Nomads in New Zealand (part 2)

As we drove the van down the off-ramp into Picton from the Bluebridge ferry, the sun was already getting low in the sky. We'd arrived around three thirty, and so only had around two hours to find a place to park the van for the night before it became exponentially more complicated by the lack of natural light. We spent a few moments in Picton figuring out our general course through the south island - down the left side, through the centre and back up the right - before embarking west along some of the craziest winding roads that we had come to know and love, towards Abel Tasman national park.

New Zealand is a hiker's paradise, filled with a multitude of well-maintained, multi-day "great walks." As well, there are hundreds of smaller trekking trails, ranging from a few hundred metres to month-long, pack-in-pack-out odysseys. After having driven a rapid pace towards the south island, we realized we weren't really taking advantage of the fact that we had much more time to see the country than we had in previous countries. So, we decided we would walk the Abel Tasman "great walk," camping as we walked up the forty-kilometre distance up the northwestern coast of the south island. To that end, we had to drive towards Motueka, an access town to the park, where we would reserve our campsites and plan our walk with help from the Department of Conservation ("DoC") staff.

But we wouldn't make it there today, travelling along the spaghetti roadway that is the Queen Charlotte Drive. We passed very little that looked accomodating for a night's freedom camping. Finally we ended up pulling into a DoC campground, "Aussie Beach," where we watched the sun set, cooked some food and spent the night. It was around this night that I realized the construction of the bed wasn't going to be satisfactory; it was essentially a pallette, made from particle boards, so they had buckled into a curve in the middle. We would wake up in a pile in the morning, and the normally difficult process of putting one's trousers on lying down was made doubly hard by having to work up a hill.

We drifted through Nelson the next day, in what was supposed to be a short stop to see why the interior lights of the car and the CD player had stopped working. I tracked down the problem to the fuses - one of them had blown - but repeated attempts to replace the offending fuse resulted in more blown fuses. There was a short in the system somewhere that I wasn't going to find, or fix. This problem had been dogging us since before we got on the ferry, and we had met someone waiting in line who, when confronted with the problem, suggested we take it to an auto electrician. And when we saw a place advertising same in Nelson, we knew it was worth a stop.

When I walked in and greeted the guy, I asked him (in what I perceived to be typical Kiwi fashion), "How you going." He must have taken me for a native, because he completed the code phrase with the completely enigmatic, "Ah, box of fluffies." It was then that I had to break down and reveal I had absolutely no idea what he had just said, and could he explain it.

Box of Fluffies: Short form, "box of fluffy ducks."

Box of fluffy ducks: Can't complain.

We moved on to the problem at hand, and he said he'd take a look. He recommended some cafes and local stores, and we wandered around. What followed was a typical situation of car repair; getting your vehicle into the repair schedule. When we did come back to find the van under repair, we saw the dashboard torn apart, the roof ribs pulled down, wires strung, and the auto electrician on his back under the dash. It looked expensive. But when we strolled up, he nodded authoritatively and said he'd tracked down the problem; during a repair for rust, some steel plates had been welded over a rusted out hole, and an interior wire had been melted. It was just a matter of time. Fortunately, the repair was less expensive than it looked, but most of our day was gone.

We decided to press on to try and make some headway towards Motueka. Fortunately, one of the motorhome crowd we had met at Aussie Beach had tipped us off to a really nice place to freedom camp outside of Motueka: Kina Beach. Finding it prominently displayed on our map, we make tracks and get to the area just before sunset. We find one really promising spot seems to be taken by three vans and some guys doing some drinking; looking for a more secluded spot, we walk around a loop and find a nice spot looking up off the road towards the rocky beach. It all looked straightforward enough; a short hop onto the firmly-packed sand, a quick reverse and a perfect spot to spend the night.

Except, as it would happen, the sand wasn't as firmly-packed as I had thought. And here's the funny thing about vans; the weight isn't distributed well, so you don't get the power where you need it. And finally, rear-wheel drive works much differently than front-wheel drive.

In short, I got the van marvellously stuck in the sand.

After a brief panic, I tried what most completely inexperienced van drivers would do: rocking it back and forth by switching between first and reverse. This succeeded in a lot of encouraging motion, creating massive holes in the sand for the wheels to rest in, while not moving the van an inch back towards the road. Fortunately, we were next to a rocky beach, so there was no shortage of rocks to grab and bring over to try and create a more stable footprint for the van to attempt to drive on. And as we started to collect the rocks, I realized just how well dug-in the van was on the left side; the wheel was almost completely buried.

Two hours later, the wheels jacked up and rocks deposited, there was a bit more rocking, but no progress to be made. I admitted defeat and agreed with Amy's suggestion that we walk over to the party in progress and ask for help in dislodging the van.

