* * Day 16, Westport

I have a pleasant observation to share with you on today’s blog. In due course. Please follow along.

We began the day at a bakery with Jim and Heather Galt in Hanmer Springs. Jim is the motorcyclists who had loaned me his Honda ST-1300 for a ride a week earlier in Hamilton, on the North Island. They recognized Jane and Whitney as they emerged from the healing water baths the day before, and arranged then to meet for breakfast.

Jim chatted about his motorcycling with a local group of older riders (motto, “Growing old disgracefully”) and said I should attend next year’s ride which goes from one end of New Zealand the other. He said I could hire (that’s Kiwi for “rent”) a bike for the trip. I thought about it seriously until I came to the realization that our bank accounts would still be in sticker shock from this trip for several years. But oh, what fun it would be!

We continued our journey by setting our sights on Westport, on the northwest coast. The day was blissfully sunny and warm, and the highway was spectacularly curvy, including the final kilometers through the Buller River Canyon. In places, the road narrowed to one lane as it hugged overhanging the limestone cliffs. We found a motel on Main Street in Westport, a town that looked to have perhaps a couple thousand people. It is a treeless, windy coastal town with a pretty pink art deco town hall.

We were looking for something to do for the afternoon, and I learned there was an underground adventure featuring New Zealand’s famed glow worms. Jane and Whitney weren’t interested, so I drove 20 minutes south of town to a tiny village called Charleston where I placed a charge of $165 on our long-suffering Visa card to do an escorted cave tour. Along with six other tourists, I was given a full wet suit and cave helmet with light to don. Our guide was a chipper young woman with a mat of Rastafarian-like hair, and a karabiner for an earring.

We were driven a few kilometers in a small bus towards limestone cliffs. We were told by our driver that Charleston was one of the oldest towns in New Zealand, originally a rich gold mining area, once considered for the national capitol. The boom town grew into 20,000, but then shrank back to today’s 300 after the gold resource played out.

 Disembarking from the bus, we hopped aboard a tiny train with an electric locomotive pulling a half-dozen open-air carriages through a delightful rain forest alongside a small river called the “Nile” (How creative, eh?). Limestone cliffs flanked the trail. We rode for a couple of kilometers, and then walked to an area in the woods where 100 inner tubes were kept. We each grabbed one of them, then walked through the woods to a pedestrian suspension bridge across the river, then sharply uphill on 100 steps to the entrance to the cave. We turned on our headlamps, got a briefing of what to expect, and then wandered inside.

Of the six other tourists, four were American girls from the mid-west and the other two were a young couple from Dunedin. I ended up making friends with the latter, named Sam and Grace.

The cave was quite nice, with many stalactite and stalagmite features. Our guide stopped at several places along the way to show us the various formations and to take photos with her waterproof camera. We saw some tracks in the mud that she said were made by the dog of the cave’s first explorer. At one point, we turned off all our headlamps to witness the complete darkness. I put my hand in front of my face close enough to feel the warmth, but couldn’t see it.

The next place we turned off our lights, we could see pinpoints of white light above us. There were the glow worms. The lights were steady, without any flickering, and close enough to touch (but we didn’t). When we turned the lights back on, we could see that the worms were tiny, less than an inch long, translucent and thin, with hairy strands dropping perhaps 4-6 inches below. The guide explained that the worms used the light to attract small insects that were swept into the cave by the wind. The hairy strands caught the insects, and then the worms had the ability to reel in the insects and ingest them. What a great system!

We were walking gradually but consistently downhill in the cave, made more difficult by the uneven surface and often low ceilings. Finally, we reached the edge of a pool of water where our guide said, “Okay, here’s where we get wet.” We entered the water, plopped onto our inner tubes, and linked together by placing the next person’s ankles under our armpits. The guide took the front, and gently towed us through the watery, dark channels. We extinguished our headlamps again and floated in the dark until we entered a vast, high chamber where thousands of pinpoints of light glowed gently above, as is stars in an immense galaxy. It was completely mesmerizing and utterly unworldly. I could have stayed in there for hours, were it not for my neck which became tired of holding my head up at the odd angle.

