Wanaka

It’s Saturday March 28th. We woke up this morning here in Wanaka to the sight of the rising sun illuminating the peaks across the lake from our room. The mountain tops were bright golden above the green grassy slopes below. The tops are too high for anything more than low beige grasses and cold-proof vegetation to grow on.

(early morning, Wanaka. The park begins across the street from our room. The trail goes either direction from here)

(those mountains in the background are waaaay far away!)

The lake was relatively smooth this morning and the ducks were out enjoying it. I walked the short distance across the park into town to pick up morning pastries for breakfast. The bakery were I sought something for Brenda had warm sultana scones just out of the oven. In the parking area for the small lakeside park a station wagon full of young people were just coming to life after having slept in their car the night before. A tall young woman stood beside the car, rubbing her eyes, while inside, a tangle of indistinct bodies and sleeping bags was stirring like a basket of puppies trying to wake up. Back in our room Brenda had pastry and coffee in bed while I worked on the computer handling what I could from my office, where it was just after lunch yesterday. Soon however 3 or 4 of the ducks from the lake had wandered up to our sliding glass door demanding their expected payment for being cute. We of course complied.

("Come across with the pastry kiddo, and nobody gets hurt, see". We've got beaks and we know how to use them")

Later in the morning we sat out for the walk on the travel path around our side of the lake. We saw a group of children preparing to take off in small sailboats, apparently being instructed by some men in the art of sailing.  Like all young boys, they were more interested in testing the limits of the craft in motion, spinning around in the tightest turns possible, than in accuracy. The trail goes to a camping area called Eely Point. The views of course are indescribable in my poor vocabulary. People may find it strange when they ask what we did in a tourist area like Wanaka, when we say “we walked” but I can’t think of any better way to see this gorgeous country. It also occurs to be for most people who go on vacations to do something at a place, they spend their time traveling to get to a thing they are going to do. When we travel by motorcycle however we are doing the thing we want to do as soon as we leave the parking area. We are doing our activity all the time, not just when we arrive somewhere. We saw ads for rafting, jet boating and bungie jumping but we’ve already had our excitement just getting here. We are now content to walk these quiet forested paths with the beautiful aftermath of nature’s power in our view at all times. Storms damage a relatively wide area by human standards, but nature’s wind is temporary and limited in scope.  A tornado may tear up a swath of buildings or blow down some of man’s other constructions, but a glacier rearranges mountains, creates lakes that go for miles and flattens out areas the size of major cities. 

(this would be "the old man of the sea", but it's a lake and the "old man of the lake" just doesn't have the same ring to it.)

(same old man, same lake, farther along)

We stayed two days at Wanaka, a town we both loved from our first night here a couple of weeks ago.   I went for a solo ride while Brenda stayed behind for some quiet time in town.  I thought I’d go explore the road around the west side of the lake going toward the mountains we could see rising in the distance.  This road quickly leaves the lakeside and twists off into the foothills (read “mountains” in Eastern Ky terms) rising and falling in perfectly radiused turns as if designed by a motorcyclist.  Since it follows the curve of the hills, one could ponder just how sympathetic Ma Nature is to our needs after all.  The mountains take a long time to seem any closer, an indication of just how doggone big they are.  I finally realize that I’m not actually going to get there if I have any chance of getting back to Wanaka before suppertime and, as has been a constant feature of this trip, my stomach won out and I turned around. 

(and it goes on this way for miles and miles....)

One of the things that I have neglected to mention so far is the number of one-lane bridges in New Zealand. I guess it makes engineering sense in that you only have to build a bridge one-half as strong since it will never have two lanes of traffic on it. The system seems to work rather well when there are so few cars on the road. One comes to a set of lane markings that tell you a one lane bridge is coming up and there is a round sign with two arrows pointing in opposite directions, one larger and a different color than the other. If the larger colored arrow is pointing in your direction of travel, you have the right of way and if it’s the smaller arrow then you must yield to someone coming through the other way. Everyone seems to understand the system and it works well except when the bridge is around a blind curve and you don’t see it coming until you are already on top of it!
 
When one is only used to traveling by car, the view of the world framed by a windshield and hardtop becomes the “normal” one, the frame (literally) of reference for how the world in motion looks.  Even in a convertible automobile with the top down, the driver is held in one spot, level to the horizon, front view still constricted by the windshield frame, side and downward view limited by the car’s bodywork.  When I talk about what I see, what I experience, from a bike to someone who’s never been there, I can tell that they have no reference point for understanding what I’m trying to impart.  Kurt Vonnegut once wrote in parable about the Tralfamadorian’s, an alien race whose experience of time was not like humans.  In trying to explain it, he likened the human experience of time to a man seated rigidly on a railroad car with his head encased in a turret, immobile, with his view only forward, only of what visible out of the gunbarrel-like tube extending from the turret.  The railroad car could only go in one direction and the man could see “time” as what unfolded through the barrel’s aperture as the car moved inexorably forward.  The Tralfamadorians, in contrast, were above the plain upon which the track ran and could see everything around it, forward, backward and on all sides, at once.  While a motorcycle doesn’t afford quite that degree of omniscience, it is an improvement of the same kind, if not degree, over the car experience.