In the end, they turned out to be really helpful and friendly guys; two Spaniards, a Briton, and another guy whose origin escapes me. We started out just pushing, with the van in neutral. Nothing. Then we tried rocking it, combined with the pushing; nothing. Finally we had to bring over one of the other vans, tie the two together with rope, and combine the pushing. To our great relief, the other van dragged our van out of the sand. Diagonally. A great cheer erupted when we put the van back on the road: three hours later in almost pitch black. We made some friends that night, shared our drinks, and went to sleep with aching, but relieved, muscles.

The next day we set off for Motueka, eager to leave the van for a few days and set off on a trek through the parkland. By the time we pulled into Motueka, we realized we weren't going to have time to set off today. We got ourselves sorted with the DoC, reserved some campsites along our planned route, and spent the remainder of the day outfitting ourselves for the trek to come. Originally we had decided to take the small camping stove with the rest of our kit - but when we saw how much stuff we were already going to be taking, we decided to leave it behind and stick to a basic regimen of cold meals.

The next morning we drove up a bit further north to the park entrance, leaving our van at the water taxi service that would pick us up a week later. As we set off on foot, a gentle drizzle began to fall, but we were well prepared with our MEC pack covers. I began to recall fondly our six-hour days of walking in Nepal, although in this case we were regularly passed on the road by boats, towed on trailers, taking people to the water and up the coast for a day's tour.

Even though we had slimmed down what we were carrying to the bare essentials, the packs were still quite heavy. In addition to our sleeping bags and tent, we were carrying plenty of extra clothing (it was starting to drop to around three degrees Celsius at night), and food enough for five days. While I knew that as the trek went on, we would gradually lighten our load as we ate through the food, it was no encouragement on the first leg of our hike. The rain didn't help. But as we passed into the main body of the park, crossing raised walking platforms of several hundred meters to keep human feet off of delicate marshland, I began to take in the truly wild nature of the park. The rain made it seem all the more lush, and soon we were walking through densely packed tropical forest. The everpresent symbol of New Zealand, the silver fern, shot up absolutely everywhere, while behind and above towered trees of all kinds. The forest path was quite popular, with hikers passing us in both directions, and every once and a while we would be rewarded by a view of the Cook Strait over our right shoulder.

Beautiful Abel Tasman beach.

At around three o'clock we arrived at our campsite at the Torrent Bay Estuary. By the end of the first day of hiking, my feet and back were aching. It was the biggest relief just to set the pack down and know that I wouldn't have to carry it until tomorrow, and that after we ate something it would be that much lighter. We were also rewarded by the rain having abated, being replaced with glorious beams of sunshine. While the park was interesting to look at during the dismal grey, in the blazing sun, it was spectacular. The tide was on its way out, and before we embarked on the serious business of dinner, we enjoyed a stroll around the estuary. The most direct route to the coast was across the muddy plain of the now-clear estuary, strewn with clam-shells and tiny hermit crabs who disappeared at the slightest human movement. Walking around without my pack on was like floating on air. The beach was an absolute treat, with powdery white sand and a blue-green lagoon formed by the tidal exit of the water.

After returning to our campsite and having our first of many cold meals, we turned into our 2-man palace and, also reminiscent of Nepal, went to sleep shortly after the sun went down.

The next day was to be our most challenging. The hiking trail crosses three areas of water in total, and there are various windows for each in which the tide makes it possible to cross. If you miss a window, you have to wait for the next tide. Because of our campsite reservation (which were diligently checked each night by a DoC representative who dropped by to review our paperwork) we had to cross two in one day, which represented at least seven hours of walking.

After striking camp rather late (there wasn't much point in hurrying as we couldn't cross the first tidal area until the tide started to go out) we put everything back into our packs and set off. We ate our lunch in a lovely cove, and were just starting to relax when we could see nine kayaks in the distance, bearing down on our tropical turf for a place to beach. One of the attractions of Abel Tasman is a big trade in kayak tours, which we opted not to take. You can combine kayaking and hiking, leaving your kayak behind and having your packs delivered to you; seeing the park's coastline from the water is probably quite striking. But since you have to be part of a tour and really have no freedom to go off on your own, it didn't really appeal to us. As well, the kayaks have earned a nickname for the less-experienced as "divorce boats," as they can be challenging to operate as a team. Amy and I have canoed together, and it works, but that doesn't mean we wanted to spend a whole tour with people for whom it didn't.

After a few more hours of walking, we made the first tidal crossing, which involved taking off shoes and socks and crossing the frigid ankle-deep waters while trying not to step on too many pointy clamshells. The aches were already setting in, and we weren't even half-way to our next campsite. We pushed on towards the next tidal crossing, taking little delight in our surroundings and getting increasingly irritable as the day wore on. As we approached the second tidal crossing the sun was low in the sky, blazing directly into our eyes. I have distinct memories of feeling like we were walking through a desert, our destination constantly getting further and further away from us.

