Meditation, Culture, Supervision & Exploration

Friday November 25, 2011

Daylight howled in with a fury & drenched us with its wet caress. The TV station announced that the winds raged all over NZ. Stewart Island was experiencing gusts of 100 knots while other parts of the South Island were being hit w/ 130 knot gusts. Tracy leaned into the wind down hill twice in the morning to see if the ferry would be attempting a crossing. By 10AM they canceled it for the day.

The Muffin led his two man crew of Wayne & Daniel out to the work site in the driving rain.  At the urging of the Muffin we visited the work site where Wayne & Daniel we're toiling away in the driving rain. They were literally working in a swamp. If you stepped off the boards where they were putting in posts you could go up to the knee in mud & lose your boot. If the rain stopped & the wind died down the sand flies converged within 10 seconds for a tasty meal. The Muffin of course was sitting under an umbrella all snugly in his new possum fur jacket supervising his poor mates. We got out of there before they put us to work.

We decided to meditate w/ our eyes closed for several hours. We cleaned up our left overs from last night's dinner & decided to venture out. Cabin fever I guess. We had tried to use the lodge van , but there was no power. Mona, the manager showed up & explained they had taken the dead battery out & had just replaced it.  Luckily Vic had only made Tracy try to push start the van for about  a mile in an attempt to use it. That may have contributed to Tracy's heavy meditation & although I thought it might have been a chant it was probably snoring I heard. We decided to visit the Ocean View Art Gallery & we found some very unique oil dab paintings of the local area. We purchased one to ship home. Showings & wine tastings will take place at our home location beginning in December. We tooled around the island & figured we could only get lost a little bit. After all they only have 20KM of roads. Over 95% of the island is national park w/ miles of trails & many huts for backpackers. We found several nice beaches, black swans & more wind & rain, but at least we were driving into it rather than by it. We crested one hill & found the height of technology-an old fashioned phone tacked up to a tree trunk. It apparently works as a local wired it back to his house across the road where he would sit on his front porch, wait for unsuspecting tourists to use the phone & then he would yell at them to get off his private line. Good sport on Stewart Island.  We finished off the two bottles of wine we had started the previous night & went to dinner at our favorite restaurant & had a delicious fish pie & roasted capsicum soup w/ prawns. Back at the lodge we swiftly hit the sack as our adventuresome day had worn us out.