11/2/18: hoo boy a long one

Ever spend almost two hours writing up over 3500 words on overcoming your fear of heights and memories of Animals You Have Seen? No? Well, I have and so this feels like an entry to skim for pictures if even that, but I know I will be so glad to open this file one day and have such detailed descriptions of these roads and those maggots.

A short history of roads I have refused to ride on and the consequences thereof:

• Hawk’s Nest: I did technically ride this once before I refused to again, but I’m counting it here because I only barely wobbled through, absolutely petrified and definitely not in total control of the bike. I made Mike pull over on the other side and got off the bike gasping for breath, in shock, shaking, etc. Mike stayed on the Tiger and watched me for a minute, then said “Come on, I have to pee,” so I got back on the bike and finished hyperventilating in my helmet as we headed north to look for a bathroom.* After that, I refused to ride Hawk’s Nest and either avoided it all together or, once, went around it via Pennsylvania and asked the rest of the group to meet me in Barryville which is, FYI, kind of pretty far along 97 after Hawk’s Nest and I get no cell service there. That was stupid. 
• Route 52 from Ellenville over the mountain: Tried this road by myself once. Got maybe two miles in, to the part where the road is going straight up and to the right you can see only sky, then panicked and awkwardly, slowly, rolled myself back down until I could turn around and go find a gas station parking lot where I could hyperventilate safely. The main consequence of this was Mike teasing me a lot but otherwise there is nothing on the other side of Ellenville so I wasn’t missing much. The road itself also teased me a lot, as going south on 209 from Ellenville (which I’ve done a LOT) you can look to the left and see where 52 cuts along the mountain, approximately 25,000 feet up, and the cars look like ants and every so often one of them is magnetically pulled over the (tiny) guardrail because as everyone knows that is a very common thing that can happen on high, twisty roads with lots of exposure which is why the sane people stay low and slow (fun fact: that is also how the Greenland shark can live to be over 400 years old—it stays low and slow, and if it’s good enough for the Greenland shark, it’s good enough for me).
• Route 44, which is just north of 52, and from the west starts with a nasty switchback heading up the mountain. Panicked at the sight of that, I made James and Mike pull over so I could freak out and the guys could very nicely suggest I get my fucking shit together. In the end, James & Mike went over and I went around, the consequence of which was that I took a very long time to meet up with them and I am sure for some portion of that they assumed I was dead (sorry, guys). (Also James told me later that except for that one switchback the road was basically fine. Sorry again, guys.)
• The road up Bear Mountain: another sheer-cliffs road, very steep, lots of turns. No real consequence because thankfully everybody is bored of riding to Bear Mountain and the one time I attempted it, I was able to turn the bike around and find a place to wait until the rest of the group came back down.
• Route 218 along the Hudson: this is one of those roads that is only open part of the year. Lots of curves, cliffs, etc. Stefan was kind enough to show me a non-cliff way to Cornwall where we met up with the rest of the group that weren’t a bunch of weenies. We managed to get there minutes before they did so at least I wasn’t responsible for a major delay in the ride because I needed to go 50 miles out of the way to avoid a road small children could probably safely navigate.
• Wow this is a long list, and I’m probably leaving some roads out. Poor Mike: I think he’s tried to convince me I could handle every one of these roads and I’m pretty sure we argued over 52 in particular for two or three years. (Yes you can! No I can’t! Yes you can! No I can’t! on repeat)

A list of roads that I have now ridden and either have or would ride again:

• Hawk’s Nest
• 52
• 44
• 218
• Those two crazy roads in VT: the one through Smuggler’s Notch and that other one up the mountain, and now in New Zealand:
• Lindis Pass
• Haast Pass
• Route 6 up the West Coast
• Crown Range Road (twice, in fact, once without realizing it (north to south) and then the second time (south to north) thinking, geez, this road is difficult and...familiar)
• Te Anau-Milford Sound
• The road over Mount Cargill

I could keep going with the second list, but I’m leaving it here to remind me of a few things:

1. I say I can’t but eventually I do/can so I may as well start leading with yes. (This is not the equivalent of “Mike is always right,”—he may have been right about a few things but let’s not get crazy here.)
2. Being in a no-choice situation is very helpful to the gathering up of the courage.
3. Per Broman, ride your own ride: don't worry about being slow in the really hairy bits.
4. DO watch your line—go as slow as you need to go to stay in your lane as drifting wide in these types of turns could be quickly regrettable.

