Nomads in New Zealand (part 1)

Arriving at Auckland's international airport put me in mind of our last long-haul flight; from Ottawa to Paris. I don't think I'll ever truly adjust to jetlag, as our first day in Auckland was only slightly less surreal than our first day in Paris after an eight-hour flight. The body rebels, reeling from the mismatch of time and space. It's like your spirit travels at its own pace and gets separated from your body, and the spirit just has to catch up on its own time.

New Zealand has a rigorous environmental security program. When you arrive, you are obliged to fill out a form declaring anything remotely objectionable in the realms of animal, mineral and vegetable. There are bins on your way from the arrival gate that allow you to toss anything you think might get confiscated; there are heavy fines for anything the environmental screeners might find you trying to sneak into the country. There are spot checks and sniffer dogs. It's not actually that big a surprise; to know a bit of New Zealand's history with introduced species, it makes an awful lot of sense that they are being so cautious. We declared anything and everything that we thought might not stand up to scrutiny, but in the end, we didn't have a problem, and we even got to work our shoes onto a special cleaning matt to remove any traces of foreign soil.

Outside the airport, and away from the stress of environmental security, the familiar other-worldliness of jetlag began to creep into the edges of my psyche. In theory, we should have been fine: we boarded the plane near the end of the day in Bangkok, had a period of darkness on the plane, and got off the plane around noon in Auckland. To look at it on paper, it more or less resembled a day. But the body knows differently, and lets you know about it. For me it just comes in the form of an insistent, subconscious demand: YOU WILL SLEEP NOW.

A few phone calls and a bus ride took us to the Oaklands Lodge, a hostel in a suburb outside of Auckland. It was a fair adjustment to pay seemingly outrageous prices for room and board; we weren't in Nepal any more. But the place was nice and friendly, and perfect for collapsing in a heap at three in the afternoon and sleeping solidly for seven hours.

We had figured out on the plane coming over that we wanted to adjust our schedule in New Zealand and Australia slightly; instead of spending two months in each country, we would spend three months in New Zealand, and one month in Australia. Both countries have so much to offer: there was just no way we would be able to see everything we wanted to see in Australia in two months. By contrast, you can see a lot of New Zealand in three months. The only question that remained was how we were going to see it. There were essentially two options: going with a tour, or going under our own power. While a tour is the most efficient way to go, there are all the limitations involved with it. Little choice about where and when, and they were also quite expensive. Going on our own meant getting our own wheels, and in that respect we could rent or buy a campervan, which as well as giving you the freedom to go where you want, saves you a lot of money on accomodations and food, as you can cook your own meals.

After crunching the numbers, we decided to see what we could buy in the second-hand backpacker van markets. Given that we were going to travel for about two months, we would be looking at spending about the same if not less money than on a rental, and if we sold it to someone else, had a good chance of getting our money back. Essentially, in the worse case scenario we could leave it on the side of the road at the end and be no worse off than if we had rented. In the best case, our cost of travel would basically be free, less the cost of petrol.

We quickly discovered we were in a great situation as buyers, which drove us more towards a decision to buy. The tourist season was ending with the end of summer, and people that had been travelling in campervans were now selling; many more than people that were buying. So we had our pick of a large selection of vans, and we decided to be very picky. We wanted something with automatic transmission, so we could both drive; we wanted diesel rather than petrol for the cheaper fuel. We wanted something relatively new so we wouldn't constantly be worrying about something going wrong. We saw many vans, met many couples trying to sell, felt badly when we figured out we couldn't help them out. One couple became quite desperate; their flight leaving in six hours, stuck with a van they couldn't sell, the guy told me I could have it for a thousand dollars. But it just wasn't what we wanted, and as the old adage goes, if it looks too good to be true...

Our van, nicknamed P.B. - Pinot Blanc.

After a week of biding our time and adjusting to New Zealand, we finally chanced upon a newer vehicle, a 1996 Ford Econovan, equipped with just about everything you could think of for a cross-country adventure. We decided to go for it, and bargained a great deal. Within the next two days we had bought a few extra things, a few days of groceries, and set off. The Ford was a manual transmission that ran on petrol: in other words, exactly the opposite of what we had been looking for. But as a 1996 model, it was actually one of the newest vans we had seen, which meant we would have an edge when it came to selling it in two-and-a-half months' time. Seeing the misery that some sellers were experiencing, we knew we wanted all the help we could get when it came time to sell.

Our road trip itinerary was pretty wide open, in my opinion, the best itinerary you can get for a road trip. In case you don't know the general geography of New Zealand (which was us when we got there), the country consists of two islands: north and south, separated by a four-hour ferry ride on the Cook strait. As New Zealand approaches the winter months, the south island gets colder than the north, so we decided that we would make a relatively quick pace to go south, and then head back north at a more relaxed pace.

The day of our departure from Auckland was a bit chaotic, and we set off later than expected; in the end we made our destination for the night a campground about three hours to the east of the city, in the Kauranga valley. It was definitely a trial by fire for us both, with me as driver and Amy as navigator: not having driven since France, on an unfamiliar side of the road, again with manual transmission, in a van that drove like a bus (well, maybe not a bus, but bigger than the mid-size cars I was used to). As if that wasn't enough, there was a constant clanging coming from the back of the van that we couldn't immediately identify; and just as we were getting used to the drive, the sun went down and plunged us into darkness just as we left the major highway and entered the very rural backwater. The campground was ten kilometers down a narrow gravel road that twisted and turned, climbed and dived, and caused the clanging in the back to turn into a full-on scrap metal cacophany. By the time we pulled into the campground, our nerves were shot. But we made it.

The next day was spent sorting out the contents of the van to see what we had purchased. Boxes and bins of all kinds of bits and pieces; blankets, pillows, fishing gear, a cooking stove (the source of the rattle, and easily muffled) and propane tank, tent, sleeping bag, books, maps, everything. By the time we had reorganized everything into a way we could actually find things, it was noon. So began our new schedule, dictated by the sun and the moon. Because we didn't want to risk the car's battery by keeping the interior lights on, when the sun went down, that was essentially the end of the day. And because we would go to sleep relatively early, we would be wide awake an hour before the sun would rise. We did look into other options to give us some light to read by: battery-powered lights, rechargeable and not, but they were essentially not worth the effort and cost in batteries. In the end we found some great candles, which not only warmed up the van in the cold south, but gave a very cozy light.

