Landing a Leap of Faith

I haven't been stuffing my bag full of paua shells or jade hei-tiki pendants, but it seems that every new packing is becoming more of an ordeal. Something has to give soon, as I struggle to awkwardly tie a sleeping bag from a clasp on the back – for now though, the hoarder in me has to take baby steps. I figured I could do without the XL St. Patrick's Day t-shirt – I'm keeping the felt green top hat though, at least until I have to choose between that and my underwear.

I got dropped on the outskirts of Dunedin on a sunny morning, sticking out my thumb at 9:45 and throwing my stuff in the backseat next to a Rottweiler before 10:00. Me and Jason are driving along, chatting about life and sheep shearing and whatnot (like you would), when we segue into his girlfriend. In particular, the teensy tension that arose when he went and beat up her brother that time, and slightly went to jail for a year because of it. As we drove along Highway 90 towards Gore, he was kind enough to point out the little prison where he just got released, three weeks earlier.

I hope that you never doubt anything I write here, but I still feel the need to remind everyone that this story is completely unembellished. I heard it all: how the politics of prison works, how he organized a little committee to solve disputes between inmates (rather than the usual method of pounding the crap out of each other while the guards turn a blind eye), how the prisons differ between the North Island and the South Island (of course he's seen both, spending time in Palmerston North for drunk driving), and eventually about how the gangs operate around these parts and how one morning he was drinking his coffee, getting ready for work, and a hit man employed by a rival gang totally tried to shoot and kill him.

At no point during this ride did I feel the least bit threatened. If anything, my biggest concern was that I'm not a good enough writer to churn out a decent novel, because fully fleshed characters like this don't just stroll along every day. It took two rides, and the second one, from Gore to the heart of Invercargill, was with a totally normal guy in the transportation industry who, despite having a little device that beeped when you were in the vicinity of police radars (somehow), was way lower on the badass scale.

I made it to Invercargill, a flat city of 50,000 that's typically a stop, not a destination, just after lunchtime – not bad, considering it's a two and a half hour drive anyway. I got dropped along Tay Street, a wide avenue of store fronts, and had a few hours to wait before my Couchsurfing host was able to meet me. So I started wandering, first to Starbucks.

That needs some explanation. Coffee culture is big in New Zealand, as I've said a few times before now, and I've been trying to really get into it, with the flat whites and lattes and all these polished gizmos for espresso. For a place that holds quality coffee in such high esteem, the people have a bit of a tendency to stick up their noses to a place like Starbucks. I ended up there not because I really like their coffee, or even because their caramel macchiato is particularly awesome (if anything, it's a bit too sickly sweet) – it's because there are 20,891 Starbucks on this planet, and 20,890 of them are north of the one in Invercargill. An unassuming sign inside with the GPS coordinates in brackets is the only indication you'd get of that piece of trivia – everything else is business as usual at the world's southernmost Starbucks.

The day was hot and my bag was heavy, but I trudged through the city, which was modern facades for the most part, with really old (by New Zealand standards anyway, from the late 1800s) buildings thrown in haphazardly (well, I guess they were left there haphazardly). It's all a bit bizarre, but still pretty neat.

By the mid-afternoon I came to Queen's Park, a 200 acre splotch of greenery that has its own outdoor aviary – lots of squawking behind metal bars, including a little enclosure for the flightless Weka from Stewart Island (they look a bit like the rare, signature Kiwi, but looks can be deceiving). The aviary isn't far from the farm park, with some familiar faces (and smells) from Kaikoura: massive kunekune pigs, sheep, llamas, and rabbits. What Invercargill can really boast about though is an emu and a wallaby.

Exploration finished (for now), I took a seat in the shady glen, autumn leaves strewn on the grassy floor, and cracked into a new book.

Rory, a Tasmanian ex-pat with a decent collection of passport stamps, is in the middle of a digital photography course, taking care of six Yorkshire Terriers, working on his home (a 100-year-old Victorian building that was saved from being a rundown student house), and building a holiday home with his partner, Mark, about an hour west of Invercargill – but still agreed to look after me for a few nights. He picked me up just in time for dinner, showed me to a real spacious guest room, and had a real nice chat about the remote parts of Tasmania, the best spots in Newfoundland, and plenty of little pockets and life experiences that lie between the two.

The three of us drove along the coast today, catching glimpses of Stewart Island en route to Orepuki, sitting right on Te Waewae Bay. Back during the Southland gold rush in the late 1800s, this was a thriving spot – today, it's something of a ghost town, and that natural seclusion was a major selling point for the guys, whose holiday home sits right along the edge of the cliff. 

Beneath is Gemstone Beach, a sandy strip that still has the scattered semi-precious gemstone (and handy to places where people still pan for gold and occasionally strike it), and the edge of Fiordland is visible on the horizon, where jagged mountain peaks poke into the sky. 

 

That view was obscured slightly by gathering cloud this afternoon – we poked around with some odd chores in a gathering wind (this whole area has a battered look about it, as if calm days are unheard of), finishing up and getting back on the road just as the rainstorm started.

If you had to pick a spot in the world to find some escape, this could be it. On the southern tip of New Zealand, there aren't too many distractions or places to hide from yourself – chunks of Fiordland remain remote and unexplored, and there may or may not even be a moose wandering around there.

 

The rain let off this evening as we finished a dinner of roast lamb and made plans to drive through the Catlins tomorrow. I had assumed that I would come via this scenic coastline on my way from Dunedin, but apparently the chances of lucking into a ride there are near nil (not to mention it takes much longer to go by that road) – this works out great then, because now I get to leisurely take it in and get to see it from a local's perspective. That's not the only reason I'm paying attention to the weather though – my aim is still to head into the hills for the 60km Kepler Track this weekend, at which point I'll be entirely at the mercy of the elements for 4 days.

Over the past three months, I've learned something about trusting myself, but just as important is the ability to trust other people. No, you can't let yourself be totally naive, but maybe, just maybe, strangers aren't always out to get you. Maybe they'll even help you for that brief little bit of time two unrelated paths cross, whether they're an ex-gang member convict or a wanderer finally settled on the periphery of the world. At the very least, they'll make that intersection a lot more interesting.

Cheers,

rb