Trip Update #2

My how fast a week travels by... it's already that time to send out another update. Tuesday, May 21st Drove down from Nelson, NZ to Franz Joseph. This pretty much took all day. During this time, we had a wide selection of cassettes to bide our time with - Top Hits of 1999, multiple multi-packs of 80's hits (gotta love 'em), and the Oldies Rap cassettes. The coastline looks absolutely fantastic. For those of you who have had the pleasure of driving on the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway in California), it was like that but with higher mountains next to the ocean. We stopped off multiple times for pictures. There were great viewpoints and lookouts all over the place. Rayman kept on muttering something about 2 minutes to Wapner and buying his underpants at K-Mart. When I informed him that K-Mart had officially changed its name to Big K, he went ballistic, so I had to take him out (or take him oot, for you Canadiens). Wednesday, May 22nd Did a full day hike up the famous Franz Joseph glacier. I was very skeptical at first, since my family and I did the glacier hike outside of Calgary last year and it was equivalent to walking on a frozen swimming pool (minus the falling-in part). But, things were looking up when they gave us each a pair of hiking boots and their supposedly patented Ice Talonz, which are spikes that you attach to said hiking boots, along with ice axes. So we went in a small group of 9 with one guide up the glacier. A lot of time was spent waiting around for the guide to carve out steps for us to walk on the ice with - it was during these times that we were able to humor ourselves with our own ice axes. Thankfully, no one was hurt. We had to squeeze through very tight crevasses and caverns made in the glacier by the melting water - it was then that I was thankful that I paid some extra cash for the waterproof pants (no, not for that reason!). Rayman unfortunately misjudged a hole filled with water to be slush on ice early on in the trip and suffered from a numb big toe until the next day. All in all, the hike was absolutely spectacular. Just hanging around such a huge block of ice all day was pretty cool. Thursday, May 23rd Another full day of driving. This time we were headed south to the spectacular Fiordlands. We had some interesting discoveries that you may want to be aware of: - The top speed of a Toyota Corolla is 164 kmh. Acceleration of a Toyota Corolla going uphill with base speed > 75 kmh is equal to or less than 0. Net (could we call this a Corollary?): the Toyota Corolla sucks (sorry Anand). But it does corner well. - God never intended for Tom Jones to do a cover of "Burning Down the House" by the Talking Heads. Someone please inform him. - The world would be a much better place without that damn "Dancing Queen" song. While you're at it, throw in that accursed "I Will Survive" song. Stopped at Wanaka for Puzzleworld, complete with a wooden maze with 1.5 km of passageways. For those of you who know me well - you can imagine that this place was like I died and went to heaven. Next, we stopped in Queenstown briefly to unload some weight. My wallet was weighing me down, so we booked a cruise through the Doubtful Sound, a kayak trip in the Milford Sound, and a rafting trip down the Shotover River (Class 4-5+). Ouch. Continued on to Te Anau, which is a lot closer to the aforementioned Sounds trips. Friday, May 24th Doubtful Sound is not really a sound at all; it's a fiord. However, when folks finally realized this, it was too late to change the name. FYI, a fiord is carved out by a glacier and is U shaped. A sound is carved out by a river and is V shaped. So, fiords tend to be much much steeper. The entire southeastern corner of the South Island of New Zealand is full of fiords, hence the designation as Fiordland National Park. Since we're talking very large and steep mountains here, you can imagine that it's pretty inhospitable. As such, only a few of the fiords are even accessible by personal vehicles. For Doubtful Sound, we had to take a boat across a lake, an hour bus ride through a very mountainous area (the bus was specially outfitted with super duper brakes), and then another boat through the Doubtful Sound. Absolutely beautiful - words simply cannot describe. The whole thing defied imagination, and looked like some filmmaker conjured it up. We saw some dolphins swimming around and playing. For some reason, I couldn't get them to tell me when they were going to do something cool for a photo. Threatening to turn them into a can of Starkist didn't help. After an exhilarating day, we returned to Te Anau for some very very bad Chinese food. It even said so on the menu. Te Anau is also home of the