Emerge with the newly-risen sun. Walk towards M’s house (so I can crash with her) but after walking a fair way, realise I forgot my camera so we return to the Karaoke place and collect it; by that time the trains are just about to start running, so we decide we may as well go to the fish market. Wait for the 5h25 metro, emerge probably around 6am to a blue sky at Tsukijishijō station (I think?). Walk through fish market in search of someone M vaguely knows – I hear the story with my ears but it does not register with my brain. Avoid the golf buggy things, whizzy mopeds and polystyrene crates of fish.

Huge tuna, shellfish, bright red snapper. Clean, fresh smell of the morning, the ocean, sea creatures just killed, or crammed into writhing captivity.

We ask someone. We find him. As M chats away, I watch the throbbing paua, like a thick black heart muscle, straining from its pearly green shell to flip itself and suckle onto the plastic board of the scales. Maybe it knows it’s going to die? It’s hard to feel sorry for this extra-terrestrial sea creature; fascination is dominant in my sliver of attention. The man M knows gives us a map with a good place to eat roughly indicated among its scribbly lines.

I see blond tourists getting in the way, and despise them. Gaijin. Clumsy and alien. We are yelled at and trapped between fishmongers who are essentially blocking each other, whether or not we could disappear like they want us to.

It’s all confusion.

My eyes rove slowly over the scene and I mistakenly marry the gaping red and bone of a tuna corpse with the image of a human face in a dim, bluish-lit booth: I momentarily see the decapitated head of a man in my mental slowness. I am relieved not to have seen this and somehow thrilled to have envisaged it.

We go see the guy who works next to M’s shop (she part-owns a shop) and he tells us another place to go, but apparently they don’t like foreigners, who eat too slowly. We want to eat there. He leads us there. Stopping what he was doing. For us. We are fish market royalty.

Personal introduction works a treat, and he gives us ¥2000 so the tuna was on him. The tuna is raw and delicious. Even better is the (other delicious fish – forget name, if I ever knew it), which is seared on its dalmation skin but raw and tender through its flesh.

Then comes the cooked fish, we don’t know what type but the skin is red, cooked in the Sai Kyu style. Heaven. Culinary perfection. Despite the inviting plunge-pool bowls of soy sauce and (vinegar?) I cannot put a thing on that fish because it is so melt-in-the-mouth delicious as it is.

It is still before 7am, and we are fed. The trains are running, so we slope off to bed. Don’t look at me, commuters of Tokyo, I’ve had a busy night and I want to be alone… sleeping… and putting those memories where they belong – in a dream.

In fact, I was in Australia from December 30th – March 29th, and had internet access for much of my time there, but it was either too sunny, or exciting elsewhere, or I had important emails/University applications to attend to (just found out – I got in!) and I therefore never managed to produce a single blog entry during my time Down Under.

Not to say that nothing happened. Australia was a rich and eye-opening experience. I love and miss Kangaroos, and the Harbour Bridge, and the Melbourne cafes, and the lovely warm sunshine.

So!

I first arrived in Brisbane – stayed with my Grandma’s nephew, who is retired and lives on Bribie Island, which is abundant in pelicans, mosquitoes, and more retired people. Finished my knitting, in the deliciously oppressive heat of Brisbane’s rainy season (that for some reason I snuggled up in quite happily, like a big comfy duvet; although I can imagine it being HELL in conjunction with any form of stress).

Then down to Sydney, stopping the night in Byron en route – the worst and most over-priced Youth Hostel I’ve stayed in to date, a ‘roaches climb the wall’ affair, but a glorious and wonderful place itself; if I could go anywhere in Australia on a whim it would be Byron, the country’s Far East.

