We…

We, a carbon race in the flesh, beings born of Earthly abode and boundary, blossoming the mystery of eternal consciousness and potential, are living and breathing mosaics, pinnacles of antiquity; echoes of the supernovas siren, sculpted by the ghosts of aeons and ancestry. We have woven, from the very dust of stars, empires a long with their ashes and machines that can liberate us as well as destroy us, all on a fragile spec that spins around a star and gleams like an emerald in the velvet void of space, so we must remember the virtues of modesty and humility as we are, after all, but a thread in the grand tapestry that is existence.

As we go by

To live a humble life, one must cherish the mystery in distant unknown lights and smoke, the far side of a mountain, and the dark side of the moon.

The world we leave…

Parents,
Idolised
in the starry eyes
of the miracle they brought to the world

A world with no more forests,
A world with no more mystery,
A world with slim chances
and infertility

A world of oily feathers
A world of birdless song
A world of only painted heather
Because we chose not to get along

A world to be hopelessly climbed
into financial drops
Where the Politicians resigned
because we’re all fighting for the last poisoned crop

Now the child, grown up
looks back at us in betrayal
his eyes,disappointed and confused now
his face has gone pale
Because he has a dead future that he looks upon, feeling sick
at what we allowed to fail

So hear the yearning of the Trees
for there is nothing more noble
than to wipe dust from your knees
And flip over the table
with Earth in your heart, our home,
whose gifted us with this chance
to eternally roam.

some grand occurences and reflections in the night

In travel, and in general life too I guess, really cherish a moment of spontaneous and even short-lived greatness. You might not realise now,  but believe me, a while from where you stand now, that memory is going to be so, so amazing. Fill your heart with each moment wether that’s a beer on a beach, a smile from someone you’re never going to actually meet or know, or even just entering a room with good energy, HOLD ON TO IT and let no other thing blot it out. Because as I lie on my bed now, I’ve stopped the travel to save money and study Ecology for a while before the road takes me away again, and I’ve just sat and cried with joy, because I have a handful of memories that are eternal and golden and they’re mine till I get alzheimers. I mean, one of the best ones is of getting my backpack caught on a fridge door at a 7/11 in Northern Thailand, I mean that is trivial to the reader, but it’s so funny to me because of who I was with and the situation it created. I even worried that I’d forgotten a lot of things, and I certainly have my goodness so much has happened, but I’ve realised the mind doesn’t constantly reinforce these good memories they simply merge forward when youre alone and looking at a kettle from your bed or will spring up sporadically in a conversation.

Another thing I learned about travel is not to expect a sudden change in your self don’t do what I did and expect to be all of a sudden changed and then begin to forcefully induce change and no, you don’t want to lose your sense of self, home, who you are, like that. I’ve matured a lot and looking back I did push all that away half from being lost in the gold of free youth and half from expecting too much. I have learned a vast amount from travel. About people, cultures, talents, freedom, humanity. But it only comes to you when you are willing to open up and embrace it. Wheras it may not appear you have learned something instantly, by god when you’ve chilled out and your kicking back for a while and have time to reflect and think then it will shock you.

Another thing that I can feel gradually becoming a truth made clear to me is that we are all infinite beings of light made from stardust, literally and scientifically, living on this blue amazing planet that is quite literally the rarest opal in an infinite sea. This has been made clear to me in awakenings as I camp by lakeshores and look upwards and see the endless glitter of stars that puts us in our place by the sound of some nearby geese slowly cawing to sleep and a distant crashing occasional avalanche from retreating glaciers, or sitting on a rock by the edge of a melted glacier and hearing a parrot fly overhead, and just feeling a part of everything. Or gazing through the most powerful telescope and seeing Saturn crystal clear edged between stars light years apart; it’s gleaming orb center balancing between it’s halo ring, and it looked so fragile hanging  there in foreverness, but just so perfect. And in the morning the lakes ripples like some Truman show fantasy, ordered perfect jutting robotically towards me, beneath a mass of cloud pouring over and down a mountain slope, filling and seemingly invading but stopping at the bottom, to form a shape much like a legless giant with his head bowed over the far side where we can not see, his arms curled around the left and right sides. And then I’m picked up hitch hiking by an 80 year old irish man, who would not have picked me up if he wasn’t going to see his wife in her residential home, now at the end looking over the edge after a long life of chasing their dreams together, and he took me back to show me his home , and we ate soup and drank tea and ate fruitcake on the patio outside, he said he doesn’t get many visitors these days, the whole house he’d built him self: all 8 rooms and all the timber he’d collected himself 450 years ago.Still with his accent. And unbelievably, the very next ride was with a guy who had met the same Irish man as I’d just met, they met in india, we met in New Zealand, but he was told the same story as me: the Irish man had travelled the world in a campervan 60 years ago… and crazily enough, we’d all come to meet in the right place at the right time, those two living a village a part, and not even knowing it.