The way out of the campground was much easier to navigate by daylight without the clanging, and so, we made our way eastwards towards the northeastern coast of the northern island. I figure the whole of our trip has, in a way, prepared me for driving in New Zealand. Driving in France introduced me to roundabouts and re-introduced me to the mysteries of manual transmission. Driving in the French alps with Mary and the Ardeche with Ronna steeled me to seeing perilous drop-offs out the car windows, breakneck turns and narrow roads. Driving in India acquainted me with unusual road obstacles and hazardous weather conditions. Even so, none of it really prepared me for what we were to drive through in New Zealand.

New Zealand is essentially a mountain range running north to south through both islands. People say that the south is more mountainous than the north; but to my perception, they're both chalk full of mountains. To make a road across and around the country, you would follow the path of least resistance, where it is easiest to construct said road. The end result of this is a road which is constantly turning left and right, up and down. You are never bored when driving these roads, which are helpfully signed with the appropriate speed to make the turns. While the speed limit for main highway roads is 100 kilometres per hour, the speed on curves averages around thirty, and at some points, fifteen. You'll climb up a mountain side, switching back and forth up a road, only to drive down the other side. The engine temperature will rise dramatically as you spend twenty minutes climbing, and then you can effectively put the car in neutral and coast downwards for the next twenty as you ride down the other side. You feel like you are rarely heading towards your destination. And to top it all off, the countryside is just so interesting to look at.

We began to tell people, when they asked us for our impressions of NZ, that the nature of New Zealand is very similar to Canada: it's just compressed into a tiny island-sized package. Every ten kilometres or so, the countryside completely changes. One minute, you're driving through a gorge, twisting and turning perilously; the next minute, you've entered a plain, stretching wide open for kilometres. Meadows of sheep will graze next to meadows of cows, and in the background will be a forest of coniferous trees, shooting up in the incredibly fertile soil to fuel a rich lumber trade. In the rich pasture lands, you see impossibly lush green hills, rolling into the distance, so pudgy the look like moss-covered balls of play dough.

Sunset over Napier's coastline.

Crossing the north island towards the east through the twisting-turning gorge, we emerged onto the coast at Tauranga, which gave us our first view of the Bay of Plenty. The road followed alongside the water (rising and falling, but not turning so much). As an Ontario boy, it's uncommon for me to see a body of water that goes on over the horizon. Our driving took us through Whakatane and Opotiki, normally bustling towns whose tourist trade was waning from the end of the season. From there we wound our way towards Gisborne and Napier, regions famed for their grapes and vineyards. We actually over-indulged a bit with the region's grapes, so we didn't sample as many vineyards as we might have liked, but from what we tried, we very much enjoyed. As we stopped for the night on our way, we began to learn the ropes with what the locals call "freedom camping" - essentially, finding a place out of the way to stop, closing the curtains and hoping no one would mind. No one did. Napier was an excellent place for freedom camping, the local city council actually setting aside a small space of land looking out onto the ocean for the motorhome set to park on for two nights and then move on. It was the windiest night I've ever spent, the van rocking on its wheels, the wind howling and the waves crashing. I slept like a baby.

We visited "opportunity shops" as we drove cities and towns on our way, looking for little things to make our van more comfortable. After months on the road with just our packs and fragmented possessions, it was an opportunity to spread out, and be reminded of what it's like to have a place to keep your things. Our previously loved acquisitions were small but significant: a lid for a pot, a new sweater of infamous New Zealand merino wool, a new teapot. After drinking one too many glasses of wine out of plastic mugs, we lucked out at a wine shop, who sold us some fancy Spiegelau glasses for a pittance because they had actually just taken over the shop, and couldn't access the store's computer.

As we pressed further south to tour that island before the onset of winter, we passed through Carterton, the defacto paua shell producer for New Zealand. Paua shell is that distinctively irridescent, rainbow-hued shell that adorns much of the jewellery that comes from the country. It's harvested from a clam-like sea creature (the Paua) by hand, with a carefully-regulated code of conduct for the skin divers who pluck them from the sea bed. It's actually illegal to use any kind of SCUBA equipment to harvest them, as a few years of over-harvesting dwindled the numbers of Paua to dangerous levels. But now with these regulations the Paua is flourishing and business is booming. After they're brought up from the sea, there's a long process of sanding and cutting, polishing and perfecting, to produce a dozen or so pieces that are sculpted into various forms of jewellery. Amy found several raw pieces that will undoubtedly make unique items when we return.

From Carterton we drove the next day to Wellington, to catch the Bluebridge ferry to the south island. These ferries are massive ships, capable of taking thousands of passengers and dozens of cars at a time, with multiple levels, cafes, lounges and even a movie theatre. As it's a four-hour crossing, it can get pretty boring, and there are a variety of things to keep you occupied. Apparently if the wind gets choppy enough the ferry can get stranded on heaving waves until it's safe to dock; fortunately, this didn't happen to us. We stayed out on the deck, watching the land retreat until the wind made it too chilly, and then spent the rest of the time below decks, waiting for our arrival onto the South Island.

Notes from Nepal

Kathmandu was covered in a thick blanket of clouds when the plane began its descent into the airport, which obscured the haze of pollution that usually covers the city. After de-planing (which I don't think is a real verb), the first order of business was buying our tourist visas, conveniently available at the airport. The visa is sold for the equivalent of thirty dollars U.S. per person, payable in a variety of different currencies - but, cash only. The purchase of the visa was the first example of old-school bureaucracy I would see in Nepal: three guys were required to process the visa. One took the cash and issued a receipt, the next recorded the details into a book, and the third pasted the visa into the passport. What would seem like a simple process took us nearly twenty minutes of standing in lines, for reasons I couldn't fathom. But once the visa was issued, we were free to travel as we liked through non-restricted areas of Nepal for the next three months.

