SGBRSH

14 June 2016

As of about a week and a half ago, I have officially entered my fifth month of travel – a length of time that honestly feels kind of useless. Five months seems far longer than necessary to describe experiences that have passed in what feels like a blink of an eye, but also sometimes seems so long that it makes me feel exhausted just thinking about it. Linear time has never felt so flimsy. Regardless, it has put me in a reflective mood.

Remember the very first thing I ever wrote on this blog, about how this trip was nearly four years in the making? Well – before the whole “I want to travel the world for a year” thing, there was something else, which was simply: I want to go back to Bali.

When I was nine years old, I traveled with my family to Bali, Indonesia, where we lived in the house of a family friend for one month. This month printed itself indelibly on my brain, and I can recall full conversations, meals, and even days in weirdly specific detail. It’s my opinion that I have this trip to thank for the desire to travel that has burned in me ever since, and thus in some small way, I believe it’s thanks to the deep impression that Bali left on me that I’m sitting in this hostel right now, typing this blog post and listening to the rain on the converted warehouse rooftop. Weird how things cascade into each other sometimes, isn’t it?

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2 April 2016

Here is something I realized a while I was unloading the dishwasher: you can only unload a dishwasher so many times in the same place before that place becomes home.

It’s not all about the dishwasher, obviously, but I think my meaning here is clear – “home” as a place and as a concept is much less fixed than I once thought it to be.

I spoke of this briefly when I wrote about Kaiteriteri over a month ago (an amount of time that is shocking in its rapid passage), but the feeling of home I felt there is subtly but significantly different than the home I feel here, in this terribly managed yet charming Queenstown bed-and-breakfast. Somehow, without my conscious knowledge, this place has shifted from the “place where I sleep and store my belongings” type of home (the type I now realize I felt in Kaiteriteri, which is not at all a slight to the time I spent or the people I met there) to the “place where I want to go after a shitty day” type of home. Like I said – subtle but significant.

I’ve been in Queenstown for nearly five weeks now, already two weeks longer than I originally intended to stay, and I still have another three weeks left here. This is the longest I’ve stayed anywhere since I left California, so in that regard it comes as no surprise that I have grown so settled here. But it’s more than just the length of time – it’s the people, it’s the easy sense of family and routine that has sprung up in the house, and it’s the special magic that this part of New Zealand has that seems to take hold of nearly everyone that comes here.

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11 March 2016

I’ve been spending a lot of time on horseback lately; I’ve also been spending a lot of time on a quad bike, which feels very satisfyingly Mad Max-esque.

As an offshoot of this, I have been finding myself frequently riding on the back of the aforementioned quad bike, sucking up piles of horse shit with a massive trailer-hitched vacuum that was manufactured, apparently, for the specific purpose of sucking up piles of horse shit. Who knew.

The context for all of this, before we continue: I’m in Queenstown, way down on New Zealand’s South Island, working as a guide at Ben Lomond Horse Treks outside of town on Moke Lake. This place and this job are both vastly different from where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing in the rest of New Zealand, and it is the most at home I’ve felt since I left California. I’m living in a bed-and-breakfast with the other girls I work with, and it’s probably the fanciest accommodations I’ve had yet: a big old house with wood floors and a huge kitchen and views of the lake and the jagged, shadowed mountains that characterize the area and brought Middle Earth to life on the big screen.

The workdays here are not easy – we get up before sunrise and arrive at the station by 8:00 in the morning to bring up our 28 horses into their day paddock and feed them breakfast, and we usually don’t get home until 6:00 at the earliest. All day we take care of every aspect of the horse trekking business: catching, grooming, feeding, and tacking up horses and leading the treks, of course, but also a myriad of other jobs that keep the whole place running: fixing broken fence lines, hiking up canyons to clear the filter at the spring so we can have clean water in our hoses, polishing saddles, and cutting back the seemingly impenetrable forest of native bush which features long, thin thorns so large and so sharp that the Maori people traditionally used them for tattooing.

 It is the most physically demanding work I’ve done in a while, and absolutely the most satisfying – I’m outside, working with my hands, getting things done that need to be done that have a clear purpose, and at the end of the day I feel like I’ve truly accomplished something worthwhile. Definitely better than washing the endless dishes of endless backpackers.