Mountains, Roads, Sky

The plastic, rubbery denseness of all the dips we take into the lake of contemporary society, for some, fatally with no return, lifts us away from the Garden, carrying us sleepily into strange hollow mists, much like I imagine the Druids of ancient England carrying those rocks for miles. We have become rocks. Stony. And the plastic has become alive, and we pursue it dimly and allow it to carry us away. And if the balloon rises, as in if this crushing truth is raised, we curl back our leaves in refusal, denial, like dogs that won’t stop barking. I’ve seen this and I experience it most days, when I’m not running to purple horizons, I observe it from afar. But it’s fortified on adventures like today.
Started with my decision, halfway down the street en route to work, when i stopped sort of divided in the mind over wether to carry on to work and dig or carry on to that purple horizon, especially difficult after booking my flight to Bangkok and all the memories keep rising up and kicking me and I think what about 5 years time? Will I want to go back in time and turn around? And so all my deepest drives kept tormenting me and I go back, in fact I ran back, to my flat. I had to clamber in the window due to my goldfish memory, all because of trying to function properly in what some people emptily refer to as the real world, which, from the view of my own life-long dreamy perspectives, is as far from what is good, true and real as a stranded, lost and suffering Whale who has strayed too far and can’t break out of the tundra he’s now embedded in, unless he listens closely. And the Male force of what we call real is battling the female forces of Nature and it’s bringing down the whole pack of cards.
I got to my room and danced, and while packing my things into my backpack I stopped to stare at the world map on the wall and my eyes ran a long an invisible line that crossed over the world, with gaps, and landed in Christchurch. People say I’ve travelled so much but to me that line only looks like a tiny scratch by my insignificant human form on a looming Earth.
I’ve always ran from things when a tingling urge to go and feel my imagination in the playground that is the world arises.
“Go for it bro'” said a Maori, as I bounced in my step with my home on my back.
After just a few minutes of waiting, sat on my pack, cigarette and lunch at hand, by the cars that whizz endlessly, I was picked up by Julio a bronze and yellow Italian. He was so mad to talk that when his satnav stopped working he got annoyed with it because it meant he had to focus his attention on the road. He taught me about Italian politics, how the politicians don’t pay tax, and how the North drags the South. I found it interesting, but my belief on taxes is far different from everyone elses. People disagree with tax to the extent that it’s too high but never seem to agree with me that no one should be forced to pay tax, especially if it’s toward something they don’t agree with such as a war in a third world country. To me it’s exactly the same as a charity knocking at your door and asking you for money and when you say no you don’t agree they steal your money at gun point and threaten to lock you in a cage. That is “government”. We got lost, and stopped at a junction and Julio left the car to look at his map. The back of his yellow long hair, his bronze skin and Earthy clothes against the Sun and a long, endless road made me feel like we were running away something of great doom and into something eternal and golden. When he turned around his skinny frame and his facial features made him look child, primitive and monkey-like, and when we drove onwards everything faded back into what it was, a bit like that very night in my tent as I sat and wrote in the dusk light by the lake shore and the scattered rocks ahead of me and the best air you could ever get, as I lost my heart in the freshness, and then a fragile rabbit hopped and landed beside the winters-end hard tree I was camped beneath, and through my tents open flap, there was an intense moment of frozen connection between the two of us for a few minutes before he ran away behind the dead tree and every thing carried on as it was.
That night as the light was lifted up to rest on its ledge, and the crystal moon began to hang, everything turned over to endless stars to carry on beauty I was hummed to sleep by the cawing mother of a family of sleeping ducks from a few trees to my right. In that moment of deep tranquility, I felt unborn, and when all other levels of being are merely stripped down to being alive, with trees and stars and sleepy caws and rocks and dust and breath, you feel the grand realisation that you are every thing and every thing is you, absolutely. And that is how we are meant to feel when we lay our heads on the ground, we are meant to feel a part of every thing. We are meant to feel at one with the Earth and that where we sleep is special rather than just a mortgage. This patch has been home to everyone from animals to pioneers to ancient Moa-hunting Maori. That’s how I felt. The edge of a very long lineage of explorers.
The next morning as I walked a long the shore, to fetch water from the lake, the clouds blew in from over the Mountains and slowly curled downwards then vanished to my right, and the planes and Mountains to my far left, over the vast lake, were barren as if they had been scratched by the fingernails of the Gods. The planes and hills of the South Island are barren, brown, long, deserted and beautiful. I got closer to the lake, knowing that my ancestors would be foraging and hunting while I’m gifted with the chance to gaze at birds and hop among rocks and hitch hike (but what is better?), I splattered down onto mud and disturbed tiny monasteries in the rock pools and spread away frequent zig-zagging and spikey slices that had been pressed into the soft mud by the patting of dancing claws. I reached a bank and had to plan out my journey around it which made me feel human, these basic things are all we need. I sat among the grey rocks, with white and brown mossy paintings a long them, cities in their own miniature right, and sat with fixated vision at little birds drawing closer and closer, unbelievably, as if the had noticed me but were as curious as I of them and were able to satisfy this curiosity at the surprise of my deviance from the usual giant,. for them, human frame that often radiates hostility and rejection. But as I sat calm I could observe the gentle hop, the mating twerp, and even the brown hoops around his or her breast, two necklaces, the lowest thick and proud, the highest thin and humble, and then another strip a long the face, like two sidewats triangles crossing the eyes, pinned by a beak, making the bird look like a Jesse James kind of anonymous bird. Nature has something untouchable, totally within our reach. It has something elegant, from every crevice cuinto a mouintain side over millenia, to every atom and every flock, something quite remarkable and splendid that we will never truly be able ot place out finger on. All we should really be doing, after solving out own issies, is satring in awe as it rolls on with cogs of icomprehensible time and churning force.
So the rest of the day went on, I met a nice Irish guy whose eyes shon, and drank tea in front of the Mountains, it’s all we all need, and then carried on the road and a conservationist took me all the way to Mt Cook, he’d just got back from brazil, a third world country, and we both agreed that for any country or any thing for that matter to progress there needs to be a future that can be foreseen. For example, the third world countries aren’t being helped by first world countries, they are being exploited and because they aren’t being shown the way, almost like a little brother, they are still stuck. It’s like trying to see the other side of a Mountain without climbing gear. It’s all about education. It’s the same with the first world and climate change. If we had known th effects our actions from 40 years ago were going to have today we wouldn’t have done them. it’s also the same in the present. What we do now shapes tomorrow and the world we leave behind for our children.
That night I camped beneath the stars again, I formed a stone circle around my tent for a stronger sense of bonding with the land I was on, and I just layed in my tent and thought and watched the distant peaks turn from bright blue down to crimson and then to a strange deep mysterious faded orange that sprayed out from what appeared to be behind the mountains and made a fantasy city of harp-plucking mythical creatures seem ever more possible before the shades of night layed down and the giant sky of stars splashed before me and I just lied on the floor, gazing, at the hoop of the galaxy that ties us into a knot and wondered if I could flip it over to the other side, would it be the same? I cried with joy. All that was heard on that silent night was the occasional haunting groan of a crashing avalanche and retreating glacier spitting ice and snow.
The next morning I walked a long way to the Glacier and perched on the end of a rock and just stared into the gigantic oblivion that is the melted glacier, like a giant, vast, so incredibly vast and huge scoop out of the land, the looming mountains and all around, icy, frosty and home to perilous snow beasts and demons, and the canopies behind flushed with a vibrant green, and where the glacier had once been there were now patches of long blue pools curling around each other in the frozen time that has been going the first homo sapien walked form Africa and even longer. I was sat on the edge of a clock of the Earth like a grain of sand. A Kea, a native Aotearoa parrot, swooped high up ahead of me in the high sky nearly at the peaks, calling and echoing throughout the vastness. A part from that beckoning it was so silent you could hear a tiny rock clatter down the slope beneath the grass verge under my hanging feet.
So as I headed back to Christchurch I realised I don’t want to carry on living in the flat and I want to find my way in the planes and the mountains in my tent for my last few weeks in this amazing country and really go for it and live in the dust, free.

