skiing the south

I've been on several ski areas in Colorado and Montana. Now I've been on three different areas here in New Zealand (hopefully four today) and there are some marked differences down here.
No. 1, the biggest difference: there are no trees. No trees anywhere on the mountain. As far as I can tell, this is a universal rule here.
Everywhere I've been in the States, trees serve as the dividing lines on the ski area. Trees are cleared to make runs, so if you want to know where a run goes, the trees tell you. Sure, there are areas that open up, or open bowls to ski, but on the main mountain, most runs have a tree-lined border.
Not here. For whatever reason, the mountains where the ski fields are located don't have trees. So the ski areas are just one open face. The named runs blend into each other, or are simply the valleys or drainage creases. Sometimes a run is bordered by rocks, but more often it's just a matter of skiing where you can. The small ridges, valleys and cliffs on any mountain side are the only things keeping New Zealand ski areas from just being one wide-open run. And in some cases, that's exactly what you get.

No. 2: the view. Part of this has to do with the first difference, but there's more to it. In the Rockies, the mountains are bunched up. The ski areas might be at higher altitudes than in New Zealand, but the mountains here often rise straight up off a sea-level plain. At a lot of the resorts back home, the base of the lifts is essentially right at the highway. There's the resort, condos, hotels, a whole complex at the base. Even if there isn't, the base of the mountain is the same as the bottom of the ski area.
In New Zealand, the ski areas are generally perched right at the top of mountains that just keep going down. The skiable area or the part that gets snow, is only the top third or quarter of the mountainside. This, along with the lack of trees, means you get panoramic views of a valley floor that's a lot further down than the ski field. At the two areas I've skied the past couple weeks, when you came to a ridge or just before a steep drop, it appeared as though you were at the top of a cliff that fell all the way to the distant valley. It was a bit disorienting, a bit exhilarating, and far more of a view than I've ever gotten on a ski field back home. There also aren't any areas that have turned into resorts the way they are back home. There's not really any place to put the condos and restaurants up on the side of the mountain, and the access roads are mostly just gravel switchback tracks all the way up.

On the down side, the areas here aren't nearly as large and generally don't have near the quality of snow as areas back in the States. Also, they're not particularly cheap. But it is skiing, and there's a quality to New Zealand skiing that's all its own.

falling

It's terrifying.
Standing over a 440-foot drop, in a metal pod suspended by cables. A stretchy cord attached to you by a harness you're not sure anyone really checked was on properly, and a couple of bulky pads around your legs, which are held on by velcro.
You're ferried to the suspended pod by a open-air gondola, with a metal grate floor so you can see all the way down. Then suited up inside the pod, which seems to have as much glass as metal and wood for flooring.
When your name is called, you make your way to the side of the pod without a wall. Your legs are shackled to the cord, so you can only inch forward in a waddle. This is unnatural, so you have to look down. You don't want to look down.
The crew tells you to put your toes over the edge. When you feel you're close enough to the edge, they still think you're a long way away. As you inch forward, you have to look down to control your feet. The ground is more than 400 feet away. It's enough to kick in several survival instincts, all of which don't want to be near that edge. No matter how calm you thought you were, your nerves are wracked seeing the drop.
When you finally get to the edge, you're not sure you're going to be able to jump. You look down; you know you won't be able to jump. You look straight ahead, at a point on the hill in front of you. You hear the man who led you out to the edge count down - "one, two, three." You don't think, you just look straight ahead and jump forward.

Well, they tell you to jump out and away. I didn't, even though I meant to. I bent my legs and leaned forward, preparing to straighten my legs and propel my body forward. What happened instead was I started to fall, looked down, and my body froze. It felt like I jumped, so I didn't know it at the time, but the company videos the whole thing. When I watched the video, I realized I actually fell in that same legs bent position, halfway through the jump.

I'd watched the promotional videos of people jumping before I jumped. I knew when you jumped, your body was parallel to the ground. You fell that way until you dropped far enough for the slack in the bungy to play out. Then the cord attached to your feet caught, and you fell the rest of the way head-first.

