I subscribe to three different magazines*. While I enjoy the magazines I subscribe to I’d be lying if I said I read every article in every issue of each. Indeed, between all three combined there’s probably an issue’s worth of articles I’m thrilled to read, an issue’s worth I’d read at a pinch, and an issue’s worth I’m not interested in at all.

And so…I keep dreaming of a subscription service which allows me to choose 15 articles a month from a suite of magazines, turns them into a PDF, and sends the PDF to me to print.  I’d happily pay for it…

* And the Surfer’s Journal

About six months late and looking the worse for wear my Boston Review arrived over the weekend.

I think I know why it was late….

I’ve never been to France. In a stange way I’m actually kind of chuffed I own a mag that has.

The painting crew were run by a friend of a friend of mine. They were travelling to Montauk and I hitched a ride.  There was a Puerto Rican from near Long Beach somewhere, a gruff old guy with a beer-rounded belly and a beard, another older man with a long-broken nose, and some young guys, pale and slouching, from the unhappy suburbs round Islip. They all looked at me like I was from another planet when I wandered down their boss’s driveway telling them I’d be catching a lift. Shambling and shaggy with baggy jeans and long hair, I was used to looks like that in Long Island.

I travelled first with the Puerto Rican and a couple of the pale kids. They said nothing but the Puerto Rican was friendly, more talkative than me even. At the end of the day, I hitched a lift back again. This time with the older guy with a beard. For a while he didn’t say much.

“So, where’re you from?”

“Me, oh, I’m from New Zealand.”

“Hmh, I knew it was somewhere like that. Everyone was trying to guess where you were from. Those young guys, they’d never heard an accent so strange. They figured you must be from Connecticut or something.”

This is near perfect. I love the horses’ return at the end.

The youth hostel dorm in Quetzaltenango was lots of things. It was bustling. It was friendly. It was anarchic. It was communal. A single room, a tin roof, plywood walls and 30 beds in rows, it was home to aged hippies and earnest Spanish students. It was busy, it was transient, it was a good place to meet people. It was not restful. Plastic bags cackled through the night. People stumbled in the dark. Toilets flushed. The French woman three beds down snored like a hibernating bear. After a while I got used to it. The sub-conscious sentinels that keep watch during sleep relaxed a little. Decided that I didn’t need to be woken with every noise. They relaxed but not so much so as to stop me from waking in an instant, when a drunken Dane peed on the floor nearby. The sound was unmistakeable.

“Hey!” I didn’t need to say anything. An outraged American, even closer to the urine stream, was springing to action.
“Huh”
“Not here. The toilet. The toilet.”
“Nuugghhh.”
“THE TOILET”
“Auuggghhh” The weeing stopped and he shambled off.
I pulled my pack up onto my bed and slept next to it for the rest of the night.

The next morning the Danish guy didn’t remember a thing. Drunk. Sleep walking. The urine had already soaked into the floor.

Three months later and a long way further south, in a much smaller room in Puerto Natales, I woke to the same sound. This time there were only four of us. Me, Christine the French Canadian, and Sandra and Eddie, two English travelling companions. We’d just walked round the Torres del Paine. And had celebrated that night by getting pleasantly drunk.

Once again. I didn’t have to say anything. Sandra was closer to the action.
“Eddie? Eddie! Good God Eddie what are you doing?” Sandra, was well heeled, with an accent from an expensive school somewhere. Her tone I thought was just about right for the situation. Eddie, however, was having none of it.
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m having a piss.”
His voice had a grumpy certainty to it. Quite convincing, and for a moment, still only half awake I wondered whether peeing on the floor was normal after all. Or, at least, normal where Eddie came from.

He finished his toileting and got back into bed and for a moment there was silence. Sandra was clearly as confused as me. And if Christine was awake she wasn’t saying anything. Maybe it really was normal. Maybe…
“Arrrrgghhhhh!” That was Eddie. “Where are we?”
“The youth hostel in Puerto Natales.” My chance to contribute to the conversation.
“And I was just…”
“Pissing on the floor.” Sandra finished the sentence for Eddie. Sounding rather cross.
“Fuck. I thought we were still on the trail. I was outside the tent. I couldn’t figure out why you were asking.”
“Right.”
Christine began to giggle.
“Maybe,” I wondered aloud, “you might want to mop that up?”

My mental maps from my first years of travel are much like the maps drawn by ancient mariners. Coastlines carefully plotted but with great empty spaces inland (save for the odd dragon or airport or two). If it was more than 50 miles from a surf spot, I wasn’t interested. The temples of Ubud? No thanks. Not while Padang Padang was breaking. Komodo dragons? Just big lizards really and at least two days travel from Lakey Peak. Celtic Castles? If they were on the coast, perhaps.