The tide was just beginning to come in as we approached the second crossing, a shallow river with a kilometre to be crossed to get to the other side. The signage was particularly obscure this time around, so we made our best guess as to where to begin our crossing and started over. Even more frustrating was it wasn't clear where we were supposed to continue our trek on the other side, and we certainly didn't want to end up walking along the shoreline looking for it, as the tide rolled in. We had to take off our shoes and socks twice as we encountered deeper stretches of water that were coming in, and by the time we encountered the third creek of water we just left them off, muttering curses against the pointy clamshells as we went. Finally we saw an inverted triangle in the distance on the other side, and made our way towards it; indeed, it was the other side of the crossing. As the sun set behind the treeline, we emerged. Now it was only another twenty minutes before we would arrive at our campsite. Dusk set in as we arrived to the sign welcoming us to the campsite - another 150 metres away to the actual campsites - and my arms were about to fall off as we deposited our packs in a pile.

We shared a picnic table for dinner with a German couple, who were hitching their way across the country. While I had my doubts of the safety and effectiveness of this strategy, they had apparently found it easier than expected to get rides to where they wanted to go. If our van had seats for passengers, room for their gear, and was in fact headed in the same direction as them (it wasn't) I'm sure we would have offered them a lift. It was interesting to talk to them, as they indicated it's very popular for Germans to travel (we had certainly noticed a great deal of them in New Zealand) as it represents a sense of adventure and wildness that is not available in Germany.

We lazed about the following day, giving our sore muscles a chance to recuperate, as our walk for the day was only to be about three hours to our next campsite, where we would spend two full days - meaning, one of those days there would be no dedicated hiking at all. Other hiking groups packed up and left as we read our books on the beach, strolled aimlessly and generally took our time over breakfast - until we decided we were ready to go and packed up. Our trek took us across no less than four beaches, the path opening up from forest to a sandy beach, with a sign instructing us to walk along the beach to the next opening back into the forest where the path would continue. Giant rock formations constituted book-ends to the beach, worn down by centuries of weather and wind.

As we passed Totranui, the furthest most point that water taxis will drop people, we found the amount of other foot traffic dropped significantly; it would seem that most people just take day trips through the park, and few of those go north. With only four hours to trek today, slightly-lighter packs and muscles that were slowly adjusting, the walk was much more manageable. We arrived at our campsite, finding it to be very deluxe - in addition to a formed concrete fire pit, axe and firewood, there was an installation containing not one but two sinks with both treated and untreated water. Luxury!

An Abel Tasman sunset.

In our "day off," we lounged, basked in the sunshine and enjoyed the surroundings by taking the opportunity to do some short hikes around the area. We visited the local sea lion colony and saw many of these magnificent creatures sunning themselves on the rocks, as well as swimming and playing in groups of two or three.

We thought we were the only ones hardy enough to brave camping in the cool temperatures, until we were joined by another another couple, Duncan and Michelle from Auckland. We ended up getting along very well, sharing our meals and company before heading to bed. The next morning was a treat - hot breakfast, coffee and tea - before we packed up our respective camps and parted company in the drizzly morning, them heading for a mountain hike to get a panoramic view of the park area, and us to head back to Totranui to connect with our water taxi back to civilization. The ride back is as good as a roller-coaster, and it's hard to believe that what took us five days to travel by foot takes us thirty minutes to travel by boat.

The showers we had back in town were some of the best ever, and when we spotted Duncan and Michelle being dropped off from their water taxi (in fact, the same company as ours) we hooked up and shared some well-deserved beers and pub grub. We arranged that we might meet again at their place in Auckland when we returned up that way.

After our hike through Abel Tasman, we thought we would try to drop into a farm nearby for a WWOOF. After they had helped us extract our van from the sand, the Spaniards we hung out with mentioned that they had volunteered on a commune on the other side of Abel Tasman park, called the Tui Farm. It had apparently been so popular through the WWOOF website that they had decided to de-list themselves and be referred solely by word of mouth. The farm was well-knwon in the area, so we decided it would be worth a shot just to swing by and see if they had any availability to WWOOFers. This entailed some more mountain driving through winding roads, but was worth it if just to visit the small town of Takaka. Takaka is the largest settlement to the other side of the Abel Tasman park (you can enter the park from two sides) but even then it's no bigger than a town. That said, it's a town which is clearly buzzing with activity, and no trace of a single franchise store. The town's probably not big enough to justify it. Instead, you had locally owned hardware stores, grocery stores, butchers, and restaurants with exceptional character (my favourite being called "The Dangerous Kitchen"). While we were essentially just passing through to resupply and head towards the Tui Farm, it would have been fun to stay for longer. We did find the Tui Farm after some doing, but unfortunately, they were already fully stocked with WWOOFers. Which was a shame, given the range of produce they farmed and products they fabricated on the farm. We pushed on.

The Franz Josef glacier.

We decided to head further south along the west coast, typically the rainier of the two, to see some glaciers. There are two popular ones in the south island, the Franz Josef glacier and the Fox glacier. We spend more time at the Franz Josef, as it's a bit easier to get to. The glaciers are amazing: the ice has a noticeable blue tint, and the glaciers themselves are huge. Tours take adventurers onto and into the glacier, and when you see them scaling across the glacier, they appear no larger than ants. The "action" part of the glacier, the terminal, is where melting ice is ejected in the form of a glacial river; the water is a sludgy grey, and not suprisingly, very cold.

