Beth O'Brien

It’s been a long time since I posted here, but as I am about to embark on a two and half month trip to New Zealand (and a short stint in Australia) I thought this would be the ideal place to keep people updated on my adventures.

I am sitting in my favorite coffeeshop in Brooklyn, buzzing on coffee and worrying about all the tasks left to complete before I leave town.  Feb 17th.  9 days.  In one of those amazing coincidences it looks like my subletter for the months of March and April will be a couple visiting from New Zealand.  I hope that works out.  For both financial and karmic reasons. 

This may very well be the first time in my short tax-paying history that I finish taxes _early_.  This is probably not fascinating to you, but I am proud.

What else to do?  In another astonishing first I may already be packed – 9 days early!  I plan to do a lot of camping and hiking, so I bought a nice, light 2-person tent (the embarassingly named "Hubba hubba"), a comfy sleeping bag and some of the camping extras like a lightweight, quick-drying towel, waterproof pack-liner, random stuff bags, LED headlamp, first-aid kit, a couple cups etc etc.  For those interested I will post an exact pack contents listing.  It has taken a while and some consultation with camping afficionados to come up with a list of items to bring.  I got a new camera (the Canon G10) and a little solid-state laptop (the Dell Mini-9 Inspiron running Linux Ubuntu) for a non-obtrusive communications kit.  My brother lent me his awesome Kelty backpack with aluminum frame, and a roll-up foam mat. I am definitely bringing my 3mm wetsuit and booties after a brief, completely insane thought that I would leave them behind.  Crazy.  I want to surf as much as possible while there.

I fly into Seoul on the evening of Feb. 18th (my sister Kerry’s birthday!).  After a layover of two hours I begin the next long leg of the journey.  I will fly into Auckland the morning of Feb 19th at 10:30am.  I decided to treat myself after the 24 hour journey to a private single room in the YWCA.  After that there will be much more roughing it.  I will be looking to buy a car – something in the station wagon variety.  Haven’t owned a car or driven much in the past 6 years.  Should be interesting.  I hear they drive on the left side of the road there….I will rent a USB satellite internet connection for a couple months.  Take a look around, drink some espresso and then immediately head west out of Auckland to the surf town Piha.

The ladies of Black Sands Lodge have a rugged little camper van on the beach which I will stay in in exchange for 3 hours work a day.  I am hoping for gardening and outdoor activities, but will clean bathrooms and make beds if that is what is needed.  I am crossing my fingers that they have a few boards around that I could borrow, as well.  Though buying a board might be in the cards as well.  Strap it to the top of my new car and drive south.  

I am nervous and excited.  I haven’t left the country in over four years.  Not since my Uncles’s wedding in Austria in the summer of 2004.  My passport had expired for two years without my noticing. 

I have heard nothing but good things from people who have travelled to New Zealand.  Spectacular scenery, ample budget accomodations, friendly people.  My sister Kerry and her husband Rick spent there honeymoon touring the South Island.  I have butterflies.  So much to get done this week before I leave.  Back to my taxes…. 

I have always liked the idea of living with less. Packing for this trip was a good exercise in "what do I really need?" I wanted this pack to ideally be something I could live out of for years if I needed to. Paring down is an interesting process. Here is what I ended up with (more or less – little things keep being added and subtracted as my departure date gets closer).

First, what I will be wearing the day I leave:

The shoes I will be wearing are the (slightly mismatched) Scarpa boots on the far left. I have been wearing them in the past few weeks. No blisters at all so far, so that’s a good sign. Obviously I am not wearing three pairs of shoes, so I will be packing away the pair of Vans for sockless lounging, and flip-flops. For flip-flopping.

My bag will be full of all this stuff:

Clothes. Went as minimal here as I thought was practical. One extra bra, a tank top, two t-shirts. one long-sleeved shirt, one pair of lightweight, quick-drying nylon pants (legs can zip off to become shorts), 3 pairs of socks, 3 pairs of underwear, 3 bandanas (multiple uses for those).

Beach Stuff. Bikini. Board Shorts. Rash Gard. 3/2mm full wetsuit. 3mm booties. Hat.

Rain and cold gear. Arcteryx gore-tex rain coat and North Face gore-tex rain pants. Quality long underwear. Marmot bottoms and Duofold top. This stuff is generally on the expensive side, but having spent many many days working for hours out in the rain and cold, I know wearing the tech stuff makes a big difference.

