d-I-V-O-R-C-E

Marvellous. I was idling away a few mins on the computer, waiting for flckr to upload photos and found this reference to myself on http://www.karybrown.com/?q=node/11 :


***
Fran Hortop divorced her husband because he spent too much time playing World of Warcraft.

“Without the normal rigmarole of social interaction...he can whoop it up…without ever having to physically shake hands." Hortop said on her blog, Confessions of a Video Game Widow. "It’s like playing action men all over again. Did action man have a girlfriend? He most certainly did not. You have now become obsolete."
***

I love it. She writes with such authority, the writer of this piece. Married and divorced without any knowledge on my part. Dan thinks it's hilarious. I wrote this article for Bintmagazine.com about two years ago bemoaning the lot of the videogame widow. It was supposed to be funny. Obviously, I'm not good at funny and the irony was too heavily veiled. My first divorce!

Volcanic action

Just done the Tongariro Crossing and feeling very pleased about it. We have t-shirts to prove it too, and a funny-looking certificate courtesy of the lodge that arranged transport and food. The Tongariro Crossing is known as one of the best day walks to the New Zealanders who are so fond of walking. It involved 7 hours of walking, scrambling and low-level climbing in the hot autumn sun through the gap between Mount Tongariro and Ngauruhoe and round Tongariro's middle. This is proof of our presence on the mountainside, a picture of Quintin, Nick and Amani mid-trek:



We walked up and down the mountain range nose-to-nose with about 2000 other hikers but this did not tarnish the experience. Ngauruhoe is a stunning, near perfect volcano shape and streaked with beautiful black and red scoria. Tongariro blew its top off completely many, many years ago and you can tramp through its craters - red rock or filled with turquoise and emerald mineral lakes - before descending past the solidified remains of previous lava flows into the bush. We got a few scrapes, swollen limbs, blisters and stupid Lord of the Rings photos but I think we all loved it. A good way to celebrate Nick's birthday. And a pretty spectacular way to introduce Amani to hiking, although maybe not quite as spectacular as the swollen hand she was sporting at the end of the day. Here's me and Amani before our first big ascent. We are smiling and happy but we've yet to see the state of the track ahead:


I've never been to a truly volvanic place before and it's an odd feeling walking through such a sublime, alien landscape. There's evidence of geological change everywhere in this region of Taupo (pronounced Toe-paw in Maori - we've been getting lessons from Dan), but I had no idea how constantly this environment is changing now with landslides, road washouts, river swells, mini-eruptions, new hot water springs occuring here and there as the great tectonic plates shift under the earth.

Ruapehu, the big man of the three volcanos in the range at about 2700m, last erupted in the mid nineties. Just a week ago, the latest and long awaited lahar slid its way down the mountainside bringing its torrent of mud and slime. The last lahar in 1953 took out a local railway bridge just as the Christmas Eve train was crossing and 150 people were killed. Police have been stationed in the area for two years, unable to move more than ten minutes from the predicted sight of this last lahar to manage any catastophe caused by its occurence. They did not want a repeat of the Tangiwai Bridge disaster, one of the most remembered disasters in New Zealand's history along with the eruption in the l880s of Mount Tarawera which buried one village and swallowed two others entirely. The lahar seems to have done exactly what it was predicted to do which greatly pleased all the scientists involved in the contingency management programme. The day after our great trek, aching and whimpering a little, we went to visit the memorial to the 1953 disaster at the Tangiwai railway bridge. The lahar had blasted through this site, as if it was retracing the steps of its ancestor lahar. It had covered the area with grey silt and muck, obscuring picnic benches set up for visiting tourists and covering the monument itself although this has been given a swift clean by locals. Here's a picture:



Dan keeps joking that we need a little earthquake or two to get the full New Zealand experience. We missed one in Aukland a few weeks ago and on Tarkaka Hill in the South Island where friends Sara and Garret live. I'd quite like to keep my experiences of spectacular geological activity to the simulations and exhibits we've seen at the museums in Rotorua, Wairoa (the buried village site) and at Te Papa in Wellington. Excellent museums every one of them and more than enough of a taste of geological meltdown for me. And I aboslutely do not need to see an eruption. This is how I like my geothermal attractions, relatively tranquil and beautiful:



More photos, of course, on flickr....

Dante's rehabilitation

By the way, Dante doesn't seem to have been as 'ugly' as he is made out to be according to an article I read in an Australian newspaper. His nose might not have been all that big. Perhaps someone did a CSI-type facial reconstruction for him and found out we'd been too cruel all these years to think of him as less of a looker. All those rather severe statues of him, like the one I went and prayed to in Verona for my First in Paradiso studies in my final year, might not be accurate. The article suggested he might not have been so scary, so stern. Perhaps I could refer them to a passage or two of Inferno to change their minds? I always thought he looked handsome as he was.

anenome pulsatilla

Nadia is trying to establish our homeopathic remedies.

I've been reading a very interesting book by one of the great homeopathic practitioners (whose name escapes me so that makes it a useless recommendation), an Indian guy who has spent much of his life studying and practicing and developing homeopathy. He's lucid, he details a lifetime's hard research with much conviction and he has occasional lapses into the kind of philopsophising that reminds me of when I studied Dante at college with a wonderful Dr of Italian who pronounced love 'lurve'and made us all feel like it was the most important word in the world. Smitten then, am I, as anyone who reminds me of the old hook-nosed Italian and indeed, Dr Took, gets my attention.