That's what I was waiting for when I fell, to swing over and start to fall head-first. It's odd that position would be more comforting, but at least then you know the equipment is working.
The brochures tell you there's eight seconds of free-fall, but it's actually eight seconds of falling until the bungy reaches its full stretch and starts to pull you back up. It's probably closer to two, maybe three seconds of free fall before the cord starts to catch you.
Those two or three seconds felt like 20 as I fell. If you've ever had a falling dream, the kind you wake up from just before you hit, you know exactly what it felt like to fall toward that river bed. I was making a noise, something between a groan and a yell, as I just seemed to fall. My brain tensed. I was falling.

Then, of course, the bungy caught. I swung down and went head-first. When you reach the bottom of the cord's stretch, they say you're about 10 meters off the river bed. I didn't notice. I did notice a bit of pressure, and one contact lens shifted slightly. On my way up, I was just glad I hadn't lost the lens. Then I reached the top of the bounce and went weightless, which was an odd, but expected, feeling. Then another drop I barely noticed. At the top of the second bounce, they had briefed us beforehand, we had to reach to our left knee, grab a strap there and yank it away from our body. This would release our legs from the cord, leaving us suspended by a chest harness as we were pulled back up to the pod. Otherwise, it would be a slow lift feet-first, which didn't seem a pleasant prospect.

Once I pulled the foot release, it was over although I was still dangling in mid-air a couple hundred feet above the ground. At that point, I was gripping the point where the cord attached to my harness and breathing the quick breaths of a post-adrenaline rush. When I was hauled back up and released, my legs were shaking so I could barely stand up. As I watched the next few jumpers through the glass in the floor, I had to kneel down to steady myself.



I have now jumped out of a plane at 12,000 feet and bungy jumped from a pod 440 feet high. The bungy jump was, by far, harder. It was more terrifying and it wasn't as exhilarating afterward.
When you skydive, at least for the first time, you're attached to an instructor. He does all the jumping; you don't really have any control of the process once you're in the plane. Even if it was up to you to do the jump, at that high up the ground is more of an abstract concept than a reality. Free fall at that height doesn't feel like falling; it's like something completely different, a singular sensation. It doesn't feel like you're falling to the ground as much as it feels like the wind is rushing up past you.
But to jump off anything a few hundred feet above the ground, your brain has a very good idea of just what the ground below you means. It's not abstract at all. If you have any fear of heights or of falling, it kicks in big-time.
When you sky dive, it doesn't really feel like the ground is getting close at all until the last few hundred feet. After leisurely checking out the scenery as you're suspended by a parachute, you have a second or two of the ground rushing up at you, then your down. There's adrenaline, but it's a calm rush. Afterward you're on a high, grinning uncontrollably and excited for the rest of the day.
The Nevis bungy also involved falling, but it was an entirely different experience. It was sheer terror. You have to walk out to the ledge, you have to jump. The whole time the ground is definitely rushing up at you, and you're rushing down to it. It's not a calm adrenaline rush, it's a sudden, harsh, drenching of your panic centers. I was in a group of about 20 jumpers. After each person jumped, there was some of the nervous laughter that comes after any intense experience. Most people had a hard time standing for a few moments, as their legs were shaking. But the euphoria accompanying the end of a skydive was nowhere in sight. Immediately after they jumped, people were hyper, anxious to talk about the experience. But on the bus ride back to town, a half hour or 45 minutes after the jump, people were silent, some sleeping, their energy drained.

This is not to say I regret doing the bungy jump. I'm very glad I had the experience. It was something I'd wanted to do since I got to New Zealand. This is the country that invented commercial bungy jumping. And if I was going to do it, I might as well do the biggest. I even have a desire to do it again.
All I'm saying is I can't imagine I'll ever forget the feeling of falling. In fact, when I went to sleep that night I woke up, twice, with falling dreams. They weren't necessarily nightmares. It wasn't that I thought I was going to hit the ground - I had a bungy cord attached.
It was simply, exactly, the feeling of falling.

on our way

Blogging will be harder and harder from here on out, not that I've been eating up New Zealand's network lines with the frequency of my posts anyway. But in less than a week our laptop will be headed home, and we'll be on the road with no telling how often we'll be stopping to log on.

I will get some updates up before we leave NZ on what we've been doing (cramming in tourist stuff - skiing, bungy, walking on glaciers) and perhaps even some reflections on finishing our year here (although that's the last thing on my mind - instead I'm thinking about our crazy four months of traveling ahead).

For now, I'll give a brief geographical update (I'm in an Internet cafe and paying by the minute)...