We picked up our bags from the baggage carousel and made our way to the exit; we were well-advised that there would be a gaggle of taxi drivers, hotel touts and tour operators, waiting to help us find ways to part with our money, but even with this knowledge in mind, I would compare it to a frontal assault when we left the airport doors. Within seconds we were surrounded, people pushing flyers towards us of their remarkable hotels, telling us how they could take us there for just a look. It seemed a well-practised routine, and you could tell who had more experience than others: some guys spoke a little louder and a little more forcefully than the rest. It just became surreal for me and I realized that regardless of how loudly and convincingly they spoke, we were still the ones with the power here, and I started to flex it. While joking with them over the absolute absurdity of their onslaught, I told them they had to step back behind a certain line (which they all did). I think for them, it was a bit of a game, as they would joke with each other in Nepali when one would start reducing his price to try and win us over. In the end we took a chance on a place, agreeing to pay a dollar for the car ride over there, regardless of whether we stayed or not.

The car in question was an older model of Toyota Corolla - one might call it vintage - in surprisingly good shape. Driving in India had prepared us for driving in Nepal - no seat belts, loose traffic rules, et cetera. On our way to the hotel, the Pilgrim's Guest House, we got a few lessons in Nepali, which while similar to Hindi (the prominent language of India) is notably different in the ways that matter. But since Indian television programs are so prominent throughout Nepal, everyone can understand Hindi to some degree.

The Pilgrim's Guest House turned out to be acceptable for our needs; we ended up staying there for the duration of our four-day stay in Kathmandu. The hotel is on the northern edge of the city district called Thamel, otherwise known as the tourist district. It's called the tourist district for good reason; the real estate is taken up almost solely by hotels, restaurants, pubs and outdoor shops, and only tourists have the necessary money to be able to afford to stay there. This may seem surprising when you consider that a moderately cushy hotel room can be had for five U.S. dollars per day, and something quite lux can be found for fifteen. It certainly gives you an idea of the relative economies at play here, and how Nepal is very much on the poorer scale.

Meditation on the rooftops of Kathmandu.

The city seems to want so hard to be taken seriously as a modern city, but lacks the infrastructure necessary to see this end. A small shop will have a hand-painted sign declaring itself a supermarket, while their selection of goods will be far from super. Credit cards are taken only in high-end establishments, and then, only when the phones are working; there are established blackouts in the city to reduce strain on the power grid; there are no street signs. They're proud of their city, tolerant of the traffic jams and the pollution, the noise and the bustle. The city sprawls for kilometres, with buildings seemingly constructed on top of one another, and small shack-like huts are built in the cracks in-between. It's the kind of place that's very hard to take in all at once, as there is just so much of it. Buildings are decaying, but despite the cracked facade, the Nepalis that live here are very frugal and efficient with their buildings. Water is all heated by the sun, for example.

Kathmandu has an undeniable charm, if you can see past the grimey exterior. Unlike Delhi, or any of the big cities we've visited for that matter, the people here don't seem to live here solely to make money. There is no doubt that the culture of the west has a huge influence on the culture of the city and its inhabitants: the dress is western, and few people wear obvious Nepali styles, except the older Newari men who wear traditional brimless caps. And it's only in Kathmandu that you'll see women riding scooters by themselves.

We knew that we wanted to go on a trek in Nepal; it's one of the most popular activities in Nepal, and for good reason. With few paved highways to connect the mountain villages, the walking trails have been highly developed to support the foot and animal traffic that transports goods from town to town. We spent the time in Kathmandu preparing for our trek, hiring a guide and porter from the Sherpa Trekking Cooperative, and organizing a tour that would take us from Pokhara, a small city six hours from Kathmandu, and around the Annapurna Sanctuary for seventeen days. At the end of the trek we would fly back to Pokhara from the mountain town of Jomsom.

In preparation, we decided that we needed a few warm clothes: some fleece layers, in particular. We didn't have to look far: about as far as you could sling a cat. Trekking being the number one pastime for foreign tourists visiting Nepal, Kathmandu is busting at the seems with outdoor shops. The prices for boots, sweaters, jackets, tents, sleeping bags, you name it, are ridiculously cheap compared to what you'd pay back home. But the reason for this is that the goods are locally made, and logos are sewn on with a such a high level of quality it's hard to tell a fake from a legitimate product. The most highly copied items are items with The North Face logo: but the quality is almost as good, so for the use of a few weeks, it's definitely worth the price, which you inevitably reduce with some simple bargaining. Every shopowner will profess that his items are the real deal, but something usually gives it away: most often, a tag with a logo that's different than what's emblazoned on the front.

The other big business in Kathmandu (if not all of Asia, it seems) is the sale of pirated DVD movies. They're available by the boxload, for the equivalent of about two dollars per movie. We bought a few to see if they were created by someone taking a videocamera into the movie theatre; but no, the quality was just as good as any regular DVD. The surprising part was the selection: movies that hadn't even hit theatres yet were available, and even movies that were never to see the light of day in North America. The best example was an Al Pacino movie I'd never heard of: the description on the back of the label had obviously been typed up by the DVD pirate, who went on to criticize the movie in such terms I wondered if anyone would ever buy it.

After a few days of acclimatizing to Kathmandu, including a bout of carbon monoxide poisoning from the horrible pollution, the day of our trek finally arrived. We started in the dark hours of the morning with a walk to the bus terminal for six hours of bumpy roads towards Pokhara. We met our guide, Bhakta, and our porter Padam and strolled the dark and hazy city streets towards our bus stop. Even in the early hours there was a visible presence in the city, a simmering of activity as it began to stir itself awake. Reaching our bus, our bags were strapped to the roof and we began a lazy trundling towards Pokhara. It's only about one hundred kilometres to Pokhara, but with the poor condition of the winding, climbing roads, the age of the bus, and the need for rest stops, it takes a long time to get anywhere. There's not much to say about the bus ride other than it was relatively comfortable, the scenery was very impressive with the large, terraced hills and deep river valleys spanned by suspension foot bridges. Our experience was marred only by the passing of one overturned bus, who had probably overturned as a result of trying to overtake on a poor road. The passengers simply waited alongside the bus, drinking tea and waiting for another mode of transportation to come and continue their journey.

We had set up a hotel reservation in Pokhara so that we had a place to stash our extra baggage while we trekked, and a place to sleep when we got back. Arriving in Pokhara, we weren't met by the taxi as promised by the hotel, so we caught another one and swung by the hotel to drop off our stuff, and continue on to Phedi, the trailhead into the Annapurna Sanctuary. We didn't get much of an impression of Pokhara at the time, other than it was small and manageable, and a pleasant lake meandered through it. We were focussed on the trek at hand.

