Both Jenn and I awake in the middle of the night to an escalating roar and the ground shaking.
"What's that?" Jenn hisses. I know what she's thinking — The Moon Man is right again and the predicted catastrophic NZ earthquake, the big one to end all big ones, is happening right outside our camper.
But then we hear another familiar sound — the clickety clack of wheels on rails and we realize it is a train shooting past very closely by our Blenheim campsite. The campsite is fine — clean and with a good BBQ for our dinner, but its location is less than desirable being right beside the rail line and State Highway Numero 1 with trucks rumbling down to Christchurch.
The morning brings clouds and light showers. We manage to get away early (early for us, 9:30 a.m.), fill up with water and diesel, hunt down a decent place for cappuccinos and take Highway 63 out of town, heading back once again towards the west coast and the mountains and pesky sandflies that await us.
Rows upon rows of vineyards fly past. The day before, we fulfilled our quota (and then some) for vineyard visitations and wine tastings, but it is still interesting to note all the different wineries, little and large, that vie for vintage recognition in the Marlborough region.
One of the perks of staying in campsites for an extended period of time is you get to observe the ablution habits of your fellow travelers. Many folk, we have come to realize, obsess over oral hygiene and will brush their teeth for a VERY long time. We once watched a fellow stand outside his camper, scrolling through his laptop and scrubbing his teeth vigorously for well over ten minutes. Other times I have started and finished shaving at the sink and the guy next to me is still cleaning his chompers.
"Last night, a girl in the washroom was really going at it," Jenn tells me as we drive along towards the only bit of sunlight in the sky. We take this as a good sign that we are headed in the right direction. "So I tried to out brush her. I was determined to brush longer than she was, but she just kept going and going. She was a champion brusher. Well over five minutes. My teeth were literally squeaking and I just gave up."
I share with her my morning encounter with the nose honker/hoarker in the shower beside me. "And then I dropped the soap and it went under the divider, into his shower stall." Jenn is appalled. "I had to reach under with my hand. 'Uh, excuse me, just retrieving my soap bar. Please don't spit on it..."
Jenn reminds me this is why you wear flip-flops in the showers.
We stop in the NZ holiday town of St. Arnaud, located in the Nelson Lake district. The view of Lake Rotoiti and the surrounding mountains reminds us very much of Lake Louise.
From the jetty, we can see long and chubby eels, dozens of them, hiding amongst the grasses in the lake.
The sandflies chase us back to the camper for repellent and then we do a couple of short walks through the forest and around the lake. When we return, we meet a young woman from California playing her ukulele at the edge of the jetty, singing songs from an artist called Ingrid Michaelson. Our west coast companion is a good singer — she plays and sings happily away while I take a dip in the brisk lake water — and we write down Ingrid's name so we can look her up later on iTunes.
We have bought a Lonely Planet book on South America and our Spanish lessons via iPod continue as we drive (we are now on Part II!) so definitely Argentina and perhaps Chile and a few other countries are on our horizon. Tasmania, we still have more to find out about. We did a budget check recently and although NZ is pricey and our travel budget is leaking financial fluid each month, we still have a healthy amount of funds to travel extensively for a while longer. There is no call yet for either of us to return home. In fact, I am surprised we are keeping the Scubby on longer. I had imagined that after two months (maybe even sooner) I would be ready to bail out of the van and sleep in a normal bed, but here we are, arranging to keep it for a few more days and now backtracking through the south island to visit a few more places, get in as much as we can.
The kayak trip seemed to be a turning point — returning to our Scubby after that adventure felt a bit like coming home again. It was easy to resume life on the road and the routine (or lack of it). I have few thoughts about what comes next after all this. South America or Tasmania is as far as I get and even those are not pressing decisions. I figure something will eventually just point us in one direction or the other and off we'll go and start figuring it out.
For the first time in a long time, I am content to just be doing nothing. No projects to validate my self worth. I have urges to write at times, mostly about our adventures and what we're seeing and feeling. Nothing larger than that has come to me, like I thought it might once the clutter of my past life cleared out. Maybe it will later. I'm leaving the space open. I'd love a ukulele, like our California companion, to play music. I haven't watched TV in months. For the first few weeks, I craved an hour of something mindless, but now I don't miss it. I have little sense of what is going on in the world except for the snippets I read on the front pages of papers waiting to pay for gas or groceries. I find asking people we meet what is going on in the world makes a good conversation starter.
I am a bit nervous about traveling to South America, simply because it will be all different. Different language, a different culture. We've had it very easy in NZ, speaking the language and being white people in a white country. This will change. I will be out of my comfort zone again.
But if there is one thing I have learned on this journey so far it is that when I am out of my comfort zone, the best things happen.
We make a return visit to Murchison, having passed this way before on our way to Motueka to meet up for our kayak trip. We treat ourselves to boysenberry and Gold Rush ice cream cones at the town tea room, and then continue on, through more farm land and foothills, to the town of Reefton and from there another 10 K to Slab Hut Creek campsite.
This is gold rush area (thus the ice cream...) In the late 1800's, the inland west coast was full of prospectors, panning and mining for gold. Now the rush is over, but at our DOC campsite located directly beside a creek, gold fossicking is still encouraged. We meet a Dutchman, now New Zealander named Josh from Hawke's Bay, busy by the creekside fossicking for gold using his own self designed filtering methods. It's painstaking work and no one is getting rich. Josh says its more of a meditative process — methodical and repetitive with the underlying potential thrill of finding a big nugget. Over time, he and his wife Janet have uncovered enough gold to fix his wedding band which had worn thin. "Now I'd like to collect enough to make a new ring for her," he says. We later find out that next year marks their fiftieth wedding anniversary — thus the hunt!
He chuckles at the two younger men who show up with electronic sensing gadgets designed to find gold deep in the ground. "Keep those crazy vacuum cleaners away from my area!" he chides them.
After hours of digging and sifting, he's managed to collect a small amount of gold which he adds to his growing collection.
The electronics boys leave empty handed.
