Mental Chains

Howard Jones, eh?  Remember him?

Back home and a bit adrift.  Kiwi sunshine now behind me, and before me, well, who knows?  Back now in this odd bit of Europe where we drive on the left, use a local currency not a Euro, don't shut for lunch, and open on Sundays.  New Zealand seems European in a lot of ways.  Listening to recorded guides, and reading information, history, looking in museums it's kind of fascinating the way the people arrived in the Island.  Everyone and everything seems so new.  The Maoris weren't significantly earlier than the Europeans, although, to my mind, established enough that it's really odd that the names they gave places, and landscape features have largely been replaced by the good old arrogant empire building brits.  Dutch explorers were there at a similar time but seem to have taken a much more look, learn then get in and claim kind of approach.  It's an odd thing the remains of an Empire / Commonwealth.  Odd in particular because you get the feeling that New Zealanders see themselves in some way as European, and yet here I am, back in the UK listening to radio debate about Polish immigrants, and somehow it seems we have yet to embrace being European.  I wonder if I have?

Odd feeling of being slightly disconnected, which I associate with being in a zombie like not sure if I'm tired or not kind of a state, as well as that weird place where I have no job, no plans, a good chunk of emptiness (not in a bad way) stretching out.  And indolently, I seem not, for today, to care.  

Must part

Fare thee well for I must leave thee, do not let the parting grieve ye but remember that the best of friends must part.

And once again it is time to say goodbye. As ever I find myself drawn to the sea, pulled into a trance by the regular movement of the waves, with that feeling of sadness and finality coming over me.

New Zealand has taken its toll on my belongings too, so I say a final farewell to:

1. My camera, broken beyond repair in a strong gust of wind nosedive to the floor in Nelson. The replacement really is much better …
2. My walking poles left in a mountaineering instructor's car
3. My Aldi children's ski gloves. A gloved high five goes out to these which did a superb job of getting me through a five day mountaineering skills course. They did well, and by the end of the week they were dead. There may even be a photo of them in last salute pose on the sunny balcony of a hostel …
4. Micro Towel. Hated this, dumped it. Something smaller than the size of a tea towel has done a blinding job ever since.
5. Sunglasses. Bit the dust in a belly flop onto paddle board incident. Replaced with polarised better bigger lensed ones. Farewell sunnies.
6. North Face T-shirt. I loved you. You were a fabulous purple and you understood a woman's shape. You were polyester and you dried overnight. Unfortunately you held onto the Rotorua sulphurous mud smell for pretty much ever, and the flattering vertical white stripes down the sides were embarrassingly unwhite and unlikely to ever be so again.
7. Karrimor walking sandals. Your work was done. You were ancient and you were not designed to ride a bike. Mesh walking shoes were indeed the way forward. Your sacrifice has not gone unnoticed or unthanked.
8. Gelert stove. Ah, sadly you let me down. I mended you on arrival and you broke again, the teeny screw being lost forever. Today we say goodbye.
9. My heart. New Zealand has taken a part of this and there is unfinished business. I need to return. There are mountains and crossings with my name most firmly on them. Alas, not yet …
10. Half of my lower right back molar. I haven't mentioned this but yes, it's missed, and it's been slightly irksome for some weeks now. NHS will be consulted …

And I take with me:

1. The best ever trainers / walking shoes / sandal things I have ever had. I hope it wasn't just a holiday romance between me and the Kathmandu mesh topped, vibram soled darlings.
2. The tiniest souvenirs known to man. Badges and bottle openers for the main part. Penguins and Kiwis all the way.
3. The micro fibre map of the Redlands mountain bike trails, doubling up as the best camping towel I have known.
4. Tupperware. In memory of the hostel kitchen argument I witnessed, I have my own tupperware and nobody shall ever argue with me about it. It's been a boon for leftover food against the ravages of ants, wasps, inquisitive birds, possums … … … and I can see it having usefulness similarly for the future so it's coming home too.
5. A summer dress and sandals
6. Memories, thick and fast. Abel Tasman five day trail, cycling round Wellington's shoreline, cycling up One Tree Hill in Auckland, riding up to the lake near Rotorua on Christmas day for a swim, riding the Fixie in Nelson, bus journeys, people, hostels …
7. Skills. The Alpine Butterfly knot, knowing how to rope up for glacier travel, knowing how to get back to the bottom from a sport climb, snow anchors, a zillion different ways of cooking 2 minute noodles.
8. Writing and thinking joined up together. As time progressed, I found I was really enjoying bringing together thoughts on wildlife, culture, and environment and putting them into writing. I remembered I had a brain and almost used that 20+ year old degree from time to time. It was good.
9. Perspective. I've persevered with the mindfulness book learning, and if this comes home with me, I think it bodes well for a more balanced kind of future. I won't say a happier one because I am happy, it's what I do, I do it well.
10. Photographs. What am I going to do with all these photographs?

