Those of you who pay attention to my online presence (what, no-one?) may have noticed that my internet quietness began just after Fiji. It was not, for once, the quiet of no available wifi, but instead the quiet of having the imaginary friend in my head actually present to annoy in person. For those of you un/fortunate enough not to know her, she is Keppet/Christine, she is a physicist, and yes we do indeed have a portmanteau internet name for ourselves which turns out also to be the word for a medieval lead box used to contain important wax seals. Who knew?

Despite being probably more British than me – or at least more obsessed with tea and Red Dwarf – Keppet now lives in San Francisco, very inconveniently for me when I want to rewatch tv with her. Quite apart from the fact that she would have never forgiven me had I left her out of my travels, we clearly needed at least a little time together so we could attempt to change each other’s opinions on Mad Men’s “The Suitcase” episode. (Failed. It still fills me with glee and her with misery. But at least we tried…) I therefore pencilled her in for the first half of my 4 weeks in North America, but due to my own rapidly accelerating problems with planning everything over the course of my travels, I left the whole business of deciding where we would go and how we would get there and what were we doing for Thanksgiving entirely to her, beyond interjecting some unhelpful questions about why is it impossible to hire a manual car in the US…

I therefore owe her quite a lot of thanks for organising a most excellent fortnight (except that she hasn’t been reading this blog, but I think I remembered to say it in person too). Obviously, once I was actually there I regained some agency and may have contributed my favourite ‘let’s just drive a bit further and see more things’ attitude to allow the inclusion of a couple of extra things (just some National Parks…), but the fundamentals of the trip were all hers, and very good they were too. Starting from Los Angeles, we drove over a thousand miles in a sort of circle over ten days to see (some of) the sights of Arizona, Utah and Nevada, before flying north to Washington state to spend the Thanksgiving weekend with mutual internet friends there.

Despite both loving Angel, we resisted the temptation to swish around L.A. alleyways in long coats and just attempted to get out of it as quickly as possible. Which wasn’t very quickly… by the time we had collected our hire car and sat in several sections of fairly stationary traffic, we were still in its suburbs 3 hours after our flights landed, and ended up stopping for dinner. (Burger and chips, of course. What’s the point of coming to the US if you don’t have at least one good burger? Except I had a lot more than one, in fact, but never mind that.) After that, however, we switched drivers and pressed on, such that the girl who’d just crossed the dateline into the same day but 21 hours earlier ended up driving for hours in the dark across the Mojave desert. Fun! (Actually… it kind of was. I like driving, and our hire car was nice to drive. But still.) We made it as far as Needles that evening, which was of no real significance to us except that it was close enough to the Grand Canyon to allow us to get there in daylight the following day if we so chose. Except that, in the end, we didn’t. We had spotted, next to the boringly straight line of I-40 on the map, the considerably more interesting-looking switchbacks of Route 66 crossing the Black Mountains. Add to that the historical interest of Route 66 itself, plus a revived ghost town called Oatman on the way, and the scenic route clearly won. We therefore wended our way at leisure through the hills – occasionally a little too closely, as my brain adjusted to driving on the right – and stopped off to see desert landscapes, wild burros, odd roadside graveyards and tourist traps with shops like ‘Fast Fanny’s Place’ (even more entertaining when British). The end of the daylight (around 4.30pm Mountain Standard Time, which took some adjusting to after longer days in the southern hemisphere) found us arriving in Tusayan, a little town just outside the Grand Canyon National Park, with conveniently cheaper accommodation than anything inside.

The Grand Canyon itself, when we drove up to it the next morning, suffered from the same problem as other famous sights have seen on my travels – it looked like it does in photos. Keppet’s blog (she’s been writing about this trip in much more detail than me) makes a good point about the sheer scale of the place and how hard it is to take in, which I think was a part of my problem, but it is also just one of those places you’ve seen glossy, high contrast photos of, and you somehow expect reality to be even more glossy and dramatic. In reality, however, it is hard to find perspective to appreciate the depth and width of the canyon, without which the far wall looks rather small and washed-out by the haze, and slightly disappointing as a result. Keppet, however, had experienced this problem before and had a cunning plan to deal with it – we would walk down into the canyon a little, to better appreciate its proportions. This was a good plan, even if it did result in us having hundreds of near-identical photos taken from the exact same perspective but with slightly varying elevation. What it also gave us, however, in the two hours it took us to descend Bright Angel Trail to “3 Mile Hut” (2,112 feet/643m down) – and the two hours back up – was some scale with which to understand the canyon. The time it took us to drop through the first, off-white stratum into the red stone below – and the fact that we never got out of the red stratum into the one below that – made the ochre rainbow stripes of strata still below us all the more impressive. The trees which had been all but invisible from the canyon edge towered over our heads, but the Grand Canyon is still of a size that can be understood in terms of time taken to traverse it. The butte far below us when we started was eventually above us, and we met walkers in the opposite direction who had stayed the previous night in the canyon bottom. Although that stayed distant as we climbed down the edge towards it, I could start to see it as the next stage and estimate timings. We never planned to go any further than we did, of course, but that kind of mental appraisal gives me a real physical appreciation of a place, a mental map which allows me to later remember it and compare it with other places I meet. On top of all that, of course, it was a very pleasant walk for an autumn day – not stiflingly hot as it would be in summer, but also not too challenging thanks to ice and snow, even though there was a little at the top. We paced ourselves to get back to the rim before sunset and thus got to enjoy some truly stunning oranges and reds over the cool evening blue of the shadowed canyon below, which definitely ranks in the top five sunsets I saw on my whole trip. (There were lots. And I really like sunsets.) We had dinner in Grand Canyon Village and took a very brief look at the stars outside before our weariness and the quickly plummeting temperatures convinced us to just go back to the hotel and look at all the photos we’d taken.

We spent the following morning leisurely driving eastwards along the canyon’s south rim, enjoying all the different perspectives on it until the Colorado bends north at the eastern end and the topographically challenging depths of the Grand Canyon abruptly become the flat plains of the Navajo desert plateau stretching to the horizon. Flat plains occasionally bisected by other smaller canyons, it’s true enough, but still flat enough on top. We stopped to inspect one such canyon carved by the Little Colorado River, looked at its couple-of-hundred-feet-high walls, shrugged, and proceeded to spend some money at a Native American trading post (ie permanent stalls) cunningly set up between the car park and the viewing point. We then headed north towards Utah, detouring a little to see the Vermillion Cliffs (kind of reddish-pink, honestly) and get our first distant view of the Grand Staircase/Escalante cliffs, stepping up majestically over miles of ground and thousands of feet in elevation. We ended the day in Kanab, a small town just over the border into Utah, which sits at an interstate intersection and this has a disproportionate quantity of motels and petrol stations. It is not exactly a tourist destination, however, and we did get asked by our fellow hotel guests the next morning why exactly we were there. The best answer I could come up with was ‘because we didn’t want to stay in Fredonia?’ (A nearby Arizona town whose name had appealed to us, but it turned out to be tiny with a rather dodgy-looking motel, so we drove on.) Apparently inter-town or inter-state rivalry made this an sufficient answer for a few laughs, and I congratulated myself on my social skills and moved on…

Having consulted the local tourist information centre on what there was to do in the area, we drove up through the first cliff stratum (red) to the second (off-white) on a fun unsealed road (yay) to a slot canyon called Lick Wash, which we just thought was a good name. Although this was not as narrow or perhaps as photogenic a slot canyon as others in the area, the fact that it was free to visit and didn’t require pre-booked permits definitely endeared it to us. It was still very pretty – a deep cleft carved in light blond sandstone by the power of wind and flash floods. Hundred foot cliffs encased a river bed just wide enough for two to walk abreast, and odd honeycomb patterns appeared in the rock at head height or above. We enjoyed the sheer emptiness and rockiness of it all (Utah had a lot of that), ate a few biscuits, then made our way back to the car.