We also make a stop at a series of natural blow holes. They're quite impressive solely as geological formations, with a vast series of eroded trenches and mounds, seemingly towering stakes of pancakes. But as you pass by the larger pit formations, you are regularly rewarded by an almost volcanic jet of water blasting into the air from one of the aforementioned blow holes. As the larger waves come in from the ocean, the water is under pressure, and is careened down natural formations until it erupts through a hole in the ground. Unfortunately, as much as water is being ejected upwards from the ground, it was also falling quite substantially from the sky, so we decided that we had got a good idea of the blow holes, and made a bee line back to the van.

After a couple of days sleeping in the van and living on the road (or, at times, right beside it) we made it a policy to check into a motor park to have some showers and wash some clothes. Our next stop was Wanaka, a small picturesque town named for the lake which it sits adjacent to. In many ways it reminds me of Takaka, with its community buzz and small town feel; however, with its traffic in adventure sports and bus tours, there are far more up-market options available in Wanaka.

It was, however, very much worth the stop, and so highly recommended by my cousin Mary (who used to own a home there) that we ended up staying for three days. Mary used to work at the local cinema, Cinema Paradiso, a place of infinite character and classy selections. When we went to see a film there, the cinema was adorned with a giant sheep, advertising the new horror-comedy, Black Sheep. Our film wasn't as good as that would have been, but the whole experience was well worth it as we sat in comfortable couches and had freshly-baked cookies at intermission. Our stay in the Mount Aspiring Motor Park was as rewarding, if for two words: hot tub.

In Wanaka we fixed the woefully-warped bed in our van, with the friendly assistance of the kind folks at the local Mitre 10 (New Zealand's national big-box hardware store: North Americans should think Home Depot). When we went in to look for a replacement hose for our propane stove, I asked casually if there was a place we could rent tools so that I could fix up our van. When the guy asked me what I needed, I realized all I really needed was a power drill and perhaps a hammer: they were only too happy to loan us the tools we needed, and even a box of screws to use. They sold us the wood we needed, cut to size, and an hour later we were set up for full bed stability.

The infamous New Zealand Kea parrot.

We also took the opportunity to do one of the walks in the area, known as the Rob Roy walking track. It's a five-kilometer stretch about twenty kilometers outside of town. As we were having our breakfast before we started walking, we started chatting with some other hikers, Bryan and John. John's a guide by trade and walks the Rob Roy track at least three times a year, so while we didn't decide to walk together, we did have several conversations as we took turns passing each other. Bryan runs a photography shop in Paihia, and mentioned that if we were in the area we should drop by and say hello. We pass by a small construction crew rebuilding the hiking trail, and are rewarded with our one and only sighting of a Kea (a large, greenish-brown cheeky parrot) running off with one of the guy's lunches. A Kea is somewhat famous in New Zealand for its brazen contact with humans: cars left attended in Kea-filled areas often come back to find the black rubber window seals have been torn away by the birds. At the end of the trail, ascending further up onto a mountain track, we are rewarded with views of yet another glacier.

Amy's a hit with the Japanese tourists.

Our last morning in Wanaka, we decided to cook our breakfast beside the lake, so we hauled our small pile of cooking gear to a picnic table and set up shop. Little did we know we would become a tourist attraction for a busload of visiting Japanese tourists, who must have been dying to get up close and personal with these "backpackers" they've heard so much about, who actually drive around the country and sleep in their vans at night. I jest: they were quite good fun.

After Wanaka, we hauled back into the van and drove further inland, towards the winegrowing heartland of the south island. We make a stop in Cromwell, a small regional town, with the intention of heading on towards Queenstown. Staying the night in the Cromwell Chalets motor camp, we notice a notice for seasonal grape pickers, which got us to thinking. We had struck out with grape picking in France, and none of our WWOOF visits had anything to do with grapes, so perhaps this could be our opportunity to get a closer look at the wine industry. This is of course complicated by the fact that we have no work permits for New Zealand, so we decide that we'll just ask at some of the places we expect to do tastings at, and see if something casual can be arranged.

We visit first Rockburn estate, where we sample their wines and decide to ask on our return where we pick up a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc to go with the night's meal. Our second stop is at Quartz Reef, where we meet an older couple who have been picking, and ask casually about doing some picking; we're directed to Dom, who's not actually connected with Quartz Reef, but is the manager at another vinyard, Gibbston Valley, as well as managing his own vineyard. We chat for a while and get along well, and in the end we decide to volunteer to do some picking, which works out well as we can park in the vineyard's extensive parking lot.

