Home Base

The road has brought me back to Michigan once more, which means that it's time for a relax-and-reboot transition. I hope you'll stick with me as I soak up the last of my memories and prepare myself for the next leap forward. For now Mission Moving On is still a work in progress.

There and back again

With less than a week now to go before our flight back to the States, I'm starting to get asked: how does it feel to be leaving New Zealand? And let me tell you, no one is more interested in finding an answer to that question than I am. There are a lot of thoughts and feelings flying around right now, and not a lot of them are very articulate.

But here's the best analogy I've come up with so far: it feels like you're nearing the end of a truly delicious dessert. And even though you know you're not really hungry anymore, and so it's really the right time to run out, you still feel a little anxious about being finally, irrevocably out of mouthfuls. Because it's so incredibly scrumptious, and because you don't know when you'll get a chance to have it again, and so part of you still wants the dessert to go on forever. Or at least, if you have to be done eating it, you wish you could keep tasting it whenever you wanted to. You feel nervous that the memory of the taste just isn't going to be enough. And yet at the same time you know that in a while, after the "where did my pudding go?" sadness wears off a little, you'll be glad that you didn't overeat. You'll know that your portion was that "just right" amount that leads to maximum appreciation of your dessert experience.

So here we are, taking our last bites of New Zealand, trying to enjoy every one. And watching New Zealand like you watch loved ones, when you know you're going to be apart, and you want to memorize every little detail about them to keep with you while they're away. Here's some impressions of what our last road trip to the Coromandel had to offer.

Will Work for Beer

Tommy and I were quite keen to have one last WWOOFing experience before leaving New Zealand, so we'd been keeping our eye on the WWOOF "hotlist," which features last-minute requests for workers. And when we saw the listing for Mike's Organic Brewery, just outside beautiful Mount Taranaki, we knew we had found our place...

Good Beer

Good Views

Great People

WWOOFing is one of those exciting opportunities to work for something other than money. Not that the cash overfloweth at this stage of the trip, but our time is even shorter. And it seems to cut out the middle man somehow: instead of menial labor in exchange for petty cash that probably would have gone toward pasta and beer anyway, now we can go straight to the source. We can clean, rake, paint, and bottle and seconds later have a cold lager in our hands, great new friends all around, and the afternoon off to explore. It makes the work itself seem so much more intimately connected to all that goodness.

Neverland and camp sites at the end of the rainbow

There's more than a little magic in New Zealand, and sometimes you know for sure that it's gotten inside you. This is our cliff, at the northmost tip of New Zealand, where we napped and made up fairy tales.


And here's our campsite at the end of the rainbow. I know...it's a little gratuitous.


If there's one thing I really hope I can hang onto from this experience, it's the sensation of moving through mythic space. We weave ourselves into new stories every day, whether we write, speak, sing, or walk them, and here I know that being a storyteller is sort of like being a magician. Choose your own adventure. As Captain Planet would say, the power is yours.

Car meets curb and we meet friends

Once upon a time, Tommy and Lauren set out in their friend Kev's car to visit Northland. Several hours into the drive, that car met a curb, and jumped right over it in excitement. Which, as Lauren and Tommy now know, is not good for either tie rods or drive shafts. Things seemed likely to get a bit pathetic. But who should happen along at that moment but an ex-pat American couple with a swanky, Victorian-style B&B overlooking the sea. "Come stay with us," they said, "and we'll give you food and a room you could never in your life hope to afford in exchange for painting walls in our new house." And so Lauren and Tommy got to experience the flashest, most unexpected WWOOF stay imaginable while their car got a whole new set of parts.

There's another way to tell that story, which would involve some supernatural narrative structuring and the drawing of some divine-type conclusions. Our hosts put forward the idea that the whole ordeal was possibly "meant to be." And I can't deny that there is something that feels extra-coincidental about it all: the timing of it, our increased ability to accept and let go at this stage in the trip, our hosts' incredible generosity. But I also feel a sort of postcolonial, postmodern inhibition about implying that we were somehow singled out by the universe for special treatment. I feel nervous about making a religion out of being fortunate, overextrapolating from being incredibly lucky. In equal measure I desire and fear to construct universal principles from the experience of being taken care of. Is it possible to talk about blessings without talking about their opposite? Not curses, necessarily, but even the absence of good and comfort and care? Why me, yes, and also why not someone else?

And so, since that particular question seems unlikely to resolve itself anytime soon, having kept many quicker and wiser minds awake for centuries already, for now I'll stick with the more straightforward story and allow you to come to your own conclusions. We had an accident that could have been much worse. We were taken in by a lovely family and got to stay in this house...

in this room...

with this view...

and we were filled with gratitude and wonder.

Fakatonga

One of the motivating factors for embarking on my New Zealand adventure this year was the Peace Corps placement of my friend Alicia in the tiny Pacific Island chain of Tonga. Only three hours from New Zealand, but isolated and tourist-free enough that I probably wouldn't have ever heard of it, much less visited, if not for Alicia. We had talked about crossing paths in the Pacific for at least a year, and then a few weeks ago I found a magically cheap flight and booked myself a ten-day holiday from my holiday.

