Gnu's Noose

How to navigate greywater and other life lessons

2009-08-22T13:46:00.005+08:00

So this is what happens when you're on a ship that wobbles like a chubby old lady out for her daily schlep -- you wake up each morning and discover that while you were sleeping and dreaming hopelessly of the wonderfulness that is solid ground and all that determinedly stays on it, things in your closet-sized cabin move, slip, slide, and land ceremoniously into the dustbin next to your uselessly bevelled coffee table. Aside from laying your sad, little possessions on the floor like a garage sale, each lying in wait to be stepped on in the wee, incoherent hours of the day, there's little that can be done. Other than, of course, ensuring that your dustbin never houses anything remotely resembling trash. The dustbin thereby lies promoted to a receptacle of all that isn't fettered to a larger, more stubborn object. Like yourself. I've started wearing a lot of my stuff to bed. And underneath my pillow lies a veritable flea market.

This leads, naturally, to the conclusion that, for the above reasons, one's toilet bowl must always remain firmly closed when not in use.

Now that I have glided into the realm of the bathroom, I feel compelled to share another life lesson. The art of preventing bathwater (or, more accurately, shower-water) from making an escape into your already rank cabin and successfully guiding it into a coin-sized shower drain. Two options exist for the shower-contemplators:

1) Do it the usual way, with the shower open to full capacity, drowning you in a deluge of delightfully warm water. This is the fun, normal way, the one that results in the whole exercise being the enjoyable experience that it's meant to be. Of course, you can forget about leaving that bathroom and entering your cabin for the next 24 hours. The time you spend inside the bathroom as your not-so-delightful greywater invades and annexes your cabin floor can be spent doing some mental arithmetic to calculate to rate of evaporation of water per square centimetre.

2) Unhook shower head from the stand and retreat to the far corner of your shower well. Meaning, move three inches backward from your shower curtain. This should ensure that you are no longer in physical contact with the shower curtain. Now think thin and cower into a miserable lump. Turn the shower knob ever so slightly to obtain a medium-sized trickle of water. "Douse" self with aforementioned trickle, slather soap, and re-douse. Note that the dousing process when achieved by a trickle of water, takes exponentially longer than when using a shower the normal way. By the power of 83,376. Once complete, switch off the shower, thus killing the trickle. You may now stop cowering. Replace shower head on its stand, and tremulously part shower curtain. If, at this point, you notice that despite your best efforts, some bathwater has escaped onto the bathroom floor, moan and curse loudly. Yet, ever so optimistically and bravely, open the bathroom door a crack. If you see a water-invasion (a minor water-ingress is acceptable) on your cabin floor, return to cowering position. Towel yourself dry if required, because it's going to be one long night, asleep in that bathroom.
-----
Final point of note -- we have easily the most sensitive fire alarm onboard. Breath smelling of freshly consumed smoked meat or potatoes would probably set the damn thing off. Why do I say this? Ask them poor souls who were blissfully asleep at 5 a.m. three days ago when the alarm went crazy for long enough for all of us to muster, before the officer on watch sheepishly announced that the alarm (and he, presumably) had gone bonkers. Or last night, when I was not-so-blissfully asleep at 9 p.m. This time, I only got as far as putting on my shoes before the hapless second officer announced with resignation, "False alarm, false alarm. Sighhhhhhhhh..."

Maybe I should start sleeping in coveralls and safety shoes.

Speechless

2009-08-19T12:23:00.007+08:00

São Miguel, little green Azores.

Okay, more brown-black than green. Wiki lied.

I swore and swore and swore that this post would have real, actual text strewn about everywhere, real written stuff. Proper words and everything, even whole sentences, after what feels like centuries of silence. Ambitious plans, I made.

And now, sitting in my cabin after a day of painting signs on large, white, missile-shaped GPS receivers, carpentry and screw-drivery and hole-drill-ery, climbing up and down rickety stairs wearing blindingly orange coveralls, profuse sweating, excessive email checking and Googling strange things, I'm left without one sensible or interesting thing to say. My sole purpose in rambling thus far has been to convince myself that I've done the daily verbal spew I promised I'd start doing. Box ticked. A-okay. More like D-minus-not-okay.

But it's a start. The middle will also happen. Soonly. Tomorrow, I swear.

New beginnings

2009-08-10T10:17:00.004+08:00

Summer moved on

2009-06-30T12:51:00.006+08:00

Long Nights

2009-05-14T04:28:00.005+08:00

Stormchaser

2009-04-05T04:02:00.003+08:00

A year on, the last of my days on a diamond in the rough. Bye bye, my lady.

Turn a corner, around a Cape

2009-03-19T23:35:00.015+08:00

For a trip that started with my mobile phone being stolen the day I landed in Cape Town, the one week that I spent with South Africa was more than sublime. It was therapy, a full-body massage for a very weary soul.

Long hours spent on the road, watching the country blur beside you, soaking in the newness and the sun, the tangible dust, the noisy wind and endless roar of the engine. Just sitting, seeing, and watching quietly as the knots and stress and knuckles and chewed fingernails all seep away.

A visit to any part of Africa is deemed incomplete without having been on a safari, regardless of whether the African nation or region you happen to be visiting is at all known for bountiful wildlife. Still (thankfully), I seriously doubt anyone looks for ostriches in Egypt. Anyway, South Africa is in fact unabashedly rich in the wildlife department, thanks to its phenomenal, world-renowned Kruger National Park. But, as things came to pass, it turned out that the six usable days I had in South Africa would not allow for a trip up far north to visit Kruger AND do it justice AND do a certain other activity I’d set my sights on in the southeastern part of the country.

Next best? A half-day safari in a private game reserve a few hours drive from Cape Town. While nowhere comparable to what I can only imagine the splendour of Kruger to be, this safari was charming its own way, with its grumpy buffalo, aloof zebras, lugubrious giraffe, feisty springbok, sassy elephants, and our excellent guide, who, on one occasion cheerfully handed us all a large ball of rhino dung, asking us to sniff it, and extolling its awesome aroma, before actually telling us what we were cradling so lovingly in our arms.

A mid-morning pit stop during the safari for a ‘drinks break’, which consisted, oddly enough, of juice and/or wine/champagne/beer in the afternoon had me immensely puzzled, until a visit to the reserve website a few days later revealed that what we had signed up for that day was in fact a half-day tour at the “Aquila Luxury Private Reserve”. Suddenly, the made-up faces of our safari-companions and the slight wrinkling of their noses at our disheveled presence seemed to make a lot more sense. In spite of (and probably because of!) all of this, the day was incredibly, surprisingly fun. Next time, maybe we’ll even see not just one, but a whole herd of gnus.

Cape Town’s most popular claim to fame is the towering Table Mountain that dominates most of its landscape. Technically, Table Mountain isn’t exactly “towering”; it’s more of a mountain stopped short in its tracks… into a plateau. This table-top is easily accessible by cable car today, although several trekking routes snake all around as well. Table Mountain adds to Cape Town that exotic air that Rio de Janeiro is said to exude; to say that the views from above are stunning is a terrible understatement.

And yet, there are those other bits and bobs about South Africa that everyone knows and shies away from mentioning. As the Lonely Planet admits, it’s very easy while in South Africa to have an exclusively “white” experience of the whole country. The hotel the company had me staying at in Cape Town was distinctly, unapologetically “white”, or non-black for the most part, its clientele comprised mostly of young, rich, yuppie white South Africans, hip and terribly cool. As a little brown girl in the midst of this strange divide, neither here nor there, I was as confused and ill-at-ease as I daresay many of the immigrant and first- and second-generation Indians in South Africa are. In the end, for my part, I was happiest in the Baz Bus backpacker bus, on my way to Stormsriver, to stand on the Bloukrans bridge and contemplate jumping off it. When the world ceases to make sense, take a little walk and get lost a little bit. Or take a little swim, and drown a bit. Or a little jump, and fall a fair bit.

I was fortunate enough, however, to have met a Cape Town local while at work on the boat, the Marine Mammal Observer, Victor, who, when he heard that I would be spending a few days in his city, promised to devote an entire day to showing me parts of Cape Town that I wouldn’t normally see as a tourist.

What followed was a completely mad and enlightening day, where, among a multitude of lightning visits and drives, I saw Cape Town’s local casino with its own ice skating rink, desolate at 10 AM on a Friday morning, where Victor and I promptly proceeded to skate away shakily at first but with steady improvement, to some seriously horrible music, for the rest of the morning.

Celebrating our achievements with a very suspect brunch at Wimpy’s, we headed back to the city via a combination of the local train and rikki, a sort of shared-taxi-which-is-actually-a-minivan. A note about Cape Town’s train system. The Lonely Planet will have you believe that it is a dodgy and substandard mode of transport, but it is by far of much better quality that local intra-city train systems in India. And yet, the Lonely Planet calls India’s local trains a vivid and thrilling not-to-be-missed experience. I guess India is allowed its charming third-worldliness, as long as it doesn’t aspire to move up the global food chain. But for South Africa, which insists that it is as First World as any other, thankewverriemuch, why, the train system is truly “appalling”!