Have I mentioned the car yet? No? I should have. We hired a Ford Fusion (not the same as a Fusion in the UK: more of a Focus/Mondeo cross) which was really pretty enjoyable to drive and came with a whole heap of quirks to entertain us. The paint colour was nominally grey but changed on a whim from black to silver to blue depending on light conditions, and the internal low-level lighting was purple when we started the trip but orange when we finished. We didn’t notice when it changed or why… Plus, on top of this, there was ‘Mykey.’ Mykey was a safety system and boy, did it want you to know that it wanted you to be safe. Not only did it beep nearly incessantly at ignition if you weren’t quite exactly ready to move off yet (eg if your passenger was being uncontrollable and hadn’t put her seatbelt on yet), but the car was limited to 80mph thanks to the rental company and as such you got a triple beep warning that you were ‘approaching top speed’ every time the speedometer needle touched 75mph. On roads where the speed limit actually was 75mph, this was a bit annoying… On the whole, though, it was a most excellent car which both of us found easy to drive and which had enough character to keep us entertained for nine days. Although it dealt with the 10 miles or so of unsealed road up to Lick Wash with aplomb, we had been told that the road condition deteriorated after there and so decided not to push on through to Escalante the short way. Although we spent several hours looping round on more major roads, this was a good choice because it meant that not only did we get burgers for lunch (told you) on our way back through Kanab, but we got to the break in the lowest cliffs called Red Canyon just as it looked perfect (ie very very red) in late afternoon sunlight. After marvelling at its sheer redness for a little while, we went east to Bryce Canyon, our destination for that night.

Neither of us really knew anything about Bryce Canyon – Keppet hadn’t been told to go there by anyone and I’d certainly never heard of it – which may explain why it made quite an impression on us. It was just so… unexpected. The word ‘canyon’ is itself a bit of a misnomer: yes, it’s an area below a plateau carved out by water and wind, but it only has one edge: it is more the whole edge of the plateau weathering away down to the wide plain below. And how it has weathered. Not for Bryce the sturdy buttes of the Grand Canyon, or the clean, deep lines of Zion Canyon, no. Here, the pink sandstone has been sculpted into armies of frail ‘hoodoos’: ranks on ranks of delicate pink pinnacles, often topped with wider blocks waiting to fall in another thousand years or so, stretching off into the distance. It was not a landscape I had ever seen or heard of before, and it elicited a ‘holy crap’ from me as we arrived at sunset and first saw its rather magical beauty. (The other thing that got a ‘holy crap’ that day: a giant chocolate brownie dessert spotted at dinnertime. Maybe I need to work on my sense of perspective.) Just to make matters even more magical, it snowed overnight, leaving a stunning landscape with snowy frosting sparkling in the thin air (at 8,000 feet, Bryce was also literally the high point of our road trip. Though that’s a little unfair to the low point, which I’ll get to…). Wanting to get up a little more close and personal with the landscape below us, we took a path leading down to the canyon floor, but as we expected it to be difficult or impassable due to snow fairly soon, we didn’t take any supplies with us. Three hours later, we emerged slightly thirsty but with our wonder undimmed: each new vista as we turned corners and wound through the rocky labyrinths below still elicited little wows and a slight desire to cry at our inability to stop taking photos. Bryce Canyon probably stands as the high point of the trip for me in terms of landscapes, being just so surprisingly strange and fantastical.

From Bryce, we tracked back on ourselves a little way until heading further west into Zion National Park. Zion Canyon is much more normal than the Grand Canyon or Bryce Canyon, really, being as it is just an incredibly deep valley with steep sides, but the scale of it is what makes it special. (The rocks are also pretty shades of red, but after the previous few days that did not impress us so much.) Unlike the Grand Canyon or Bryce, one experiences Zion from the bottom of the canyon (after driving in from the east down some impressive switchbacks), with sheer vertical walls nearly 2000 feet high on all sides. Once again, this is a landscape carved out purely by a flowing river, no matter how much it resembles a classic glaciated U-shaped valley. (One of the things I found hardest to comprehend about all these landscapes was not exactly the sheer length of time it had taken for rivers to create them, but more that that length of time had elapsed with nothing but rivers coming through. In my mind, obviously, ice ages happened everywhere…) We stayed in Zion for two nights, but unfortunately our first day there was the first real weather failure we had – it rained. As such, we didn’t feel like doing any longer walks up towards the height of the plateau, and just stayed down on the canyon floor admiring the bright yellow autumn leaves, the various waterfalls and other features one can drive up to and see. In the evenings, we enjoyed the tourist village just outside the park boundaries, in particular one restaurant we discovered (the Spotted Dog) which did good and inventive food accompanied by an obviously excellent wine list (where we restrained ourselves and stayed at the bottom of the price range). On the second morning, however, the day dawned bright and clear, so before moving onwards again we decided to tackle a walk called ‘Angel’s Landing’ which takes you to the top of one of the large rocky outcrops still remaining when their canyon wall friends have eroded back away from them. Keppet had done this walk before, so I followed her confidently – until we got to the final half-mile of the track. She had done this before but had somehow lost all memory of it and was daunted by the scramble ahead, with sheer drops on either side and only an occasional metal chain to cling onto – especially as her shoes seemed to be having grip issues with the loose sand often found sitting on top of the sandstone rocks. My adrenaline, however, was up and running by this point, and scorned the idea of heading back down without making it to the end… so I abandoned her under a nice tree and continued onwards. To find that, indeed, the final section was a little daunting. I got over an irrational fear of cliffs a few years ago and now have what I like to consider a perfectly rational fear of them. They are, after all, a little life-threatening. Particularly if you are on a narrow neck of land about 1m wide with a 1000-foot sheer drop to either side and only a low, slack metal chain to hold onto as you attempt to walk along it. Luckily the adrenaline drove me along as I first set out (Keppet couldn’t do it! Hah! I clearly can!) and soon enough I was blithely hop-skip-and-jumping within feet of a definitely fatal drop into the canyon below. In all honesty, though, it was a fabulous walk with superb views on such a pleasantly cool sunny day as we had, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even if my legs were a little wobbly when I got back down.

One instance of my let’s-just-drive-a-little-further approach to road trips affected our route onwards from Zion. Keppet’s original plan had us staying there for 3 nights and then driving directly to our end point in Las Vegas, but she expressed slight sadness at the fact that we weren’t going to see Death Valley, which had been one of the original suggestions. Looking at maps, I reckoned we could get close enough to Death Valley by the 3rd night if we drove all afternoon that we could go see it the following morning before looping back east to Vegas. So, since I wanted to see it too and I drop lots of annoying hints to get things I want, that is what we did. We drove west into Nevada, skirting round the north of Vegas, until we got to a town called Pahrump which our guidebook informed us had some accommodation. It has to be said, though, that I use the term ‘town’ loosely. Pahrump was my first exposure to the idea that Nevada is deeply, unsettlingly, quite odd. It had casinos, of course, for the same state law reasons that Las Vegas does, but it has none of the style, dreams or wealth of Vegas. Instead, it has a few large casinos spread out amongst shopping malls and empty lots between uninspired housing developments. The grid pattern spreads for miles across mostly empty desert land with occasional blocks of development, and I found it a fairly intensely depressing town apart from the amusing weirdness factor which sustained our interest for the one night we stayed there. Luckily, we wanted nothing more of it than a night’s accommodation before heading west across an ever more arid landscape into Death Valley itself, which wasn’t quite what either of us expected, I think. It was dry and hot (for late November) and clearly inimical to life, but I had expected less weird chemistry and Keppet had expected more bleached bones in heaps at the side of the road. What we got instead was salt. Miles and miles of salt. Mostly straightforward NaCl, stretching across the valley basin and forming weird crystalline sculptures on the ground hundreds of feet below sea level, but there were also occasional cameos by bizarre sections of green, purple or black chemicals in the exposed rock and dust of the valley walls. I don’t think I have ever been anywhere that felt quite so alien and unfriendly to life, even if some plants and animals have somehow evolved to deal with it. It fascinated me, but it also gave me a headache and a slightly upset stomach (perhaps I shouldn’t have tried tasting the salt…) such that a half-day’s exploration was quite sufficient for me.