 

A weekend away

 

It started at as an idea, to get away from it all this weekend, to go tramping and get lost in the mountains and the bush. A meak attempt to starve my self of the devices we take for granted in our society. So I got a bus out of town, where the kind driver dropped me at what he called the lucky spot, where he’d dropped many a wandering cast-away before. It was outside a garage, so I got an Ice Cream and then a Coffee so it would melt faster. The girl packed the ice cream into a huge rainbow coloured, hot air balloon sized, ball of sweet awesomeness. Would you pick up a lowly hitch hiker, with his face splattered in ice cream?
I was only waiting for ten minutes, to my surprise as if I saw me I wouldn’t pick me up, before I was picked up by a man who looked just like a mixture of David Bowie, David Icke, and a lizard. He was an american, expressive silver-fox. He was a psycho-therapist and had worked with ex gang members on rehabilitation programs. He was also a teacher, and had a great way of teaching; dancing on the tables and singing songs to the kids. It was a quick conntection, and I was left by the roadside once more, with a chest filled with warmth and a mind filled with interest. I want to become a listener.
Over my handful of years on this planet, I have become to believe that the reason for being a human is, funnily enough, to fulfill the human experience, which is different for all of us. Find things that satisfy you and do them lots. Always push your boundaries and live your life doing weird things with strange people.
I got picked up by a Samoan called Tim and a Kiwi called Damien. I ended up drinking beers with these guys on the drive and getting drunk and going to their mate Rob’s house party in the mountains. We all got wasted, rented out bikes, and reaked havoc on the town. We then went back to the house, a rather large house, drank lots of Moonshine, and talked shit for hours in the kitchen and outside. When the others had space cakes and went to bed, Damien and I hit the town. We tried to enter a pub but couldn’t because we had bottles. So we met a bunch of random kids on the street. Damien was like “you remind me of my son”. We stood and talked shit for a while and listened to the banging beats that were booming from their cars. We then went to another pub and ordered two beers. Damien poured his away and said “too fuckin fruity”. We then walked home and things got a bit weird. As we were talking, Damien got the idea that I was an undervocer poiliceman, although I have no idea why. He asked me for my pass port and eventually it was okay and we ended up back on good terms. This evoked a sense of mystery in my heart. After talking more shit, I eneded up passed out on the couch with a line of chocolate and orange peel leading towards me. The next morning, we woke up, drank beers, Moonshine and wine, and drove back to Christchurch. I had a sleepy view of the world going past me. My life is a flourishing forest of tapestries but I would trade every moment to relive the summers of my early childhood.

 

A brief introduction to the most fabulous, and fattest, Parrot in the World

 