The trip was incredibly rich and packed with new impressions and thoughts. I spent time with Peace Corps volunteers, crazy expats, Tongan families, as well as beautiful beaches and palm trees. Because Tonga receives few tourists, and because I was blessed by a friend who's now pretty much fluent in Tongan, I got to see a very varied slice of Pacific Island life and get some insight into the Peace Corps experience. I'll try to show you a bit of it via a (perhaps overly long) photo tour.

The domestic flight from the island of Tongatapu to the Ha'apai island chain. I flew over on a tiny six-seater plane, sitting next to the luggage, and gaping shamelessly at the islands and reefs and little waves that I pretended were dolphins. Those are colors I don't think I had ever seen before in nature.

I arrived in Ha'apai to a greeting party of Alicia, several curious Tongan children, and Mui Mui, Alicia's singularly adorable adopted dog. The pampered "palangi" (or white people's) dogs are a source of endless amusement to the Tongans, whose dogs - like the pigs and chickens - generally roam at will, feed where they can, and eventually are eaten by the family for a special treat. But don't worry...Mui Mui is off the menu now.

Most Tongans work at subsistence farming, and Alicia's neighbors kept us well provided with food from their bush plot. Like these "hopa" bananas, which we later fried for breakfast or made into countless loves of banana bread.

Sunsets in the Pacific seem invariably beautiful and are the Tongans' favorite time for a warm evening swim. Here's Alicia with the neighbor kids and Mui Mui, followed by the spectacular sunset on our night at Uoleva.

And here's Uoleva during the day. Thanks to Alicia's friendships with the residents of Ha'apai, we got to spend two gorgeous, practically free days on this uninhabited resort island, swimming and snorkeling on the reefs: a nice look at how the slightly less poverty-line tourists might see the Pacific.

We even got a free snorkeling trip on the way back.

We also got to spend a lot of time with Alicia's incredibly hospitable and generous neighbors. They invited me to spend a traditional Sunday with them, making lu in the umu (coconut oven, pictured above) and then dressing us up in Tongan mats to go to church (below...Alicia and Tupou) while our big meal cooked. The afternoon is then spent in a colossal nap.

And when I left, the family even presented me with some traditional Tongan gifts, including this gorgeous sea turtle shell, which the Tongans are allowed to harvest, but which U.S. Customs prohibits me from taking home. We called to ask and they basically laughed in our faces. Would you like some ivory and gorilla hands with that? Maybe a nice tiger-skin rug? O.K...point taken.

All in all, I had a wonderful stay, experienced incredible hospitality, and also got eaten alive by mosquitos, sunburnt, and stung by a tiny jellyfish. I grew quite attached, actually. I hope I get to cross paths with some of those beautiful people again soon.

Kiwi Hospitality

There's another horn that needs tooting, I've realized. The New Zealand countryside can't steal all the glory. Tribute must also be paid to my wonderful hosts, the Kiwi friends and friends-of-friends who have been taking me into their homes and and bringing me along on their holidays. In Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Tongariro, Akaroa, and Arthur's Pass, I've been fed and housed and driven about by the most wonderful people, and I'd like you to meet them too.

Me and Tommy with Beth, Laura, and Kev: youth workers and North Island hosts extraordinaires. They worked at a summer camp with our friend Luisa last year, and this year they have offered us their homes and cars whenever we needed to clean up, rest a bit, or stage some northern adventures. Pretty incredible for people who had never met us before January.

Tommy with Juliette, Jane, and Megan; Tommy with Richard. I met Juliette, Megan, and Richard in France (you may remember them from the photos of the castle holiday), and they've since introduced me to a whole network of fun-loving Kiwis and to a variety of typically Kiwi holiday destinations down south. You couldn't ask for more delightful, silly, and generous friends.

Giving and receiving hospitality is one of the most marvelous parts of travel for me. The "pay it forward" economy of helping someone along on a journey seems such a strong proof against the lie that humans are inherently selfish. It restores your faith in the potentially exponential effects of friendship. And I hope that someday, I'll be able to pass some of this good energy on to others. Negative emotions aren't the only ones that snowball and pick up speed when you roll them down a hill.

So long South Island, bye bye Bilbo

As I flew over the Cook Straights last night, leaving the South Island for the North, I started thinking about how often lately I've actually been able to feel the emotional and existential sandshiftings that signal "transition time." I've been putting my ear to the ground for them, trying to give myself time to absorb the aftershocks, miss the old and realign to the new. It's gotten me to wondering whether life is actually moving faster and hitting harder on this trip, or whether I'm just paying more attention. Maybe life has always been changing from moment to moment with this much color and noise, but I had my eyes on a bigger picture that just hasn't existed while I'm here.

Anyway, there's a wee semi-philosophical moment for you, prompted by the emotional weight of leaving the South Island. After cozy visits with Kiwi friends, an amazing road trip with Devon and Ross, and a fabulous WWOOFing stay, Tommy and I have both made our separate ways north to start new adventures. And to make the whole transition that much more weighty, we've even left our beloved car, Bilbo, behind, where he will hopefully run free - low on battery life, but mighty in spirit - with new travelers some day. As for us, we've got our packs on our backs again, we've bid adieu to the Southern Alps, and the trip seems totally new and unknown yet again.

