Milford Sound: Gertrude Valley

ultratransparent spring water rippling in superabundant sunshine, surrounded by flowery grass scattered with orchids, beech trees dripping with moss, ferns, and mushrooms. Vast walls of marble, quartz, and granite extend huge arms across the sky, making a bowl, and we sit like sapient specks of dust in the center. We walk on a vast field of rocks that have fallen from these raw heights and come to rest in this exact spot, where the foot falls. The nuclear furnace around which we orbit clocks its solstice path and catches the ragged edge of the ridges and marks out valley-marching shadows the path weave in and out of, the disc of the sun sparkling along the battlements. At the top, a waterfall over bare, shattered rock, dashing into a stream overpowering in its purity, mist washing over skin hot from the long, scratchy climb.


A Quick Note on Quicksand:

Clambering through paths of mud and roots, vegetation leaning in all around us, finding my first quicksand -- really, a sort of pudding with enough sand to hold up a seemingly stable surface, butt soft like a custard and quite deep (this one about a foot deep, enough to easily suck your shoe right off). Poking it with my walking stick, it wiggled like jello setting in the fridge. Almost an organism in its own right, a tricky fairy to keep the unwary from venturing too far into woods they're not prepared to deal with.

Global Warming Mis-Adventure: Fox Glacier

as ice transitions to water, as the seas warm

the unstable moraine, the gravel and rocks riven from the valley's walls that fall from the ice as it melts, that makes up the uppermost semi-solid surface, is constantly undermined both by the increasing glacier melt and denser rainfall, condensed from the vapors of warm carbonated oceans.

And so instead of how it was when Billy and I visited in 2003, as a quiet walk through rain forest
emerging into a mind-bending view of the face of the glacier, towering beautiful above its ground-out valley,

the rains
that have been pattering n the campervan roof, forcing the constant donning and un-donning of jackets, profoundly de-stabilized the sides of the valley into huge landslides in the days before we arrived, rendering the whole (apparently essential) task of getting the tourists within view of the glacier into a skull-crushing swarm of orange machinery, steel blades cutting into the vast curves of gravel the glacier left so subtly, back-hoes scooping, pirhouetting and releasing their jaws into dump-trucks like over grown child's toys, struggling to organize a glacier's death throes. In spite of all this Mad Max effort a huge swath of collapsed gravel still lies across the path. The great glacier looms far off, blocked by signs and the sheer impossibility of maintaining something so enduring as a road in such a deeply unstable situation, and I wonder if this isn't an echo of times to come. The real wonder is the sheer number of people who come here, to glimpse its demise - the swarm of sudden interest, vulture eyes. Will all of out natural wonders have such a last flash of interest, will they have to generate such fireworks?

I my orange jacket I felt like a clown at a funeral, feeling way too happy for the occasion. In the milky, ashy, roaring water draining away from the glacier we could actually see chunks of ice, floating away to the sea.

Once I learned to view it from inside the disaster, it was, really, quite funny, in a sad and spectacular kind of way.

New Zealand: Trees, vines, ferns, moss, fungi, lichen, water, and stone

Every time I enter a rain forest and see its extraordinary abundance of life forms I feel lifted by a sense of gratitude for being able to apprehend so much life, all at once. So many stories, so much delicate geometry, intricate, growing and evomving before my eyes. The tree pushes up, the vine climbing the trunk, stretching a coarse matrix of hairy roots across the bark, which is already densely decorated by competing webs of colored lichen. Moss grows in the root-hairs, storiing water in its spongy bulk that the vine (and all the plants who grow embedded in the moss) uses to grow when it isn't raining, and then the densifying moss becomes a sort of aerial soil for ferns, other species of moss, orchids, countless plants small to large, and even more trees, creating this three-dimensional filling of space with roiling, intermixing, growing life. I could spend a lifetime studying just one of these trees and understand less than 1% of what's going on. Over and over, we fall for the forms, the trolls, fairies, our attempt to understand the complex by anthropomorphization, hovering over an amazing, tiny fungus as the other hikers blow right through. Amanda has an amazing eye for even tiny mushrooms; we bought a guide, and now we have already eaten two species...

Aboriginal Australia, a few words.