As the South Pacific sun sinks into a Mountain studded horizon, the deep blue and faint orange twilight passes the cicada’s verse over to the crickets, and a rather special bird rises from it’s twiggy slumber, joining the dance of Aotearoa night. He rustles, clings, and eventually falls from the comfort of his tree, hurtling through the canopy, as other animals stare in shock; just as you would, if you ever saw a big fat man colliding past your window, before your very eyes.
He thumps the ground, showering his audience in dirt, causing mini tremors that stretch, to at least a foot, in all directions. He begins to pat the ground and crunch the leaves in yawning strides, with his long, prehistoric talons latching to the soil. He possesses an unusual cautious pride, as he heads up through the undergrowth and out onto the hilltop, gazing to the endless sea of black spikes that is now the dark forest; much more alive now, blanketed in night, than it was in daylight.
The trees ululation, knowing his call can trump all others, does not phase him, or halt his song any longer. For it is December, mating season of the Kakapo, and he has been waiting for a long time. However, the Kakapo does not breed every year; that depends on how much rimu fruit is available. But not to worry, because the average Kakapo has a whole of 120 years at it’s mercy.
His oval head shrinks into his body, as his entire frame merges into a plump ball of feathers, inflating, much like a balloon. All you see are bright green feathers, two gleaming eyes, and a marble beak. His guttural, war-drum pant can be heard for up to 5km away, to which no other parrot on Earth can compete. He will repeat his boom another 20-30 times that very night, followed by a high pitched metallic ching, for three months to come. The Kakapo is a very horny parrot indeed. How’s that for courting?
He is joined by another 100,000 Kakapo’s each night, all in a mad search for the one. Or so it would be, if you were to arrive at Aotearoa shores over 7,000 years ago, as it peacefully existed, prior to it’s claim beneath the hand of man. Evolution had, before man’s arrival, rendered the Kakapo’s traits, such as the inability to fly and it’s sheer size, quite useful, as it meant the Kakapo could hide from the island’s only predators: eagles and vultures, as there were no native mammals in the forests where the Kakapo roamed. The Kakapo flourished.
But the Kakapo, with it’s strong scent, habit of freezing when threatened and the unfortunate ease for it to be shaken out of trees, made it an easy target when man came along, accompanied by the Kiore (polynesian rat) and polynesian dog. The Kakapo (Maori for night parrot) was sought for it’s decorative purposes by the first humans, as it’s vibrant feathers indicated status and, I’m sure, it’s magical features gave rise to many an enchanted story, beneath the overhanging rocks the first humans dwelled in, and feather’s wrapped them in warmth by the glowing fire, after a day of hunting. Maori used the Kakapo feathers to create various cloaks and garments. There is an ancient Maori proverb used for people who never seem to be satisfied: “You have a Kakapo cloak, and you still complain about the cold”.
During Moa-hunting times, the Maori enjoyed an abundance of resources. Moa’s provided them with sustained clothes and meat that could last for many years. During the Moa hunting period, contrary to their violent cultural image, there is no evidence to show the Maori waged wars. Instead, it is believed that their ways of agression were adapted to the need to fight, among tribes, for food, as a result of having little animals to hunt, and the start of agricultural development that brought land ownership into the spectacle. Wars were waged over land, crops and farms, after they lost their primary source of livelihood. And other species, such as the Kakapo, became targets. The Maori cleared forests for vegetation and thus, violating habitats, pushed the Kakapo higher and farther into more isolated realms, such as the Mountain Peaks of Fiordland. Although, I’m sure much greater spiritual appreciations of land and animals were gratified, over lucritive desires. The Maori deemed, as observations had told of the Kakapo’s irregular breeding patterns that were associated with heavy fruiting events, or “masting”, that the Kakapo had the power to foretell the future. The Kakapo also dropped berries from the Hinau and Tawa trees into secluded pools to preserve the berries for future months. Replicating the Kakapo’s behaviour, the Maori started to preserve their food in the same manner. Their attitude towards the Kakapo wasn’t as destructive as the more recent arrivals.
The true downfall of the Kakapo was met at the arrival of Europeans, who were led by their stony belief that every thing consumable with the possibility of financial value attached, was to be seen as a mere commodity and treated as such. The early settlers, accompanied by weasels, stoats and rabbits, peristed in their relentless quest for the ever domination over land, animals and culture, disregarding ancient ways of living, and striking harsh blows at a defenceless, unique biodiversity that has developed for millenia past, and at a special parrot, endemic to New Zealand bush. Over a century or so, they saw the number of Kakapo plummet, on the main land, from tens of thousands, to non at all.
In the 1800’s, in a desperate bid to save the species from extinction, naturalist Richard Henry set up camp on a remote pocket of Islands in the Deep South, off shore from Stewart Island. Equipped with oars, intuition, and an inner burn to help conserve the wild, he transferred an incredible 570 parrots to these islands, and lived in the inhospitable conditions for 12 years, with a basic cabin and the bush to keep him alive; reserving him a prestigious seat in the world of conservation, and a Kakapo named after him.
But Nature is callous, as stoats swam out to the island’s where Richard resided, killing every single Kakapo that he had tried to save. It was a while until anyone did any thing at all, and even now, conservation efforts are still being made. Such as the Kakapo Recovery Team, who are actively monitoring the Kakapo and have restored it’s population from mere tens to one hundred and twenty four. This progression is wonderful, and hope is not lost for the Kakapo, but it’s presence is as critical as ever, and there is still a lot of work to be done.

To learn more of this spectacular parrot, and to help it’s survival, visit the team at http://kakaporecovery.org.nz/      

