Easter Easter Kayak Kayak

I’d been talking with Theresa, kind of randomly, about taking a trip together somewhere for Easter weekend this year, without coming to much of a decision. I wanted to go to the top of the South Island, maybe to Shambhala again or something, but tickets to Takaka were sort of expensive and they close for the winter and I wasn’t sure and I didn’t know, so I just sort of didn’t commit to anything and left it at that, figuring I’d just hang out and relax at home over the four-day weekend. I like to relax, and I like home, so, you know? Fine.

Except that somehow I got looped into this big email discussion between Theresa and a couple of her friends (some of whom I knew a little bit, others of whom I’d never met at all) about taking a trip down to Marlborough Sounds to do a spot of kayaking, as sort of a last hurrah before winter really sets in. I like kayaking, and I like friends, so it didn’t take too long for me to commit fully to the plan, going so far as to hook up with my kindred spirit in planning (e.g., The Other Mom), Amber, to spend almost three hours with a shopping list and a calculator at the Kilbirnie Pak-n-Save to buy all the food for the weekend—catering for two vegetarians, one Passover-observer, and one person who’d given up chocolate for Lent–for which, you’ll be happy to know, we came in exactly fifty cents under budget.

I kind of knew—you know how you just kind of know, sometimes?—that this trip was going to be comedy gold, right from the beginning, when we all got to the Wellington ferry with like four hundred plastic bags of food ten minutes before it was supposed to leave, and we had to repack everything up and check our packs and, like, introduce ourselves to each other (“So! You must be Chiara!”) and sprint onto the gigantic boat and find a place where we could hang out for three hours and eat cake. We did find such a place and we did get many coffees and sort out who spoke which languages and tell dumb stories and all the things you do when you don’t know people very well yet but kind of know that they’re good people and that you’re all going to get along great.

I dropped a bottle of quite nice red wine on the ferry right as everyone was getting ready to disembark, we lost part of our luggage for what was to be the first of several times, and finally crashed at the beleagured backpackers whose misfortune it was to host us, and that was pretty much it for that evening.

Friday it was all go, sort of. I mean we had to get all eleven thousand of our plastic bags rounded up, and then we had to wait for the kayak van to take us to the kayak place, and then we had to go to the kayak launch in Waiwera, and then we had to, like, learn how to paddle and what to do if we capsized and how to read a map and so on and so forth. After that came, of course, the packing. We packed, and unpacked, and repacked, and packed again, and overpacked, and underpacked, so so so so so many times on this trip. So much packing.

Waiting for the bus, with like a quarter of our stuff shown.

You can’t buy alcohol in New Zealand on Good Friday but the kayak dudes sold us this bottle of bubbles they had in their fridge. Rachel approves.

Just getting into the packing here. In other news, I have ridiculous hair and a very big nose.

Okay, we’ve got all our gear stowed away, we’ve got our spray skirts and life vests, I think we’re just about ready to go, right? Something still seems not right somehow…I feel like we’re not really getting anywhere…

Ensign Chiara reporting for duty, cap’n.

We started out very nicely, gamely paddling our way to Monkey Bay.

Okay, now see that ferry in the background? We’d heard all these instructions from the kayak guys, and we’d all nodded our heads at appropriate times, like when he said that we had to go really hard when we crossed the channel to make our campsite by nightfall, and that we had to time it right because the channel is, of course, where the gigantic inter-island ferries cross. We all nodded a little harder when the kayak dude was all “They can’t stop for you! THEY REFER TO KAYAKS AS SPEED BUMPS,” and we tried to pay attention when we were told where not to cross. To our credit, we crossed at the right place, just not at the right time, because we didn’t really understand that after that ferry up there in the picture would come another, larger, more terrifying ferry, right when we were in the middle of the channel and just when the wind was picking up and making paddling difficult for those of us who are comprised mostly of marshmallow fluff instead of muscle. It came really fast, so like one minute I was yelling “Keep going! Keep going!” and then the next minute Theresa was like “I really think we should turn around RIGHT NOW LIKE RIGHT THIS MINUTE” and we had to shout for everyone to turn around and the waves were real big and I won’t speak for anyone else but I was really scared, like actually terrified. I guess in the end we didn’t get close enough to be in any real danger, and of course no one capsized or anything, but damn that boat came fast.

