Steve Bein, writer & philosopher
Find all of the Fated Blades novels at Powell's, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Audible, or from your favorite neighborhood bookstore.
The final chapter of the saga of the Fated Blades is the novella Streaming Dawn, an e-book exclusive available for any platform.
If you want to follow my quest to become the Worst Bikepacker in Australia right from the beginning, start with my August 29th post, “Not All Who Wander Are Lost.” Then just click Newer whenever you reach the bottom of a new page.
Or, if you want to fast-forward past the Tasmanian Trail and see how hard I tried to become the Worst Bikepacker in New Zealand, start with my October 22nd post, “And He’s Off!”
One year ago, in the parking lot at Cape Reinga, I assembled Booster, filled her water bottles, and took the above photo. Then I started riding south on the Tour Aotearoa.
I knew it was more than I could handle. The Tasmanian Trail proved that. Initially the deal I made with myself was this: The TT is your test. Pass the test and you get to ride the TA. Well, I failed the test. Hard. But I attempted the TA anyway, and man, I’m glad I did.
Hindsight being 20/20, it’s fair to say that bringing my bike and camping gear down to the bottom of the world is one of the best decisions of my life. Sometimes in life you bite off more than you can chew. Sometimes the thing you bit bites back, and it starts chewing on you. With the Big Ride, the whole point was to bite off more than I could chew, knowing it would chew me up, and that’s exactly what happened.
The Me who rode two days into the wind on Ninety Mile Beach could not have fought through the four days of unrelenting headwinds that greeted the Me of a month later, on the north end of the South Island. Three days into that onslaught, a heartbroken Me gave away his ukulele because it caused too much drag. (It took nearly a year for me to pick up the uke again.) That Me could not have climbed the Crown Range in a single push, and the Me who ultimately made that climb wouldn’t have had to surrender his ukulele.
The long and short of it is, the Me who started the TA didn’t have the mental or physical fortitude to finish it. The Me of today seems to have kept that mental fortitude from the Big Ride, and he’s testing his leg strength later this weekend with a sixty-mile ride from Yellow Springs to Cincinnati to enjoy the fall colors. If I make it, it’ll be my longest riding day ever. (My max on the TA was 42 miles.)
Anyway, the upshot is I’m stronger and hardier than I used to be, in every way worth measuring. That means the Big Ride is up there with my PhD, my black belts, and my novels as a major milestone in my life. I try not to let pride play a big role in my life, but I gotta say, I’m proud of this one. In fact, I’m so proud of it that I commemorated it with a tattoo. (My first!)
I love it. It says Not all those who wander are lost, which is the second line of The Riddle of Strider. I’d tell you that’s the poem Bilbo Baggins writes about Aragorn, but obviously you already knew that. If anyone had any doubt that I’m a mega-nerd, a tattoo in Elvish surely dispelled it.
I knew it had to be a circle, because rings are a thing with Tolkien nerds and because that’s the only way I could think of to make it upside right to everyone. (I don’t like the idea of a tattoo that’s upside right to everyone else in the world, because that means it’s upside down to me. It’s mine and I deserve to see it upside right.) The fact that the big swoopy lines resemble Booster’s spokes makes it even cooler.
I have just one regret from the ride: when I finally reached Bluff, I was so exhausted that I completely forgot to get myself a medal. Someone sells them down there, and past Me knew that. But the Me that reached Bluff, stronger though he was, was as forgetful as ever, and on top of that he had long since run out of ADHD medication, plus he was tired as hell. So no medal for Steve, but a tattoo is pretty damn good as a substitute.
Hey, I will get back to this trip report ASAP, but this message can’t wait. Morocco needs help.
In the awful wake of this earthquake, the Moroccrew put together some financial aid for Driver Abdul and Mountain Man Mohammed, two of the guides who took such good care of us over there. In the process of doing that, we heard from a mutual friend who works for GoFundMe. She put together a list of vetted places you can donate, where your money will go directly to people who need it:
I am not that worried about our new friend Mohammed, our mountain guide (who I’ll tell you more about in later posts). That dude is tough as nails, and since the quake didn’t kill him, I don’t think the aftermath will. But he is sleeping on the street because the buildings in his town aren’t safe to enter.
So I do worry about the folks who aren’t as tough as nails. Not everyone gets to be a mountaineer when they grow up. For that matter, not everyone gets to grow up. Nearly 3,000 people are dead. Among the living there are babies and kids and old folks and people who were already injured or sick before the quake struck. Many live in small towns like Mohammed’s, with few resources to help their people.
I can tell you already, he’s going to spend most of our money on other people. That’s who he is. He told us about how hard covid hit Morocco, and all the things he was doing to help back then. It’s not a particularly poor country, but it’s not particularly rich either. In the post-covid economy, a lot of folks couldn’t feed their kids. Mohammed was there to help, and it’s a good bet he’s helping now, even as I type this.
Still reeling from that, they sure as hell don’t need an earthquake. If you’re able to help, I have it on good authority that you can get your money directly to Moroccans who really need it. Here’s that link again: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/morocco-earthquake-relief
If you’re ever in the mood for a quick philosophical read, I highly recommend Harry Frankfurt’s lovely little book On Bullshit. Bullshit is one of those words that you think you understand, but when you take a closer look at it you realize there’s more to it than you thought. There’s a difference between lying to someone and bullshitting someone, right? Frankfurt goes looking for exactly where that line is, and it’s worth following him along the journey.
Here’s what I’m learning about Morocco: there’s a lot of bullshitting here. Please understand, this isn’t meant as an insult. I’m not talking about lying here, I’m talking about the art of bullshitting.
Price tags, for instance. This is a haggling culture, and that means for certain items, when you ask what they cost, the first answer you get is bullshit. So is the second, and possibly the third. I bought a $35 table runner for $20 because $35 was a bullshit price to begin with.
As it turns out, lots of other numbers are bullshit too. A four-hour drive is never under five hours. Sometimes a street isn’t one street. It’s two, or a half, or whatever it needs to be.
Today we toured Fez, not the city but the medina—the old city, where we’re told there are fourteen gates in fourteen kilometers of wall, because in the Koran seven is a sacred number and so are multiples of seven. Sacred seven isn’t a bullshit number, and maybe fourteen gates isn’t either, but the fourteen-kilometer wall is pure bullshit. For one thing, the actual length is closer to eight km, and for another, the builders of said wall never measured it in kilometers. They couldn’t have, because the medina is about a thousand years older than the invention of the kilometer.
Fez is called the City of 9,000 Streets. One map shows 9,760 streets, in a city of about 12,000 riyads, and a little over 13,000 homes in total. Those numbers are bullshit. That would be an average of less than two homes per street. Even if each home sits on two or three streets, you can’t account for long streets with loads of homes and businesses. The only way to get 9,000 streets is to stretch the hell out of what you mean by “street.” For example, this walkway counts, though it’s barely as wide as my shoulders:
To which you might say, sure, all city nicknames are bullshit. New York is not in fact a big apple. Philadelphia, supposedly the City of Brotherly Love, is famous for its sports fans booing Santa and pelting him with snowballs. Plus, who cares how many streets there are?