Finally we rounded a dark bend and the light from the outside first appeared. It was an otherworldly, greenish-tint light, as if directly from Middle Earth, with bright rays of sunshine filtering through thick, jungle-like vegetation. We emerged from the cave amidst huge limestone cliffs and boulders. Our little stream from the cave joined the Nile River, where we floated a few hundred meters down through small rapids until the end of the trip. We returned the inner tubes and then waited in the rail carriages for another tour to return.

I chatted with the young couple, Sam and Grace. Sam was 22 and training to be what he called a farm banker. Grace was 26 and mother of a two-year old boy who was staying with his father. Grace was a dark-haired woman with a brilliant smile, one of the most attractive women I’ve ever met. She taught pre-school. I knew Whitney would enjoy meeting her so I asked them if they would join us for dinner, and they agreed.

We met Sam and Grace 45 minutes later in Westport. Jane and Whitney had already found a restaurant where they wanted to eat, right across the street from out motel. But when we entered, the waitress said they were fully booked. The owner/cook then told us we could sit outside at a covered picnic table and they would serve us, “But it will take awhile.” So we sat outside chatting for an hour, then two hours, before we finally had our order taken. It was 10:30 when we were served. If we had it to do over, we would have gone elsewhere, but we enjoyed the company of our new friends and the meal was excellent. Sure enough, Whitney and Grace within minutes were chattering like long lost friends. Grace was endowed with a delightful personality and was a joy to listen to. She was raised by her mother and her father had died recently. He was a hard-living Sicilian man who had fathered six children by six different women. Sam was pleasant, although more reserved. They had met nine months earlier through an on-line dating service and she joked about getting a younger guy she could mold appropriately. We had a thoroughly enjoyable evening with them, more fun than had we dined alone.

I came to realize that these chance encounters were the defining aspect of this vacation. We’ve always tried to meet local people when we traveled, but this trip was something else entirely. Between the contacts I’d made prior to the trip through Rotary and the fact that this is an English speaking language, the table was set, so to speak, for much more interaction than perhaps our journeys to France or the Czech Republic. I started to do an inventory in my head of the people who had shared their lives with us. It went something like this:

Janis and Dave Hannah, the Rotarians in Whangaparaoa

Janie Storie, the Rotarian and her husband Kim, son David, grandson JJ, and daughter in law Louisa in Whakatane

Gordon and Suzanne Stevenson, the Rotarians in Taupo, and their granddaughter Iana.

Libby Gairdner, the Rotarian in Hamilton, along with her extended family:

Son Jared and daughter Danae’s boyfriend Israel, meeting Danae by Skype

Husband Tim Anderson and his daughters Chloe, her husband Joel and daughter Ava, and Adele and her partner Sam

Libby’s friends Jim and Heather Galt

Tracy and David Fisher, friends of friends in Ashburton, along with their children Peter, Andrew, and Hailey, and their friends Daria and her daughter Emily, and Monica and Kirsten, and Peter’s friend Chris

Paul and Maggie Harris, our innkeepers in Dunedin, and the elderly man Lynn who shared the excitement of seeing the albatrosses at the end of the Otago Peninsula

Scott, Vernon, and Toshi, the guides on our Routeburn Track hike, and all the other hikers: Lynn, Laura and Matt (from California), Bryan (from London) and his brother Steven (from Israel), Mitch and Kim (from Seattle), Clinton (from Australia), Eric and his wife (can’t remember) (from Auckland), Keith and Misim (from Australia), and Simon and Dina (from the Virgin Islands), and eight people from Japan who were very nice but quiet around us.

 And most recently Grace and Sam in Westport

All of these people have enhanced our experience and provided memories for us, and have made this the best vacation ever here in the world’s most appealing nation. It will be sad and difficult to leave here.

Jane and Whitney are still sleeping (8:45 am), but when they arise, we will pack again for the next place, where we’ll couch surf with Rotarians Rex and Jo Morris in Nelson. Trying to stretch out the fun for a few more days…