South Pacific 2005

We've been in Rarotonga the last three days. We snorkeled twice off a beach which might have had a lot more coral before a few weeks ago, when four cyclones hit the island, and are said to have caused lots of coral to break off. There were lots of nice reef fish, including some long cornet fish, some incredible picassofish, sunset groupers, some convict surgeonfish that are very inquisitive and swim inches away from us, lots of white fish of all sizes which blend in with the sand, and a few large fish of various dark colors. The rock crevices contained lots of pink-spined sea urchins and I saw some kind of clam which looked like a wavy iridescent blue-green opening in the rock.

The beach by the place we are staying is not quite so varied. There's a little island you can walk to without ever getting your shorts wet. The real problem walking out there is avoiding stepping on one of the thousands of sea cucumbers sitting there being sluglike on the sand. For variety, there are a few different species, but most of them just look like sand stuck to slime on a cylinder about 10 inches long. We did see a cute snake-eel which was white with brown spots, slithering about the sea of sea cucumbers.

The place itself, Aremango Guest House, is definitely "budget accomodation". The budget does not include fans that run all night -- you have to get up every hour and push a button to turn it back on. What are they thinking? The beds are pretty old, and you also have to close the window about 4:30 AM as soon as the rooster cacophony starts. And bring your own towel. However the people you meet at such places are often on much slower and more interesting voyages, or in the instant case, attending weddings which their friends from New Zealand have decided to have here. I am sure that the people at Kingsgate in Auckland have interesting stories to tell too, and probably even interesting investment advice, but you don't get to talk to them at all. Their rooms are air-conditioned and tolerable to be in.

Yesterday we took the cross-island walk -- the trail was also trashed by the cyclones. It started out along the road to the power station, but at some point abruptly became a very narrow steep track on which we pulled ourselves up by tree roots, just like our walk up Mt. Apo in the Philippines in 1988. Going down was not only just as steep and narrow but often confusing -- it wasn't always clear that when the trail appeared to ford the river that it continued on the other side. Fortunately, the picture we took of the map posted at the beginning of the trip came in handy and we found our way out of the rain forest. Once again we didn't take enough water -- when we got to a little store at the end we each drank 1.5 liters immediately. And a fruit smoothie.

If you're ever here, check out Sails Restaurant in the sailing club in Muri, which has lots of very nice food, and for something simpler go to That's Pasta, run by a couple from Milan who make their own pasta and sauces and desserts. Don't bother with The Flame Tree, reputed to be the best restaurant on the island at least in our guidebook -- it isn't worth it. Also the Pacific Resort has a roving thug in a Hawaiian shirt who sidles up to you in a laid back island manner and indicates that if you aren't staying there you shouldn't be there unless of course you are going to the restaurant but after such a reception you don't feel like it.

Renting bikes today has caused it to drizzle, but hopefully it'll stop before we ride back to catch our ride to the airport for our 10:20 pm flight to Tahiti, arriving at the convenient time of 1 in the morning.

I hope that you have all taken a moment to appreciate the full moon as it passes Jupiter tonight. It's the first full moon after the equinox, which means that tomorrow is Easter (how do they figure that in International Date Line Space? Is it taken from the sighting at Mecca?) and everything is closed for the weekend. Rotorua is packed with vacationing Aucklanders. Our host at the Funky Green Voyager (a hostel) said there would be no problem getting bookings for dinners and shows however: the Kiwis will all be out on their mountain bikes.

The North Island of New Zealand is quite volcanically active -- the volcano Ruapehu last erupted just 10 years ago. There's a whole area of geysers, fumaroles, mud pools, boiling water pools, and just general smelly gas coming out of the ground. And covering the whole town, perpetually. Taupo and Rotorua are in that area.

Taupo has a Craters of the Moon site with steam coming out seemingly from bushes, and several mud and boiling pools. All the rocks have really pretty colors of sulfur, oranges and yellows and greens, and there are bright yellow club mosses growing in that warm environment. Just up the road is Orakei Korako, another private thermal area with a cave. The adaptation of plants capable of thriving in steam earns our respect.

