27 April 2016

It’s no surprise that this last log did not get written in New Zealand and it remains my last job after unpacking and putting stuff away, filling the laundry basket, checking the credit card accounts for damage and checking the voicemail.   I have now reached a point where I feel I can legitimately download my last thoughts on the trip to SI NZ.  So here goes:

• The Chinese middle class are on the move and travelling.   No longer sequestered in air conditioned coaches, they are now confident travellers hiring motor homes and camping in campgrounds often with their extended families.  On a recent fishing trip there were nine in the boat fishing, seven of whom were Chinese, none had been in a boat before or had ever fished.

Unfortunately the average Chinese traveller has not quite got the notion of clothes for travelling.  They are generally dressed for a stroll through Central Park in late autumn.  Flat soled shoes, business trousers, city styled overcoats and frilly pink umbrellas were de rigueur on rocky and steep tracks to view the glaciers.  Audrey, I think there is a Marketing opp for Frederick.

• Deleting photos.  Do you remember the good old days when you only had 36 photos on a roll of film so you made sure you didn’t waste any.  You would get the photo right before hitting the shutter.  People were posed, the pic framed, the focus right.  You dropped off the film at the chemist and a week later picked up your memories of your trip.  If they were slides, some weeks later you would receive a small package in the mail.  You would then go through your work, discard any duds and mount them in a photo album.  It all seemed pretty simple.

Now we have technology to make everything so much easier.  So we snap away collecting megapixels with gay abandon.  Clicking away in the knowledge I can always delete any I don’t need later. And so by example when we travelled for a year in 1979 we took 700 photos (slides actually) and in three weeks in New Zealand we took 654 photos!

When the nice young lady from Malaysia offered to take my picture with the glacier in the background she didn’t take one photo, oh no, she took three.  So now it’s up to me to make a decision on which one is the best, which is well framed, is the colour and focus right, do they meet the rule of thirds and so it goes on.  Why didn’t she get it right the first time.  The solution, I keep all three pics because I can’t choose.

So now we face the question of how do you store your photos, do you need backup copies, which ones will you print or will you create a book, do you delete them from the SD card, do you create an album on your iPad, will you view them on your TV and so it goes on.   Technology has made it so much easier (as spoken with a heavy sense of sarcasm).

• Butterflies on boats – one of our young fishers was resplendent in black tights with sparkles.  It was like the Milky Way emblazoned on her legs.  The bling was there as was the colourful shoes.  We had a butterfly on the boat.  Butterflies don’t like the ocean, they get seasick.  It’s so relaxing looking out over the ocean swells hauling a double header of blue cod with the sound of someone filling a plastic bag in the background.
• Whale watching – we got to see sperm whales off the coast of Kaikoura.  They could have just been large logs that periodically let forth with a geyser of steam.  That was until the fluke lifted and the whale returned to the depths to catch squid at about 1000 metres.  It seems the young males stay in the area all year; in contrast the females stay in the tropics where the water is warmer. Go figure.
• Crayfish and fillets – after two hours of fishing we returned to our motor home with a crayfish each and six fillets of deep sea fish.  That night we ate the crayfish and following we exceeded all standards of appropriate meal size and ate all six fillets, with chips.  Eating so well created an interesting comparison with the food being prepared in the camp kitchen that night.  It ranged from peanut butter and jelly toasted sandwiches or breakfast cereal for the impoverished backpackers, through to noodles, steamed vegetables and soup for the Chinese families or maybe bouillabaisse for a French family.  We went for steamed crayfish and later fish fillets in beer batter, simple but honest.
• Airports, they are all the same.  Yeah, I know they are a bit different but fundamentally all airport architects came out of the same school.

You start your wonderful adventure in an airport with security queues, display screen, shops selling overpriced souvenirs, all in air conditioned comfort and your pockets stuffed with passports and exit or entry paperwork. Three weeks later you are back in an airport with security queues, display screen, shops selling overpriced souvenirs, all in air conditioned comfort and your pockets stuffed with passports and exit or entry paperwork and you wonder if it was all a dream, did it really happen?  You then realise your megapixel collection will reassure it did in fact happen as will your credit card – but there is that moment of doubt when you are back in that airport waiting for the return flight.

• Travelling with a rugby team of teenagers filling the back half of aircraft – not my preferred travelling style.
• Observations – New Zealanders are great entrepreneurs and proud of their country.  They create fantastic opportunities for tourists to empty their wallets in return for a good and often frightening time.  They have bungee jumps, cliff swings, mountain bike runs, jet boats, train rides, hikes along the coast that start with a water taxi delivery, fishing trips that end with you receiving a crayfish and just overwhelming scenery.  The country is incredibly clean, neat and tidy, and pretty empty.  There is no graffiti, no litter and no delaminated tyres strewn along the roads.  There are no derelict and abandoned buildings, no farm yards filled with rusting old farm machinery.  The shopping malls display pictures of people bike riding, sailing and hiking.   I reckon I could live in New Zealand if only I could learn how to correctly pronounce the word Maori.

That’s it until the next adventure which might be on a river or a trip through the Oz backyard.  As always if you have had enough of these emails just say so and you will see no more.  I was encouraged by a UK journalist one evening in Wanaka to move to a blog site. If that happens your inbox will offer a sigh of relief and I will tell you what the address might be.

Yours in perpetual motion.