A week or so

They say that experience makes you wise, well that’s only if you see it. I’m still not as wise as I’d like to be considering some of the things that I’ve seen and done, but that’s because, as many will agree, when you are in the heart of an experience you only see the tip of the iceberg; the most potential that moment has, in shaping you, is abstracted by distractions of the Now, until some time after.  I’m sure if you found a message in a bottle, you’d be so excited in reading it, that you miss the one behind that was adressed to you. Now I try to invest more energy into making the print people have on my heart and life become a truth. You are as wise as you see.
Jo and I parted on the topic of ear surgery. Unexpected; I envisaged something exotic, until our talk was knotted by time and horns. People gazed for a while as I struggled with my bags like a circus act, until I managed to haul them over my c-shaped body, before moon striding toward the slip-road, that was to be my station for some time to come.
I sat, stood, stretched by the slip-road with my creased bent sign, loud with red and black pen. A car pulled over: “you Mongrel Mob bro?” he said. I said what’s a Mongrel? As it turns out, Mongrel Mob is a street gang and their colours are black and red, the colours im flashing, maby I should have said I was Black Power: their sworn enemy. The world as we know it always has, is and will be tribal.
My lift was with a Brother Trucker. You know you’re in for a journey with Brother Truckers. This one and I told asian stories, which is like ancient people yelling across valleys to one another when you’re both separated by a meter of organised mess and roaring pipes.
Lived the dream at Hobbiton and fulfilled some age old fantasies drinking endemic ale by an open fire in the Hobbiton Pub. One day, I will live in a hole in the ground.
Then another Brother Trucker picked me up who was shaped like an egg. You know you can trust some one who is shaped like an egg. We circled all 33km’s of Lake Taupo, which fills a long extinct volcanoe with aeons to it’s name. Ancient Maori’s buried their chiefs on the island in the middle. A European once rowed their and never came back. No one has heard from him since.
You watch over the light when you have to as our ancestors once had to, and learn that it will go it’s own as it has been forever no matter what. I hoped of putting up my tent before the light went and visited a familiar hostel to talk to Jon about where to do so. He told me I was mad. He said it’s going to rain tomorrow and who the hell picks up a wet hitch hiker. I said no one. He said if you stay here you won’t get a lift so get back on the road with a hi-vis on and look smart. Highly visible and smart, I pressed down to the capital beneath the closing sheets of night.
A weight of darkness was lowered and made way for the navy dusk’s song, briefly, before returning up at the press of a button. I didn’t notice, I was so tuned in to the molecules that drifted through a curved gap in the hills and over the faint ripples of a lake. They went past me, through me, mostly, in their belief that this man must have the devil’s soul for travelling at this unholy time. What else?
Just then, a car pulled up and I joined a farmer and another hitch hiker down the Desert Road through the night. I’d heard tales of hitch hikers being dropped on the Desert Road for the first, and last, time.
Vanessa and I searched gas stations with roles. Vanessa chatted up men and I looked after the bags. As much as I’d like to have swapped, it was best we remained conjugal.
Do you ever meet people whose aura and aesthetics conflict? Vanessa’s did. I guessed it to be a lonely perception of mine, seeing her as physically young. She had clear wrinkles, but not a grey hair that I saw. Her eyes were river moss green, especially when she gazed. She had seen something. She was outlandish, and I sensed our future lands to be outlanded from each other, after all, she could be old. A lady with curly black hair and a twisted face, who’d seen her share of joy, took Vanessa away.
Then a Phillipino girl and her Man Husband appeared and I got in their car, too. The Man thought because I’d been living with a Jehovah’s Witness for four months was a miracle that gave him the cue to preach about the bible in his way that was right, oh so right and hers wasn’t, hers was illogical. I’m sure Jo would agree. I think schizophrenia is often mistaken as faith.
There is a pattern in the world; the loud are above, and the thoughtful are below, beyond. His wife and I stayed quiet, allowing the loud to flow.
In a car, you can only see half the drivers expressions. Every thing changes when you get out to shake their hand, looking them in the eye. It’s as if they slip from a bubble and look at them selves again, but I  don’t mind; we are all each other, after all. I said good bye to his wife with sorrow and warmth.
When my old man and I travelled across Europe to stay at his mud abode in the Bulgarian Mountains, we often used our helmets as pillows and dozed any where we could, which takes you to societies brink. I’d lie and sleepily look at the characters who came and went: stretching stop offs, angry wives, The Drugged Up, old business man and his business son, the overly joyful. You find a rare breed in those hours. I’d often wonder what it would be like to spend a day with each one of them, doing what they do.
  Just as I was considering a night like the latter mentioned, I was swept in to a car of clubbers by my own reluctant curiosity; reluctance at their more ambiguous reasons for crawling at this time that just did not intruigue me much at all, then again entering a different dimension every 20 minutes fed my curiosity. Some day I might be stuck in a metal and glass box and all I’ll have beside a coffee and a screen to stain my brain will be the memories of strange lands beneath strange lights.
After greeting the Lord of It All in front, the bouncing driver and my stoned neighbour, we drove into the night.
My neighbour kept warming me into the fact that I was some piece of the puzzle being given this chance to be a part of this jigsaw of elegant heroes.
My neighbour, being the apprentice of Lord of It All, did the bitch work, selling “tinnies” – pre-rolled joints – to strangers and getting told to stuff it at every thing he said. He was intelligent, when we were alone, but he wasn’t when we weren’t. You and I are prey to conformity, too, with it’s cutting ways that makes ignorance blossom.