Rotorua is a big weekend vacation spot for Aucklanders, and Easter is a big weekend -- many of them were there for a Caribbean music festival called Jambalaya. All of the hundreds of motels seemed to be completely full, and we almost lost our reservation, calling to confirm it just in the nick of time. We went to a Maori "hangi", basically dinner theatre where there's a simulation of a Maori village, the group is "welcomed" as if it were visiting from another native island, a bunch of traditional dances are performed, and then a bunch of typical banquet food is cooked in the traditional native way in a hole in the ground, which left the lamb and chicken quite tender and moist. A short walk in "the bush" in the dark after dinner showed how reflective silver ferns are in the dark, and that glow worms also live in the rain forest, not just in caves.

It is a curious aspect of cultural drift that the dances which were once performed by warriors are now done by the crowd in the Drama club at your high school. Judging from the carefully preened individuals in the Army ads on the Simpsons, the wars are being fought by them too. I'm not sure what the Warrior class is doing. They'd have us believe they were in sales, but that is dubious. Probably selling flowers on street corners with cardboard signs.

The manager of the Mitai family Hangi estimated it cost about NZD $3000 to put on a show. It costs $75 a person approximately to get in, so with 60 or 80 people there that night they made money. He also announced they will soon be bottling water from their sacred spring to sell.

Rotorua has a little thermal site called Te Whakarewarewa that has several geysers, two of which were geysing for a very long time while we watched. The sign said that the star geyser, Pohutu, lasted 1 to 5 minutes, but it kept going for about 45 minutes, assisted by its sidekick the Prince of Wales Feathers geyser. This site also had a live Kiwi in a darkened glass room, which was very cute as it ambled about (it doesn't have wings) poking its nose in the ground looking for food. Posters listed several ways that Kiwis are more like mammals than birds. It's also pretty obvious how kiwi fruits got their name -- the bird is similarly shaped and similarly hairy.

Now we're in suburban Auckland, and we'll go to the airport early tomorrow Easter morning to fly to Rarotonga, where it will be Saturday again, and then Easter the next day. So, for us, Easter lands on Groundhog Day this year. We had a nice last-supper-in-New-Zealand at a little Asian place called The Java Room, which suffered only in having the same ultrarubato cheesy 50's American music on the box, the same Muzak feeder station as in Blenheim I bet, and an inexplicable sound effect every two minutes that sounded like a jet plane taking off. The interval was just about what you would expect for a busy airport and the whole effect was like being at SFO waiting to leave except the airport here is 20 km south of town. What makes that sound in a restaurant kitchen?

On Tuesday we visited a few more wineries in Blenheim, having long conversations with the people giving the tastes in order to pace the day so we didn't get too confused or drunk. We had dinner at a place called Herzog, where an Austrian winemaker closed his winery and three-Michelin-Star-for-Austria restaurant and moved the whole thing to New Zealand about 5 years ago. The food was good, but the wine was pretty Swiss -- the grapes and the character of the wine were different from the other Marlborough wine we'd had and generally not as satisfying.

Wednesday we crossed the Cook Strait to the North Island, returning our little white Toyota Echo in Picton and picking up a little white Toyota Echo in Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. We'd arranged to stay with a couple we'd met on the Galapagos cruise last fall, and we drove to their house. Their house is a two-year-old flat on the beach within walking distance of downtown. I think it's the nicest place we've ever stayed anywhere. Adrien Brody is staying in another flat in the same building while filming King Kong (the owners of it aren't quite ready to move in). We felt right at home in Wellington -- Robin drove us to the transmitter tower with a great view of the city (Twin Peaks), past the abandoned military base with art galleries (Fort Mason), and past lots of houses sitting in rows right next to each other with no gaps on steep hills occasionally punctuated by urban stairways. She took us past Peter Jackson's house, and at one point we saw a major piece of scenery driving by on a trailer. We picked up her husband Michael at the airport, who took us on a two-hour walking tour of the central city, which has a large new museum dedicated to the Maori heritage of New Zealand, a circular Parliament building referred to as The Beehive, and vibrant shopping and drinking districts. After that we had our only home-cooked meal on this trip, and just hung out with them and drank lots of wine and talked about New Zealand and the US and travel and politics. It was a completely enjoyable visit.