Aboriginal Australia

Back when Neanderthals still ruled Europe, and our bead-making Cro-magnon ancestors were just arriving from Africa, the first aborigines were arriving in Australia in their dugout canoes. Their culture survived fifty thousand years, including the last ice age, making it by far the oldest continuous human culture on the planet, and consequently the most sustainable by any reasonable definition.

They lived on the hottest, dryest, and flattest landscape on earth, and they seem to have been the most peaceful civilization the planet has known, with little evidence of organized conflict of any kind. This didn't serve them well when the British arrived, who treated them literally like animals (under colonial law, the native aborigines were considered part of the "flora and fauna" of the land, the property of the landowner), and what happened next was atrocious even by American standards. 'Nuff said.

Their culture is based around the concept of Dreamtime, that the world is created by the dreams of all its creatures, with great respect accorded to every living thing, and a strong sense of the eternal present -- in contrast to our western notion of progress, which may or may not be compatible with actual long-term sustainability.

An extreme beach of grandeur

Whaririki Beach

There are lying-on-a-blanket beaches, beachcombing beaches, and swimming beaches, and then there are the rare beaches like Whaririki which enrapture with majestic vastness , the scuptural opera of sea, wind, stone, life, and sand dancing together for eons. The western edge of NZ has been experiencing massive uplift over the last few million years, and as the ocean cut into this rising stone it formed great cliffs that back every west coast beach, generating cubic miles of sand that is lashed by wind, cemented by spray, then carved by wind again into a tapestry of organic patterns that extend unbroken for square miles between dreadnoughts of rock made of flowforms of wind and sea, arches and swoops, towering like great castles, their feet blanketed by mussels, seaweed, and myriad tidal creatures (including anemones that, when closed, look like shiny cabernet grapes but feel pillowy and soft when touched), crowned by exotic hanging gardens of windswept tea trees, alpine flowers, and palms.

After experiencing the beach, we climbed up to explore the edges of the cliffs that line the coast, the brilliant expanse of empty space over the Antarctic ocean on one side, on the other a Suess-y picture of grassy pasture dense with sheep shit, festooned with comically exotic palms and gnarled tea trees. Ridiculous views in every direction. Constant gale-force winds threatensssss to push us off at any moment. We duck over a lip of a hill and find a calm, warm pocket of air where we can rest for a moment, eat a couple of oranges and take in the glory. Swallows hurtle overhead, twist and dive over the treed cliffs below. A day like no other, under the stark brilliance of ozone-free sunshine.

Birds, Wilson's Prom...

Wilson's Promontory (aka the Prom, leading to jokes about "going to the Prom"...):

This place is bird city. As soon as we arrived we were greeted by a flock of brilliant red parrots - actually, crimson rosellas - who hop all around, squeaking and squawking, checking us out, finally hopping up on my hand to see what we've got. (Shona, you would love it here!) After a few hours, they start to seem like pigeons, more annoying than exotic. Just another freaking prismatic parrot, nothing to see here...

The kookaburra's call sounds like a monkey, a classic "jungle" sound - OOH OOH OOH OOH! AAH AAH AH AH! (Hear it at: http://www.anbg.gov.au/sounds/kookaburra.au .) You've heard it in countless cheesy TV shows and movies. At dusk the second day on the Prom we heard and then saw 2 of them duking it out, one yelling OOH OOH OOH! While the other yelled AAH AAH AH! And they meshed their claws together and fell from the trees while a couple of magpies circled around, playing bystander.

William Ricketts Sanctuary

I think that as we age our journeys mark us, and ultimately whittles us down, but if we live fully, with passion and with our own principles, what we lose is just the extraneous stuff, so what is left is just your essence, and that can be a beautiful thing. William Ricketts, even into his nineties, had the boldest, purest, most penetrating eyes, and though his voice was thin he still spoke strongly about the spirituality inherent in the natural world, about how the way we treat nature is also the way we treat ourselves. But he spoke most powerfully through his sculptures, loving ceramic renderings of people (mostly aborigines) and animals with lifelike, haunting expressions, set in his sanctuary among the lushness of a subtropical rainforest garden. Insects buzz by your head and mist drips from the ferns. The whole sanctuary is a work of art, a loving collaboration between nature and one sweet man. Not your usual white box gallery.