If you said that, you’d be right. I don’t care. I’m telling you all this because I love a good bullshitter.
Done poorly, bullshitting is just annoying. Done maliciously, it can be dangerous. (Right now a host of bullshitters are actively trying to topple democracies all over the globe, by putting a pretty face on fascism.) But done well, bullshitting is a high art. So now let me introduce you to a bullshitter par excellence.
This is Idris, our tour guide in Fez, and I wish he were my grandpa. He would have gotten along famously with my Grandpa Bein, who I would not call a bullshitter per se, but he is the man who said, “I don’t lie, but I do improve the truth.”
Idris was a history teacher before he became a tour guide. In a city founded in the 9th century, that’s a pretty great resume. (And by the way, an educator myself I can tell you, all good teachers are bullshitters. They can make things matter to you even if those things don’t really matter.) He was also born and raised here in the medina. “I’m so old, the walls here know me,” he told Misty and me. Then, with a sly smile, he whispered, “Thank god they don’t talk.”
I don’t care that his 9,760 streets and 13,000 homes are bullshit numbers. I like a good storyteller, and Idris is a hell of a storyteller. He also knows where to get the best price on anything you might want to buy. Or so he says. Maybe he’s bullshitting there too, but whenever we need something—a notebook for me, a portable fan for Sam, I forget what else—he tells us just where to go.
I’ll be honest: Idris was a breath of fresh air in a city that needs more fresh air. Morgan put it well: “There are some challenging smells here.” The heat doesn’t help, I’m sure, but the fact of the matter is we’re hiking long miles through a city whose sewer system is 1,100 years old. Oh, and it doesn’t work as well as it used to. There was an effort a couple of generations ago to eradicate the rats, and as Idris explained to us, it turns out ancient people knew a thing or two about what rats are good for.
We see feral cats everywhere we look, and back in the day, their job was to keep the rats in the sewers. The rats’ job was to eat the stuff they like to eat in the sewers, and make their nests out of stuff they find down there, and as it turns out, those are two really important services. They clear clogs. When the French decided rats are gross, they exported that attitude to their protectorate, Morocco. Now the street cats scrounge for something other than rats, the rats are mostly gone, and the sewers back up and stink.
Volubilis! Once a major city of the ancient world, then it just sort of dropped off the map. Founded by the Berbers, taken by the Carthaginians, conquered by the Romans, reclaimed by the locals, settled by Christians, resettled by Muslims, then abandoned, scavenged for parts, and left for dead. For 1,700 years Volubilis was the spot. Then, about 700 years ago, everyone just packed up their shit and left. Kind of like Detroit.
The mosaics here are absolutely incredible. The only other place I’ve seen the like is Pompeii. And like Pompeii, there are countless others here just waiting for UNESCO-funded archaeologists to discover them. Fans of Greek mythology will recognize the feats of Hercules, and fans of American mythology will recognize an early Roman version of the Bat-Signal.
Abdul drove us here from Casablanca, with a stop through Moulay Idriss where I had my second serving of vegetable tagine. This is a lovely cumin-spiced dish of root vegetables on a cloud of couscous, baked in the ceramic equivalent of a cast-iron Dutch oven. It’s conical, it’s colorful, it’s called a tagine, and the veggie version is by far the most common vegetarian menu item in Morocco. In the next two weeks I will have vegetable tagine somewhere between ten and twenty times.
But hey, we already know I can eat the same thing almost indefinitely. Nate, not so much. I think you could put $100,000 cash in a tagine, tell him it’s free for the taking, and he would not lift the lid to check.
Not $100,000 cash.
I think Sam and Morgan had vegetable tagine about as often as I did. Our lone meat-eaters, Nats and Misty, enjoyed more variety, though I must say I saw a lot of chicken and lamb skewers. But Morocco does deserve a tip of the cap as one of the easiest countries to be vegetarian. There was always something for me to eat. Often the same thing, but I’m not going hungry.
And there are some fabulous drinks to go with this. My favorite? Avocado juice. The second I saw it on the menu, I knew I was going to order it. But it got even better. The waiter asked, “With milk or orange juice?” Me: “Orange juice.” Because obviously we need to make this thing weirder. Waiter: “Sugar or no sugar?” Me: “Sugar.” Because I’ve put extra sugar on a lot of things in my life, but never an avocado.
I’m telling you, this thing is delicious. And if ever a drink deserved a crazy straw, this is the one.
After Volubilis, Moulay Idriss, and a quick stop in Meknes, we drive on to Fez. Which is also spelled Fes, or even Fais. Abdul is also spelled Abdel, and in fact the spelling conventions in general here are just a great big mess. That’s what you get when France colonizes you. Those people have too damn many vowels. There are so many words that begin with a oua instead of a w, and I have to imagine this has a depressive effect on the economy. Just think how much higher their ink budget has to be. Just think of how much faster their athletes would be, or how much longer the street signs would last, if they didn’t have to bear the weight of all those extra letters.
In Fez, or Fes, we’re staying in a riyad, or riad, which is a traditional multi-story house build around a courtyard, or courrtyarrde. Our riad is about 300 years old! We’re in the medina, the old part of the city, where the streets are narrow and the walls are high. That’s a good idea in a desert country near the equator! On most streets you’ve got shade most of the time. More about Fez tomorrow!
At about 2:30 in the morning, the rest of the Moroccrew roll in. It wasn’t smooth sailing. We had a driver lined up to bring them to the hotel, but they never saw him. We would never learn what went wrong. He waited for them for hours, but at the wrong terminal. Was he given their flight information or wasn’t he? Above all, why weren’t we given his contact information?
It’s not a good sign of things to come. On top of that, the hotel has reservations for us for six nights. We’re only staying one. Another bad sign.
But at least the gang’s all here! We have three new arrivals, all from the Peru Crew of 2017. Nate the Generous did almost all the legwork planning this thing, which is the norm for him. He did the same with our fantastic trip to Peru, so Morocco is promising even if our driver and our hotel haven’t quite got things squared away.
Nate and Sam basking in the heat.
Sam the Mighty is the fittest person I know. She coaches Crossfit and runs marathons on mountain trails. Sam also gave me the best advice I could possibly have gotten for my big rides in Tasmania and New Zealand. I’m no endurance athlete and I don’t know a thing about how to plan a diet for biking all day every day. Sam to the rescue! “You’re in luck,” she said. “The best thing for you to eat is already your favorite food: peanut M&Ms. A little sugar, a little fat, a little protein. Just what you need.”
That’s what I told people she told me, anyway. In Morocco she corrected me: “I’d have worked some broccoli in there too.”
Sam with mountain man Mohammed at the summit of Toubkal (13’640’). Neither of them is tired.
Misty the Iron was my triathlon partner in Hawai’i, back when we were capable of (or even interested in!) such things. I spent most of my grad school days rock climbing or scuba diving, and Misty is the only person I did both of those with. (She and Nate were core members of our climbing crew, along with Peru Crew member Matt and our beloved, dearly departed Macavan.) Misty is tough as nails, she’s lived all over the planet, and on top of that she’s a phenomenal cook. Really the very best kind of travel buddy.
I do have a picture of Misty waving next to a sign that says Misty Waves, but my compooter can’t find it. Anyway, that sign is in South Africa, about as far from the High Atlas as you can get and still be on the continent.