Legal Alien

Today I have visited a Kiwi wildlife centre. In the sense of the bird, not the nickname for the New Zealanders. Apart from seeing the funny and surprisingly large nocturnal and flightless icons of New Zealand, it was educational.

You can understand why the NZ customs guys are so vigilant about introduction of new species when you look at the issues the department of conservation is up against with the legal aliens who reside in the country. Many of these were deliberate introductions. For example, the deer were introduced for game hunting. Unfortunately much as happens in the UK, without natural predators and with abundance of food, the populations increase rapidly and so of course does their rate of consumption of the available vegetation resulting in depletion of habitat. So now the deer here are culled, or more bizarrely to my UK eyes, they are farmed, in that they are held in fields by the road side just as you would expect to see cows, fields of animals peacefully grazing, domesticated. Except when they are big enough, the stags in particular are sent off into the wild so that men with guns can come and shoot them for “sport”. I gag a little as I use the word sport in this context. I'm not sure whether it's really any different to sending cows to abattoirs for meat. Except of course we don't tend to have cows heads stuffed and mounted over our fireplaces. Which is as big or small a thing as you make it.

Stoats were introduced deliberately too, in an attempt to control the rabbit population which was probably doing for young sprouting vegetation what the deer were doing for anything out of the rabbit's reach. Unfortunately the poor old kiwi is a ground dwelling bird not accustomed to such predators, and the rarer ones were becoming rarer still. The kiwi wildlife people now tag the male kiwis, and by transponder can tell what the birdies are up to. Heart rate etc. demonstrates when the birds are sitting eggs. And it's the bloke bird who gets to do the egg sitting. Division of labour, eh? But now the wildlife folk go in and remove eggs, taking them back to the centre to hatch. It seems a bit harsh until you hear the stats which are 95% of eggs left in the wild do not result in viable adults, and in incubation 95% do result in viable adults, all of whom are released back to their original area. The kiwis lay minimal numbers of eggs, and they are huge, so it's a massive investment for the birds to create their one or two young per year. Interesting stuff, eh? Efforts are also under way to reduce the stoat population so it is a two pronged approach.

I kind of like that the kiwis near Franz Josef were only defined as a separate species as recently as 1994. Goes to show we don't know everything about the planet doesn't it. I'm mildly curious as to how this was established. After all, definition of separate species, unless something has changed since these things were inserted into my brain, was about production of viable offspring. Presumably this means it has been established that the local kiwi bird cannot reproduce with those found elsewhere. Did someone take time to try to bring them together, I wonder or is this work done today by geneticists in a lab? Or is it done with syringes, female ova and male whatevers brought together. I rather hope it's a clinical genetic exercise these days. Don't know why. I love the example of horses and donkeys producing the sterile mule for some reason. Sticks in my memory as a clear definition.

Singing I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien ...

Rain forest

I climbed up a misty mountain through rain forest vegetation today. It brought back in amazing technicolour, and scent and sound the classes I took many many years ago. Walking on a man made path through incredibly dense vegetation you wonder at both the methods used to create the pathway, but also the almost moral decisions which would have to be taken to clinically hack through swathes of vegetation to create a sanitised pathway for us, the public to access this amazing environment. What plants would have been in the way, what decisions would have been taken as to the route, was it based purely on gradient, angle, need to connect A to B or would the creators have looked at the plants and decided which could stay and which could go?

