For the Love of Ben G.

Starbucks and The Electric Company

Everyone loves reminiscing about the retro 1970s shows they grew up with. We all make fun of the dorky hairstyles, the out-of-date cars, and the insanely wide collars.

But did you ever stop to think about the colors?

What really scared the crap out of me besides remembering the harvest gold cars, avocado green ovens, and burnt umber sofas of my childhood was realizing that it hasn't gone away. Oh no; the global shortages of earth tones reported in '77 were just a cover story—they've been slumbering these past three decades, growing bolder and tackier by the month.

I first noticed the trend at Starbucks: the trendy walls covered in caffeine-inspired scrawls seemed at first to have a sensible Mediterranean color palette, but when I looked closer, they've literally lifted the colors of the 1970s, Soul-Glo and all, and dumped it into suburban strip-malls across the world. In California at least, it seems to be state law that all newly constructed condos and row houses must be painted in green, gold, and brown. I'm not the only one to have noticed the hideous Starbucks color palette!

Worst of all, the scourge seems to be returning. Don't believe me? Check out this page from the 2004 Williams-Sonoma catalogue:

Yipes.

I Did Not Jump The Shark

Jumpin' the Bungy
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And that's a wrap, folks. Without exaggerating, I can safely say these past three weeks in New Zealand have changed my life for the better. I love this country, and I wonder if I don't have a little Kiwi blood in me—it just felt like home from Day One.

I'm heading back to California tonight, and so I wanted to share my crazy bungy jump photo (just incredible—two or three good arcs of pure weightlessness, with no jerk or yank at the bottom at all!) with you all. I cannot wait until I get to do another bungy jump! They're seriously addictive.

I'll leave you all with a few Very Important New Zealand Ratings:

Most Adorable Award:

New Zealand Lambs (they also receive the coveted Most Tasty Award).

Most Sweaty Place:

Franz Josef Glacier (no, really!)

Best Skiing:

Treble Cone, Wanaka

Best City:

Dunedin (love the architecture, the college town atmosphere, great music, and great cafés!)

Worst City:

Queenstown (total tourist trap; since they don't mine gold there any more, now they get their gold out of rich foreigners' pockets. Wanaka has pretty much everything Queenstown does, and does it better.)

Best Place to Stay:

Top Ten Holiday Parks. I stayed in these great, cheap little cabins all over the place.

Worst Place To Stay:

Amber Lodge in Queenstown. Ask me why sometime: I have photos. Ugh.

Most Scenic:

Bar none, driving the Haast Pass was the most stunning and emotional experience.

Best Seafood:

Kaikoura! I loved the roadside stand seafood barbecue where I had dinner. One of my favorite meals of the trip.

Best Day Trip:

I can't recommend strongly enough that everyone in Auckland take the day trip to Tiritiri Matangi Island, the endangered bird sanctuary.

Most Expensive Activity:

Internet access. Man, I can't believe how much they charge here to use your own laptop to get online! NZ$10/hour wasn't uncommon. Still, it was worth it to get all these photos to everyone.

Total Distance Driven:

4316 kilometers (2682 miles), an average of 216 km (134 miles) each day

Total Photos Taken:

2273 photos and 42 movies, a total of 6.1 gigabytes, or two DVDs

Well, it's about time for me to start getting ready for the 13 hour flight back to California. I'll be leaving Auckland at 7 pm Monday… and arriving in San Francisco seven hours earlier the same day. Isn't time travel fun?

Milford Sound and Homeward Bound

Mitre Peak in Milford Sound
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Alas, all good things must come to an end. And so I'm nearing the time to say goodbye to New Zealand, which will always hold a big meaty chunk of my heart. Some of it I'm pretty sure I left in the water under the Kawarau Bridge on the 134 foot bungy jump leap I took this morning. (Yes, I will post photos of that as soon as I can!)

I'm in the beautiful Scottish-style city of Dunedin now, on the southeast edge of the south island of New Zealand. Dunedin is probably the nicest city I've been to in New Zealand, with a great friendly feel, a huge drum-n-bass music culture, and great museums. The stonework in the churches and the famous train station is just beautiful.

Yesterday, I toured the beautiful fjord of Milford Sound by boat. The experience was, as usual, beautiful and awe-inspiring. It's getting to sound like a broken record, but I love the huge variety of ways nature has crafted New Zealand into a hundred million shapes and sizes. Tremendously cool.

