Carey and I will be camping in Yosemite for our vacation next week. Today, I read this news from the Los Angeles Times:

A major rock slide this morning at Yosemite National Park injured three visitors, destroyed more than half a dozen cabins and prompted park officials to evacuate popular Curry Village as a precaution.

The slide let loose about 7 a.m. more than halfway up the 3,200-foot face of Glacier Point, which looms above the tent cabins and concession services on the valley floor below.

An 1,800-cubic-yard slab of rock cartwheeled down the cliff, shattered and sent boulders and fist-sized granite shrapnel spraying toward the edge of Curry Village and its more than 500 tent cabins, regular cabins and hotel rooms….

The rock fall was the second in two days at Glacier Point. Tuesday afternoon, a smaller slide sent boulders cascading toward Curry Village, destroying one tent cabin.

Thankfully the campground where we’ll be staying, according to the park rangers, is about a kilometer away, so we won’t be affected. Still, the news is a bit unsettling. I may wake up really early one morning and run through the campground, shaking a box of rocks near other peoples’ tents.

Last year Carey and I had the blessing to spend a few weeks in New Zealand. I really enjoyed my time there and saw some things about Kiwi culture I would like to import to the United States. I’m no expert on New Zealand and these are pretty superficial suggestions. I hope you enjoy them.

1. Toilets. The US has done a great job moving toward low-flow toilets that save water, but toilets in New Zealand take it a step further. They have two buttons for flushing: half-flush and full flush. Depending on the size and type of the, um, deposit left in the toilet, one can determine what level of flush they need. A great way to conserve. The attitude toward conservation and ecology was refreshing.
2. Currency. I mentioned this issue a while back in another post on currency, but I really enjoyed the fact that New Zealand had one dollar and two dollar coins. The paper money varied in size and color. And perhaps most important, they had eliminated the one cent coin. All transactions were rounded up or down. Imagine a world with no pennies. (Longing sigh.)
3. Roundabouts. Once the anxiety produced by driving on the other side of the road subsided, I came to really enjoy using roundabouts at most intersections. The flow of traffic slowed but rarely stopped, except at the busiest times. They also made me fondly remember the bike circles at UC Davis. This suggestion, however seems least likely to gain any traction here in the States, especially in Los Angeles. We have way too many cars on the road and I think the learning curve of the roundabouts would result in a lot of accidents initially. When you’re the one learning and you share the road with other drivers who know how to use roundabouts, that’s one thing. When everyone is learning to use them together, that would be chaos.
4. Paninis. We have them here in the US, but they were everywhere in New Zealand. Nearly any coffee shop or restaurant carried the pre-made sandwiches in a refrigerated glass case and would heat them up for you on demand. A great alternative to lots of the fast food here. Because there were so many paninis, the variety was nearly endless. My favorite was a really simple recipe that Carey and I have copied here. Two slices of sourdough, a grilled chicken breast, Camembert cheese, and cranberry sauce. Slap it all together, put the sandwich under some heat and pressure, and you have a great dish. We substitute Brie for the Camembert since it’s easier to find in grocery stores here. Also, we use boneless, skinless chicken thighs from time to time.
5. Rugby. We had the opportunity to attend a Super XIV match in which the Chiefs beat the visiting Stormers. Both Carey and I enjoyed the match greatly and any match we saw on television during our trip. Rugby has the hard-hitting edge of American Football, but, like soccer, play generally doesn’t stop, so there is less time to preen and people only celebrate goals. The clock system is similar to soccer and games don’t last three hours. It takes some getting used to, with all the rules, but a spectator can grasp the gist of the sport rather quickly.

We’ve been home for a couple days following our tour of the South. Well, really it was just Dallas and some of North Carolina. We saw great friends and family, ate lots of wonderful food (but we’re now trying to go vegetarian in order to make up for the vast amounts of pork we ate), and visited some really cools musuems. In Dallas we went to the Sixth Floor Musuem, aka the Texas School Book Depository from where Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot President Kennedy. (I say allegedly not because I believe in some vast conspiracy but because he Oswald was killed before he could face trial.)

In Charlotte we went to the Discovery Place and saw some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dead Sea Scrolls! My aunt and uncle told me about the exhibit as I had no clue they were in the US. I’ve never had the opportunity to see them before and I was speechless. The exhibit was overall done rather well, though I have a few quibbles with it, like the fact that the audio tour doesn’t have any recording of someone reading the texts in Hebrew. It would have been amazing to hear the texts in their original language along with the translations the museum provided. The great news is that they’ll be coming to San Diego in July 2007. I’m already excited.

Carey and I are about to leave for the South, specifically Texas and North Carolina to visit friends and family. I have never spent time in Texas apart from waiting for my next flight at the Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport and it has been almost ten years since my last trip to North Carolina, where my dad grew up and went to college. Carey has never been to either place. I’m curious to see what has and has not changed in the Tar Heel State. Sweet hushpuppies, I plan to eat much Hannah’s Bar-B-Q and drink gallons of Cheerwine.

The following is a travelouge for the first leg of our New Zealand trip:

March 31: leave Los Angeles via Air New Zealand; watch Capote on the flight (really good film); Carey brings a cake to celebrate my birthday, which I will miss thanks to crossing the International Date Line; try to sleep.