Personal Care. I bought a box of Ziploc freezer bags to organize all the little things. Bathroom: toothpaste, travel toothbrush, razor, nail clippers, tweezers, mirror, earplugs, floss, DIva Cup (a must-have for the ladies), one small bottle of each: soap, conditioner, shampoo, three month supply of medication, assortment of cold medication (only because I have a bad cold right now), some advil, immodium, allergy medicine, sunscreen with insect repellant, first-aid kit: gauze pads in different sizes, roll of tape, muslin bandage, assortment of band-aids, rubber gloves, safety pins, needle, 2 povidone-iodine prep pads, 6 benzalkonium chloride antiseptic towelettes, irish tea bags from Clio.

Communications. Global phone with SIM card – I am going to rent a New Zealand SIM card and number for the two months I am there. Plug adapters for their 220v outlets. Little notebook with handwritten phone numbers (old school!), travel alarm clock with handy temperature reading. Canon G10 camera and leather case, one extra battery, charger, strap, 8BG and 16GB cards, Dell Inspiron mini-9 solid state laptop running Linux Ubuntu, power cord, neoprene case, USB card reader, iPod nano, power cord, cassette-tape adapter (just in case I get a car with cassette player!), New Zealand Lonely Planet guide.

Camping Gear. Sleeping bag. Foam pad. 2-person lightweight tent. Extra tent poles.

Camping Gear – Smaller stuff. LED headlamp and three AAA batteries. 1 enamel-covered steel cup, 1 stainless-steel cooking cup with fold-out handles. 1 32oz SIGG water bottle, 1 quick-drying large towel, 1 fold-out knife, three packs of camping toilet paper, 50 ft. nylon cord, survival/emergency kit: whistle, compass, swiss multi-tool, little LED light for key ring, DEET insect repellant, anti-fungal cream (ok not survival, but certainly necessary). waterproof matches. not shown almost forgot: 8 clothespins. fork, spoon, knife.

Stuff bags. (not all shown) 3 nylon mesh bags, 1 solid stuff bag, 1 medium Granite Gear waterproof pack-liner, 1 waterproof Sea-to-Summit bag (for communications kit). extra Zip-loc bags for food stuffs…
 

Passport and Wallet. duh.  I probably should’ve taken picture of my keys, too. I will be making xerox copies of passport and driver’s license to send to my parents in Virginia and to carry with me in another part of my bag.

I also have to get a day bag, something smaller to carry things when I can leave my whole pack somewhere secure.  My friend Al gave me one that might work out.  Smallish, looks waterproofed.  Could make a good carry-on, too.  

Well, that’s the basics. I could obviously do without the laptop, iPod and phone. In fact I didn’thave any of those things the last time I took a long, overseas travelling trip.  That was 1998, and I was 21.  I did a week-long trip from Rome to Budapest, Vienna and Prague on my spring break.  Then at the end of the semester I spent a month or so touring Greece and most of Spain.  Phonecards were all I needed. 

The laptop is for doing this.  Obviously.  The iPod to listen to Ajahn Brahm podcasts when I am feeling lonely, and music while I am driving.  And the phone will probably come in real handy when I am trying to buy and sell a car.  All worth the extra weight.
 
 

Almost everything I need to do before the trip is crossed off my list. I left computer issues until the end. The sound on my little laptop still isn’t working. The good news is I have learned a lot about installing programs in Linux. Nothing super fancy but I am proud of myself. It took some doing to figure out how to get Skype to work. Really, I just had to find the appropriate step-by-step to follow on the Ubuntu forums. But that took figuring out that my laptop architecture was LPIA, not i386. Baby steps. The latest program is called Logjam, and is what I am typing in right now. It will allow me to compose messages while offline, which I am sure I will be. A lot of the time, I hope. I want to get to the parts of New Zealand that cell phone towers can’t/don’t reach.

The last few days have had a sort of solemn, goodbying quality to them. It seems that many people are unsure of whether I will actually return at all. As the trip grew slowly from a month to a month and half to two and a half months, I don’t blame them for wondering. My “move” to New York was not particularly premeditated. I came here for an internship on a low budget HBO movie and just never left. I had the cheapest rent ever (thanks Kate Duffy!) and an almost immediate network of work contacts who actually started calling. Things just fell into place and I followed along. It was as if New York wanted me to stay. That was in the fall of 2002. If you believe in seven year cycles, well, we are almost to the end of mine in New York.

