Howler Monkeys?

I might have sucked at being married, but I feel I’m doing pretty good job with Syd. I think we’re honest with each other, which is hard to be. Rather than bottle up my frustration, just now I worked up the nerve to ask her please not to comment on my driving because I don’t like to feel like I’m being scrutinized, or to rationalize my drifting toward the white line on the left, or to be reminded to turn on my signal. I’ve been quite stunned, frankly, at how undefensively receptive she is to such requests. She took my comments like a champ. We’re both compulsively considerate people so I think there’s a good balance of singular travel desires being met without either of us having to fight for them. And our interests mesh well, so often if one of us has a suggestion, the other is amenable. That’s what it was like traveling with Jill in Costa Rica. No wonder marriage was so difficult for me: it’s rare to have such an fair-minded partner. I hope that my saying this doesn’t jinx anything.

Last night Syd called a friend of her friend and he came to visit us at the hostel. He’s an expat who misses home but can’t afford to go back. It’s a little sad.

Some of our hostel-mates hit the town and returned at 2:00 a.m. full of noisy high spirits. I was tired enough that I got quickly back to sleep, after a run outside to the icy bathroom. I envy men their ability to stay mostly clothed for a nighttime potty visit in such a clime.

At breakfast at the Morrison Street Café in Nelson, Syd picked up the Christchurch paper to find a feature on pole dancing, which I present to you here, for a certain person’s benefit.

We were in the car only for about an hour, from Nelson to Matueka.

On the outskirts of Nelson, I snapped some pix of the pretty spit (is that an oxymoron; isn’t there a prettier word for spit?)

Tonight’s backpackers’ lodging, The White Elephant, is a funky sprawling Victorian on about an acre of land, with two Airstreams and a couple motel rooms plunked in the backyard, at the edge of vineyards with a distant snowy ridge in the background. It appears as though it’s been some years since someone got artistic with the side of an outbuilding.

There are lots of young people here, including a young man whose father runs the Stewart Island ferry and who broke his pinkie by kneeling on it when he was drunk. It’s interesting trying to figure out the origin of the various accents of English that I hear. I still can’t reliably differentiate between Kiwi and Aussie, but I spotted the Irishman in a second. I was pegged as being from B.C.

After dumping our stuff in our new room, we took someone’s advice and walked several kilometers down to the Matueka Sandspit.

Kiwis are outdoorsy people. On our stroll, several passed us on bike and foot, going at a healthy clip, skin ruddy from the sun and air. They tend to dress in stunningly few layers. Even in the gale-force winds we encountered in Wellington, they’d stroll down the street in open jackets and shorts. As we made our way down the path, there was a loud chorus of birds, some of which sound to me like howler monkeys, with a hollow echoing call before a trill of notes, and then a strange noise as though they’re tapping their beaks on a steel pipe. Syd thinks they might be bellbirds.

We also saw a number of shorebirds. The tides prevented us from crossing a little land bridge over to the sand, but a heron-like creature found it an ideal place to catch fish.

Though the walk was level, I was exhausted.