We've left Queenstown after 10 days or so. Queenstown may be a tourist destination, but it's still a wonderful place to be. You couldn't ask for a more scenic location, nestled against the shore of a lake underneath two rows of mountains. I love the town, and loved to spend time with some friends (and crash on their floor; much cheaper than a hostel) but it's easy to spend a lot of money in Queenstown. Still, a bit sorry to leave.
On Thursday we loaded our stuff in the car once again and headed up the West Coast of the South Island to the Glaciers. There's two easily accessible Glaciers within 20 miles of each other, coming off the top off the Southern Alps and falling toward the ocean. They don't quite make it all the way to the coast, but they do come from about 11,000 feet all the way to 300 or 500 feet above sea level, just a few miles from the ocean (one of the crazy things I still haven't gotten used to in this country is just how close the mountains and sea are. I read a story about someone who climbed Mt. Cook, NZ's tallest mountain at a bit more than 12,000 feet. He started at the ocean coast, and made it to the summit in five or six days).
You can walk on the glaciers, as long as you're willing to pay a company for a guided group tour (they supply the boots and crampons). We'd been to the glaciers before, just after the New Year, but hadn't gotten to do the hike so it was one of the things we wanted to get back to before we left. We got great weather, and the experience was definitely worth the trip.
Now we're outside Chirstchurch in Methven, hoping to get a few more days of skiing in. Today was supposed to be a ski (or snowboard, I might try that for a few days) but the wind was too bad. We'll try again tomorrow.

Then just about one week - Aug. 7 - until we fly to Australia.

white july

It's been a long time since I woke up to the sight of an all-white landscape with fluffy snowflakes falling from the sky. I'd forgotten the peculiar light of a bright day when you can't see the sun, the light diffused through clouds and snow. It's been several years since I've had the opportunity to wake up and make a snowman with people who suddenly have a day free of obligation.

Years of Mississippi living meant I hadn't lived through a real winter for quite some time before coming to New Zealand. Even before that, real snowfalls in Missouri were few and far between (more often I woke up to a blanket of ice after a night's freezing rain fall).

We've been staying in a house full of travelers here in Queenstown (I don't think there is such as a thing as a Queenstown local). Our connection is through an Irish friend, one of the five regular inhabitants of the house. None of the five ended up working on Friday, the day of the snowfall. Even the snowboard instructor was told not to worry about going to work (the ski field was open, but transportation was a bit dodgy). So instead, everyone put together the street's tallest snowman.

The snow also provided the added benefit of great skiing on Saturday. I'd gone up on Tuesday to Treble Cone, an area an hour and a half outside of Queenstown, with a group of Irish friends. It was my first day of skiing since last September, and the conditions were somewhat similar. Just like my day of skiing in the North Island last year, clouds dominated. Unlike my North Island day, we weren't actually skiing in clouds. This time, the air was clear and we had great views of the valley below. The clouds filled the sky above, however, leading to a flat light making it hard to see the contours of the snow.
Saturday at Coronet Peak there was none of that. The sky was clear, the sun shone, the snow was fresh and soft. The downside, of course, was the giant crowd waiting at the bottom of every lift. But the conditions made up for the waits.

counting down...

Just two weeks left for us in New Zealand. We have a few tourist things on the list between now and then, but mostly we've seen what we want to see.
Now, we're just overwhelmed with the details we have to take care of between now and then - like packing, planning the next stages of our trip and trying to sell all the stuff we've accumulated in our year over here.

touring the South Island

We've left Dunedin (and finished the working portion of the working holiday). Now it's all holiday. The last few days we've been hanging out with Irish friends in Queenstown. Got in a day of skiing at Treble Cone with good snow and good views (not of the snow though - too many clouds meant no shadows so tricky to see what you were skiing on).
Not sure what we'll be doing over the next few weeks. Maybe another day of skiing here, hopefully a bungy jump. We're looking at heading back up the West Coast for a day of hiking on the Glaciers, then maybe three days or so of skiing or trying to snowboard at an area near Christchurch. We fly out of New Zealand on Aug. 7 (out of Christchurch). In between we'll try to have some fun and not freak out about all the details - selling as much stuff as we can, packing as much as we can, and deciding if we want to send the rest home.