The final calling point on our road trip, prior to abandoning Mykey at the airport and flying north to Seattle, was Las Vegas itself: again, somewhere Keppet had previously been but I had not. I don’t think I have much to say about Vegas that hasn’t been said better by other people before: it is, simply, quite insane. We were there the evening before Thanksgiving, so almost everyone thronging the streets apart from us was there for Thanksgiving, and whilst I’m glad I’ve seen it for myself now I have absolutely no comprehension of why you’d want to return on a regular basis for holidays there. The whole concept of the city in the desert is crazy to begin with, of course, but everywhere I turned I found another thing assaulting my brain and turning it into jelly: our hotel key card advertising models who would allegedly make our night; footbridges accessed by escalators, not stairs; hotels with maps to help you find your way around them; an incredibly tawdry live show pirate ship fight where the women apparently won by virtue of getting the men to have sex with them; the Venetian hotel having a replica of the Grand Canal inside on the first floor; the airport departure lounge having its own quota of slot machines; all the street touts handing out playing cards with pictures of prostitutes on, who apparently took my short hair as a sign that I might be interested (and these discarded cards being picked up and giggled over by kids); every ‘themed’ hotel cramming as much tacky replication of the original into as small a space as possible with no understanding whatsoever of what actually makes the originals appealing (‘Paris’ had no style, ‘New York’ no culture, ‘Camelot’ nothing I wanted to recognise at all and the ‘Venetian’ no faintly fishy sea smell…). The gambling halls in each hotel are huge and well-attended, but stick out like a sore thumb from the themed opulence around them which the hotels pretend to be, and outside the city huge developments of identikit grey-toned housing for workers surround the glittering centre in a similarly incongruous way. Down the Strip, families towed along wide-eyed children getting who knows what kind of idea of how the world works…

It was a definite relief to escape from such insanity to the cool, wet and calming Pacific North-West, our final destination before going our separate ways. We visited mutual internet friends, the Coopers, for the Thanksgiving weekend, staying at their house in Port Angeles and worshipping their cats. It was thoroughly enjoyable, even if I have slightly less to say about it than the insanity that preceded it… but that’s a compliment really, right? We toured round all the excellent eateries of the area, said hello to the snow and biting wind on Hurricane Ridge above the town, and went for a pleasantly damp walk through the temperate Hoh Rainforest, definitely living up to its name on the day we were there. Sometimes I wish Britain still had its natural forest cover, complete with huge tall trees, epic amounts of moss and the smell of humus gently decomposing, but I’m also quite fond of its blasted open hillsides as they are now, so I guess I’m difficult to please. But I’m definitely happy that there are still places in the world where that kind of habitat survives. The cool wet windiness was my first real return to northern hemisphere seasons as I expect them: despite the snow in Bryce Canyon and sub-zero temperatures on several nights in the previous week, my brain had not switched back into winter mode until the overcast skies and rain swept in from the sea really made me feel properly at home. As, of course, we also felt with the Coopers themselves, who were yet another instance of getting along ridiculously easily with internet people I’d never met before. Even if I did want to kidnap at least one of their cats…

But that, unfortunately, was the end of our skippet holiday fortnight. (Less unfortunately for you, perhaps, since at c.4,400 words this is nearly the longest any post on this blog has been. That’s what you get from me having a proper keyboard again.) It was wonderful. It was interesting. It was occasionally life-threatening. I want another one.

I have learnt:

- that you cannot rely on Antipodeans to keep British place names pronounced properly when they steal them: Winchelsea with a soft ch? Aviemore with a long ay? Pfft, I say.

- that if you want to find people who still treasure physical books, who will pick up any book to see what new knowledge it may have and who will continue to value the words inside even when the covers have fallen off, just look for your nearest backpackers’ hostel.

- that the earliest human settlement of New Zealand was only about 800 years ago.

- that sandflies are a bit like a cross between a mosquito and a midge, and I like them equally little.

- that the American-ish way of pronouncing the ‘dd’ in eg ‘buddy’ softly is actually a variant of an ‘r’ sound, though I am not sure whether using it as an example is wise when trying to tell people how to roll Rs when speaking Maori.

- that telegraph poles in New Zealand, unlike British ones which have been made of trees much bigger than the pole needs to be and planed down to uniform size, are instead made of trees that are roughly the right size to be a pole. This means you get slightly wonky poles with knots sticking out of them, which adds a certain rustic charm to electric wires.

- that motel cooking facilities always have the small and medium saucepans from a set only. What do they do with the large ones?

- that I apparently do not consider the accelerator pedal in a car to be the ‘go faster’ pedal, instead treating it more as a ‘power’ pedal. This leads to going rather slower than I normally would when suddenly I’m driving an automatic for the first time in years and the pedal doesn’t work that way…

- that ‘historic’ can mean less than a hundred years in New Zealand. One finds roadsigns pointing the way to eg ‘Historic Swimming Pool’ and ‘Historic Power Station.’ I also enjoyed the generic ‘Historic Place’ sign, which popped up everywhere and made me want to pull over to find out what it was…

- that apricot brandy is rather yummy, even if it does make me want a log cabin with a wolf sleeping in front of the fire.

- that I apparently say “X a.m. in the morning” quite frequently. (The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.)

- that unsealed roads are fun.

- that Britain has no monopoly on changeable weather, and the west coast of New Zealand could give the west coast of Scotland a run for its money in the ‘unpredictably wet and windy’ department. (It would win in the ‘snow and glaciers’ department, though.)

- that the words ‘wee,’ ‘youse’ and ‘unco’ are common parlance in NZ, which pleases me no end.

- that although sweets are called lollies, an ice lolly becomes an ice block, confusingly.

- that the shared cultural experiences of New Zealanders appear to consist mostly of adverts. (And even I now share one: “you know I can’t grab your ghost chips.”)

- some the meanings and pronunciations (ish) of various Maori words commonly found in place names. Off the top of my head, I now recognise: tai, whenua, moana, roto, wai, iti, nui, kai, tangata, kakariki, te, rua, tapu, mate, tomo, whare, kuri and tutai (thanks for that one, cheeky). Though I may potentially be mis-spelling a few of those since I haven’t got the internet to check them right now and I will forget to check before I post this…

- to recognise many often brightly-coloured Antipodean native birds, from black or sulphur-crested cockatoos through rosellas, galahs, splendid fairy wrens (which totally deserve the name), pukeko, tui, the New Zealand woodpigeon (which looks and sounds suspiciously like the European version if it had a technicolor dreamcoat to wear), kaka, kea and of course everyone’s versions of ‘robins’ which are nothing of the sort… But I never saw any kiwi, even in enclosures which supposedly had them. I think they’re a myth.

- that it is possible (and apparently desirable) for a railway line to run through the middle of a roundabout.

- that two tectonic plates actually cross over between New Zealand’s North and South Islands: in the north, the Pacific plate is being subducted under the Australian plate, while in the south it’s the opposite. I never even knew that happened. How does it end?

- that the thing called Marmite in NZ is NOT THE SAME as the thing called Marmite in the UK. I may even like their Marmite slightly less than *gasp* Vegemite…

- that the only word you seem to really need in Fiji is ‘bula,’ which as far as I can tell means: hello; welcome; cheers; my intentions towards you are friendly; and good day my fine fellow isn’t it a lovely day?

- in written Fijian, ‘d’ is pronounced as ‘nd’ and ‘c’ as ‘dh.’ I have no idea why.

- that I am really paranoid at 4am, particularly about bedbugs.

- that my iPod has lots of songs about death on it, which it likes to play me during rough voyages. (Though I accept personal responsibility for selecting We Will All Go Together When We Go minutes before we crashed daisy’s car…)

- that travel itineraries from STA are not always perfect when it comes to, say, departure terminals. Or even departure times…

- that my feet are pathetic. Again.

‘Fiji time,’ as mentioned in the title of this post (apologies for the atrocious M.C. Hammer paraphrasing, except not really) has become a key phrase for me this week, repeated by me or other tourists as an explanation or reassurance for many things. It means, essentially, things happening when they happen. You may think you have a timetable for when the one daily boat to the Yasawa Islands will stop by, but really? It’s on Fiji time. It’s a good bet that it will come at some point within a few hours of the apparently specified time, and it will not be early, but that’s as far as you’re going to be able to narrow it down. The best thing to do is just plan to wait somewhere comfortable, and ponder Douglas Adams’ assertion that time is an illusion. (If you’re waiting for lunch as opposed to a boat, this becomes even more apt.)

Most things here happen eventually if one sits and waits for them: mealtimes, sunburn, fish swimming past, drunken tourists finally going to bed. Probably the apocalypse if you sit and wait long enough. There is a feeling that none of it really matters, that you are in some kind of suspended or stretched time, like a bright Saturday morning where an hour lasts forever and the aeon of the weekend stretches unhurriedly before you.