April 2: arrive in New Zealand at the Auckland International airport; picked up by Carey’s family who have already been in the country for a week and friends who live and work there; tour the wharf and downtown of Auckland; eat a meal (breakfast for them, Carey and I aren’t sure what meal we’re eating since our time is all thrown off); do some shopping; go back to the airport and fly to Queenstown on the South Island; check into a motel; have dinner with in-laws, first lamb whilst in New Zealand—Kiwis like to use the word whilst.

April 3: walk around Queenstown; pick up supplies, rent equipment, and pack for the Milford Track (MT) backpacking trip; leave for Te Anau via a bus; check into motel in Te Anau.

April 4: visit bird sanctuary in Te Anau; board another bus that takes us to a dock on Lake Te Anau; at the lake, board a boat that takes us further down the lake to the MT trailhead; begin our hike with a short 5 km walk to Clinton hut; eat dinner, play cards, Carey wipes us all out in Hearts; see the southern sky clearly for the first time, as well as a colony of glow worms.

April 5 (happy birthday, Tracy): second day on the MT; walk 16.5 km from Clinton hut to Mintauro hut through the Clinton Valley along the Clinton River; eat lunch at Hidden Lake and are quickly attacked by sandflies; begins to rain on us as we approach Mintauro hut; eat dinner, play cards, Carey wipes us all out in Hearts and Rummy.

April 6: third day on the MT; walk 14 km from Mintauro hut to Dumpling hut; climb up to Mackinnon Pass (1069 m) in the first 6 km, where we can see both the Clinton and Arthur Valleys; have a snack at the Pass Shelter; begin descent into Arthur Valley (800 m down in 4 km); starts to rain—never hard, but consistent; eat lunch at Quintin hut (this is where I wait for lunch because I outrun the food); leave packs and take short side trip to Sutherland Falls, the fifth highest waterfall in the world (580 m), it was on this brief stretch that I put on my rain pants and they trasformed into the rain chaps; get the packs back on and continue to Dumpling hut; try to dry out our clothes and put on anything dry that we own; eat dinner, play cards, Carey wipes us all out in Rummy; rains all night.

April 7: fourth day on the MT; hike 18 km from Dumpling hut to Sandfly Point and the Milford Sound; rain lets up and cascades cover the walls of the Arthur Valley; view MacKay Falls; everyone’s legs are weak from the previous day’s descent and never loosen up, many groans; arrive at Sandfly Point minutes before a downpour that includes hail, the hail does not melt in the waters of the Milford Sound; receive more bites from sandflies, which don’t seem that bad; take boat ride across the Milford Sound and try to get as many photographs as possible on the choppy water; take bus from the Sound back to Te Anau; check back into motel, have showers, put on dry clothes, go out for celebratory dinner—I have a rib eye steak, Carey has venison.

April 8 (happy birthday, Bean): take bus from Te Anau back to Queenstown; return backpacking equipment; sign up to go bungy jumping off The Ledge with Carey’s brother later that day; rent car and drive on the left side of the road for the first time (no heart attacks or strokes); take Skyline Gondola ride up to ridge of mountain so we can jump and see terrific views of Queenstown, Lake Wakatipu, and the Remarkables; bungee jump; return down to Queenstown; leave in-laws and drive to Glentanner in the Aoraki Mt. Cook Mackenzie Region.

More photos are up in the New Zealand set over on Flickr. More to come.

On our trip to New Zealand, we visited a friend living and working there and Carey asked him, “Greg, what are Kiwis like?” He responded with another question, “The people, the birds, or the fruit?”

The first leg of our trip included hiking the Milford Track with Carey’s family on the South Island. It was a four day, three night backpacking trip through the Clinton and Arthur Valleys with Mackinnon Pass in between. Arthur Valley receives an annual rainfall of 9 meters (29.5 feet). So the question is not so much if it will rain, but how much. One ranger at a hut we stayed at—they don’t let you stay in tents, but require that you stay in three huts along the track—said, “There is a peak just outside our hut and it is pretty accurate in predicting the weather. If you can see the peak, it means it’s going to rain. If you can’t see the peak, it means it’s raining.”

I learned some important lessons on the trail. The first is never outrun your food. Carey’s brother was carrying most of our food and on the third day I was at least a half an hour ahead of the rest of the group in getting to our planned lunch stop, which ended up taking longer to get to than any of us expected. I sat in a small shelter watching everyone else on the track eating their lunches. I think when I looked at some of them, they turned into T-bones and hams in my mind. The second lesson from that day was that when you buy plastic rain pants from the discount bin at the sporting goods store, in just a few yards on the trail, the crotch splits and they quickly transform into rain chaps. Rain chaps, in case you were wondering, are not nearly as effective as rain pants.

Before we go much further, I’ll answer the most common question I’ve been asked: did we see a lot of the scenery from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films? The quick answer is no and yes. No in that we didn’t go on any tours to see specific sites nor did we pay to see the museum exhibit of the props in Wellington—though we did see one of the Corsairs of Umbar in the museum lobby.

Yes in that we did drive by or see some of the scenery that was actually used in the film. But so much of the film was a cut and paste job, there weren’t a whole lot of places where you could point your camera and recreate a scene from the movie. The flimmakers would often take a mountain range from here and a field and lake from there and superimpose actors onto the collaged background. In Nelson, a town on the northern end of the South Island, we did stumble upon the jeweler who made the One Ring. They were selling replicas, but we decided to keep our money since it didn’t look like they would turn us invisible.

I plan to write more about our trip, but I’m busy editing and organizing all the pictures we took while we were there. I’ve uploaded some of the first photos over on my Flickr account. You can see them in the New Zealand set.