Now we're in Napier, a city which was leveled in an 7.9 earthquake in 1931. Since Art Deco was the style of the day, the entire downtown was rebuilt within three years with that aesthetic, and has consciously preserved it ever since. Virtually all of the buildings have the zigzags and sunbursts and "eyebrows" and ziggurats and general style of that movement.

We left Christchurch a couple of days ago, and as we drove we were enticed by signs to yet another food festival, actually in this case a wine and food festival showing off the wines of the Waipara Valley. This was much smaller and better-behaved than the Wildfoods festival, but there was still some tasty cheese and lamb and wine. (Venison is more the meat of choice here, I'm finding). We were directed to the most worthwhile wineries (Pegasus Bay and Mountford) by someone who was evidently an accomplished drinker. You go with the experts you have. He also felt that we were all brothers on account of having beards. At Wildfoods they had just run out of the magpie pies when we wanted one -- here they'd just run out of the marlin sandwiches. Oh well. We got some toasted hazelnuts with a nose of toasted hazelnut.

Now we're in Blenheim in the Marlborough wine region, famous for its Sauvignon Blanc with overtones of gooseberry and grapefruit. We're staying at a eccentric bed & breakfast that was hard to find at night but is pleasant enough. This whole area looks exceptionally like California, like the Napa Valley or perhaps Santa Maria -- brown hills and green trees. There is an aspect of traveling in places similar to your own that is a bit dreamlike, where everything looks sort of the same but then on close examination isn't. The similarity here is so striking that it's a lucid dream at most, or just waking life.

Our wine distributor friend Paul in LA told us to check out Koura Bay Wine, which is only available for tasting at the Station Cafe in Seddon about half an hour away. We found a delightfully opinionated lady who let us taste all the Koura Bay wines (n.b. to potential tourists: the custom here is to give you tastes for free), told us who her favorite wineries and wines were and why, told us which ones were foreign-owned (she went through a list of about forty wineries off the top of her head and knew each one. One gets used to wine people who are able to say that the 1998 of thus and so has a touch more passion fruit flower than the 1997 owing to a particular rain storm that fell only on the western edge of the Wairau, but knowing who owns whom gets to be downright Baseball), told us that a company named Montana makes about half of the Marlborough wine (it's called Brancott Road in the US so nobody thinks it's wine from Montana), and so on. Koura Bay makes a good Sauvignon Blanc and quite a nice Pinot Gris, though that doesn't make it into the US, much.

After checking out a couple other wineries, we went for a walk in the hills just before sunset. An Irish vineyard worker who was up there for a run was impressed that we were up there after just one day in the area -- he says lots of people have been here for six months and don't even seem to know that there are hills. Observant residents of the San Jose area will feel familiar with the use of the term "six months" as a metaphor for "resident of incomprehensibly long standing". It also helps explain why people ask us if we are locals, when we don't look it or sound it. Blenheim is growing. The Limerick ex-pat is planting up in the gullies as far as the frost will permit; they are putting in big fans for the cold night. Although, in the valley, at our B&B, the proprietor grows limes.

If Blenheim is Napa, Renwick is St. Helena -- we'll go there after we sign off and visit as many wineries as we can stand and still be able to distinguish gris from noir.