And of course, the same rule of irony applies: because time is unimportant, you suddenly have an abundance of it. Each quarter hour stretches long enough to acquire some sunburn, to watch coconut trees sway in the gentle breeze, to gaze at a dazzling array of colourful fish flitting around a coral reef or to develop a new theory of world government. Sufficient to each hour is the evil thereof?

One thing that worried me a little before I arrived was the lack of things to do, of activities and things to see which I could fill my days with. I am not normally a beach holiday person for exactly this reason, and as I left Auckland I tried to remember why I had allowed myself eight whole days here. There are islands to see, certainly: beaches to walk on; sun to bathe in; reefs to snorkel past; other tourists to talk to; sunsets to watch – but eight days? That was longer than I’d allowed myself to explore places where there was lots to do. Okay, it had mostly come about for flight scheduling reasons, but I still wondered how I was going to fill all that time satisfactorily.

I needn’t have worried. While it’s true that I’ve read more books this week than in all my previous travelling (six versus three and a half) and sat listening to music, and finally got 3 stars on the last few tricky levels of Angry Birds, and occasionally just sat staring off towards the horizon thinking of nothing at all, these are things I have done because they were there to be done, not because I was bored in any usual sense of the term. And I have not felt that I was wasting time as I was doing them, that there were better things I should have been doing instead (despite this being quite probably true). In a similar vein, I had a couple of hours before dinner when I started writing this blog post… so a couple of hours is what I am taking to write it.

And so, in the end, having nothing to do and having everything to do tend towards the same asymptote: time stretches out forever until it’s past, and then retrospectively went really quickly. I fear that once I have left here, Fiji will shrink to one warm afternoon of sunshine, turquoise sea, green islands, hot white sand, swaying hammocks in dappled shade and a few blurry underwater photos of coral. I’m already finding it hard to remember what I actually did on any given day, and I’m still here.

But that’s okay: it can stay in my mind as a warm little blob of golden relaxation, a little holiday from my bigger holiday, and a place that I don’t necessarily need to visit again to recapture its absence from reality, if I can just remember how to work the same trick on myself when I get home.

(Note: I stayed two nights on the ‘mainland’ of Viti Levu, three nights at a backpackers on Mana island and three nights at a more proper resort on Waya island. If you have any questions about actual details, ask away.)

I had originally intended to write at least two blog posts for New Zealand, one for each island. I was there for three and a half weeks, after all, and after blogging on a per city or at least per state basis around Asia and Australia, writing only one blog in nearly a month felt like it would be short-changing you. Of course, that was before I got quite far behind on my Australian blogs. It was also before getting to New Zealand and realising that it wouldn’t work that way – I visited too many different towns too briefly to have more than a paragraph to say about each, and even splitting it into the two islands fails when I want to talk more broadly about culture etc, since there is obviously a lot they share. You are therefore going to get a single post for the whole of New Zealand, which I assure you will not short-change you on quantity, no matter what its failings may be in the areas of structure, coherency or lyrical poetry.

Two internet friends, this time, aided me on my travels, and both came equipped with a car (or at least a brother with a car), which was most convenient. Particularly so in that one lives on the North Island, one on the South – and amusingly they had never met before (though they know each other online) despite both having met me. They shall be known here as daisy and cheeky, since although I am actually okay at referring to cheeky by her real name – I’ve had to talk about her to my own relatives in the past and hers more recently – daisy is just daisy in my head and evermore shall be so. And if she’s going to be daisy, cheeky may as well be cheeky. I’m not sure if that’s a worse name to be called in public than ‘skits’ or not, but hey, she chose it.

Anyway, daisy was actually able to take all my time in New Zealand off work and accompany me round both islands, so as such she wins the super-special prize for Hobbling I Have Spent Most Time With Continuously Ever (it’s a virtual cookie) and also an extra prize for not, you know, murdering me in my sleep. We split our time nearly half and half between the islands: two weeks in the south, one and a half in the north where we gathered up cheeky and dragged her along too.

In the South Island, I flew into Christchurch, where daisy lives in a western suburb which has been relatively unaffected by the earthquake(s) they have had. We did go further into the city one day, strolling through a fine spring day up to the fenced edge of the Red Zone to peer at the wonky buildings and deconstruction crews within, but basically Christchurch was a base from which to plan our time. We drove across to Akaroa one rainy day, which is a sweet little harbour town that was an early French settlement in the area (before the Brits went ‘nope – all ours’) and which still hangs onto its rues instead of streets. A couple of business signs (eg for car servicing) even went to the lengths of being in French, which whilst pleasing to me must be rather confusing for the majority of local inhabitants living far too far away from France to make it a language worth knowing.

Once we left Christchurch, we headed south: with limited time to see everything, we decided that the third of the South Island north of there was the third we were not bothering with. We drove to Dunedin across the Canterbury Plains, which are very much what they sound like (except un-Kent-like): plain, flat, uninteresting farming land (dairy, in the main). Dunedin, on the other hand, is an odd little city. I am not quite sure why so many of New Zealand’s Scottish immigrants ended up in the south of the South Island – or at least why the culture managed to survive strongly there – but Dunedin is a prime example. Set up partially in Edinburgh’s image – and I must admit the town name was cleverly done – it has a statue of a certain Rabbie Burns in the town square and tourist shops as full of thistle brooches, family tartans, sporrans and scian dhus as any in Edinburgh itself. Given that you don’t normally find those south of Gretna, it’s a bit weird to bump into them on almost exactly the other side of the world.

From Dunedin, we explored the Otago Peninsula, which is a nice little finger of land with beaches, harbours, hills, and New Zealand’s only castle: Larnach. As a general castle appreciator, I might have classed it more as a small baronial mansion, but it did have crenellations, so. It was nice, anyway, and had a gorgeous view over the peninsula and harbours below, having been sensibly built on top of a hill (and then they had to glass the balconies in, having learned that you get weather on hilltops). The landscape of the peninsula itself, we later found out, is of different rock types as it stems from a different volcanic eruption from most of the mainland it adjoins. Indeed, at one point we climbed a small hill only for a noticeboard to tell us we were now on top of a volcanic vent, which is always what I want to hear. However that may be, the landscape here was also the most reminiscent of Scotland’s that I saw: low, rough, green hills dotted with sheep and gorse (sorry about that, New Zealand) surrounding rocky bays with small villages clustered in each one. The sunny spring weather made it into a June day somewhere in the Inner Hebrides before my eyes.

Heading yet further south, we made for Invercargill, where we did no more than spend a couple of hours in the museum (containing the obligatory number of extinct bird skeletons, some live (if generally stationary) tuatara, relics of Antarctic expeditions and the geological map that told us about the Otago Peninsula) before the rain closed in and we drove to Bluff to wait for the Stewart Island Ferry with a crossword and some chocolate (somewhat of a theme). Bluff has very little apart from one of those signposts showing you how far it is to everywhere else, a slogan that tells you it’s where the highway begins, a sculpture of a chain disappearing into the sea towards Stewart Island (in Maori legend, Stewart Island is the anchor for the South Island’s canoe), and once upon a time a couple who filled their entire house with paua (abalone) shells. They’re now dead, and the house contents have been relocated to the Christchurch museum, where they had scared me slightly. Imagine your typical retired couple’s bungalow full of every type of clutter and all variety of brown soft furnishings, then cover every inch of wall space with giant shells. Yup.

