wce.80d.org

i meant to be better about keeping up with this blog, but i really haven’t had regular access to email or time to spend writing at the computer. it is actually more of a blessing than a curse, though the backlog on my email accounts is going to be tough to tackle when i do get back. i leave Christchurch early Saturday morning and am leaving my laptop here. there’ll be no email, no cell phone, no computer screen for an entire week and i couldn’t be more excited.

i’ll try to briefly recount the past few days, though it will be hard to do that briefly. my talk on tuesday was well attended and it went very well. it is nice to have gotten it over with early in the week and to have gotten such a good response from so many people. i’ve been exploring the city in my running shoes, getting lost and finding my way (literally and figuratively) through cemeteries, city parks, and the botanical garden. i took the bus out to the beach where I met bernard, a 80-90 year old woman with only three toes and not a bit of sense about how to use a digital camera. i’ve been spending a lot of time with rick, dave, and greg and i was surprised to be so comforted by their familiar faces.

i’ve also met loads of new people who are as indescribable as the nature here is. there’s the old belgian guy who gifted me with numerous bugs (dead and alive) and who, despite his complete inability to hear a melody or a bass line, kept pulling me out to the dance floor at the conference dinner. there’s ross, the ‘technologist’ who might be the loneliest and yet most arrogant person I’ve ever met. there’s ‘kitty’, who looks just like a skinny version of arthur but who puts on a more elaborate stretching routine than bikram himself every time I pass en route to and from downtown from my hostel. there’s jess and jess, two ladies from virgina tech who are fun but who embarrassingly remind me of myself when i was a masters student. no lack of strange and mostly friendly encounters here, and i feel like i didn’t even have to try.

i want to write about yesterday though it really is beyond description. i went up to castle hill to the pass between the west and east halves of the island. we hiked through an underground river all day and there really is no way to describe it. the chill of the water as it rose above my waist, the beauty of the rocks and micro-drainages inside the cave, the laminar flow pushing against my legs as i climbed over the knap of the constricted flow, the echo of water bouncing off the cave walls…that hike really stimulated all of the senses and made me feel so alive. it was very enchanting. afterwards, we had dinner on top of castle hill at one of the limestone formations where they filmed lord of the rings; this landscape here is so beautiful and so exposed. there are birds and cicadas and fish and ducks and flowers and biting insects and japanese tourists everywhere! the rivers are these amazing, braided, gravel-bed systems which i can’t really explain.

okay, my general plan for the next week which i definitely expect to change...i’m going white water rafting this morning in what may be the world’s largest gravel bed river. then i’ll leave early on saturday morning and go hiking from saturday to sunday at arthur’s pass. then I head over to the west coast to hike along the heaphy track where i’ll leave joe, my unofficial tourguide who needed an excuse to get away this week, to be joined by the random other hikers along the way. then i return to christchurch friday morning before my flight leaves. it is going to be an intense few days but i'm perfectly relaxed and surprisingly unalarmed at my lack of a real plan, which joe has convinced me i should strictly avoid.

i'll try to send one more set of notes before i return, but depending on when i end up where, it may be after i return...