The Earth Did Not Move

Pictures from this post can be found in the album to the right titled “New Zealand: Heading North.”

• Thursday, 20 Jan: Early morning wakeup, good-byes, rush to the bus stop, on the bus for five hours but felt like less than two!; in Christchurch, walked around city center; at i-Site, decided on single room at YMCA; realized I left wine on the bus, went back, made arrangements to pick it up next day; checked into YMCA, napped, went to coffee shop for lunch/internet; went to first night of World Busker Festival.
• Friday, 21 Jan: Woke up several times in the morning for no reason, didn’t get out of bed until 10am; had breakfast at coffee shop; picked up bottles of wine at bus stop, took them back to YMCA; wandered downtown; went to  Maui Maori haka show, with dancing and cultural explanations; met up with couchsurfers at a pizza/pub get-together; saw acrobat/busker show (fantastic!).
• Saturday, 22 Jan: Up early, on the bus at 7am; headed up east coast to Picton, with a stop in Kaikoura; took ferry to Wellington, 3 hours and lots of fun, although choppy water; met Lee at the harbor; went to Lee and Ian’s beautiful house (friends of cousin Robby’s) and got settled; went on driving tour of Welly suburbs and fabulous city lookouts; ate at Malaysian restaurant with sadly deficient waiting skills but good food; back to the house for wine, chocolate and Borat.

 

Throughout my travels, when I’ve left a travel partner or host, I’ve faced a bewildering set of emotions just after saying good bye: sadness, disappointment, fear, excitement and a sense of adventure. It’s not a particularly comfortable mixing pot that burbles in my stomach or chest area, to be honest. For some reason, fear is the one that I can taste the most. It’s almost as if, having spent a delightful time with someone, I am terrified that everything will be downhill from the moment “bye” leaves my lips. I’m afraid that the earth will move and I will fall over.

And sometimes, it does go downhill. For example, when I arrived in Christchurch the day I said goodbye to Matt and Fiona, several things went wrong. For one, I left my carefully packed wine on the bus and didn’t notice it until an hour after leaving the bus station. For another, I realized too late that I spent too much on a single room at the YMCA. And when I unpacked, it was to find that a travel-sized shampoo bottle had exploded, leaked out of my toiletries bag and made a gigantic-sized mess in my tightly packed clothes.

There are days when I wonder what’s so attractive about this solo travel thing, after all. I’m telling you, I seriously wonder.

Luckily, once everything starts going wrong, small things start going magically right. I met an incredibly nice (and talkative) lady at the bus station who called my bus driver and made arrangements to bring the wine back the next day. The YMCA room was overpriced for a large room with a single bed and chair in it, but I met some nice folks in the common area. And the shampoo explosion? Well, I discovered I had a rather powerful heater in my room, which dried my vigorously rinsed clothes in no time, and now three of my shirts smell pleasantly of Dove.

After a gray and rainy few days in Christchurch, along with some good belly laughs courtesy of the buskers in town for the World Buskers Festival, I made my way north, having slept through the earth-moving quakes occurring in the wee hours. It was an exact reverse of the route Matt and I had taken, but even so, I saw a few things we’d missed: fur seals along a particular stretch of coast, where we hadn’t been looking during our road trip; the pink, sectioned off pools that we’d passed wonderingly turned out to be salt evaporation pools, pink because of the dual-purpose of farming brine shrimp; and the equivalent of emo youth on the bus, complete with piercings, wild hair and forlorn stares.

The ferry from Picton (south island) to Wellington (north island) found me experiencing a slight sea sickness for the first time in my life. Oddly enough, exposing myself to the sun deck, wind, rain and cold made me feel better; odder still, reading on that top deck made me quite comfortable and calm. Other green passengers passed me and seemed ready to vomit upon just seeing me read and several asked how I could manage.

In Wellington, I very purposefully repeated my litany of luggage to myself: “Big pack, little pack, wine. Big pack, little pack, wine…” and thus managed to haul all three out of the station successfully. There I was greeted by a friend of my cousin’s who had offered to put me up and show me around Welly, as they call it, and thus began another upswing of my travels. Surely when I leave Lee and Ian, my recipe of emotions will leave me feeling strange, but hopefully when that happens, the earth will stay still and the next upswing will begin fairly quickly.

--Z