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.