After a slightly bumpy hour crossing the Fouveaux Strait (I’ve never been on a ferry which carried sick bags before), we spent one and a half days on Stewart Island. However, as the heavy rain persisted on the first evening we were there, we did nothing more exciting than curling up in our cosy little motel/house in Oban (the main town) with its gas panel fire, cooking dinner and watching QI as the rain poured down outside. The following day, however, was dry if grey and chilly, and we decided to go to Ulva Island, which is a littler island contained within a harbour of the bigger one. Stewart Island itself is important because its natural moat has kept out the majority of non-native predators and plants introduced over the centuries, allowing the native flora and fauna to live pretty much as they ever have. Obviously in the area of the township, though, there are still house gardens and pets, so you have to get a little bit out into the bush before it’s completely as it should be. We chose to do this by taking the short trip on the tiny boat that goes to Ulva (tickets are a muttonbird plant leaf with ‘Ulva Island Ferry’ written on them) and walking all its paths for a few hours – after passing the sign that asked us to check our bags for rats. Despite having seen native New Zealand plants around us in the previous few days, this was the first time that I was really aware of it as the completely different ecosystem it was before European settlement (or even Maori), the first time that I looked around me and saw not a single plant I recognised. I suppose I am too used to Victorian botanical gardens, to the fact that we brought almost every interesting foreign plant back to Britain from the corners of the earth and were overjoyed if they prospered, such that I honestly don’t know what’s properly native and what isn’t. In the previous few days, seeing a few plants I knew amongst the ones I didn’t had made it just feel like a park with a few unusual plants in, but on Ulva Island I was surrounded by native trees, ferns, grasses, even mosses, and it was beautifully strange to me even without the melodic birdsong of bellbirds and tui, the crack of kaka breaking bark off trees with their beaks and the colourful flash of a parakeet passing through. I learned to recognise totara and rimu trees, along with a few others I would start to notice everywhere we went, and generally spent a happy day meandering through a strange world and only occasionally wishing I had brought gloves with me…

Back on the mainland, having gone as far south as I will quite probably ever go in my life (though not as far south as Scotland is north…), we headed northwest towards our next destination on the west coast, Milford Sound. We stopped for lunch in Te Anau, a nice little lakeside town which was having a lovely sunny afternoon and seduced us into staying a little longer than we intended. Plus we forgot to get petrol and had to go back, because with a 150km dead-end road to Milford Sound and no petrol, that would not have ended well. The end result of all this was that we telephoned ahead to Milford to put off our planned afternoon cruise until the next morning, because otherwise we would have had to speed along a rather unsuitable road to get there in time. Instead, we had time to admire the scenery as we went, particularly the textbook glaciated valley along which one approached the Homer Tunnel. Steep, snowcapped mountainsides cradle a wide, flat floodplain across which a river meanders most prettily. Quite wonderfully – though this will only amuse those of us from Ayrshire – this is the Eglinton Valley. I don’t know who bothered to export that name, but I know that poor old Eglinton Park in Kilwinning is going to look even less impressive to me now. Before passing through the Homer Tunnel – a rough-hewn way under the mountainous head of the valley – we stopped at the snowline to say hi to some kea. Kea are large green parroty birds with a very knowing look in their eyes and a delight in eating bits of cars. I took photos of them while daisy did her best to shoo them away from her tyres. Then onwards and downwards into Milford Sound itself, a stunning and very iconic fjord with a tiny seasonal settlement at its head and several small cruise ships waiting to take tourists along its length. Also, several million sandflies, waiting to snack on the tourists. Apparently, in Maori legend, the sandflies are there because the goddess of death was worried that Milford Sound was so beautiful that men might forget their mortality when gazing upon it – unless they had hordes of biting insects to remind them. Thanks, goddess of death. It is definitely beautiful, though – the only part of Fiordland accessible by road, but doing its best to represent a whole type of landscape. Our cruise took us right out to the fjord’s mouth into the Tasman Sea, pointing out seals and rock strata and penguins and fault lines and 11-armed starfish and glacial melt waterfalls falling from ridiculous heights. Everything there messes with your sense of scale – the smallest mountain peaks are as high or higher than Ben Nevis, rising straight out of the water to their peaks above, making 150m high waterfalls look quite ordinary until you focus on the size of the trees around them instead of the landscape to which they belong. Unlike the rest of the Southern Alps – which are even higher – I saw Milford’s mountains without a cap of cloud on top, and as such saw their perfect untamed snow-tipped peaks in all their glory, even under a clear blue sky on the afternoon we arrived.

The main bulk of the Southern Alps – familiar in parts to anyone who has watched Lord of the Rings, since they were a perfect fit for the Misty Mountains – were not quite so accommodating. From Milford Sound (named, by the way, after Milford Haven, an even less apt bit of borrowing) we drove to Twizel, which I have no idea what it may be named after but it’s a cute name, don’t you think? We drove there via Te Anau, Queenstown and Wanaka, through New Zealand’s ‘lake district’ which I had to concede to be superior to ours, at least on the weekend we were there: huge lakes, big pointy mountains, not too many tourists even on a sunny day, and a complete absence of Beatrix Potter Experiences. Twizel, on the other hand, sits in the midst of the Mackenzie Basin, a mountain-ringed area of mostly arid land which is being overrun with willow trees even as farmers attempt to convert it into dairy land with massive irrigation rigs which trundle across the fields adorned with Rugby World Cup flags (well, they did at this point, and I suspect those All Blacks flags aren’t coming down for a while yet). It is an easy point from which to access the eastern side of Mount Cook and its surrounding mountains, which we did even though it refused to poke its head out of the cloud for me. But daisy assured me it was there really, and we went for little walks to see glacial moraine, turquoise meltwaters and giant icebergs instead, which quite contented me.

Given that Mount Cook does not have an equivalent of the Mont Blanc Tunnel, and neither do any of its friends, on the following day we drove for 6 hours back through Wanaka and then on to the west coast via the Haast Pass just to come back to the western side of it at Fox Glacier. For five whole minutes that evening the cloud did lift and Mount Cook and Mount Tasman stood resplendent and sparkly in the late, low sunlight. At that point, though, we were distracted by the motel’s cat (very friendly, very dribbly) and by the time we looked back they were hiding again. They continued to do so the next day, as we walked to see the glacier coming down from their western flanks almost to sea level, but the glacier itself was beautiful – and again larger than my eyes wanted to think it was – even though we didn’t pay the additional money to go up and actually walk on it. I wish we had more glaciers in the world still.

Our final port of call before heading back east over the mountains was Greymouth, where we went to ‘Shantytown’ – a typical sort of recreation of pioneering life, goldpanning, logging etc (I had not realised how much New Zealand was seen as an endless source of timber to begin with). Entertaining in an ‘I’m glad we have modern medicine now’ sort of way. We also went a little further up the coast to Punakaiki to observe their ‘pancake rocks’ – limestone rock formations in regular layered cliffs which do indeed look a bit like a stack of pancakes – and then we had to have pancakes for lunch because every information sign we’d read had the word pancakes somewhere on it. Mmm, pancakes.

Heading over Arthur’s Pass back to Christchurch (which we found out was due to the original Arthur looking at the mountains and saying ‘that looks like a pass there’ such that when his brother later surveyed it and found that it was indeed, he just thought of it as the one Arthur saw), we had a little bit of an accident, managing to write off daisy’s car sideways into a safety barrier thanks to surface water and gravel. Luckily it was still perfectly drivable to get us back, poor car, and our only injury was a graze on daisy’s wrist (and some achey shoulders and spines the next day), but still a little upsetting. Maybe it was the goddess of death, concerned at how many wonderful things we had seen…

North Island! Woo, I think this is turning into the longest post by far on this blog. I hope you appreciate how long this is taking to write on my tiny touchscreen. And by ‘you’ I mean the two people who haven’t already given up long before now…

We flew up to Wellington from Christchurch – another decision made in light of limited time and complicated logistics of getting everyone back where they needed to be at the end, but as it turned out the ferry had multiple major technical problems that week, a good choice. Cheeky met us in the airport, and took us to dinner with her brother and some of her real-life friends, which was a little intimidating, but I think we all survived okay (so long as I didn’t mention Wesley Wyndham-Pryce). We then went back to her town of Paraparaumu to stay with her parents for the next couple of nights, as she had a work training course she had to do, hence the aforementioned practice at calling her by her real name. We also got to meet her horse, to see her mum’s new baby alpaca, and to bake chocolate brownies. All clearly very important.

We therefore had exactly a week to tour the North Island from bottom to top (leaving her a weekend to get the car and herself back home at the end), which worked pretty well. Again, we left out a few whole areas, and did a lot of zig-zagging and sometimes backtracking, but we saw a really high quotient of the must-sees again, plus a few nice little surprises.