These are summed up, of course, as Lessons 1 and 2 of motorcycling: you’re stronger than you think ad you’re capable of more than you realize. New Zealand roads have been a tremendous opportunity to (re)learn these lessons, not least because the scenery is outrageously beautiful that it makes the overall experience less painful but also because there is so little traffic I always feel like I have the time and space to give the roads the attention needed and holy guacamole there are SO MANY of these roads.

All to say, the ride yesterday from Te Anau to Fox Glacier was a hard ride. A great ride, but an exhausting ride. I don’t think it was over 300 miles but it took all day and when I got to Fox Glacier someone asked me where I’d come from and I couldn’t remember. “There was a lake,” I stammered, before a brain cell reluctantly came online and dredged up the right answer. Bed before 9 pm, as per.

BUT NOW FOR THE MOST IMPORTANT PARTS!! Here are some things that have happened in the last 48 hours:

• A nice man was able to zip-tie the side stand sensor back together so no bypass necessary. He also noticed a bolt missing on the center stand so I officially don’t have to use it anymore, which is too bad because I did so enjoy the struggle.
• A maggot mouth-peed on me in a cave.
• I was a foot away from a long-finned eel, which is basically my only enemy in all of nature.
• I rode in a helicopter to look at a glacier.
• I saw TWO kiwis and FOUR tuatara.
• Lots more sheep, red deer, and alpaca, as per.
• It turns out that a cheese toastie looks terrible but tastes delicious, the key being that in between the window and the plate, a panini press gets involved and THAT makes all the difference.
• There has been a shocking change in my appearance.

Post side-stand-fix on Wednesday, I figured I’d take a down day to do some laundry and read the new Michael Connolly for Motorcycle Book Club. But THEN I remembered seeing a sign for glowworm tours, so I looked that up, and hey presto I had just enough time to do the laundry and read a book before a 5:30 pm sharp departure on a boat that would take me to a CAVE of glowworms.

Probably goes without saying I was the only person taking notes during the various speeches we got from guides on the boat and on land, but I bet all those other people regret it because I am now FULL of facts about glowworms, starting with the truth that they are actually maggots.

This is a summary of glowworm highlights but do not fear: the unabridged version is also available in my full travel journal you are WELCOME.

• Glowworms are the maggot or pupa stage of a fly; this stage lasts only 12-13 days whereas the larva stage takes NINE MONTHS. The fly itself lives from one (the ladies) to five (the gentlemen) days and accordingly does not bother to grow a mouth because it doesn’t ever get to eat. 
• During the pupa stage, the worm makes a little hammock nest and then sets as many as 70 “fishing lines,” which it spits of out its mouth (and because it includes uric acid it is mouth pee). Each line is threaded with dots of mucus that contain a paralytic agent which is honestly one heck of a party trick--there are pictures of these lines below if you can't contain yourself from knowing what this is all about.
• When the worm is hungry, it emits a glow from its butt (a bioluminescent phenomenon that has been artificially engineered into mice, silkworms, and potatoes; hats off to the scientists who came up with THAT list of things that would be even cooler if they glowed) in order to attract flies and other whatever who then get tangled in/paralyzed by the lines and then eaten by the worm. 
• The worm-maggots are territorial, so their little blue glowing dots are very regularly spaced out in order to comply with worm-maggot zoning laws (violators are eaten by the property holder on whom they infringe—talk about an HOA penalty, ho ho ho). 
• Used fishing lines are cut free to drop below and that is how a person can get mouth-peed on by a maggot.

The tour I took involved a 30-minute boat ride across part of Lake Te Anau, which is a very big lake: 66 kilometers long and 417 meters at its deepest point (big enough numbers I assume they are also large in normal-people measures). The glowworms choose these caves (foreshadowing: and other locales) because there is no wind to disturb their fishing lines, and it is nice and dark so as to best showcase their glowing butts. The cave-walk part of the experience was wheeeeeeeeee and I am pretty sure that whatever safety regulations we have in the States are at least six to 12** volumes longer than the ones they have here. The cave entrance required about 25 feet of duck-walking, and then inside the cave was extremely dark and extremely loud because there is a big, fast river making a LOT of noise. There was some low lighting in places, but otherwise the guide told us to put one hand on the handrail and use the other to detect outcroppings of rock before we banged our heads into them. At one point there was a gap in the handrail where someone hadn’t bothered to fully join two sections and while that gap may have only been six inches, the moment in which my hand fell into nothing and it was completely dark and all I could hear was the roar of this big river right underneath my feet, well, let’s just say there can be a “pucker factor” off a motorcycle as well as on.

