heaven - sandflies = old man mountain

No postings for a while as we've been overcome spiritually by rural bliss and metaphorically by convulvulous (sp? gardeners?) and sandflies. We're currently living at Two Rivers Cotttage down the lane from the Yellow House at Old Man Mountain in the South Island. All sounds v story book and it's certainly a place where a Good Life fantasy can take hold. We've moved out of Nadia's house after a lovely week of hanging out with the family and cats and the random people that often turn up magically around teatime.(Nadia is Dan's v good friend and surrogate NZ mother. She is an amazing cook and a homeopath and is a bit of a magnet to anyone within reach with an empty belly or an ailment or emotional trauma).

We've moved to the hut that Dan stayed in when he first came to New Zealand in the 90s. It sits on the bank of the Buller River at the point where it joins the Maruia with old man mountain visible in the distance - the rock formation that gives this place its name. It's the kind of place you can spend a day doing not much, a little gazing around you, a little gentle consideration of your circumstances, a little dozing. Dan made the bed that we're sleeping in and you can see little bits of him here and there in the wall carvings or doodles that decorate the kitchen.

We wake after nine and have tea and homemade granola which gives us the energy to climb the steep hill to the neighbours house and back again. After the walk, Dan wanders off to hammer nails, dig holes or some other manly pursuit and I go back to the hut to write short stories about South London teenagers and The Paris Book (now capitalised, as still troublesome). Some afternoons I help Dan pick fruit so we can earn our keep. We're also painting Nadia's wagon. These activities are punctuated by a series of short breaks for tea and cake and a bit of a chat with whoever has dropped in. Last week we met the oddest American who had come to NZ to meet the trees and was hitching through the Buller Gorge. He'd met some cool trees up north, and was trying to find some wise Maori dudes to talk herbs. He had a push me pull me effect on us - tired hippy expressions, his head full of fetid dredlocks but the bluest eyes. Dinner is at Nadia's and after a film or a fire we stumble down the lane again in the dark to the hut.

One word of caution or complaint, one little blot on this bucolic landscape: sandflies. I have been bitten in every corner of my body, in every place you can be bitten and in places that you surely should not be bitten too. Mosquitos are nothing to these tiny black evil jaws with wings. They like it in the morning before you've had time to find your socks or in the gloom of the evening, they like it just before it rains and just after, they like it by the river, they like it on a farm that's slightly overgrown with convulvolous (sp?), they like foreigners' blood. Cook called them sandfies, although they are really some sort of other nasty fly. His men took one look at the swarms and having forgotten their deet, scarpered from somewhere or other round here, they just got on the boat and went somewhere else. But we're here all the same. They are the reason we will probably not stay here forever, the reason we'll probably come home in July.

Jude and Roger get wed

This is the main reason for our journey north east, a wedding at Mokau - for Jude and Roger. A happy occasion for two very lovely people.

A sign of a good wedding is not very many photos - too much fun to be had eating and drinking and having good conversations with people you've never seen in your life. Happily, we have only three or four shots of the wedding (the important one being the photo you see above).

Other good signs? Tears, Dan dancing, extensive and heartfelt speeches, spontaneous speeches that make you cry all over again, hangovers, campfire singing, swapping addresses, drunken conversations about your own wedding (whether it's happened or might one day happen). Having never met either bride or groom before, I was a little surprised to find myself weeping heartily during the ceremony. But it was irresistible - a good weep comes easily for me, but this was as intimate and lovely as any wedding I've been to and so I cried till the mascara ran down my right cheek. It stayed there all nght long.

There were a few good moments that weren't according to plan like when the local Maori kids were caught thieving from some of the guests tents and Karlos sped off to chase them down or when Roger's wedding fire crept a little too close to the eucalyptus tree. These occasions have to be marked with both good and dangerous moments, it's what Garp might call pre-disastered, it augurs very well.

It was a very good day out.

Spaceship Road Trip

This is our spaceship Nasa.




This is the camper van that took us travelling through New Zealand's Northlands from Auckland to the tip of the island at Cape Reinga, then east to Bay of Islands and finally, Jude and Roger's wedding at Mokau.




Dan was our handsome and indefatiguable driver and I was navigator, cook, en-route provider of water and chocolate and chief music maker. We only got lost twice and neither of those occasions were truly due to my incompetence - just small hitches in an otherwise perfectly executed driving experience.

After weeks in strange hotels, hostels, friends' homes and on loving sister's floors, it was an exciting proposition, a home of our own and the freedom that goes with it. Freedom to sing Simon and Garfunkel out loud with broken voices, to adorn our home with drying underwear (must be careful not to drive off with the brown underpants hanging from the wing mirror) and to cook up our weird and wonderful cravings.

Here I am making pasta at Kai Iwi lakes campsite. Kai Iwi means food of the people and our leek, mushroom and creme fraiche spirali - a dish that would be just passable at home - is transformed into something approaching delicious by these lakeside circumstances.

Dan is just out of view drinking red wine ("we'll only have one bottle tonight, love, as I've got to drive lots tomorrow") and there's a man called Steve just further out of view playing guitar. Later on Steve invites us to join a group of Irish campers and we listen to him singing Simon and Garfunkel songs, his own voice slowly breaking and faltering as he polishes off his box of red Velluto classico. The camp guardian joins us for a song, but he's too shy to either sing or play, and another camper brings her recorder but it's a bit flat and so she does a bit of random harmonising. It's one of those lovely evenings that just hangs on the brink of something hilarious and ridiculous and every time I feel like ruining it with my cynical heart and sniggering I concentrate on the stars above me and the buzzing of the mosquitos. After our second bottle of red wine ("we'll set off later tomorrow after a reviving swim"), we crawl to our spaceship and spend our first night. Awkward sleeper that I am, I sleep more soundly than I've done in weeks, despite the fact that I am bedding down in the back of a people carrier and everytime I roll over I roll into either Dan or the back seatbelt bracket.

The Irish kids wake up the next morning freaked out and freezing. Four of them, three girls and a guy, in one very small two-man tent (much to the delight of guitar man Steve who reads rude things into this), and still cold. Some Blair Witch branch-cracking action occured in the night too, although that might have been the kids in the next camp catching a stupid possum in their possum trap. That's camping in tents for you. People Carriers are the way forward. Just look at the view through our sun roof:



The next morning, not at all hungover from our redwine singalong, we swam in the lake which was clear and warm and with a ridged, rippled bottom that felt good underfoot.