Happy camper

Still on a New Zealand high. I went to my fourth Thanksgiving meal in four days last night and was extolling the virtues of the trip to anyone who would listen.

I did get a belated scare while watching the news on the hotel TV last week. A blurb on a New Zealand helicopter crash caught my eye. After doing some researching, I found out it was a group of tourists headed up to fox Glacier, the same place I’d been two weeks before. The outfit was a different one than I’d used, but I remember seeing their helicopters. It was very jolting to me; all seven people aboard died. So sad.

And yet another reason to be thankful, for sure. There but by the amazing grace of God go I.

And go I do. Next week is the 10k. It’s in Siem Reap, a direct flight from here, at Angkor Wat. I’m not taking any time off or doing much touristy because I’ve been there. My flight leaves Saturday morning and arrives around 11 and the race is at 6:30 Sunday morning. The flight out is at 6:30, so there’s an afternoon.

About 20 of us are going, several on the same flight. I’m rooming with someone who’s doing the half marathon, but I’m only in for 10k.

 

This weekend is the last chance to really practice and yesterday I did 14k and today I did 13k. I would have made it to 14 but I had to cut it short to get to the Gator game on my Slingbox. I’m exhausted and sore. I have no idea what I was thinking when I registered for this thing.

Usually on weekends after the gym I come back, shower and take a nap but yesterday I got back and Skyped and today I turned on the game. While watching it, I’ve gone ahead and done laundry and cooked for not just one but two weeks since I’ll be out of town next weekend. I’m looking forward to a nap.

After next weekend, I’m in town til Christmas for sure; I have a birthday party and then a Christmas party. I’m considering Hong Kong over Christmas weekend just to see Mockingjay and Star Wars, but we’ll see. Right now I’m not into it.

But New Zealand … amazing. I’m posting a few more photos.

I went with a tour group, Flying Kiwis, which I’d totally recommend. I never intended to do a camping trip, but I had specific dates I could work with and wanted to stay X number of nights or so. Once I found out I had to be back at work on 11/12, that narrowed my options. It was camping or nothing.

And for me, New Zealand was one of those places I needed a set itinerary. There are just way too many options to choose from. Like Greece and its “mainland or islands?”question,  you have to decide which island you want to do first, at least unless you’re staying for weeks and weeks.

The north island is more cultural (and Hobbiton) and the south is more adventure-oriented. It’s where bungee began. I have no interest in that, but the hikes and stuff were more interesting to me. Someone told me Queenstown was where you needed to go, so I put that in my tour requirements.

I wound up with the “Wild West” tour from Flying Kiwis, and it was perfect. I met the group in Queenstown and we worked our way up through to Nelson, Picton and then over to Wellington. Basically, it’s sort of the equivalent of U.S. 1 in Florida – up the coast, except there are mountains on the other side.

We camped, which, really, was a first for me. Yes, I camped twice at Disney, but that’s hard to count. This time, it was legit – in some places, we didn’t even have showers, although we always had flushing toilets. (Which, as mentioned before, ALWAYS had TP.)

All the tents – mine was named Evil Knieval (yes, that was the spelling they used), our tables, stools and cooking equipment got pulled in a trailer behind our bus up the highways and byways. The bus was pretty good, too, with a sound system that was decent although I got tired of the kiddie music. (By that I mean 20something, not Sesame Street.)

When I signed up, the brochure indicated I would be sharing a tent but it ended out not being the case, so between that and the fact I spent WAY more money than I intended, I did not bother upgrading to a bunk when I could.

Honestly, the tent wasn’t bad. I’m not up to the point where I’m ready to strike out on my own, “Wild”-like, but I got pretty darn good at putting it up and taking it down.

The first night was brutal, though, because it was super windy and started to rain. Someone showed me how to do it, which was good, and I took two sleeping bags because it was going to be really cold that night. I was glad because I really was cold, and I could hear the wind just whipping. It took me back to the RV at Hope Village, just wondering if the wind would flip me over. In this case, it didn’t, although some of the tent pegs got bent during the night. But it didn’t cave in like one person’s did, so that was a win.