We saw lots of neat cave features, including a big waterfall, and then the twelve of us were loaded into this little tiny boat which was just like the boat from the It’s a Small World ride at Disney except it was—I’ll say again—SO dark that closing and then opening my eyes made no difference at all; we were atop a dam and the overflow went into the previously-referenced big waterfall so it was both incredibly noisy and also felt very dangerous; our guide pulled the boat along, hand-over-hand, using a chain strung above us, so we would occasionally bump into a cave wall which was as terrifying as any jolt that comes unexpectedly in total darkness is, especially as the boat is also randomly dipping from side to side when the guide moves his weight; and so when a constellation of little blue glowing butts appeared above us I was so relieved to have some light that I didn’t even care when a line of mouth pee dotted with paralytic mucus fell on my head.

We spent maybe ten minutes being boated around in the glowmaggot cave, having been strictly ordered to be completely silent, absolutely no photography or video allowed, place your hands on your knees and don’t move them, with just the constant roar of the river and the occasional jarring jolt and it was…well, it was magical. Because of the structure of the cave, we were sometimes less than a foot away from a group of worm maggots; other times the ceiling soared up and we could look up to see dozens of those blue butt lights above us. When we were closest, the worm maggots made so much light that I could just make out my neighbor’s up-turned face, and it was all I could do not to defy the code of silence and whisper the suggestion that he could still be awed by the experience but also close his mouth, but then I decided that if he wanted to risk swallowing some paralyzing-mucus mouth pee, who was I to stand in his way?

On our way out, just about fifty feet or so from exiting the cave, our guide paused to pull out his (tiny, one-quarter-watt) flashlight and alert us to an eel that had somehow pulled itself out of the raging river current and was lying on the rocks just inches away from our feet. I did not die, obviously, but for the briefest moment I wanted to. Here’s why:

• The long-finned eel has a SHIT-TON of teeth. Too many teeth. 
• It is creepy as fuck to look at, especially when you see one that is five and a half feet long and weighs as much as 55 pounds and NO, I am not making this up—that’s how big they can get.
• They can live over 100 years. Who needs an eel for over 100 years? 
• They can spend up to 48 hours out of the water, stalking you/plotting your death.
• “Juvenile” eels are “renowned” for their ability to “scale near-vertical heights of 40+ meters” and I don’t know WHY they would do that but the fact that they CAN—HOW?—should be enough to have them eliminated from the face of the earth before one of them shows up in someone’s second-floor bedroom. 
• The lady eel might only lay eggs once in her (unreasonably long) life, but when she does, she puts down anywhere from one to 20 MILLION eggs. MILLION.

Ugh I am thinking about committing hari-kari just writing this.

After the caves we got some more fun rain forest and endangered-bird-species facts and then our guide opened the floor to questions. One guy wanted to know why moths etc. would fly into the caves where they could then be eaten by maggot worms; the answer is that they don’t; they are either born there or brought in by the river. There were no further stupid questions so I took advantage of the time remaining to conduct an intense interrogation about the long-finned eel and I’m disappointed to say I got very few good answers as to why we should let these things continue to menace our society.

That’s over 1200 words about maggots and eels and I’M NOT EVEN DONE.

Yesterday, Thursday, I made the run from Te Anau to Fox Glacier. Here is where I must say two things: one, it was extremely windy along the coast—so much so that I got what might be the best series of selfies I have ever taken (okay also the only series of selfies I have ever taken)—and two, as you will no doubt surely see, I HAVE A TAN. That’s right folks: me, the person first diagnosed with Vitamin D deficiency one July, and then a year later told I should be taking supplements even though I already was—I’ve gotten some color. Not to panic, I’ve got SPF 50 in the bag, but even still I’m spending so much time outside I’m actually starting to look like I might not burst into flames at my first step into sunlight. !!!!! (Also, Trang, that pin? [heart eyes emoji])

(Per my phone, these pictures were taken in this order and all in the same minute. It was so f-bomb windy. While the F700GS is about a hundred pounds heavier than the S3, I still had a lot of "fun" along the coast. And yes, I was trying to capture the road behind me, as well.) 