worst Internet connections in the world. My first computer was actually pretty fast - but the mouse didn't work. You can only get so far by pressing "Tab" to navigate around the Internet. Try it. The second computer we tried actually worked, but the connection was slower than a drunken snail. We left completely frustrated. But we did manage to change the screensaver to reflect what we thought of the situation. That'll show them. Saturday, May 25th Woke up early to go to the Milford Sound for kayaking. This one actually is accessible by car, but only because they intended to make the sound a international shipping harbor and drilled 1.2 km through a mountain for an access way. They changed their minds after the drilling was complete, and thank goodness for that. It would have been a crying shame to ruin something so beautiful. These mountains were steeper than the ones we saw the day before. Rayman kept asking me to take pictures and capture it, but it was simply impossible to get the whole thing without losing the perspective of the water to even tell what you were looking at. I guess a postcard shot from the air will have to do... The kayaking was fun, but we often found ourselves slacking on the paddling to just stare in awe and attempt to soak it all in. Stunning. Imagine a wall right in front of you. Now, imagine that this wall is 1400m high. There was one fellow who was climbing one of the ridges to get to a peak. For lunch, he had one leg dangling on one side of the mountain and the other leg on the other side - the mountains get THAT narrow. After getting back to Te Anau, we cruised up to Queenstown to take part in some raging Saturday night nightlife for once. Problem was that we couldn't find any (this is very odd for Queenstown)! It appears that we have hit the low of low season. Which is great since nothing is crowded and we're able to book everything last minute without issue. But, we also have a lack of places to eat beyond 7pm in some towns. You take the good, you take the bad, you take it all and there you have... Sunday, May 26th Still in Queenstown today. We were scheduled to raft the Shotover River today, but the river level is too low so they switched rivers on us. After finding out that we would get only four Class 3 rapids in, I got my money back. Rayman put it to me eloquently - "You're spoiled". So, we took the advice of others and booked the Shotover Jet, which is a jet boat powered by a 400hp V8 engine that can go up to 70 kmh on only 3.5 inches of water. Our first gut reaction to this was "whoopty frickin doo", but we had heard too many good things about it. Well worth the money. We decided that the driver was high on something, because he kept on hurtling us towards the rock walls of the canyon and narrowly missing it by inches, much to the delight of the passengers. The water level was so low that on many occasions we could feel bumps from the rocks below hitting the bottom of the boat. But the most memorable thing was getting splashed with the icy cold water doing 360 degree turns, while getting pelted in the face with mini ice balls of hail. That is pure fun. My eyebrows froze off and I had to get them reattached. Rayman is suffering from pockmarks on his forehead from the hail. Well, that concludes Week 2 of our lampoon vacation. We leave NZ on Friday, after which my stories will probably be toned down a bit (hopefully my Visa bill will follow this route as well). Till next week! Through this all, there has been one glaring and repeated observation. We don't do enough of this type of thing as a nation. I have met countless of people who quit their job and are taking a year to travel (or usually until the money runs out). They will figure out what to do next when they get home - and this is NOT the exception. Consensus here is that me taking only 3.5 month to see NZ, Australia, and Southeast Asia is absolutely ludicrous. This would be a 9-month trip for most of the rest of the world. -Paraag Tidbits: 1. NZ has an interesting way to conserve water. All of the toilets have a half flush option for #1 versus #2. 2. NZ knows how to make a good cup of hot chocolate. They actually use hot milk (gasp!) instead of hot water. Someone please tell the Swiss Miss. 3. More McDonald's info - there's a proliference of McCafe's here which is like a cheaper Starbucks. They are actually doing quite well too. 4. NZ and Australia both feel more loyal to the U.S. than to Britain, despite the British flag being part of their own flag. There is some history behind this when the U.S. came to their aid years ago and helped out before Britain did - I forget the specifics. 5. After 4 hours of watching rugby games, I still can't figure out what's going on.