I got smarter as the trip went on, picking locations that were closer to the bathrooms or next to a distinguishing feature, like a bush, so I could find it easily in the dark. We had about 15 tents and they were all exactly alike, so at dusk or whatever you didn’t want to crawl into the wrong one and freak someone out.

Our days started fairly early, with breakfast around 7 or 7:30. We’d, pack out and hit the road, stopping in an hour or two for our first break or hike of the day. Sometimes, we’d spend a few hours in a city or something, where our guides loaded up at the grocery store for the night’s meal.

That’s what this one town, Hokitika, was – just a stop on the road. I bought a pair of gloves there, and then a meat pie, which I took with me down to the beach to eat. The chair, made of concrete, was just sitting there, a la Kenny Chesney. It was fantastic.

Say no to crack

I have plenty of time to write this weekend because I am working an event for work. It’s some international trade meetings that happen every year and I guess we just got lucky. Usually they’re in Beijing the every other year they’re in China.

My job consists of babysitting a room that’s sort of an adjunct media room/lounge for the U.S. governmental offices. It’s really not bad. Of all the assignments, my personal belief is this is the easiest. The main show is about a 30-minute drive (no traffic) away, so I have the residuals. I’m on the day shift; it’s busier at night, I think, because some of the people are staying in this hotel. Since that’s waking hours in the U.S., my guess is they’ll be working a lot at night.

That’s a guess because even though this is Day Five of me sitting here, it’s only the first day of the actual event, which ends on Monday.

It seems that everything with the State Department involves a lot of planning, calendars that cover minute details and countless “countdown” meetings.

And lots of emails. Lots and lots of emails. And since I am in an adjunct facility, and the fact that none of these meetings take part in our office, I have to get the emails off site.

All this, in turn, means that I’ve been issued a Blackberry. It took seven seconds to hate it. It probably took seven minutes for me to establish a password that fit all the requirements, then type it – twice – with my fingers and/or thumbs.

Now, I feel like Pavlov’s dog with the damned red blinky light. I completely understand why they call these things “crackberries.” They are the devil’s idea so far as I’m concerned.

The emails come two and four at a time, with relays of “such-and-such car started its engines” and “such-and-such car left the site” and goes on to it being 10 or five minutes out, arriving or whatever.

And that’s just one example. All kinds of emails go back and forth. The first day, when I was bored, another bored person at a different location and I had them flying back and forth as to how bored we were.

It’s not healthy. I swear, I do not understand why people love their smartphones. This thing is a tether. I don’t want it and cannot wait to give it back.

Hopefully, that will be Wednesday. Let’s just say that Thanksgiving is going to be awesome. Everyone is looking forward to that here.

At this point in the post, I was going to change the subject to New Zealand but then a wonderful illustration of “overstaffing” just meandered by.

A new person from one of the agencies just arrived and she said something about, with some change, she was unsure of her role. The guy she was talking to said, “you just need to stand around.”

That’s your tax dollar at work, folks!

New Zealand’s tax dollar (how’s that for a segue?) is really at work for tourists. The place is fantastic. The beaches are fantastic. The ferns are fantastic.

Ferns are the national plant (or something) of New Zealand, with good reason. They’re everywhere. The silver fern is used in the logo of the All Blacks rugby team (I think it IS the logo). And on all the hikes you do, ferns are everywhere.

They’re not like ferns that I’ve seen before, either. They can be HUGE – like, the leaves are the size of my leg, which ain’t tiny. They also grow into what look like trees. I waffled and wondered if they were palm trees because they were so big. Are ferns and palms related?

The beaches are just wonderful, not that you swim in them. It’s too cold, for one, but mostly the surf is too rough. I’m not even sure that anyone other than Bodhi would tackle them.