Last but not least, the only one none of us had met before: our driver, Abdul the Unrelenting. (I’d say the Tireless but you want your chauffeur to have tires.) The little snafu at the airport proved not to be his fault; in fact, I think he’s more a victim of it than we were, since it cost him money. Abdul lifts weights, takes selfies, takes more selfies, carts us all over the country, and takes even more selfies. He’s a conscientious driver, and when Sam decided she needed a workout on the hottest day in Earth’s recorded history, Abdul took her to the gym. (With Nate and Morgan too! Don’t ask me what possessed them to go lift weights on a 117° day in a confined space with no air conditioning. Misty, Nats, and I found a swimming pool, like civilized people.)
Abdul would ultimately drive us almost 5,000 km in just two weeks.
Meet my new workout partner. I never got his name. I only joined him for one workout, and couldn’t even complete one rep. My heels are on the wall for this photo. My man is free-standing. He does pushups from this position.
Our workout station is right on the coast in Casablanca, overlooking the second-biggest mosque in the world. That would be the Hassan II Mosque, which has enough room for 105,000 people to pray. (And by the way, praying Muslims take up more space than, say, seated football fans, so this place is huuuuuuuge.)
It was plenty hot today, and it’s Eid, so almost everyone is off work. That means if only they had a beach here, it would have been packed. Sadly, no beach, just a seawall, a rocky shoreline, and enough floating plastic trash to choke a blue whale. I’ll admit that was enough to keep me from swimming. The pool at the hotel was good enough for my tourist ass. Besides, if I’d been swimming in the plastic, I might have missed the confrontation with the cops.
Boys will be boys, and cops will be cops. Teenage boys like jumping off seawalls into the surf. (Teenage girls too, but I didn’t see any of them. There seem to be a great many things that women aren’t allowed to do here, at least not in public. “Where are all the women and children?” was a frequent question, not to be answered until much later.) Cops like preventing teenagers from doing reckless things, and for reasons I’m sure they themselves understood, the cops standing guard over the Hassan II Mosque decided one particular stretch of the wall was off-limits for jumping. This, of course, became the only bit worth jumping off of, so cue the laugh track and the Benny Hill music as the cops, hopelessly outnumbered, tried to prevent an unending stream of boys from jumping lemming-like into the sea. I took one photo that captured the moment perfectly.
I just love the defiance of that boy in blue! Sometimes my camera is touched by luck; I caught him about half a second before his buddy shoved him off the wall.
The biggest challenge of the day wasn’t the jet lag and it wasn’t the equatorial heat. It was the smells. Families at the beach burned plastic trash to cook their meat. (Cancer, anyone?) Men and dogs urinate in public here. The sidewalks are dotted with dog shit (I hope that’s the only kind) and in the older parts of the city, trash jams the sewers and the stink just builds and builds. Clearly the locals don’t mind; I wish I could shut my nose off as easily as they can. But I am a Western tourist and apparently prissy enough that open sewage is not a thing I like to be downwind of.
(Not a stinky part of the city.)
Highlight of the day: reconnecting with Morgan and meeting Morgan’s brother Nats. Morgan was on the Peru Crew six years ago, when we went down to hike the Moonstone Trail and see Macchu Picchu. That was a hell of a good time, and Morgan is a hell of a good guy to bring on an adventure. He’s an emergency room doc and he does not fuck around when it comes to the first aid kit. The man has everything.
Morgan the doc. Possibly because of his beard, everyone here calls him Ali Baba.
Nats is a natural born politician if ever there was one. He makes instant friends with everyone, yet somehow he’s not a bullshitter. But over the next few days, I would come to learn he has a weakness: if you put carpets in front of that man, he’s going to buy one. He is powerless to resist.
Nats the councilman. He did this same shot in the nude, Burt Reynolds style, but those photos are just for his OnlyFans.
Second highlight of the day: the most amazing roasted almonds, rolled in a spice blend I’ve never had before and—spoiler alert—would never find again once we left Morocco. Anise, fennel, I don’t know what all was on those things but they were damn good. Anfa Boulevard in Casablanca, one or two doors down from the Hôtel Idou Anfa. I’m telling you, they’re worth the trip.
2023 continues to be the Year of Travel. This time I’m off to Morocco. The biggest item on the to-do list is a tall order: climbing Mt. Toubkal. It’s a nontechnical peak (i.e. we don’t need ropes and harnesses) but it is 13,670’ tall, so I really ought to train for it.
You know, like I should have trained for the Tasmanian Trail or the Tour Aotearoa.
True to form, in preparation for this climb I’ve diligently stuck to my patented daily Steve Bein Cardio Fitness Program: go on about your day and hope for the best. The most important tool in the program is low expectations. If you want to be able to run a four-hour marathon, you’ve already lost the race. But if you don’t mind being winded after climbing two flights of stairs, hey, look at you! You’ve already met your fitness goal.
Anyway, here’s looking forward to two weeks in a land of monarchy and medinas, tile work and trekking, camels and casbahs, spices and spiky desert plants.
Okay, I’m waaaaaaay behind on this. I don’t really understand why I can find more time to write while I’m traveling than I can while I’m at home. Travel Me has always been better at stress management than Work Me, but apparently he’s better at time management too. Which makes sense, now that I think about it. He doesn’t hit snooze as often in the morning, he’s busy pretty much from the moment he wakes up, and his to-do list is wonderfully uncontaminated by house care, yard work, etc. It’s like the old saying goes: if you want to get something done, ask a busy person with no dog to walk or floors to vacuum.
Good thing for me, I’m traveling again. Lounging in Montreal’s airport at the moment, en route to Casablanca. I’m off to do some hiking and light mountaineering with a group of travel buddies. So with some time on my hands and all my throat-clearing out of the way, I’ll jump back to my conference at Javeriana.
Right from the outset, this group proved it understands real philosophy at a much deeper level than most philosophers I’ve worked with. What they understand is that you don’t have to do philosophy in sterile laboratory conditions. You can do it outside.
Nietzsche saw this. He said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” I don’t think he’s quite right; it seems to me Stephen Hawking had his share of truly great thoughts, and he wasn’t a hiker. But the means of locomotion isn’t really the point. The point is getting out in nature is good for your thinking.
Right before the conference began, a bunch of these philosophers took the funicular up to the summit of Monserrate, the lush, verdant mountain that looms over Bogota’s eastern hills. They didn’t walk because it’s steep as hell and because in the recent past, tourists used to get jumped on that trail. Being outside is good for your thinking; being mugged, not so much.
I didn’t join them. Instead, I stayed behind to finish my paper, because I am a Very Good Boy. But I did manage to get up there later in the week, in good philosophical company. Conversation outside tends to stray away from the books and articles, venturing deeper into what really matters. In this case, we talked a lot about death, loss, and how to cope with them; how to make a university a more just place; how safety works; what counts as dangerous; whether I should buy my niece and nephew fun things made of plastic. The difference is like a carefully manicured English garden versus untamed rainforest. I like a good garden, but it’s a controlled experience. It doesn’t quite conflict with my maxim choose luck, but I find I’m much more likely to encounter a genuinely new idea in the forest than in the garden.