As is the crime rate and poverty in the Cape Flats, Cape Town’s edition of Dharavi. And yet, as Patrick, Victor’s oldest friend drove me through the flats, and after a visit to both his and Victor’s homes, I was left scratching my head with puzzlement at what exactly it was that South Africa was so ashamed about. Agreed, the City Bowl and Cape Flats residential areas are worlds apart, but the city’s (and country’s) refusal to accept that the shiny-happy and the not-so-shiny-happy are all part of the whole package is bewildering and disheartening.

The paranoia exists everywhere. All through my week in South Africa, with uncanny frequency, I’d see houses fenced in with tall, barbed-wire meshes, all claiming to be electrified with enough voltage to vaporise the foolish instantly, guarded by the “city’s best armed forces”, shops with loud posters declaring that they had “absolutely-no-cash-on-the-premises-so-please-don’t-rob-us”, travel books and pamphlets detailing precautions to take while travelling through the country, entreaties to white travellers to please not look too rich, thankyou. In all the hotels, in the tourist buses, the staff, drivers, servicemen are black or coloured, the clients, white. You catch the driver muttering under his breath, “#*&@&# whiteys”, you watch the doorman stare stony-faced straight ahead as he holds the door open for twittering, dolled up, white twenty-somethings. Years after the official end to apartheid, South Africa still remains a country divided. Enough has been written and said about this. But to see it for yourself, through neutral, brown eyes, is a very strange kind of tragic.

I spent the better part of three days on a bus to get to the far-flung Stormsriver on the eastern cape. Stormsriver is the closest settlement (“village” would be a generous term) to the Bloukrans Bridge, site of the world’s highest commercial bungy jump, something I educated myself about soon after I knew I’d be spending some time in South Africa. But the lesser known factoid about Stormsriver is that it is at close proximity to the Tsitsikamma National Park, a rather rambly, lost, confused, and incredibly beautiful parkland, fringed by a fantastic beach and seaside cottages.

I stumbled into Tsitsikamma in a post-bungy daze, blissfully and deliriously happy, with the majority of the day left at my disposal to ruminate shamelessly over my free-fall into the void. And Tsitsikamma provided the perfect venue for the indulgence I had in mind. A lazy lunch by the sea, followed by a wander into the woods, conversations with the birds, and inordinate photo-clicking. One of those days of unmistakable perfection.

I will always swear by backpackers, even the grimy ones. I cannot stand spending more than a night at a hotel; most hotels are depressing, solitary, and utterly soulless. The only reason I survived two months in a hotel room in Norway was because I barely spent any time in it at all.

The Tube n’ Axe backpackers in Stormsriver was an incredibly lucky find. Alright, so it wasn’t so much a find as one of (a grand total of) three available backpacker lodgings in the village, and somehow, it sounded the most appealing. And it was the first backpackers I rang from my depressing-yet-oh-so-cool Cape Town hotel. And it was also one of the hostels where the Baz Bus, easily South Africa’s best backpacker bus, made a routine stop. Enough said. Convenience is a very compelling thing.

The two nights I spent at Tube n’ Axe backpackers were probably the most fun I’ve had at a backpackers in a long time. Travelling solo this time, I found myself in the company of great hosts and very easy-going and friendly co-travellers. From a solo young Brit, Nick, recently laid off from a investment banking job in the UK (and not the slightest bit broken up about it) and heading to Jo’burg to meet his dad, and who seemed to have fallen terribly in love with the Dutch hostel receptionist, to a young South African couple heading for a week-long trek, to an intriguing German couple who “made factories for people”, to the toothless African chef, to the fire-stoking bartender, Andrew, and his accidental, thrill-seeking Brazilian girlfriend, Lorena, the mix was fantastic and fortuitous. The nocturnal bonfires to stave off the chill added to the merriment, as did the pool table and the large-screen TV. My last night at the backpackers was spent guzzling a deliciously cold bottle of cider, somberly watching “I Am Legend” with a bunch of my hostel-mates and discussing the vagaries of an emotional Will Smith, before we all stumbled into our respective dorms and into a very pleasant, very content slumber.

But even now, looking back at my week in Africa nearly a month ago, I know I did everything I possible could’ve in the little time I was there, and yet left so incredibly much out. The journey back to Cape Town with the Baz Bus provided glimpses of the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. The Drakensburg mountains, Jeffrey's Bay, Port Elizabeth, Plettenberg Bay, and even a place magically called “Wilderness”. And that's just the southern cape. I’m holding on with bated breath. Until next time?

Addendum:

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of leaping into nothingness, with the sky at your feet and a seemingly endless fall, the cold rushing into your face and drowning your cheeks, arms spread-eagle and free. And then, silence. Nothing but the quiet. And the bliss.

Gone, Still

2009-01-13T09:43:00.005+08:00

There, and back again.

A full circle. Promises of a perfect circle.

Silver

2009-01-09T17:50:00.004+08:00

To a year of colour ahead.

Slow Speed Ahead

2009-01-02T02:02:00.003+08:00

Another year bites the dust. Another grey hair, another goodbye.

I wish I knew what to make of the months gone past, but the speed with which life twisted, turned, spun, screeched, belched, gasped, grinned and wept have left me mute, wordless.

And weary.

I'm glad for everything 2008 was, taught, made. I'm grateful I was there. I'm relieved I made it.

Of Gravy Trains...

2008-12-12T06:00:00.002+08:00

... and Daisy Chains

2008-12-12T05:50:00.001+08:00

Dust to dust

2008-11-22T08:34:00.001+08:00

Starry Nights at Zero Degrees

2008-11-07T20:50:00.012+08:00

What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.

I got through Kilimanjaro through the skin of my teeth, although, in the end, I felt like I hadn’t nearly given it everything. It’s easy to ponder wistfully once the deed is done and the dust has settled. It’s human nature to look back in regret and wish so desperately that you’d held on for just that bit longer, for just those couple of hours more. Breathed a little more, a little deeper, tried a little harder, a little more desperately, a little more determinedly.

But it’s one thing to look to live by a quote like – The pain will go away, but giving up will stay with you forever. And it’s quite something else to remember to repeat that to yourself over and over, with indisputable conviction, as you heave what you’re convinced is the heaviest body on the planet (yours, that is), 5,895 metres up the earth. Gasping for air, desperately trying to ignore a pounding headache and bubbling nausea, straining at muscles that have all but shriveled up and died, quaking in the bitter, inhuman cold, it’s the starkest struggle to find purpose and reason in the madness that finds you inching your way up a continent’s highest mountain in the dead of the night, under the blinding stars, in the silence of the darkness. The only sounds you hear are your own ragged, deathly breathing, panicked gasps, uncontrollable, wheezy coughs, and the sickening sound of the gravel sliding under your feet as you take three steps backward for every two steps forward.

And yet, merely a day later, once lower altitude and thicker air have left you all but completely renewed, you eagerly seek and plan your next fix, the next time you get to put yourself through yet another experience of agony. Nothing logical can really explain this – it isn’t masochism, nor fatalism of any kind, merely just mountain-madness, that inexplicable strain of wanderlust that compels you to undergo a ludicrous amount of pain and suffering for, among other things, a fantastic view. One would imagine the rewards couldn’t possibly match up to the effort. And one would be mistaken.

Africa is mad and glorious. And much like India in many ways, as far as my limited experience of the former goes. The roads are about the same quality (and therefore range from fabulous to bone-dislocating), the streetscapes look and feel more or less the same, the clothes are functional, the vendors affable, the summer sun searing, the cars dusty, the language colourful. But some exceptions – nearly all women with very short hair, nearly every bawling baby trussed behind a woman’s back, open vehicles rapidly filling up with red earth, the absence of neon signs, the multitude of Lutheran churches, $20 bottles of Nescafé. And 1,250 Tanzanian Shillings to the US Dollar.

Tanzania, until recently, was continually plagued with economic turmoil, given its wild neighbours and the equally wildly fluctuating oil and commodity prices. Yet, as Joseph, our young Chagga guide offered optimistically, things are now looking up, what with the wealth of natural resources prevalent throughout the country, especially gold and natural gas. Natural resources sitting pretty, sitting ready, sitting-ducks for exploitation, sitting in anticipation of better times ahead. Why, let’s bring those Nescafé prices down, now, shall we?

As with several other parts of Africa, tourism plays a large role in supporting the economy. In a country that boasts of the Kilimanjaro National Park, the Serengeti, and Zanzibar’s glorious golden beaches, it’s not surprising to find tour operators and their accompanying touts at every street corner. Booking a trek to Kilimanjaro can be done in two ways – locally after arriving in Tanzania (at, supposedly, a greater risk to life and limb while up the mountain), or in advance with an “internationally located” booking company prior to setting foot in the country. Given that our contingent comprised two Aussies, one Pole, and one Indian, we resorted to following the latter, admittedly “safer” option. There’s only so much flexibility you have when you take on the responsibility for the well-being of others. Gambles, risks, and experiments can only be attempted when traveling solo, or with companions equally reckless.