I suppose I am not being very reassuring. I have every intention of returning. New York is more my home than anywhere I have lived so far. Ithaca is a very very close second – but in some ways I always knew Ithaca was just a waystation for me. I was never a very consistent resident of that beautiful little town. Always hopping off to different places (Beacon, Rome, Yellow Springs, Brooklyn), making the move before the decision. Finally leaving Ithaca was a weaning process of about a year. Many weekends spent on the upstate bus returning. Until one day I just never went back.

There is something soothing to me in the self-sufficiency of carrying everything I need on my back. I’m not giving everything up – it is just packed away in my workroom in Ridgewood, awaiting my return. As much as I like having all those things – the tools especially – I know I can live without them. And now I will. A lesson learned a long time ago: the fear of losing things lessens in proportion to what you have to lose.

Since my Uncle Tom’s wedding to Danielle in Austria in May of 2004, the farthest I have strayed from New York in the past four years is Buffalo, NY and Charlottesville VA. My passport even expired for two years without my noticing.

It’s almost midnight and I am sitting on my little couch in an almost emptied room. I still think I am bringing too much, but I don’t want to leave anything behind. The biggest difference from my last trips is all the communications equipment I have. Little laptop, cell phone, iPod. All three not necessary but also helpful in a way I don’t want to give up. I wasn’t going to take a cell phone and personally don’t think its necessary. But it will be very useful while trying to both buy and sell a car which I will be doing the beginning and the end of my trip. It’s not too much extra weight to carry to ease that process. I have been wavering a lot on the iPod too. I am not even sure I will be able to charge it, though I know New Zealanders have technology too and I could figure that one out there. I am mainly bringing it to listen to Ajahn Brahm podcasts about Buddhism and other assorted speaker talks that may help soothe the lonely hours. Mental health is important. I also am envisioning plugging it into a cassette player with my cassette adapter (also bringing that!) and blasting some good tunes while driving down gorgeous backcountry roads. Eh, the possibility of that is worth a few extra cords and junk to carry.

I have been very nervous, excited, mind-racing, stomach-turning, palms sweating all day. I don’t think I truly believed this whole time that I would actually do this. Sort of like a plan you always talk about doing but don’t really think you will ever do. Well, here it is. I have thrown my hat over the fence. Time to go retrieve it. Don’t know where that parable comes from, but I keep thinking about it. I got the ticket on a whim, without thinking about it too deeply so that I would then be forced to plan and organize for the trip. There _is_ turning back now, but how stupid would that be? Sounds amazing. Now I just have to show up to the airport and sit around for 27 hours while I am ferried across the world. Not so hard, right?

Here it is, my life in bags for the next 77 days:

 

It’s 3:20am my time, 5:30pm Seoul time. This airport looks so much like JFK, it is kind of eerie. The first part of the trip went so smoothly, it’s almost strange. I got to JFK at 10am, for my 12:50pm flight. I didn’t wait in line to check-in. I didn’t wait in line to go through security. It was all over in about 15 minutes. Having only got about 5 hours sleep the night before, I fell asleep fairly easily on the plane.

I forgot how much I love to sit and stare out a plane window. I think I recognized the same region we passed over on the way to Tokyo in 2003. I watched the vast expanses of white. Snow and ice with no sign of humans for as far as I could see. This turned slowly into uninhabited brown hills in what I think was early morning peach light. Seemingly no vegetation. Dipped and pointed like brown pudding underneath a rippled piece of cellophane. So hard to tell if the sun is setting or rising. My guess is we passed close to the North Pole. Once you get up there, the sun itself doesn’t know if its coming or going. As I periodically checked out the window, the snowy expanses were dotted with small settlements separated from each other by large white plains. Snaking lines of rivers turning back on themselves so tightly that traveling down them would take eons longer than a path cut straight from point A to point B. Blacks, greys, off-whites. Next the crazy quiltwork of agriculture. Straight lines at odd angles enclosing distinct patches of color. Dark greens, oranges, yellows, browns. The land cut up so that every inch is claimed. So different from the endless uninhabited spaces we passed over only hours before.

I am still sniffling, nose-clogged and phlegmy lungs. But the air pressure changes taking off and landing weren’t as painful as I feared. I bought some incredibly overpriced earplugs in the airport that seemed to do the trick.

I am more than halfway there. But not by much.

I am sitting at the “chill out lounge” of Base ACB – a backpackers hostel – on Queen Street even though I am not staying here tonight. Or tomorrow night, for that matter. If you were in town and not staying here either, it might be a good place to just go relax, pay for some internet and maybe meet a cute young guy with a gelled up fauxhawk. I booked myself for Saturday and Sunday night in the large dorm room. Maybe I will meet some people, maybe I will be annoyed by young drunk Australians. Can’t wait to find out. Friday is still up in the air. No worries, Mom, there are plenty of accomodations around town.