The next day (and the next, actually) are spent picking grapes. Our first day is spent picking Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris, small green grapes with light brown shades. It's easy work and the time passes quickly in thankfully good weather. It's been getting nippy in the mornings, but nothing we can't handle with sweaters and jackets, and by mid-morning we're in short-sleeves. The picking crew is made up of the Gibbston valley staff, and a legion of contract workers made up mostly by international backpackers. We met Anika, a German girl travelling on her own who picked up a job working for the vineyard to make some money. At the end of the day we park next to her van at the Gibbston valley vineyard, and we make a feast of spanish omelettes and fried potatoes. I got a first-hand view of grape pressing, and the rapid pace they try to set; turns out they aren't pushed to turn grapes into wine for fear of losing the grapes to frost. In Gibbston valley's case, they actually only have so many grape containers and need to clear them for the next day's picking.

The next morning the van wouldn't start; it's just too cold. So we hitched a ride with one of the Gibbston valley staff, Nathan, in his truck. It's a good thing too, given the thin, bouncy gravel road we have to climb to get to the second vinyard. I'm glad someone else is driving. The night was so cold there was quite a substantial frost, which is the equivalent of an earthquake in this winegrowing region: quite a lot of money is spent on frost prevention. Every vineyard has a frost alarm, and if the temperature goes below a certain point they spend thousands of dollars hiring helicoptors to come and fly over the crops. The idea is that the updraft of air created by the helicoptor rotors will raise the temperature by a few degrees, and often, that's all you need to prevent frost from settling. In addition there are windmills and drums filled with burning diesel. With hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in grapes, a frost can wipe out an entire plot: there's no insurance for this kind of event. So, when one of the frost alarms didn't go off last night, it's the talk of the harvest, and everyone is chatting about it all day.

Pinot noir grapes.

The second day is a bit longer than the first, but by now we've improved our technique: today, it's pinot noir; tiny, wrinkled red grapes. There are also "second-growth" grapes, big juicy red clusters, that we have to be careful to avoid: they're not as flavourful. As we fill our buckets with grapes, clipping them off at the stem, they get tipped into larger bins. As the grapes get chucked into the bins, they're picked over by the well-trained eyes of the Gibbston valley folks; many bunches are tossed out because they don't make the grade.

After saying our farewells to Gibbston valley and Cromwell, we made our way towards Queenstown. It was probably a lovely little town until it became the unofficial epicentre of New Zealand's adrenaline sports, and now it is jammed packs with high-end restaurants, outdoor supply stores, and tour operators. There are now direct flights to Queenstown; you can make it your only New Zealand destination, if you wish. On the recommendation of some people we've chatted to, we decide we want to investigate going on a cruise through the Fjordlands, the southwest coast of New Zealand, made up of towering bluffs. There are two main cruises: a shorter day cruise through the Milford Sound, and a longer overnight cruise through Doubtful Sound. The latter was recommended as better value for slightly more money, so we sign up for that one but it doesn't leave for a few days. We go on hikes, hang out in the town, catch up on email, generally waste some time before driving towards Manapouri and the beginning of the Fjordlands cruise.

The cruise was wonderful. We meet some other tourists and revel in the fantastic scenery that is the Fjordlands. We don't have any rain, which is great, but on the other hand we don't see any of the fantastic waterfalls the area is known for. The transit to the Navigator, the main boat taking us out into the sounds, is a bit of a big deal; you take an hour-long boat ride to a stretch of intervening land, a bus across it, and then board the Navigator. There is only one road in this neck of the woods, which is used by to service the hydro dam - and that road is purpose-built, not connecting to any other road in New Zealand. Everything has to be shipped in, including petrol for the bus. According to our driver, it's the most expensive road ever built in New Zealand.

On board the Navigator, they stuff us mercilessly with great food. We have muffins when we board, soup a couple of hours later, a massive buffet dinner; the next morning, a cold/dry breakfast for the early risers and a full-on caloric fest an hour later. No one can complain we were left hungry. We ate like pigs. Speaking of pigs, the hunting and killing of them is actually big sport in New Zealand, and like all big sports, it has a dedicated fan base with its own magazine: "Pig Hunter." I'm actually not kidding about this. The magazine was shown to us by a woman we met on the cruise, who bought it as a gag; it's replete with stories and photos of pighunting exploits. The photos are mostly of men carting out dead boars on their backs, but there are also touching stories of women and kids getting in on the action, talking about their first kill. What seems to be absent (or taken for granted as known) in the stories and depictions of the pork stalking is that the kills are all made with a big bowie knife, which strikes me as particularly grisly.

We also meet Hugh and his wife Joan, Canadians from outside of Toronto. When we got to talking to them, they turned out to be some of the nicest, friendliest people we'd met, and by the kind of coincidence we have come to expect, they are actually grandparents to a child of the sister-in-law of a good friend of Amy's.

Sunset over Doubtful sound.

The Doubtful Sound itself is quite striking; mountains towering out of the water, covered with lichen, moss and trees in varying stages of growth. The water between, through which the ship made steady progress, was almost black from the depth. The sun set behind a fjord around mid-day, but not before we stopped in a bay for some out-of-boat activities. Kayaking, nature tours in a launch, and unbelieveably, swimming. Our quarters for the trip were a shared quad with another couple, in our case, the aimable Britons Bryan and Jane. Bryan dared to swim; big marks for bravery.