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16 February 2016

How to describe these last two weeks? It has so far been a fairly quiet time in Kaiteriteri, and I have no major events to expound upon or words of wisdom to impart regarding any harrowing travel experiences. It has been fascinating to me to discover how little I need to feel at home in a new place: a moderately comfortable bed, a semblance of routine, a few friends, good food. Simple. Because of this, life at Kaiteri Lodge is perhaps best understood to the outside reader through sensory snapshots. Picture an old movie reel, maybe a little scratched and the sound a little static; the film has been yellowed with age and now has the warm yellowy tint of old photographs and childhood home videos. Maybe your favorite quiet song is playing as the clips hitch by (for me – “Atlas Hands” by Benjamin Francis Leftwich, or “Constellations” by Jack Johnson). Here we go:

As with many places like this one, social life is anchored by dinnertime: multi-lingual conversation, everyone talking over and translating for each other; accented English and stumbling attempts at speaking French and laughing to tears over the amount of syllables in the Finnish word for “ice cream cone;” a glorious mess of language shared over the dinner table in the hostel restaurant. Beyond dinner – walking under the stars on a clear night with friends I didn’t know a week ago, through the middle of the street left empty by departed beachgoers, pointing out the Southern Cross and the Seven Sisters and upside-down Orion’s Belt, staring slack-jawed at the thick brightness of the Milky Way; taking a trail into the forest that same night, flashlights held in front of us until we turned the corner into a little streambed and were greeted by the light of a million tiny glow worms all across the trees and hillside that looked like little white-blue LED lights, but even more like the stars we could see through the trees above us, feeling like we were swimming in a pool of fairy light and exclaiming with awe in three different languages. A Sunday market in Motueka on an overcast, muggy day, wandering through the fruit and veggie stalls just to see the colors, trying on sunglasses and browsing through piles of secondhand books, buying mugs of spicy chai and sitting for hours at a little café table talking until our cups were empty and it was time to go home for lunch (“home” – such a malleable word). Lying in companionable silence on the hot golden beach, waking up now and then to shift or reapply sunscreen or jump in the cool, salty ocean; floating with eyes closed on the gentle rolling waves, listening to the sounds of the sand underneath shifting with the motion of the water.

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6 February 2016

As I am belatedly realizing, it is much easier to write a blog post in theory than in practice. In theory, I can dash off a thousand words before breakfast (all of them, of course, beautiful, poetic, funny, and inspiring); in practice, I have been finding myself hard pressed to come up with a hundred words that I feel are worthy of sharing – and this despite the fact that I have spent the last week or so since I last wrote driving through some of the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, this phenomenon (common name: Writer’s Block) is exceedingly typical among anyone, ever, who has attempted to write anything at all – and so after another week in New Zealand, all my brain is supplying most of the time are things like “it was cool” and “lots of plants” and “wow.” Otherwise known as: nothing anybody wants to read. However, I am going to do my best, because I am dedicated to the Art of Blogging, and also know that there are definitely several family members waiting on an update.

So – on February 1^st we started our drive to the South Island, and aside from the few drawbacks of traveling so quickly from place to place (missing out on those cool little side roads you want to explore, stiff back from sitting in the car all day, never being able to unpack, etc.) it has afforded me an amazing slideshow-type view of North Island landscapes.

Everything about the land I have seen has felt magnified and intensified – bigger and wilder and brighter than anything I have experienced in California (this, admittedly, could be because everything here is new to me, but there’s really no denying the drama of the North Island). I have never seen so much green in my life: huge, wide, idyllic, sweeping valleys of rich farmland dotted with houses and lined with old fences and horses and sheep tucked away in little grassy swales; the outer foothills of those neat little valleys that bleed back into dense and wild canyons absolutely stuffed with foliage – pine trees and massive ferns and various leafy bushes and a huge variety of fragrant and unusual flowers.

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29 January 2016

Despite the fact that I arrived in New Zealand less than 24 hours ago and have seen only a tiny fraction of Auckland (i.e., one single city block and the inside of a grocery store, which looked distressingly similar to a Costco in the same unsettling way that your living room looks vaguely different when the couch has been moved a few inches), my arrival here feels momentous enough that I want to document it anyways. Aside from the grueling day of air travel itself, which took about 27 hours altogether, the road to get where I am right now – sitting on a twin bed in the converted garage of somebody’s house in Auckland, looking out an opened window onto a ridiculously lush garden neighborhood which, based on what I’m hearing, is absolutely teeming with birds and cicadas – was about four years in the making, and deserves a bit of a background story. 

The idea for this trip that I’m taking with my family (one year around the world) began as more of a pipe dream than anything else, as many amazing and seemingly impossible things do.

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