Trip Update #1

Hi everyone, Welcome to the first installment of the Where in the World is Paraag update. To refresh your memory, I'm on a 3.5 month trip through New Zealand, Australia, and most of Southeast Asia just for the sheer heck of it. That, and because I enjoy making my poor mother worry to death about her "only son named Paraag". A friend of mine from college, Rayman, is with me for the first 10 weeks, and the remainder will be on my own. Enough of that boring stuff... to the juicy details! Wednesday, May 15th Landed in Auckland, New Zealand. Rayman and I took up residence with the local YHA (Youth Hostelling Association ??) - essentially a room crammed with bunk beds with one bathroom per floor. It's cheap, which is the point. We used this day to get our bearings straight (as opposed to the Bering Strait - bad pun, sorry), and figure out how to tackle this weird island country we know as New Zealand. Given our relative lack of time to see the sights (the prevailing local theory is that 12 days is not enough to see anything), we decided to rent a car beginning the next morning to drive around the two islands. The rest of the day, we walked around downtown Auckland. Went up the Sky Tower, which is Auckland's version of Seattle's Space Needle or Toronto's CN Tower. As with all such towers, spectacular views were seen. Thursday, May 16th Picked up the rental car and immediately scoured the city for a music store that sold cassette tapes upon the realization that New Zealand is not proliferous in the radio station arena. After purchasing some oldies rap cassettes, we were on our way. Our first task was to figure out which side of the street we were supposed to be driving on. Add the fact that I kept on turning the windshield wipers on whenever I wanted to a signal a turn - you can imagine the hilarity that ensued. We headed to a place called Waitomo Caves, where we donned on some holey wetsuits and went Black-Water Rafting in the caves. Personally, the name lured me in. Little did I know that I paid to go tubing in the dark in a cave. Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun. The cave was full of glo-worms, which are attached the ceiling and glow a bright light blue color (who'd a thunk?) in the dark. Pretty neato. Left and drove to Rotorua (we called it Roto-rooter) from there. The country-side is very hilly. Made me wonder what a pain in the neck it must be to mow. Then I realized that New Zealand employs millions of natural mowers - they're called sheep. Maybe I should get some sheep for the backyard - Marcus and Scott, I expect a full report on the viability of having sheep in the backyard my trip's end... Friday, May 17th Went Zorbing in the morning. For those of you not in the know, Zorbing is a fantastic little ride where you jump into a very large spherical plastic ball along with a couple bucket loads of warm water, and they roll you down the hill. Don't worry - I have pictures. Also took a gondola ride to the top of a mountain to check out Lake Rotorua and environs (isn't that a great word?). We luged down the hill a few times - probably the most fun I've had in a while. The ride was far from being idiot-proofed like everything is in the US, so we felt like Mario Andretti. Actually, driving around New Zealand has been similar. Stayed the night in National Park. Saturday, May 18th Full day hike through Tongariro National Park. The Tongariro Crossing is billed as the "finest one day hike in NZ", so we just simply had to do it. Well worth it. The majority of the hike was up and around volcanoes (not active), so the earth was very rocky and sandy. Though very strenuous, I wasn't hurting much at all afterwards. Apparently, my investment in a good pair of hiking shoes paid off (thanks roomies). Drove through the night to get to Wellington (capital city on the southern tip of the North Island). Saw Star Wars - Episode II. Awesome. Theatres here have assigned seating - kinda neat. Must be a British thing (England and India are the same if memory serves). Sunday, May 19th Took the ferry from Wellington to Picton in the South Island. South Island is clearly more magnificent. The mountains are simply huge. Actually reminded me a bit of the Appalachians in West Virginia, though only slightly more dramatic... Got another rental car (another white Toyota Corolla), and perfected my driving skills on very windy roads. Rayman complained of headaches the rest of the evening. I, on the other hand, wish the sun would stay out longer so I could drive more. If only they rented convertibles... Staying in Nelson. Monday, May 20th (today) Did a full-day kayaking trip around part of the coastline of Abel Tasman National park. Stunning beaches and mountains. Gorgeous landscapes is the repeating theme here. Back in Nelson tonight, preparing for a long long drive down to Franz Joseph tomorrow. Franz Joseph is on the western coast of South Island and is home of a very famous massive glacier. May do a hike. May do a plane trip. We'll figure it out when we get there. So far, it has been very easy to book stuff since it is low season here. It's also freakin' cold, which explains why it's low season. Oh well. Rayman and I will probably extend our trip in New Zealand by 4-5 days (at the expense of Australia). Too much to do and not enough time. Andrea (my boss), can I take a 6 month leave of absence? Look for updates roughly weekly from me. Let me know if you want to be removed or if I need to add someone. And please write me if you can. I know this is not a personal e-mail, but it would be nice to receive e-mails from folks letting me know what's going on. I'll find the time to respond, don't worry. The nights are pretty long here, and so far, we're not really wasting time or money on nightlife. I already do that at home, so why do it here? -Paraag Words for the wise: 1. It is worth $1 to rent a comforter to stay warm in the hostel bed, regardless of your opinion on whether or not you should have to rent something like that. 2. Always check the parking brake before calling AA (NZ version of AAA) to help you with your supposed "braking" issues. 3. No matter how hard you try, there simply is no way to escape eating breakfast at McDonald's. Nothing else is open early enough.