Fox Glacier is a TINY town—population 300!—but it has a couple of restaurants and after fighting that wind up the coast I was glad to fall face-first into an excellent veggie burger at Mac’s. I was completely wiped after dinner, but before I hit the hay I could NOT resist walking three minutes down the road from the motel to ANOTHER glowwormmaggot viewing location. There is a (lovely) rainforest area with lots of root…holes—isn’t there a word for the base of a fallen tree that makes a little cave area?—and a small population of worm maggots has set up shop in a few of those. Apparently this feature is well publicized in Fox Glacier and/or there is nothing else to do as there were a good dozen or more people wandering around in the dark looking for glowing maggot butts. A few people were using their phones for light but it was just the end of twilight and so there was exactly the right amount of natural light that kept one from bumping into a person once that person was a foot away but also necessitated a lot of “Hello”-ing to navigate around before getting into that 12-inch range. The wide variety of accents made this particularly charming and I kept my flashlight off just to enjoy it.

(Here I must confess that I had found a little pocket of carefully-spaced worm maggots and when a group of people came wandering by I couldn’t help but draw their attention to the cache and from there the sharing of the fun facts was inevitable. One of the people finally asked me, “Are you a guide here?” and I was extremely glad for the dark to hide my blush of shame as I said “No,” and darted away. Casey, not everyone is as interested in glowwormmaggots as you are.)

Today’s Friday and so I was like fuck it, I should get in a helicopter and go look at a glacier so I did. We took a 30-minute tour of the Fox Glacier and looped around Mount Cook. We landed at the top of the glacier and spent a few minutes there, which was really cool in theory but also after the first 90 seconds it was just a group of five people standing around in the snow having already taken every picture possible so that was kind of weird. I did get a snap of me in my signature look: wrinkled pajamas, half a rain suit, and inappropriate footwear. I was definitely the only person who’d been up there recently in motorcycle boots, but it was either those or these little wimpy sneakers I have so I went with the waterproof option. It’s impossible to resist the temptation to take pictures from a helicopter because whoa I’m in a helicopter but it’s also the case that they don’t even begin to capture what it’s like to be so close to this part of the world. Also the glacier has receded a LOT in the past 100 years. Way to go, us.

Still killing it with the selfies: 

Mount Tamsen on the left and Cook on the right--this picture taken at about 9,000 feet. 

We were THISCLOSE to the mountains. 

It was so beautiful from up there. 

We landed on the glacier and here I am in mufti.

Hiking shoes and motorcycle boots. 

After the helicopter ride, the only thing I could think of to do next was to go back to the forest and take pictures of the glowwormmaggots in the daytime again YOU ARE WELCOME (below). After that? I opened Google maps, typed in simply "birds," and all my wishes were granted. 

About thirty minutes*** north of Fox Glacier is Franz Joseph Glacier, which is also both a glacier and a town. In the town of Franz Joseph Glacier there is a place where a person can visit both actual rowi kiwis and tuataras. I don’t have a shortage of fun facts on either animal, but it’s getting toward dinner time and I need to wrap this up. Suffice it to saw there are fewer than 400 rowi kiwis in the wild today and getting to see two of them up close and personal was extraordinary. The Wildlife Center has the kiwis in a kind of super fancy pen, which is open at the top, so even though it is very dark in the room (kiwis are nocturnal, and, like the penguins, have a strict no-photos policy) it was completely bonkers to be so close to these two guys doing their kiwi thing. There were just two other people in the room while I was there and so the three of us helped each other find the birds and cooperated to make sure everyone had a good view when they were running around. And run around they did—the birds on exhibit today were two 10-month-old boys, and while they look comically like mops on sticks, they can run surprisingly quickly. A couple of times they bumped into each other and did some play-fighting, a portion of which appeared to involve just running in circles around part of the enclosure and a portion of which involved good old-fashioned beak-stabbing until whoever was getting beak-stabbed managed to get away, all the while making a “stop beak-stabbing me” noise which brought back such fond memories of fighting with my sister in the back seat of so many different cars—I still to this day believe those fights are what drove my parents to purchase a minivan—and when I close my eyes I can just remember what it’s like to strain against the limits of the seatbelt in order to pinch the flesh on the back of your little sister’s arm until she cries. Didn’t we have fun, Shan? Those days!