Jade Stadium

One more from the All Blacks game - this was our first view of the field after entering the stadium. Our seats were just on the other side of this Silver Fern (in the second row).

textin' fool

I know "the kids" are all into back home, but before I arrived in New Zealand I never sent text messages (of course, I was rather behind the curve on cell phones as a whole, but we'll ignore that. I'm still ambivalent about cell phones in theory, but in practice I've given over my soul).
Never had to. Coming here has given me an idea of just how cheap US cell phones can be (and just how expensive all communications are in New Zealand).
There are no "free nights and weekends" plans here. What there is, at least unless you're interested in a two-year contract, is 59 cents a minute for all domestic calls - Unless you're calling a cell phone from a different provider, then it's even more. It's even the same 59 cents a minute to call the States, the UK and several other countries.
Texts, on the other hand, are 20 cents each and free on weekends. So that's how you communicate.
There's something to be said for the option - it's much easier to coordinate meeting somewhere (such as a restaurant) since you don't have to worry about talking over the noise of people around you, or disturbing those around you with your talking.
I haven't, however, started to use text slang. Nor have I gotten as proficient with the texting as people here who grew up on it - I had a roommate when I first got to New Zealand who could type two messages on two different phones at the same time, with one phone in each hand.


[As an aside, I just wanted to mention how screwed up NZ's phone charges are in another way: I bought a calling card. Using the card, it costs just 3 cents a minute to call the US, dialing a local number to connect (obviously more if I have to use a pay phone.) However, it costs 5 cents a minute to call long-distance within New Zealand. Tell me how this makes sense.]

the rugby

I'm still not feeling well, so I'll hopefully post up more on this soon but I wanted to get a quick comment up on watching the All Blacks:

- Seeing the haka live was incredible.

- The weather couldn't have been better, and our seats were in the second row just in front of one of the goal lines - there were two trys (scores) which happened in our corner, less than 50 feet away.

- The atmosphere was one of the strangest I've ever been a part of. The crowd filing into the stadium before the game had a little buzz of excitement and anticipation you get before games people are interested in, but less than I would have expected.
It was even odder once the game started - for about the first 10 minutes, the stadium was dead quiet. There were about 35,000 people in the 37,000-seat stadium, but there was no rustling, no murmurs. There were cheers and applause at the right moments, like a change of possession or big hit, but then the silence would return. We could literally hear the players grunt from across the field. It felt more like a theater crowd. I couldn't quite figure it out, but after New Zealand went ahead by a couple scores the crowd definitely relaxed, and you started to hear more of a background noise, with people shouting encouragement or derision. I started talking with an older guy sitting next to me, who had obviously seen a lot of New Zealand rugby. His explanation was the crowd was nervous, worried at the start Australia might win.
It's a slightly different approach than most crowds in the States. In the year I've been in New Zealand, the All Blacks haven't lost a match, but the tone of coverage is always "well, yes, they won but...": the stars didn't play as well as expected, a segment of the game didn't look polished, a player is injured, the lineup still isn't settled. Something.

You get that in the States, too. But I think the approach in the States is "we expect our team to win, and if it doesn't, or look like it might lose at some point in the future, we're angry about it."
The approach here seems more like "we're happy our team is winning and we know it's one of the best in the world, but I just don't know if they can keep this up. There - see that? I told you we couldn't keep it up. I knew we couldn't really be that good this year."

so what's a haka?

I mentioned the haka when talking about the All Blacks game. Just to let people know just what I'm talking about:

The haka is performed by the All Blacks before each match. The word haka generally refers to any Maori dance (New Zealand's indegenous people). The All Blacks' haka, at least, is more of a chant with a few body gestures for emphasis.

The haka the All Blacks perform before each match (or the one they used to always perform - in the last two years they've started to introduce a new haka which was written specifically for the team) is called Ka Mate. New Zealand's rugby teams have performed the haka before matches since the late 1800s.

It's performed just after the national anthems and immediately before the opening kickoff. It's one of the most intimidating and stirring sights I've witnessed at a sporting event - the crowd goes silent, the players' chants (and thumps - part of the haka is beating the hand against the thigh or chest, which adds to the noise) are pumped through the stadium loudspeakers and for a moment, everyone watches.

Not everyone is as impressed, however. We were talking with a Scottish gentleman this evening who believes the haka should be banned from rugby stadiums.