The customs officer coming at Auckland airport was an older gentleman who seemed very dubious about the details of my trip. Has he never encountered someone who plans to backpack, hike and camp around the country for a couple months? I mean, come on. I am NOT the first person to have this idea. No problems at customs, though. Long lines but I wasn’t in any particular hurry. That is the best part about this trip. Today I felt no incredible rush. Got to wander the strangely barren downtown, stop in the DOC office and strain to hear the gentleman there explain the ways of the Great Walks to me. His soft soft voice and my post airplane muffled hearing was not a very good combination.

The Air Bus ride from airport to downtown brought some pangs of loneliness. But walking and wandering around town always cures that. And now there are plenty of people around. In fact, Munir, a young business student from Moscow just started chatting with me on the worn and sagging couch. He asked me if I was also going to school. When I told him I already graduated he said, “Oh, last year?”. I stopped to add it up and responded “Um, no….9 years ago”. Good to know I can still blend unnoticed in the twenty-something hostelling crowd.

I am definitely starting to flag a bit. I guess I am not impervious to the crazy long trip and spotty sleeping schedule. So far I have found Auckland a bit depressing, but it might just be me that’s a bit depressed. It has been overcast, and a bit sprinkly. Really nice, though, after a couple months of cold cold New York winter weather. Absolutely no complaints here. It was 71 degrees, according to the pilot, when I disembarked. I was sweating up a storm by the time I made it to the YWCA. I have a tiny little single room on the fifth floor with a ton of greenery out the window. It’s lovely.

So much has happened in the past few days.  I will have to take more time to compose a post later this evening. 

I am now the proud ownder of a white 1994 Mitsubishi Magna Sedan.  Manual! The engine purrs, almost no rust.  Good tires.  All for $1600 NSD (which translates to roughly $900 USD).  I talked him down from $1650. hahahahaha.  But I think it was a good deal.  So far, at least.  I will let you know if adventurous mishaps begin.

Saturday, I bought the car and got the hell out of Auckland as fast as I could.  I had spent the night before in a ten person hostel dorm, sleeping almost not at all.  It was basically awful.  I couldn’t stand the thought of another night in one of those disco and hip-hop blaring dens of constant activity.  And I got exactly what I wanted the next night, camping in a field of sheep. 

The place I am staying now is beautiful and idyllic.  A little campervan parked in the driveway of Black Sands Lodge.  Which is basically the home of a lovely middle-aged couple (I believe) named Bobbie and Julia.  Very nice ladies.  I am staying for free in the campervan in exchange for three hours work a day in the garden.  An awesome deal.  And they have an 8′ surfboard to rent for $20NSD for three hours.  Not bad not bad.  My board is 9′, so there might be a little learning curve with this one.  But I think I am ready to tackle a slightly shorter board.  If not, I will find out soon enough.

More later about the action packed past few days….

This morning I woke up to a rainy and chilly morning. I got online, checked messages and chatted with people before heading off to check the surf. I figured I might skip it today since the report didn’t sound great and my arms were a bit sore from the day before. Man, I get out of shape fast. When I got down to the beach, though, it looked like a good day for me. The swells were smaller, and though still messy, looked catchable and not too difficult to get out. So I went back up to the lodge and picked up the board and my stuff.

I got out past the whitewater closer to Lion Rock after maybe 10 minutes of paddling. Sat a while, watched some waves pass. There were about 4 other people in the water near me, and more coming out at a steady slow pace. When I finally caught a wave, my hair (so long now!) was whipped over my eyes and I was so disoriented I couldn’t do anything but ride in on my stomach. I tried paddling back out for a short while, realized I was exhuasted and headed back in.

I went back up to the lodge to grab a hair band. Returned and watched the surfers a while, hoping to regain energy and strength to try again. I fell asleep on the beach next to my board, waking up at noon. I guess today wasn’t the day either.

When I got back to Bobbie and Julia’s, I found a letter on my bed in the campervan. Such an amazing and unexpected surprise! I opened it up and read it with a cup of tea and leftovers from Emma’s party. It made me cry, I was so happy and excited to get this sort of contact from home. Hi Kerry, Rick, Silas and Camille! Can you hear me!!! Your letter made my day. Thank you so so much.

