Ladies and gentlemen, we are now at the part of my South Island Pictures: The Neverending Series where I show you that awesome trip I took about a month ago with my awesome friend Alice, a trip of such fun and happiness and gossip and chatter and general silliness that it rivals only my South Island trip last winter with the delectable Lydia in terms of being the best trip ever. What we did, Alice and I, was we met in Nelson and we totally went on a weekend kayak trip together, even though our Tongariro Crossing Experience served to underline the sad-but-true fact that we are…well, that we are not Outdoorsy. Alice said she’d called her mother in Ireland to tell her we were going on this trip and her mom was all like “What have you done with my daughter?”
But here we are doing a damn fine job, I think you’ll agree, of faking being so. Spray skirts and everything.
The trip was pretty simple, actually: a day of kayaking (that involved a stop for carrot cake) and a day of hiking (which was a four hour walk along mostly flat ground through beautiful native forest for which we wore our boardies and jandals), but you’d think by the way we were acting that we were these super hardcore trampers.
Basically the whole purpose of this trip was for me and Alice to talk for eighteen hours a day in beautiful natural settings. We were pretty proud of ourselves for having chosen basically the last good weekend of summer in Nelson for our trip. The best part of the kayaking day was floating around some beautiful lagoons and just drifting along with the tide, gossiping about people we knew and watching snails and worms under the film of the water.
We spent the night at a floating backpackers–usually it sleeps thirty people but since we were there at the end of the season there were only six people total there, which was great because it was a pretty tight fit in the sardine can bunkroom we were supposed to sleep in.
You can’t really see how tiny this room is, unfortunately for you. Or maybe you will be able to survive without speculating, as we did for at least an hour, how eight people are supposed to fit (with their gear!) into a room the size of my old pink room in Wellington, you know? Yes, you’ll be fine. Just rest secure in the knowledge that the second picture is staged and that I am not usually this cheery in the early morning.
I just happen to like this picture of the water taxi taking our kayaks back to base late in the afternoon as we were waiting for the little rubber boat.
I don’t seem to have taken pictures of the hiking day, or of us walking around op shops in the rain, or of us eating chocolate pudding at the hostel in Nelson, or of us being chatted up by a couple of university students in a Thai restaurant (their idea of a chat-up line was to denigrate Christchurch–we were nowhere near Christchurch by declaiming loudly “I hate flat cities, eh. Flat cities are the worst), or of us reeling in shock at the very expensive price tag on the World Of Wearable Arts Museum entry admission. Although, wait, hang on, I do have a couple of pictures of me pretending to drive an old car and also of a fake lady wearing tea cups for a bra, because that’s what there is in this museum: old cars and fake ladies in funny clothes. It is a pretty cool museum, even if we did have to walk there in the pouring down rain from the airport.
I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car for two years but I think I remember how it’s done.
As usual, I didn’t get pictures of the best parts of this weekend: the earnest contemplation of tiny mushrooms on our bush walk, the sitting on the beach talking about pretty much everything, the pride in not dying after kayaking for five hours, the thrill of scoring our five-dollar Warehouse boardies, the calm lagoon, the fantails and tuis in the bush, the weird statues we saw at the art gallery at the end of the trail: everything was simple and silly and fun with an extremely fabulous friend, the perfect way to end the South Island trip and remind me why I want to be here, want to come back.
