place!!
-i was called 'translucent' for being so pale and not tan.
-SURFING LESSON this morning with Ken (no joke).
Ok!! Gotta run. The beach is calling to us. It's 75 today and so gorgeous.
Ps skype name is sophiebess4
Also I have a cell phone here and it's free to get calls so give a ring from skypebif you wanna!! number is 011 64 0211898619
!!!!!!!
Xo
S
-Flight with free wine!
-renting our car from 'rent a dent'. no joke that's what the company is called. !
-driving on the wrong side of the road. terrifying.
-arriving in raglan. A great surf town. adorable. no one appears to wear shoes.
-staying at solscape an eco-backpackers hostel on the top of this mountain-y hill overlooking the whole beach. it has little train cars that we stay in and a communal kitchen and lots of international travelers. my kind of place!!
-i was called 'translucent' for being so pale and not tan.
-SURFING LESSON this morning with Ken (no joke).
Ok!! Gotta run. The beach is calling to us. It's 75 today and so gorgeous.
Ps skype name is sophiebess4
Also I have a cell phone here and it's free to get calls so give a ring from skypebif you wanna!! number is 011 64 0211898619
!!!!!!!
Xo
S
Saturday, February 20, 2010
I'm off again!!!!
Tomorrow I begin another adventure. Last time I went international we went native:
We'll see what happens in the land of kiwis and sheep.
I'll post as often as I'm able to while we travel all over the country. Then...let the wine-ing begin!!
-sb
We'll see what happens in the land of kiwis and sheep.
I'll post as often as I'm able to while we travel all over the country. Then...let the wine-ing begin!!
-sb
Monday, November 30, 2009
home
coming home feels like coming to a sudden and screetching halt. my body in motion suddenly stationary.
how to make this time at home (nearly 3 months in itself) worthwhile and meaningful. not just a time to sit and waste time. how to use Boston, my family, this apartment, all of this, to my advantage, as another stage in my life and not simply a (long) resting stop between adventures. this is what I struggle with here.
a rather spectacular person wrote recently something staggeringly beautiful.
"I find myself floundering in a vat of my own confusion, that I can’t find the clairvoyance to make sense of anything, to pick anything out, to push through it, like honey, pushing into a wave. "
i thrive on adventure. even when it's rough and i struggle with it, i love it. in the comfort of home it is difficult to find adventure, to feel challenged, to push myself to do strange and cooky things
also, this child has something else to say.
"and I feel I should be ‘responsible'... Here’s my thing right now: I’m still at that phase/point in my life where I write things like “responsibility”, in quotes, and feel like maybe I should just fucking take the quotes off because it’s real. That’s where I am. That’s how things are changing. Fucking weird. Warped. Unreal. Real.
rather startlingly, you are right: it is time to run naked in the park without those markers--or rather, to remain 'responsible'----and look, there i did it again with the quotes----and leave our clothes on and keep it all perhaps a little quieter on the madness front? but that's not what i'm feeling these days. i'm feeling honey and waves and i'm right there with you: life's terrifying without the quotes and terrifying to think we ever need to live without them. but we do!
circles and cirlces andcirclesandcirlces of logic aroundwego. tadaa!
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
the last few weeks have been awesome here in oregon. after harvest was finished and we'd done pressing all the fermenters we had about a week where we didn't have much to do in the winery. So I went to help Gen out a bit at her winery in Mac, learned a bit about different methods from her three bosses, and went out to the woods to a little cabin and enjoyed the time to relax. but too much free time makes me start to feel aimless and luckily this past week things have been picking up once more. We started bottling the 2008 vintage of merlot, pinot noir, malbec and today we're doing tempranillo. basically we take the wine that's been aging in barrels for the last year or so and combine various barrel types into one big tank, then pump through the bottler which has 6 spouts with empty bottles on them. then cork them (or sometimes we screw cap...) then back onto the pallet to be labeled by...next year's interns.
we've also been having lots of fun just every day. this place feels like home these days, and it's awesome knowing what to expect each day, how i fit into this life, what I'm expected to do, all that. I feel really comfortable with Felix and Rebecca and Madeline and obviously Ryan too.
and of course, all good things must end. Today is my last day at Carlo & Julian. A few days ago we had a raging good party for a family friend who turned 30. It was a blast and quickly turned into a dancathon. (Mal, i missed having you there with me.) And last night was Gen's boss's birthday bash--also a great time--and tonight we're having a goodbye dinner for me just the fam and low key. Tomorrow I'll pack up and head to McMinnville to stay with Gen for a day or two, work at her winery and learn more lab work stuff, then we're headed to Portland and then, Mama Carolyn comes and we party party party.
After that, well. Gen heads out on the 16th and I'm going to be living in Portland for the next week, to fly back to Boston on the 22nd.
OH and exciting news. I have a job lined up in New Zealand for March and April harvest....sooo I guess I really am going to kiwiland! Let the adventures NEVER END!
woohoo.
we've also been having lots of fun just every day. this place feels like home these days, and it's awesome knowing what to expect each day, how i fit into this life, what I'm expected to do, all that. I feel really comfortable with Felix and Rebecca and Madeline and obviously Ryan too.
and of course, all good things must end. Today is my last day at Carlo & Julian. A few days ago we had a raging good party for a family friend who turned 30. It was a blast and quickly turned into a dancathon. (Mal, i missed having you there with me.) And last night was Gen's boss's birthday bash--also a great time--and tonight we're having a goodbye dinner for me just the fam and low key. Tomorrow I'll pack up and head to McMinnville to stay with Gen for a day or two, work at her winery and learn more lab work stuff, then we're headed to Portland and then, Mama Carolyn comes and we party party party.
After that, well. Gen heads out on the 16th and I'm going to be living in Portland for the next week, to fly back to Boston on the 22nd.
OH and exciting news. I have a job lined up in New Zealand for March and April harvest....sooo I guess I really am going to kiwiland! Let the adventures NEVER END!
woohoo.
Friday, November 06, 2009
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