At the mouth of the water body we were navigating, we stopped and saw the Tasman sea as the sun set. Several islands in the mouth were home to a seal colony, which barked and dove as they woke from the slumber of the day to go hunting for dinner. The boat turned a lazy circle around, and people descended for the night's feast as the boat lodged itself in a quiet bay to anchor for the night. We ate, drank and chatted until well past our regular bed times.

After dinner we attended a nature talk by Kimmy, the naturalist on the boat with a packed audience as she described the flora and fauna of the region, letting us know what animals we could feel free to run over on the highway (the possum, noteably) and which we should avoid.

Doubtful sound, completely still.

The following morning, after the carb-fest of a breakfast spread we hadn't seen since staying at a four-star German hotel, we stopped in very still fjord bay and the engines were turned off so you could experience the Fjordlands at its most peaceful. The water turned as clear as glass and you could here every sound with absolute clarity. It was quite a special experience. Eventually the engines rumbled back to life and we made our way back towards Manapouri.

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.

Wine review: Tavernello

For those who like to occasionally venture off of the sunny side of the street, there are also wines to drink while you're there. Tavernello is conveniently packaged in a set of three formed plastic drinking boxes and can be yours from any supermarket for the incredibly economical price of just over a single euro (1.12€, less with tear-away coupon).

At first glance, Tavernello Vinodo (tavola rosso) isn't much to look at. The packages are opened by pulling off a single shiny plastic silver tab, allowing your waiter to ask perhaps, "shall I rip it open a container or two for you?" After wiping up the spilled droplets of ruby-coloured liquid that have spurted from the container to your shirt sleeves, you are rewarded with a bouquet of deep earthy tones of mushroom, berry, and prune. As well, slight hints of pomegranate, raspberry, and camomile are evident after the wine has been allowed to breathe, and these scents are best accentuated by swirling the wine around in a plastic cup.

The taste of the wine, while lacking in any real body or character, is obviously structured so as not to offend or charm anyone: this is clearly a wine for pairing, and indeed, when matched with a smelly cheese or spicy salami, the flavour of the wine is dramatically improved. With notes of prune, evergreen, blackberry, rubbing alcohol and old shoe, Tavernello smells slightly better than it tastes and is probably enjoyed most on the sixth or seventh box. It is slightly tannic, possibly having been fermented in a French oak barrel, or more likely, fermented with crushed oak chips, and will leave your lips puckering.

Thankfully, there is little aftertaste, and the wine has a pleasant warmth and smoothness. Best drunk immediately: do not cellar.

The Loire, so far

Your feedback to these dispatches has been amazing - it’s nice to know that you enjoy what we’ve been experiencing! In response to demand, a few of you have been asking about the Loire valley, so it is with great pleasure that this dispatch will be a report on the playground of French kings of old, the Loire valley.

Before getting much further into it, I’ll set the scene: Amy and I are enjoying a carafe of red wine, produced locally in the Loire valley, that came to a total of 5,90€. After exchange, that works out to about nine dollars, which should give you the first tip-off: wine is cheap. Cheaper than water, as it turns out, cheaper than coffee, and definitively cheaper than tea. I know it’s a digression from the Loire, but it’s definitely worth taking note of, so let’s have a breakdown (keep in mind I’m through the better part of the carafe, so you’re just going to have to keep up with my train of thought):

Tea, with milk: 2€50
Coffee (small, STRONG cup): 1,25€
Water, Evian, 500ml: 2€
Wine, 750ml (admittedly, cheap but good): 1,85€

For the curious, the euro is about 1.5 Canadian dollars. We’ve done some “self-catering” as the guidebooks call it, i.e., buying our own groceries and making our dinners, and the grocery stores sell the wine themselves: I know, for readers from Quebec this isn’t a strange thing, but us Ontarians still buy it from the government, so it’s a hell of a novelty. And they have row, after row, after row of the stuff. It was a jaw-dropping experience, especially when you consider the price.

So, back to the Loire. We drove down from Erik & Laure’s on the tenth, with a trip carefully laid out by Mappy, an on-line direction service that takes your start and destination and gives you a complete roadmap of how to connect point A to point B. It’s really accurate, right down to when you should slow down for the photo radar stations (yes, Ontarians, France has these, but they’re carefully signed). Still, France is unique, and managed to screw us up about three times. Mostly when we were passing through a town of any reportable size; that is, one where the main drag isn’t the highway. We’d have to use the force a bit to figure out which way the highway was going to connect us back, and given our relative inexperience with the road signs, we still managed to get completely lost. Luckily, my shifting has been getting better, so I’m able to do all sorts of fancy three-point turns without much pain. Stalling the car has become the exception rather than the rule.