Phedi is one of those "blink-or-you'll-miss-it" hamlets whose claim to fame is being one of three starting locations for a trek into the Annapurna sanctuary (so named for the protected wilderness area surrounding the highest peak in the area). When we arrived, we spent a few minutes getting ourselves ready for walking, and in those minutes we were offered walking sticks, bottles of water, extra porters and food for the road. Unfortunately, we came prepared and couldn't drop any money on an area which could probably have used it. We started to trek.

Our first day, or at least, the remains of the first day, were spent just getting to the next town on the route, called Damphus. This involved an ascent up switchback stairs of around four hundred metres. Yes, stairs - made out of rock slabs, but stairs nonetheless. Several dispatches ago, when I first mentioned the phrase "trekking in Nepal," if you had any flights of fancy that our trek would involve machetes, abseiling and zip lines, I'm afraid you're going to be a bit disappointed. Thirty years ago, getting around the Jomsom trail probably was a "real" trek: today, it's evolved for the convenience of the people the trekking route serves. We're only visitors. The trails' true purposes are for trade and transport, and a lot of effort has gone into making it easier to get around. A road through the mountainous area has been historically impractical; it's comparatively easier and cheaper to strap four hundred pounds of goods to human or animal porters and send it around from place to place.

But I digress. Our trip up the Damphus hill was pretty slow, as Bhakta had decreed we would ascend "slowly, slowly" in order to let him gauge our pace, as well as to get used to walking on the trail. We didn't complain, and had our first view of the scenery we would be seeing for the next seventeen days. From midway up the hill, we looked down into the whole lush Pokhara valley, large rolling hills carved into farming terraces, shrouded in mist in the far distance.

We arrived in Damphus a few hours later, to stay at our first lodge. You basically have two options when you trek through Nepal: you can camp along the route in your tent, or you can sleep in lodges. No one camps on the Jomsom trek, as there are so many lodges, and the towns are only a couple of hours' walk apart, so there isn't much free space available to camp in, even if you wanted to. But on other treks, or off the beaten path, it's the only option, and it's fairly complicated: you could do it on your own, but for the money, it's much more viable to hire a fleet of porters and gear. Our trek, however, was not one of these: it was lodges all the way for us, and I can't say I minded that at all.

I can't remember the name of our first lodge, but it was probably "The Damphus Inn" or something to that effect. Staying in lodges is cheap compared to staying in the city, but you're expected to eat dinner there, which is where the real money is - especially if you like to drink. As you trek higher into the mountains, prices ascend proportionally and choice thins out. Our guidebook mentioned that it can be terribly bad form to sleep one place and eat someplace else: this can see your room rate jacked up, or even get turfed out in the middle of the night. The one saving grace was that we were trekking in the low season, so we never had a problem finding a place to stay, or getting a good deal on room and board.

The sun set at around seven o'clock, and the power was out, so dinner was held around candles in a very dark dining hall. One thing that we never got used to was the fact that non-Nepali guests have their orders prepared first, and then the Nepali guides and porters retire to the kitchen to eat. With limit cooking resources, it's just the way it is: there are only so many burners in the kitchen with which to make food. By the time eight o'clock rolled around, it was pitch black and there wasn't much else to do but go to sleep. I found our daily schedule would change completely, and be very much tied to the movements of the sun

Sunrise over Damphus.

We awoke the next morning to a magnificent sunrise at around six o'clock; this is the kind of thing postcards are made from. The sun reflected off the mountains in the distance, the Annapurna range, in a pastel collection of pinks and oranges. It was a sunrise worth getting up early for, and to be honest, it raised the bar pretty high for sunrises. We learned later that this is one of the best reasons for starting a trek in Phedi and spending the night in Damphus, as with other routes, you have to spend a couple of days trekking before you get to a location high enough to see the surrounding mountains. And really, that's what makes trekking so special - the mountains, looming in the distance.

These are some massive peaks we're talking about here: this it the country of Mount Everest (or, Sagarmatha, as its known in Nepali), and Annapurna isn't much smaller. At around eight thousand metres, we weren't going to be climbing it, but just getting to the base camp for mountaineering would require us to get to four thousand, one hundred metres. The Annapurna Base Camp is affectionately referred to as the "ABC" - its acronym.

After breakfast, we settled up our bill and hit the trail for our next destination, Landruk. Bhakta was be careful not to have us walking to far in a single day, and I didn't mind the pace as I managed to stop us every fifteen minutes or so to see something that had to have its photograph taken. However, as the days were to wear on, I would find that we probably could have handled a tougher trek.

As we walk, I find that Bhakta isn't one to chat; I suspect it's because he's not comfortable with his level of English. When we do talk, it's mostly to do with a little local history or what we can expect over the next hill. Padam, while very friendly, doesn't speak any English, which makes any attempt at conversation a bit frustrating and mostly restricted to pantomiming and hand signals.

We figured out quickly we were going to be getting a lot of exercise in this trek. Because this area of Nepal is so mountainous, there are very few parts of the trek which are flat for a very long time. Consequently, walking involves going up a lot, and then going down a lot. You don't go at a very fast pace, but your legs get a different workout depending on whether you're going up or down. I know this because at the end of each day a different set of muscles would do the complaining.

The road to Landruk, as I recall, wasn't composed of a lot of up or down, but varying bits of both to small degrees. While Nepal is a temperate country it still gets quite cool in the mornings and evenings, so we start off in full fleeces and jackets, and as the day goes on, we strip down layers until we're in our shirtsleeves.

Sunrise over Landruk.

Landruk has only a handful of lodges, so we choose one and hang out there while it rains a bit. We chat with some other trekkers for a while, but it seems as the sun sets and after dinner is eaten, there's little to do but head for bed. The next morning we are again rewarded with a stunning sunrise, which led into breakfast, getting everything packed up again for travel, and then back onto the trekking trail.

Our initial intentions were to head steadily north towards the Annapurna Base Camp, however, reports were trickling in from trekking groups heading south that there was snow in the range, and that we weren't likely to get that far. Hoping for a little luck and a change in weather, we persevered onwards towards our next destination, Chomrong.

