The tent is soggy, and chilly, and we’ve been inside for 2 days, waiting for the rain to stop. Bill Church and I are in the southern tip of New Zealand in Fjordlands National Park, having flown into Auckland four or five weeks earlier. We’d had big dreams of climbing rockwalls and getting our first experience on glaciers, but the weather in the big mountains is “the worst in years”. Even experienced climbers have come off the peaks crying for the families back home, so we’re definitely not going to be trying that, thanks. 

We are 23, and have drifted south in a bit of a fog, which is fitting, because that’s what the weather here is all about. The peaks are high and lush, and stab into the cold water (boats from the Antarctic expeditions come and go out of ports nearby).  They are gorgeous and they are awesome. As in, they make you feel awe. As in tiny, insignificant. On our first day in the park, I started to climb up a hill to get a better view, thinking it was only a couple hundred feet high, only to realize I was off by a factor of ten. My eyes and brain literally couldn’t conceive of something that high, and I trudged up for an hour before I could recalibrate. 

Between the drizzle and the massive inferiority complexes, we’ve made an unspoken agreement to hide in our tent. I am now halfway through the copy of the Lord of the Rings I bought in Christchurch just a week earlier.  I’d never read Tolkien before (I know!), and Bill made me buy a copy in the most amazing bookstore down the street from the Cathedral Square where all the buskers perform. It was a big one-volume paperback, which I’ve upcycled into a “hardback” by duct-taping cut of slabs of cardboard onto the spine and covers, to hold up the rigors of tramping. I’ve interrupted my musings about how much Middle Earth must feel like New Zealand (I know!) to pen fan-fic about Eowyn after she gets left behind in Edoras while the men ride off to war (I know!), as our condensed body odor and sweat damps our sleeping bags and drips off the ceiling of our tents onto my box-book. 

In a few hours we’ll have a meal of Lipton Ready Noodles and Sauce, and in the morning the clouds will part, enough so we can spend most of a wonderful day hiking up a shoulder of the mountain behind us, and crawl around on some boulders while we eat cheese and apples, and head back down to our stinky tent.

In a few days we’ll take advantage of a “free” rental car (many tourists  rent cars when they fly into Auckland, drive south to Christchurch, then fly home – so the cars need to come back north) which we will damage in three…entirely…different…accidents, the last of which will be a collision with an unlicensed, uninsured driver less than a mile from our final destination. By then Theoden will be dead, and Faramir will have stolen the heart of the woman of my dreams.