We've had increasingly good dinners the last three nights. On our last night in Te Anau, we ate at the Redcliff Cafe, and enjoyed chatting with the owners as we were leaving. Te Anau is still a pretty nice place -- there aren't any massive hotels -- but they aren't happy about how it's growing so close to the lake. They refer to the tourist mecca to the north, Queenstown, as Cranetown (i.e. construction cranes). The following night in Dunedin we ate at Bell Pepper Blues, a kind of stuffy little restaurant in a slightly seedy area. They stuck us at the back, but the food and wine were all really nice. Last night we had the Grand Menu at La Bon Bolli in Christchurch, in which the chef sent out several courses of his choosing. If I remember correctly, these were the courses: an eggplant tart amuse-bouche that everyone got; a brie and avocado salad; a tomato consomme; a little pastry cup with dark smoked mushrooms; a plate of sweetbreads; a carrot-ginger sorbet palate-cleanser; venison; an orange crepe; a plate of apple desserts; and petit-fours. The whole thing took about three and a half hours, and we had six different glasses of New Zealand wines with it all.

The drive from Te Anau to Dunedin was pretty direct -- we stopped only to mark the southernmost point we've ever been to (46 degrees 15 minutes south), and to take a picture of the sign marking the section of highway going from the town of Gore to the town of Clinton as the Presidential Highway. It seems a little odd that there's so little land in the world south of 45 degrees south (only New Zealand, a little South America, and Antarctica), while there's a huge amount of land north of 45 degrees north.

We headed to the Royal Albatross Centre where we had a booking to view the albatrosses. Most albatrosses nest on islands, but there's a particular spot on the Otago Peninsula where they've been nesting since the military cleared it and set up some trails around World War I. The albatrosses squatted on the turf after the invasion threat to New Zealand subsided. They have a little observatory where you can go and watch them for awhile. During our visit, there were three chicks sitting on the ground (of about 20 of this year's batch, the others of whom were out of view); an adult who had just finished feeding one of them and was walking up the hill to get ready to fly out looking for more food, but the wind wasn't cooperating; and three or four juveniles just flying around the area. They're really large birds, with a three-meter wingspan. They hardly move their wings. Just the feathers a little bit to control their soaring.

We could also see dozens of shags (another New Zealand seabird) hanging out on the cliffside.

After our albatross viewing, we went on to our appointment a few kilometers away with the yellow-eyed penguins. These penguins had set up a couple of colonies on some farmland, and the farmer decided to declare them a reserve, but to let tourists come look at them to help support the costs of preserving them. There's an elaborate maze of tunnels and blinds so the penguins can't really see us up close watching them. Before we went out to the blinds, the guide explained that these are the second-rarest breed of penguins, second only to the Galapagos penguins, which we saw last year. This is a collection which we won't pursue. If one were known for having seen all the species of penguin in decreasing order of rarity one would keep from being bothered at parties and in saloons, but it's more for somebody who likes cold weather and long boat rides to isolated Subantarctic Islands.

The guide also explained that March is their moulting season. Just before that they super-gorge on fish and get really really fat, putting on an extra 30 percent of body weight. Then they just go and stand somewhere for a month while new feathers push out all of the old ones. Some of them we saw had just finished the moult and had nice new shiny coats, and some others were standing there with a dull fluffy covering of old feathers. They're a very cute variety with a yellow "mask" added to the typical penguin coloration. However they are notable for being anti-social. They ignore each other and don't make cute penguin swarms.

The town of Oamaru between Dunedin and Christchurch has a colony of blue penguins, but they were all out to sea at the time of day we were passing through, so there would have been nothing to see. Penguins commute. So we just looked at all the big buildings (they have pretty grandiose architecture for a little seaside town) and had a platter at the local cheese factory. The art gallery had a painting by Edward Lear, of Petra. Hmm.

Now it's Sunday morning in Cathedral Square in Christchurch in a massive internet cafe next to the cathedral, and the bells haven't shut up the whole time I've been typing this, though they seem to be stopping now -- I guess it's time for the service. We'll probably walk over to the weekend flea market instead, and then to the brand new art museum, with Frank Gehry-lite architecture.

Today was another perfect day, another fiord, another tunnel.