Five hours of "Nepali flat" later, and we arrive in Chomrong. "Nepali flat" is a longstanding joke from Nepalis to foreigners - it means a lot of up and down. Chomrong is a small hamlet - more of a collection of houses, really - that exists at a crossroads from three directions. Our lodge was warm and hospitable, and we met another trekking couple from the UK there - Gavin and Jade. Jade was, unfortunately, suffering from what we assume to be giardiaisis, a nasty bug which turns your intestines into knots. You catch it by drinking untreated water, and while it's treatable from widely available medicines, you have to have the foresight to consider that you might get sick, and bring some with you; something which they didn't do, and as it happened, something we didn't do either. We were lucky; Jade wasn't, and the indications were that they would probably be calling their trek to an end shorter than planned.

But for us, it's another morning of a stunning sunrise, breakfast, packing up and setting out. The reports are in, and it's snow to the north - lots of it. Five feet. So much so, that the lodge owners are closing up shop for a few weeks to let the stuff melt out, which means for us, we're not going to make it to the base camp. It's a bit disappointing, but it does mean that we have some extra days to spend, and we don't have to rush anywhere. We elect instead to turn south and head towards Gandruk, the largest settlement in the area and home to the Gurung ethnic group (that is to say, the majority of people that live there are descended from the Gurungs).

I've struggled to find the time to write this dispatch, so I'm going to just post it to ensure that something gets posted rather than thinking we've dropped off the face of the earth. Before signing off, I'll leave you with the rules for a great card game that Bhakta taught us, called "Dal Mara," which in Nepali, means "the Killer."

It's a four-player trick-taking game, with two teams of two; team members sit diagonally opposite from each other. The goal of the game is for one team to win the tricks that contain the "ten" cards. The dealer deals out the entire deck, counter-clockwise (in Nepal, this is the norm) in a slightly irregular fashion; to the first player, you deal three cards, then a fourth face-up, then the fifth. The fourth card determines what suit will be trump for the round. After that, the dealer deals five cards to the remaining three players, then four cards each, then another four cards each (or, whatever number strikes the dealer's fancy; Bhakta would sometimes deal three, then three, then two); it seems the cards just should be dealt in groups.

In this game, the two is the lowest value card, and the ace is the highest value card. The ten, while the key to winning the game, is only more powerful than the nine, and less powerful than the jack.

Two conditions will force a re-dealing: either the dealer has no trump cards, or one person has all the ten cards. If either of these are the case, the cards are re-dealt.

The player to the dealer's right commences play, and cards are laid by the players in a counter-clockwise direction. Players must follow suit, unless they don't have any cards of the suit, in which case they can lay trump or any other card, except a non-trump ten. The only time they can lay a card in this situation is when they have no other choice.

There is also a seemingly optional rule that a player must play a card higher in sequence than the one previously laid. If you don't have a more powerful card

Since the objective of the game is for you and your partner to win the tricks where tens are played, it's not always important to win for the sake of winning. For example, if three cards are played: 6 of spades, 8 of spades, jack of spades, and the fourth player has no spades, he or she doesn't necessarily need to play a trump card to win if they don't want to. Since there isn't a ten in the mix, there won't be an advantage to winning the trick, unless it's to take the opportunity to lead.

It's also a popular strategy to lead an ace so that your partner can put down a ten of the same suit, if they've got it, because nothing but trump can beat an ace. Dangerous to do, of course, if the suit's been played out a bit and it's likely someone has run out and can play trump.

The game ends when one team wins the tricks containing the tens, but this really only happens with luck and good tactics. More often, at least one ten will be won by both teams. If one team wins only one ten, they must deal the next round; if both teams win two tens, the one with the least tricks must deal the next round.

And if you want to play it like the Nepalis play, each trick you have to throw down your card with an oath-like protestation. I can't remember what they actually said, but it translated to "what do you think of that!" and "get out of my hand."

Andrew and Amy in the Ardeche

After a short train ride from Chambery and a longer bus ride from Valence, we arrived after sunset in the small french town of Les Vans. We had traded emails with Ronna and Honoré leading up to our arrival - on our part, we had to tell them about our incredible coincidence that Mary, a former WWOOF participant on their farm, was none other than my cousin, and for theirs, to tell us that a movie that they were interested in was playing that night in Les Vans, and would we be interested in seeing it?

A neat beginning to our WWOOF experience: start it off with a movie. In this case, "Indigènes", an award-winning world war two drama concerning the experience of Algerian soldiers fighting under the French flag to purge France of the German occupation. An excellent and suspenseful movie, it also had a blessed amount of subtitling to translate the Algerian spoken by the lead characters into French. My french is good enough to get by, but when they spoke quickly, in accents and colloquially, I was lost. With subtitles, I could comprehend it much more easily.

Ronna and Honoré make an interesting couple. They've raised two daughters, both out of the house: one recently married, and having started a farm of her own out in the Alps. Honoré is the quiet one, generous with his opinions to his friends but to those he doesn't know, conservative with his comments. During our first week, we didn't get much conversation out of Honoré; in addition, his accent is so different from what I'm used to I really went more by instinct than anything when it came to properly interpreting his instructions when it came to farm-related activities. There were more than a few times I had misinterpreted. He also doesn't speak English: not a bit. Honoré has no fondness for technology: doesn't concern himself with cellphones, computers or new cars.

Honoré's truck is a well-loved Ford pickup with absolutely no automatic anything. The seats bounce around during a trip, the passenger door must be opened from the inside, and the dash is a veritable workshop of miscellaneous tools and implements you might need when driving around farming properties. The sides of the cargo area can be unlocked and swing down to make it easier to load things in and out, and when I pointed out that one of the mechanisms wasn't actually secured by the bolts, he shrugged and showed me how it could be wedged to work just fine. What will stick with me about Honoré is his capacity to put things in the easiest form to understand: perhaps this is from dealing with the sixty-plus WWOOFers they've had over the years. He doesn't waste a lot of time explaining something and tends to show you how to do it rather than talk you through it. Sometimes it worked with us: sometimes, it didn't, but in the end, we figured it out.

In many ways, Ronna is the complete opposite to Honoré. She's vibrant and talkative, with a quick wit and a gift for telling stories that are rich with detail. In fact most of her stories begin with her saying "and the story with that is...", which led me to tease her a bit about it. And then we developed a great conversation about the ways people from different countries speak, how people begin sentences, and how they fill silences. It's actually quite interesting if you think about it: how many times do you say "uh" in a sentence when your brain is thinking of the right thing to say next? Or do you just ramble on until your brain catches up?