Sydney was next, where I attended a week-long course at NIDA, and stayed with my very cool Aunty K and Uncle R who fed me brown rice and vegetables and tofu. After staying with meat-lovers, who could barely fathom another food group, they probably saved my life…

My time in Sydney was punctuated with a trip up to Bingara, North of Tamworth where they hold Australia’s most prestigious country music festival, which was seen and not heard by me, when I was there to change onto the Countrylink bus. I spent a week Jillarooing on a cattle station just outside Bingara. I thoroughly enjoyed the horse riding, and was able to add several further justifications to my vegetarianism. Wrestling sheep and cattle in order to take off their tails/testicles with a penknife is not really my idea of fun, and a reality that meat-eaters should probably confront before they chuck the rest of that burger in the bin. It did not only cost a dollar.

In the midst of the blood and guts, cropping and chopping that life on a cattle station entails (no pun intended) there was a day that stuck out for me in my character analysis of our dear, autocratic host.

J, the man who owned and oversaw the station, shot his own dog and cut her open to retrieve the puppies inside her. And he was upset by this – finally he showed some regret at seeing a living thing die. He told me “on you go, you don’t want to see this” when I went to check on the dog, who had been suffering a traumatic labour all day. But I turned back as I left, and saw that dog straining its head round to look straight up the barrel of his gun. She knew exactly what was happening. And then, with a dull ‘clack’ and a quick mist of blood, she was dead.

J took those puppies that survived home, I think there were 4, and the next day he reported that 2 had died in the night and 2 were doing fine. I didn’t care to take comfort in this, or even really believe him.

Just to harp on about my food fussiness, I did something quite out of character on the cattle station: I ate meat for the first time in a year (my previous veggie stint had lasted from the age of about 11 – 18). One of the guys working on the station – funnily enough a chap from Bourne, which is just near the town where I grew up in England – had hunted, shot, carried to the Ute, skinned and gutted a roo single-handedly.

I had to respect that, and as it neatly side-stepped my principal objections to eating meat (no farmers were ripped off by supermarkets, and until that gunshot, the kangaroo was probably having a perfectly lovely day in the outback, just as always) I felt happy eating it. Besides, it made a welcome change from the variations on pasta they’d been feeding me (again, it was a relief when I got back to Sydney and could eat colourful, nutritious food with my Aunt and Uncle)

I was back in Sydney during the second half of January, and around this time I experienced a fair few coincidences. Most notably, on Australia Day I was walking through Hyde Park and saw a girl walking towards me who looked just like – yes! – as she came within a metre or 2 I could see it was my cousin’s girlfriend, and I called over to her. She was in fact my cousin’s ex-girlfriend as I quickly discovered upon introducing her to the friend I was with, and neither of us had any idea that the other was in Sydney. There must have been so many thousands of people wandering around the city that day, and for whatever reason, fate decided our paths should make an “X” at that precise moment.

After Sydney I moved on to Melbourne, with the hope of spending 2 months doing something useful like volunteering or work experiencing. Unfortunately, despite some promising contacts, I was unable to get work experience (bureaucracy strikes again) and ACMI don’t take volunteers for less than 6 months at a time. So I found myself with time to run, read, loll around, walk the dog, eat lots, check my facebook every couple of hours, hop on and off trams – usually paying the fare, but not always…

So I took a Circus Skills course at NICA, and volunteered for the Alliance Francaise French Film Festival, where I met some cool people that I was able to hang out with afterwards (and had a group photo with Jean-Pierre Jeunet!) And I spent ages emailing my mum, giving her explicit instructions on how to hack into my computer to retrieve old essays for the masters degree application i had decided to make. I then had to polish up the essays, hunt down references, fill out the application… etc etc.

Before I had arrived, my Melburnian friend (whom I’d met when he was visiting Paris, and a friend of ours in common recommended we meet up) put me in touch with his sister, who had a free room that she agreed I could move into for 2 months. Which is both cheaper and just generally nicer than staying in a hostel.

The girls I lived with were really wonderful, as were their delightful and receptive group of friends (that’s a shout-out Sanj!) We did a couple of day trips together, much rifling through thrift stores and hemming of the skirts we found in them, the Linden Postcard show in St Kilda that our other housemate had entered, watched the whole first series of True Blood, went to their friend’s 1950s birthday party, we were extras in a low-budget zombie movie shooting in our neighbourhood, went to Golden Plains, MANY things.