Paddling got harder after that because it was getting late and starting to get cold and then the sun was in our eyes and I was feeling a little unsettled about the ferry because I hadn’t gauged it correctly and had been telling people to keep going when we should have just waited. Fortunately for us, as we got into the bay that held the campsite that was to be the scene of many wacky hijinks, we saw…a whole pod of dolphins!

Obviously I wasn’t able to fumble around in my dry bag and grab my camera and turn it on and actually capture the dolphins (bottlenoses!) but if you sort of look waaaay in the distance you can see some splashes where the dolphins were. Of course I ruined it a little by being the mom and screaming “GUYS DON’T GET TOO CLOSE GUYS GIVE THEM ROOM GUYS THEY CAN TIP US IF THEY WANT TO, GUYS, OKAY? GUYS?” but I think that’s the thing about seeing a big ol’ pod of bottlenose dolphins in the wild, in a kayak, in the Sounds,—your day kind of can’t be ruined, after that. Theresa was very proud that her friend Mike, who was in town just for a week from Switzerland, was having such a Nu Zilund Experience so early on in the trip.

Cetacean magic aside, by the time we finally got to our campsite we were all pretty tired and cold and wet and of course there were kayaks to unpack and tents to put up and pasta and quinoa to cook in shifts and all of that—we were all pretty exhausted, I think, and already we’d changed our plans a little to accommodate everyone’s various levels of athleticism and paddle experience—it was pretty clear that when we’d all been nodding along with the kayak dude we didn’t totally know what we were getting ourselves into. Fortunately it was also clear by dinner time—for which Jonas had used his manly good looks to get a freshly-caught fish off some guy on a boat, which all the other kids tore apart with their bare hands after we cooked it in the awesome camping frying pan—that we all really liked each other, as much as people can who have only just met, some of them, on the ferry the night before.

The next morning we woke up to this:

Which is sliiiightly misleading, because by the time we all had breakfast and did a little more packing and unpacking (just for fun!) and confirmed that we were not, in fact, going to take an eight-hour day trip to a nearby island, things were a little windier and a little choppier than depicted herein. This is sort of our fault for being lazy in the morning and sort of April’s fault for being autumn with changeable weather, so there was nothing to be done but to get in amongst it and see how we went.

Mike did his part by carrying with him at all times a large store of Toblerone chocolate, which he would considerately offer to everyone on the blade of a paddle, and which I think he is probably eating right here.

Amber, Theresa, and Rachel did their parts by looking very cute in their life vests and by telling funny jokes.

And you know how sometimes you are just having such an awesome time with your buddies that there is nothing to do but burst into a passionate rendition of “Total Eclipse Of The Heart?” Here is one of those magical moments, captured on film.

We paddled by a salmon farm and saw a rather forlorn sea lion patrolling the perimeter and hoping for an escapee, and then out past a bay, thinking that we’d have lunch on a beach like the day before. It was not to be, sadly, as the wind picked right up and the waves got bigger and we all got sort of tired and blown around a lot. After appealing to a waterskiing family for a tow (which they very kindly supplied—seriously, that’s New Zealanders for you) we managed to get back to our bay and sit around eating strange lunch combinations (ginger nuts and jam, salami and crisps) and having family-inappropriate conversations before suiting up and making it back to camp.