Communication became a key issue during our stay because there were a few things we managed to do incorrectly, however (I think) none were so grave that they were major setbacks or things that couldn't be done again, correctly. It's a tricky thing to be a WWOOF host; you aren't paying the volunteer, so you can't just fire them or dock their pay if they mess up. You basically work with what you get. And because most volunteers only stay for a week, how much time do you spend explaining a task to ensure it's done properly? Do you over-explain and spend more time than it takes to do the task, or under-explain and hope the volunteer figures it out? Or hope that they'll have the sense to ask questions to clarify?

And as a volunteer, the same quandaries exist: you don't want to come off as slow or stupid by asking a continuous stream of questions, when you want to be working, but at the same time, you don't want to risk getting it wrong. Ronna and I had this conversation a couple of times, which reminded Ronna of a conversation she'd had with previous WWOOFers, who described a previous farm they'd visited. Before they arrived, they received in the mail a questionnaire from the WWOOF host farm, asking them some questions in order to figure out what they can do. While Ronna thought it was a good idea, it would take a fair amount of effort. In her mind, she'd just ask one question:

Your WWOOF host gives you a task to do, and goes off to do something else. You start to do the task, then realize something that you hadn't thought to ask when the host was describing what to do. Do you:

a) Keep going, doing the task as best as you understood the instructions as described.
b) Stop working, track down the host and ask them to clarify the task.
c) Stop working, and wait for the host to return to clarify the task.
d) Cry.

So after our initial cinematic introductions, we headed back to the farm. The drive back to the farm from Les Vans takes about a half an hour, and as the movie had ended around eleven-thirty, we were driving back in pitch black. You would have thought that driving with Mary for a week would have put us at ease when it came to driving in the mountains: this was not the case that first night. I remarked at the sharpness of Ronna's turns as she drove the car out of Les Vans, and wondered if it was a hallmark of how the car drove. But as we wound our way onto the mountain roads that lead to their farm, charmingly known as Le Soulier, I quickly realized why her turns were sharp.

The roads hug the sides of the mountains, which makes them all curvy. Typically, you'll encounter small bridges every couple of hundred metres, linking one mountain road to the next. Most bridges have solid walls that would probably stop a car careening off the road into the gorge waiting below: some have tiny flags implanted into the bitumen showing where the new bridge wall was going to be built, the last having been swept away in a torrential storm, and you should be wary of the edge. In truth, it was probably better that it was pitch black that first drive home, as we couldn't see just how far down the base of the mountain was from the side of the road that we travelled. Again, for Ronna or Honoré, regardless of who was driving, they've lived there a long time: for Honoré, all his life, and the roads are just roads. For the new visitor, it's a white knuckle roller coaster ride, and you're not even going that fast. It just feels like you are. Couple this with the fact that the roads are just wide enough to fit two cars, in some places; for most of the roads, when you get far enough out of the way, the road can accommodate one-and-a-half cars. So if you meet someone, you have to stop, and someone has to back up enough to get to a point where two cars can pass each other.

It wasn't until much later on in our visit that I realized, during a drive somewhere, that my eyes would be glued to the road, even during conversation, with the completely irrational belief that if I took my eyes away from it, something horrendous might happen. There we were, passing panoramic vistas, gorges, and an impressive hydroelectric power dam, and where were my eyes? Glued out the front window. I don't think I really adjusted to those roads.

A little about Ronna and Honoré's farm, Le Soulier. The main household is a collection of buildings, well over a hundred years old, that's been in Honoré's family for generations. The buildings are all built of stone, which being up in the mountains, is in bounteous supply. The main and most-frequented area of the house is the living room, which houses a hearth and fireplace the likes of which I've never seen: the fireplace takes up an entire wall, such that you can place huge logs onto the fire. Indeed, Honoré was not satisfied with the efficient, steady fires I would gravitate to: he'd happily add a eight-foot long tree trunk (or three) to the fire, put the bellows to it, and give it a satisfied grunt.

The property is surrounded by stacked terraces on which grow a variety of different trees, but for the most part, different varieties of chestnut. When I say stacked terraces I need to step back and explain a bit more, as I don't think I'd have understood what that meant if someone were just to drop that term on me. I guess farming on a mountain has its own set of challenges, the first of which is that it's a constant struggle to get up and down the mountain. Creating access roads is one thing (ie., with switchbacks) but if you don't do something about how the land forms on the mountain, everything that falls off a tree just tumbles down the mountain.

So, what you do is scoop out large tracks of land and dump the soil below. You then use the stones you find, or bring around, to build hefty retaining walls to make sure the soil doesn't gravitate back to the slope to which it would be accustomed. At least, this is the scenario I created in my head for how these immense rock walls, holding back level sections of earth, came to be. I boggle at the amount of labour that would have been required to create all the terraces you see when you wander through the area: not just Ronna and Honoré's farm, but everyone's farm, and the roads: everything has been cordoned off with these carefully constructed rock walls. It certainly didn't get that way by accident. Luckily, being in the mountains, there are plenty of rocks to find.

Ronna and Honoré also have gardens of different plants, fields sown with varieties of crops, apple and peach trees, grapevines, and are even graced by surprise mushroom explosions. In short, they have lots of things to harvest, and no shortage of things to keep them busy. In addition to the everyday tasks directly related to the management of the fruits and vegetables, they also spend a lot of time preparing their yield for sale at either a wholesaler or at a weekly market in Les Vans. Tantalized by the advance knowledge from Mary that Ronna and Honoré produce wine, Amy and I thought we might finally get a chance to try out our secaters, but alas, harvesting grapes was not to be our task while we were there: that had been done earlier in September (probably while we were trying to do the same thing in the Loire). No, our task would be picking chestnuts.

It was perhaps auspicious that during our visit to Maggie and Sandy in Ireland, we would happen across a chestnut tree that had produced some nuts. Before that, the sum total of my knowledge of chestnuts was that there is a song that begins by roasting them over an open fire. In fact, Amy and I tried that once, and were not captivated by the results. No, I knew nothing about chestnuts. This would change.