That’s what happened again and again at this conference, and happens so seldom at the American Philosophical Association that I just won’t go anymore. It’s amazing what a difference it makes to the quality of the conversation if you all go on a walking tour together before you start arguing about ideas. There was a kinship here that I experience in my department all the time, but almost never at national and international meetings. Start outside, start with a walk, and you can bring that camaraderie inside with you. Start in sterile laboratory conditions—i.e. a PowerPoint presentation in an auditorium—and that rarely happens. (Never, in my experience.)
The last excursion of the conference was to Chicaque Biological Park, in the cloud forest of Cundinamarca. “30 minutes outside of Bogota,” the internet will tell you, but traffic tells a different story. An hour or more on a bumpy bus was enough for me to learn coca leaves do wonders for nausea. (Motion sickness was never a problem for me until one fateful scuba diving adventure in high seas in the Gulf of Mexico. After that, it has been my steadfast companion.) But it was worth it. Oh, I do love a cloud forest.
The trail was slippery as hell, and my shoes were only barely up to the task. What can I say? Cloud forests are wet. More than once I went skating, but I managed not to fall and break anything. Hopefully they’ll do better in Morocco’s High Atlas mountains. I’m not anticipating much humidity in the desert.
Our hiking party had a wide range of age and physical ability, so it was slow going. And conversation was characteristically excellent, which is enjoyable but also rules out any chance of seeing wildlife. Animals aren’t dummies; they know to hide from the local apex predator. So after our group hike, I cut out on lunch early and went on my own to go see a nearby waterfall. Photos never do these things justice, but here’s one anyway.
Trust me, it’s bigger and cooler than this. But even if it hadn’t been, four kilometers of high-speed solitude was just what I needed to cap off an excellent week. I didn’t see much in the way of photographable wildlife, but the bugs and flowers were lovely.
After Chicaque came another bumpy bus ride, with plenty of lively debate among philosophers I now count as friends. Some of us went out for one last Colombian dinner together, and by sheer coincidence a couple of us ended up on the same flight back to the US. I even gave up my aisle seat to sit next to my new friend Karolin.
This turned out to be a problem with a built-in solution. I ended up sitting between Karolin and a man with the worst case of bad breath I’ve ever encountered. It was so bad that when he yawned, even Karolin could smell it.
But choose luck! Karolin had nice minty gum in her carryon, which I magnanimously shared with Stinky as often as I could. And maybe he knows about his halitosis, because he never turned me down. Thanks to covid I had a mask with me, and filling that with my own minty breath was (barely) enough to ward off Stinky for the four-hour flight back to Atlanta.
No sightseeing today or yesterday, just conferring at the conference, but I do have breaks here and there so I’ll tell you a little more about Bogota.
First of all, I know it’s Bogotá but I think it’s a little pretentious for me to pretend to grok Spanish accent markers. Second, Bogotá is the correct Spanish spelling but the original Spanish name is Santa Fe. The local name was Bacata, bastardized into Bogota.
Third, Simon Bolivar has a house here and jeez but I really thought that would’ve been in Bolivia. Then again, my education included basically nothing of South America, except for Paddington Bear. Apparently Bolivar fought to liberate a whole bunch of places down here. I guess that gets you more than one house.
The view from my conference room.
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (the university hosting conference) is drop-dead gorgeous. It’s in a rainforest at about 8,500’ elevation, so it’s green and lush without being hot and sweaty. Unless you include the walking. Then you’re gonna sweat. All the talks are in the back corner of campus, higher up the mountain, and somehow they managed to design a building where you have to go upstairs to get to the basement auditorium.
So my calves are stronger than they were on Monday. My AirBnB includes complementary coca leaves for the altitude, but that hasn’t been bothering me much. I’m drinking like I’m in the desert, but I’m sleeping well and I’m not huffing and puffing (too much) on the stairs. That said, I’m glad I’m not trying to bike these mountains! Booster would love it here but I’d be getting my ass kicked.
A salsa troupe in one of the buildings on campus. Check out that green wall!
More cool architecture on campus.
Last thing to know about Bogota: the food is wonderful. Great cafes, street food, casual dining, fine dining, you name it. And this is fun: last night I paid $95,040 for dinner.
Of course that’s Colombian pesos, which use the same $ (which I assume is called a peso sign, not a dollar sign). In USD it was $21. This for drinks, appetizers, dinner, and dessert, plus I have a story about dessert. It was a “regional cake” I didn’t recognize, drizzled with a sweet guava jelly. I couldn’t place the flavor, and the little dark crescents in it, which I thought would be apple or plum skins, turned out to be just more cake.
My Español no es bueno, but it’s just good enough to tell the waitress I have a question I don’t know how to ask en Español. She calls over her maitre’d, whose English is pretty good, and I ask him about the cake. He explains to me that there’s a local roll called… well, I don’t remember what it’s called, and I doubt I’d remember if it were in English. Anyway, it’s small and cheesy and dipped in guava jelly it’s a favorite breakfast around here. If you bake too many of these little rolls in the morning, he says, you can tear up the leftovers, mix them with milk and sugar, and bake them as a cake.
My two companions and I find all this very interesting, but the maitre d’ tops off the story by coming back ten minutes later with three freshly baked rolls and a ramekin of guava jelly to dip them in. He has these baked on the spot, not for our entire party of forty-some philosophers, but just for the three of us who heard the story. He wanted us to know what the bread was like before it turns into cake.
So yeah, that’s my review of Bogota so far: steep hills, good food, great conversation, and not to be matched anywhere in my travels when it comes to the post-dessert mini-breakfast surprise.
First things first, yesterday I forgot to mention a highlight of the flight down here: the lunchbox museum at the Atlanta airport. What a lovely little walk down memory lane! I must say, whoever does the firearms training at U.N.C.L.E. is terrible at trigger discipline. If you’re gonna be a super-spy, don’t do it for those guys. Your teammate might blow your head off through sheer lack of attention.
Behold the glory!
My birthday is coming up if you’re looking for gift ideas.
Okay, now back to Colombia.
It’s been six years since I spent any time in South America, and I have managed to forget almost all of mi Español. I’m getting by, but I should’ve done a better job of brushing up before I left. One of these days I’ll have to find a way to spend some serious time down here, because I just love the language and the only way I really learn is through immersion. That said, I do remember coming back from living in Japan. I flew through San Diego, where my oldest friend Liz lives. (She’s not old; she’s the friend I’ve had the longest. But “my longest friend Liz” makes her sound like an anaconda.) Liz has friends in Tijuana so we spent the weekend down there, and coming off of two years in Japan I remember thinking I could learn Spanish in about a month. For one thing, I could read all the signs on day one. I could even figure out about half of them. Wild guess: the fruteria sells fruit, the carneceria sells meat.
Sorry Nihongo, there’s something to be said for a finite alphabet.
Bogota is absolutely gorgeous. Two mountains overlook the city center, and the eyes of various graffitied characters keep watch too. I’ve never seen a city so heavily (and beautifully) tattooed. I’ll let the artists speak for themselves:
I can’t decide which is my favorite, Inca R2-D2 or Cigar Lady I Wish Was My Aunt.