So apart from the obvious and unhelpfully devisive comments about homeopathy being wonderful as it is a holistic approach to wellbeing rather than a symptom-based scatter gun approach like useless conventional Western medicine (pah!), finding one's homepathic remedy it seems, is the key to a more balanced and productive approach to life. Disease, to the homeopath, is both a means of protecting the body in times of great trauma and a barrier to living out one's full potential. So, for example, it may well have been a matter of survival for me at some point in my life (or at some point before - this is one of the trickier concepts) to be overly anxious, converting anxiety into physical symptoms like migraine and stomach pains and being pathologically reserved, in order to combat a particular issue, but that state of play has proved too irrestible for me and has become a pattern that has affected everything I do, everything I feel and everything I think ever since. My remedy will deal with this root cause and will unblock my system (emotional, & physical etc) and I'll be fully functioning to the best of my body's ability.

Whatever you may think of alternatives to allopathic medicine, it is at least worth giving certain things a try if you are, as we are currently, spending lots of time in the company of a very learned and indeed persuasive advocate of one of those therapies who is willing to heal you for free. Indeed, I have been more than willing to talk expansively about myself for several hours and take a few potions here and there if it leads to a brighter me emerging. Particularly if those potions are mainly vodka with the tiniest percentage of the active ingredient in them. This allows homeopaths to give people remedies such as arsenic to cure things like stomach upsets as there is virtually no arsenic left in the remedy. this also allows opponents to refute homeopathy as a phantom form of healing. My Indian guy admits he doesn't understand why potentisation (the act of diluting a substance until it's barely there and also agitating it in a certain way to 'release the energy') works either, but his patient success rate proves it does.

Homeopaths potentise all sorts of weird and wonderful things, animals, rare Amazonian spiders, the sun, the moon - a great source of excitement for critics too no doubt. The calendular cream you use for cuts, the nux vomica for seasickness, the arnica for bruising is all homeopathic and it seems, as effective as potions and lotions that come over the counter at Boots. Goodness knows if it will work. I have every faith in Nadia and it is hard not respect her expertise even if I may not be able to understand or define it. Perhaps the power to 'heal' just comes from her. Would this be in any way more inexplicable. She listens, is calm, practical and very responsive. All the things a regular doctor hasn't time for in your alloted five-minutes with them. I want to have faith in homeopathy as it seems like such a beautiful set of ideas. But then, i've only read the first few chapters of my book. I am being open-minded. Give me the placebo if it makes me feel better. So far, Nadia has identified that I am probably a plant (sensitive etc) and that I may well be a wind anenome. For a week after taking the first dose i slept better and was relatively anxiety free. Then we started our epic car journey and the insomnia and constant need to cross my fingers whilst travelling returned. Is the remedy wearing off? Is there some sort of cosmic force-field in the Honda Integra that stops it working? Did I lie too much in my interview with Nadia? Are hypochondriacs perversly immune to homeopathy?

Meanwhile, Dan has received something for the deteriorating state of his guts. (Lawrence may have some idea of what I am talking about as he has shared a room with him). He also got stung on the leg by something nasty one night and received several remedies for that. Guts are still an issue, possibly worse (is this a case of got to hit rock bottom before you start to get better again?) and the bite/sting only got better after turning ugly and red and agonising. For one exciting/horrifying moment we thought it might be a white-tailed spider bite. This beast is Australian and poisonous and is creeping into NZ. A friend of friend was bitten and the skin on his leg started to fall off until he was hospitalised. Thankfully, Dan's skin is still intact.

We bought a car. I'm not going to talk about it much at the moment as car ownership is not an easy ride - forgive the pun. Culprit number one is the dodgy clutch which causes us to stall occassionally. To Dan, who is driving as I am a useless 32 year old who can't, this is a constant underlying fear even though it has only really happened at traffic lights in one-horse NZ tows and in supermarket carparks and so is not really a life-threatening issue. Oh, and it's a bit of a concern when trying to park in a very small parking spot, say, in the backlot of an inner city hostel. If you've seen the Austin Powers movie where he does a 250 point turn in a corridor you might have some idea of the spectacle we made in Auckland last week. I personally know the clutch is tricky after the two driving lessons Dan gave me in the Old Man Mountain orchard. An interesting way to pick fruit. Don't be alarmed, though. It's a 100% safe way of travelling and significantly cheaper than getting the bus. We bought the metal beast for 300 pounds and we'll hopefully sell it for the same. It seemed too much of a bargain to put aside. Isn't it alarming how quickly you can jettison your environmental ethics for a cheaper ride? We are intermittently ashamed of ourselves. George '3 allotments' Monbiot would scoff at our half-heartedness. We've vowed not to travel by plane for the next five years to make it up to George and the planet (we've just got to jet half way round the world first). Have also vowed that next trip to New Zealand will be undertaken entirely without the aid of air transport. Making plans for the great adventure of 2013 already. Should anyone want to join us on this epic journey, start saving now.

We made a relatively epic journey from the South Island to the northern part of the North Island this week - three days in the car with our dodgy stereo. This was a little too intense for our 1987 Honda Integra (not yet old enough to be a classic car and certainly not pretty enough), and for the driver and navigator. Some good landscape sped by - Mount Ngauruhoe (or Mount Doom for LOTR afficionados) and the Rangipo Desert that stretches from the shadow at its feet across the middle of the the North Island. We've been hiding in the bush for weeks with the manuka trees and the sandflies, so it was wonderful to see this strange expansive New Zealand landscape and all the evidence of impending geological meltdown. We may or may not go to Rotorua to see the bubbling mud springs and other thermal spectaculars. It costs $50 to get near the bubble and trouble and those in the know have told us of similar natural marvels elsewhere that are, goodness, free. Even flashpackers have to stick to their budget and we've just decided to go to San Francisco for a week and will need the cash for that and a week in relative luxury in Fiji - coup permitting. Maybe the yanks will have a coup too and we could get a prize or something for visiting three countries undergoing some sort of military junta situation. We must be careful what we wish for.

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