A chestnut grows to maturity, protected from the world in a hard, spikey shell called a bogue. When the nuts ripen the bogues fall to the ground and split open (or split open and fall to the ground. I don't know which, as the bogues were all off the trees when we got there). In a really well-developed chestnut bogue, there are three nuts side-by-side. More often, the nuts have already fallen out of the bogue. Then they fall into the crevices of the land, are covered by leaves and twigs, and become generally hidden.

Enter the work, and it's simple enough: find the chestnuts, dig them out of the bogues if necessary, and drop them into buckets. Fill a bucket, and pour it into a burlap sack. Heft the sack into the truck. Of course, there are some twists. The first being that not all chestnuts are good for consumption: worms get at them. The more obvious examples have big holes in them and crush easily, however, some you can't see and look just fine. For this reason all the chestnuts that are brought from the fields are dumped into large tanks of water, and left to sit there for around two weeks. The water purifies the chestnuts, and the ones which aren't good float to the top.

The next trick is to get around the terraces without putting too many of the bogue spikes into your knees, legs and hands. Because they're everywhere, you can't really sit anywhere that you haven't brushed clear, so you end up stooped over for most of the time you're out there. I thank Amy's mother for getting us very good gardening gloves in preparation for our WWOOF visit, as they were great protection from the bogue picks, but that didn't stop us from getting more than a couple in our fingers.

On some of the terraces, Honoré had laid out great green nets for the bogues and nuts to fall into, and with a bit of twisting and throwing action, all the nuts fall into a convenient pile to be collected. As Amy was quick to note, it was like hunting for Easter eggs, and especially satisfying to find a whole cache of nuts waiting for you.

Of the times that I was on my own collecting chestnuts with Honoré, he would sometimes tell me not to collect nuts from a certain area, because they were, as he would put it succinctly, "pas bon" (not good). It took me a while of puzzling over how he could tell the difference; they certainly looked like the other nuts, but hey, I only work here, so if they're pas bon, that's was good enough for me. To this day I have not got the keen eye for finding a good chestnut from a bad one, but I have figured out enough that it depends a lot on the tree they dropped from. Some trees are better than others, I suppose. As well, there are indicators of quality that can be ascertained by just looking it over carefully. I will leave that to the experienced professionals.

Editor's note: Ronna sent an email to help clarify this and other points, and she comments on the chestnuts:

A bit of information: the chestnut trees (as all fruit trees) are grafted: some varieties are more tasty than others, or a particular variety may be the ones we need to be gathering for a particular sale, etc. Also, there are trees around (like behind the house) which we didn't get around to grafting and those are definitely "pas bon du tout"!

Once you've collected a sizeable number of chestnuts, it turns out there are a bunch of things you can do with them other than roast them over an open fire. You can turn them into jam, flour, or bottle them whole with spices or without. There are different varieties of chestnuts, of which Ronna and Honoré have several, and are quite proud of the work they do.

One memory that will always stick with me is the sound of jets breaking the sound barrier on a daily basis as the French Air Force practiced aerial combat maneuvers overhead in the Ardeche. Only once did I catch a glimpse of them, but there was no questioning what they were.

It took us a while to get to know Ronna and Honoré, certainly more than a week, which made me glad that we stayed two. Ronna is also keenly interested in photography, which prompted more than a few conversations there. She's also a Nikon enthusiast which in itself makes her alright in my books. Honoré is on the town counsel of their township, Malarce sur la Thines, and was actually the mayor of Thines for several years. The two of them obviously have a vested interest in the environment, being organic farmers, but they also are interested in issues which touch on them more indirectly. For example, the local hot-button issue in Malarce is the introduction of windmills as an alternate power source. France is heavily reliant on nuclear power, using reactors for over eighty percent of its consumption. There are big lobbies on both sides of the windmill argument, with the arguments falling something like this:

Pro-Windmill	Anti-windmill
Nuclear power creates waste that is, at the least, difficult to deal with	Windmills are noisy, and mar the landscape
Wind is a sustainable and renewable energy source	Wind is not a reliable energy source: some days it's just not windy
Windmills create no waste product	The creation of a windmill takes a great deal of energy and materials, possibly more than it will provide

There are other arguments, both those seemed to be the big ones that were voiced during our attendance at a town hall meeting on the subject. It seems to be a politically-charged issue; no doubt the nuclear industry would chafe at the prospect of their apparent monopoly on power being challenged by yet another source, especially when an experimental fusion reactor is in development in the southeast of France. If all goes according to plan, it is supposed to be a very clean source of nuclear power, but it won't be ready for some years, and I'm sure they're going to need every euro of funding they can scrape together.

During our stay with Ronna and Honoré we also harvested carrots, apples, squash, pumpkins and potatoes. I must confess that apart from some gardening I helped my mother with when I was very young, I haven't had the opportunity to be this close to vegetables in their native habitat. So pulling potatoes out of the ground and realizing that only a small percentage looks like something I'd see in a supermarket, was very humbling. The rest had bumps, folds and eyes running through them: in short, very "organic". And perfectly edible. Actually, let me qualify that: they were some of the best potatoes I've ever eaten. But it makes me wonder about those supermarket potatoes. Are they treated a certain way to increase the yield of "perfect" potatoes? Or are we just getting a very small selection, the rest of the "unseemly" potatoes being chopped up and turned into french fries?

I could go into great detail about the rest of our experience with Ronna and Honoré, but as I write this, we've already crossed two countries and I fear that I'll have to be a lot less verbose if I'm ever going to catch up. While WWOOFing might not be for everyone, for us it was a very grounding experience, and a very much needed break from the museum, restaurant and hotel version of tourism we had been cast into. Tourism from the inside-out, if you will. It was good to be doing something with my hands. While we never got much of an opportunity to sample the wines of the region (to be honest, it was nice to "detox" after knocking off close to a dozen bottles of wine with Mary) it does give us the perfect excuse to go back.

After a healthy dose off goodbyes, we hopped on a bus towards Montpellier. We had a few days to kill before our next country: Spain.

Mary in the Alps

The French Alps. One minute you're riding along in the train across a hills and plains, speckled with trees, and then suddenly these giant spikes of stone are protruding up from the ground. It's not a subtle transition, and it got our attention after spending weeks in relatively flat areas of Italy. I say relatively flat, because they have plenty of knee-throbbing hills and the people tended to build fortified towns and cities on them. Even in Gubbio, the mountains were glorified hills, where trees and grass grew almost the whole way to the top. With the Alps, things stop growing at a certain altitude, and then everything turns to craggy stone. And then it gets covered with snow.