Majority of the night I spent listening to my neighbours disappointment at having to wait for Lord of It All to smoke crack with his clients, who was thin faced and jiggled around a lot like a puppet, it seemed strange to me that his every word was obeyed.
We picked up the bouncing one’s dad, who stared into the checkered driver’s seat like he was going to do some thing very bad for the whole journey and if you’ve ever seen some one who is staring so distantly into something as trivial as a chair, you think that they must be focusing on something, but really they aren’t and is there much they’re focusing on on the inside either? Just more of that one thing that keeps me focusing on nothing at all and I don’t know what I’m missing out on apparently, cuz.
As we got deeper into the night we entered a Maori house party. I remembered clear that night the warm welcome but also an undercurrent of mistrust. One guy sat and stared into us all with eyes that had been long victims of crack and was entering the stage of no return, he talked in grunts and wasn’t very human at all, but then a lifelong crack addict talked to me who was really great and loved to live. We had to leave, though, because the house party thought we were “bloods”, as we were wearing red, and they were “crips” because they wore blue.
Gangs are big in Aotearoa; as one Maori elder put it, an “ingrained aggression” that is passed from one generation to the next. The Maori were the only indigenous people the the British had to resort to bargaining with for their land out of the inability to win the war. Maori’s would behead people and eat their brains because they believed this gave them knowledge. They were far from a peaceful people, and the British knew this, and they suffered it too. What is interesting is the spiralling of colonised people’s into the realms of drugs and alcohol.
Lord of It All said yeah man now you get to see how the world works. you’re telling me to see how the world works when you really believe that bag of crystals you live for is sourced locally?
We then drove the starey guy back to his home and in the window I saw two kids playing and giggling.
  I ran on zombie mode for a few hours before getting some deserved sleep on the ferry over to the South Island.
Entering the South Island is a passing into a dusty vision, through the port hole window, the lines between dream realms were quite blurred and hard sleep on crippling seats took me to join the rest of the Mecca trinity we all here, in this hunk, sanctified in, being carried over opaque coral shades in the deep and round to see the shards of light through split clouds laying into splits in the sillhouettes of zig zag Ranges, down, into canopies untouched on the lonely shore that nestled into it’s firm hold a settlement that became magnified now in the timeless awe.
My first lift of the journey is with Damien;  classic Kiwi with prolonged eye contact and slow speech, which might have been because of his lack of sleep or just how chilled out he was. He was off to the Spa for a “beer, chill and a perv”.
For the most part I’m bad at judging quick when hitch hiking, but when you aren’t in a position to risk the little you own you have to learn to be. A mad driver pulled over with tattoos and shades. The boot clunked open before we made eye contact. He wanted me to throw all of my gear in his boot before talking to him and when I did manage to get a few bitter words from him they were just “stick it in the boot, bro!” and when I asked where he was going, “going that way!” so I said thanks but not thanks and sped off.
After a long time of pacing in the layby, I got picked up by Duanne, who took me to the seal colony in the waterfall. The seals dipped and dived,dancing happily. Three seals sat in line on a series of rocks on the bank with their heads cocked to the sky as seals do with pride. I looked at Duanne and we exchanged a human smile.
I got to KaiKoura and put up my tent on Duanne’s friend’s lawn. I stayed for two nights and on the last day visited the local seal colony. On the floorboards leading through a pond and bank, I saw three pups lying quite far off from the colony soaking up the sun on the bank. They looked as if they’d just been popped out of a cannon. I’ve fallen in love with seals. As I built the courage to get closer to get better photographs I sat with my legs dangling over a plastic underground tunnel. I then heard a groan and just missed a deadly seal bite. The other seals responded to the fear of their friends almost instantly and stiffened their flippers to hold up their plump bodies and gave me the death stare in an attempt to scare me off. When the wind picked up they really flung them selves at me and I had to leave.
I went for a walk and looked over to the KaiKoura ranges, the dove-white dust on the tips looked as if it could have been brushed away. A long the reefs, arched rocks appeared to be escaping from the land, pointing to the sea and the mountains. Marokura, Maori God of these waters, was believed to have carved out these reefs in order for an abundance of life to flourish.
I often complain about modern civilisation but in these moments I deeply appreciate the opportunity it gives me to see the majesty of our natural world. Some 40 years ago I wouldn’t have had the chance to visit the ends of the Earth like now.
Day flipped to night and I walked back to my tent. Simple things in life such as the faint curavture of the dark ocean against the starry sky fills my heart with such love but also worry that my chldren’s children may not be around to see these things if we carry on the way we are with our wars and Earthly destruction.
It took me so long to get a lift out of Kaikoura I even saw a whale watch bus drive towards town and also back from town before getting picked up by Brent. We talked shit all the way to Christchurch then had beers.
After weeks of living rough in tents, I thought I deserved the fancy hotel I booked my self that night. It had a double bed, a plasma TV, a hot shower and I could sprawl out naked like a starfish on the silky sheets and just forget every thing ever. I felt disgusted at my self but still enjoyed all 140 dollars of it.
 Now I’ve found a base in quake torn Christchurch, my adventures around the South Island can begin.

