Thursday, March 26, 2009

New Zealand again

Some months later, and the details have faded before I have managed to record them here. What's left is a distillation of selected highlights. (What this means is that although I think I can remember every meal we ate, place we slept and person we spoke to, I'm not going to inflict it on my readers).

Coming down to The Gates of Haast from the pass through a drenched vertical landscape thunderous with the descent of water, steep walls rising on either side. It is gloomy and excessively green, vegetation crawling on every surface. We stop to let our brakes cool and take some photos but the strange chlorophyll light won't allow itself to be captured: the pictures are saturated with brightness in some parts, sodden with darkness in others. The air is so wet that I can feel its damp touch on my skin. When we're finally disgorged into the grassy, innocuous flatlands, it's a relief.

Waking up to see the white flanks of a mountain that had been cowled in cloud all afternoon finally revealing itself, and riding all morning beside blue-green rivers. Around every corner another peak slides into view. A car passes us with a trailer full of dead deer: there is dew caught in their fur and the inert bodies jig slightly as the trailer sways on a bend.

Riding all day in the rain, with nowhere to stop for 60 km except the Copland Bus Shelter. We set our sights on it for 40 km but when we arrive find it infested with sandflies. We eat a muesli bar, standing, and converse with some malodorous hikers who have just traversed the Alps from Mount Cook.

The first sight of the tongue of Fox Glacier, protruding down through the rainforest from its mist-veiled neve. We walk up from the carpark with our heavy boots and woollen socks dragging at the end of our legs. When we step out onto the ice, everything is suddenly different. The temperature drops 10 degrees and the light shifts from green to blue-white. The crampons even necessitate another way of walking, feet flat to the ground, biting into the ice and requiring a slight wrench to free them. There are layers of ash in the glacier that have blown across the Tasman from our own domestic bushfires. I stand on the surface, eroded like limestone into crevasses and strange peaks, listening to the water run in its invisible channels and feeling fragile and organic .

For a while after returning, I see things in my world I have never seen before. I read the placards scattered along Canada Bay describing estuarine ecology and the mechanics of mangroves I pay attention to a (very large) sandstone house near Tarban Creek that I have been riding past every day for years and have never noticed. This new vision lasts for a couple of weeks before it is eroded by familiarity and I am back in my old mental landscape, blinded by routine to everything around me.