The similarities between New Zealand's South Island and Patagonia are so striking as to be almost disorienting. And the fact of the matter is that traveling around, here, is just reminding me of how much I yearn to someday return to Patagonia. The scenery and topography and weather are all amazingly similar, and I find Patagonia much more culturally interesting than New Zealand.
Although it's easy to say that New Zealand is a stunningly beautiful country, I hate to say that I find it rather boring. I like the people, to the extent that I've interacted with them, better than the Australians (who are brash and more "rednecky") – perhaps it might be accurate to say that New Zealanders are like Canadians, contrasted with Australians' more USA-style. But as much as I love my little hikes, my urban and rural random explorations, my real interest in travel is with culture. New Zealand offers the Maori angle, as Australia offers the aboriginal. There's a great deal of interest there, but neither is particularly accessible to the casual traveler – you get something packaged and museum quality, and frankly you would learn more surfing wikipedia on the subject for a few hours. True cultural immersion in the damaged, ultra-colonialized native cultures of ANZ is basically impossible.
So what's left? Just a bunch of Britishy pseudo-Americans. That sounds harsh. I like the New Zealand accent – as a linguist, I like to try to work out what makes it different, and I think I've reached a point where I can tell it apart from Australian. They do weird things to the front vowels, in New Zealand.
There's the other problem with traveling. I told myself while in Japan last year that I wasn't going to travel, touristically, alone any more. And here I am, less than a year later, traveling alone again. Why? It's hard to resist. The opportunity arises, I have cash burning a hole in my bank account, and I go off on some adventure. But… though I enjoy aspects of it, I feel my aloneness, when traveling, that I never do when living day-to-day life.
The main purpose of this trip was to visit my mother. I don't get down to see her very often – it seems to run once every two years. And the trip to NZ was spontaneous – I had some extra money (trust me, I needed it – NZ is easily the most expensive place I've ever traveled, more so than even Japan), and an extra 6 days to use up, and I don't when I'll get another chance. My original intent had been to go to Singapore and Malaysia after seeing my mom, but the Lunar New Year holiday created airline scheduling problems that I wasn't able to resolve due to having procrastinated too long on planning.
I enjoy "road trips" which is the type of trip this has been. By the time I return my rental car to the Auckland Airport, I'll have logged 3500 km trekking around NZ, easily. But the side effect of "road tripping" is that I have way too much time to think, as I drive. When traveling on public transit (airplanes, boats, trains, buses) I don't think as much, because I can read, I can relax, I can nap, I can look out the window attentively. But driving requires more concentration, and all I can do, as I drive, is listen to music (which in New Zealand has proven difficult due to the sparsity of radio stations and a problem with my mp3 player) and think. Think. Think.
My thoughts are: I like Korea better than New Zealand or Australia; I miss Patagonia but like Korea better than Patagonia, too; I like Korea better than most places, so I guess I'm in the right place, for now, in my life. Just because I like Korea doesn't mean I like some of the crap that gets pulled – I've been watching (via the weird, voyeuristic window that is facebookland) the misery of some of my fellow Jeollanam English teachers with dismay, and have essentially made up my mind to skip the renewal with the public schools and return to hagwon work. Most foreigners in Korea feel that hagwon work is much worse than public school work, and there are definitely ways in which public school teaching is a "cushy" job… but the utter disregard for competent administration seems pervasive and universal in the public schools, at least in Jeollanam, while with hagwon at least, it's more hit-or-miss – so for every incompetent administrative experience you can also run across things done quite well. Whatever.
Here are some pictures (not in any particular order) showing the Patagonisity of the South Island.
This first is one of the long, one-lane bridges that seem extremely common here, even along fairly major highways. Just remember – trucks and RVs have right-of-way: might makes right.
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The town of Kaikoura, where I am at the present moment:
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