Pretend-to-care-ians and Fish-n-Chip-ocrites

Let's be fair to the retirement home for hippies: they had 450 acres, a fresh stream with swimming holes, and were off-the-grid. But Paradise... it wasn't. We should be a bit lenient since they were just returning from Hawaii, their winter home, and were still gaining momentum for the season, but there were just too many issues. The gardens were great, but we spent half a day buffing a guy's 5th wheel trailer so he could sell it to make his income (since they didn't work much off the property). Mostly it was the personalities that irked us, though. Everyone seemed to have personal development issues (passive-abrasive is my personal fave). Of the 6 residents that were around, we only liked the kiwi (the rest were American). The fact that we've been vegan and obviously came because we're sympathetic to the cause didn't seem to register. In fact, little did we know being vegetarian is actually not ethical at all! And we thought that eating no meat, drinking no milk, reducing our other dairy consumption, and only eating the most expensive eggs was striking a fair balance. Silly us! Their facts and figures rivaled Goebbels' in their lunacy and since we could barely get a word in, we hit the road. You'd think 20-, 30-, and 40-year vegans would have chilled out a bit along the way and ditched the anger, but alas... For interest's sake though, I'll mention that they did have a whole bunch of gardens, they were on solar and used a special wood stove to heat their water. They each paid $75-150 per week to be there and had to work on the land 30hrs a week.

We wrapped up our time in the Northland region by going to see the extreme northern tip of mainland New Zealand

and seeing the biggest Kauri tree, which rivals our biggest trees for girth. 14m in circumference.

We also hitched with a couple in a van that decided to drive down part of a 90km-long beach. Went really well until we got stuck. Getting us unstuck was my first official experience driving a right-handed vehicle. We breezed through Auckland again and down the coast to Raglan (and we just barely beat the Canadian Geese down from the Yukon),

home to a world-renowned left-hand surf break. The most liveable town we've seen so far, but also the most backpacker-friendly, for better and worse. We had a couchsurfer lined up for the night only to arrive in town amid a major communications crisis. Short-lived though it was, there was not debit, credit card, internet, land line, or mobile phones for half a day. Picture that for a minute. Not sure about the extent, but it happened hours away near Auckland, so it could've been a decent chunk of the country. Since we couldn't get hold of our host to get his address, we had to stay at our first hostel of the trip.I'm trying to be a bit more open to trying meat/seafood from people who have caught and cooked it themselves, so I tried some red snapper. It was chewy and didn't taste very good. Is meat an acquired taste? We surfed the next morning, Amy for her first time. Despite the wetsuit, I was actually really cold in the water, despite it being much warmer than I've surfed back home. We ended up staying with the couchsurfer the next day and it turned out one of them worked at Panorama in Invermere for a summer!

I finished a book I've been working on for 2 months. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhentsyn. Even the abridged version is pretty hefty. He spent 8 years in forced labor camps in Russia during the golden age of communism. The book details the rise and incredibly long run of what were essentially death camps. They say 30-60 million people died in them. Utterly shocking for some of the reason people got arrested, such as unfavorably comparing a bourgy poet to a proletariat poet (10 years!). The interrogation, forced confessions, torture, working outside in Siberian winters without proper clothing, starving to death over a 25 year period. Unbelievable. Puts Orwell to shame. Not the most cheerful book, naturally, but very well written, considering the author never once had the whole book in front of him, for fear of what might happen to him. The 6 original volumes won him a nobel prize in literature and exile. Well worth checking out, even just to skim.

Today we had our weirdest ride and our most fortuitous. The former was very stoned and very strange, but in the end harmless, whereas the latter we almost turned down because they already had 4 people in the car. But we squeezed in and after explaining that we were hoping to hear back from Couchsurfers, they offered us their place when they weren't even around! Internet, shower, kitchen, and no supervision. In fact, I even pushed my luck and texted him when the internet went down, and within ten minutes he showed up (he was staying at the girlfriend's house) and even brought an extra foamie in case we needed it. And this isn't the first time NZ hospitality has lived up to its reputation. We've been given beer, invited inside, been driven way out of the driver's way, given maps, etc. In all my traveling, this has by far been the nicest people I've come across, in my opinion. And yet they all keep warning us of the bad apples and to watch our bags...

-Dan