Epilogue
On the 21st I left Picton aboard the massive Interislander car ferry to reunite with Roxane in Wellington. The skies were grey but the sea was relatively calm as we passed through the dramatic terrain of the Sounds. There is a rock formation here that, according to Maori legend, is the eyeball of a giant octopus killed by the hero Kupe. When the sailing wakas passed this point, all except the navigator were required to close their eyes. It’s easy to see how these great cliffs and bays could acquire a religious significance.
I had a happy reunion with Roxane at the pier – with perfect timing she arrived just as the ship started letting people off. We walked back through Wellington, a city she had become quite familiar with by now, and to Rosemere Backpackers, where she had been working for a while and making lots of friends among the long-termers there. It was nice to fit right in here, in a comfortable place among friendly people.
We spent two weeks in Wellington, me relaxing and recuperating and repairing my gear for the next leg, Roxane working reception at the hostel on alternate days. I cooked a lot of real meals with fresh vegetables and filled and emptied salad bowls repeatedly. To satisfy a long-held personal craving, I held a burrito night where I purchased tortillas, beans, and all the fixings for vegetarian burritos for everyone and collected $5 per burrito to cover costs. It was a great time. I introduced a lot of people to their first taste of a burrito, especially Brits. My favorite line was: “So what is a burrito exactly? Is it kind of like a kebab?” Everyone enjoyed it quite a bit, though I wound up somewhat in the red. While beans and tortillas are some of the cheapest items in any San Francisco grocery, it turns out in New Zealand they are “specialty foods” and cost significantly more, on the order of USD $2.50 for a can of refried beans! And I could not, for love nor money, find refried black beans (which I consider to be “version 2,” permanently obsoleting refried pinto beans).
I was also introduced to the game Bananagrams, which could be described as real-time Scrabble, played on your own board, where there are no points counted, the first person to finish the tiles wins, and you can rearrange your entire board at will. In other words, it’s nothing like Scrabble except that you arrange tiles with letters on them into words. It was enormously popular at Rosemere, and was played for multiple hours nearly every night. Surprisingly, it became quite popular amongst non-native English speakers too, once we hit upon the idea of forming teams. It turned out to be a great way to practice spelling and learn new words. I frequently teamed up with one of Roxane’s and my new friends, Maria, until Maria reached the point where she could win singlehandedly and I was barred from giving her further assistance.
We booked our onward flights with a travel agent – a novel experience for me. I had thought travel agents were a vestigial limb of the pre-Internet travel infrastructure, waiting to shrivel and fall off. But it turns out that for long-term multi-segment travel, the various offerings by different airlines and conglomerates are complex enough that it’s useful to have an expert help. Also, getting competing travel agencies into a bidding war is both fun and profitable.
Our next destination is Indonesia, where we will learn to scuba dive and get into all sorts of other adventures. I’ve bought a language book and started studying, I’m quite excited to put theory into practice.
My further adventures will be posted at http://jacob.hoffman-andrews.com/geeks-errant/, while Roxane’s will continue to be at http://roxanew.wordpress.com/. See you there!