i am insanely jealous....

....of this lifestyle.

 

(as always, names changed to initials)

Sorry for not writing more lately! It has been very hard to find any privacy or extended internet access to write you any email. G has just a USB dongle (we know how well they work) and is limited to the princely sum of 200Mb/month! So I basically had no net access and so had to suffice with loving you nonverbally.

I have had a wonderful time here; G is probably the closest member of my family in personality/temperament/interests to me. She nearly did a PhD in genetics (the funding ran out halfway through) and is a dedicated hiker/outdoorsy person. So we have had a lot to get on about and a lot to talk about. I haven't seen her in over four years, but we hit it off with no problems whatsoever. It's been fun!

I can't honestly remember the last time I wrote to you properly -- I told you about the mycologists on Queenstown Hill? And the crazy German girl at Milford Sound who started screaming? If not I will tell you next time. Anyway, I took the bus from Queenstown to Franz Josef to go hiking the glacier. I arrived in around 1500 and immediately went hiking around some of the walks that give you a nice view of it with a French girl I had met on the bus. Franz Josef is a real one-horse, blink-and-you-miss-it kind of town. Anyway, I got up ridiculously early to watch the Spain-Germany game and then went for the guided hike on, in, and around the glacier itself. It was really stunningly beautiful; hiking on the ice is really good fun, and squeezing your way through wormholes, tunnels, and crevasses was an excellent use of my time.  It was fairly easy going: the hiking was very easy, as a lot of the time you were stood around enjoying the scenery while the guide was there with a pick carving out the steps for you to take. But you wouldn't believe it if you heard the other people on the hike in the hostel afterwards! You'd swear they were the invalid ward from the Somme or something, the way they were carrying on about their legs and their knees and their blisters. A big bunch of crybabies and wussies: we only walked about 15km.

A funny thing happened in Franz Josef; I met a guy I knew back in school! I hadn't seen him in about 8 years, and there he was, not only on the other side of the globe, not only in the same one-horse town, but the same fecking hostel on the same night. He only lives about 5 minutes away in Knocnacarra. Madness. I can't wait to get away from all of these fecking Irish people about the place. Half of the fecking Republic is over here.

Then I took the bus from Franz Josef to Nelson, which took about 12 hours. It should only have taken about 8 but the buses in New Zealand stop about every 10 fecking minutes.  Typical of the Kiwi attitude. Along the way, we stopped at a national park for an hour because there were some nice rocks to sele there! Fecking hell. Actually, if you had to stop somewhere, there was a good spot; the odd pancake-shaped rock formations were extremely beautiful. There was a path around the coast with big warning signs saying not to cross it. Myself and another Irish lad observed a very inviting track going from the other side of the barrier down and around, and I mentioned I was tempted to the bus driver; so he agreed to stand watch where we would jump the barrier, so that we could go down and explore without the Department of Conservation people coming to give out to us.  I felt like I was sneaking around stealing apples; it was great fun, and very odd to have a fifty-year old random bus driver keeping watch for you. We both went down the path and made our way through this incredible cave and came out the other side with a glorious view of an amazing rock formation; I could have spent an hour just watching the turbulence of the tide.

Anyway, I arrived into Nelson to find: no cousin. Turned out she had gone to the other place where the other bus company drops people off. I was busy trying to figure out the public phone booths (they don't take coins, what the fuck) when she drove up! So we drove about 45 minutes out to her farm. She had spent a few years travelling herself, and knew just what would make me happy: I came to her house to find myself setup with a room to myself, a whole double bed to myself, and even a /real towel/! Pure unadulterated luxury.

So we spent the past two days hiking around the various national parks and such (all spectacular, New Zealand is utterly blessed) and eating the extremely delicious food of her husband, who is a professional chef. One night their neighbours came over and we all had a few drinks, which was rather nice. The neighbour is a bit crazy and brought over his AK47 last night and offered to let me fire it a bit, so I happily took the chance to gain some valuable life experience by blowing a plastic target to smithereens. (It's a powerful gun!) I had actually planned to do a bit of shooting in Nelson myself; this morning I went out to a rifle range a bit out of town which offers firearms training. It was very educational; the guy was a New Zealand champion marksman, and an excellent teacher. I fired off a few hundred .22 rounds, first with the sandbag and then as I got better standing up, before moving on to the .223 calibre rifle, which is a very powerful gun and very loud. He actually had me shooting at targets 400m away up a hill, and I was very pleased that by the end of it I could hit a fairly small target 3 times out of 4. Then we moved on to using the shotgun on clay pigeons; that is very good fun, and by the end of it I was hitting most of the targets, which is very nice. And now I am in the library using their free internet to talk to you!

Hope you are keeping well; remember always that I love you to bits.

All my love

P

Pathology is /no/ comparison to this.

:(