BRIEFLY

On the West Coast finding free Internet is like pulling teeth.

We’ve been moving quickly, eating fast—so much has happened—time flies.

If you think keeping up with these blogs is easy—it’s not. They’re catching up on me and I have neither the time nor the energy to record all of the events of the past week. I will be more diligent in future such situations.

In the mean time, briefly—

4:00 am is the coldest time to wake up when sleeping in your vehicle.

Fox Glacier is bigger, better, and bluer than Franz Josef.

When the fog rolls in, so do the penguins.

Sandflies congregate in a strange place called Jackson Bay, where they pillage, rape, and murder unsuspecting tourists.

Keep your eyes peeled for broad shouldered women cooking lobster out of trailers—they open at noon, never forget.

Greymouth is the worst city in New Zealand—the ugliest, most inbred, horrid, retched waste of urban existence on the entire West Coast. Its streets are empty, yet still the sliding doors open, unsteady, and McDonald’s stays busy beside the Thai Place, and nobody really knows what time it is, wandering the vacant isles of the grocery store after dark.

The roads along the coast are curvy, winding—dizzying.

Abel Tasman is beautiful, vivid with newness and growth; even the dead sprout life from their fallen corpses. Moss is rampant, orange and green and black, and millions of miniature forests grow on rocks and in the bark of tree-trunks and shrubs. The path winds through deep shadow, over rope-bridges and rivers and dried lakes, dusty mountain tops with spectacular views of a turquoise ocean, lapping shores of coarse, golden sand.

And you know what? There are a lot of hippies in The Golden Bay.

Nelson isn’t happening—sorry—although their theater manager has good taste is cinema. We returned the car across the street from a poster for Metropolis.

I paced the streets of Christchurch, late at night, in the rain. It was deserted, damaged, and eerie. An obese man was sitting on his porch, shielded from the downpour, eating a pizza straight from the box.

“Keen to suck” is written on the stall beside the toilet with a phone number.

Some freak with a Mohawk is lecturing a homeless man outside a pub.

Briefly...