Oh, the ineffable awkwardness of the B&B breakfast with the other guests and the host organisms. You cultured this yogurt yourself? That’s wonderful. And – No. Thanks, but no. Today is not a prune day. We kinda fly outta there after contemplating lying to the guest book. LOVED the bagpipes! There’s quite a trek ahead of us. Maybe we can stop in Havelock at the famous Mussel Pot for a plate of their famous green-lipped mussels. It turns out we’re much too early for a mussel lunch, but right on time for coffee, the essential nutrient of all travelers.

On to Nelson, a large town / small city en route to Golden Bay. Between the city and the sea, miles of sand flats extend as far as the eye can see. Is the tide out? After lunch, a voluminous antique store draws us in. Lots of quirky stuff, with a curious predilection for Made In USA items, e.g. milk bottles from New Hampshire. We make a couple good scores: a kiwi key rack (say that fast three times), an unearthly blue plastic basket-textured baby doll, a wee squirrel nutkin with genuine fur tail, a raccoon claw bottle opener, and a beautiful little ceramic kiwi. Treasures all. We chat up the guy behind the counter and discover that he and his partner scour US flea markets and upscale fairs like Brimfield and then ship a container full of goodies back to NZ. Kiwis can’t get enough of American detritus.

The GPS goes incommunicado as we leave Nelson, but we’re headed in the right general direction so we put our trust in the Lloyd. With little warning, the road begins rising and twisting mightily. Our trajectory is relentless. Joss becomes increasingly unhappy, though I’m managing skillfully. This is the fearsome Takaka Hill. The only way to Golden Bay is up and over. Near the top, at some ‘caves’, there’s a turn-off that offers a heart-stopping panorama. I pull over just to catch my breath. Now we’re on the downward side, slowly switchbacking into lush valley grassland as the golden light of magic hour turns everything into a dream. We ease into Pohara and find the Sans Souci Inn, our resting place for the next three nights. The inn’s host is also a chef. Tonight he serves venison and it is nearly divine.

We decide to forgo the boat ride along the shore of Abel Tasman Park. It would have meant a 45-minute drive to cover a mere twenty kilometers and then the post-boat return trip. I didn’t have the inclination to do the road jockey thing again so soon. We have many absorbing miles ahead of us.

Besides, there’s lots of grubby laundry to do. Especially grievous is the garb that made or didn’t make the Tongariro Crossing. We get four loads washed and hung up on the line, then we head to Takaka town for lunch, and after, a visit to Te Waikoropupu Springs. Takaka is a genuine counter-culture community; you can almost hear the wind chimes, smell the patchouli, and taste the sprouts. I can see that bare feet are customary in NZ: no law prevents one from shuffling into the supermarket barefoot to buy gingernut biscuits. Lunch is very organic. I feel virtuous. The benign stores of Takaka are named Shambala and Hinterland, but not very interesting. The ice cream stand operates with the simplest formula, either vanilla ice cream or vanilla frozen yogurt with your choice of four kinds of frozen berries. It’s then mashed and extruded, soft-serve-style. Delicious and ice cream headache cold.

Te Waikoropupu Springs are just up the road. The volume of water that they produce could evidently slake the thirst of a city the size of Boston, but it is most remarkable for its extreme clarity, a shimmering, bottomless brilliance that is what the word ‘aquamarine’ was invented for. Staring at the depths, I get the sensation of being underwater while standing dry and sunburned on the overlook. These characteristics make Te Waikoropupu unique in the world. The path to the springs crosses many riotous, crystal streams and wanders through a forest, a thicket really, of strange conifers whose bare, twisty trunks stretch branchless for twenty or so feet to a thin, tufted canopy. This is a dappled, murmurous wonderland.

We decide to take dinner in Pohara town, but maybe should have eaten at the inn. Joss enjoys a plate of green-lipped mussels, whose shells really have an emerald green rim. I order something that’s a mashup of an egg mcmuffin and a fish sandwich. Into every life, a little whitebait must fall.

Oh, the ineffable awkwardness of the B&B breakfast with the other guests and the host organisms. You cultured this yogurt yourself? How wonderful. Thanks, but no thanks, no prunes today. We kinda fly outta there after lying to the guest book. LOVED the bagpipes! There’s quite a trek ahead of us. Maybe we can stop in Havelock at the famous Mussel Pot for a plate of their famous green-lipped mussels. We’re much too early for a mussel lunch, but right on time for coffee, the essential nutrient of all travelers.