Our computer-directed plans took us south, avoiding Paris completely, through non-toll routes and generally replete with big sky, sprawling farmer’s fields, and all manner of French scenery. We didn’t make any stops as we wanted to arrive at our reserved hotel at or around the time I’d said on the reservation form (6 PM), but then, there wasn’t much we wanted to stop at anyway; the towns are so small, you tend to drive right through them with a slow-down for a traffic circle on either end (those are getting easier, too). All you get is a sign with the town’s name going in, occasionally, you get a sign advising you of the reduced speed limit - but not always, a few buildings that have been around for three or four hundred years, and then the same town-sign with a red line through it advising that you’re now done with that town. Then it’s back to hay fields, corn fields, or more bizarrely - fields of dead sunflowers. As in, baked to a crisp.

So, we went straight for Blois, which we figured was going to be our hub for Loire exploration. It would figure - we were completely fine through our entire trip, directions and jedi mind powers working just fine, but when we got within 2 kilometers of our hotel, we got completely lost. I imagine it had something to do with the line indicating our direction just “ending” at the name of the city we were going to, and not actually getting a highly detailed local map; you bet that’s a lesson we’ve since learned. We went towards the first source of civilization we could find, a community centre, and asked around where the address we were looking for was. A group of women gave us a few different sets of directions. We decided to choose the first set and drove off, without too much confidence. We weren’t more than a kilometer away when we were hailed by a car being driven by one of said women, pointing at us to turn right. We hooked up at the next turn and she gave us some more directions, and we did in the end, arrive exactly where we needed to be. It’s the second example of serendipity, of the universe consipring to help us get where we need to be, and something that we’re definitely paying attention to now.

The hotel we arrived at was an example of a “self-service” hotel - a lot of them have been automated such that you show up, touch a few buttons on a kiosk, slide your credit card, and get rewarded with a key and a room number. When we arrived, a note taped to the door to “Mr. Andrew” advised exactly how I could retrieve our key, and I was to find later that the reservation service had left two messages on my cell phone with key retrieval instructions. For a self-service hotel, it felt pretty personalized!

I’ve managed to blather on for this long without even talking about the Loire valley. It was indeed the playground of kings - no less than thirty grand chateaux - castles, let’s face it - dotted along the Loire river from Sancerre in the east to Angers in the west. And these aren’t just any castles, they are built with stone mined from quarries in the area, the finest stone, and then decorated with ornate carvings, tapestries, sculptures, furniture, paintings, you name it. In some cases, thousands of hectares of land set aside for the development of precision gardens, row upon row of exotic trees. We have (so far) visited two: Chateau Cheverny, and Chateau Chenonceau.

Chateau Cheverny is good example of French design. Everything is symmetrical; from the paths leading to the castle, to the layout of the garden, you get a sense that the role of architecture was to prove that the kings could defy nature by imposing an ultimate sense of order upon it. And impose they did. Cheverny is a big lego block of a building: long, relatively thin, but tall. Three sections of building, topped on the two outside parts by large domes, and marbly white. The building is surrounded by a field of fine stones, raked into position by tractors. Of all the chateaux, it’s supposed to be one of the best for showing how a chateau would have been furnished, and it was exceptional: plush velvet chairs (none of which you could sit on), rich mahogany desks, tables and armoirs; paintings of former kings and queens, counts and duchesses; tapestries that have adorned the walls for hundreds of years, only to be hidden by a fairy-tale four-poster bed with crayon-coloured velvet coverings; and the interior of the building, which deserves a special mention. Every exposed ceiling beam was painted with the continuing flow of the royal coat-of-arms. The walls were “papered” with Cordova leather, painted with elegant patterns, and then decorated with dozens of painted scenes, derived from moments taken from Don Quixote. I suppose if you lived in an age before television, just walking around and taking in the mastery of the scenery was a considerable entertainment.

Cheverny was also host to a permanent exhibition for Tintin, as apparently the chateau was the inspiration for Moulinsard, the chateau owned and inhabited by Tintin’s friend Capitaine Haddock. Apart from faithful recreations of items and scenes seen in the Tintin stories, it was perfectly missable, and a bit of a let down in comparison to the overwhelming chateau: perhaps a bit of an edge over the other chateaux in the area, which must all be competing for the same tourist dollars. But I guess if you were a die-hard fan of Tintin, you’d have reached nirvana.

Chenonceau, like Cheverny, inspires the same feeling of “wow, that’s big”. The avenue just to approach the castle itself is probably three hundred metres long, and lined with trees that are probably each one hundred metres high. We’d had our doubts about going to Chenonceau when we did - it was beginning to rain, it was only going to be open for another two hours, and it cost 9&euro each for us to enter (~$27 Canadian). But even just walking down that huge tree-lined avenue was worth it, and it only got better.

Without the brochures in front of me, I can only tell you that Chateau Chenonceau was built by a King for his mistress, and to look at it, you have to wonder exactly what she did for him, because it’s another architectural masterpiece and probably took dozens of years to complete. It’s comprised of three main areas: a large expanse out front with a small tower, then a drawbridge which takes you to the castle proper, replete with living and bedrooms, and then a long stretch of building which actually crosses the river Cher. This last section houses long halls on the first and second levels of the structure, and servant’s quarters and kitchens below. The stores of the castle were actually replenished by boat, and the whole thing would have been extremely defensible in the event of attack given its independence from the land.