And so it was that we chose to book with Africa Travel Resource (ATR), a UK-based travel company, who employed African Walking Company (AWC) in Tanzania to do the honours for us. Although they didn’t come cheap, neither ATR nor AWC could be faulted for efficiency or service. If you ignore the muddy (yes, literally muddy, with bits and pieces bobbing about) water we had to drink on one of the final days of the trek since one of the “regular” lakes supplying water had frozen over, things went perfectly according to plan. A plan that did not rule out the possibility of mild diarrhoea, hypothermia, acute mountain sickness, and sleepless nights. And we cheerfully acquiesced.

Kilimanjaro International Airport was a very pleasant surprise. Small, spotless, very pretty, and very well-maintained. Given that it’s the first stop for many Europeans in Tanzania, it’s probably no surprise that all the signs are in English, the souvenir shops list prices in Euros, and the beer and wine bars are well-stocked. PrecisionAir and Air Tanzania operate several domestic and international flights; yet, in a manner nearly exclusively and charmingly African, the check-in counter for the Ethiopian Air flight from Kilimanjaro International Airport to Addis Ababa on my way out of Tanzania did not open until an hour before my flight was due to depart, due to the blatant absence of Ethiopian Air staff anywhere in the airport that afternoon, as we were nonchalantly informed by the airport staff. The fact that the flight eventually departed and landed exactly on time is due credit to a continent where things work exactly as they should, in a manner you’d least expect.

And so it was that we began our trek, at the Rongai gate, sitting at 1,950 metres, with “only” another 4,000 odd metres to scale over the next 5 days. With lungs filled with an equal amount of fresh air and red dust, accumulated during the hour-long ride to the National Park gates, and stomachs fortified by a substantial packed lunch, the possibilities seemed endless. It seemed paranoid to imagine that our legs perhaps wouldn’t be able to take us to the summit. Given how easy the first day was, with the incredibly slow (“Pole, pole”, Swahili for “slow, slow”) pace in the shelter of the forest, shielded from the blazing sun, and unchallenged by the mild inclines, it really didn't seem like we'd suffer too much through the adventure. Naïve, hasty conclusions, drawn and designed by oxygen-filled brains.

The camp at first night was everything a “first” camp promises to be – new and therefore exciting, quaint, and reasonably comfortable. After a very Rajesque dinner, seated on a table outdoors, drinking a cuppa and downing bowls of soup and bread, we proceeded to while away the twilight hours playing cards and losing in turn, like clockwork, hurling good-natured abuses and well-aimed jibes, under the inky blue-back skies, huddled in the cold, in our fuzzy jackets and hilarious beanies, giggling uncontrollably into the night, laughing in our contentment.

The second day of walking was similar to the first, but now emerged the extra layers out clothes, the path got a little steeper, and we were suddenly faced with legs a little less fresh than before. Long days on the trail, tired evenings in camp, restless sleep inside tents rattled by a persistent wind. That was basically how it went, day after day, gaining altitude with each morning, sniffing at smellier clothes, anxiously observing more irritated tummies, more tired legs, and braving that stronger nip in the air.

By day three, at around 4,000 metres, we all started to feel the effects of altitude in different ways – all quietly moaning and clutching various body parts, heads, tummies, calves, feet, yet plodding on as resolutely as we could manage, because down as we were, we weren’t anywhere close to being out yet. Every rest stop rejuvenated, every sip of water and every bite of chocolate refreshed, each stint of forty winks made us feel that much more capable of facing up to the now clearly formidable task we’d taken on so brazenly.

A long walk across a surreal, lunar-esque landscape, completely exposed to the harsh sun, all through day four took us to the veritable “base camp” at 4,700 metres, where we were meant to eat and sleep as much as possible in preparation of the insane, long night/day ahead. By this time, I was battling a severe headache, nausea, and constant chills. Popping a few pills alleviated matters only slightly, a nap some more; yet, the nausea ensured I barely did any of the eating I was meant to do, which meant that I woke up at midnight tired and far from full-strength. A nocturnal battle with a mouse, who chose that very night to camp with me inside my tent, meant I had even less sleep than I had dared hope I’d get amidst the howling wind. Even so, waking up in the dark, dressed for the worst, in five layers of clothes, two pairs of gloves, and a head swathed in fabric like a mummy, over which sat a head-torch, the possibilities, still, seemed endless. In the constancy of that moment before the first step toward the summit, watching the billion dizzying stars blink in mad approval, it felt wrong to not believe that we were meant to be there, and, several hours later, at the top.

However, a six-hour summit climb in torchlight, in rapidly thinning air and freezing temperatures, truly is a killer. What seemed certainly possible at 4,700 metres quickly disintegrated into the ultimate struggle, step for step, as the headache re-emerged and worsened with each metre we ascended. Then along came the nausea, closely followed by total breathlessness, and legs that felt like lead. Inevitably, four hours on, I had reached the brink of my battle, staggering sideways and endways, devoid of any sense of balance, and chilled to the bone. The moment of truth when Joseph and I decided it was best I went back down before the altitude sickness got any worse didn’t quite feel as indecisive and weighty as I imagined it would (yes, we all imagine it, no matter how optimistic or hopeful. It would require either a staggering amount of confidence and/or vanity to think you wouldn’t come to a point where you had to make a decision, one way or another, either in your head or out aloud…). At that point, it felt like the only possible decision, and one I made without too much angst. Asking yourself to face three more hours of dark, speechless agony when the next five paces feels like the end of you, requires fortitude and strength of will I’ll easily admit I lack. Or, lacked. Failure only makes you more determined.

The others struggled on after I started descending, but they never made it to the highest point, Uhuru peak at 5,895 metres, either. They climbed as far as the Kilimanjaro crater rim (Kili is an extinct volcano), a certain Gillman’s point at 5,681 metres, and decided they’d definitely had enough. Then came their excruciating 2-hour descent back to base camp, which they all completed at different times, one managing a scree-run, one stepping gingerly and painfully slowly, and one combining the two.

My descent back to camp took place in a feverish, headached daze, which involved some amount of spewing as well. The glorious re-entry into camp and inside my tent was quickly followed by six hours of the deepest sleep I’d had in days; when I eventually woke up, the night and the summit attempt seemed light years away, and all I knew and felt was immense gratitude for the warmth of the tent and the silence in my head, which had finally ceased pounding. Very few things in this world can measure up to the enormity of such pure, unadulterated gratitude.

That afternoon and the following day merely involved moving our weary bones all the way back down to the Park gate. The walk downhill was naturally easier, and the thicker air the lower we reached cheered us no end. Here stories tumbled, jokes were shared, and the banter that had slunk away the past few days returned with a bang, shoving to the side any contemplation of stinging toes and knocking knees. Yet, the look of pure relief and surrender that filled each of our faces as we walked through the Park gates the following day should’ve been recorded somewhere for posterity. It wasn’t, but I doubt we’d ever forget.

-----
More and more, with each passing day, I find myself colliding with kindred spirits, restless souls with itchy feet, aching for motion, tortured by inertia, always searching for the next new landscape to tread, the unfamiliar language to decipher, the unpredictable roads to peer out into. Not all of these seek to defy gravity; some stretch their legs and run as far and long as their legs can carry, some find themselves in the silence of the world below the oceans. All looking for worlds different to those they are otherwise wrapped and surrounded by. Spilling out of the containers they find themselves in, splashing about trying to see more and discover a view so different to what they’ve grown accustomed to that their eyes barely know how to describe it. And then again, over and over. That insatiable greed. That addiction of discovery.

Blue Steel

2008-10-11T13:26:00.001+08:00

A Diamond in the Rough

2008-10-06T09:40:00.003+08:00

Breakaway

2008-09-16T12:25:00.005+08:00

Floating down a river

2008-09-12T11:11:00.001+08:00

As the skies fall

2008-09-09T08:55:00.002+08:00

Fountain

2008-09-02T14:23:00.004+08:00

How long has it been since I last wrote... anything of consequence? Over the months, the words dissolved, then evaporated, some disintegrated, then sublimated into obscurity, back to where they came from, into figments of my imagination. All those words, all those thoughts, all the jigsaws and pieces stumbling over each other helplessly, begging to be collected, to fit together, aching for order, all those shards, still in my head, still contained within, more fearful of spilling over, day by day, with each passing day.

But when were those last glimpses? June, March perhaps? It appears my only catalysts to words were journeys, joyous, physical, mental ones, magic trips, slivers of astonishing possibilities, fortresses of memories, purveyors of dreams.

Come spring, come fall. Come grey skies and pouring rain. The earth turns and I turn with it, never really looking around long enough to watch the leaves twist, bend, turn inside out, never to be the same again. Lost to this earth forever, lost to my world, out of my sight, out of reach. My eyes averted, eyes that skim over and look away, out of focus, choosing distraction, afraid of diving too deeply, too intently, and seeing too much. Comprehending too much, and watching it all flow away.