I saw all these characters on a walking tour of the city with the other philosophers at the conference I’m here for. Plenty of good conversation along the way. We also had an exotic fruit tasting and a guided tour of the Gold Museum — or rather, a Gold Museum, since Colombians really have a thing for gold museums. They have six.
The original Batman.
Here’s a weird thing about gold: everyone thinks it’s pretty, but only Western Europeans seem to feel the need to go to war for it. In East Asia, the most prized metal was silver. In South America, it was never used for money. Mostly it was for art. The original myth of El Dorado, the City of Gold, traces back to a story of an Inca chieftain covering his body in sticky goop, then gold dust. When the dawn’s first light strikes him he shines like the sun. For a minute or two he is The Man of Gold (that’s El Dorado en Español), and then he goes for a swim. He smears off all the gold and goop, thereby fertilizing the womb of the earth — aka the the bottom of the lake — with his golden seed.
The conquistadors get word of this and think there’s a city out there so chock-full of gold that the leaders can fill a lake with it. They go tromping across the land in search of this magical place, draining lakes as they go. As you know, they weren’t exactly pacifists about this. So basically they were bad at playing Telephone, mistook the man for a city, and in looking for him they killed a shitload of people.
Growing up, I just assumed gold was something people naturally obsessed over. King Midas, Yukon Cornelius, all those D&D treasure hoards: they seemed normal. It never occurred to me that a culture could have gold aplenty and not turn it into money. No doubt the Incas and Mayas paid a pretty penny for it. Gold is shiny and rare, and that makes it expensive everywhere. But when Spaniards and Germans came in search of Colombian gold, they didn’t raid vaults of gold bars; they melted down artwork to turn it into bars.
Weird, right? Or is this something my grade school and high school teachers just forgot to teach me? Is this common knowledge?
Better dental work than the last guy.
I’m so fancy. You already know.
Tomorrow the conference begins in earnest, and I don’t know how many pretty pictures I get after that. Philosophers reading papers to each other isn’t what you’d call must-see photography. But I will find time to visit a bike shop or two. I have a hot tip on where to rent bikepacking gear for a future ride down here.
That’s the best my phone could do to capture the thunderstorm I just flew through to get to Bogota. I know, I know, it looks like the plane wing is lit by that bright shiny lightbulb, not by lightning. Trust me, there were airsick passengers and frightened children to go with the lighting effects.
I’m here in Colombia for a philosophy conference, and to do a scouting run for a future bikepacking trip. The Ruta El Dorado is on the someday list as a ride to do with adventure buddies. It’s a long way to fly for a short ride, but what a ride! 112 miles through the Andes, 8,940’ of elevation gain, most of it above 8,000’. Believe it or not, my lazy ass will actually train for this one.
Plus there’s the Andean Bear Corridor project. Super cool.
First report from the scout: this airport is bloody hot. It’s 9:00 PM, we’re at 9,000’ or so, yet somehow it’s about 90° in here. We’re all sweltering.
I’ll report more soon. For now, I’ve been traveling about 18 hours and I’ve still got at least another hour to go. But I landed safely, I didn’t get struck by lightning, and I haven’t been arrested by Migracion or mugged by a taxi driver’s friends. (I’m told that’s a thing that happens here. Always book your taxi! Don’t just hail one on the street.)
Rewind the calendar to December 10 and let’s get back to the TA.
Today’s ride could have been written by Gary Gygax. (For the insufficiently nerdy, he’s the dude who created Dungeons & Dragons.) Most bike rides don’t have a plot, but this one followed the classic D&D module formula turn for turn. The quest: climb the mountain, reach Haast Pass, and defeat whatever foes you find there.
First up, four hours of riding through the cover art of the fantasy novel section of the bookstore. (In truth, that’s not a D&D thing, it’s an NZ thing. The whole country looks like this.) Strange birds, misty mountains, waterfalls galore. This is the valley of the Landsborough River, whose placard describes it as “a major river, 50 km long.” New Zealand is small enough that thirty miles qualifies a river as “major.” There’s nothing too harrowing in your first four hours of hills. Like any good D&D adventure, the first few challenges are just to wear you down and deplete your resources. It’s at the end of this that you reach your first truly Gygaxian sight: a bike-eating tree.
Defeat the tree and you’ll soon find a steep canyon filled with the roar of a raging river. It’s impossible to cross except by the Gates of Haast. In any other country this would be called Haast Bridge, but not here, and not in D&D. Here you get the Gates of Haast. I would love to tell you Haast is the name of a demon or war god or something, but it turns out he’s just an explorer (though one whose resumé Gary Gygax would have appreciated).
After braving the Gates, you face four kilometers of nonstop saving throws as the mountain tries to break your body and spirit. The hike-a-bike is so steep it feels like you’re pushing square tires. (Or perhaps that’s just the evil magic of this place.) You fear this will go on for the whole ten-kilometer ascent, but just as in a well-designed adventure, this boss monster is scary but beatable. Perhaps the mountain becomes less steep, or perhaps it’s the waterfalls that heal your soul—Elvish magic, you hope, to counter the hexes you’ve suffered so far. But I checked: there was no Lord of the Rings filming up here, so no elves for you.
Magic or not, the waterfalls give you a chance to rest. Three big falls—Roaring Billy, Thunder Creek, and Fantail—all worth dismounting to explore. At Fantail Falls you find a curious puzzle to solve. This is good; there should always a challenge for the skillful characters. Hundreds of people have come before you and left tiny cairns on a fallen tree. Why do they do it? Only Gygax knows. The puzzle you must solve is this: those before you have already taken every single surface where rocks will stack, so how will you put your own little cairn on the tree?
My answer: make a new horizontal surface. I found a long tongue-shaped rock I could sneak into a little crevice, and a teensy tiny wedge-shaped one to secure it. Voilà! Who knows what evil could have befallen me if I hadn’t solved the puzzle and built a little cairn on my brand new tabletop.
There are booby-trapped bridges too. Ten may cross, but eleven will die. There are pit traps one inch deep. Beware!
At last you reach the summit, where you learn the Māori name for Haast Pass, Tioripatea, means “Looks Clear.” That wasn’t so bad, you say to yourself. But once again Gygax proves he’s wilier than you are. Your quest was to “defeat whatever foes you find at the pass” but it turns out your worst enemy is yourself. You’d planned to camp at the pass—not legally, strictly speaking, but there’s a hiking trail, and you’ve camped on those before. But the DM and the DOC have outsmarted you: the trail is entirely hilly until it becomes impassable by bike. The only way to camp up here is to leave the bike behind and schlep all your gear uphill in search of level ground. Ugh.
Or, if that quest seems hopeless, you can ride to the next legal campsite. But that’s another twenty kilometers away, and you’ve biked 64 km already. The farthest you’ve ever ridden is 72, and the day after you had to hitchhike to the nearest hot spring. Ugh.
What will you do? Hazard the hill or risk the road? If you’re me, you’re not lugging all that gear without a backpack. Screw that. I was tired as hell, but surely the rest of the mountain is, y’know, all downhill from here.