We drove 120 km from Te Anau up to the top of Milford Sound, another fiord somewhat smaller and more popular than Doubtful Sound. The last 70 km or so of the road are certainly among the most beautiful highway miles I've ever driven -- wide grasslands between mountains, alpine scenes, mountains decorated with cute clouds, ferns in the forests, a tunnel at the top, snowfields, glaciers, waterfalls. It takes about two hours to drive but one can easily get distracted for that amount of time or more by the scenery each way.

The cruise was similar to yesterday's. One thing that was different is that a young man picked the cruise as a setting to propose -- his girlfriend accepted his offer, and then everyone wanted to take their picture. Another thing was a little silly -- this particular boat had three masts with remote-controlled sails, which they unfurled at some point. The silly thing was that they were strictly for effect, and that the boat can't even steer without the motor running. So it was really an annoyance that all the rigging to secure the masts just got in the way of pictures. This boat also had a really good naturalist guide who was wandering amongst the guests with a wireless microphone so she could easily intermingle pointing out things of interest and answering individual questions.

One of the things she taught us about was the Tree Avalanche Cycle. On the exceedingly steep hills surrounding the fiord, trees grow over the years. At some point, they weigh too much and fall off the hill. Since all of their roots are intertwined, entire sections of trees come off at once, creating a tree avalanche. The cycle is that any particular part of the hillside will have a tree avalanche about every 70 to 100 years. She also pointed out rocks containing copper, ones containing iron, ones with lines caused by other rocks scraping against them pushed by the glacier, several fur seals sunning themselves, and a few seabirds out in the very calm Tasman Sea.

It's been a wonderful three days in Fiordland -- tomorrow we leave for the east coast of the South Island.

They call it Doubtful Sound, but they explained that it's actually a fiord, since it was created by a glacier instead of a river. Merriam-Webster online doesn't mention this distinction but they haven't been to New Zealand. The "Doubtful" part refers to Captain Cook's uncertainty as to its use for a harbor since the prevailing winds blow in and it's too narrow to tack out.

Yesterday we spent the entire day on a tour to Doubtful Sound. A short bus ride took us to Manapouri; an hour-long boat ride across Lake Manapouri took us to a section of road, where another bus took us over a steep pass to the end of the sound. Then we were on a boat for three hours cruising around the fiord and its various arms.

Once again, the weather was beautiful, and the fiord was calm. Even when we went out a mile or so into the Tasman Sea to get to a rock with a bunch of fur seals, the boat hardly pitched at all. On the other hand, apparently it snowed on the mountains around the fiord just last week. The guides on the boat kept encouraging us to take the picture quick because the clouds were expected to roll in at any moment, but they never did. The weather map shows a high pressure area parked in the Tasman Sea, just like it does on nice fall days in California. Doubtful Sound gets 220 days of rain per year so their apprehension is more urgent.

I was in front of two Americans on the bus who wouldn't shut up about all the extreme stuff they were going to do, skydiving and parabungeying and otherwise ignoring the landscape they were in. I could understand doing that in Las Vegas which is totally boring and nothing to look at but its prevalence in New Zealand seems hard to explain.

The fiord landscape is really pretty -- all these green steep mountains next to narrow waterways, covered with pine trees and tree ferns, at least up to the tree line.

On the way back there was a brief tour of the Manapouri power station, a hydroelectric station 220 meters underground. The bus drove down a winding 2 km road to get to the viewing platform above the machine room. We're all looking forward to the same tour of the Exxon National Wildlife Refuge Oil Refinery when the opportunity opens up. (The whole area was very nearly flooded for hydroelectric during the 1960's, but New Zealand had an opposition party at the time, something there isn't in America, and voted them in rather than eradicate the whole landscape. Bechtel had to redesign the power station to use a bit less gravitational acceleration. I'm sure that the next time it comes up, the World Bank will insist on a more efficent use of natural resources, judged by the only existing metric.)

