Righty-Loosey, Lefty-Tighty

… Remember that when you lock a New Zealand door. It’s true about half the time.

Seí±or Requado (Snore) was worse last night than the night before. And he sleeps forever: 8 pm to 8 am. If he says anything to me this morning about our laughing in my room at 9:30 last night, I will lose it. I will do a Maori “I will eat you” haka and bulge my eyes, pound my chest and flash my fangs. I’m just saying.

I’m glad you like this blog, Oleggy and Mom and Eleni and Molly and Jilleen. Thank you.

We had a farewell coffee with Mabbie in downtown Queenstown, and Syd thoughtfully offered to take her to the airport, which Mabbie appreciated. After a couple hugs, we were on our respective paths, she back to Australia (a two-day trip each way to her home town, Armidale!), and we to Te Anau about two-and-a-half hours southwest. We left the mountain range adorably called The Remarkables and passed through farmlands with flocks of sheep, cattle, swirling gaggles of black birds, and a penned creature that looks like a cross between elk and deer, except it has a mane. It is rolling hill country, speckled with orange tussocks and green gorse against straw-colored grass. The outline of some of the hilltops look like the soft peaks of beaten egg whites dyed gold and emerald. Blue, snow-capped granite looms in the distance under heavy overcast, sunless skies. There aren’t many trees, but the most common are bare with red tips on white branches. ‘Tis a colorful, earthy palette.

. . .

Remember I told you that Lake Wakatipu is deeper than Loch Ness? I should have checked my sources. It may or may not be. I don’t know. The fact is, that honor verifiably goes to where we are now, Lake Te Anau, New Zealand’s second largest lake which, at its deepest point, is 417 meters, twice the depth of aforementioned Loch. I am an irresponsible but not a malicious journalist.

Whenever I go into a bathroom that has a stopper, I continue to fill the sink and watch the water drain. I just can’t accept the conclusions I made after yesterday’s highly scientific experiments. The water is still running counterclockwise. Maybe my problem is due to the way I conducted my American tests. Would someone fill a sink for me and tell me what the water does? Perhaps the skewed outcome is because I examined only a toilet flush and not a sink drain.

. . .

Arriving in Te Anau we found our way to Bob & Maxine’s Backpackers and dumped our stuff. We have the entire place to ourselves, so I broadcast my possessions throughout the kitchen and living room and made a mess. However, I just ate an entire bag of gummy snakes, half a chocolate bar, a huge bowl of buttered popcorn, half an apple, a chocolate granola bar and half a bag of potato chips, so there is now less food clutter. I’ve never cleaned up a house with my mouth before.

I made a beautiful, roaring fire which I enjoyed for an hour, and then we departed for our nighttime tour of the Te Anau glowworm caves, recommended to me by my buddy Pat. The trip began in a big catamaran that ferried us across the lake at a brisk 18 knots (about 35 kilometers an hour) to the mouth of the cave on the opposite shore. We tried to listen to Willy, the guide who was speaking over a loudspeaker but drowned out by the inattentive hordes. So we moved up to the front of the boat and flanked him to hear better. But his Kiwi-Maori accent was so thick that I barely understood a word. This is all I gleaned: the lake is over 500 kilometers in circumference. It has four arms (or are they legs?) that were named as they were discovered by Westerners: South, Middle, North and … oops … there is even a more northerly branch that they had to name something else. I forget its name, but they didn’t call it North North.

The visit to the cave was rewarding. A whitewater river crashes through it, with powerful falls and eddies. There were all kinds of chimneys and interesting layers of rock. But we weren’t there for the geology. We were there for the glowworms. The glowworms are nothing more than rather disgusting, oozy maggots of the fungus gnat Arachnocampa. They live for about a year on the walls and ceilings of caves in New Zealand and Australia, dropping beneath them glimmering “fishing lines”—gooey threads to catch passing insects for supper. Unattractively, they make these lines by puking, and they may create and oversee as many as 1,000 of them. They’re territorial and will cannibalize their companions if another gets too close. (I wonder if they bug their eyes and show their tongues first.) When they finally metamorphose, the boys live for only 24 hours and the girls for 48, long enough to breed future generations.

So why do we care about glowworms? In each of their bums, there is a wee cold light, just a pinprick. Inside the cave, we got into a small metal boat and drifted in the blackness where thousands of tiny spots flickered just like stars: constellations of them, in one part looking like a Milky Way. Apparently we’re in the low season so the display is much more muted and sparse than in the summer, but it was miraculous anyway, to drift in the dark without any bearing save for these soft dots of luminescence. Part of the drift was totally silent except when the boat bumped into the cave wall. Our senses were reduced to smell, as we sat with hands safely in lap, so I found it unfortunate when somebody farted. It was an unnerving sensation to move from silence toward the sound of thundering water, but we were in good hands and didn’t go over any falls. We couldn’t take pictures, so you’ll just have to use your imaginations.

On the homeward-bound catamaran, Syd rode outside in the cold and dark the whole journey. I didn’t. The moon is getting full but was obscured under increasingly dense clouds. Still, even without light we could see the silhouettes and shadows of mountains all around us.

They call this part of the country Fiordland, for reasons we’ll discover firsthand tomorrow when we visit Doubtful Sound in what is forecast to be pouring rain.

This is really disgusting and embarrassing, but now I’m eating leftover Indian food. All of the aforementioned items are in addition to the dinner salad I had late this afternoon.