Of course it’s not. This is New Zealand. “Flat” means “not the steepest part” and “downhill” means “down except for all the climbs.” So I logged a new personal record for distance, 75 kilometers, and found a good campsite halfway between the summit and Makarora.
You’d think my legs would be much stronger by now. My hitchhike was forty-three days ago, over a thousand kilometers north of the Gates of Haast. (“Rest Day Part I: It’s Nothing, Mate,” way back on October 29.) 72 km was too much then, but now… surely 75 is okay. Right?
Wrong. The next day I make it a whopping nine kilometers to Makarora, a mere speck of a town and one sadly lacking when it comes to hot springs. I make do with a proper bed, a hot shower, and a fistful of anti-inflammatories. I defeated the mountain, but not without cost. A fitting end to a proper boss monster fight.
In 2,200 miles of biking through Tasmania and New Zealand, I only passed one rider. He was a little kid and he challenged me to a bike race. I already had a headstart, he passed me, and I gunned it to pass him. That’s the peak of my racing career.
Eva and Henning, aka Ze Germans, were a little faster than me. Marcel the Iron Dutchman was a lot faster than me. Dr. Kate was so much faster than me that my first thought was I can’t imagine being that strong. However, riding on the heels of that was my second thought: Dude, you’re a sci-fi/fantasy writer. You can imagine a lot. So for this Throwback Thursday, let’s imagine what it would take for me to be as strong a cyclist as Dr. Kate.
We’ll start with Will Smith. He and I share the same build:
Image credit ExclusivePix
Oh, wait. We share the same natural build:
Image credit NBC via Getty Images
When he was the Fresh Prince of Bel Air (1990) I was in eighth grade, and both of us were 6’2”, 135 pounds. Eleven years later I was in nineteenth grade and he was starring in Ali. We’re both still 6’2”. I was 170 pounds and he was 223.
I’ll call this the Dr. Kate standard. If Will Smith can put on 88 pounds of raw muscle, then I can put on whatever muscles it takes to climb hills and eat up miles alongside Dr. Kate. I can imagine that. Smith proved it’s in the realm of possibility.
My body double and my hero. Image credit IEG.
But how to get there? Smith had a bevy of personal trainers: a boxing coach, a weightlifting coach, and someone to oversee his diet. I’d need all of that and also a licensed clinical social worker to talk me off the ledge every time I said I’d rather die than lift weights. But I can imagine all the people who worked for Smith working for me. (I can’t afford them, but I can imagine them.)
But even the best support team in the world wouldn’t be enough. Smith had external motivation. Playing Muhammad Ali was the precursor to muscle-bound roles in movies like Hancock, I Am Legend, and Suicide Squad. Together those four netted him $85 million. Plus I bet Jada digs those muscles. So imagine me raking in $85 million in book sales and Jada Pinkett Smith Bein having the hots for me. Not easy to imagine, but like I said, I can imagine a lot.
Image credit Peakpx
I reckon that’s what it would take to motivate me to do all the cardio and strength training I’d need to match Dr. Kate. All I need is the adoration of one of the world’s most beautiful, most successful women, plus the promise of a $20 million paycheck with a steady stream of those to follow. Teaching philosophy will never pay that well, but I can imagine a world where my novels sell that well.
So here’s the part I have a hard time imagining: how could being a stronger bicyclist increase my novel sales to millions of dollars per year? If you have any ideas, drop me a line.
Hard to believe I’ve been home for two weeks now. Harder to believe I was in New Zealand just two weeks ago. It feels like I’ve been home forever, but I guess winter will do that to you.
Let’s have more summery thoughts! Time for another edition of People Who Were Nice To Me, and this one is long overdue. I finished the TA a month ago and I wish I could go back and thank all of these people again in person. I thanked them all at the time, of course, but if I could do it again now I’d be going back to summertime. But I digress…
Gordon and Sharon: Gordon got props once before in the North Island edition, for giving me invaluable information about the TA—most importantly, the tip to ignore the road closure signs between Picton and Pelorus Bridge. Gordon rode out to meet me at the foot of the Maungatapu Track, then escorted me to his home outside of Nelson, where his wife Sharon had a wholesome dinner waiting for us. They put me up in their spare room and we stayed up late talking about the TA and all things bicycle. They’re both serious riders and they had lots to teach me as well as lots to feed me.
Reefton’s rando twins: Their last name probably isn’t Rando. They’re just two random guys I met on the sidewalk in Reefton, who gave me just the advice I needed to fix Booster’s shifter. Turns out all I needed was a can of WD-40 and some tips on what to do with it.
Shontal the hotelier: She runs the Old Nurses Home in Reefton, but more importantly, she owns a laptop she was kind enough to let me borrow for the day I was stranded there. Laptop access was surprisingly difficult to get while traveling. Thanks to Shontal, instead of spending my day nursing my knee, I spent it nursing my knee and working my way through the one argument in my sabbatical research that had proved the stickiest sticking point.
Fraser the bus driver: On Thanksgiving, GPS problems sent me rolling back into Tapawera with my tail between my legs. I saw Fraser’s bus at the Four Square there and asked which way he was heading. He was the exact opposite of the douchebag bus driver who repeatedly refused to take me and Booster from Auckland toward Cape Reinga. Fraser let Booster aboard with no qualms at all, and dropped us off halfway to Lake Rotoroa. So I completed my full mileage goal for the day and ended up exactly where I wanted to go, even though those miles didn’t connect Tapawera with Rotoroa.
Eva and Henning: Ze Germans I rode with for several days on the Wilderness Trail and thereabouts. We passed each other a few times before chance put us at the same dairy (that’s kiwi for convenience store). They’re riding around the world, 18,000 km ridden so far with another 18,000 to go. Talk about living so well that death will tremble to take them! Well done, you two. They say they’re only faster than me on the road, but I suspect they slowed down for me once we hit gravel. We camped together and broke bread together, and shared plenty of my very favorite thing: excellent conversation.
Heather the helicopter lady: In Harihari I went to book a helicopter tour of the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers. Heather, the woman who books the flights, said “We need a minimum three passengers, so we need to find you two more.” Then she went about actually trying to find me two other people to make the flight happen. She asked me if I could wait twenty minutes, so I went to the nearest dairy to hold up my end of the “we” in “we need to find you two more.” I shamelessly asked other customers if they’d like to take a helicopter ride. Get this: Heather walked all the way to the dairy, phone in hand, to tell me she couldn’t find two fares in Harihari but she could book me on the first flight out of Franz Josef the next morning. Who does that?
Nichole and Payson: Bikers extraordinaire, podcasters extraordinaire, and generous enough to spend an evening interviewing a nobody like me.
Crystal from Atlanta: We randomly met at that weird wall of bras near the Cardrona Hotel. She’s the one who told me about the Cardrona’s frickles—that’s fried pickles, and they are just what you need if you’ve spent half your day pedaling up a mountain and you’re going to spend the second half pedaling up the same damn mountain.
Marcel the Iron Dutchman: Another rider I crossed paths with once or twice before we decided to ride together. He’s got a badass bike with a belt drive (no oil! you lubricate it with water) and internal gearing, and the man himself is made out of steel. We rode to Wanaka together and spent a couple of days there, which included a misguided kayak adventure and one of the best meals of the entire TA for me. Until then I’d only used blue cheese as a cold, crumbly topping. But stir it in the pot with your veggies and they turn into cheesy blue-tasting goodness. And once again, plenty of excellent conversation.