On to Nelson, a large town / small city en route to Golden Bay. Between the city and the sea, miles of flats extend as far as the eye can see. Is the tide out? After lunch, a voluminous antique store draws us in. Lots of quirky stuff, with a curious predilection for Made In USA items, e.g. milk bottles from New Hampshire. We make a couple good scores: a kiwi key rack (say that fast three times), an unearthly blue plastic basket-textured baby doll, a wee squirrel nutkin with genuine fur tail, a raccoon claw bottle opener, and a beautiful little ceramic kiwi. Treasures all. We chat up the guy behind the counter and discover that he and his partner scour US flea markets and upscale fairs like Brimfield and then ship a container full of goodies back to NZ. Kiwis can’t get enough of American detritus, as opposed to stodgy British stuff.

The GPS goes incommunicado as we leave Nelson, but we’re headed in the right general direction so we put our trust in the Lloyd. With little warning, the road begins rising and twisting mightily. Our trajectory is relentless. Joss becomes increasingly unhappy, though I’m managing skillfully. This is the fearsome Takaka Hill. The only way to Golden Bay is up and over. Near the top, at some ‘caves’, there’s a turn-off that offers a heart-stopping panorama. I pull over just to catch my breath. Now we’re on the downward side, slowly falling into lush valley grassland as the golden light of magic hour turns everything into a dream. We ease into Pohara and find the Sans Souci Inn, our resting place for three nights. The inn’s host is also a chef. Tonight he serves venison and it is nearly divine.

We cross the great water today – North Island to South Island. The ferry departs at eight in the morning, so we must crack-of-dawn it. We are up and outta there at 6:45 and walk to the Bluebridge Ferry terminal, rolly suitcases and all. To indicate WALK, stoplights in NZ make a high-pitched wheet sound, followed by five seconds of clucking. I find this sound delicious to imitate. The elevator at 54 Bleecker make a weenie noise as it passes between floors. I like that one, too. Anyway, Joss had put me on wheet probation right away back in Auckland, but this morning I get a total free ride to wheet to my heart’s content.

Morning in Wellington harbor is a lively time. Two bright red tugs pull into berths right outside the terminal, while rowers in eight-, four-, and two-man shells glide past.

Our departure seems to be delayed, the boat’s elevator is out of service, but finally we board, get settled, and order some food. There will be no nautical barfing for us. We are too swell for swells. The voyage takes three hours, the final hour of which is a majestic sail up Queen Charlotte Sound to the port of Picton. Steep, pine-covered slopes close in like walls on our port and starboard then slide away as we swan up the blue-green water.

You can’t take a rented automobile from island to island unless you return it the island from which you rented it. Therefore, it is necessary to rent a car anew. I theoretically booked a South Island auto after all that rigmarole at the KeriKeri airport with the too-boatlike Holden. Picton presents us with a Corolla, which at first Joss deems too big. She tests this hypothesis utilizing the scientific method: a Focus is found in the lot and she spreads her arms across its back, holds the pose, then embraces the rear of the Corolla and compares. Bingo. We’ve got ourselves a set of wheels. This is good because I suspect that driving the North Island is a cakewalk compared to the Alpine Adventures that await us here in the South.

Our B&B is mere steps from Picton center. We stroll into town for a meat pie, a heavenly concoction especially when accompanied by a side salad. Picton has seaside charms: the view up Queen Charlotte Sound, a main drag with one-story shops and bars, a spacious promenade and park on the water that features a striking blue reflecting pool dedicated to a WWI hero with a life-size statue of Donald Duck in the center.

Picton is home to a wonderful little aquarium that guidebooks tout as a seahorse sanctuary. The ticket guys shoos us in – “Hurry! It’s feeding time!” We round a corner to find a group listening to the authoritative gent with a lizard on his arm. It’s actually not a lizard, but a tuatara, a reptile, yes, but a singular species more related to dinosaurs than other earthly reptiles. It’s extinct now on mainland New Zealand, preserved in the wild only on some twenty islands reserved for endangered flora and fauna. We’re encouraged to touch the tuatara, to which one small child exclaims, ‘it feels like grandma’.

We will now follow this guy anywhere. It’s time to feed the fish in the big tank. A stingray about the size of a bathmat plasters itself against the glass of the tank displaying its white belly and the strange expression that its long, down-turned mouth and pair of nostrils make. It knows exactly what time it is. The edges of its body flutter and its mouth opens to receive a piece of sashimi.

When his box of chum is empty, he slips away, returning with the red plastic milk box with a Little Blue Penguin within. Disoriented at first, the bird soon develops a curiosity about its confines and its audience. It is being rehabilitated after an inner ear infection. Once it fully regains its diving ability, it will be released. People take photos of the Little Blue Penguin in the red box. A sentence kinda sums it up.

Sadly, the seahorse promo is over-hyped. There’s a single one. The pipefish, though, provide compensatory fascination. They are transparent and float vertically, like oral thermometers with a green stripe instead of mercury. This little aquarium may be a bit shabby with weird signage, but it more than makes up for it with charm and professionalism.

