The Gross Post and Bug-bite Report

Disclaimer: If you want to know how our trip is going by and large, please read the preceding more poetic posts. Thanks.

OK, since I love and care about all of your entertainment so very much I am now writing this AGAIN, this time at night in our spare, swanky room at “The Palace” a rambling Victorian backpackers hostel on a promontory overlooking a Shell station and more generally, the town of Nelson, a town that boasts a church whose design is listed as both “Gothic” and “Industrial” in Let’s Go (the guidebook that is our curse but sometimes also our salvation).

How’s that for a super-run-on opening sentence?! How much do you think Mykle loves the design of the church (called “Christ Church”, just to be original)?

So basically I started my EPIC post earlier with a BIG THANK YOU to all of you (Mom, Michelle, Zina, Paul, Jordan, and Halie) for the weather updates (it seems I am doing well here with the perfect hot yet cool-breezy blindingly sunny weather) and well wishes. THANK YOU! Things are pretty aimless, and road-trip groovy, which has its ups (we are free like the albatross- which we SAW…more on that later) and its downs (we don’t know where the hell we are going and don’t really care, leading to major indecision). All we know is that we are going to do the Kepler track at some point; Kai wants to go to Fiordland because it is “Mystical”, and Mykle really wants a burrito*. Some days the plan goes like this: we want technology, showers, and Thai food (that was today). And yay! We got all those things! Good thing too, cause;

We finished a piece of the Abel Tasman track today, 4 days and 3 nights of ghetto-fabulous “tramping” (which is not as exciting and scandalous as it may sound, also known in the States as “backpacking”) through curving temperate jungle/piny coastal woods along the slope of coastline that leads to golden sand beaches and a clear, brilliant turquoise sea. Damn folks, it’s pretty here. All those island paradises that are so beautiful in the brochures but also boast flesh-eating-parasites and scorpions as big as your fist? Don’t go there. Come here instead. It’s like California got really big and also happens to encompass Colorado, Tahiti and parts of Norway. People walk around barefoot in the grocery store. Everyone wears those Maori fishhook necklaces, not just surfers (or perhaps everyone IS a surfer). People say “Wicked” like they’re in Vermont.

BUT, as usual, I digress. Our first backpacking excursion went well, and we had a ball, despite having brought NO wine, books, or even a deck of cards. We love Nature, but sometimes Nature is boring (sorry Mom and Pop), so we had to amuse ourselves by looking for crabs and sea creatures A LOT, and being huge bumbling dorks and making each other laugh. And going to bed as soon as it got dark every night, which helped ‘cause we rose with the sun, like farmers do, and Greg Brown, and Michelle Medina. I like that kind of life. Makes things simple (this from a girl who usually goes to bed at 2:30 am!)

I thought maybe I would talk about our trip by highlighting of all the beauty we saw (jellyfish that looked like a frilly red and pink crinoline Victorian lampshade, albatrosses dive-bombing the water like there was no tomorrow, yet ANOTHER perfect beach with perfect clear water and flat golden sand and giant fern trees hanging over it like a resort landscape-designers wet dream) BUT INSTEAD I am going to tell you about the trials and travails. We are, as you all know, not the most geared-out REI-friendly sporty backpacker-types. We take to the jankier side of the whole experience, and we kept having to assure ourselves that we were LEARNING from this experience, cause Abel Tas is (supposedly) the easiest tramp we could do, and therefore the one we could use to get a feel for what we would need on the trail. Such as chocolate. And books. And more than one can of fuel (whoops!) Luckily, there are kind (or just really polite) German couples that quietly populate every natural area around here, that will loan you Ibuprofen and fuel and insect repellent (are you getting the jist of this?).

The first fun fact is that I don’t have a normal ergonomic backpack with me (my folks sent mine to Christchurch by way of Antarctica, and it has not yet arrived…eeep!). Mine is a purple and teal wonder from the Italian equivalent of Wal-Mart (no, it’s not Invicta, I wish it were!) which is about 3 inches too short for my torso. After a couple days of pure pain, I am now used to it. I just would picture sherpas lugging loads of mountain climber-compressed oxygen up Everest in bare-feet and then I would be alright. Or maybe the muscles in my back have died.

So I have (according to Mykle) early-stage leprosy (it’s a hand rash! NO, I don’t know where I got it, it formed the day I stepped on the piece of jellyfish!), and he has (according to me) a eye pustule (which is actually a sty, which is just as bad when you have to pull a blob of flesh out of it and then his eye fills up with blood….don’t worry folks, I took pictures!). These were our afflictions BEFORE we decided to go hang out in the wilderness with no insect repellent. We took showers tonight and got to count the bites. The culprit is the sand fly, whose bites (wonder of wonders) do NOT bother me as much as Mykle. They do itch, don’t get me wrong.

I am also suffering from a weird ankle pain that makes me hop around like a gimp, Mykle had crippling and very annoying back pain all three nights, and we both have big scratches, which make us just look badass. As if we needed help in looking such on the trail, with our baggy and patched cargo/carhart ripped-hoodie beanie-wearing haute couture. Get us in the wilderness and suddenly we become stony travelers. We had many humorous travails with our food setup (next time we shall bring MORE FOOD and no tent…Kiwi tracks have swanky huts that you can stay in with windbreaks and kitchens and toilets and such. We opted for the camping cause A. We are cheap and B. It was a Kai hazing ritual since she carried the tent), one of which involved an enraged Mykle punting (our only) pot into the ocean with a mighty kick, after the stove and pot fell over three times because of gale-force winds. We retrieved the sucker, only to find it has a huge dent. No Mom, Mykle sometimes does NOT respect the cookware, but this is balanced by his almost religious fervor in the proper seasoning of cast-iron pans.

All in all, we had a great time. The natural beauty is amazing. The last stop on the treck was near a lodge, where we were able to get cold beers, an over-priced anti-pasti platter, and make friends with an Argentinean waitress. These places are not road-accessible, so you have to take a helicopter (we wish!) or a water-taxi. We rode back to the beach where we started in one of the latter. Then we had the surreal pleasure of riding in a boat on wheels pulled by a tractor back to where our caravan* *was parked. This, as Mykle pointed out, is old hat if you’ve ever been to Burning Man.

*We think you that there should be some kind of Burrito IV that Californians can take if they are away from guacamole and carne asada for more than two months. It’s essential.

**You have to say “Caravan” and “Take-away” and “Toilet” here so people will know what you are talking about.