no-name girl in jelly shoes

what they say is true, i believe they keep the rawest kinds of beauty here at the bottom of the earth. at the end of all things? this weekend i was lucky enough to experience a sort of scenery that was so effectively unhinging...i mean no words. i've tried to write this thing on like seventeen different occasions with the intention of conveying the particular sort of newglee i felt in these mountains, almost giddy. i don't want to be tired and overdramatic and i don't want to downplay this thing, but i think it's a personal sort of affirmation you'd feel when you make you really nail knitting for the first time or have just successfully cooked a dinner from start to finish with only minor third degree burns. So to set the scene; a german engineer, an aspiring film producer, a self-described woman's rights activist/hip-hop choreographer and i walk into a bar...and then the next morning all pile into a rental car named "sunny". steering on the wrong side where left is right, we set off across the country through wildly winding/jutting/plummeting mountain roads negotiating our way through some seriously stomach droppingly stunning scenes, too surreal to really comprehend. it was a kind of setting laid out in front of us that it would not have been surprising at all to have to break for an orc riding a t-rex around each prehistoric jutting cliff-face bend in the road. "new zealand....it's not just part of Australia!!!" Four hours and half a tank of gas later, it's sunset on the west coast over a slice of the weirdest pizza i've ever experienced (when placing our order, we were asked if we wanted apricot or barbeque sauce with our broccoli pie). We had arrived in Punakaiki, known for it's beach front blowholes and pancake rocks...intriguing. It was here I had my first mountain-cliff-beach-rainforest collision and still haven't fully recovered. A short hike spat us out onto this rocky outcropping overlooking this canyon of an ocean setting, giant rock faces emerging out of the sea like the remnants of some kind of ancient city. "new zealand....rocks!!!" i can't describe this scene adequately, and the pictures never do it justice, but i got that adrenaline rust taste in my throat and my chest kind of closed up and my pupils dilated and words weren't ready. after sunset we retreated back to an adoreable beach hostile thing and bunked with two french mons who picked out various django reinhardt battles until the wee hours. It's weird not being able to fall back on the same cheap cultural references for jokes or having all puns or word play fall flat. i find myself thinking about half a dozen times a day 'bummer, that would have killed back home'. humor with a language barrier is diminished and oddly enhanced with exaggerated facial expressions with no throwback inside jokes to fall back on. we laugh at phrasing, these guys nearly burst a blood vessel when i used the phrase "wailing on it" when attempting to describe how to really obliterate someone in foursquare. so yes. the next morning we loped along the beach and then got back into sunny and drove the rest of the way to hokitika, a small town where this annual Wild Foods Festival is held. It's interesting being in such a small country, the entire region has this sort of small town community type feel. no one has as last name on the south island, folks here on the east were talking about going to this festival like it was some theme party down the road, and it was known that very few would be left behind. some took party buses, many hitch-hiked (notably quite safe here, and a common practice for much of the starving youth of the nation) but one way or another the majority of Christchurch and everywhere in between set out on this weird kind of pilgramage to get their hands on some whitebait and mountain oysters. It should now be noted that this festival ended up being completely lame, the food was pretty tame and expensive...we were done with it in an hour and spent the rest of the day tramping around in the mountains we had seen the day before on the cross country drive that was easily the highlight of the weekend. in this case the journey truly was the reward. except the earthworm in a shot of redbull. that was pretty sweet.