We're in Te Anau and we'll be picked up shortly for our next tour.

Yesterday we took a walk in the woods on the Kepler Track. It was mostly through a beech forest with lots of mosses and mushrooms, and some very cool bird sounds. There were some bogs we walked across also. They have these huts in the national parks here so you don't have to take your tent or stove -- but you have to get reservations, especially for the Milford Track, on July 1 for the following year.

Then we went on a tour of the Te Anau Glowworm Caves. After a short boat ride across the lake, we went into a much more tourist-friendly cave than the one in Fiji. Part of it was on little boats that were propelled by the guide pulling on ropes attached to the ceiling of the cave. There were lots of glowworms in the cave -- some of it looked like Magellanic Clouds. It seems that most of the worms had a glow around their light other than the one I was looking directly at -- I guess that's how eyes work.

We went to a Chinese restaurant, which was all good, and all different. The shredded duck soup was very thick and gummy and delicious, the black pepper venison (from the New Zealand Taste category of the menu) was delightfully tender and tasty, and the scallops were served with the part of the scallop you don't get in the US, the part which surrounds the muscle. You know that little round muscle in a mussel? That's the part of a scallop you usually get -- there's much more than that that you don't.

Not a whole lot, but as we've been sitting here typing we just felt an earthquake. It was pretty mild, at least here. It's now 12:08 AM Monday Pacific time (9:08 PM Monday New Zealand daylight time). Check out USGS after the waves have had a chance to get there, to see how big it was and where it was centered.

Yesterday we took a guided tour of the Franz Josef Glacier. The Franz Josef Glacier is one of only a few in the world that empty into a subtropical rain forest. It is not permitted to go to the glacier by yourself, since it is advancing at the rate of a meter a day which is a lot of ice falling onto tourists if they allowed you there. Early every morning the professional glacier people go up and hack out a trail for the day. The tourists get on a bus at 8 AM. We walked up the glacier valley from the parking lot about 2 kilometers, up a big moraine, strapped crampons onto our boots, and then walked on the ice for a couple hours. The ice is a beautiful blue color, and it was actually quite easy walking on it as long as you were careful not to step into crevasses 130 meters deep. A big chunk of ice fell off right next to the guide. He said, "I didn't plan that actually." We met a nice young guy from Amsterdam who hung out with us for the rest of the day. Christoph is studying to be a lawyer so he won't be nice for long.

Tony, our glacier guide, said that he had in the past couple of years occasionally been hired to run tours for Lord of the Ring aficionados. "I'd show themn the place where Peter Jackson had stood framing some particular shot and they'd ---" [pantomimes frantic camera clicking --- New Zealanders don't appear to say "be all" in the California sense but this is a place where the idiom is called for]

All of New Zealand has been just gorgeous. Driving across the island to the Wild Foods Festival was gorgeous, but we were in a hurry and didn't want to stop -- it was kind of like the Road to Gerlach with a long line of cars in a vaguely deserty landscape and policemen checking to see that nobody was prematurely drunk or speeding.

Driving down from Franz Josef to Te Anau today was just gorgeous, with a huge range of different landscapes -- rain forest in front of snow capped peaks, gorges, bare mountains next to big lakes, brown hills like California, and even a little bit of miscellaneous flat farmland.

Leaving breakfast this morning we picked up a hitchhiker named Emma from Somerset who tolerated well the 40 km or so that we drove into Haast Junction with the gas tank empty warning light on. We had intended to buy gas in Fox Glacier but in the fuss of picking up a hitchhiker we forgot. It was also forgotten to take a picture of a sign referring to MINNEHAHA something or other which, if anybody from Minnesota is reading this, knows that this is not, strictly speaking, a Maori expression, and when I am on a cheaper internet connection I am going to look up to see how come that name got associated with any features in Fox Glacier, Westland, New Zealand.

Anyway the car was conservative in its estimate and apparently had ten liters left.

