Scenes from New Zealand

As some of you know, Sailor Boy and I spent six months in Australia and New Zealand in late 2003/early 2004. I fell in love with New Zealand while we were there. I love the country, the people, the culture, the atmosphere. SB tells me that before I pack my bags for good, I should remember how far south it is and think about what the weather is like in the winter.

Which is a good point, since, growing up in Florida, I never developed much of a tolerance for cold weather. For instance, I haven’t been outside in weeks.

But we were in New Zealand right about this time, at the height of their summer. I can hardly believe it was three years ago. Once we showed up in this tiny town beach town on the west coast of the south island and checked into one of their little hostels. It was a charming place, all organic gardens and vines-on-trellises and house cats. I’ve heard absolute horror stories about the hostel situations in big cities in Europe, but I found, almost without exception, that the places in Australia and New Zealand to be charming, safe, well-appointed, well run, and kind. Then again, we always chose the little indie joints over the big corporate backpackers. (We stayed in one place in Brisbane that scared the crap out of me, but it was an emergency situation).

“You’re in room 3,” said the young clerk in the charming hostel in the little town on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand.

I held out my hand, and he looked at it curiously.

“Key?” I said.

“Key?” He cocked his head. “Oh, you mean locks. Yeah, we don’t have those here.”

“Then how do we keep our stuff safe?”

“Safe?” More head cocking. “Ohhhh, you mean crime. Yeah, we don’t have that here, either.”

Another thing they didn’t have was soda machines. Instead they had giant coolers, which they called eskies (short for eskimo), filled with ice and soda, and a little bowl on top with a taped message: SODA: 50 CENTS. I kid you not.

One of our guidebooks extolled the virtues of the caves a short hike from the village, so SB and I decided to borrow the hostel’s bikes and go on a little tour. The beach wasn’t too far away and we packed lunches to make a day of it. Unfortunately, the guidebook had been a bit vague on how to find this cave, so we decided to ask at the front desk.

The guy was as perplexed by our request for directions to the cave as he was by our request for a key. “We don’t have any caves near here.”

SB brightens, because though he thinks nothing of hanging out under 60 cubic feet of water surrounded by sharks, jellyfish, and deadly-nerve-poison-dart shooting seashells for as long as his dive charts and oxygen tank will allow, is a bit wonky about chilling inside a tunnel of rock.

I, on the other hand, love caves, and was not to be deterred. “But the guidebook says…” (I have since learned that a lot of guidebooks are written by guys sitting in rooms in New York City, who have never been to the country they are writing about, let alone the cave.)

The nice clerk pulls out a tourist map of the area. “I’ve never heard of it.”

I point on the map to a small set of squiggly lines with a dark semicircle inside one. “This looks like a cave symbol.”

“So it does.”

And off we went, Sailor Boy putting on his bravest face and me grinning wider than a cave mouth. According to the map, the trail up to the cave began inside a local dairy farm. So we parked our bikes outside the gate and walked down the dirt road towards the trail. SB had a really weird, Stepford Cow encounter that I actually caught on film (there’s nothing odder than two-hundred calves staring at you with big brown eyes) but I’m banned from showing it on the blog due to SB’s “no picture” mandate. Curses.

Eventually, we found the trail, and started walking. And walking. And walking. And the whole time, SB kept saying that maybe the clerk was right and the guidebook dude was screwing with our heads, and were we sure this was even a trail? After all, he argued, as we struggled up a particularly steep and overgrown-with-tangled-underbrush bit of trail, if there was a spectacular cave in the area, wouldn’t the local tourist industry employees be aware of its existence?

As he said this, I tripped over a log and through a bit of brambles, and into a clearing outside of the most spectacular cave either of us had ever seen. It was a cave from a children’s book illustration, all enormous arcing opening and giant stalactites dripping down like fangs from a ravenous maw. This is what it looked like:

(Yes, that’s SB behind the blue bubble.)

We were stunned. Speechless. Once, in Australia, we’d driven eight hours into the outback to see a set of highly-lauded caves, and they weren’t half so interesting as this gorgeous geological formation halfway up a mountain from a dairy farm. The cave opening was about fifty feet across, and stretched back and down into the heart of the mountain for longer than that. Here I am standing inside:

Note the long blonde hair, tan complexion and toned physique. None of these things are the case at the moment. Man, if only I had the chance to be an itinerant backpacker in the middle of the summer for a few months right before the wedding. I’d be slammin’.

I’m standing at the farthest point in the cave that we could reach without ropes and other climbing equipment. Behind me, there’s a cliff that leads into a darker and more tunnel-like section fo the cave, a section SB and I were not stupid enough to go into without a map of said cave. (While we were in NZ, we heard news stories every week about idiot hikers getting lost in unmapped caves and almost dying before they escaped. Lucky for them, all the terrifying underground monsters live in caves in Virginia, according to Hollywood.) Sailor Boy was happy in the main cavern, since it was as spacious as a cathedral and about as bright.

We ate lunch in the cool shade, then hiked back out, still marveling that such a glorious place could be completely unknown to the folks at our hostel. In America, they’d be selling tickets. In Australia, we’d have driven half-way to Alice Springs to see it. In New Zealand, it was just a tiny mark on a tourist map outside a dairy farm. We edged past the cows, who ignored us this time (phew!) and spent the rest of the afternoon biking around, sampling the fruits on the “take as many plums as you want for a dollar” table (which was about 65 cents) outside of everyone’s front lawn, and going up to the shore for some ice cream (Hokey Pokey, of course, which is the best ice cream flavor EVER) and looking at the penguins that lived on the beach.

Late that evening, we returned to the hostel, and showed the pictures of the cave to the clerk. He was duly impressed, and promised that he’d point the place out as a decent attraction to future visitors.

Oh yeah, I’d totally write a New Zealand guidebook. But neither SB nor me can now remember what town we were in. 🙂