I jumped in my car and headed north to Cascade Falls to see the Kauri trees. A nice little 45 minute walk through the forest and next to a creek. I was sort of rushed because I needed to be back to the lodge by 3pm to help with the gardening again. Yesterday we spent most of the time cutting and hauling away flax stalks. Then I sat and repotted little Carex seedlings from off one of the paths. Bobbie had devised a new way to repot them using toilet paper rolls. Once replanted in them, the roll will decompose. She was very excited with this, admittedly, ingenuous idea. Another plant I learned about was the Potukawa, or the New Zealand christmas three. There are seven on their property. Around Christmas, this evergreen tree blooms into red flowers comprised of a bunch of needle-like stamens.

The road out to Piha is narrow and windy. But I am definitely getting the hang of driving on the left side and shifting with my left hand. Sitting in the garden now waiting for Bobbie to arrive and put me to work. A cup of Irish tea (thanks Clio!) and some cheese and crackers. Down on the beach yesterday I walked up to two young guys next to a rented campervan to say hi and see if they were going out surfing. Turns out they were German tourists who had to return their van that morning. They had two big boxes of leftover food they wanted to give away to someone. I was the lucky recipient! Tea, coffee, cheese, marmalade, three boxes of cereal, eggs, sugar, salt, spices, can of tuna fish, can of diced tomatoes, some onions, vegetable bouillon cubes, paper towels. Such a great score.

Still working on post about days in Auckland. Will get that up soon.

The first thing I immediately picked up here was saying “Yeah yeah”. Very catchy. I met a young woman named Emma (pronounced EEma by her) and I think she was the one who gave me this first linguistic gift. I have a feeling I will be annoying you guys with this one when I return back to the States. Watch out for it.

Kiwis also end lots of sentences with “eh?” just like the Canadians. I don’t think I will pick that one up, since I am already immune to it. “Good on you” means “good for you”. And I have already earned a couple of those. Oh, and “chocker” means full.

My name is pronounced something like this: beeyeth.

All the municipal signs, etc., here have the Maori translation printed on them as well. Very cool. Imagine if we had the local native american language printed on our garbage cans, street signs and tourist information posts. The indigenous culture here is very visible, it seems to me. Or at least seems like it in comparison to America.

There are only two things in New Zealand that will hurt or possibly kill you: the katipo spider and the white-tailed spider. She told me this the first day as she was cutting New Zealand Flax stalks and I was hauling them away. White-tailed spiders like to live down near the base of the flax trees. The white-tailed is not aggressive, and the bite won’t necessarily kill you. You will be put on antibiotics right away and the resulting infection may be nasty.

After working a while in the hot sun, she remembered something. “Oh yeah there is something else that can kill you in New Zealand….Americans driving on the wrong side of the road!”

I saw my first white-tailed today as I was weeding along the road at the edge of her property. My main task for the day was getting out as much Wandering Jew as possible. If Woody Allen was around, he would most certainly accuse me of anti-semitism. I was also pulling out a few different variety of weeds along the way. After two hours of intense work, Bobbie let me off early. Back to the beach to watch the waves!

It was about 6:45pm as I got down to the beach. A stunning 2 minute walk away. So perfect. The sun sets straight over the waves, so its very hard to look straight out at the surfers. Luckily there are rocks to either side of the beach that you can crawl out on and watch looking in a northerly or southerly direction. Last night the waves were barrelling and the setting sun lit them up from behind into this beautiful light aquamarine color. You can see any objects in the ocean (like these large brown seaweed-like stalks) cascading up and over the falls. The waves were mostly closing out, which means all breaking over at once instead of along a line from once side to the other. Closing out is not good because you can’t surf it.

Tonight there were probably around 8 people outside catching the good waves and a handful of people inside trying to learn to stand up in the crumbing whitewater. People were catching some good rides. I would’ve gone out if I wasn’t still so tired. I watched from the rocks to the south of the beach, near “Camel Rock” as two girls paddled out on shortboards. Jealous jealous.

Across the waves is Lion Rock. An amazing, towering massive rock formation. It was called Te Piha by the Maori and was at one time a Pa, or fortified palace. It is considered a sacred site to the Maori. I saw the lion in it all at once yesterday when the sun hit it perfectly. It faces out to the ocean and even has haunches in the back.

Here is an old image I found online, since I can’t upload my own right now:

I hope tomorrow morning I have more energy and the arms aren’t too sore. The past two days have been all about paddling practice. I would like to catch a wave and ride it tomorrow.

Oh! I forgot. This morning as I walked out onto the beach around 9am, there was a rainbow over Camel Rock. Camel rock is more obvious, as it has two big humps.