A night in Krabi, Thailand, October 2013

In Asia meeting a partner is the heart of a night if you travel alone. The beauty and indeed the caution is that there is no pre-ordaned interaction such is the case in college or work;  those agents are for the real world. You are no longer in or for the real world.

Besides, who wants such a monopolised way to live when here things are so speedy youre on your feet five times at once. There is no force for you to be together but the force for free youth. You don’t have to share the same haircut or flavor but better if you oppose or at least rub on some thing, spoon feeding the mouth of leaning-over-tables-beer-in-hand-fiery-slurred-bouncing that you are going to have as in that moment both parties are aware that double vision promises for future reunions are empty most of the time. You’re both aware that the stirring present is the only time you will have together ever and we don’t want careers etched on our gravestones; or for that matter any thing that happens in Asia.
“Craig” he said.
“Jake” I said.
“Had a girl yet?” Some times I feel that if people had to “come out” as straight, I’d be the first they’d run to. Is it my haircut?
“Nope” I said.
“Then why are we here?”
“Here” was filled with people who were good to get away from to a bar that was Westerner-free and enjoyed in peace by local Thai people, seeking cover from the cultural downpour that rained relentlessly just a few blocks away. We lost track of “rounds” after the fourth drink.
Craig was in the army and boasted a bold tribal tattoo on his left arm that he prided with a vest he bought one time at a Spanish party island. He had a thick Liverpool accent that swung necks and surprised cocktail-holders.
We befriended one of the bar men for different reasons. I talked to him about music and tribal-man talked to him about drugs. In our time the latter topic seems to be sought for in most social settings and is the fast lane to status.
The Thai barman had his black and red Manchester United hat low and in a rainbow hoop, circling his head that made his weathered face appear unusually small.
When tribal-man had used every thing in his power to get drugs as it’s not as easy as it is in our own country, because there is less a fear of death there, hat-man remarked about a friend he knew who had “The Best In Town”.
“It’s Ecstasy White And Makes You Feel Good And Good The Next Day Too” Said hat-man.
“Perfect” Said tribal-man, not one question too many, and after agreeing that all men are brothers we organised a time and a place and swayed our own ways. I was taken by the adventure more than any thing else.
At the edge of the pier we were warned by handfuls of shifting Thai men robed in black that it was they who had the white stuff and that we should go with them but we insisted that we were going to wait for our man and out past the light pollution all I saw were huge shadows of islands hanging distantly.
Then we heard a coarse roar in that unique way boat engines roar because of the splash and then beside the pier was a waving boat driver with hat-man perched on the end of the boat with two fingers touching lips under sly smiling eyes in the low glow of cigarrete flame against a forever blackness behind him and the rumble below him. There is a curfew on driving boats here and we had an audience on the pier but Asian boats are narrow and so were the chances of getting caught we hoped being as white as we were and in to the middle of the boat we were crammed along side our beers and goose bumps.
I’ve learned that Mountains and Islands appear bigger when it’s dark. Whether that’s because the dark is the truth or because you feel vulnerable when you put your self in the dark I don’t know. I remember sitting on the back of my Dad’s screaming Harley Davidson when we rode back to England from the Isle of Skye and when I squinted enough the Silent Scottish Mountains looked haunted and infinite.
We pulled up next to a pier of one of these Islands and hat-man leapt onto the boards, calmly approaching the entrance that was not to be seen. We were in the company of the only light in a whole maze of islands and it was hard to make out the driver on the end of the boat. We stood on the edge, envisaged the night and drew exciting conclusions that this was good because it would make a great story when we get home but I’ve told it a few times and every time it has sounded long and dry.
When hat-man approached from the Island I was more acutely alert than hopeful and tribal-man gleamed monk-like through the ripples back to the city.
By the harbour we munched sweet, gooey pancakes baked brown and crispy swimming in coconut oil that dripped down our chins as we pressed our teeth into the soft mango dough and soaked our mouths with Asian delight. In these moments every flavour you can get your hands on is added to the cake.
We got on the road as fast as we could. Tribal-man and I on one scooter behind hat-man and his friend on another scooter and we drove with speed possessed by a confidence we felt entitled or obliged to. I clung to the back of tribal-man as I have done before to my Dad and a familiar contemplation of death rose in my chest. But I managed to push it down after swallowing the distinctive asian air and those two things as well as brief side views of the waving Thai men, tribal-man’s hair line and orange freckles are all I remember from that journey.
I was starting to become absorbed by it all when we were stopped by one of the single most terrifying things that I have ever seen and my first thoughts were of the white stuff, betrayal and an unexpected feeling of strange content that sat in my stomach for a while. Why didn’t we turn our scooters when the lights were blurry and tint?
We stared at a light dotted wall draw ever closer as distant as Islands and as silent as Mountains, but a lot more infinite in the ink of the fake dark, because when you are drifting with the sharks beneath an ocean of which the light will do any thing to crush you with and the shadowy ripples soothed to stagnance as the dust we were once spinning with glee began to settle as we rose to a solemn surface, there is not a lot else to do but to stare and wait for the wall. I laughed absently.
I remember reading some where that 70% of Thai people favour police corruption over justice as long as the economy is boosted. I also heard of people taking bullets for smoking a joint.
As we passed hat-man being patted down we floated into the spotlight of a solid uniform’s torch like a salmon passing into a net. A hand gestured to take off our helmets and sprayed light onto our white faces, and waved us through! We kept going as if we were so relaxed and had known all a long that we were to be allowed through the wall.
Now our conscious spinned on a pins-eye as we debated whether to leave our friends or to stand in the dark layby we had pulled into and wait for them. The debate was merely a wirrel of “what if’s?” and “how the?” and swearing and pacing around and excitement and fear. What if they had been arrested? Was hat-man a drug lord? Dude, that was totally planned. They know who he is. He’s clearly a barren. And what if we wait here and are seen as accomplices. They’ve been gone for quite a while now…
The decision was to wait. 2 hours. Besides, we had tried to leave, but we had ran out of gas. So when hat-man & co chugged out of no-where the only exchange of words was that they were going to collect fuel for us. They took a very long time.