PS Tuatara are older than dinosaurs having first appeared over 200 million years ago, they can live as long as 200 years, and according to this brochure I will bring home and keep forever I was lucky to get to see “Rewi” as he usually stays in his burrow whereas the five (unnamed) ladies apparently enjoy the out-of-doors more. I managed to see four of the six tuatara and during the [redacted] amount of time I spent looking at them not one of them moved at all. Low and slow, baby: the secret to longevity!

PPS Kiwis are the only birds in the world that have their nostrils at the end of their bills, rather than the base!

Pictures: 

Casey's Guide to Glowwormmaggots

This is the view from the maggot boat, looking into a fiord off Lake Te Anau. 

This is the rain forest area where I saw more maggots in Fox Glacier--picture a bunch of tourists bumping into each other in the dark while I chased after people with my maggot facts. 

These are probably the two most important pictures I have ever taken. These are the maggot's "fishing lines," which I went back to find in the daylight because YOU'RE WELCOME. First pic is no zoom, then I simply HAD to get a closer look at that paralyzing mucus. Isn't it BEAUTIFUL??

Yeah that's me trying to figure out the panorama feature on the phone: somewhere, Brandon is shaking his head slowly while a single tear rolls down his face.  

I know I said I'd stop but I couldn't resist taking more pictures of roads. This is an area south of Queenstown called The Devil's Staircase and tbh I've seen a LOT more roads here that might better earn that name.

The Devil's Staircase goes along a very pretty lake. (I feel like I might be getting better at this panorama thing!)

So let's all take a moment and congratulate me, again, on making it over the Crown Ridge Road for the SECOND time, which is switchback city and is ALSO the highest "sealed" road in New Zealand.

Yes, this another picture taken exclusively to try to show the road.

This is a lake somewhere I forget where. Waterfall may have been nearby or not. It was a long ride.

This is the view from Knight's Point, where it was VERY windy, but the Tasman Sea was gorgeous. 

More glacier; also a waterfall going down onto the glacier (taken at an angle because the pilot had us "leaned over" a bit which drew some gasps but hahaha you cannot scare ME by leaning over, pilot).

Whoever was in charge of the graphic design at the Wildlife Center somehow got license to go pretty intense with the poster campaign.

The tuatara. There are two in this picture, a lady on the left and Rewi-the-male-okay-fine-HE-gets-a-name in the center. I am fairly confident they will still be in these exact poses whenever these words are read, not like in "so long lives this, this gives life to thee" kind of way, but more like you don't outlive the fucking DINOSAURS burning a lot of calories. 

Tomorrow, Saturday, I'm up early to head to Kaikoura. I'm sorry to report to my Uncle Don that I will be missing out on Nelson and Collingswood, where he lived for a while, but I've squandered my days on maggots and penguins and I need to head back to the east coast in order to have the bike back in Christchurch on Monday.

Improbably, I have made a reservation to swim with some dolphins on Sunday. We'll see how all THAT goes--I can say for a fact I have not been in a bathing suit situation since ARUBA, which was like...six years ago? Seven? I was very relieved to know we'd be wearing wet suits with the dolphins, as while my face is suddenly not transparent, the rest of me has been indoors ever since that trip and I have a very very painful memory of getting a tremendous sunburn on my back when we were snorkeling in...Cancun?? one spring break.

(Also I have been warned repeatedly that these are WILD dolphins so there are no guarantees, which is how I may come to find myself treading water in the South Pacific Ocean, looking around desperately for just ONE dolphin friend, while all the goddamn dolphins cavort just out of eyesight, in league with their sheep and red deer friends. I expect that just as I am dragged back onto the boat, a single dolphin will swim by and show me its butt. This may also be the title of my memoir: Animal Butts I Have Seen.)

 ttfn!

* I have SO many stories about riding with Mike I really need to devote a day just to those. Ha--a day! More like a book.

** Confessional time, again: I have made the conscious decision not to worry about adhering to the Chicago Manual of Style. I mean, I want to, but at the same time I've got these sheep to chase, and so [bangs wrists together] I am (TEMPORARILY) breaking free of the shackles of a style guide. (Don't worry, CMS/proofreader friends--I'll be back!!)

*** Take it as a sign of my evolution as a rider that I didn't even think to remark on the road between these towns--it's 30 minutes because it's basically Tiorati/106/Arden Valley over a mountain. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!