Mute

2008-08-29T15:16:00.002+08:00

The Long Walk ahead

2008-08-24T17:24:00.002+08:00

Two years on, still dead, still standing...

Passing the world by

2008-08-18T00:51:00.003+08:00

Kili, here I come!

Rush Hour

2008-08-03T22:16:00.006+08:00

Life on a seismic boat, strangers on a shipping lane. Out of our depths, in limbo.

A change of scene, a welcome break. A change in scenery, a hint in the air.

Kin

2008-08-03T22:05:00.002+08:00

Ghosts

2008-07-29T22:20:00.001+08:00

How I miss being missed...

Morning Bell

2008-07-08T18:34:00.003+08:00

Yes, still Radioheady. Incorrigibly.

Across the universe

2008-07-06T20:42:00.005+08:00

Once upon a time, there was a little girl, who flew, and flew, and flew...

... away. Flapped her wings, and disappeared...

... across the universe, all the way, far away...

... into the night...

... and into the arms...

... of the love of her life, that music in her ears...

... the music in her dreams.

---
P.S. Thanks for the piccies, wea.

Memory Lane

2008-06-24T18:11:00.001+08:00

Behold these days

2008-06-22T20:19:00.002+08:00

where nothing is real.

Then and Now

2008-06-18T19:08:00.004+08:00

It's still all clear as crystal, how it all came into being, nearly two long years past -- bleary at KLIA, buried under Crazy Diamond, watching, from the corner of an eye, one half of the world dreaming wearily on makeshift couches, and the other half plodding by.

Sprint forward a few months ahead. A struggle, inspired, aspired, desperately seeking that perfect flare. Twisting, turning, bending bewildered cameras, begging for their coorperation, exulting in their success.

And then, a Mellow May. Sunday mornings in the sun, with endless mugs of soy coffee, mounds of peanut butter and towers of books, earphones growing out of my ears, and my sweatshirt pouring out of my skin. Sepia Sundays, silent sun.

A few months forward? Or a few steps backward? After a while, it stops making any difference. All you remember and all you know are nights in bright lights, conversations on couches, perfect pizzas, mountainous milkshakes, force-fed fuzzy kiwis... and words. Words and ideas, thoughts and hints, on a page, on that screen, in that image, inside that song. Giddy laughter and vociferous banter, over and over, tirelessly, endlessly, enthusiastically, unaffectedly. A content time. A warm life.

But sea changes and seas change. A way of life becomes the weight in your life. And before you know how, and when, and why, and how possibly so stealthily, once more, with never sufficient warning -- the earth turns, the tides ebb, and your sea disappears... completely.

Filtered

2008-06-16T14:29:00.003+08:00

Fourteen long hours in KL airport, and amazingly, eight hours on, I'm not bored yet. It's amazing what a good book, endless cups of coffee, moving pictures, on a screen, music in your head and in your eyes, words on your mind, colours at your fingertips, rain on a window can do to keep restlessness at bay.

Tea-toned. Monochrome.

Blue skies. An eternal web.

Colours everywhere, overflowing, oozing, breathlessly. Visual ecstasy, a crisp beauty.

One last look...

2008-06-12T11:59:00.002+08:00

... because, pilgrim, although it kills me, I'll let you win this one.

Still, I'll find a way. You know I'll find my way right back.

(I can't even think of a title)

2008-06-04T15:05:00.002+08:00

Day by day, lesser to say. The words drying up, the voices silenced, the footprints disintegrating, the memories fading.

Photos, then. Effortless escape.

The calm before the storm

2008-05-25T14:59:00.005+08:00

In a matter of minutes, the ice turned into a rage, the clouds hustled, growled, squeezed and spat at the earth. Lashing at my face, rejoicing in my unfettered ecstasy.

My sea in spate. My stage rent. My battle begun.

Life in a Glass House

2008-05-23T16:02:00.008+08:00

For a day that began like this, there had to be reasons. Something, anything, that would've made me understand all that I devoured with my eyes through the rest of the day.

A sea as unruffled and unwavering as the staunchest of memories.

And at the same time, malleable, deceptive, capable of being shredded by the most irreverent, the most irrelevant.

The fragile.

If only I could've told where the sky ended and the earth began...

... I would've torn myself away, and remembered.

In the end, there couldn't have been a more fitting day than yesterday for the devastating, crippling beauty all around.

To them, without whom, none of this world would've existed for me.

Yesterday was for you.

Time Thief

2008-05-21T15:58:00.004+08:00

Asleep by the sea

2008-05-17T16:46:00.002+08:00

Up, up and away

2008-05-12T13:53:00.005+08:00

For all of now, yet one more place to call home. Once again, asleep by the sea, lulled by the tides, calmed by the winds. I know my place, under the skies, in my quiet. I know my peace.

Flight of Fancy

2008-04-29T01:40:00.002+08:00

Kaleidoscope Eyes

2008-04-28T03:34:00.005+08:00

Soon, I'll find I've disappeared completely, once more. Again and again, all over again. A blur in the headlights. A mirage in your eyes. A figment of your imagination.

The Persistence of Memory

2008-04-21T21:47:00.002+08:00

Apologies, Dalí.

Minding gaps

2008-04-20T21:22:00.002+08:00

(Quiet)

2008-04-15T16:21:00.004+08:00

Sometimes, it pays to really, truly appreciate the lush, red carpets and amber lighting, the oaken furnishings, the clipped echoes of eager footsteps trotting along long, candle-lit corridors. It pays to let the strains of music flow over you like a park fountain in summer. It pays to quell the fury within.

Rivers of steam

2008-04-12T19:43:00.004+08:00

Because everything has a shelf life.

In the peak of summer, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible crabbiness.

Symmetry

2008-04-12T12:06:00.011+08:00

(It was with great astonishment that I realised this morning that I'd completely forgotten to throw in the handful of words and pictures I'd diligently stashed away in a Word document about Cairo here. Clearly, this oversight is earth-shattering.
*straightface*)

-----

Cairo suddenly feels a million miles ago…

Desert Daze

2008-04-12T10:26:00.000+08:00

The Sinai from the sky.

In keeping with the intricate, convoluted unravelling of events over the past year, my trip to Cairo almost didn’t happen. In the midst of juggling a million potential travel plans, trying to anticipate all the visas I’d need, and in trying to apply for too many in too short a time frame, I somehow ended up passport-less until the morning before I was to leave for Egypt. Such inconveniences barely frazzle these days. Realistically, I can’t really allow them to, what with anxiety attacks and aneurysms being so annoyingly detrimental to long-distance locomotion…

In retrospect, however, I probably shouldn’t have stayed up the entire night before I left. Perhaps, then, the hapless guy at the window seat in my row on the first excruciating eleven-hour flight from Perth to Dubai wouldn’t have had to climb over my seat (yes, over. As in, one foot on my arm-rest, one leg over me, followed by a carefully placed foot on the aisle) a few thousand times to make his way to the toilet, as I collapsed into a veritable coma.

Oh, but the Sinai! Thankfully, much awake through the second four-hour leg from Dubai to Cairo, I shutterbugged manically at the wonderfully weird landscape below. Acres and acres of dry, sculpted desertscapes, housing powdery dunes sprinkled amongst unforgiving crags. Red, red earth, baked crisp. Abrasive tunnels of wind, blinding dust swirls, slowly yet resolutely eating away at their world. Arid, thirsty magic. A rumbling silence.

I’ve never been more acutely aware of how crippling it is to be utterly lost in translation. More accurately, lost without translation. In more ways than I can count, Egypt looks, smells, and feels like India. But something as simple as stepping into a cab and trying to get somewhere disintegrates into an exercise of hopeless futility. I seriously doubt I’ve ever mimed more in my life. Even writing doesn’t work as you’d hope, since all the numbers are read backwards. I spent a large part of a morning trying to explain to a cabbie that I wanted to go to No. 26 on a certain street, while he planted the cab stubbornly at No. 62, insisting that we’d arrived. It took a while until I saw the light.

Managing to wrangle a trip to Egypt at the company’s expense seemed like a very clever idea. In theory. The flipside of attending an intensive, unimaginably academic training course in an exotic country is that, while, for all practical purposes, you’ve hit a pot of gold, being where you are and everything, the struggle is in trying to see and do everything while watching, with cold horror, time slip through your fingers.

In a while, though, you get better at juggling everything, once again. Thanks to an extremely patient Egyptian girl, Azza, also attending the same course, the four mind-boggled non-Egyptians were taken to the very beautiful Azhar Park, set smack in the middle of Old Egypt. An elevated dusk, surrounded by minarets, graves, and the muzzein’s call. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the magic started to pour into my skin, like backlit, mellow honey.