The clock's ticking, and I only have two days left here in New Zealand. Time to make the best of it! See you all back in California soon. Make sure to check out my Flickr page for lots more photos of Milford Sound!

Ski Treble Cone. No, Seriously. Do It.

Treble Cone
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I'm not kidding when I say that if you're at all into skiing, you absolutely must make the pilgrimage to Treble Cone on the south island of New Zealand. Skiing Treble Cone left me at a loss for words: it's situated thousands of feet above glacial valleys and lakes below, with views of the majestic Southern New Zealand Alps all around you.

Treble Cone a few hours' drive from the adventure capital of Queenstown, so most of the tourists down there stay where they belong; the real pros from all around the world come here to the ski town of Wanaka to make the trip up the mountain. Since it's winter down here when it's summer in the rest of the world, North American and European skiiers all come down to the Mecca of skiing here in New Zealand.

I actually came here on a lark: I was driving south from the beautiful Franz Josef Glacier, and after making my way through the "holy shit, it's so beautiful" Haast Pass, and I came to the tiny, adorable ski town of Wanaka, where I'm currently sipping a long black in an internet café. I saw all the ski bums and happy boarders hanging around town, and stayed in a little lodge with a bunch of backpackers, resolving to ski Treble Cone in the morning.

Choices, Choices…
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Bright and early, I woke up and drove my little orange Barina Holden up the zigzagging mountain road, with gasp-inducing views of Mount Aspiring and Lake Wanaka unfolding below me. I ran into a few fellow computer geeks on the ski lift who were way interested in VMware Fusion, and we rode together nearly to the peak mountain elevation of 1960m (6430 feet—yes, that's right). I'm no pro, so I took my time, enjoying my way down Upper High Street, a great blue square (intermediate) course down the mountain.

Treble Cone's claim to fame is that they have a huge variety of intermediate and advanced slopes, but even then, I didn't feel out of place at all among all the pros. Every slope was way steeper than anything I saw at Whakapapa or back home at Lake Tahoe, and every view of the lakes and glacial valleys below made my eyes pop out of my skull. I'm sore as hell now, but I'm still absolutely chuffed (to use a Kiwi expression) to have experienced the best in New Zealand skiing.

Cheeky Kea
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The most unique part of the Treble Cone experience is the Kea bird, which are one of the only alpine parrots in the world. The parrots literally hop around the slopes and nibble folks' food at the café when they're not looking; they're quite intelligent and very naughty! Kea are everywhere here, and their inquisitive, cheeky nature is most apparent when they jump up on your car and nibble at the rubber around your windshield. I have muddy parrot tracks all over the hood and roof of my car now!

As my New Zealand vacation draws to a close, I'm going to start the drive down to the beautiful Milford Sound in the Fiordland of the south island. I'm not sure how far I'll make it tonight, but that's the beauty of this trip: I've been playing it completely by ear, traveling as far as I like and staying wherever my fancy falls. And so far, it's worked terrifically. Oh, if only I could pull up my roots and stay in New Zealand forever. It's more than a little tempting!

The Hottest Glacier I've Ever Hiked

Franz Josef Glacier
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Today, I had two of the most moving experiences of my life: I took a helicopter ride up onto Franz Josef Glacier and hiked over the ice, and then I drove Haast Pass, past the awe-inspiring southern alps of New Zealand and countless alpine lakes and waterfalls. I can't begin to describe how emotionally moving these experiences were for me; the sense of scale (both time and space) here in the remote regions of the South Island is completely humbling, and I feel lucky to have experienced it.

Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers are two incredibly high ice flows that make their way, about 5 meters a day, down towards the ocean. They meet up with the temperate rain forests of the south island, creating a beautiful contrast that's unmatched just about anywhere else. I took a heli-hike trip up onto the ice of Franz Josef itself, which was a 10 minute helicopter ride each way combined with a two hour hike with an experienced guide. The hush of the ice all around me, as well as how I felt dwarfed by the miles and miles of blue and white environs, really made me reflect on how much more of the world I want to experience after visiting New Zealand—especially the world back home in California.

What amused me the most about the glacier hike was just how damned hot it got; we'd been told to wear 3 or 4 layers of clothes, so I really bundled up, but after an hour of hiking, I was dripping with sweat! It got up above 16º Celsius (above 60º Fahrenheit) on the mountain, and the ice started dripping and forming little rivers everywhere. Some of my sweat is now permanently part of Franz Josef Glacier, a fact I'm immensely proud of.