One of these was the ‘Forgotten World Highway’ from Stratford to Taumaranui. (Stratford is named for the famous one: every road name is a Shakespearean character. I suppose it’s slightly better than Tasmania’s Doo Town – did I mention that? – but it still made me cringe a little.) This road ran through about 150km of almost forgotten farmland – tight, winding valleys which were settled by pioneers but have never developed further as the landscape didn’t make it worthwhile putting tunnels through all the hills for the road (though there is a pretty unused-looking single track railway which forges its way through as well). As such, the road twists and turns its way over 4 saddles between the hills, with views back to the volcanic bulk of Mount Taranaki beyond Stratford. (Lesson learned on this trip: mountains on the South Island are tectonic upthrust. Mountains on the North Island (and there are only really four of them) are volcanoes.) The only town on the whole stretch of road – or at least, the only place food can be obtained – is the tiny settlement of Whangamomona, which appears to have declared itself a Republic a few decades ago. I’m not sure exactly how it did that, or whether selling passports to your republic is really particularly normal, but perhaps it’s easier than pretending that the rest of New Zealand actually knows they’re there. Beyond Whangamomona, the road becomes even a little more fun (and I got to drive this bit, woo), with an unsealed section, a deep river valley whose sides it hugs and a long single track tunnel with rough walls again. Cheeky’s brother’s car was a little underpowered for some of what we put him through (‘he’ because he has a name – Zac), but managed everything very gamely.

From the sunny spring warmth of Taumaranui, where we bought ice cream, we drove quickly back into winter as we drove up the sides of Ruapehu (also a volcano, and much more recently active – you can buy postcards showing it exploding) being pelted with you-have-lost-all-visibility-now rain until we reached the somewhat deserted ski village, which the snow was just deserting. After the rain lifted, we got an appropriately apocalyptic view north to the other two volcanoes in the group – Ngauruhoe and Tongariro. With louring cloud overhead and volcanic landscape all around they completely justified the Mordor soundtrack being played in the car at the time (Ngauruhoe is Mount Doom) and I could imagine orcs marching across the desolate rocky land around us.

Proceeding from active/dormant volcanoes to more extinct ones, we drove north to Lake Taupo. This is technically the huge crater lake filling what remains of a caldera which exploded in about 180AD, covering the surrounding area in several metres thick of debris and causing the sun to go red in the sky as far away as China and Rome, where it was recorded. The lake is ringed with beaches of pumice stones, which are oddly fun to throw into the water: they don’t skim, they don’t splash, but they do bob up and down on the water very pleasingly. We then followed the river which drains out of the lake, stopping to see Huka Falls (not high, but definitely voluminous) and Aratiatia Rapids – an odd thing where the hydroelectric power station which has dammed the river there allows the water to overshoot its turbines every so often to show how the river used to power through a set of rapids below. I have never before seen a raging torrent fill up and then empty again within half an hour, so that was pretty cool to watch (and I will look out for it when The Hobbit comes out, as apparently some bobbing along in barrels was done there).

Sticking with the volcanic theme for another day, we brought it to a natural climax with a trip to Rotorua. This whole area is full of natural hot springs, odd clouds of steam escaping from vents in the ground, geothermal power stations and the like, but Rotorua is the undoubted hub. No other town smelled of sulphur in quite the same way… although we did not see much there as it was raining in the evening and we chose to stay inside and watch Shaun of the Dead. But just before midnight we did go out and walked through some trees onto a little wooden walkway beside a large thermal pool, dark at night and nicely creepy with its steam rising to distort the town lights beyond. Did I mention that it was Hallowe’en? I think we did it justice. In the morning, we got up and drove to Wai-o-Tapu (‘sacred water’ in Maori, which I hope meant ‘do not jump in this water’), an area of geysers, thermal pools, mud pools, sinter terraces, weird orange fungus on the trees, bizarre colours at every turn and an almost chokingly strong atmosphere of hydrogen sulphide. Pretty amazing, although definitely the sort of beauty that makes me conscious of my mortality, what with superheated water rising from underneath my feet and all.

For a change of tone, we drove west again to Waitomo (via an absolutely fantastic, minor, unsealed, single track hill road which I am so glad I got to drive…) where we failed to find motel accommodation thanks to production for The Hobbit actually being in town at the time – but managed to find a hostel below their budgets where we could happily sit and play silly games all evening. Waitomo is an area of caves, only some of which are open to the public (I assume they’re filming in some of the others), mostly standard limestone cave formations again (and no iron ore to make bacon rock this time) but with a few satisfyingly huge chambers, some cave wetas (surprisingly big for insectoid things, though lacking the shock value that the tree weta which took up home in one of daisy’s shoes in Stratford had had), and an amazing number of glowworms, which you were taken to see floating in a little boat below their pseudo-constellations in beautiful dark silence. Outside, there was also a very good little bushwalk which took you through arches and into a few more external caves. It’s amazing how much entertainment three people can gain from crawling into tiny spaces in rocks (and this theme continued in Coromandel).

Our penultimate stop, then, was the Coromandel peninsula, sticking out to the north-east of Auckland – and I could see why it is a favoured holiday destination for its inhabitants. Lovely beaches, stunning cliffs, pretty little towns and lots of delicious seafood. Plus some entertaining little oddities like the Hot Water Beach, where people go for two hours either side of low tide to dig themselves a little thermal pool in the sand. It all reminded me a little bit of Cornwall, if Cornwall had bigger beaches and 95% less population.

With one day remaining, we decided to go a little bit past Auckland – we didn’t have time to go all the way to the northern tip of the island, but we drove up to Warkworth and Matakana, which provided us all we needed for 24 hours’ entertainment: a nature reserve with little cliffs to climb and things in rockpools to annoy, a wasps’ nest to run away from, a giant kauri tree to admire, a little local museum with all sorts of bizarre things inside, and a trampoline. Who can resist a trampoline? Certainly not us.

Auckland itself I have very little to say about, as I mostly moped around it sad to be on my own again, consoling myself with retail therapy and books…

I realise that I have not said much about New Zealand as a whole here. I did originally intend to, but for once got very caught up in the details of where we went – mostly because I think we had a pretty good itinerary and wanted to mention all the cool little places we went – and now I do not think it is any longer the time or place for several hundred words on its culture or customs. I think, though, I can sum some of it up in three observations:

- New Zealand gives the impression of having more seamlessly integrated pre-European inhabitants with later colonists of anywhere else I’ve been. I know there are still socio-economic problems and other nasties lurking in the background, but Maori culture has left more footprints on modern Kiwi culture than I have seen Aboriginal or Native American manage in their respective countries. The place names still survive, along with some commonly used words and things like the haka which have been adopted by the country as a whole. Generally speaking, it appears to be a united country with a united cultural experience informed by both sides, even if the colonial one is still hugely dominant.

- it’s the one place I’ve been where I’ve ended up buying quite a few tourist things before leaving because I feel like I got enough of a handle on it to not be completely shallow in doing so – some of those things have a little bit of meaning for me now, a little feeling of ownership, of meaning to me personally. Part of that is probably spending more time there proportionate to landmass than anywhere else, and spending it all with locals, but I’m sure some of it is also the general welcoming nature of the approach to tourism – come and find out why we like our country so much! it seems to say.

- I found myself attempting to sum up New Zealand in a pithy sentence to some Brits I met in Fiji the other day, and found my description becoming this: “it sort of reminded me of Britain, if we actually liked ourselves.”

I spent four out of five days with my friend Myo (who most definitely goes by her internet name, as it was years before I knew her real name and therefore it sounds really weird to call her by it), who has lived in or around Sydney all her life and as such has lots of favourite places to go that aren’t necessarily in the tourist brochures. (And also, quite importantly, a car.)

On my first day there we stayed in the city centre, climbing one of the end towers of the harbour bridge for a bit of a view over the Rocks area where I was staying, wandering past the Opera House, feeding mynah birds (and a few pigeons) in the botanic gardens, and observing ‘old’ (1800s!) ships moored at the Maritime Museum in Darling Harbour. But on the following days we got out of the centre despite staying within the city limits: to South Head on a ferry to see the extent of the harbour area, lean over some cliff edges and eat the best calamari I’ve ever had; to Ku-Ring-Gai Chase national park to see (or do I mean photograph?) a mangrove swamp and its shy crabby inhabitants, a bush turkey building a magnificent pile of dead tree bits and lots of native trees and flowers; and to North Head and the eastern beaches north of it to see the Harbour from the other side and go play with wildlife on beaches that those of us who look at myo’s photos often feel we know well: the pelicans on Fishermen’s Beach, the bluebottle floats around Dee Why and of course the shells, starfish, sea hares and sea squirts on Long Reef.