I arrived in Mexico in this frame of mind. And all went more or less according to plan. Arriving at night, flying over city lights that stretched horizon to horizon, we slept over at the airport. The next morning we used my carefully researched notes to get us to the right bus station on onto a bus to Puerto Escondido. For six weeks we surfed up and down the coast. In the melting heat and thumping marcismo of Puerto Escondido. In the sleepy surf camps in bandito country in Michoacan. In the dilapidated concrete shell hotels of Pascuales. I didn’t go any further inland than Tecoman. That was a trip to the bank.

We did end up, after all that, stuck for couple of days in Mexico City though. It was just the way the bus and plane schedules worked out. The first evening we were wandering round the safe but still hectic Zona Rosa, half-heartedly trying to do something, when the sky began to rain ash on us.

“Yuck”

“Pretty bad smog, aye”

“Yeah, wow what a polluted city.”

Pete scrapped a big glob of the stuff off a car windscreen. “Glad I don’t live here.”

“Yeah. It’s actually pretty hard to breath. Let’s go back to the hotel.”

The next morning skies had cleared. Big billowing clouds puffed and bulged above the horizon but above us it was fine. And the pollution seemed to have gone.

“Let’s do something.” I think it was Bill’s idea. He went and asked at the reception about day trips and they told us to go to Teotihuacan.

“Las Pyramidas”

My Spanish was still pretty bad but it sounded, I told Pete and Bill, “like there might be Pyramids there, or something.”

And so, with misplaced accents and forlorn verbs searching for objects, I navigated us via the metro to the right bus station and on to the ancient city.

We bickered a bit wandering through the tourist stalls. Pete was driving irritating me. I was bugging him. And we were both driving Bill nuts. I’m not sure we really started paying attention until we made it to the top of the, ‘Pyramid of the Moon.’

“These buildings,” a guide explained to some tourists next to us. “We ancient even to the Aztecs. They didn’t know who built them. Their legends had that the pyramids were the creations of an ancient race. Or Gods, perhaps.”

“That Pyramid of the Sun, which we are looking at, is the World’s largest pyramid outside Egypt.”

It was impressive. Hewn geometry. Jabbing into the sky. It shone lazy yellow in the sun. Behind it, the dark clouds billowed, threatening.

“Looks like thunder,” I wondered allowed.

“Thunder?” a German tourist looked at me like I was an imbecile. “That’s the eruption. You know, the Volcano?”

“Volcano?”

“Yes the one that everyone’s talking about. In the news. The ash cloud that smothered the city yesterday?”

“Ash shower? Oh. That ash shower.”

The German gave up on me and I went back to staring over the ruins. The ancient city and monuments, as old as legends, sun-gold against the eruption-dark sky north of us. And I decided that seeing I’d come all this way I should probably take notice of the land as well as the sea. Every once and a while, at least.

90% of love songs suck. Here’s two that don’t.

For what it’s worth, I think Classic Girl works because it’s about actual human experience rather than some sort of idealised form of it. While Ash on the other hand aren’t quite singing about love but instead that giddy feeling of falling into it. Which works just fine amongst the tumbling guitars and space cadet lyrics.

Oh, and, “they may say those were the days; but in a way you know for us these are the days…” has to be one of the happiest lines in pop.

Skydives, sandy drives and the ghost of a seal.

Here’s the story that stemmed from this, and which AA directions published.

Below is the story I would have preferred they published.

And here (at the old blog) is what really happened.

–

Falling for Nelson

One of the best things about backpacking is the lessons you learn, not only about the places you go but also about yourself. There are parts of your personality that you will never meet until you’re stranded in unfamiliar territory – making your way map-less across an unfriendly city, or trying to buy tickets in a train station where you can’t read the place names let alone speak the language. The discoveries you make will stay with you long after Rio is only a faded memory and Xinjiang a stack of photos in the cupboard.

You don’t need to lug your pack to the ends of the Earth to learn these lessons either. All you need is somewhere new. Recently, not far from home at all, travel gifted me just such a moment of self-discovery. I was poised, my feet dangling out the door of a Cessna, four kilometres above Motueka, when I learnt that I was afraid of heights.

Desperately.

Back on the ground skydiving had seemed like a great idea. ‘Why not?’ I thought. Now, as Thomas my tandem partner made the last adjustments to our gear, I had all the answers I needed to that question. We were several hundred feet higher than Mount Cook, for a start. So high that small fluffy clouds grazed like sheep way below us. And, in a few seconds, we would be travelling at over 150 kilometres per hour – straight down.

“Ready?” Thomas’s voice was as sunny as the sky above us.
“Nuuerrk,” I croaked.

With that, he accepted gravity’s invitation on our behalf and we pitched forward into nothing…

My trip to Nelson and Golden Bay hadn’t started this way. Not at all – my first mode of transport was defiantly sedate, a 1952 Bedford school bus, which took me from the airport to the World of Wearable Art and Classic Cars museum.