It's my developed opinion that there's nothing like a mountain to really remind you of how small and young you are. As our train wound its way through the mountains to leave Italy, the trip actually became less interesting but for all the tunnels through which we had to pass. This of course is another testimony to the enormity of the mountains; you're not going over top of them, and it's pointless to try and weave a course between them. It must really have been easier to blast holes through them.

At the last stop in Italy, customs officers boarded our train and made sure we weren't terrorists by checking our passports. Once again, by not flying, we didn't get a stamp on our passports, so our return trip is going to be devoid of any evidence that we visited Italy or Germany. Apparently we got off very lucky: people we would meet much later would tell us that on their exit from Italy, the train sat there for an hour as personnel and engines were changed. I think we must have gotten a better deal as our train was bound for Paris, and was already of the french train system.

I wrote a fair bit on the train while Amy read, so after a while we acclimatized to the massive mountains that meandered by in the background. It wasn't that long before we arrived in Chambery, a city close to my cousin Mary's village in the Alps, Bourg St. Maurice. Our trip to visit Mary, and choice to travel to Chambery, offered her an opportunity to audition Chambery as a potential "big city" for her to visit when she needed a "big city" escape from the Bourg.

A little background about my cousin Mary. The last time I'd seen her was over twenty-five years ago, a event marked by a now legendary tale in which our parents had decided to be efficient and park both her and I in the same perambulator (we were each around three or four years old at the time) and Mary bit me. Unfortunately, occasion has not brought us together in the intervening years, so any time Mary and I are connected in the same thought or sentence, this bit of ill will is naturally reminded to any who know the unfortunate incident. I think I got over it, as I have absolutely no memory of the event and the only proof of the story is a photograph of the two of us in the oversized perambulator (stroller, in case it's not a familiar word) and I was willing to chance that twenty-five years of growing up had softened Mary up a bit.

Mary is a world traveller. She lived and worked for a year in Madrid teaching English to high-power executives, made coffee and bought a house in New Zealand, and then met a guy which prompted a return to Europe in order to live with him in France. When we tumbled off the train in Chambery, we were easy targets, and she picked us out readily. I of course recognized her immediately, and if there were any lingering doubts about either of us being bitten, they seemed to disappear immediately.

Again, stories about family are often hard to sit through for anyone who doesn't know the players, but there are plenty of interesting bits that I'm going to relate here. We met Mary's dog Sheesha (named after a mountain). There was some discussion as to what breed Sheesha is, but to me she looks like a mix between a black lab and a collie. Whatever she is, she's got a lot of energy and after getting to know you, she's very friendly. We would not get the chance to meet Mary's boyfriend Severin, for really interesting and exotic reasons involving him working in Qatar painting something while hanging from mountain climbing ropes. However, we were introduced to a coffee machine which bore his name, mounted proudly in the kitchen. But I get ahead of myself; we had first to survive the trip back to the house, and kitchen.

Our walk through Chambery was uneventful, but interesting enough with enough big-ticket items to score high on Mary's radar such that she'd feel it was worth visiting for a big city fix. We caught up fast and happened upon our very first stupendous coincidence: Mary had done a WWOOF visit on the very same farm that we were going to visit in the Ardeche, just two years ago. In the end there are only so many farms participating in the WWOOF program, and it happens that Ronna and Honore's farm has a lot going for it in its description, so I suppose it's not that big a coincidence. However, it is just one in a series of coincidences that makes me feel like I have very much come late to the party: I never knew about WWOOF, and every time we tell people about it, they seem to know all about it, know someone that did it, or have done it themselves.

The drive from Chambery to Bourg St. Maurice ("the Bourg") is only an hour, but it was a white-knuckled ride for me. I should know this by now: you get used to the roads you drive regularly, and the road looks completely different from the driver's seat. But for us, never having been there before, driving high into the mountains, looking out the window down hundreds of feet as it all speeds by, it took some getting used to. Quick lesson about for those who don't know about driving up mountains: obviously, you don't go straight up. Rather, roads are cut into the side of the mountain in a zig-zag pattern, so you're kind of driving up the side of the mountain at about a twenty- to thirty-degree angle. Then you hit a small circle to turn back, and do a drive up another twenty-degree road until you hit another turning circle. Switchbacks, they're called, I think.

Mary and Sev live in a charming flat about halfway up the mountain. They're renting as they've just bought some land upon which they're going to build their house in the coming years. We had lots of energy after our train and car rides, so we took a walk about the mountain, and were rewarded with a sunset that spread amazing colours across the clouds and mountain tips of the range we could see: at first a sparkling reddish-orange, slowly transforming into mauve and fuschia. The clouds have to be just right to see those kind of colours. Nearby, a mountain stream blasts water through gigantic piles of rocks. It was very humbling, not to mention loud.

The room in which we slept had a window looked out onto a range of snow-peaked mountains. When you opened the window, you heard the rushing of the mountain stream. The air was fresh and crisp. Combined with what must be stupendous snow and those crazy mountain roads, it was definitely one of those moments where you realize how differently people can live.

The whole village of Bourg St. Maurice is essentially built around winter sports: skiing, snowboarding, hiking, and then the services surrounding it. There's not much else, but with those kind of mountains, there doesn't really need to be. Both Sev and Mary work in the industry, which as she describes, means that she is pretty much incommunicado between December and May. The population of the area swells as visitors rent up all the seasonal places to stay and take vacations in the resorts.

Our week with Mary was one of eating extremely well, drinking a fairly copious amount of good wine, taking several alpine walks, and spending a night in a mountain retreat. It was a fabulous visit, and an excellent opportunity to build some new memories that don't involve biting. We also found out that we share a love for good coffee, and if anything, Mary is even more selective about the quality of her coffee, and clearly better trained at the preparation and tasting of it. I mean I know what I like, and my standards are fairly high, but I think Mary was spoiled down in New Zealand and now she has to suffer through mediocre coffee. I agree with her though, so far: Italians know their coffee. Followed by the Spanish, and then the occasional French outlet that knows its business.

She dropped us off back in Chambery where we embarked on our next leg that took us towards a different range of mountains, the Ardeche, and our first WWOOF visit.