In this way, 2 months strolled by very pleasantly. I could perpetually add to that list (and I shall – the Moroccan Soup Bar! If you are ever in Melbourne GO there, and take your Tupperware with you!) but I have to stop somewhere.

Anyway, the entry originally begun and not finished on March 5th, in ‘four-seasons-in-one-day’ Melbourne, went as follows:

Warm. Pre-storm. It smells like ironing, although the crumpled, grey cotton sky wouldn’t suggest it. The clouds sag and break like a giant leaky ceiling over my head, as I walk to the bank on the corner of Brunswick Street. Somehow I don’t mind the rain here…

I do so love a pun – my favourite is “The eyes (ayes) have it”. Beautiful.

So here I am in Ikoma! I have my own room, a laptop, which has kept me on facebook pretty much every day, and I feel very much a part of the family. For those of you who don’t know me that well – I actually am part of the family, but have only met my uncle’s mother – I call her obaa-chan, an endearment along the lines of ‘Grandma’ - once before, and have never spent so much concentrated time with my uncle and aunt. It’s wonderful! I sincerely hope they feel the same.

Ah, yes… to have family in Japan! Life is expensive in terms of trains, the money practically teleports itself from my wallet into the ticket vending machine every time I walk past. I barely see the stuff. What’s the currency again? ¥en, right? Thank goodness I don’t have to fork out a fortune on accommodation.

I gathered from the landing card I’d filled in (ticking the box next to ‘restricted items’ because I was carrying 2 Feijoas – not illegal drugs or firearms, which should have had a separate tick-box in my opinion) that I had to go and pay my regards at the Food Quarantine desk.

All clear.

My cousin had emailed me with explicit instructions on which bus to take, and after exchanging the stray $20 AUD from my wallet for one and a half thousand Yen (at least I couldn’t tell how badly I’d been ripped off), I managed to point and nod enough to obtain a ticket for the 17h30 departure, which I paid for by card as it exceeded my recently acquired Japanese fortune.

The ‘Lost in Translation’ culture shock that I’d been expecting failed to materialise, as we sped down the left-hand side of a motorway with trees on either side, following signs which read ‘Tokyo’, through the darkness of early evening rain lashing down on us. It could well have been England.

Saturday 17th kicked off with a trip to the supermarket, before baking a cake (a disaster cake that stuck to the bottom of the tin because I had no greaseproof paper, and so the middle fell out when I tipped it upside down – although it was delicious nevertheless…) I was then picked up by my cousin to visit his sister/my other cousin and her little boy (bringing some massacred chunks of cake with me) and after that I was dropped at Eden Park, just in the nick of time, to watch the Blues play the Western Force. And annihilate them!

I nearly didn’t attend the match, because the 3 cheapest types of ticket had sold out by the time I got there. As I was stood, staring up at the bad tidings on the screens above the ticket office, a chap came up and nudged me. “Here, we’ve got a spare ticket if you want one?” I definitely did. “Someone’s looking after you,” he said. Noticing a Scotch accent, I asked him where he hailed from. Turned out he was a ‘wegie (Glaswegian) like my dad. So, you see, we are all linked in the great Karma circles of life. I’m sure I’ve paid him back, or will do, somewhere down the chain.

The ticket was a $0.00 ‘comp’ and I could basically sit wherever I liked, which was a real blessing as it soon started to drizzle. Ha! Not only did I get a free ticket, but I was spared the NZ autumn weather. Lovely.

After the match I hopped on a bus and went for dinner at my aunty’s brother – also my host’s son – ‘s house (tenuous, tenuous…) It was actually time for dessert by the time I made it, so I scoffed an egg on toast and tucked into some homemade bread and butter pudding. Nice load of carbs to line the stomach before I met friends for a few beers in town, and then crashed at their hostel.

Sunday! Yummy hostel breakfast (I was cooked for, which was nice) provided me with the energy to walk back to Sandringham. Had a shower and threw a bag of overnight stuff together, because I was stopping with different relatives in Albany that night, before I was picked up by Emma.