So I'd like to propose a toast to the South Island and to our trusty car, via some last travel photos of our final weeks in the south.

Queen Charlotte Coast Track

Kaikoura

Abel Tasman National Park


Arthur's Pass

And here's to you, Bilbo. You taught me how to jump a car, how to believe in empty-tank miracles, and how to throw the schedule out the window.

Life at Ngaroma

Tommy and I feel like we got pretty lucky with our first WWOOFing experience. As I shared in my last post, our hosts really helped us get our hands dirty and make ourselves at home. So here are some photos to take you through a day in the life of a very happy WWOOFer.

Greeting the Morning

Shifting the Sheep

Puttering in the Gardens


Walking the Farm

Running the Dogs

Dining with the Family

Calling it a Day

Wonderful World of WWOOFing

Farming Firsts So Far at Ngaroma Homestead

1. Shearing a sheep

2. Firing a rifle

3. Driving a quad bike

4. Running a pack of dogs

5. Herding sheep with the dogs and the quad bike

Picture your very favorite city-girl-goes-down-on-the-farm story - it can be anything at all, as long is it's not the Hannah Montana movie. Now picture me fulfilling a lot of those timeless tropes: she intentionally tries to miss actually shooting the Canadian geese; she's not terribly gifted in the arena of gear changes or tire pressure; and she's a vegetarian, for crying out loud, on a sheep farm (who after the sheep-shearing incident, incidentally, is probably off of the wool as well). In short, I'm having an absolute ball here. I hope to get you a couple photos of the farm (and my pack of dogs) soon.

And Whither Then? I Cannot Say

So after all the wonderful photos and countless days of joy, tears (mostly mine), and silliness (of the most meaningful sort), the era of the Road Trip has officially come to a close. Tommy and I dropped off Devon and Ross at a (remote and unbelievably gorgeous) WWOOF farm in the Marlborough Sounds, where we sang one last round of "The Four Best Friends" in front of a herd of sheep. And then, unexpectedly, I dropped off Tommy at the Picton ferry terminal so that he could start a long, difficult journey back to the States for his grandfather's funeral. Lights up on me, alone in the Sounds, the lone driver of our car, the sole guardian of our fuel canisters and musty cooler bag. When life decides it's time for you to make a change, it's not always a gentle process.

It's always surprising how quickly a travel experience, even of the least stable sort, begins to feel like your one and only "real life." Leaving Devon and Ross felt like The Band breaking up or your kids leaving home, and when I said goodbye to Tommy I told him to come home soon. You may well ask: by "come home" do I mean leave his family and his hometown and come back to a foreign country where we live out of a car...to meet me at a farm that neither of us has ever seen before? Yes. Strange as it sounds, that's actually what I mean. And I know when I see him coming up the driveway, that's exactly how it's going to feel.

But now, for a short time, home is just me. It's a butterflies-in-the-stomach kind of feeling. I have five days to myself, then a journey to our first WWOOF stay near Kaikoura, which I'll be starting solo, and then Tommy will be back in about a week and a half. Not a ton of time, really, but with all the changes in the air it feels very new and unknown.

There's a new chapter heading on this next page of the story, I think, but I don't get to read what it is right away. You have to listen slowly and carefully. You look for clues. And no use trying to guess early - you have to let the story reveal itself to you in its own sweet time, or you risk not hearing everything it has to say. It's sounds a little mystical and zany, but that's the best I can do for you right now. It's time to set out on the next leg of the adventure.

Pursuing It With Eager Feet

And now the grand photo finale: the second half of our 4 Best Friends Road Trip, and the end of an era, it feels like, down here in New Zealand. These pictures span the waning weeks with all four of us together in Bilbo Wagons (our new name for our trooper of a car), and remind me of everything I've loved and learned from traveling with these cats. (More on that in my next update...)

Wine Tasting

West Coast

Eating out at an organic garden/pizza joint in the town of Ross

Or eating in over the camp stove

Jumping out of planes

It's been a good ride

And I Must Follow If I Can

Interlude: Rees-Dart Tramp


Day 1: 16.5 km, 3 mountain streams, 1 magical forest, 18 disbelieving muscles, 2 completely mud-saturated hiking shoes, 4 exhausted but very happy trampers



Day 2: 15 km, 1 saddle crossing, 3 fit and ready warriors and 1 totally exhausted tramper (yours truly), countless top-notch mountain vistas

Day 3: 15 km, scattered showers in the Misty Mountains, 1 golden field through Rohan, 8 sore feet, 3 blisters, 3,574 sandflies at the end of the day

Day 4: 16.5 km, unrelenting downpour = wet tents, soaking clothing, rising creek levels = getting a late start and sprinting to catch the shuttle bus out = 3 hours of pretending to be chasing orcs to keep my feet moving, followed by a warm night of hot tub, pizza, and beer