In contrast to Cheverny, Chenonceau was more open; Cheverny was massive, but only a few rooms on the first and second floors were open, and they were only the lavish rooms that the royalty would have inhabited. In Chenonceau you could visit practically every room in the castle, including the kitchens and servants’ areas. Our self-guided tour took us right up to closing time, and when we left we spent the rest of our time there in the gardens and hedge maze. The maze wasn’t extremely difficult; my guess is the last thing you want to do, if you’re a hedge maze designer, is make it so complicated the King gets lost.

In addition to the chateau tours, we also visited a few places that were quite interesting: a chocolaterie, and an underground mushroom farm.

The chocolaterie is just a few minutes from Blois, at Montrichard. It’s owned by a guy named Max Vauche, who is obviously quite high up in the chocolate business in France. The outlet was pretty small, but the chocolate was tasty and the designs were ornate. The tour was a little bit cheesy (odd, in a chocolate place) but nonetheless informative; it’s quite the process to make chocolate. The video portion of the tour showed off their investment plantation in some tiny island off the west coast of Africa. The cacao nut is about the size of a softball, but shaped more like a football. Inside are the actual beans, woven in a gummy tissue.. The beans are scooped out and poured into a pile where they’re covered with big leaves and left for three days to ferment; they’re then carted off to be dried on the ground somewhere else for a few more days. Pile them into fifty-pound bags and then they’re sold at the market at a government-regulated price. Interestingly, most people who harvest cacao don’t even know what chocolate tastes like, as the production of chocolate doesn’t form part of their economy. The Vauche plantation was quite innovative in bringing back some finished product to the people (or producing it on site, I can’t remember) so that the harvesters are actually cognisant of why they’re actually harvesting the nuts.

There’s a whole science in producing chocolate: how much sugar to add, keeping it at a constant thirty degrees celsius; pouring it into moulds and then letting it dry. I’d tell you more but the lady giving the tour started talking a bit more quickly as she realized she was running overtime and I was starting to get a bit tired from keeping up with her. Anyway, it seems the French know a thing or two about chocolate but I don’t think that’s much of a surprise to anyone. Ironically, we didn’t have time to buy any there, and a huge queue had formed, so it wasn’t until much later that we actually sampled some French chocolate from another supplier. Yes, it is good.

The Champognierie (mushroom farm) requires some explanation. All the chateaux in the area, all the city halls (a “Mairie”), big homes, etc., were built with a type of stone called Tuffault, which was mined from several areas around the Loire. In one area alone there are four hundred kilometers of tunnels that descend up to 250 metres. Eventually a law was passed when sections of pasture started collapsing that prohibited further mining operations. However, the mines have a few interesting properties: they have a high humidity, a constant temperature (regardless of the year) of twelve degrees celsius, and absence of sunlight: the perfect conditions for growing mushrooms, and storing wine. In fact, most wine storage facilities are called caves (their owners, cavists) and you can tour them and see thousands of bottles stacked one after the other in huge racks.

In this particular Champognierie (there are four like this in France) they concentrate on growing mushrooms that are a bit more difficult to grow and hence have a larger market value. The ones we’re accustomed to eating (white mushrooms and the brown-topped Cremini mushrooms) are grown in large greenhouses. The ones produced in the Champognierie are more exotic varieties such as Royal Blue, Oyster and Shittake, which sell mostly to higher-end restaurants.

In addition to the mushrooms, this particular Champognierie hosts a section of mines that has been transformed into an underground sculpture exhibition; started just after the second war, someone had the idea to use the mine as a site to showcase France’s village heritage. Various showpieces would be carved into the mine walls showing different aspects of the village: churches, the Mairie, pubs, a livery, etc. Apparently the project fell out of favour and ran out of money, and now only lately a single guy does it himself with no formal training. It’s quite stunning to see, even if you can’t go right up to something and walk around (there are plenty of barriers to keep grabby hands at bay).

Some time has gone by since I started writing this particular entry - the softening effects of the red wine of a couple of days has long since faded - but we’re still in the Loire valley, in Tours, after having gone through Chinon and Chenonceau in hopes of finding an opportunity to pick grapes during la vendage, or the autumn grape harvest. We’re finding it a bit difficult, as the various municipalities decide amongst themselves when their vendage will be, and owing to the hotter-than-usual summer, the latest word is that the harvest won’t start until the 20th, or pretty much the day we leave France for a jaunt over to Ireland to visit my family there. Maybe not this trip!

As I round off this entry I’ll leave you with a summary of thoughts about the Loire valley:

• Wine is cheap


• Chocolate is delicious


• Driving is interesting


• Life is good.

Amy and I celebrate our second anniversary tomorrow. Hope you are all enjoying the fall colours and are healthy and happy!