Emma is the daughter of my Dad’s mate, with whom I’d stayed in Napier, and her friend works at the Mt Smart Stadium, and had procured us tickets for the rugby league match that day. Yes – MORE rugby, because I bloody loves it.

I did not emerge converted to rugby league, I’m a union girl, but I could definitely appreciate it. A whole new world of rugby has been opened up to me… Nice. Was a good laugh too – the Blues game on Saturday had been a solitary affair, my full concentration on the action, but this time we were a group of about 8, all in our mid-20s. All a bit hungover.

Emma dropped me in Albany, where I spent the rest of the day eating nice food and drinking a few gallons of tea, before hopping into bed at a respectable hour.

Monday. I was picked up in Albany by my Canadian friend from Dunedin who’d just bought a motorbike. I was a bit wary of making myself really ill whizzing down to Auckland on the back of a bike, already having swollen glands and a croaky voice, and also wary of a painful death on the road, but all went well and the whole thing was a hoot.

What wasn’t a hoot was the packing I had to do once I got home. Went to bed early, feeling increasingly ill, after setting my alarm for 5.25am in order to get to the airport in time.

The following morning I boarded my flight for Tokyo. It was the first time during the whole of my travels (Hawaii included!) that I haven’t had rain when leaving a country.

Don’t cry for me, Aotearoa! The truth is, I never left you!

Maori culture’s phenomenal; I’d spent that day visiting Whakarewarewa, where I’d seen a dance/song/haka display, and then I’d made my way to the Rotorua Museum, which is brilliant and I recommend it. I learnt all about the 28th Maori battalion that fought during WWII, it’s fascinating stuff…

http://www.28maoribattalion.org.nz/story-of-the-28th/about-the-28th

Back in Auckland, I stopped the night with the same relative who had picked me up back in December.

Where was I now? Older? Wiser? My suitcase was heavier, that was certain.

I think my tolerance of the disgusting has been drastically reduced with the introduction of Rotorua’s sulphurous stench into my life. It smells awful, but it is awesome. Bubbling, boiling mud! Marvellous. Glorious mud.

I’m now off to fit as many (cheap) cultural activities as possible into my day, with the added pressure of having a 5pm bus to catch. So I gotsta have it all wrapped up by 4pm, basically.

Go, go, go!

As we neared the Kaikoura peninsula, the road snaked along the seashore, darting to and from the water’s edge. I perked up when the driver announced we might be able to see some dolphins frolicking in the bay, and caught a glimpse of 2 that leapt in unison. Woooooow… I had never seen a dolphin before and I have always really wanted to.

My American friend, who I’d met in Dunedin and was coincidentally on the same bus as me, went off to her hostel and I hiked up the hill (now lumbered with my second, significantly larger bag that I’d recovered in Christchurch) to the Dolpin Lodge Backpackers. Phew! They had space for me. It’s a very cute hostel, which feels like someone’s house; I’d definitely recommend it.

That day was spent at a leisurely pace of almost total inactivity; I read my book, had a cuppa, went into town to find Collette in her hostel (although I only found it when I tried looking a second time, later that afternoon – it was miles up the road and I felt rather glad they’d had no space or I’d've been there too) and I went to Global Gossip to write up my blog. Incidentally, I hope you’ve read my mega account of Dunedin and the Bus-on-the-Hill.

So I met up with Collette that evening, we ate spaghetti, baked beans and cheese (very sweet of her to share, although I was a little alarmed by her having the audacity to call it a ‘recipe’…) and she told me she was booked on a Dolphin Watch. I decided to call the Whale Watch people in the morning to see if they had any spaces.

They didn’t! Nothing available! So, at half 8 in the morning (I’d gotten up early to make the call) I found myself strolling along in the direction of the seal colony. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the woman at my hostel had said I could walk round the peninsula along the coast before turning off to rejoin the cliff-top path, as long as I beat the tide coming in, and didn’t mind jumping across a few rocks.