My impressions of Sydney formed on my own are therefore limited – although I could have explored in the evenings I almost never did (thanks mostly to illness that made sleep seem decidedly preferable when I could get it) – but on my last day I did walk around alone and decided I rather like it. I liked its feeling of settlement history, from the archaeological dig beneath my hostel of all the poor housing of The Rocks razed in the 1900s when plague spread, to the brass plaques on the pavement in Circular Quay showing both the original shoreline at settlement in 1788 and the ‘circular quay’ itself shoreline of the early port. I also liked the restored Victorian shopping mall in the QVB (Queen Victoria Building, obviously), the cute but pointless-seeming monorail around the city centre. It is a bustling, modern city centre that hasn’t lost sight of its origins, which will always win my affections.

Oddly, the thing that Sydney has which I am most jealous of is its ferry system. I love that it is not only still the quickest, most efficient way to travel between the city centre and some suburbs, but also a pleasantly unhurried way to get between various stops around the immediate Harbour Bridge area. I like that a certain class of ferry were all named for the first fleet of ships to arrive in Sydney, including the ‘Borrowdale’ which I caught at one point, and I loved watching the commuters at Manly disembark from their cheerily-painted vessel with their business suits and bicycles just as they would from the Tube.

I wish I had had a little more time there to explore more thoroughly – or a little more energy in the evenings to allow me to see it in the glitz of its night lights, but I was generally pleasantly surprised by it – as a huge city with a feeling of openness thanks to the harbour and sea and areas of nature reserves, as a busy city that was nonetheless friendly and relaxing in its quieter spots.

The Sydney blog will go up now, but I then expect to be totally offline for a week here in Fiji (tonight I’m on the mainland, but I don’t expect any internet access on the islands), in which time I will attempt to write something coherent about nearly a whole month in New Zealand. I’d better, because when I move on from here I’ve got another few weeks amongst friends, and that’s the whole reason I’m so behind now. It’s somehow rude to sit and blog when you have friends in the room, even if all you’re doing together is watching tv…

…but anyway. *makes Must Do Better note on own report card and skedaddles*

The pattern will continue for a while yet: I am currently in New Zealand, where I have been touring the South Island with one friend and now today we are both flying to the North Island to gather up another friend before touring around there. Now, these two friends both know each other but have never met before, so this should be an interesting experiment…

Because of course, all these people I happen to be really good friends with on the opposite side of the world are Internet Friends. Which most of you reading this blog will not be shocked by because either a) you are internet people or b) you know me well enough to have heard me start an anecdote with ‘my friend Kepp… no, wait, that’s not her real name, my friend Christine I mean’ – but here’s a post for those of you who are a little less sure about the idea.

A long, long time ago, I was in 3rd year at university and had just discovered that one of my favourite fantasy authors had written some new books and I wanted to discuss them but didn’t know anyone else who read them. As I was conveniently living on the same staircase as the computer room that year, I ended up searching for people online talking about them and happened across a little messageboard full of pleasantly crazy people who I am still talking to nine years later (on the same messageboard, even though it’s been wiped or rehosted a few times since then). Since those days, I have wandered out into the larger realms of blogs and facebook and twitter etc, so I have internet friends from other spheres now too, but Hobblings have always been my core online family (the author is Robin Hobb, and we’re never ones to pass up a silly name if one’s available. (Does anyone remember why we called the board Cecil now?)).

Nine years on, of course – and with a reasonably static central group of people on the messageboard, since Hobb is not a tremendously popular author and the books she’s put out in the meantime haven’t stimulated huge fandom – I now know these people pretty well and have met a lot of them in real life (and established that none of us are burly dockworkers pretending to be something else, as was the initial suspicion). I’ve even met a high proportion of the Australia/New Zealand contingent, thanks to us having all been somewhat more footloose and fancy-free about 5 years ago and actually organising a couple of international meet-ups which many people found a way to get to. So of the 7 friends I’ve said hello to down here (…or dragged off to tour around with me) I have met 5 of them before, even if only once or twice.

But then, meeting internet people is almost never as strange as I once thought it would be. We talk to each other regularly online anyway, so we all know each other pretty well to begin with and meeting people in person usually makes them easier to talk to thanks to body language, facial expressions etc. It is a little odd when they all turn out to have accents and voices of their own and don’t sound like the voices in my head, yes, but as a general rule I have never disliked anyone in person who I thought I liked on the internet (and I’ve liked several more than I expected to).

Of course, we all have a lot in common now, which helps – years of stored in-jokes and memories, plus the wonderful fact that being fans of the same thing seems to mean a lot of commonality in liking other things, so it becomes a community of recommendations and shared music and DVDs sent around the world: thanks to various members of this bunch I discovered Amanda Palmer, the Decemberists, Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica, the entire oeuvre of Joss Whedon and indeed most of the television I watch these days…

In short, I have spent the whole of the last month bouncing around between various internet friends who I haven’t seen in years or ever, and it has been excellent. I can only hope that the next month – wherein I have one week on my own, but am otherwise in similar company – will be just as good.

… but I’m sure it will be. Because internet friends are awesome.

Melbourne gave me my first feeling of ‘normality’ for a month – thanks mostly to the rain – but outside the city the countryside still felt alien to me, wide open and looking like it expected to be dry and scrubby for a significant portion of the year. Tasmania, however, took that familiar chilly rain and expanded on it to include green valleys, mountains, cows and sheep, remote white sand beaches and a populace that looked weatherbeaten and just a few years behind current fashions… Since I have now offended my Tasmanian friend I spent the week with, let’s mention her. Jes lives in Hobart and took a few days off from the internet to tour round the island with me (it was a happy moment when we found free wifi in Launceston after 4 days’ isolation). We hired a car and followed a very well-planned itinerary – that she’d been emailing me about since Singapore – to see as much as we could in a short space of time. (This also included quite a lot of time driving around in the car singing along to eg the Dr Horrible Commentary songs, but that’s just our idea of fun.)

Starting in Hobart, we spent a day at MONA (Museum of Old and New Art), which I would thoroughly recommend to anyone who a) is in Hobart, b) enjoys interactive art and c) has an occasionally puerile sense of humour. It would seem that a lot of life is about vaginas, or at least artists think it is. (Some of it is also about poo, but don’t worry, that was covered too.) We managed to spend 7 whole hours just wandering around an art gallery and I can confirm that giggling together at things which possibly weren’t meant to be giggled at is a good icebreaker when you haven’t seen a friend for 6 years or so.

After leaving Hobart, we toured around as much of the island as we could, taking in mountains, caves, beaches, gorges and of course a wildlife park with some Tasmanian Devils. From the convict site at Port Arthur, sitting in its green valley on a sunny spring day, to sea kayaking in the bays of Freycinet as the clouds came over, the temperature dropped and a fabulous sunset totally failed to materialise, everything suddenly felt a lot more British to me than the sunny, dry expanses of Australian bush I had seen on the mainland. And by ‘British’ I mean (mostly) the good bits – the upland farming, the ‘mountains’ which punch above their size by being very pretty, the deprecatory attitude towards the weather of everyone we met. I also should not underestimate the feeling that it actually was Spring, with daffodils and wisteria in bloom, even with a sprinkling of snow remaining on the mountaintops: that finally I was somewhere where I understood the visual cues of the year around me. It’s strange how that made me feel more at home even than towns called things like ‘The Braes.’

It’s certainly true that Tasmania has a slightly small-town feel: even in Launceston and Hobart, the two biggest cities, it feels like everyone has gone home to bed by 8pm at night. Since we were usually in our motel accommodation attempting to concoct dinner by that point, though, that wasn’t exactly a problem – and it made for yet another pleasant change of pace after the bars of Melbourne and before the city lights of Sydney…

I don’t seem to have a whole lot to say about Tasmania, but I think the several hundred photos I took there balance that out: it’s hard to sum up mountain scenery, possums on our front doorstep or cruel taunting cave rocks that looked like bacon better than my camera can. I had a thoroughly enjoyable six days there nonetheless, and maybe one day I’ll go back and make myself feel more at home (by climbing more hills and/or prodding jes more).