At first glance, the office building in Cairo where the course was held, has the appearance of a quiet suburban residence, much like the upmarket homes in Connought Place or Gulmohar Park in Delhi. Leaning against the barricade on the balcony of the ninth floor while nibbling at a lunch of tomato, cheese and bread, each day I’d thaw in the blinding sunlight and soak in a bit more of the city. Among the myriad unusual sights that have come to epitomise Cairo for me was that of an Arab lying blissfully asleep in a patch of sunlight for a good part of the day, every day. It was Azza who explained that the reclining Egyptian was most likely the night-shift security guard of a nearby building, catching his forty winks after a long day of, most intriguingly, retail. Apparently, it’s a common thing for locals to set up temporary shop along street corners, selling odds and ends to supplement their income. As I was slowly discovering, in Cairo, the surprises never cease.

Hazy Chain

2008-04-06T16:57:00.006+08:00

Scours. Scars. Cars.
Lees. Leas. Lease.
Seer. Sear.
Fear.
Here.

Momentary Lapses

2008-04-04T20:00:00.007+08:00

Half Full

2008-04-03T20:54:00.004+08:00

Round and round and round and round...

TrooBloo

2008-04-02T05:21:00.001+08:00

Rent

2008-03-28T04:43:00.000+08:00

A shibboleth, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘a word used as a test for detecting people from another district or country by their pronunciation; a word or sound very difficult for foreigners to pronounce correctly.’ A way of separating one people from another.

Awake

2008-03-26T00:31:00.000+08:00

Blue skies in Cambridge scream, “Look!”

Breath

2008-03-22T23:48:00.012+08:00

Fragile

2008-03-21T23:19:00.009+08:00

Roads

2008-03-20T20:01:00.003+08:00

There was a time a few years ago when I would’ve given anything, traded every possession, bartered my mind, sold my soul, just so I could scrape together enough money to study at Oxford. Life has moved on since, but all of last week, there I was, nearly four years on, back at what would’ve been the beginning of my other life. Still, now doesn’t seem wrong somehow, doesn’t feel like a terrible mistake or a lost chance or wasted years. Instead, merely the purest affirmation of the fact that somehow it was always meant to be this way, in this time, in these shoes, with those greys in our heads, with all those twisted, frenetic, madly zigzagging years tailing behind. There’s an intangible, wordless, delicious perfection in the way we all collided once more, like it was the most natural, most logical thing to have ever existed on this earth. So far away from the place we used to call home, in the bitter cold of Brighton, in the pouring rain, along a cobbled beach, under blazing, shimmering, fiery lights, along rows of rows and rows of multi-hued mini-‘houses’, by the platinum lagoon, white, bright, light, a warm car, swirling steam, shivering hesitantly from a cup of acrid coffee, gravestones and freezing toes, duvet daze, radio heads, joined at the head, all halves. Blankets of fragile dreams, our own home, our own precious world. I have always, always walked that road. We all have, and we always will, together. I could walk forever.

Sky Father

2008-02-27T08:14:00.003+08:00

Will you find this?

White Nights

2008-02-20T14:11:00.004+08:00

Late nights in white walls. Silent passages, vacant chairs. Words falling on invisible ears, water through a sieve. Silent streets and stiff breezes. Vacant lots, empty roads. End trails and entrails. Rustling leaves, echoing footsteps. Dark houses and cold draughts. Weary feet, withered eyes. Steaming coffee and bottles of water. A warm, restless slumber and quiet dreams of no waking.

Static

2008-02-16T23:49:00.005+08:00

Don't know if I want you to understand me.Or go.I confess this heavy heart has me on my knees'Cause it feels like static when you're here.Static when you're goneStatic everywhere

Dead Quiet

2008-02-01T11:10:00.000+08:00

Summer moved on

2008-01-14T06:24:00.000+08:00

Flowers in the window

2008-01-10T06:19:00.000+08:00

24

2008-01-09T23:59:00.000+08:00

Bye, bye baby.

Set in Stone

2008-01-04T16:20:00.000+08:00

Nothing is...

Flashback Parade

2008-01-01T21:14:00.000+08:00

Two weeks of complete escapism. From life, from the outside world, from reality, from familiarity, from memory. How did I get here? And where am I headed now? To what end?

New Zealand is a country that takes your breath away, in ways that seem too absurd to be possible. To borrow slightly from a very witty postcard I noticed at the ubiquitous souvenir store here, I’ll always remember about this country – the portion sizes at cafés (die of shame, America!), the verdant meadows stretching beyond eternity, the surreal blueness of the lakes, the aquamarine sea squinting in the sunlight, snow-dusted mountains, volcano cones symmetric to perfection, the warmest, most good-natured cheer, and the heartfelt humility all around. This country may have a legacy of suffering nature’s might and violence, but look around and all you will see is quiet gentleness – both, in the magnificent landscapes, and among the people. A fortnight of travel in the best weather imaginable may not be the most unbiased backdrop for my Kiwi experience, but until I grow weary of this wanderlust, I know I have to keep coming back here.

And this is how it all began…

Auckland

2008-01-01T16:39:00.001+08:00

Back again. Thirteen days after I first set foot in New Zealand, I was back to the beginning, where it all started to explode delightfully. While the idea of spending new year’s eve atop a misty mountain or beside a babbling brook was hopelessly tantalising, the logistics of having to return to Perth on the first day of the new year (how inglorious!) forced us to seek more practical options. City-esque options. Like Christmas in Christchurch, all over again.

Getting to Auckland pushed our north island odometer beyond the 1,000 kilometre mark. Close to a thousand miles in the south island, and a little over a thousand kilometres in the north. And I’m starving for more. More sheep, more rolling meadows, more glassy lakes, more turquoise, more mountains, more strange-sounding towns, more mini-republics.

Auckland’s most imposing sight, and most likely the first thing you’ll notice about its skyline, is the unimaginatively named Sky Tower. This is the tallest building in the southern hemisphere, and while it’s not exactly a thing of beauty, most Kiwis are shyly proud that their country holds this accolade, transient though it may be.

I was, however, hugely wowed by the fact that there are over forty extinct volcanoes within the Auckland region. A closer look at the landscape, glancing beyond the urban decks of apartment blocks and high-rises, reveals a delightful number of slender, graceful cones in one direction, confronted by a few chubby mounds on the other side.

It was to one such chubby mound that John and I headed first. Mt. Eden is one of Auckland’s highest natural… um… highs, a quaint, old extinct volcano that is now a much-loved, popular picnic-ground/lolling-park for the locals. And as with every grassy patch in New Zealand, this one had its faithful regulars – chirpy tourists, freckled sunbathers, hungry cows, and the athletic types, who insisted on sprinting up and down the steep flanks of the crater with utter nonchalance, and, undoubtedly, the express purpose of making us feel comprehensively lumpy and unfit.

Trundling down the hill and towards the city, we caught closer glimpses of the Sky Tower and the shopping/entertainment complex below, SkyCity. Among the myriad attractions and facilities it has to offer, the most blatantly touristy is something called the Sky Jump, which involves a 192-metre suspended, controlled drop in about 11 seconds. And jumpsuits, lots of screaming, and manic photo-clicking by Japanese bystanders. John and I watched, staring into the sun, grinning infuriatingly.

An epithet often used for Auckland is ‘City of Sails’, and while the reasoning behind this is not immediately obvious, a quick hop across to the various Prince/Princess/King/Queen/Court-Jester jetties reveals a rich assortment sails, fluttering atop equally opulent yachts. Luckily enough, the day we chose to explore the bay was also the day the Russian training sailing vessel, Pallada, docked in Auckland as part of its voyage around the world. Not insanely eager to get aboard yet another boat, we were content to take a ridiculous amount of photographs from the pier, surrendering to unabashed touristy-ness.

Wellington may be the capital of New Zealand, but Auckland is easily its busiest and most populous city. Its resemblance to Melbourne is compelling, and in a lot of ways, it could very well be in Australia (yes, I do know that that statement will earn me a lynching in either country). Wild, unkempt, arty, and oozing attitude, whether it’s the vivid architecture, unusual art, the potpourri of its residents and their boisterous, outgoing nature, or its charming disarray of urban beauty.

Auckland really does know how to bring in a new year. Its streets overflowed with bars and pubs open till the wee hours of the morning, each promising an unforgettable kickstart to 2008. The Sky Tower promised to shower the city with an endless bouquet of fireworks, backpackers with in-house pubs hosted theme parties, while yachts and cruise ships had soirées of their own. Not quite the party animals, John and I decided to participate in the simplest kind of revelry – a public celebration at the Aotea Square, a free and alcohol-free gathering in front of the town hall, complete with a countdown and an unobstructed display of the Sky Tower fireworks. It felt like we were shedding fifteen odd years, with the effortlessness of a duck shrugging water off its back.

Along came midnight, and with it, a cascade of cheer, good humour, and uninhibited celebration. Most merely yearn for a good reason to be happy, to shed their melancholy, and, even if it’s only for a few moments, feel unreasonably optimistic. Fireworks can make you feel like that.

At the end of it all, we walked back to our backpackers, among the throngs of euphoric revellers, all hooting, cheering, clicking photographs, munching on doughnuts, hopping a little, skipping a bit. Such mirth! Such unfettered electricity! There are truly very few things in the world as uplifting as a happy people, and I guess bringing in a new year in a treasure of a country as New Zealand, is reason enough, more than anyone would ever need, to be so helplessly ecstatic.