I think I tarried a little too long looking for shells before getting to this bit of the coast, because the water really was coming in. I had to do a few action leaps across rocky footholds that were only there for a few moments between waves. I got pretty good at it, though, and felt rather Bond-esque by the time I got over to the lower grass path (although I was still unable to join the cliff-top).

Had a wonderful time looking at things along the way, it was quite the adventure. I had my iPod, which helps. Gave my adventure a soundtrack.

There were loads of Fur Seals lazing around; many of them I didn’t keep the recommend 10-metre distance from because they were so well camouflaged I almost stepped on them. But, dear animal-lovers, fear not, for I did not.

On the way back from my monster walk (see photos, they do speak a thousand words each, after all) I passed the Dolphin Watch Visitors’ Centre, and decided to go in and enquire, even though I knew my bus left at 10am and that tours take at least 3hrs. The woman was very sweet, and said I could totally do the first tour of the day, 5:50am-9:30 am. This would leave me juuuuuust enough time to power-walk back to the hostel, grab my cases, and make it to the bus stop 15mins before the 10:10am departure, as required. So I booked onto it!

Later that afternoon, I went for fish and kumara chips with my American friend, which was fun. I must say though, I do find her constant comparisons between NZ and the her own country (which does everything better – “whoops their asses”) so utterly boring, and I feel sad for her that she can’t be more culturally receptive. Surely this is the whole point of travelling? Some people clearly aren’t cut out for it.

After our delicious (fresh!) fish supper, I went back for a cuppa tea with the news, a wee read of my book, and an early bedtime. I did have to be up at 5am, after all…

After a rather sketchy walk in the dark to the Visitors’ Centre, I found myself on a bus with a load of people in wetsuits (absolutely NO regrets about not being able to actually swim with the dolphins – it was far too cold…)

The sun rose as we left the bay, bounding over waves in our double-decker boat (I’m sure that’s not the official term). The snow on the mountains looked like it was on fire, in the hot pink morning light.

Eventually someone spotted a dolphin, and we all jumped up to hang over the sides of the boat. Another, another. They were jumping out of the water - it was awesome. Suddenly, the lovely French woman who I’d been sharing a blanket with, pointed over the side, and I saw a dolphin right up close to the boat!

I cannot properly describe what I saw over the course of that boat trip. We were told that we were very lucky to be seeing so many dolphins in such beautiful conditions. Apparently there were three to four hundred dolphins in the water with us… and the light on the water was so beautiful.

It was choice, bro.

That evening A and I went for a stroll round the town, to check out the cinema and find somewhere to get dinner. We managed to strike up a rather fiery debate; A was dismissive of the Scots’ call for independence and, as a half-Scot with a father deeply in favour of – as Mel Gibson put it – FREEDOM, I found myself arguing against accusations of pettiness and nationalism bordering on/paving the way for racism.

3 hours, 2 curries, 2 Devils Advocates and maybe a bucket of saliva later, we both collapsed (exhausted) into bed.

Next day the Canadian boys were predictably relaxed about timing, and I spent the morning haunting the kitchen/TV area of the Central Backpackers, the ghost of a former customer. Someone thought Black Hawk Down would make appropriate breakfast viewing, and so we endured severed limbs with our muesli, as Somalia throbbed on screen in violent shades of blood.

There’s something about watching DVDs in the daytime – especially before noon – that makes me feel utterly nauseous. Perhaps New Year’s Day (or any significant hangover) can be the exception. One is generally already feeling nauseous.

Anyway, I ventured again onto the streets of Dunedin, leaving my stuff at the hostel, to enjoy a stroll in the sunshine and keep out of mischief. On the far side of town was a grassy space called the ‘Oval’ where a Gypsy Fayre was set up. It was like a utopia of trinkets and caravans, with a sign saying ‘Wooden Things’ and a band of Rastas playing bluesy folk numbers.

I got a text from J saying they’d be at the hostel shortly, so I headed back. I was lugging my case down the hostel stairs just as they pulled up and pip-pipped.

We went to the beach, where the guys donned their wetsuits and went for a surf, while I enjoyed the excessive attentions of a wet dog brandishing a branch of seaweed, and read my book during seaweed-lobbing intervals.

