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Adventure Guide: New Zealand's South Island
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Look, bungee jumping isn't difficult or particularly scary. Anybody who can fall has all the necessary skills. At the Kawarau Bridge jump site, you walk into a kind of combination museum and department store, trudge up a flight of stairs, walk out onto a platform, and watch people leap one after the other—old, young, men, women. It used to be that you got a free pass if you did it naked, but New Zealanders aren't particularly prudish, and the concession was losing money on the deal. Now, for the same fee you can wear anything you want, or nothing. Endowed young ladies seem to have a compulsion to do it topless. I endured this stoically. Who am I to pass judgment on another culture?
I decided to go fully clothed, for aesthetic reasons. We were weighed, our weight was written on the back of our hands. Then we stood in line for too short a time. When it was my turn, a crew of Kiwis fit me into a seat harness, tied a thick towel around my lower legs, attached the bungee and a safety cord, and told me I was good to go. One fellow checked the weight on my hand, fastened off the bungee, and asked me if I wanted to touch the Kawarau River, which appeared to be a tiny, winding ribbon far below.
"How deep can you go?" I asked.
"Waist deep."
"Get me waist deep," I said.
"No worries, mate," the jump master said when he saw me double-checking the rig. "She'll be 'roight." And then he counted. Fast. "Five-four-three-two-one." And I was airborne. I'd curled my toes over the launch platform and leaped directly forward, in the swan-dive position. This is not really frightening. Most everyone has dived before. And that's about how scary a bungee jump is—a dive into a pool. So I held the swan-dive position for a time, feeling a bit smug about my form, until the weight of my upper body dragged me face-first toward the river and my feet wanted to flip over my head and I felt my arms making little circles, trying to correct my flight. Meanwhile I spent some seconds recalling the instruction from above: I need to tuck my chin into my chest when I hit the water.
It was about this time that the jump was no longer a dive and everything was going completely cattywampus. That was a discomforting feeling, and I might have savored it, or it may have turned into soil-your pants fear—I don't know because suddenly it was all over and the bungee cord was slowly applying the brakes. Somehow I had one arm at my side and one out in front of me. I recalled the highest dives I'd made as a kid and knew that if I hit the water at speed, I could break a finger or two, so I made a fist with my leading hand. I looked like Mighty Mouse coming to save the day. But even as I tucked my head into my chest, I could see that I wasn't going to get within ten feet (three meters) of the water. It was as I've always maintained: Scales the world over register about ten pounds (five kilograms) too heavy whenever I step on them.
The dismount was fun and ingenious. Crew members in a specially equipped raft tethered to the shore paddled out under me. After a few moments of gentle bouncing, my body just hung there, upside down, like a bat on a cave ceiling. At this point I was lowered onto a kind of trampoline in the middle of the boat. A woman calmly said, "Tuck your head and roll onto your back." I did that, and the crew had me out of my gear and back to the museum cum department store in minutes. There you can buy pictures and even DVDs of your achievement, which, of course, I did. A month or so later, when I got home, I showed the DVD to a family I know. The son, a young man just graduating from high school, was probably the only person who might be at all impressed. He watched carefully.
"What'd you think?" I asked when it was over.
"Well," he said, thoughtfully, "it kinda looked like a bear falling off a cliff."
Amanda and Greg met us at a pleasant restaurant and winery immediately adjacent to the jump. This was my first trip to New Zealand, though fishermen of my acquaintance had visited over the years, raving about the countryside and the quality trout streams, but generally denigrating the food. In those days haute cuisine apparently consisted of overcooked canned vegetables and boiled mutton. But not now and not here; this place, the Winehouse & Kitchen, had quality wines, my entrée was a superb pan-seared trout, and the vegetables were fresh from the vineyard's gardens. It looked and felt like a winery bistro in Napa, California.
Peter and Greg discovered they'd both attended Dartmouth College, where Peter skied and Greg played rugby. Both being avid surfers, skiers, runners, and climbers, the whole idea of the South Island enchanted them. It was an adrenaline junkie's paradise. But Amanda and Greg had never paddled Doubtful Sound and wanted to know what that was like.
Fiordland National Park, in the very south of the South Island, has 14 fjords—long, narrow arms of the sea that were left by receding glaciers some 10,000 years ago—and they're rugged enough that only two, Milford and Doubtful Sounds, can be reached by car. To kayak them, it was necessary to assemble our gear, which included wet suits, life jackets, paddling jackets, spray skirts, and camping gear, transfer all of it to a car, drive for a time, then take a boat across Lake Manapouri, or the Lake of Tears. The name, it is said, was coined when a Maori hunting party, caught by a sudden storm, realized the chief's daughter was lost in the forest. The warriors resolved to wait until dawn to search, but the girl's sister went out to find her in the dark. Both girls were found dead, and the lake was filled with tears of the tribe, or the tears of the sisters, depending on who's telling the story.
The Maori people—seafaring Polynesians who arrived in northern New Zealand about A.D. 1200—came down to the present-day Queenstown area to collect a variety of jade so hard it cuts steel. This material revolutionized hunting and warfare, and it brought the brave Maori south into the storms and winds of the 40th parallel, the "Roaring 40s," as they are called.
Our boat docked and we transferred gear once again, this time to a van. We did it bucket-brigade style, very quickly, very efficiently. The Kiwis had this down to a science. The van then rumbled over 15 miles or so of gravel road and dropped us at the water's edge, where the kayaks were arranged on racks, ready to go. As our guide, Ron Hielkema, pulled up to the craft, he saw what appeared to be a road-killed opossum. "Ah, little fellow's taking a nap," Ron said, and then he ran it over, stopped, backed up, then crushed it again.
"We've got 70 or 80 million opossums here," Ron explained. "They were imported from Australia. The damn things kill the forest. They get out on the branches of the trees and eat new leaves. After they've done that a few times, the tree dies."
That wasn't the worst of it. Before the arrival of man, New Zealand was inhabited almost exclusively by birds. It was a bird island. It was almost entirely free of ground-based predators, and in such an environment it was wiser to hide in the bush and go flightless. The opossums—along with dogs brought by Polynesians and Europeans—were killing off the kiwis and other ground dwelling birds. So were domestic cats and stoats, which are a kind of ermine imported from England to kill rabbits.
In any case, Ron said, a thoughtful conservationist always made it a point to kill opossums whenever possible. In New Zealand, tires run red with the blood
of crushed opossums.
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Adventure Guide: New Zealand's South Island
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