Waitomo Caves

2007-12-30T18:24:00.002+08:00

The Tongariro Crossing took the wind out of us. A shrill, cold, gusty punch in the guts. So when we woke up the next morning to brilliantly sunny skies in National Park village, we knew we had to leave quickly, before a profound sense of regret for not waiting a day to do the Crossing in such perfect weather swallowed us whole. Still, bolt though we did, we couldn’t really avoid glancing up at the deliciously blue sky now and then, and sighing forlornly. Hindsight is such a slippery bastard.

We covered the 144 kilometres to Waitomo in less than two hours, with the inland route offering the standard fare of tiny towns and lots of sheep. Bolstered by a scrumptious breakfast at a highway café, we tore into Waitomo, eager for the next adventure. Not entirely educated about what it had to offer besides the numerous limestone caves, we were only mildly surprised when we discovered that Waitomo was the veritable one-lane town, even more so than National Park village. Still, differences exist – while National Park has a more rugged, country-Western sort of feel to it, Waitomo is more… upmarket. Definitely more yuppie. National Park belongs to the grubby, down-n-dirty trampers, Waitomo is for the adventure-elite. It offers manicured “adventure activities”, complete with a “coffee-break and warm showers” at the end of the “adventure”.

I don’t do it justice, though. It really is a good place to head to for a day, for some truly wonderful spelunking and underground sights. Waitomo’s claim to fame is its Glowworm Cave, which, amazingly enough, is host to thousands of glow-worms, dogged long-term residents despite the innumerable unwelcome human guests they have to tolerate each year. The cave in itself is unremarkable (by cave standards, that is. Not that I’d know any better, but hey, I’ve seen pictures! Spectacular photographs of caves in… er… other places!), with the regular assortment of stalactites and stalagmites. The magic begins later, however, when you hop onto a boat and paddle along an underground river, face upturned. A few seconds for your eyes to adjust to the darkness is all it takes, and suddenly, a night-sky descends upon you, in all its fluorescent-green glory. You’d be forgiven for drawing fictional constellations of your own in your head – the resemblance to a star-studded sky is uncanny. There are other glow-worm caves elsewhere in New Zealand, but the one in Waitomo is the most densely populated.

Cave sights apart, there were other… eccentricities to contend with. Most significantly, there was definitely something oddly creepy about our tour guide, a Kiwi named ‘Savitri’. While her pronunciation of her own name was baffling, to say the least, there was also the disconcerting way in which she stared at each of us like we were alien marauders from a neighbouring galaxy. Most unsettling, however, was the tone she adopted with the kids doing the tour. Anyone knows I’m not a devoted fan of children, but I’m miles away from this woman’s mastery of the art of veiled loathing. While most of her conversations with the yell-ey mites on the tour were civilised and gentle, she’d slip in the odd evil-sounding reproach with expert guile. Something like, “Now kids, you really do need to behave, or you wouldn’t want to disappear somewhere within the black, underground river, would you? Hmmm?” Followed by a saccharine smile. I kid you not.

The Tongariro Crossing

2007-12-28T01:54:00.001+08:00

A crossroads of a kind. One that would tint, ever so subtly, the little that remained of our trip. In a way, I guess, it couldn’t, shouldn’t really have been any other way, though at the time, I would’ve disagreed violently. Regardless of the fact that there is no dearth of reasons to go back to New Zealand, the one burning just that shade brighter is that I have to do the Tongariro Crossing. Again.

Even before I’d set foot into Kiwiland, the other thing I had my heart and legs firmly set on, aside from the bungy, was this Crossing. The grave title felt misleading, given that the Lonely Planet (and several other sources) repeatedly stated that this is the best, most spectacular, most mindblowing one-day trek in New Zealand. Promises of emerald-hued lakes, dazzling, scorched volcanic landscapes, plains of ash, steaming vents, and miles of blues and greens and yellows and reds. A crossing between three towering volcanoes, Mount Tongariro, Mount Ruapehu, and Mount Ngauruhoe, the latter, better known as Peter Jackson’s “Mount Doom”. A heady prospect, in the end, too good to be true.

So it was that John and I set out, into the bitter cold of 7 a.m. in National Park village, into a wilderness we could barely perceive, thanks to a stubborn fog that we were told would clear up in a couple of hours. Ever-trusting, we soldiered on, through wisps and streams of cloud, trails of wood and rock, up, down, along, over.

Somewhere along the beginning of the route, unchallenged by the gentle terrain, still optimistic, still cheerful, still bursting with anticipation and energy, I would remark to John that even if the weather didn’t clear up too cleanly, I didn’t expect we’d regret making the decision to do the crossing on a less-than-perfect day. But, as it always comes to pass with brash statements like that, Mr. Murphy prevailed, yet again. I spent the next four days nursing a deep sense of guilt for subjecting John to what ensued that day, digging into my wallet to pay for his meals as atonement, deaf to his protests.

The weather never cleared. The cloud never lifted, and the rain never stopped. The heartless wind never relented. And we never got to see a fraction of all that we’d hoped we would. Every promised landscape, every emerald lake, every red crater, painted white. Obscured by clouds, by stinging rain, and the aching cold.

We spent the next seven hours trudging through volcanic ash and sludge, damp and soft enough for our feet to sink into, but dry enough to scour our ankles and eat away at our toes. Shoes filled with pebbles, ash, mud and hellknowswhatelse, and bloodied socks. Furiously flapping ponchos, soaked parkas, dripping t-shirts, drenched pants, drooping caps. Numb hands, frozen noses, icy cheeks, chilled to the bone and the marrow and the whateverelse that lies within the marrow. Seven hours in wet clothes, further refrigerated by the ubiquitous wind. I have never, ever, ever, EVER been that cold in my entire life.

Towards the end of the crossing, when we’d entirely given up all hope of comfortable survival, we stumbled into the Ketetahi hut, the DOC place for long-haul trampers to crash. Furnished with only the mere essentials – basic bunks and two small stoves, it also hosted an additional feature that brought us (and all the other day hikers with us, the collective foolish!) nearly to tears – a heater. You had to see the sheer numbers of miserable, soggy, icicled trampers that thronged and jostled and wedged themselves against each other like pieces in a jigsaw, just so they could get closer to that object of benevolent radiation. And you had to see the funnels, channels of steam issuing from each of us the instant we stepped away from the wind and into the hut. When he regained sensation in his fingers, John managed to take this picture:

John insists that what he was trying to capture was the haze of steam billowing from my cowering back. I can only recognise bits of my bright blue tee and half a mop of wet hair. But there is a certain haze…

Whangamomona

2007-12-27T01:22:00.007+08:00

The ‘Forgotten World Highway’ from Stratford to National Park village takes you to a completely different country within New Zealand. Literally. The Republic of Whangamomona is a microscopic blip even on the highly magnified north island road map, but it’s a proud nation by itself, complete with its own president, a restaurant-cum-hotel, post office, and border control.

I was so tickled, I left my bag, camera, and wallet inside the restaurant and walked out chirpily.

New Plymouth

2007-12-26T02:45:00.000+08:00

A stroke of sheer stupidity saw me trundling across New Zealand from end to end merely so I could get to Wellington. A flight from Christchurch to Auckland, way up north of the north island, at a painfully ungodly hour, followed by a second flight from Auckland to Wellington, at the southern tip of the north island. It was also during this national circumnavigation that fate decided that I could ill-afford to miss out on the quintessential travel experience that is losing one’s checked-in baggage. Arriving at Wellington airport at exactly the same time as John, a patient wait at the baggage claim carousel slowly turned my expression of mild grogginess into thorough bemusement. Miles and miles of multi-hued bags, of every conceivable size and shape found their way into the outstretched arms of their fidgety owners, yet my child-sized backpack (the size of a chubby five-year old child, I mean) refused to make an entrance. Eventually, through with the cocktail of bemusement, denial, annoyance, and resignation, I tottered off toward the Lost Baggage desk and filed a report. Explaining to the airline staff that my ‘address’ over the next week would change four times caused no little amount of strife, but in the end, the fact that my bag made it to the YHA in New Plymouth barely ten minutes after we checked in is testament to the fact that this probably happens more often than I’d imagined. I guess I’ve just been lucky a lot.

Getting to New Plymouth took a better part of the day. Okay, nearly all of it. Finding the Hertz desk at Wellington airport was easy, though, and soon enough, John and I trotted towards the car park, minus one backpack, eager and gleeful, and into a brilliantly blue Toyota Yaris. Besides the obvious advantage of being able to go wherever, whenever, the hugely underestimated plus about renting a car is that it’s like a large, mobile suitcase. You’d have to see the sheer volume of stuff we tossed over at regular intervals onto the backseat to believe it.

