Becoming wallpaper

Being on your own is taboo, and in my experience can make some people surprisingly uncomfortable. I was told explicitly in Vietnam that a single traveller, particularly a man, can be quite threatening. Sole traveller, single parent, lone gunman, the associations with disenfranchisement, madness or criminality can, if you are sensitive to these things, confront you more frequently when travelling, particularly here in NZ, where as a proportion there seem to be fewer single travellers than there were in Asia.

You notice something in the air most often in the evening when you venture to the pub, restaurant or cinema in search of a diversion from cheap stubbies, pasta n sauce, and the hostel's DVD collection. It can be quite a dispiriting experience, but where there is taboo, there are conventions for avoiding discomfort in your and those around you:

1) Mind where you sit / stand. You need to balance being inconspicuous with avoiding lurking in the shadows. In a pub, there are three acceptable locations - by the bar, in front of the Sky Sports TV, or in a fireside armchair if there is one. In a cinema, sitting in the back row is not acceptable, this being the domain of the demonstrably successful in love only. Any location in a restaurant lit by fluorescent bulbs is fair game for a single, however.

2) Take a prop. A newspaper or dog are acceptable accessories to reduce your weirdo factor in a pub. A book is a risky alternative which works in some scenarios, but which can mark you out as intellectually aloof from the common if you are not careful.

3) Watch the time. In every pub or bar there is a time after which it is impossible to sit on your own and retain any semblance of social respectability. It can be any time between 5pm, when the after-work crowd comes in, and 11pm, when only prostitutes, clients and pimps are left (in Asia that is) and it varies between establishments, but the change in music, clientele, menu or whatever it is is instant, palpable, and inviolable.

4) It is never, ever acceptable to enter a pub on your own when a quiz is happening. The point of a quiz is to create an illusion of dynamic social interaction where the anally-retentive can indulge their love of trivia and pointless competition without being ostracised. A single person sitting in the midst, whether taking part or not, would expose this fabrication just as clearly as when the house lights go up at the end of a university disco and reveal spotty youths prancing around with arthritic hand gestures in a bland gymnasium on the outskirts of town.

5) If in doubt, don't strike up a conversation in a pub. It is possibly the most loaded of all initial social interactions, and the chance of success in conversing with a stranger is substantially outweighed by the risk of being perceived as a lonely, alcoholic benefits defrauder. If you need to chat, sit at the bar. A good barman will talk to you. A great barman will make it seem like they actually want to talk to you.

I'm sure the are a million sensitivities that vary across different cultures and scenarios. If enough people contribute them here, maybe I'll pull them together somehow.

Doubtful Sound

Apologies in advance for the length of this entry... The trek to the summit of Avalanche Peak brought on a recurrence of my Premiership career-ending knee injury, or rather the over-ambitiously speedy descent did. It took me three days to come to terms with the fact that I would not be able to walk the Milford Trail on this visit. In recompense to myself, I decided to follow the recommendation of a hostel owner in Wanaka to go sea kayaking on Doubtful Sound, the larger, more aloof and less popular sister of Milford.

So it goes that Captain Cook named this Fiord because he didn't think there would be enough wind for his ships to exit if they ventured inside. This 40km fiord (a glaciated valley which reaches the sea) was my home for two days, my companions Adrian the guide, Scott the New Yorker from Fargo, and Debbie the hairdresser from Cornwall with a nephew who went to my school. After an hour of paddling we reached the main body of the Sound, and Adrian stopped us for the first of his many party pieces. He asked us to estimate the height of the near vertical mountain rising out of the water ahead of us. We centred in on 1,500ft, less than half its actual size. Adrian explained that the scale of the fiord baffles every visitor's senses. Suitably awed, we struck off down Hall Arm looking at geological fault lines marked by huge fissures in the cliffs and listening to far off penguins. Adrian used to work for DOC (Department of Conservation) and was a learned and laconic guide, explaining dolphins recent absence from the Sound as a result of the hydroelectric plant at one end, and bringing to life beech trees' 250-year cycle of life and death clinging to sheer granite rock faces.

Towards dusk we camped by a river mouth and feasted on our various one-pot wonders, washed down by wine in a bag and mini-eggs, courtesy of Jesus' death 1983 years previously. After dinner Adrian said he would take us Kiwi-spotting. His attempts at communicating with the deer in the valley earlier had done nothing to dispel us of his deep lack of seriousness, so we headed past the camp toilet and into the rainforest with our expectations suitably tempered. To our advantage, a full moon was up, and our head torches redundant. Male Kiwis are highly territorial and, when we paused a little way into the bush, Adrian positioned us ahead of him and, with a blade of grass, did a passable imitation of the male of the species. We were deathly silent as Adrian supplanted his faux calls with a shuffling of his feet in the style of a Kiwi trampling ferns. A minute or so later, from maybe 15m away, the dark taking its toll on more than one sense, came the sound of ferns and bracken being broken at pace. The noise stopped and after a few seconds a scream arose from low in the bushes 5m in front of me. It was piercing, plaintive, aggressive, and utterly thrilling. This rare nocturnal bird shrieking at me to "ger orf his laaaand" had me grinning and shaking with excitement. We retreated and, true to form, he chased us further, eventually offering us a glimpse of His Kiwiness in the gloom. A Kiwi in a zoo is runty, absurd and pitiful. In the night of the termperate rainforest in Fiordland it is quite majesterial, and worthy of its status as the national emblem.