Lake Matheson Reflections
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The night before my heli-hike, I walked around the beautiful Lake Matheson, justly famed for its beautiful reflective views of huge Mount Cook/Aoraki and Mount Tasman above it. I caught it at sunset on a partly cloudy day, so my photos don't fully do the view justice, but with the fingers of sunset poking through the beautiful light rainforest around the lake, I got to experience a good chunk of the magic.

After hiking Franz Josef, I started the drive towards the phenomenal Haast Pass. Nobody warned me how emotional the experience would be: it's about two and a half hours of towering alpine mountains with sapphire lakes nestled in between, with each turn more tremendous than the last. I only managed to get a few feeble photos out of the trip, but as I drove and listened to two of my favorite driving albums (Orbital 2 and Risotto), I really felt at peace with myself and with the land.

Rainbows over New Zealand
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I've settled down in the adorable mountain town of Wanaka for the evening, and I plan on skiing Treble Cone in the morning (a recommendation from a few fellow skiiers from Whakapapa and the glacier). The weather gods have been kind, and today and the next few days should all be fine weather. Alas, I'm soon back to Auckland on Sunday and then to California on Monday, but I'll never forget my experiences here in New Zealand.

Off the Deep End

Christchurch
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After skiing Whakapapa and exploring the Art Deco town of Napier, I flew to the south island of New Zealand. The population is sparse enough as it is on the north island, but the south island is heartbreakingly beautiful and empty in comparison, with most of the population spread between Christchurch and Dunedin in the south, and Nelson in the north. On Saturday, I flew into Christchurch, which is a beautiful English-style city with wonderful 1800s architecture and masonry everywhere. The Avon river runs through the middle of the city, and the buildings are sculpted exquisitely around it. Really very charming.

I spent the night at a cool backpackers in Christchurch (what you'd call a hostel elsewhere in the world). Hosteling isn't really that bad, provided you have a good pair of earplugs and eyeshades with you to keep the noise and light from your roommates manageable. I've stayed in a few hostels on my travels in New Zealand, and they definitely range in quality: some are just a few hikers staying in a cabin in the woods with (hopefully) a wall heater to keep warm. Others have a full pub, Internet access, and provide bedding. I was surprised to learn that the card games backpackers play are pretty much universal; I played Asshole for hours with a group of kiwi students last week, and was glad to see it was the same game I played at Boy Scout camp!

The Kaikoura Coast
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Today I'm in the coastal marine life town of Kaikoura (which means "meal of crayfish"). And yes, the seafood here is the best I've ever had, bar none. Last night, I went hiking around the rugged, rocky coast with fur seals resting on the rocks uncovered by low tide, and then stopped at a roadside barbecue for the best garlic scallops I'd ever had, and a little patty of egg and a fish called "whitebait". The fisherman who served my meal was friendly and outgoing, and we chatted along with another traveler from South Carolina about the world, fish, and recommendations for sights to see.

This morning, I woke up bright and early to swim with dolphins right in the ocean (again recommended by Ingrid, Terry's orca researcher friend), with the Dolphin Encounter tour group. There were literally hundreds of dusky dolphins leaping around the boat, almost as if they were dancing. Donning my wetsuit, flippers, and snorkel, I dove into the chilly water, and was immediately surrounded by curious dolphins. We sang to the cetaceans through our snorkels, dived down to look them right in the eye, and swam circles around each other playfully.

Dusky Dolphins Dancing
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Being so close to the dusky dolphins was incredibly moving; to see these intelligent mammals right up close and personal in the wild is truly a gift, as the dolphins weren't fed or coerced towards the boat in any way. They just wanted to be there. The only thing that wasn't quite so moving was the realization that dolphins do, in fact, pee and poo like any other animal, and that they were happily doing so right in the water around us. And I thought this was a civilized country! Geez. :)

Hopefully this afternoon I'll go on a helicopter tour to see whales off Kaikoura, but if that doesn't happen, I'll head west over New Zealand's Alps to the West Coast, and start making my way down towards Queenstown, the adventure capital of Kiwiland. I can't believe I only have a week left in this vacation paradise. I absolutely love it here, and I never want to leave!