Our bright eyes started dim after a while, though, when the rumbling in our collective tummies grew alarmingly audible. We’d left Wellington behind in an inexplicable (even to us) hurry, so I flapped around with a huge map of the north island while John craned his neck for “knife-fork-plate” signs on the highway. Eventually, we gave in and pulled into a dour shopping complex, in the middle of nowhere in particular, displaying the ubiquitous, gaudy McDonald’s sign. Contemplating a highly suspect savoury quiche, I made a handful of rash promises to myself to never again head to a fast-food joint for breakfast. Well, except perhaps for coffee. Caffeine does make the world wonderfully rosy.

Our first week in New Zealand taught us that the concept of traffic on highways was, mercifully, an entirely alien concept in this part of the world. Imagine our dismay, then, as we turned a corner and were forced to screech to a near halt behind a long, long line of cars humming patiently at average strolling speed. It took us a while, over thirty minutes of automotive crawling, to realise that being a holiday, the entire population of the north island and some were headed toward the splendid beaches that dot the west coast. While that did keep us on the road for longer, we amused ourselves by grabbing eyefuls and camerafuls of pretty, deceptively manicured landscapes, and some patently amusing signs by the side of the road.

My first glimpse of the glowering Mt. Taranaki, towards which we were headed the following day, sent happy shivers down my spine. Taranaki isn’t an “active” volcano in terms of a human lifespan, but merely the knowledge that a couple of centuries ago, more than once, it exploded and sputtered and effused and destroyed everything in its path is a hopelessly, madly exciting thought in itself.

When we finally made it to New Plymouth, it took us even more map-consulting and chugging along bewildering twists and turns in the road before we managed to locate the YHA. Located a kilometre away from the town centre in an unbelievably picturesque glade, this hostel bore little resemblance to its title. Neither was it teeming with youths, nor was it anything you’d come to expect of a hostel, even in New Zealand. In a good way, that is. More akin to a bed-and-breakfast, this place was surrounded by lush lawns in every direction, dotted with individual cottages for the reclusive. A babbling brook by its fringes, and gently cooing birds snuggled within dense trees, all cloaked within a blanket of dewy fresh air. Our six-hour drive to get there felt utterly justified.

Pretty much the strangest (and in a way, the most ingenious) thing we saw that week was upon entering a busy Chinese noodle bar. Drawn to its clean, cheerful sign, we entered, only to be confronted by a wall with a dazzling array of food pictures. I imagine the idea was to keep customers from asking ignorant questions about what the fat-cow-chow-bow-eat-this-gloop-now-you-dim-sum really was, but unfortunately, nearly everyone spent a good amount of time grinning idiotically at the wall before trotting over to the counter and chirruping, “Can you make the Tim-Lim-Bim-Bam-Boo-Zill vegetarian?” Alright, maybe not everyone, but I kinda did. I think they clunked an egg over the top of my otherwise very edible (and yes, vegetarian) noodles as revenge.

Another queer, and entirely unrelated, feature of this town is the crazy slopes of the roads. Cowering inside a car at one end of what can only be described as a road that was most likely a significant segment of a terrifying roller-coaster, we gaped, choked loudly, and then John checked the brakes. My heart goes out to cyclists heading up those roads.

The following day we woke up nice and early and stepped out to take in as much of the town as we could before leaving for National Park village. The waterfront of New Plymouth is one of the nicest and cleanest I’ve seen in any city. There’s a small railway track just in front of the promenade, and I can picture weary travellers smiling richly in their trains, as they watch the pristine waters whiz past. The walkway also hosts another extremely strange contraption – a wind wand. Unlikely to be of any practical use, it serves more as a wonderfully quirky accessory to an otherwise immaculately orderly town.

Before heading out in Mt. Taranaki’s general direction, John and I decided to amble into Puke Ariki, which I’d heard and read so much about. The Lonely Planet’s description is oddly vague, so we didn’t know exactly what we were visiting until we stepped inside. Puke Ariki literally means ‘hill of white hairs’ or something weird like that, so it was with thorough puzzlement that we wandered about inside this excellent museum-cum-DOC-cum-tourist-information-office-cum-all-round-educational-experience. Honestly, there’s no other way to describe it. Taranaki here, Taranaki there, Taranaki everywhere, but it was all so well-done and mindbogglingly fascinating, you couldn’t possibly tire of it. This place even had a room that screened informative and slightly wild Taranaki movies every fifteen minutes. We sat there, in pitch darkness, watching the screen, and seated on the craziest chairs, which glowed, changed into psychedelic colours, and shuddered every time the soundtrack hollered a bit. That chairs shuddered, that is, not us.

It was to get to Dawson Falls via Stratford, forty kilometres southeast of New Plymouth, on the eastern flanks of Mt. Taranaki, that John and I eventually tore ourselves away from Puke Ariki. The weather had been promisingly, if not perfectly, clear all morning, so we hoped to catch the entire volcano in all her towering glory. Worrisome, though, was the stubborn cloud seemingly stuck to the tip of the mountain like super-glue. It felt like it’s take some serious huffing and puffing by the big bad wolf to blow that one away.

The road to Dawson Falls was wonderfully quaint and bewildering at the same time. Etched into the flanks of the mountain in a series of intricate twists and turns, it was lined with the most gorgeous canopy of thick, lush vegetation. It was literally like negotiating those towering mazes at theme parks. Long sections of the road were covered with green all around, sideways, above. Goodbye blue sky.

Dawson Falls in itself is utterly beautiful. Not among those that blatantly tries to dwarf you with their majesty or size, but instead are so pretty and so out of the way (we had to descend a series of steep steps that disappeared straight down from the road and into a tangle of bush, branches, rich, brown sludge, and heavy air), that you can’t help but be utterly taken by them.

When we finally got as close to Taranaki as we could get, it took us a good thirty minutes before Sticky Cloud condescended to move the slightest bit and flash us a glimpse of the mystic mountain top. Thirty minutes of staring fixedly at a single point, and then, whizzzz. It was a flash alright, but utterly, staggeringly worth every minute of standing guard in the cold. Maybe it’s my mountain fixation all over again, but for me, few things can stand compare with the slight of the earth reaching for the sky.

Christchurch

2007-12-25T23:18:00.000+08:00

‘Christmas in Christchurch’. Appropriately corny, but more importantly, convenient. Kray had to move on and fly away home, while John and I had our eyes longingly set on further northward escapades. The two days we spent here offered countless spires, parks, wide town squares, and hours of vacant strolling, with enough time to let crystallise the several thousand splendid images of the week past.

Along the way, an inland “Scenic Route” from Lake Tekapo took us into what closely resembled a ghost town – Mt. Somers. Starved and in dire need of wholesome nutrition, we stumbled into the only place that looked like it contained anything edible AND fulfilled the basic requirement of being… um… open. Amazingly enough, the tavern (clearly the only one in “town”) we munched at managed to dish out fare that few could fault. Even this herbivore chomped away happily at her serving of cheesy nachos and beans, making idle (mental) guesses at the number of drinks the local drunk at the bar had managed to down that day, still young at 2:00 p.m.

After the gluttony of landscapes and natural beauty that we’d dangerously started to take for granted, the unmistakably charming-European-city-esqueness of Christchurch delivered a completely refreshing experience. Contemplating the infamous backpackers’ “supermarket breakfast” (i.e. cold, soggy sandwich + vending-machine coffee) while taking in bustling views of the centrally located Cathedral Square, I couldn’t help but feel stupefied by the utterly undeserved good fortune that had me sitting there, in that moment, tired, sunburnt, and painfully happy. Heartbreak heaven.

Both Queen Victoria and Captain Cook feature prominently throughout the city, in the form of statues, memorials, gates, street names, ponds, gardens, parks, benches, little fish, buildings, restaurants, puddles of mud, local flower species. Honestly, I exaggerate only ever so slightly.

The one thing that was open in the city was the Botanic Gardens, and while the thought of 10,000 plus varieties of plants didn’t particularly drive me into raptures of ecstasy, a visit promised more gardens to stroll in, delicious hues to feast tired eyes on, and dewy grass to sprawl and roll around in. Few things can match up to such joyful, indulgent vegetation.

Pure serendipity saw us wander towards the local Arts Centre, which, although closed, as with everything in Christchurch over the holidays, boldly hinted at the volumes of talent and skill that lay within. Originally grounds that housed Canterbury College and University, the spread of gothic buildings and facades, accessorised by quirky modern art additions (a wire-framed “house”, seemingly suspended in mid-air) charmed us shamelessly.

The one thing to carefully avoid in Christchurch is anything that claims to be a “beach”. A close, confused examination of the Lonely Planet failed to reveal even the slightest mention of sand fairies and happy, bronzed surfers, a perplexing omission in a country that boasts of a coast within arm’s reach (ok, approximately a couple of hundred kilometres) of any town. It was only after we drove around, in a considerable number of circles, and towards a promising (on the map, that is) spit that we realised why. Bounding up a steep dune (and kicking shovelfuls of sand into each others’ faces in the process) we realised that a beach littered with seaweed and some odd, brown stuff (rotten seaweed, perhaps? Dog poo?) was probably best left unexamined.