Back to the B&B for R&R, a wee lie down before venturing forth for dinner. I type some. Then – BAGPIPES! Are you fucking kidding me? They’re coming from right below my window. Smack in the middle of excursionary contentment, fucking BAGPIPES. They must belong to this house somehow. I suck it up. I imagine Jocelyn must have been sonically electrocuted. The remainder of the day is spent slowly decompressing from The Assault of the Giant Gasbag.

Before tackling New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa to one and all), we must eat an enormous fucking breakfast. I order the Big Kiwi, which consists of three scrambled eggs, streaky bacon, and a pale sort of latke, plus an impressive sausage called a Kransky. With enough caffeine, anything is possible. We walk along the waterfront in the brilliant sun to the imposing museum.

Of primary interest is the giant squid, the largest on display anywhere. It’s pretty fucking grim, lying there in its chemical solution looking very much the worse for wear, tattered and stitched and exfoliated. A video of its capture, which seems to have been accidental, underscores its sad end. Somehow, longline fishermen reeled it in after it went for the bait and didn’t let go. Once on the surface, it apparently expired and was hauled aboard and frozen. It’s about 30 feet long, with eyes the size of basketballs and all manner of strange adaptations. I Love Cephalopods!

Jocelyn makes a fascinating discovery. Tucked away is an exhibit dedicated to Carmen Rupe, New Zealand’s most famous trans person and transgender Maori to boot. The display features some of her most fabulous headgear and a too brief synopsis of her fabulous life. Te Papa’s presentation of New Zealand’s rich heritage could benefit from a better throughline or organization or something. I keep getting the sensation that I’m in the national attic.

I feel it’s incumbent on me to touch base with the Fellowship Not-Of-The-Ring. At noon today, there’s an AA meeting at Saint Mary of the Angels church hall. We both go. Afterwards, we head back to the museum for further enlightenment and shopping purposes. Te Papa sells plush squids in two sizes, but upon close examination they’re revealed to be beakless. We shall leave NZ squidless.

Last evening, Louise pointed Joss to a couple of interesting vintage clothing stores on Cuba Street while Dev offered to meet us to coffee in the afternoon, so we combine business with pleasure, wander up Cuba Street not buying anything and meet the young man for flat whites in a leafy courtyard. Then, he is off to rugby practice.

A rough night at the sweet B&B. The beds just sucked. So flabby as to perpetrate the dreaded inverted-parabola-torture scenario, the bane of side sleepers. Oh, well. I snost and I lost. Our host is quite lovely and considerate, though her payment system flummoxes. I am compelled to initiate a mission to find cash money, following her to the nearest ATM, which just happens to be across the street from an establishment called Mr. Bun. Mr. Bun!

This kerfuffle sets us on the road a half hour later than we anticipated. Will we make the 10:30 Weta Workshop tour in Wellington? Whew. Not a nanosecond to spare, what with parking on a residential street and everything. Weta has provided all the special effects for Peter Jackson’s work, as well as many other productions. They offer a short tour, really just a visit to a prop room/repository/museum with a peek at some of the craftsmen at work. Aliens and armor and hardware hang from every available surface. Our guide hands around four iterations of chainmail. Joss and I are in nerd heaven. The work involved in creating convincing verisimilitude for these nutty illusions is daunting. For example, consider the painstaking insertion of millions of individual follicles into a test gorilla in order to chart their motion: this to give the animators something real and adaptable to work from.

Locating the Wellesley Hotel is our next project. Our rooms aren’t ready, so we take a seat in the pub and order lunch. The Wellesley was a Georgian-style, four-story men’s club in its day and converted some twenty years ago into a small hotel. The exterior and the common rooms are a little down at the heels, but the guest rooms themselves are elegant and spacious, with less-soft mattresses.

After the meal, we can unload. I volunteer to take the Focus back to Hertz by myself and let Joss ease her way-tired bones. The rent-a-car return process requires no human contact. I stroll back to the hotel past the cargo port, huge ‘Imperial Walker’ cranes, stacks and stacks of containers, and giant piles of logs for export. To my right squats the giant, unprepossessing stadium the locals call ‘The Cake Tin’. I buy Gandalf stamps at the PO on the way and get a haircut from a woman named Kim.

By mid-afternoon, Joss and I begin exploring. Joss declares her desire to find a purse. Lambton Quay, just behind the hotel, is Wellington’s main shopping street. And, by golly, if a suitable handbag doesn’t appear: attractive, competitively priced, and sporting fringe. We wander through an intriguing galleria in the old Bank of New Zealand building. Devon and Louise will pick us up at the hotel at six, so we return in order to clean up our acts.

