The night Cindy arrived we headed to a backpacker's across the street from a park in Christchurch. All day long they had been setting up hay bales and telephone booth sized plastic boxes. That night, a belligerently drunk me and Cindy headed over to see what the fuss was about. As it turns out it was a peace maze (of course!). At the beginning of the maze you are handed a tiny piece of driftwood with googly eyes pasted on to guide you through your peaceful journey. By station three it becomes obvious that you are in the grasp of some crazy Christians and their idea of a profound experience. They ask you to contemplate your life and write goals (or balls) on tiny magnetic tiles, you walk through a room filled with fake plastic bread covered in fake plastic guns, then you are asked to write things that you feel stressed about and send them through a paper shredder (absolved) and watch as the word (of?) God seems to melt into the ground. I tell you, it was weird and profoundly stupid.
In Kaikoura we camped at a site that narrowly wedged us between the highway and the beach's rocky cliffs, all night we watched headlights pointed straight for us followed closely by the sound of cars whizzing by above our heads.
In Moeraki we walked among the spherical boulders strewn about the beach. Some say they are gifts from god, others say they are dinosaur eggs and some claim beacons left by Martians. There are also theories about volcanoes, but Martians and dinosaurs somehow seem more plausible when ogling giant veiny globes clumped randomly on a beach.
At Shag Point we were literally almost blown away by what must have been 200 mph winds. Cindy actually feared for her life and none of us were brave enough to step close enough to the cliffs edge to catch a glimpse of the sea lions below.
We stayed on the grounds of a burned down insane asylum and found among other things, a beautiful old building filled with rusted cars, a half finished airplane kit, about 3 years worth of discarded recycling and an antique loom covered in scrap wood and rusty metal. The owner who obviously had a fondness for collecting strange items and never ever finishing any of his innumerable projects ran such an immaculately clean and organized hostel that he scolded us for pulling up a chair to the dining room that didn't match the set.
That same guy rented us his “beach house” just outside of Dunedin at St. Clairs. As we drove up the insanely steep street we were faced with a blue box that looked remarkably like a storage container. There were no visible windows and the only clue that it was indeed a place of residence and not a dusty shed to store more of his strange crap was a power box shoddily tacked up in one corner. “It's not much to look at from the outside” he said as we wearily followed him up the steps. Once inside the square room opened up onto gorgeous sea views through century old peaked courthouse windows that he had no doubt had in storage for years before building this architectural masterpiece.
In Dunedin we toured the world famous Cadbury factory and left with visions of horrifically creepy animatronic elves planning insidious chocolaty attacks on the unsuspecting masses.
Near Bluff, the South Island's southernmost tip, we drove past fences covered in hundreds of pairs of shoes, homemade sculptures depicting bizarre, unearthly beings, nonsensical murals and experienced a taste of what it actually means to live at the ends of the earth.
In the tiny crossroad town of Haast we got to eat whitebait fritters, which are patties, literally swimming with hundreds of tiny fish.
At Franz Josef we walked to the terminal of a glacier, which seems like a fairly normal thing to do until you see that it is surrounded by rainforest and less than 15 miles from the beach. We also took a night bush walk to see glowworms, which are the bioluminiscent larva of a gnat that doesn't have a mouth.
Along the road to Greymouth we stopped at the “World's Famous Bushman's Museum” and watched a video of mentally deranged Kiwi's jumping off helicopters to fall on top of and wrestle the deer below (the birth of NZ's thriving venison industry). I also tried to buy a possum pie, but because of the “insane laws governing the meat industry” was technically not allowed to buy possum meat, I could have made a four dollar donation in exchange for a free pie, unfortunately, the bushman himself told me he hadn't caught any possums as of late.
The Pancake Rocks at Punakaiki are a scientific mystery, basically, magnificent layers of sandstone that formed in stacks only to be bored and burrowed through by unforgiving surf.
On the way to drop Cindy off at the airport a black cat darted across the car and I slammed the brakes to avoid hitting the poor thing, twenty minutes later on a windy and dangerous road, we got a flat tire. Coincidence, after the experiences of this month, me thinks not.