Why the decision to mix cars and costumes was made I don’t know, but apparently the combination is a winner. “Couples,” our museum guide advised us, “come here all the time. The women come to look at the wearable art, the men the cars. Well at least the men say they come to look at the cars but sometimes they spend more time with the dresses.”

I only had to spend a few moments with the dresses myself to realise that the men who ditched the automobiles were onto something. Woven within the wearable art is a magic of sorts and you don’t need to be interested in fashion to find it. All that is required is an eye for imagination: dreams are spliced to legends, ideas stitched to stories and fables sewn into science fiction.  After an hour at the museum it was easy to understand the tale of Russell Sutherland, the retired mechanic from Invercargill who was so inspired on visiting the museum he entered the awards himself. His design, an incredibly engineered if uncomfortable looking undergarment, won him the Bizarre Bra award for 2006 and second place in the overall event. Not bad for someone who was probably only there to see the cars.

After the museum I exchanged the bus for a car of my own and headed west, over the switchbacks of Takaka Hill and into Golden Bay. By the time I got to Collingwood the wind had gathered grey clouds, folding them over the peaks and valleys of the Kahurangi National Park. I pulled over on the edge of town to consult my directions and found myself next to the war memorial. On impulse I got out and had a look.

The story set in stone was the same in Collingwood as it is in hundreds of other small New Zealand towns: a long list of names; some surnames repeated two, three or four times. Families ended and small towns emptied. With the first footprints of rain falling on the windscreen and now feeling as glum as the thick evening sky I got back in the car and drove off to find the hostel.

The next morning the clouds were gone but the war remained. As we bumped along the track out onto Farewell Spit, Paddy our guide recounted the story of Jack Ashford, the first person to regularly traverse the spit in an automobile. Jack had been gassed at the Battle of Passchendaele, his lungs ruined. After the war, as his breathing got worse, he was told by a doctor that he had three years left to live, maybe a bit more if he got a job that kept him close to the sea. The salt air, the doctor said, might just help. So Jack found himself the one job that guaranteed salt air in abundance: Farewell Spit lighthouse keeper.

Creeping cautiously over the sand in Farewell Spit Eco Tours’s four-wheel drive bus it was hard to imagine how Jack managed the journey with rattling lungs and a rattling 1928 Chevy. But Jack did more than manage. He thrived, living to see his 99th birthday. And, by the time we reached the lighthouse at the end of the sand’s empty curve, I could see how life in one of New Zealand’s loneliest places could be curative. Sitting in the shade amongst the sighing Macrocarpa – watching as clouds, sand and sea blew by – it was impossible to escape the two things that Farewell Spit had in abundance: space and peace. Each, I thought, as good an antidote to the doom of trench warfare as one could hope for.

The last lighthouse keeper left the Spit in 1984. Since then the closest thing to permanent residents to be found on the slender strip of sand are the Gannets who set up a colony on the shell banks beyond the light in 1982. From a handful of pioneer breading pairs the colony has grown to nearly 5,000 birds. It’s New Zealand’s only sea level Gannet colony and a rare example of a native bird reclaiming territory on the mainland, so we kept a respectful distance. Gannets, though, are naturally curious and pretty soon we were treated to an up-close display of aerobatic skill as inquisitive birds, their wings bent back like bows, swept by us, checking out their awkward, earthbound guests.

Later, as we headed home along the beach, impatient sand dunes casting shadows in the early evening light, I decided that out there, on the edge of the spit, I had made it as close to the horizon as I was ever going to get. I eased back in my seat, enjoying the particular type of content that comes with having been somewhere truly special, and watched as the sun fell towards the sea.

…Meanwhile, back in the sky above Motueka, 50 seconds after it started and now some two kilometres lower, my own plunge towards the Earth came to an abrupt halt. The parachute opened.

The parachute opened! And all of a sudden everything changed. The roar of the wind was replaced by silence as clear as the sky itself. I looked around, we were still a long, long way above the Earth, but now – with my fear left billowing behind me in the strengthened-nylon chute – I began to take in the world we floated over. Down below, the tiny houses and roads were still too small even for matchbox cars. While, to the south, snow covered peaks shared the altitude with us. We spun slowly, looking out over Tasman bay, where stray clouds dragged patterns of shade and light. In the distance, Nelson twinkled in the sun. And I revised my initial assessment; I wasn’t afraid of heights at all, only of falling and, once you got beyond that, the view from up there is like nothing else.

Ok, so busy, busy, and post free until next weekend.

In the meantime though, I just wanted to say that I’m still kinda chuffed that Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel prize.  :)

As I opened my mouth I was certain I knew what I was talking about, by the time I closed it again I wasn’t nearly so sure…