All of this is an excessively long preamble to this point: Melbourne was a very welcome shift of gear from all the other gears that had gone before. For the first time since leaving home, I stayed with a friend for nearly a week and spent all my time with her, I went to bars in the evenings and got a touch drunk and had silly conversations and listened to the details of other people’s relationship drama and lay in until midday without caring and then ate gigantic fried breakfasts. (The other thing I did for the first time since leaving home was to wear my jeans – the city treated me to several days of pretty heavy rain and made me feel right at home.)

Melbourne is the home of my friend Emma, who has an internet name sufficiently awkward to say out loud that she has somehow always managed to be called by her real name instead. Neat trick. Em has a large network of friends that seems to be made up of lots of incredibly welcoming people who are happy to take a stranger into their midst for a week, discuss fantasy books with her when drunk and silly-dance with her to live music. We spent most of our evenings with them in the various odd little eateries and bars of Melbourne, a lot of which seem to reside down back alleys where I for one would never think to look for little cultish places with seating made out of pallets or a collection of old wooden chairs hanging from the ceiling. It may just be the side of the city that Em showed me, but there was definitely a laid back, artsy, low-rent bohemian vibe to the city, such that I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised if people had started drinking absinthe and dying of consumption.* I don’t quite understand how such a multitude of eateries and drinkeries are maintained unless the whole population of Melbourne goes out for a good few drinks each night, soaks them up with a big helping of dumplings and then goes off to scribble poetic graffiti on the toilet walls, but it’s certainly a fun atmosphere to drop into. Of the six days I was there, therefore, Em and I spent 5 of them being very attached to the cosiness of our beds in the morning, venturing out for a mostly aimless but pleasant mooch around town in the afternoons which tended to feature such tourist attractions as the sci-fi/fantasy bookshop, an alleyway full of graffiti or Ned Kelly’s homemade armour, then heading off to socialise for the evening until even discussions of whether Brother Cavil or Cersei Lannister more deserves to be pushed out of an airlock/off the Wall paled beside those cosy beds calling us back at midnight or so. It was a very enjoyable pattern, and whilst I’m sure Melbourne has several other faces it shows to business travellers or solo tourists, our week of lazy enjoyment was exactly the kind of change I needed from all the silly little stresses of travelling mostly alone for the previous month.

The one exception to this bout of not-really-tourism was the day when we hired a car and I drove us along the Great Ocean Road, a noted tourist route along the coast (…obviously) to the west of Melbourne, which is renowned for its little surfing and holiday towns, its dramatic coastal scenery, and the twisty nature of the road along it. Having not driven for a month, though, I rather enjoyed that challenge – and Em soon discovered my propensity to want to drive further when there are still more things to be seen just along the next stretch of road. We were originally just going to drive down the eastern side of the point of land reaching out into the Bass Strait towards Tasmania, aiming for Apollo Bay where we would sit and make the seagulls fight for chips. This we did, and then I suggested that since the southernmost tip of Cape Otway was just there we might as well go and see what there was to be seen on it. Since we didn’t want to pay to look at a lighthouse, this mostly consisted of trees, cows and sheep, kangaroos and koalas. The koalas along one short stretch of road were so prevalent that every car going through stopped to look and take photos of those sitting only a few feet above head height, obliviously eating eucalyptus leaves without a care in the world. Without even looking for any far away from the road, we counted 30 koalas in maybe 300m of road, which impressed even local Emma. After Cape Otway we could have turned back the way we’d come, especially as it was already nearly 5pm, but a little way up the western coast are the ’12 Apostles,’ a famous group of cliff stacks which had looked rather nice on all the postcards I’d seen, so I suggested driving on to them while daylight still remained. They were definitely rather stunning, even in the rain, as a thin line of sunset started to appear below the grey cloud above, but I had not yet had my fill of coastal formations and thought we could probably make it the few miles further on to ‘London Bridge’ (a plateau arch) before it was completely dark. So we continued driving northwest as a stunning sunset directly ahead of us picked out the road onwards in a line of glistening wet gold, until we’d found every lookout and rock formation there was to find in the evening afterglow. Having filled our eyes with landscape glories, our stomachs reminded us that those chips had been a long time ago… so this time Em took charge and directed us yet further north-west to the end of the Great Ocean Road at Warrnambool, where we most happily located an excellent restaurant that fed us delicious dead animals and rounded off the day most perfectly, if unfortunately still 3.5 hours away from Melbourne by the direct route back. But, refueled by food, a Dresden Dolls singalong and an unexpected giggle fit from Emma whilst cleaning bugs off the windscreen at a service station, we drove back quite happily in the starlit night. Melbourne had apparently had a thunderstorm of apocalyptic proportions while we were gone, but all we ever saw of it was a thin line of night-grey cloud to the north-east behind the city as we approached it at 1am and the trip mileometer (kilometerometer?) ticked up to 650km. Every few minutes, the line would flash white in a fascinatingly surreal way, rounding off a beautiful day with the appropriate air of specialness.

As with my travels as a whole, therefore, it turned out that the key to a near-perfect near-week was to mix apparently dissimilar things together, sprinkle with a helping of good friends and then relax and enjoy it while it’s there.

* the city I drew perhaps the most inevitable comparisons with was San Francisco, but perhaps less San Francisco as I have seen it these days – uber-cool home of the granola-eating adopters of gadgets from Silicon Valley – and more what legend has it being in the days when everything was art and music and nobody cared that it didnt make money because that wasn’t what mattered, man.

(The trams also helped.)

I have learned:

- that Angry Birds is even more popular in SE Asia than it is in the rest of the world.
- that yum cha is dim sum (okay, technically I learned that from Eptima the day I left the UK, but I confirmed it…)
- that some languages may possibly consider vowel sounds more important than consonants, and that I will really struggle with pronunciation in those places.
- relatedly, that ‘ch’ and ‘t’ are variants of the same basic sound, which I had never noticed before.
- how to execute a hook turn without getting smooshed by trams.
- that an awful lot of the world has a 2 season or 6 season yearly cycle rather than the 4 I am used to.
- that a 21-hour train journey can pass surprisingly quickly.
- that the Northern/Scottish elongated ‘oo’ sound, which I learned to use in my pronunciation of my own surname so that Scots don’t hear ‘kirk’ instead, really confuses Australians.
- that I have a lot more freckles than I think I do.
- that a surprising number of other tourists you meet in SE Asia are Dutch.
- that Australian cars are the same as ours except for swapping round the windscreen wiper and indicator control sticks, which caused some sudden screenwash when I was flustered…
- that no-one else’s budget airlines seem to be quite as horrendous at customer service as Ryanair are.
- that tree frogs sometimes live in toilets.
- that a ridiculous number of Australian places have British names. I was expecting a fair few moments of confusion – similar to the US, I guess – but was not quite prepared for the sheer quantity and the disorder with which they are applied relative to other places. Just today, for example, I drove through or past Breadalbane, Keppoch, Perth, Campbell Town, Tunbridge and Epping Forest… on my way to Brighton.
- that the Malaysian government does not like pedestrians, if the difficulty of walking along/crossing roads is anything to go by.
- that I am surprisingly capable of surviving in 30+C heat with high humidity, so long as I can make an occasional air conditioned escape.
- that I still really enjoy staying in backpacker hostels.
- that most of the soil in Australia really really is those orangey-red colours it is in photos.
- that dumplings are always amazing and that Strongbow comes in more than one flavour…

Things I have not learned:

- how to reliably switch my mental compass from ‘the sun is always some variant of south’ to ‘the sun is always some variant of north.’ Not to mention ‘the sun is neither noticeably north nor south,’ which is just confusing and shouldn’t be allowed.
- to enjoy using squat toilets.
- relatedly, to approve of toilets without toilet paper. Though I did quite like the one that had a ‘centralised’ toilet paper dispenser beside the handbasins…
- how to toughen my feet up. In hot climates, they got incredibly itchy heat rash and blistered where my sandals touched them. In cold climates, they’re back to having chilblains.
- how to lose any weight. You’d think all this walking around with heavy bags would be excellent practice, but that would be reckoning without the cheap food in Asia and then the Australian friends who force-feed me dumplings…
- how to know where my towel is. (Though right now I do know: it’s just that it’s in Melbourne and I am in Sydney.)