Nonetheless, the forest is nothing like I've ever seen before. You try to peer in through the trees at what's behind, but it's just a tangle of plant life, rich, green, luxurious plant life which twists and turns. Plants grow on plants; every tree fern sustains the life of a myriad mosses and other ferns at every ring of their trunks. Vines crawl between plants, older wood rests on newer trees and everything is pushing everything else for light and growth and height.

It's just like in the books. As you hear it start to rain, and reach for your hood, you realise you are not getting wet, and remember about the canopy structure, the trees which reach the highest, the ones underneath them competing for the valuable and abundant resources of light and water, and the layer below doing the same. So much so that the rain water hardly reaches the forest floor. I take my hood down, realising I'm not getting wet.

Yet later on, by chance, I find my hand flat against my stomach, investigating the weird sensation of flapping material. I am wearing a lightweight, snug fitting base layer merino (bright pink for those interested), and yet somehow it feels like it's flapping. My hand explores, and I realise it is properly wringing wet. You could squeeze this out. The weight of the water content has weighted the material so it's slightly hanging in places. Funnily, my torso doesn't feel cold, clammy or wet. I hadn't even noticed. I explore further. The entire T-shirt is sodden, as is my hair. I have never experienced humidity like this. Truly amazing.

Like the rest of the world, so it seems to me (and I have not researched this), New Zealand came to the conclusion we need to protect and preserve our natural habitats post Victorian era.  I feel New Zealand took a pretty robust line on things, not exactly hard line but certainly no negotiation.  Along the way they didn't shirk at putting entire villages out of work as the main saw mill businesses could no longer carry out their trade as their only source of wood became illegal to harvest.  Interesting but somehow necessary.  These days it seems to be a country entirely bought in to the importance of holding onto this version of their past, whether it's related to biodiversity, research or simply people's enjoyment and appreciation.  Can't make up my mind here whether this version of wrapping in cotton wool is entirely great, but it certainly stops the place being covered in houses which take over the thing which brought people here in the first place.

Franz Josef

FJ is a funny little town. Someone whose research skills I trust (google / wiki) advises me the town's total population is 330 people. And the bar man, who I have no reason to distrust advises me it's nearer 350 these days but 700 during the peak tourist seasons. On my travels other people have talked to me about the place, and told me there's Nothing To Do if it rains or other than the glacier. As it's such a small town, somehow with growth not aligned to the big noise which is made about it at tourist info places across the country, they do indeed appear to be right. If of course your standards of entertainment are high. Mine aren't. There are at least four places selling coffee, I reckon three selling beer, two selling T-shirts and post cards, a small but perfectly formed supermarket, and a Kiwi wildlife centre. There's also lots of ways of leaving town, such as helicopters or minibuses towing kayaks. But somehow, yes, it does remind me a little of Bannister Green where my Nan used to live in Essex. Except BG had clear industry. Fields and fields of it, and my sister's nose and eyes ran with regularity as the pollen count soared during school holidays.

But what would Franz Josef be without the Glacier, we ask? And it is a relevant question because the glacier is retreating faster than its recorded history tells us has happened before. It's diminished visibly to the eyes of those who live here in their memory span. I've met people out walking (sorry tramping) today who have been here twenty years ago and remembered seeing the glacier at a distance in the areas we now walk along. Opinion seems to converge on the view that it will be gone in twenty years time. The neighbouring one at Fox Glacier perhaps in 10 – 15 years. Will people take the time to come to this town then, I wonder?

So, Glacial retreat, I am reliably informed is something which over history happens. It's part of a cycle, it ebbs and it flows. Because it's receding now doesn't mean it won't return. Although not in my lifetime, perhaps it would be generations or maybe not at all. The point is, that this isn't a signal of panic and global warning and a time to berate ourselves for our misdoings over generations of man creating his own habitat at the cost of another. It may be meaningful, it may not, and we simply don't know.

I do confess, however, when I saw Franz Joseph today in the prescribed walkers fashion, I was sad to see what is clearly a diminished object. I thought hard about this word and wondered if I was disappointed or if indeed sad was the appropriate term. Settled on sad. It's clearly a shadow of its former self. There's a sense of loss when some of nature's great landmarks are lost, and when somehow the most challenging environments move towards benign, that sanitised version of adventure we're so accustomed to now.