"They shouldn't waste all that bloody time practicing a ballet," he said.

To which I replied, they must be good if they can whip Scotland while wasting all that time on the ballet.

damn the luck

I was going to write several blog entries yesterday, as I had a few
hours set aside to update you on the goings-on and happenings in
Dunedin and New Zealand.
Let you know about things like waking up every morning for the past
few weeks to sheets of black ice or a white blanket of frost on the
roads (which, since we're staying at the top of a hill, makes walking
interesting). Like how since we headed up to Christchurch this
weekend (for an outstanding experience watching rugby) the weather
has been extremely nice, with temperatures around 45-50 even at night.

But now that the weather's nice, my body decided to go ahead and get
sick anyway. So I had no energy to update (or do anything else on my
list, which is fairly lengthy as we have just a couple more days in
Dunedin before packing up and doing a bit of a South Island road
trip, one which hopefully will include skiing).
Hopefully I'll get some entries up this weekend (or sooner).

Photo update

Lanterns
Originally uploaded by slack13.

I've also put a few new photos up on my Flickr page, including a number of photos from a Mid-Winter Carnival they held here in Dunedin a couple of weekends ago. The highlight of the festival was a procession of lanterns (to chase away the longest night). People could make their own in the weeks preceding the festival, then parade along with several larger lanterns in all shapes. The night was capped off by fireworks.

Someone else's view from the bottom

The World's Steepest Street
Originally uploaded by Mike Went to New Zealand.

Since I didn't take a photo from this angle...

getting my travel photos up to you

I haven't been very good about putting up photos lately, so I'll try to remedy that in the next couple of weeks.

I will give you a few now - these are from our trip to the World's Steepest Street (apparently it's in the Guiness Book of Records, but I've never actually checked) across town.

We walked up the street - then back down. Apparently it's about a 1:1.26 gradient, which means it's damn near at a 45-degree angle. All I know is that it's a steep walk. And it seems crazy to me the number of driveways with cars in them just off the street - that's a hell of an end to the daily commute.

and hopefully they'll be staying...

Sometimes I forget how rare it was back in the States to meet people from another country who were just traveling around. Here, especially when you're traveling yourself and are on the tourist circuit, you meet almost no one else.

Today, I stopped by the city library. A girl was applying for a library card. I overheard the woman behind the desk tell her:

"You have to put down the contact information of someone who knows you. And they have to be in this country."

the rugby

We haven't done a lot in terms of cultural travel the last few weeks.
We've mostly been hunkered down working (temp jobs) in Dunedin to try
and put a bit of cash in our bank account before we start to travel
and drain it all.
This weekend, however, we have an activity planned that I've been
looking forward to since we arrived in New Zealand.
We're going to see the All Blacks. The haka. Rugby, New Zealand vs.
Australia, in Christchurch.

coming up

Our time in New Zealand is almost drawing to a close.
We're working for two more weeks in Dunedin, then packing up and heading to the ski fields before taking the hard steps: packing for the next few months of travel, sorting the things we don't need for sending home, selling the car.
We came here with a relatively heavy suitcase and a backpack each. Considering we were coming for a year, it wasn't an outlandish amount of stuff, but there were some clothes packed we never needed.
Now we face an even tougher packing job. Since we're not flying directly back to the States, we can't drag as much with us. In another instance of the States supersize culture and the willingness of companies to accommodate it since we mean so much money, flying to or from the States gets you more than double the luggage allowance than flying anywhere else. So we have to cut our two heavy bags down to one bag of less than 20 kilos each.
The process has already started. We mailed a some clothes home and gave some away when we left Wellington to come to Dunedin, and I left my (older and battered) suitcase in the donations pile.
We've still got a long way to go, however. The bags we still have with us have disgorged enough contents to fill our room in the hostel. We'll also have to somehow pack for summer and winter conditions over the next four months.

We'll leave New Zealand the first week of August for nearly a month in Australia. Early in September we'll fly north to Bangkok and spend two or three weeks in Southeast Asia before flying to Beijing.
A couple weeks in China and then we head to Europe. We plan on spending time in Germany (hopefully seeing our former flatmates) and several areas of the UK and Ireland, trying to stay with friends we've met here and elsewhere.
Then back to the States in late November or early December. And then I have no idea.