Putting the NZ back in GoNZo

« Return to New Zealand

I had lost all feeling in my hands. Or rather, there was a dull pain where my hands should be. When the body goes into hypothermia, it instinctively pulls all the blood from its appendages and redirects it inwards to keep the internal organs warm. That’s why we get cold hands and cold feet (although it has little to do with nervous brides or grooms). My hands were not cold; they were frozen, as blue as the ice on the glacier. It had been raining hard for four hours now, and the guide, one of those pompous ¸ber-guides with a nasally voice three octaves too high, was taking his time cutting unnecessary steps with his ice pick. Everyone was dead silent, most likely thinking about warm, happy thoughts, like how much fun it would be to throw this twit down a crevice and hightail it the hell out of here. I have learnt many lessons on this trip, and here was another one. It is unwise to spend five hours on a glacier with no shelter in heavy rain.

Recuperation was in order after the Great Gonzo Blowout, so I hitched a ride through the South Island aboard a Stray Bus, a backpacker shuttle that services the whole country. Forty-eight hours later, I am in Baz Vegas, dressed in drag and surrounded by a dozen half-naked girls wearing black bin bags and little else. Recuperation, my friends, takes many forms. I had spent a forgettable night in Wellington before crossing the Cook Strait in a storm, and connected with my fellow Strays, a mixed group of primarily English and Germans, in Picton. They were mostly traveling solo, otherwise they would probably have rented one of those cheap camper vans you find in Oz and NZ, colorfully decorated and graffiti’d with slogans like “Are you stoned too?” or “Jesus says ‘Let’s Party!” Amen.

The hop-on hop off concept is designed to ease the pain of making decisions, which was just the pill to swallow after blowing my nerves in Rotorua. iPod in the front, the driver/guide Wozza or Dodgy, rattling off facts and trivia with genuine enthusiasm. This is beautiful country after all, where pines grow twice as quick as they do in California, where rivers run gray with the flour of glaciers, and where extinct beasts like the 3m tall moa (a flightless bird wiped out in a just a few hundred years by the Maoris) or the Haast Eagle (the biggest eagle of all time) once dwelled. I heard about the legend of Maui the Maori, who gave birth to the land with his canoe, and the origins of those green stones you see around the neck of every tourist who’s ever been to New Zealand. Clear-cut logging had scarred many hills around the town of Nelson. Already, the similarities with British Columbia had started (BC also has a Nelson, with a similar hippie vibe and forestry industry).

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