Dinner was totally vegetarian in honour of A (I eat seafood and bloody loves it) who had been invited but (and I obviously kept schtum on this, er… until now, I guess) wasn’t interested for fear of ‘wine and seduction’. I was not deterred from embarking on my adventure – pah! – and felt like old friends with the lovely Canadian lads within 5 minutes.

When we got up to the bus, the sky was all colours of summery sweetness and flowers, and the mist hung low in the valley (the next morning I realised that it was actually the sea down there). C and myself set to work on the ‘fire bath’, which I quickly learned was a bath with a fire beneath it to heat the water, and J had made us a scrumptious dinner feast by the time we had got the fire going. It took a good half an hour for the water to reach bathing temperature, which was enough time to eat, drink and be merry. J hopped in his bath, and C and I played some guitar indoors before deciding it would be awesome if you were having a fire bath and some people came to serenade you. It was a balmy evening by New Zealand standards, and we sat on the wooden step outside the ‘Emergency Exit’, singing to the sky, the moon, the clouds, the stars, the possums, and each other. I have never seen so many shooting stars in my life; they would grow hot and quiver, and then blaze through the still, sparse clouds; it was quite beautiful.

The next morning I found out that A had been texted and agreed to join us for a trip to another beach, where there might be sea lions and penguins. Allans Beach, perhaps? Argh, I forget…

So with A and a picnic on board, we set off. The boys surfed (surf, surf, surf – it’s a way of life apparently) and we went off looking for wildlife. Saw 2 penguins snuggling between some rocks, thanks to an old, dribbly local (an old ‘bocker’ as they say in Somerset) who pointed them out, and a sleeping fur seal a little further along.

A was easily persuaded to join the bus community for the evening – we were awesome, how could anyone not? – and spent the night in the camper van. We were supposed to leave the following morning and hitch our way to Christchurch but J & A’s excursion into town to recover A’s belongings before the 10am check-out turned into a total disappearing act, so I gathered we were stopping another night. That was fine by me, I was quite at my leisure; the view was almost too beautiful to bear, and free accommodation is not something I’m inclined to turn my nose up at.

I took this opportunity, while people were off making and doing, to experience a wash in a hot tin bath. It was bliss. I couldn’t hear a thing, except the crackling of the fire beneath me, the lapping of water on my skin, and the wind blowing my wet hair into curls. And all the time, stretched out in front of me as if purely to be marvelled at, was the most exquisite panoramic view, over hills and ocean and sky.

After a few hours of abandonment (“back in an hour” they’d texted almost 2 hours ago!) C and I got bratty, ate all the chocolate, and walked down the road to see the (only) neighbour for a cup of tea. He had a 5-month-old Golden Labrador and a gorgeous wooden house he was building himself. Quite enough to merit stopping an hour or so. Leisure.

When we got back to the bus, J & A had returned to find a spotless kitchen (yes, I was bored) and the empty chocolate wrappers. So ner. They were sorry, though, and we all hopped in the van to visit [insert place-name when you remember what it was...] and do some daredevil yoga atop a steep cliff, with tangled masses of seaweed writhing in the rocky waters below. I did the only headstand. And handstand. And cart-wheel. Go ME.

The next morning, Tuesday 6th, although I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that, we had lush garlicky scrambled eggs on toast with spinach from the garden, before a last trip in the van to be ditched outside a petrol station on the road to Christchurch. Time to move on.

We were first picked up, after devouring a few sickly biscuits bought at the gas station, and a trip to the loo each, by an Israeli man and a woman who was probably his wife, his mother, or his sister. Or all three…? Who knows. They took us as far as Oamaru, where we had a spot of picky-lunch (i.e. houmous and carrots and nuts and rice crackers). After about 20 minutes of thumbs out, we were then picked up by a very sweet chap from Alicante, called Carlos. He said he’d take us all the way to Christchurch. Not realising I’d heard him through the open boot, A relayed this information to me as, “he’ll take us as far as Kraicha, wherever that is…”

Well, we made it there safe and sound.