Mount Fyffe and other stories

Just a few random things and thoughts I have done/have happened/have had over the past couple of weeks.

Mount Fyffe
It had been about 3 weeks since I had last gone out on my bike and in had not done much exploring around Kaikoura in the 10 days I had been here so I decided to get out on my bike and ride up to Mount Fyffe hut. I set off not really knowing what to expect, but I had been told the track as quite steep. The start of the track was a nice 17km mostly flat ride on quite country lanes and it was a nice warm day. A few kilometres before the track I came across a cow standing in the road, so I slowed down and started to cycle by it but when I got about 10m away it regard up like a horse and (luckily) galloped (if cows can gallop) away from me and stopped about 20 metres up the road. At this point a few of the cows friends in the field had seen what was going on and were staring at me. I got off my bike and started to walk along the road, thinking this would be less scary for the cow (and for me) but every time I took a step closer the cow let out a gutteral moo unlike any moo I had heard before and each time it mooed (spelling?) all of its friends moved a bit closer to the fence and continued to stare at me.

After a very tense 5 minute stare/stand off I backed down and hopped over the fence to the opposite field and walked around the cow, all the time maintaining eye contact and thinking if the cow got out of its own field it could easily get into the field I was in. Fortunately the cow didn't move and after what I thought was a safe distance I got back on the road and carried on to the track.  At the start the steepness of the climb is immediately noticeable and I was in my lowest gear straight away. After what felt like 1/2 an hour (actually only about 10 minutes) of grinding up the hill my legs started to hurt so I had to stop for a rest. This continued for the next hour or so (but with less and less time on the bike). I came across an eastern European man sitting on the side of the track having a rest and he offered me, without any hint of humor, a cigarette to help me get to the top which I politely declined. From this point on I was mostly pushing my bike up the hill and ater about 1 1/2 hours there was snow on the ground and I was having thoughts about turning back but carried on determined to get to the hut. 20 minutes later I was at about 900m altitude, with another 200m of climbing to the hut, and gradually getting colder as I was only wearing shorts and a long sleeved cycling top and despite having 3 pairs of socks on my feet were getting cold and wet due to me wearing cycling shoes which are not recommended for walking in snow. At this point I decided to turn back.

Needless to say the ride downhill was easier and only took about 15 minutes to get to the bottom. On the way back to the hostel I got chased by a dog and overtaken by a bee (Laurie:- it was almost a bee moment!) but I managed to catch the bee back up before it turned off to have a look at a flower.

Christmas
On 25th July we had a mid winter Christmas meal in the hostel. The log fire was burning, the Christmas tree and decorations were up and cliff Richard was playing on the stereo and the mulled wine was flowing (one of these things did not happen). The hostel was quite busy (for winter anyway) and we sat down to a traditional Christmas meal of some pasta and sauce (made by an Italian), potato salad (made by a German), roast vegetables (made by an English), and some potatoes (made by an Irish) (on of these stereotypes did not happen) and I baked a (very nice) loaf of olive and seseme bread (which was very nice). Altogether there was 5 Germans (goes without saying really), 2 English and 1 each of French, Australian, Dutch, Italian and Irish. Everybody contributed and helped and it was a really fun evening.

Observations of living in a hostel.

The vast majority of people who stay in the hostel are nice, the only people who I have not really liked or got on with have all been english (there was one guy who stayed for 4 days who i would describe as a 'twat' who one day spent the whole day sitting on the couch drinking water to 'stretch his stomach' in order to attempt to eat a 1.5kg burger in the evening, this was the highlight of his time here) and the nicest have probably been the Germans (although there are a lot of them). When people have stayed for a 3 or 4 days you get to know them a bit, but I am terrible at names - and quite often after somebody has been here for a few days I don't know there name and feel it is too late to ask for it.
I have spoken to a few Japanese people (in Japanese) that have stayed at the hostel and they are always really happy that someone else speaks their language and every time the first question I get asked is why I speak Japanese ( which I have to answer in English as my Japanese is very basic). They have all seemed to enjoy talking about the films of Studio Ghibli and Takeshi Kitano and the books of Haruki Murikami. One Japanese guy walked in the hostel carrying all his bags and a bucket with cleaning items in it. We asked when he was leaving if he always carried his cleaning bucket with him and he said yes and pulled out an A3 sketch pad with phrases such as 'will clean toilet for $5, Asian traveller good worker' written on with a few pictures. He had about 15 pages of these offering to do jobs such as chop wood, clean kitchen, now lawn etc. He said he had been quite successful with it earning enough to support himself in NZ for 8 months and some people had let him stay in their house or camp in their garden. It was quite impressive and inspiring that he had managed to travel around NZ with not much money and very basic English.

Having different people stay each day means you tend to have similar conversations every few days, normally about where you have been how long you have been here what you are doing next etc....  It sort of gets boring repeating yourself but it is a good topic to start a conversation with other people as they will have been asked and talked about it loads before.

Kaikoura nightlife
Kaikoura is a small town, with basically  one main street running through and as it is winter it is very quite. There are really only two decent places to go to in the evenings, The Groper Garage which has an huge open fire, but a grumpy barmaid (although I did get to watch some of the commonwealth games cycling on TV here) and the Strawberry Tree, which is an Irish pub and regularly puts on bands and has an open mic night each week. I went to the open mic night last Friday, and every week the same group of locals get onstage and play the same songs and occasionally there is somebody else who plays so everybody there is jot really interested and are talking and not paying attention. There was a Maouri guy who is a rugby player, really big and it looked he was going to break the guitar just by holding it but when he started singing the whole pub went silent and everybody was entranced by his amazing voice.

Clipsy Clipsy
As I am sure you all remember when I was on the road trip with Evelyne we met this weird Swiss guy who kept saying clipsy clipsy (a Swiss word meaning theif/stealing). A few days ago I was talking to an Australian girl who had met this 'really weird guy, who said he was from Sweden or something' in town and he told her that he was last in Kaikoura 20 years ago where he met a girl and lived with her for 3 months before she suddenly left him without saying anything. Since then he had been travelling for 20 years and was back in Kaikoura as he had found out where she was working and was going to surprise her. Later on that day the Australian girl walked into a shop and there was a man comforting his wife who was clearly upset told her that a man she knew 20 years ago had been in the shop and she was scared so she called her husband.  Later on in the evening I went out to the strawberry tree to watch a band play and the crazy Swiss guy was there and he recognised me and we talked for a few minutes (it would have been longer but I suddenly needed to go to the toilet). While we were talking I remembered when I met him before he said something along the lines of ' this is the worst hostel I have stayed in, and I have been travelling for 20 years (although to be fair it was a really bad hostel and somebody had been stealing his stuff (clipsy clipsy))' so I discreetly took a photo of him (it wasn't hard - he was really drunk) and showed it to the Australian girl the next day and sure enough it was the same guy!

That's about all that has happened in the last few weeks, I still have about a week left here in Kaikoura then it is a quick stop of in Nelson at Josh's before I fly to Kuala Lumpur.