Flight of The Chonchords

10-2-09

For those of you who may not be in the know, it turns out that New Zealand is actually an island. It is more than towering and rugged alpine peaks plunging abyss like into valleys converging into braided glacial streams. More than a conglomeration of volcanic and limestone climbing crags. More than mile upon mile of ‘cute little lamb’ infested ‘Sound of Music’ country side. It also has beaches. Improbable as they may seem, they are there, real beaches with sand and waves, and ocean. I am not saying the mountains do not exist, because they certainly do. The white, powerful, and foreboding massifs stand casually behind miles of smooth warm sand, palm trees, and surfers, as if their presence didn’t make the whole scene a bit too unrealistic. Maybe a bit too Hollywood. But Hollywood could never get away with building a movie set like this, people would not believe, critics would scoff, reputable actors like Keanu Reeves and Owen Wilson would lose all credibility. I do not believe it either.

So I surf. Or try too. I take a bus twenty minutes out of Christchurch to Middleton. I am with a group and we have heard that people surf there. We will too. The bus stops behind a dune that we quickly scramble atop. We see waves, the kind people surf. We make a plan, 1. Indian food, 2. Rent surf board and wet suit, 3. Surf. The first two steps of our three step program go smoothly, but we (mostly me) realize that step 3 is a bit more complicated than the word implies. In fact it takes strength, and tenacity, and seeming stupidity, to struggle against battering waves. I flail at the water hoping to get out to the land of the giants, where I can escape this amateur charade and get to some real surfing. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes go by, and I am maybe 10 or 20 yards farther out. I am getting closer. This is good enough. I will catch a monster here; I just have to be patient. You know just chill out. Oh but this one is perfect this is MY wave. I get ready, swim into it, get up; I’m Surfing, someone should be filming this, we could win awards, and now my board is gone. We flail together in the current, I wanting to go one way, my board the other. We arrive on the same page at the same time in roughly the same place (only because we are tethered together), we are in 2 feet of water. A sand bar? A trough? I wobble around and try to think again. The beach! Twenty minutes getting my ass kicked by waves. Two seconds ‘surfing’. Fifteen seconds getting shredded by the wave I thought I could surf. And I am back at the Beach? This is stupid.

I surf for the rest of the day, I am beaten and disheveled. I feel like I have been hit by bag of wine, drunk and sore. I love it. Maybe tomorrow?

I have begun to plan as if I were never leaving Christchurch. Antarctica it seems is simply a hoax, perpetuated by the governments of the world so that they can use ‘scientific research’ as a front for whatever conspiratorial doings they may have underway. My crew was supposed to fly down on September 30th, one day after the first flight of the season, but the ‘weather’ in ‘Antarctica’ was too bad for the first flight so ours got pushed back. That was ok. But then the ‘weather’ mysteriously cleared up in a day or two and the first flight made another attempt. This time the plane barely made it off the runway before they realized they had major mechanical problems and had to turn around immediately. This was ok too. All of a sudden they need ‘special parts’ to fix the plane. Two more days in Christchurch for us. This is starting to not be quite so ok. The first flight is scheduled to take off tomorrow. I wonder what will happen next, a hurricane? Earthquake? Catastrophic asteroid impact? We will have to wait and see.

 The pictures were taken by a girl on my crew, when we spent a day up at Kaikora where we saw mythical forest seals. These fur seal pups travel about a mile upstream to the base of a waterfall to play around all day long. The only place in the world where this behavior has been documented.