Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Aotearoa

Land of the Long White Cloud. The lost islands. The last lonely flotilla of Gondwanan shrapnel with its mostly feathered menagerie of stowaways. Accidental time capsule. New Zealand.


To get here, the only requirement is that you suspend your motor skills for a mere 12 hours in the belly of an aluminum whale that has been made to fall across the sky by some means that produces nothing but 80 dB of white noise and a curious sensation of numbness in the chest. Not much has changed since the days of wood and cloth and months of rope-pulling discovery.

Still barely in Auckland, the prettiest thing I've seen here so far is the money. But that doesn't count Cherie Galloway's toddling granddaughters. I'll use my time in the city to get past the Phenomenon of the Missing Tuesday, as I've come to call it. The hospitality of the Galloways is already helping. A car purchase is in order, and soon I'll discover the route to the South. That is, if I can get the ferry booked in the right direction. Currently, I and my potential Huyndai are on the manifest for Sunday, 2 AM. Wellington to Picton, mind you, and not the other way 'round. It's the middle of Wednesday here, for you poor yesterday folks, so not long from now I'll be on my merry wrong-sided drive.


Early winter in Auckland brings t-shirt weather. I hope Dunedin will live up to my hefty packing job. I managed to keep it to a 45 litre backpack and a travel guitar, but it's quite dense with mysteriously insulating hydrocarbon derivatives. I'm sure a glacier or two will put them to good use. For now, recouperation and plotting.

Photos to come.

P.S.: Jerry Falwell has finally died. Anyone for an ironic Hallelujah?




No comments:

Post a Comment