Dawn the next day was almost as magical, the daylight offering me the chance to try to capture something of the stillness of this place as the mist rose. The marvel for today, apart from the discover of 51 sandfly bites, was a 3,000ft high waterfall, once thought to be thr highest in the world before a Frenchman decided it was a cascading river instead. Battling the tide a flow from the hydro plant, we paddled for 5 hours around an island and back to civilisation once more - in the form of a village of 200 people. A more than adequate substitute for Milford I think.

City boy goes bush...

... and gets stuck in the mud. It was inevitable really. Driving through the Catlins, a beautiful forest reserve at the southernmost tip of NZ, it was getting dark, and I was getting desperate. I had promised myself I would finally make proper use of my camper, and sleep by the side of a road - just me, the birds and the cold for company. I spied a field with a track into it, and some large ferns to screen me from the road, and after a quick shufti, I turned in. About 5 metres down the track I realised I was sliding sideways rather than driving, the alignment of my front wheels bearing no relation to my direction of travel. Hmmm, I thought, cogently.

A few yards on, and now on grass, I parked up hidden from the road. There was just enough light for me to cook my dinner, so while my venison sausages were turning brown, I went to inspect the track. Alarm bells rang when I found a number of estate agents' signs by the track, which had been ripped down and turned into convenient car wheel-sized rectangles. The track itself was rather haphazardly and forlornly lined with thick fern branches. A gloom descending, on me as well as the scenery, I trudged back to my car to find the number for the AA and whether my phone had reception. It didn't.

I spent an evening cursing my wrecklessness, and only finishing off such a good book as Atonement could distract me from the walking and grovelling I would have to do, and the sarcasm I would have to bear, tomorrow - Easter Sunday.

In the morning, after a few failed attempts to extract the car, which only deepened the twin troughs it was in, I decided to have a hearty breakfast and prepare for a long walk to the nearest town - 10km I estimated. With thumb out by the side of the road I trudged off. Joy of joys, though, and a hunter pulled up in a 4x4 beside me, complete with loaded rifle on the passenger seat. With a toothless grin he sized-up my predicament immediately, and with only a hint of mickey-taking, he reversed and had my car out in a jiffy. As he was leaving he said, "If you'd called the AA, they would only have sent me you know". I smiled at $250 saved, but tonight I'm staying in a hostel.

The land of the leaflet

When Charly and I were in Tunisia, we had a man try to sell us a camel ride into the Sahara using a single sentence containing words in four languages. I marvelled at this feat of communication, but I marvelled more that he had picked up very quickly that we tourists didn't just want a camel ride, we wanted information. This nebulous stuff was clearly more precious to us foreigners than water, or the camel ride itself. We wanted an official camel, from an approved Bedouin, not some mangey beast herded by a toothless Tunisian at the side of the road.

Of course, when we shrugged this guy off and trudged to the tourist office in the sweltering heat, "Gappy" was already there, sat behind his desk. He was civil enough not to rub our noses in our Western uptightness. He knew what we wanted from the get go but had grown accustomed to the process you have to go through to make we tourists comfortable booking anything. It's same, same, but different, in Asia, where, in contractual negotiations, this fine phrase means something like, "Look. For fuck's sake, I know what you want to do and I can do it for you. You read it in the Lonely Planet and it says you can go to this amazing remote place, and don't go by car cos it's not as good as going by boat, and only pay 60,000 Dong/Baht/Kip, blah, blah, blah. And look, it's a fair price, possibly not the cheapest, but you'll have a good time and are you going to seriously argue with me over 50 pence".

Needless to say, this is not the way in NZ, where tourist information is a multi-million dollar business. There are leaflets offering you deals on multiple extreme activities everywhere, even in toilet cubicles. Deciding which paraglide/parasail/hang-glide/glide/rope swing to do is almost impossible, and I long for a short, dirty-looking man to come up to me on a street corner and bully me into doing something I'm not very certain about, but ultimately am likely to have a great time doing.

In praise of the Flat White

I couldn't find decent coffee in Vietnam, the second largest producer of beans in the world. NZ, however, is a different matter. Coffee is a pretty serious business here, and I still haven't reached Wellington, where it rivals rugby as almost a religion. The particular gift of the Antipodeans to the coffee world is the Flat White, of which there is no direct equivalent in Europe. This is a crime, as it towers above all espresso-based drinks. The closest is France's Cafe au lait, but it's just too milky to do the trick.

To use a hackneyed metaphor, the Flat White is the coffee a daughter would be happy to bring home to meet her parents. You'd be embarrassed to sit down to a first dinner with a Latte, a lanky, disappointing, slip of a thing whose nose would probably run into mum's home-made soup. An espresso, a short fiery man with an advanced sense of his own importance, would argue with your dad. A Cappuccino, the desert of the coffee world, would stand out a mile as a short-term fling, bound not to last and only suitable under certain specific conditions. And as for an Americano? Stronger and bigger than everything else and completely vulgar. But a Flat White, third espresso, third milk and third foam, is a keeper, husband material from the outset. Strong enough, but with an edge of creativity displayed in the swirly pattern on the top (see photo). Just perfecto.