Ronnie the Dog: We met on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, and Ronnie would still be fetching sticks if I were still there throwing them. Not the best conversationalist but she is a very good girl.
The boat dude: I feel rotten that I didn’t catch his name. I took a jetboat tour on the Dart River, because jetboats are what Batman has and because this one jets past several Lord of the Rings sites. The pilot was a young Māori man who told us all about the cultural significance of the river, which among other things is a source of pounamu, or greenstone. Pounamu is a big deal. If you’re not Māori you’re not allowed to take it, and if you are Māori, you treat it with respect. Giving pounamu as a gift is a big deal too, The boat dude found a chunk of it in the river and gave it to me. No idea what I did to deserve that, but it will certainly have pride of place on one of my philosophy shelves.
Jan and Calvin: They own the Wee Cosy Hut I stayed at in Winton. They didn’t invite me to dinner, they just set a place at the table as if there were nowhere else it made sense for me to eat. I shared a day-after-Christmas dinner with three generations of their family (their daughter-in-law and Jan’s mom were also in attendance) and got to try kiwi Christmas cake, which is a nummy spicy fruity cake under a thick robe of frosting. I still can’t get over the hospitality I received over and over again in New Zealand. Jan and Calvin are the epitome of it.
Phone hosts: Me being the phone parasite. The only real stress I experienced on the whole trip was tech-related, and the tech problems were never-ending. On more occasions than I care to count, strangers allowed me to use their phones as hotspots so I could get my phone to do, well, anything whatsofuckingever.
Descend: That’s the dive company in Milford Sound. Everyone there was nice to me: Avi the dive master; Simone the admin queen who exchanged 21 emails with me in making the dive happen; and a special shout-out to Lance the skipper, owner/operator, dive master, and dude who can hold up his end in a long philosophical conversation about the nature of compassion. I love people who ask good questions.
Ras the Diver: Every paying customer aboard a dive boat is a diver. Ras is a Diver. Quit some kind of high-powered job in finance to go scuba diving for a year. 300 dives in six months (by comparison, I’ve logged 150ish in thirty years). Ras taught me all kinds of stuff about breathing technique and air conservation. Now I just have to do a lot more diving to put her advice into practice.
That's the question I've been getting a lot, as you can imagine. A bunch of other questions too, which I'll have to get to later. Here are some quick thoughts about how it feels to be back.
C-c-c-cold! I knew it would be winter when I got home. I even packed my hat, gloves, and puffy coat on top of my carry-on. I thought I was prepared, but you know what actually prepares you for winter? Fall. And I didn't have one of those this year. My 2022 was half a winter, two springs, and one and a half summers. Which, yeah, I know, gets me no sympathy whatsoever from you people. But we've had some cold goddamn days around here and I’m starting to think maybe I should’ve stayed on that dive boat.
Noisy! Why are we willing to put up with Gas Station TV? I had forgotten it existed. Listening to gas station radio is already stupid, but whose wants to listen to inane bullshit from the gas pump itself? That thing needs a volume knob and an off button.
We're noisy in other ways too. It's such a delight to fly on an air carrier not based in the US. The inflight announcements aren't ear-piercing. Our airport TVs are oppressively loud too. I don't know why we put up with that. But stranger still was hearing police sirens again, for the first time since August. Granted, I spent most of my time off the grid when I was down there, and granted, I flew into Chicago, whose population is greater than the entirety of New Zealand. Even so, I was in Illinois maybe five or six hours before I heard a squad car. That was a bit of a bummer.
So, so happy to see my girl. She was soooooo happy to see me too! She cranked the tail-wag speed up to eleven. I can't believe how well Cocoa recovered from two total cruciate ligament tears. You'd never guess she was hurt. I have to keep her from sprinting after critters in the yard. But she is one chunky monkey! She could not possibly have received better care, and that included sprinkling her dinner with Parmesan cheese. She has a great big buddha-belly that is very nice to rub.
Caffeinated. I almost never drink caffeine anymore, haven't in years, but I did the math. Minus-one passport plus three-day delay in getting home times nineteen time zones equals one tired traveler. So I decided to defeat jet lag through better chemistry. A couple of Cokes on the flight and a little nipper from someone's Ambien prescription and I was right as rain.
Still tired, though. The jet lag hasn't been bad, but the to-do list is a bastard. I'd planned my original itinerary to give me six days to ease back into home, work, dog ownership, all that stuff. Instead I had a weekend in Chicago and Milwaukee to reconnect with family, then a drive back to Ohio on Monday to teach my first classes on Tuesday. A week later I'm still moving back into my own house (most of my stuff was boxed up in the basement). Good thing for me I was foresightful enough back in August to leave two aloha shirts near the front of the stack, so I could go to work in good form. Yesterday I found the box with the rest of them.
I'd rather be biking. Booster is at the shop, getting a new chain and a tune-up. Didn’t take me long to build her LEGO totem., did it? In the meantime I'm riding what I guess must now be called my commuter bike, Godzilla. (The bike company Giant makes a mountain bike called the Iguana, and if you have a better name for a Giant Iguana I'd like to hear it.) I've had him for eighteen years, we've been through thick and thin together, but Booster spoiled me. Godzilla's a toy by comparison. Don't tell him I said so.
Overall? Happy to be back. I've been hitting my favorite restaurants, catching up with friends, trying to stay on top of a couple of writing projects, and having a good time cooking dishes more complex than box mix mac and cheese. My dog is happy and healthy, my house seems to be more or less intact, and so far it looks like I have three good groups of students this semester. It'll be a while yet before I figure out exactly what has carried over from my Antipodean Adventure into the rest of my life, but I know it's not nothing. Something feels different. When I pin it down, I'll let you know.
I hate hate hate John Denver but unless a new crisis arises in the next few minutes, I am in fact leaving on a jet plane, not sure when I’ll be back again. I certainly want to come back, though—and soon, with Booster in tow. There’s so much more magic to see down here, so many unexplored roads to ride.
The Kennett Brothers (creators of the Tour Aotearoa) have drawn up the Kōpiko Aotearoa, an east-west trail traversing the North Island. They’ve also charted a Sounds to Sounds Trail on the South Island, connecting Marlborough Sound in the northeast to Milford Sound in the southwest. I’m due for another sabbatical in seven years, when I’ll be 56. Now I have a goal for what kind of shape I want my knees, thighs, and shoulders to be in.
I’m not going to hit “Save and Publish” on this post until the plane is moving, but right now my chances look good for a 43-hour Thursday. If all goes well, I’ll land in Chicago one hour before pushing back from this gate in Auckland. Coming home doesn’t mean coming to the end of the blog, though. Not yet. I still have stories to catch up on and photos to share. My goal—always dangerous to put these things in writing, but here goes—yes, my goal is to publish on Thursdays until I’m done, however many weeks that takes. I won’t promise every Thursday (in fact this coming one seems unlikely) but I aim to take this story to The End.
