Touch ground when it thunders

GO SOX!!!

Wow, see what happens when I leave the country for a little while. History, every time. I can't believe it, I mean I can, of course I can.

I've, at long last found a fast internet connection. It's in a big red bus beneath a glacier. Who'd of thunk? For those of you confused on how to reach me: you can either post comments here where it says comments or you can email me at jonsanter@yahoo.com. I get them both, no worries.

Yesterday I made a bowie knife all day with an amazing man named Steve Martin, no a different steve martin. We sarted witha piece of hard steel and 6 hours later I have this beautiful thing that has lots of forge marks in it. I've exaustively photographed this process I'll bore you all with it when I get home and put it up on the web.

2 days ago we feried across to the South Island, spent the night on a farm, hiked 20k of coastline then crossed the top of the southern Alps to arrive in Barrytown on the South West coast of NZ. This is breathtaking country. It's as if California's coast, Montana, Nova Scotia and a rain forest were all mixed into one place. Rugged, abandoned, basically perfect. 1,000k of coast and 30,000 people. We spend hours on the bus driving by beaches with nobody on them. Still lots of rain but it doesn't really matter. Today we went to the Bushmans establishment for some possum pie (it's not very good) and watched a history of the deer in NZ. Deer were introduced for hunting and then multiplied out of control until they were literally eating the country, so NZ declared open season on them and hired professional hunters to hunt full time. Then they discovered a market for the meat in Germany and the price went through the roof, so everyone startede killing them untill there were almost none left. In order to keep the venison industry going they decided to start farming them, but first they had to capture them alive. After some deliberatioin on how best to do this the good old boys down here decided the best way would be to hover above the deer in a helicopter and have the passenger jump out onto the back of the deer and wrestle it to the ground. OH yeah, I've seen the tape. People did this for a living. Then some really smart guy invented the net gun, so now you just had to shoot this net over them from a moving helicopter traveling over rough terrain at full speed. Much easier.

Tomorrow I go up on the Franz Joseph glacier with a guide and 5 ohters to tromp around on the snow and ice and wear shorts and have a grand old time, the day after I finally head into the mountains for some actual camping with Chris, Peter and Christian.

Chris is Scottish and no one in NZ can understand him, so I act as his interpreter.
check in at the hostels usually goes like this.
Hostel: "What's you're name."
Chris: "Chris"
Hostel: "I'm sorry?"
Me: "His name's Chris."
Chris: "He's my interpreter."
Hostel: "I'm sorry?"
Me: "He said I'm his interpreter."
Chris: "He's from fuckin California mate."
Hostel: "I'm sorry?"

You get the picture. Peter and Christian are from Denmark. They both speak flawless unaccented english. Everyone of them is 6,1 plus. I'm a midget. Pictures, not to worry, pictures will be forthcoming.

I know I haven't written much, this is mainly due to shitty and slow internet connections. But a lot of the last 2 weeks has been on the bus. In fact it's started to feel like a whorl wind tour of NZ's supermarkets as we stop to buy supplies constantly. Nice markets, if that's your thing.

We get up at 7:30 or 8, shower, get on the bus. We eat some kind of thing from our plastic bags of supermarket food, we drive to some attraction, get off the bus wander around. Back on the bus, 1.5 hours later we stop for coffee, we wander around closer to the bus. BAck on the bus drive to destination, check into room between 3 and 7, get stuff organized, have a drink, play some pool, write in journal. Try to figure out what to do tomorrow when we get off the bus. I'm excited to get off the bus for 3 days in the bush.

posted by jts @ 10:47 PM