We made an awesome dinner that sadly, did not include any more bartered fish, but did include bean burritos with grilled onions and peppers, followed by sautéed apples with wine, butter, and sugar. Once it got dark, we discovered there were all these cool phosphorescent bugs in the sand down at the beach, so we spent some time throwing little rocks in the water to make them light up, and then the girls spent some time hugging each other and swaying back and forth singing under the stars (anyone who went to high school with me will recognize this behavior) while the boys cleaned up after dinner. Someone then had the brilliant idea to all pile into one of the tents and form a cuddle puddle and discuss more family-inappropriate topics, probably keeping up the rest of the campers. We’d already decided to cut the trip a day short and Mike was leaving us altogether to go back to Zurich (via, oddly, Minneapolis) so it was our last night all together, laying around, giggling and telling stories and just talking endlessly and earnestly about nothing, like the last week of senior year, like the last night of every trip that anyone takes.

The next day Mike had to get the water taxi so he could make the first of his many flights of the day, and Theresa and I were both pretty tired of paddling, so we said goodbye for the morning to Jonas and Rachel and Amber (who had the best paddle of the trip, on the last day of course) and hung out at the now-deserted campsite for the morning.

Theresa caught up on the Welly gossip.

I took a picture of a dead jellyfish.

And also of my feet.

Finally the water taxi came and we jumped in the kayaks and got them on the boat and then had a rather windy and rainy hour—Jonas and Amber and Rachel, it turned out, had got back to Picton hours before we had and had fortunately missed the bad weather—zipping around picking up and dropping off trampers for the Queen Charlotte Track. We’d been assuring Mike that no, don’t worry, you only need to be at the tarmac for the little plane like ten minutes ahead, they’ll even wait for you if you’re not there! but it turned out we were wrong and that by the time we got back to Picton he was already late for the plane so we all had to say goodbye very hurriedly which was sort of stink. Then there was quite a lot of palaver about—of course–all our bags and luggage and everything, culminating in our completely losing, we don’t even know how, an entire bag full of our planned dinner for the night. Fortunately we sidestepped most of that drama by going wine-tasting in Blenheim instead.

I was pretty tired by that point but I managed to keep it together enough to be the sober driver over to the vineyards and even to clutch a glass of bubbles in my hand as a prop for this photo opportunity. I’m fairly useless at wine tasting, my assessments being limited to “This tastes gross!” and “This tastes sort of less gross, kind of,” but it’s always fun to talk to the very passionate winemakers, who told us all sorts of scientific knowledge about carbon dioxide and grapes and acidity levels, much to our (really!) delight.

Rachel, Theresa, and Jonas were all in a frolicksome mood after a couple of wineries.

I personally was kind of tired.

We spent the evening at a backpackers, putting together a very yummy improvised dinner, packing and unpacking our bags—which, for some reason, even though we’d lost a person and eaten a lot of the food, had not diminished in number at all–gossiping, and jumping on top of each other and demanding cuddles.

Monday morning we packed and unpacked a little more and made pancakes for breakfast with homemade rum syrup and went to a playground and got on the very crowded ferry and ate cake and drank wine and felt a little seasick and waited for ten hundred hours at baggage claim and hugged goodbye and all of a sudden were home in our separate houses. My new flatmate had cleaned the whole house and put the kettle on and watched Eagle Vs. Shark with me. I did my washing and went to bed early, setting my alarm for work the next day.

I hadn’t thought about work at all, over the weekend. I hadn’t really thought about Wellington at all, or any of my concerns or troubles there. I’d felt, all weekend, very comfortable and familiar and happy, but completely out of my little world.

It just happens that way sometimes, I guess. You bond with people you don’t really know—you can just tell that it’s going to work out somehow: everyone will take care of each other, everyone will be friendly and nice and good, everyone will get the jokes. That sort of thing happens more often when you’re a kid: maybe because you don’t really know yourself that well yet and so you’re more open to being different parts of yourself with different people, even as you’re obsessed with fitting in and being normal. It’s cool to be reminded that that sort of thing can still happen when you’re a grownup, if you give yourself the chance, every once in a while, to get out of town and do something a little different, be a part of yourself that you aren’t very often.