I’ve started to post pictures from my New Zealand trip to my Flickr account. The first set is a 360° view from the top of Key Summit on the Routeburn Track.

• I didn’t bring my laptop, and even if I had, free WiFi in New Zealand was as rare as hen’s teeth.
• Three of the four hotels I stayed in during the trip had computer terminals for guest use, but the first (Westin, Auckland) had just one – with a time limit; the second (Heritage, Queenstown) had just two and charged by the minute, to a maximum of 15 minutes; the third had four Internet “kiosks” with limited functionality.
• New Zealand is all about bungee jumping, tramping, jet-boating, wine-tasting and sheep farming. Warming a chair in front of a computer is not encouraged.

Anyway, I’m back. I’m going through my thoughts and my pictures, and I’ll try to post some highlights later tonight and this week.

For this reason, I love to go to big cities – New York, L.A., London, Paris, Bangkok, Shanghai (and hopefully someday Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney and many more).

Auckland so far feels a bit small and quiet. Of course, we arrived on a Sunday morning, and we’re leaving tomorrow (Tuesday), so I know we’re seeing it at its least lively. It certainly is a picturesque city. For example, there are beautiful glass-walled condos next to this Westin hotel with parking out front for the residents’… wait for it… sailboats. The Westin itself is one of the loveliest I’ve stayed in.

There’s a pretty good density of food options here, and since New Zealand is a country of many wine regions, the wine lists everywhere are vast and varied. We’re trying to live on a moderate budget, and it’s been somewhat difficult to get consistent restaurant recommendations. One person’s “can’t miss” is someone else’s “meh.” Last night we ate at Soul, which was just OK. We ordered our wines by the glass, and that seemed to peg us as philistines or penny pinchers in the eyes of our waitress.

I had a pan-fried hapuku with an olive tapanade, on a bed of braised onions and fennel. The fish was cooked nicely, but the olives were overpowering, and the onions and fennel were really oily.

Matt is a 31-year-old guy from Connecticut who was inspired one day during his travels to do his signature silly dance for the camera and upload it to the website he was using to keep his family up-to-date on his wherabouts.

Anyway, what started on a whim in one country, he decided to repeat around the world…

Well, you could say it caught a wave (over 10 million views as of today), and a year or so later, Stride Gum approached him about sponsoring a sequel, on their dime – which was a no-brainer for Matt…

The whole idea of carbon offsetting is met with some harsh criticism. Skeptics argue that it’s just a way to help people feel better about themselves without having to change their consuming, polluting lifestyles…

But there’s no reason why purchasing carbon offsets can’t be just one part of a person’s overall change in lifestyle, instead of an alternative to change. And the truth is the money spent on carbon offsets does make its way into projects like wind farms and reforestation initiatives.

It might be better to avoid air travel altogether, but of course it’s unrealistic. I’m happy that the airline industry is promoting not only awareness of the issue in general, but a quantification of my own individual contribution. And I’m happy that they point me to one way of mitigating at least some of the damage.

It won’t save the world, but it’s better than nothing.

Now, this part of town sucks for food options, much less banks and ATMs. So I wandered about 6 blocks north until I found a Bank of America branch.

Got my cash. Got my breakfast. Got to work.

Jeez.

10 minutes before the departure of the last #5 bus from the downtown depot, I shut down my computer. Well, I asked it to shut down. Windows chose this inopportune moment to notify me that it needed to install 81(!) updates. It warned me not to shut down, or face dire consequences.

15 minutes later, updates installed, I was allowed to leave.

But I had to find an alternate route home.

“What are you looking for?” he asked me.

“What?”

“What are you looking for?”

Reflexively defensive, “Er… I was looking to see whether my bus… uh… I’m just transferring busses, and I was checking to see whether my bus was coming, to see if I need to hurry to the stop…”

“The 19 bus?”

“Yes.”

“Your stop is…”

And that’s where I turned away and just made for my bus stop. I think he was just trying to help, but I’m naturally on my guard in that part of town, and I assumed the officer was targeting me somehow.

In retrospect, I think he was just trying to help a guy who probably looked a bit out of place, and I feel a little bad for turning away from him while he was still talking.

My last post from Thailand was somewhat cynical, and I owe this blog a more balanced account, now that the trip is over. While my cynicism didn’t really go away, I ended the experience with an overall good feeling about it. It helped that in the middle of week two, I finally got to see the destroyed homes we were replacing.

In the end, it didn’t really matter to me whether the net benefit of the experience was to me or the people I was ostensibly helping. The fact is, I had a good travel experience, and I helped build a couple of houses for people who needed them.

I enjoyed making simple jokes with the villagers I worked closely with – simple enough to be communicated via sign language. I enjoyed eating delicious thai food with cold Singha beer for a fraction of what it costs me to park for a day at my office. I enjoyed hard physical work in the hot thai sun, away from my desk and computer screen.

Toward the end of week one, I was moved from my job site to two other sites to help a group of guys transport 18 tall concrete columns a hundred meters or so and position them in 1.4 meter deep footings. The columns were heavy – the tallest of them probably close to 1000 pounds. We moved them by hand, using bicycle tires, wooden poles and muscle power. Either two or three wooden poles, four people per wooden pole – two on each side of the column. I was taller than the others, and they put me on the heavy end of the column, on the inside – shoulder to shoulder with a guy named Mai.

Since I was taller than Mai, he didn’t end up carrying any weight when we moved the columns. This cracked him up to no end. The sun was beating down on us, there was no shade to be found, and none of us really wanted to work. To him, I was a crazy farang who traveled halfway around the world to schlep heavy objects in the hot sun, and he was certainly going to let me go ahead and do that.

After we moved the eighth column, we had a bit of a break. I went to our cooler (we foreigners had a cooler), grabbed a handful of ice cubes and walked back to the guys I was working with. I handed out the ice cubes til I had none. They said “kap kun krab”, held the ice to the backs of their necks and we idled for a while. Mai offered me a smoke. I declined, and we both laughed.

When we got around to moving the next few columns, he stood on his toes in order to give me as much help as he could.