The juxtaposition of the beach to the green (or white, as in the case of the glaciers) never ceased to amaze me. I think people got tired of me saying, “It’s just so beautiful.”

It was.

How cool is this?

New Zealand, with all its previous volcanic life, has some amazing geological stuff going one. One particular day, I spent the morning on a glacier and then, that evening, camped out on a beach. The day’s travel was no more than 20 miles – and in between the two, we’d passed through a rainforest-like bush.

“Bush” is Kiwi talk for “forest.” I have to say, I love Kiwi talk. I picked up three words I need to work in my vocabulary:

• “Fiddley” – a little unpredictable or wonky, as in “if the bike acts a little fiddley, let us know and we’ll check it for you to make sure it’s safe.”
• “Flash” – impressive, as in “When Peter Jackson saw the area, he knew it was flash enough to be in his film.”
• “Smash” – get it done quickly, as in, “It’s going to rain, so let’s smash out tomorrow’s lunches before the skies open.”

The last one is my favorite. I’d really like to work it into daily usage. “On Friday, I smashed out the annual budget.” It just sounds so cool.

 

NZ in general was just amazingly cool. I’d never really camped before (twice at Disney), and I have to say NZ does it right. I’ve no idea of their tax structure, but they’ve spent a fortune putting in trails everywhere, plus facilities left and right. It seems everywhere you drive, there’s a hike available, and all the paths are clearly marked. If there’s water or swampy land, they’ve built boardwalks, complete with chicken wire on the boards to make it non-slip.

There are also campsites, some with showers, on the public property and some spots also have these really big dorms that you can rent. Like, not a hostel-sized one, but a hospital-sized one. And they also have private campsites, which have a better chance of having showers.

There are no campsites on the glaciers, thankfully, but they offer day hikes via helicopter. I’d done heli-hiking in Alaska, but it was on a frozen tundra and not a glacier. The glacier hikes are different, because the glaciers shift daily. What was safe yesterday might not be safe today.

My group of 18 didn’t all do the heli-hiking, but I think 8-10 of us did. Once we got up there, we were so bundled up I really couldn’t tell who was who.

The glaciers are really amazing, and to walk on them, you had to wear boots with these cool massive spikes called “crampons,” I think they said. It was sort of a roller skate frame you laced over your boots and had these mean teeth – like 2 inches or something like that. We were advised to keep them in the ice at all times, otherwise, we would have slipped down the glaciers.

And it really was that slippery. In one of the ice caves, I was trying to scoot along on my back (this was how you were supposed to do it, pulling yourself along with a rope) and I slipped down to the foot of the cave, even though I was still hanging onto the rope. It was just that slick.

There was a waterfall up on the glacier, too, and it was pretty amazing. Just the amounts of snow and ice were incredible. More than North Dakota!

This is me on my back, sliding through. My version of a selfie.

We hiked for a couple of hours, and it was quite fascinating to watch the clouds. The weather turns quickly, and we’d been warned that the trip might not go due to low clouds. We got up there and the clouds came in, but we were able to still hike the whole time. By the time we went back down, the clouds looked like they’d shifted, but it was raining on the way down, so I don’t really know for sure.

New Zealand is probably the fifth place I’ve gone to where I’ve heard the line, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait 15 minutes and it will change.” The funny thing is, everywhere I’ve heard it, the people think it’s unique to them.

Traveling’s an ordeal

I’m back from New Zealand and man, it’s everything it’s billed to be. I mean, beyond the beauty, every single public toilet I went into was clean and had toilet paper. How can you top that?

Getting there is never half the fun. I swear, as much as I love to travel, I hate traveling. If that makes any sense at all.

The Guangzhou airport is a beast, and this time around I thought I’d pull my hair out before wheels up.

First, it’s time for the annual Canton Fair, which is this huge event and people come from all over, meaning the airport is crowded. For the first time in my travels through the airport, there was a massive line just to get to the security line. As in, a complete standstill for 10 minutes.