So keep an eye out for Throwback Thursdays, and feel free to send questions if you have any. I’ve gotten a few and they’ve been fun to think about and write about. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy one last old school, deep-fried, burn-the-hell-out-of-your-mouth McDonald’s hot apple pie. I hold it high like the Holy Grail that it is.
Well, I thoroughly enjoyed my time on the Coromandel Peninsula and I now have a new plane ticket. You wouldn’t believe what people are willing to charge for them. Take a look at my first search results from American Airlines:
I could almost buy my own plane for that.
Lucky for me I have an aunt whose google-fu is much stronger than mine. I’ve never seen a five-figure price tag for a plane ticket before, and Aunt Carol brought the number back down to three digits. Thanks, Carol! I’d say I owe you one but it’s a lot more than one.
Now I just need a passport—which, oddly enough, is easier done than said. For the past week I made countless phone calls and wrote countless emails trying to get someone—anyone at all: the US Embassy, the Consulate, the State Department, the airlines—to tell me what it would take to fly home without a passport. No one returned my calls or emails, and no web search would tell me what I needed to know. (Though as we’ve seen, my google-fu is pretty bad. Plus, I’ve learned through hard experience that an American phone gets really weird search results in New Zealand. Looking for “camp sites near me” I get hits for Camp David and Camp Lejeune.)
The key search term is emergency passport, which I’d never heard of until 8:00 this morning and which I could theoretically get my hands on this very afternoon.
Like I said, easier done than said. Without that keyword, every search result told me A) it takes a minimum of fifteen days to get a passport; and B) you cannot possibly fly without one. Neither of those things is true. But after a week of silence I finally had someone write me back. It was the US Consulate in Auckland, some four hours away from where I was camping on the Coromandel Peninsula. It said, “Can you be at our offices in Auckland at 8:30 on Wednesday morning?”
Well, no. But I can have a hell of a good time driving my monstrous rental car on the gravel roads of Coromandel, winding along the edges of mountains as fast as I dared to push it.
I shouldn’t badmouth the car. Getting a vehicle at all was a minor miracle. Every single rental agency at Auckland International was out of cars, yet somehow I found one the company never intended to rent out. It was uncleaned, unvacuumed—unhoovered down here—scuffed and scratched, missing a piece on the front bumper, and sporting a big white cobweb across the driver’s side mirror. Someone didn’t tick the right box in time, so I rented this loud, crunchy all-wheel drive monstrosity that wasn’t supposed to be listed at all. I didn’t get the last car at AKL, I got the car after the last car. So my good travel luck continues, passport or no passport.
This car is a heavy sumbitch. It rumbles and rattles. It guzzles gas like Immortan Joe. But it’s got four wheels and a seat, and it’s a lot of fun to drive on wet gravel roads. I know something about cornering on those roads, having ridden about a thousand miles of them on the TA. And here’s a thing I should have mentioned before: is it so weird to ride a road without pedaling! I discovered this on a bus ride a few weeks ago in Queenstown. We were going uphill and it wasn’t any harder than flat land. All you do is sit there, and somehow the wheels on the bus go round and round. My thighs kept bouncing up and down, convinced they had a job to do.
My plan this morning had been to hike the Coromandel Coastal Walkway, then drive most of the way back to Auckland for one last night of camping. (Again, a stunning feat to my bike-addled brain. 200 kilometers in hours, not days? Miraculous.) But my dumbphone grabbed a wisp of cellular signal out there on the tip of the peninsula, just enough to admit a few emails onto the smartphone phone-shaped camera. There was my message from the consulate. There was the keyword I was missing: emergency passport. Not fifteen days, not even fifteen hours. If I could get there, I’d have a passport this afternoon.
And so I do! It comes in Prince Purple, to announce to everyone on the plane that you party like it’s 1999. That’s the way to get your passport stolen. None of this set-it-down-at-the-airport-and-some-jackass-walks-off-with-it bullshit. I am not letting this one leave my person until I’m standing on American soil.
So, ticket, check. Passport, check. Ride to airport, check. But I’m not home yet. Keep wishing me luck!
Well, luck wasn’t with me at the airport. The problem wasn’t flying home without a passport. The problem was flying an itinerary that sent me through Vancouver and not an American point of entry. I have it on good authority—the Canadian embassy itself—that Canadia will not allow an American passenger to set foot in the country without a physical passport, and that I won’t face the same problem when I attempt to fly to Dallas/Fort Worth on Thursday.
The Coromandel Peninsula, which I had very much hoped to see before I flew here in September, and which I never found room for on the schedule. Now I have room! So I’ll spend the next three days hiking, swimming, and building my own hot tubs on Hot Water Beach. This is kinda cool. There’s a volcanic vent under there somewhere, so you just walk on the beach until your feet get hot, then dig a hole. It magically turns itself into a Jacuzzi.
I do have one piece of advice for you if you go: do it at night, not noon. It was pretty empty last night, and as crowded as Disneyworld today.
Happy New Year, everyone! I hope yours starts as pleasantly as mine did. I woke up early for the most easterly sunrise I’ve ever seen, then spent the morning hiking the Mangawhai Cliffs Walkway. Before driving to Auckland I cooled down with a little bodysurfing, and I can’t even remember how long it’s been since I’ve done that.
Now, safely in the Auckland suburbs, I’ve been eating the last of my New World bulk food and taping up Booster as best I can to protect her from manhandling by overworked baggage handlers. Last time her box was beat to hell but she ran just fine. I’ll be happy with a second round of that.
It’s possible I’ll be handled more roughly than she is. For the first time in my life I’m going to attempt to fly internationally without a passport. Whether mine was lost or stolen depends in large part on what those charges are on the now-canceled credit card I kept in the same Ziploc.
Certainly it’s my fault for losing track of it while repacking everything I own, but the fact of the matter is a hiccup like this was long overdue. I’m a scatterbrain by nature and I’ve been exhausted, running on fumes. The last couple times I made a colossal blunder like this, I was rescued by the kindness of strangers. Catching the bus to Cape Reinga, for example, I would have left Booster’s wheels in the bus depot if someone hadn’t said, “hey, you might need those.” In Tasmania it was my best thermal layer, and a hundred miles later my tent poles. On top of that, the medicine I take to manage my absentmindedness got lost in the mail, and I haven’t mentioned this until now but I’ve been muddling along without it for two months now. It’s been fine— I forgot all of that other stuff while I was on it, so really, how much worse can I get—but losing something as important as a passport was inevitable.
So tomorrow is set to be the longest day of my life, maybe in more ways than one. On the clock it’s a 43-hour day (thank you, international date line) but who knows how many of those hours I’ll spend in an interrogation room. I can’t imagine those hours go by quickly.
Hopefully the charges on the credit card are all mine, because that leaves a glimmer of hope that some honest soul might still find the passport. Replacing a passport is a pain in the ass but what troubles me most is losing all the stickers and magnets I was keeping in that same Ziploc. Until it went missing, it had always been the official Flat and Dry Storage Zone.
Anyway, wish me luck! It sure would be nice to see my family and my dog tomorrow, even if it takes 43 hours. If the magic of New Zealand holds out, some smiling gate agent may just walk up to me and hand me my Holy Ziploc saying, “Here, we’ve been waiting for you.” Given my experience in this country so far, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.