Christmas eve saw the city abuzz with chirpy revellers hollering drunken seasons’ greetings to every passerby who spared a smile, the faithful devout, who flocked toward the sombrely tolling Cathedral bell like moths to a flame, the calmly lonely, sitting quietly on streetside benches, seeking to soak any excess holiday cheer that chanced their way. And people like us, curious and bright-eyed, with no agenda in mind, and no expectations to meet. Our tummies led the way, yet again, and we wandered into an amber-soaked Japanese joint, with stern, no-nonsense waiters, incongruent with the mellow, inviting interior. I’d never have imagined that my first taste of sake would be far, far from Mount Fuji’s home, but, as with every little upside down thing that’s happened this past year, it felt oddly appropriate.

Lake Tekapo

2007-12-24T19:18:00.000+08:00

Further northwards we did continue, and stretches of sinuous, empty roads that appeared ceaselessly long, provided the perfect backdrop for the winding down of our South Island explorations.

The word ‘turquoise’ is defined in several ways, some describing the mineral, yet others describing the colour. Yet, it’s hard to consider “a greenish blue or bluish green”, or “a light to brilliant bluish green”, or “a shade of blue tinged with green” being even a remotely acceptable description for this:

The hue, seen above in Lake Pukaki, is also shared by Lake Tekapo, our next destination. Besides trick photography and/or some serious Photoshopping, I wouldn’t have imagined a colour like that to belong anywhere in nature, but enough staring and rubbing our collective eyes, and some more staring (and gulping fatly, and I admit there was some serious gurgling too) forced us to consider otherwise. All this disbelief, mind you, after having already read the Lonely Planet’s explanation for this colour – but, but… it was so ridiculously, unimaginably, weirdly blue!

“The blazing blue turquoise colour of Lake Tekapo, a characteristic it shares with other regional bodies of water such as Lake Pukaki, is due to ‘rock flour’ (sediment) in the water. This so-called flour was created when the lake’s basin was gouged out by a stony-bottomed glacier moving across the land’s surface, with the rock-on-rock action grinding out fine particles that ended up being suspended in the glacial melt water. This sediment gives the water a milky quality and refracts the sunlight beaming down, hence the brilliant colour”
- Lonely Planet: New Zealand

Shades, relatives, and family friends of blue seemed to be the flavour of this quaint little town, complete with its tiny, picture-postcard church (apparently a favourite for nuptials) beside the lake, melon-collie (erm… I couldn’t resist) memorial, and meadows bursting with the most brilliantly violet and purple flower-like-things you’d ever see. I’ve been told since that those “flowers” are quite poisonous, even to the touch, but I’d forgive them still. As far as I’m concerned, purple and violet bits of vegetation can get away with murder. What’s that thing they say about “blue vitriol”… ?

The town had other delightful pluses – A YHA hostel with a lounge room having the most spectacular view of the lake, a hilltop observatory that afforded an unmatched 360° view, and a homely yet lively pizza diner.

While tottering around the hilltop, braving the blustery winds, we noticed that one of the lakes in the area wasn’t turquoise at all, just a regular, pretty blue. Going by the Lonely Planet’s rock-flour explanation, one would think that this lake, in very close proximity to Tekapo and Pukaki, would share their unusual brilliance. In the end, some things are best left unexplained. A little less logic is what keeps the magic in the world alive.

Aoraki/Mt. Cook

2007-12-23T23:36:00.000+08:00

While hurried initial plans may have overlooked Mt. Cook, we soon decided that the highest mountain in New Zealand more than merited at least a visit, if nothing more. We set off bleary-eyed, bidding farewell to “the hand”, and turned north once more. Driving along long, winding roads through hills that blocked all but the most resilient easy-listening AM radio channel (one we felt much gratitude for), we held our collective breaths silently, and waited to be dwarfed by majesty.

Before long, we turned a corner, and there she was, freshly awoken, bursting with radiance, and prettily arrogant.

We had to stop and stare several times before we finally made it to Mt. Cook Village, quite unable to digest the enormity of this blatant display of natural splendour. Our cameras toiled much.

The tent-shaped Mt. Cook is known (very spectacularly, I think) as ‘Aoraki’ by the Maoris, meaning “Cloud Piercer”, but was originally named in honour of the famous Captain James Cook, despite the fact that he never actually sighted the mountain during his travels. (Note: The Lonely Planet New Zealand guidebook has the most fascinating and well-written one-page extract about this controversial explorer, written by the Pulitzer-winning reporter and non-fiction author, Tony Horwitz. Wikipedia’s account is drier, but essentially says the same things). Nowhere close to Himalayan peaks in terms of altitude, this 3,764 metre-high mountain still very nearly convinces you that it belongs somewhere among the top 50 of the world’s highest peaks. It stands at… um… No. 476.

There’s something about climbing mountains that makes me go weak in the knees. Before, when I become utterly possessed with the most rabid, blind, ridiculous desire to push my body beyond anything it’s really capable of, during, when I’m cursing myself for underestimating the powers of exhaustion, and my lack of fitness in the foulest language I can muster while being completely out of breath. And, at the end of a climb, when the sheer magnitude of the experience, the unparalleled views, and the undiluted high, coupled with the aforementioned exhaustion crumple me into a ball of delicious ecstasy. It’s a strange addiction, not one that haunts me at frequent intervals, but every now and then, entirely unannounced, a sudden idea, or a longing glance at a peak out of reach is enough to ignite that manic gleam in my eye.

Mt. Cook “Village” cannot possibly pretend to be that. It comprises merely a couple of shiny, touristy hotels, another couple of uppity cafés, a Department of Conservation (DOC) office, and a ski- and climbing-equipment rental shop. We schlepped into the DOC office to find out what trails would take us as close to the mountain as time and our very average fitness would allow, and decided to first give a mild one-hour return trip to Kea Point a go.

Keas are apparently ugly New Zealand parrots, and the Tracks & Trails brochure we picked up at the DOC candidly admitted that we would most likely not see any along the way. What the walk did deliver, in the end, were miles of solitude, gentle, pebbly slopes, unimaginably crisp, fresh air, and, needless to say, superb views.

Our next mini-tramp was a walk along the Hooker Valley. Naturally, I smirked heaps when I chanced upon the name of this hapless valley. After Kray pointed out that “Hooker” was probably the name of someone terribly important, I chuckled loads. I would find out later that Joseph Dalton Hooker, was, in fact, an eminent botanist after whom the valley and its glacier were named. Heck, I’m still chuckling.

The name notwithstanding, this outing contained what would probably be a few of the most hilarious incidents of our trip. What started out as a bright, sunshiny day, quickly became capricious and moody, with gusts of squalls accompanied by stinging rain, immediately followed by sunny spells once again. Perpetually cold, I was swathed in my red-brown parka that served as a windbreaker, raincoat, and a warm jacket. Shivering John had his fleece jacket, and Kray, well, doesn’t shiver as much. Still, when the rain started to lash, the other two hurriedly extricated from their bags a couple of ponchos that they’d bought en route from Invercargill to Queenstown. Now, these ponchos, although ultimately highly effective in keeping out the rain, took lives of their own once they’d decided to team up with the screeching wind. For a considerable amount of time, all I saw were two figures wresting with blue and green flapping objects, markedly similar to sails of a ship. Flapaflapaflapaflapathud. Arrrghhhhh. More flapping, more struggling, loud curses, even louder peals of laughter from the strugglers and the audience. Fudfudfudfudfudthwump. Phew. Buttons forced shut, head in correct opening, arms flapping at sides, and the rain-armour now under control. I nearly died laughing.

Not only was this walk more fun, it was also much more startlingly beautiful. Gushing glacial meltwater, over which hung fragile, rickety bridges, swaying under the force of the wind left us speechless, as did the process of trying to cross these bridges without being blown away. A small memorial along the way, a hut shelter, and a stray sundial all served to charm us tremendously. As for our ultimate destination, it was only after an hour of walking that we realised that we didn’t really know when or where to stop. Nearly airborne at that time in lieu of the ridiculously strong winds, we were nearly at the terminal face of the Hooker glacier, goggling at the large blocks of hewn ice bobbing about in a river of meltwater. We were delighted enough to keep going, but a timely glance at our watches and at an ominously large, dark cloud slowly making its way toward us suggested that we take to our heels and flee. Good sense prevailed, and we did, but not before casting more than one longing glance at the kingdoms of ice all around. The ice axe will have to bide its time for now.

Postscript: Something I stumbled upon several days after leaving New Zealand – I reproduce part of page 584 of the Lonely Planet.

Drifting along

2007-12-23T20:41:00.000+08:00

It was on our way to Mt. Cook Village, a little over two hundred kilometres north of Wanaka, that we clocked our thousandth kilometre of the trip. A thousand kilometres in five days – a mere drop in the ocean. Deceptively, even the smallest country will wear the soles out off your shoes. As a dear friend recently reminded me, from over several multiples of a thousand kilometres, sometimes, the world is too big. Slaves to wanderlust grin giddily at this maxim, while loved ones weep silently, and gloomily bless their stars that there’s only so far you can go in a round world.