We dropped Emma off at Wanaka in front of a Kashmiri restaurant. The duty officer at the restaurant had a tshirt on that said

GEORGE BUSH AND SONS
FAMILY BUTCHERS
SINCE 1989

Ashraf (that was his name) asked where I was from and I said "California". I sent Dave to go get the camera from the car but before he got back Ashraf changed his shirt. I think he doesn't understand the detailed political geography of America.

First, a few vocabs, some used in the last posting:

Bula: the word of greeting in Fiji. I don't know if it's related to "boola, boola"...

Kava: a powder they mix with water and drink in a ceremony, or not in a ceremony. It's available in the US in capsule form, called "kava-kava" -- there was a controversy awhile ago over whether you could get a DUI under the influence of it.

Thole Binar (sp?): what you say when people offer you kava.

Binaca (sometimes pronounced bin-aqua): what you say after you've drunk the kava you've been offered.

On our last full day in Fiji we took a half-day cruise to South Sea Island, 25 minutes away, where there was incredible snorkeling just off the beach at low tide. Mr. Pantone was especially busy with blue underneath the water, using it to color many entire corals, the tips of some other corals which were otherwise coral in color, and most especially starfish. There were little schools of green fish hanging out in orange coral, little schools of blue fish hanging out in blue coral, and various other fish of all sizes and colorations.

As we got back to the hotel afterwards, the sky opened up for the first time in the four days we'd been there, unleashing a torrent that lasted about the time it took us to walk to the neighboring resort for dinner, to eat dinner (Thursdays were Fiji food), and to take a taxi back. It was very loud.


Yesterday we flew to Auckland, and then on to Christchurch on the south island of New Zealand. It was pretty late when we arrived, and all we could find to eat was a "bar platter" at a pub full of very friendly people.

Today we drove across the island to Hokitaki and went to the Wild Foods Festival. Here's what we ate:

Possum Pate
Chamois Stick
Sheep testicles
Gorse bush popsicle
Cricket and peanut butter
Raw and pickled hearts of fern
Abalone fritter
Bull penis (it was inedibly chewy and we ended up throwing it away)
Smoked conga eel on pita bread
Mutton Bird
A shot of vodka with Flax Seed
Sea Urchin (called Kina down here)
Three beers (this was the only long line in the whole festival -- it took 45 minutes)
Corn on the cob
Potato and "pepper tree" salad (a peppery leaf that grows very gradually hot in your mouth)
Worm Salsa cup
Wild Mushroom Cup
Fruit Biltong
Dutch Doughnut

It was all tasty except as noted and we got very full. We also met lots of drunk New Zealanders who liked our beards, variously calling us ZZ Top, Santa, Saruman/Gandalf, etc. We even met a woman from Zambia who knew the guy who drove us out to see the eclipse there in 2001.

Now we're at the town of Franz Josef near one of two glaciers we'll take a look at tomorrow. The Internet Cafe closes at 8:30 in 5 minutes so we will sign off.

Right after posting a couple days ago, we had our first kava ceremony at a small handicrafts shop in Nadi run by some people from a nearby village. They haven't been in business very long, and after carefully explaining that kava is a gift, were very disappointed when we failed to give a gift of buying a seriously overpriced piece of not terribly impressive handicraft, or failing that, making a donation "for the kava ceremony". Perhaps they will become better businessmen in time.

The last two days we've been on two delightful tours operated by Adventures in Paradise, a small Fijian tour company. Yesterday we went on The Cave Tour, which started with a kava ceremony in someone's driveway under a tree. It is very exciting to think of how the world is being pulled together by blue tarps. The same blue tarp that covers our metal shed at home is being used on a Pacific island thousands of kilometers away to illustrate traditional ceremonies to strangers. Then (steps omitted) we floated across a river on bamboo rafts pushed and pulled by people in the water, and walked up into the jungle to a large cave. Getting to the biggest part of the cave required crouching and walking sideways hanging on to a bamboo pole -- the water was up to our knees but the ceiling was very low. It's pretty primitive compared to Carlsbad or Tasmania, but it was still a lot of fun. They told us about a US/Scottish couple getting married who couldn't get their parents to agree on a location, so they just went to Fiji by themselves and got married in that very cave. This has been about the only story we've heard that hasn't involved cannibals. I think they are proud of their pre-Christian past. I would be. The cave had an impressive "cannibal oven" sited in a hollow columnar flowstone. Nadia, our guide, is a smashing Fijian interpretation of a universally occurring gender and loads of fun and a good guide.