You know It’s hard to see the soul through the smog of Krabi night and words. Until you’ve reached the true country together and you’ve been left alone with each other, tangled into one experience, exploring the basic web of human curiosity and fear that you both share; that we all share. It was like blowing the dust off an old map and finding the yellow stains again. For me the sweetest thing was to see again that I am still a lost child in a great circus no matter how many things I will ever see.
They returned with our gas and we pushed down the road a few kilometers to be sure that we were as far away from the wall as we could possibly be so that we could organise. As it turned out, hat-man had seen the wall from a while before and had thrown the white stuff behind him, which is how they got off like they did. We were glad for them and I was more than prepared to call it a day but tribal-man suggested that they go back and pick it up. I laughed out of flippancy but it fell on def ears and yes, believe it or not, they returned to the scene. They left us with a dubious address to go to which is where they said they would meet us and yes, we braved the journey and headed for the address. The glory of Google Maps. Well, we didn’t have any where else to go.
The pink line on the screen just seemed to go on. Finally when the red blob appeared at the end of the pink line we knew we were warm. Hesitantly, we went up the mud-track with caution and passed many a hollow concrete building we knew weren’t really hollow. After 4 kilometeres: Bleep bleep. Bleep bleep. You have reached your destination.
The red blob was a grey concrete bunker at the end of a long long line of grey concrete bunkers, with jagged cracked walls. The metal door was open. We walked in. The inside was as desolate as the outside, but with a centered lightbulb clinging to a wire that flickered into existence when tribal-man punched a nearby switch. Through the empty room was a series of doors, like one of those riddles you see when you have to choose a door and you don’t know what’s on the other side. The only locked one simply must have been hat-mans because we could see the roof of poster girls stuck to the wall and the other room was as empty as the first room. The door at the back turned round into a typical SE Asian toilet: a hole in the floor. Behind this was a whole network of corridors and darknss that I couldn’t bear to wrench my gut over, I returned to tribal-man with a trembling tone of “nothing to be seen…”
We felt so vastly vulnerable that no word can describe. I was scared, but sort of glad that I’d been so naiive. This would make a story.
It was honestly the spookiest place I have been in my life. As we sat in the cool room and finished the last of our beers, we kept hearing shuffling from out there. The shuffling came from a black bird on the top of the neighbours half built concrete bunker that looked like a construction site. It was very crooked and kept swaying in the grey solitude with it’s huge beak as if it was in a crypt. I wondered why on Earth was it sat there with no chicks or nest. Then I realised it must have been ill. But it was half covered in dark leaves and the sway was so out of tune with the rustling leaves that it wretched some thing in my gut that startled and scared me more than any thing that had happened all night. It just looked so alone and didn’t look like a bird at all. Birds fly, peck things and are filled with colour. This one wasn’t, all it did was sway.
Just then hat-man came with his friend and wafted the holy white stuff in the air and we all went in side and sat around a home made crack pipe like we were in a seyonce. The only difference was that we weren’t holding hands. The pipe was a small bottle with a straw leaning outwards and hat-man poured the thousands of tiny crystals into the hub of the pipe, which filled with smoke when lit that soon became clear again as the users cheek sucked to the teeth and we all watched in silence the first few times it was passed around the three of them, each one taking a series of consecutive inhales an exhales like they were on a mission, determined, it was serious stuff. Truly.
I eased into the situation but the only temptation I had was questions.
Hat-mans friend told me in stuttered English that this was a rare delicacy for them and could only be had when they encountered Westerners like ourselves. I found this hard to believe until the night progressed and they seemed to be genuinely taking it and treasuring it as a rare treat. Ironically, a frequent user will very rarely appreciate the drugs effect. But these two were really savouring it and making it last. It was special and I felt humbled as their witness. They didn’t treat us like we were “rich Westerners” either, countering the normal treatment of blonde and tattooed people in SE Asia. Hat-man gave tribal-man his money back, apologising for the whole conundrum.
When their brains had been rattled enough by drugs we all headed to the clubs. I chose to drive the bike this time. The club we visited was also void of westerners and filled with wild Thais, the place was so vibrant.
A unique experience in SE Asian clubs are the “back scratchers, bone clickers and massage” boys in the loo. There is no naughty business, but when you are having a pee they come up behind you and start doing all the previously stated things and then charge you money. Anyway,  after expensive beer, live music and listening to tribal-man talk a whole lot of drugged up shit we decided to play our cards with some girls. I approached a group of Thai girls and we talked and subsequently worked it with one and ended up kissing her.
Hat-man and his friend were the first to go, and then tribal-man and I parted ways and we all headed our own way in life. Outside I saw my girls moustache that must have been hiding behind my blurred vision and the dim light. Now, I am Bi-sexual, but lady boys aren’t my thing. I love peanut butter and I love marmite but I don’t like them together.

Kid

I would say that Andrew was gifted. Not only did his inventions privately secure an anthro-utopia, they ran parallel with his modesty and sadly
the world was too lost in sport and politics to be invited a long to the party and from an early age Andrew had been made acutely aware of a comforting truth; at least he could keep going without noise from their strange dance.
 The world was the alien because the world had alienated Andrew. Andrew would choose to gaze at the trees over the blackboards and to get his free kicks from books rather than a field a ball and a net. Andrew’s reclusive spurs sprang from the shuns he endured by his tutors like suggesting the “minds effect on quanta” wasn’t relevent in science class and preferring to play in space over the play ground was idealistic and childish and to the system he was a stone in the cogs.
 He was expelled after drawing lines through a whole exam paper after spotting faults in the fact he had been spoon fed the same dense doo doo as his class mates as well as a long line of potatoes before him. Let’s say he didn’t want to be a potato. He wanted to be a Kumara.
 Andrew took a keen interest in botanies and walked the entire Kruger
National Park in search of a rare species of cacti and utilised it’s ingredients developing a cure for the ebola virus.
 When he arrived home to an abandoned house he died of alcohol poisoning and had his name dedicated to a bench in Maine.