Stewart Island

January 8th

Once we got our bearings on this little island, made a booking for a 5-minute water taxi the next day to visit an island that was entirely a bird sanctuary and bought some staples in the little grocery store, it began to rain. We made our way up the steep hill from the harbor to our hotel and Mark and I fell asleep while the kids played happily around us. What a lovely place to take a nap during a cold, windy and rainy afternoon. When we woke up, the sun was out. Here's the view from our hotel room out to the center of town and the main harbor.

The four of us went hiking. This was the second hike that week (the first being in Mt. Cook) where I was allowing myself the seeds of hope that my daughter might be an eager hiker after all. She had the strength and joy that I’d always hoped she’d find out in the bush but the evidence in her early years did not point toward that end. We hiked up and down steep hills, stopping at all bridges because the troll would jump out and demand they answer a riddle or a question to cross the bridge. The trail was damp and soft, the trees were all tangled up with each other—so much so that I quickly dismissed my idea of being able to take a picture of each tree variety for my own memory. Truly, it’s a jungle out there.

After our hike, we stopped at a little gift shop where the kids bought themselves these little wooden boats. You’ve probably seen them—they’re the ones with the paddle that winds up with a rubber band and send the boat forward or backward, depending on which way you wind it. These boats were very well-made and painted in rainbow colors. We’ve all since benefited from those purchases by innumerable hours of play.

We walked down to dinner at the one restaurant in the main part of the town. We’d made a booking for it earlier as it seemed that there were far too many tourists for that one restaurant to feed and we’d been burned before in Mt. Cook when they essentially refused to feed us at the main restaurant, hundreds of kilometers from the next town. Mostly I just told that little story so I could use the word ‘booking.’ Dinner was good. We were all sated and then topped it off with a bikkie for dessert. (Cookie, turned biscuit, turned bikkie.)

That is the end of the story of for the day, but while I have your attention, I wanted to say a bit about accents. I have noticed that there is a slight difference between the Australian accent and the New Zealand accent. It seems to me that the latter is a bit softer than the former. The Kiwis are a much closer descendent of their British forebears than are the Australians and they are both closer to the Brits than Americans and all that shows in the way we sound when we speak the same language. So the way Kiwis speak doesn’t have the same bite as Aussie’s do. It’s sort of like comparing the accents of Coloradans to Texans. One is just softer than the other.

I also see that as Brits are said to be stoic, quiet and reserved people, Kiwis also seem much more reserved than I expected (though dramatically more happy looking) while Australians seem quicker to joke, quicker to engage us in conversation and more jovial all around. I’ve been surprised to feel a distance from Kiwis that I didn’t expect though I did also feel it somewhat in Australia. I have lived in several tourist towns, the most extreme being Crested Butte. And when I lived there, I recall all of us “locals” being quick to talk up the tourists. We’d engage them, welcome them, offer help, inquire about them, etc. It was part of the fun of living there. Sure, sometimes I wasn’t in the mood for them but for the most part, we were all interested in who had come to our amazing little hamlet to share the bounty. It feels in New Zealand like the service providers are taught to be very polite and more than happy to answer questions if asked but we have yet to be engaged with by them. If it weren’t for our questions, we’d probably have no interactions with locals. I’m not saying they aren’t friendly. They are very friendly but it seems as though they don’t really see us unless we come right up to them and tug on their sleeves. And when we tug, they sort of jump and say, “Oh, would you look at that, there’s a person here with a question. Can I help you?” Mark says he thinks that it coincides with an attitude of allowing this to be our holiday. They aren’t here to get in the way of our experiencing their country in whatever way we’d like. It is as though they put up a bunch of signs so we can find our way and then they go about their business. Which I suppose is fine, just, you know, foreign.