It was also sad to see how it no longer glistens, glows, no long smooth slopes. It's cracked, pock marked, scarred, areas are slipping and sliding in the melt. And maybe I am disappointed too, for me, to not have seen it in its glory, to not have experienced it in its youth. Although, I'm led to believe its heyday was 1790 and even I'm not that old. It's an odd wistful thinking thing when we look back to the past and believe it better than the present and one hell of a lot better than the future. Sometimes find myself looking at the people I know and have known and regret not having had the chance to meet them at their most youthful, vibrant and optimistic, but history cannot be changed, neither what mankind as a whole have done, nor indeed, the path I have travelled.

Miracle Mile

It's still rock and roll to me.

Today, after five days of physical hard graft which has left my body singing, humming and growling like a howling stratocaster (at this point feel free to put on Meat Loaf's Wasted youth lyrics to supplement the Billy Joel song), I have rested.

I think I'm getting better at rest.  Alcohol assisted rest, at any rate.  I woke up thinking bike hire.  But the hostel kitchen is upstairs and even though I kind of know I could have, I felt slightly sorry for my body which seemed to be trying to distance itself from my actions.  So I chilled.

I wandered down to the Queenstown waterfront via a number of cheap tacky souvenir shops (the guys at home have some treats coming their way), where I had long black and dark chocolate with lavender at the local chocolate experts cafe (patagonia).  Then bimbled into the botanic gardens, checking out frisbee golf as I went.  Strolled onto a round the lake cruise of 90 minutes where much chat with Americans and New Zealanders went on in a most mellow fashion.  Then it was back to land for lunch and more coffee.  More strolling, more souvenir hunting (those lucky folk at home), followed by a 3pm stop at a waterside bar for a glass of chardonnay.  Drank this slowly and quietly whilst idly looking at the Remarkables mountain range the other side of the lake and feeling that sense of wonder at the sheer size and impermeability of them, against the fact that only three days ago I had climbed Single cone in the snow.   Yet here I was, shorts and T-shirt, in a very melliow swelter in the sun.  Then of course it was time for ice cream ...

I have grown to love Queenie too.  Once you get beyond the shops it's all lake and mountains.  What is not to like there?  I  have been educated too.  The place was founded in European terms by a guy over from Haverford West (I can never remember if that's one word or two).  It's only industry (only, get that?!) is tourism so it's no wonder it's so geared up to it.  It manages a good turnover both winter and summer with many many adventures on offer.  No, you really couldn't get bored ever if adrenaline or shopping or meandering is  your thing.  I couldn't live here like I could in Kaikoura  but hey, it's beautiful nonetheless.

New Zealand has broken my camera and my sunglasses but as yet, it hasn't broken my spirit or my heart.  Loving it.

Body Aches

... and so begins another weary dayyyyyy, and so begins another weary day!

Oh my word, my poor old body, what on the earth was I thinking?  Most bits ache, but in a really really good, we've done a lot of work kind of a way.  Really good because a lot has been done, and I've not just survived it but actually thrived on it.  Feeling kind of fit and healthy and strong and fatigued in a really good way.  The kind of way that means I can devote tomorrow to swimming in the lake, eating ice cream, drinking coffee and going in search of cake.  It'll be productive, mark my words.

Over the past five days I have done a Lot of learning. 

I have brushed up on abseiling, prussiking, anchoring systems (with an emphasis on alpine not rock climbing techniques).

I have learned short roping, long roping, simultaneous movement over rock (running belay), using landscape features to enhance safety. I have learned self arrest with the ice axe, I have learned how to set up snow anchors with snow stake, axe, in soft or hard snow.  I have learned how to escape from a belay system without just cutting the rope and letting my partner drop to the ground.  There has been simulated crevasse rescue.  I have learned the rudiments of avalanche risk, degree of slope angles, weather conditions, type of snow, bond between old and new snow.  I have learned about sport climbing and about via ferrata.  There have been knots.  There has been navigation.  I have led, I have followed.  I have panted like a dog and crawled on my hands and knees.  It has been good.