After getting in, I did this new trick I learned and went to the first-class line and waved the black passport, which saved oodles of time as the immigration line was backed up beyond the quarantine and customs sections, which are both before. So no telling what kind of time that saved, but once to that line, I didn’t move up in the line for 5-10 more minutes, and in all, spent about 20 minutes in line.

Seriously, every time I hear someone complain about security in America, I want to choke them. In Guangzhou, it’s a full pat down for EVERY person, which takes awhile. A long, long while.

But it, too, passed and I went to my gate. I arrived in plenty of time so I just read one of the three books I’d brought.

Finally, they called my flight, but not after a gate change. This really isn’t a big deal, because how they do it, the gate is merely a false start anyway. You don’t actually go down a jetway into a big plane; you load up on a bus and get driven to what seems like a tarmac in the next county over, and then you board.

This doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens far, far more often than not. I’m so sick of little buses on either end of the flight. You come back, get off the plane and think you’re done, but then you have to wait on everyone to cram on a bus and then get driven for a solid 5-10 minutes to a building that’s forever away from your landing spot. And that’s not even counting the 10 minutes you taxied after landing.

Anyway, on both ends of my Auckland flight, I was subjected to these annoying bus rides. I swear the departing flight ride was close to 10 minutes. Then, to add insult to tiring injury, we got off the bus and THEN climbed up a staircase to a jetway. God knows where we were, but it appeared to be at a gate. What the purpose was for us to go to one gate, only to be bused to another to enter a second jetway was beyond me.

And the same thing happened on the way back. We pulled in after a long, long taxi and I saw the building and thought I’d struck gold because the little jetway thing came out. I got off quickly – somehow I’d been upgraded to economy plus – and thought I was going to make a beeline to the immigration and baggage claim areas, but no sooner had I stepped into the jetway than I realized everyone was stepping right back out on another staircase, which led to the road, which led to yet another van.

But all that’s history. I’m back now and will get to posting about New Zealand, but right now I’m really exhausted and want to get laundry done before crashing.

My first stop there, though, was the Hobbit place, so I’ll start off with photos from there. It really was cool, although I’m not a huge Hobbit fan. The guide guy kept saying, “You know how in [enter name of one of the movies], [enter name of character] [enter verb for character] and  then he [enter another verb/scenario].” Well, other than one, I didn’t know any of them.

The one I did know was the yellow door. That was the home of Sam Wise, Frodo’s best friend. At the end of the LOTR series, Sam returns to the Hobbit and is greeted by his wife and daughter. He sees them, smiles, and walks into his hobbit hole and shuts the door, closing out the trilogy.

34-17

Greetings from the land of the World Cup winners!

I was in Auckland the morning of the game, conveniently awake at 5 a.m. to watch. I had to catch the bus into town and boy, do they take the All Blacks seriously.

In the quiet downtown, I found a TV showing the final live and watched some bits with some people, mostly taxi drivers whom the casino staff kept trying to move along. No one really did.

Watching the game, I realized I have no idea how rugby works, or when the game would end. It had been something like 16-3, All Blacks, when the Wallabies went on a tear and suddenly, it was close.

Having no idea when time ran out or anything like that, I hung on with the crowd and saw some more points going up for New Zealand. I don't really understand how, honestly, but, hey, the home  team was winning, so I didn't care.

At some point, it became final and I only knew because the group around me exploded.

All of a sudden, the volume turned up and the city came to life. Everyone had been hiding out, watching the game somewhere, and it took about three minutes for those people to get to the streets, their horns, etc.

Everything became loud and things started blaring. Everyone was sober, though. It was still 7 a.m.!

Anyway, I'm in New Zealand now, getting ready to meet my tour. I'm in an internet cafe as I own no devices and the little red light just came on, so that's the sign for me to get off.