Melbourne & environs: funky city, lovely country...

Melbourne is far more eclectic than Sydney, mixing Romanesque and Victorian architecture with the most playful swooping steel and glass, goths and Japanese hipsters mixing with Australian rednecks ("bougans" in local parlance), yuppies, and rockers. Maria & Adrian's house is a sweet refuge. They are so generous as to lend us their truck, a massive Landcruiser with a chunky transmission and bellowing, shuddering motor; maneuvering this beast through the left-hand city traffic is quite entertaining on an action-comedy tip.

Riding Melb's excellent train and bus system - it seems like every other industrialized nation in the world has generally better public transport than the U.S., even ostensibly "liberal" San Francisco - a wide mix of Indian, Oceania (i.e. Samoans, etc.), Asians, africans, and various of the original penal colony descendant and ex-pat Brits and Irish, with scattered suburbs of small houses and colorfully painted businesses (running to yellow and other sunny shades), generously festooned with graffiti, all under the over-powering sun careening unfiltered through the ozone hole. All the older white folks have extraordinarily wrinkled skin courtesy of all the world's aerosol cans.

This brilliance, and the weathered faces of the rural folk, seem appropriate in the exotic wilds of the countryside, but set against scenes of Aussie urbanity, the hoodie-wearing, acne-befuddled teenagers spitting on the station floor, the dissonance seems strong, unmooring the subterranean at least in my mind, while the fundamental facts of the capitalist system that generate squalor as an inevitable byproduct churn forward inexorably, regardless of human or climactic context, what might have been cheerful brightness mercilessly exposing every flaw in crisp relief. Here we are in the twenty-first century, the density of contradiction growing like the components on cell phone silicon, unimpressed by mere sunshine.

Outside the city. Of all the places I've been - and I've been to a few - Australia is the most like the U.S., barring Canada. The main differences, other than generally predictable (and media-depicted) cultural wrinkles, are the population density and the flora and fauna. The size of the continental U.S., but with fifteen times fewer people, there's a lot of bush out there, space devoid of humans, to be explored and appreciated. Add in a plethora of unique critters and plants (considered to generally resemble the greenery of the primal Gondwanaland supercontinent), and a great park system, and you have a recipe for some incredible camping and hiking -- love!

Above, one of the beach altars Amanda made... A wombat, possibly the one that ripped a hole in our tent... Our wonderful Melbournian friends....

troublesome terrapins...

This one's for Truro:

At the Sydney Wildlife World, glassed-in rooms full of cold-blooded creatures. In one forested room I saw an eight-inch turtle hesitating at the lip of a little pond. That this was more than just stereotypical turtle-ness was revealed when a six-inch turtle already in the water, maneuvered purposely toward him; the first reptile slipped quickly past and so began the most ferocious turtle action I have ever seen, as the smaller creature zoomed and swerved, trying to nip the bigger terrapin's toes as he twisted away with flashing speed, finally leaving the battlefield to his more diminutive but aggressive terrarium-mate. The rest of the afternoon we amuse ourselves with cries of "turtle fight!"

Sydney, Australia: first step through the planet-glass.

On the ground in Sydney. Airport is sleek and airy, air temperate, an easy change. I ask A if she notices any difference in the light, and she says it is "crisper", more UV and blue, just like what I saw when I first arrived in NZ. It's the ozone hole.

Gas is cheaper. No, that's the price per liter. Gas is about$4/gal, almost $3 in SF. Typical Americans we are.

The tech sheets of steel and glass give way to brick and British style mixed with Moroccan strett fronts with intricate wrought iron. Brit block-style housing, all run together. Plants bristle in concrete everywhere. All block sizes seem smaller here, which seems nice, more human. Plenty of bicycles.

Turns out our hostel, which shows every sign of under-investment, from creaky stairs and dismal paint to a front desk person who barely speaks English (proximity to Asia), is technically in "Chinatown", though I doubt that such districts are well-defined in this century. In fact it sits on a busy street, its front stair drooping off onto a narrow sidewalk. As we stepped out, an enormous white cockatoo swooped through a parking lot between the blocks of flats, screeching imprecations. Soon we realize that these raucous, yellow-crested birds throng the city in organized, noisy flocks, keeping the few pigeons on notice.