Today we went on The Waterfall Tour, which started with a kava ceremony. This one was in a large room in a small village. Chief Leone Sarogo Dradra is very nice and tomorrow (10 March) is his 73rd birthday. He was very excited to get his picture taken "so his wife could look at him after he was gone". I don't know how he can have avoided having dozens of pictures of himself in all these years, since Wanqa, our guide, is related by marriage into that village. Since they were all so nice, we bought some handicrafts and headed up the creek towards the waterfall. Wanqa pointed out lots of plants along the way and told the medicinal properties of each one. He uses traditional medicines himself for his family. The waterfall wasn't amazingly high, but the water was nice and "cool" by Fijian standards (Josh, a trainee who is also the owner's son, seemed actually to be shivering), and the day was a lot of fun.

Fijians have an Island attitude toward consonants. Wanqa is pronounced Wanda or Wanga depending. On the other hand, Nadi, the main tourist center, is generally pronounced "Nandi" because it's easier for the half of the population of Indian origin to say.

Prince Charles is making a visit to the area tomorrow or the next day -- hopefully it won't delay our departure or make us miss our connection on Friday. Perhaps he'll get to drink kava out of the human skull chiefs traditionally get to use instead of the coconut shells everyone else uses. (I think I overheard the English tourists on today's waterfall walk wondering if he was "bringing the Rottweiler" referring to his fiancee. They gave us tips about another glacier to see in New Zealand, and we told them to check out the Anza-Borrego desert on the next segment of their trip.)

The flight was uneventful and early and there was nothing to see, like eleven hours inside the Chunnel. Every time I thought I saw an island it turned out to be a star in the Northern Hemisphere winking from view. The character of the New Zealanders seems to be intermediate in bon-vivantism between Australian and Civilized. One flight attendant kept making the sort of joke that would get you sent to a secondary search in Denver: "the captain tends to fall asleep after his second bottle of vodka" sort of thing. The flight left on Saturday at 7:15 and arrived on Monday at 2:30 AM -- we're taking it easy today.

At the moment we are in a small Internet Cafe in Nadi that smells like a sewer, which will remind us to get out swiftly as it charges ten cents a minute. Fiji dollars are discounted somewhat but not that much. It is hot and sunny and muggy. We have been called ZZ Top twice, Santa Claus and Ali Baba once each, in the last 90 minutes. This will give an idea of the polyculturism of Fiji.

We're signed up for tours of waterfalls and caves in the next two days, which may include opportunities to drink kava in local villages. We'll let you know how it compares to drinking mint tea in Moroccan carpet shops.

[mostly written by Ray]

We left Woodside Wednesday morning just before 11. We made it to LA just in time for rush hour in the rain, arriving in Anaheim at 6. We had a nice sushi dinner with our friend Dan, and were back on the road by 8:15: it took till just before 11 to arrive in Borrego Springs, a long hard 12- hour day.

But today was wonderful -- after catching up on sleep missed the night before we left, we spent the whole day frolicking in the amazing wildflower display of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park (R) east of San Diego. It's been raining quite a bit there in the last several months, but today it was cloudless with temperatures from 60 to 80 degrees. People say it's the most intense display of wildflowers in years. There were dozens of species, from a little magenta monkey flower to a field containing several square miles of desert sunflowers, and lots in between of all colors. Even some of the cactuses were beginning to bloom.

Afterwards we drove to San Diego and went out for Ethiopian food with some friends who live here.