At six o’clock, the lobby is bustling with distinguished gentlemen. Groups of two or three come through the front door, each fellow carrying a case, either backgammon size or one twice as big, but always one of those two. Hogwarts, Class of ’51 Reunion? Can’t be. No women. Then we notice the full-length portrait hanging on the landing – a Mason in full regalia. Uh-oh, mumbo-fucking-jumbo.

Devon drives us (Yay! I’m hands-free!) up Mount Victoria for a panorama of Wellington – seaward slopes covered with houses, the gleaming hodge-podge of the central business district, and distant inlets and mountains. The wind up here is strong, with a bite of chill. Then, we drive out to an old quarry located right at the shore. We get to see aspects of the city we wouldn’t have otherwise.

Lou and Dev have promised to take us to dinner. The restaurant they choose is Floriditas on Cuba Street, where Louise worked as an undergrad. Two more charming people would be hard to imagine. Both in their mid-20s, Lou’s an architect formerly with Greg’s firm and Dev’s working on his architecture degree at university. He spent several years in construction before committing to school. On Greg and Tori’s recommendation, they had stayed at 54 Bleecker Street while I was in Lisbon six months ago.

The Barn at the Wood Pigeon Lodge is a work of fantastic ingenuity. It has been retrofitted with parts of other buildings; appliances, furniture, windows, doors (sliding, French, and otherwise. A note on NZ doors: There’s no code mandating at what height the doorknob should go, so finding the bathroom in the dark of night can be an experience of desperate, noisy groping. It can sleep eleven in comfort and glory, surrounded by the lowing of cattle and sheep. As Joss and I begin to drive away, Ted the wet dog insists on trying to herd the car. Hilarious, sweet, and a little sorrowful.

It is raining in Raurimu as we leave. This is the rain that should have put the kibosh on the Crossing yesterday. Ha! We laugh at you, rain. This is a travel day for Joss and V. Our windshield wipers can now perform their appointed tasks rather than be cursed for not being the turn signal. We meander three hours through the breathtaking Whanganui River valley, stopping for lunch in Whanganui town. At least a half dozen times, the road shrinks to a single lane because the other lane has dropped into the river. We slow to fully experience a striking fence that, like and unlike the bridges over the Seine, is festooned with thousands of pairs of sneakers. In late mid-ish afternoon, we find ourselves in a lovely B&B with crickets and lawnmowers. There’s a rose garden out the window and a silly dog, named Gimme, who just wants to play ‘throw me the monkey’.

We won’t chugging all the way to Wellington, because, well, I anticipated rightly we’d be tired after yesterday’s feat. Oh, ya. Levin (pronounced leVin) is a one-story town, prosperous, unremarkable, and diurnal. We are the last people in the Thai restaurant at 7:30. They probably do take-away until nine, but as we leave the sidewalks are being rolled up.

We rally for the Tongariro Crossing, perhaps the most anticipated piece of our journey. The Tongariro Crossing is considered one of the world’s most inspiring and demanding day hikes. The route takes one up the slopes of a volcano past streams and lava flows followed by a steep climb to mineral lakes and stunning vistas of the verdant countryside and other volcanoes. It’s really not to be undertaken lightly. http://www.tongarirocrossing.org.nz/

I remember that I had requested in an email that Tim of the Wood Pigeon Lodge arrange for transportation to the trailhead. Tim did not remember. We scurry about, packing lunch and sunblock and whatnot, when Tim appears breathless to tell us we’re good to go – Now. “I’ve called Zeus. He’s got the van ready at the Plateau Lodge.” We fly.

Bouncing along the plains in our naiveté and gazing up at the snow-streaked volcano peak, we make breezy chatter. “Look,” says Greg, pointing at two black-clad girls slouching along the roadside – “Goths.” This observation delights the van. “They’re awfully far from their native habitat.”

As am I, it turns out. Once again, the arrogance of previous adventures has done me in. At the three kilometer mark, I am just too fuckin’ wheezy to enjoy myself, so I bid the others adieu and turn tail. Seven hours later, after a total of twelve miles and an ascent of just under 1,000 feet and a descent of 1,500, Devon comes by and picks me up. I have spent a very meditative afternoon in a Nat’l Park shelter lean-to, counting bees, napping, and memorizing a brochure while other hikers go and come, spouting gaily in foreign tongues or mutely zombified.

Jocelyn’s Tongariro tale is one of self-doubt, trudging, and giddy triumph. “I really fucking did this!!” In the end, she was her own Samwise Gamgee.

After a subdued meal at the local sports bar, the four Kiwis bolt (they have far to go and lives to resume), so the two of us spend a quiet night being exhausted.