Jet ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... lag...

Home! Hahahahahahahahhahahahahah! I am finally, at long, long last, back in my own home. My own bed! With my own stuff all about me, and my own cat to cuddle. And my own kitchen. Oh, the joy of eating stuff you've cooked yourself, rather than whatever's come out of some hotel's cockroach-infested kitchen*.



Oh, and my wife. Yes. Nice to be home with She Who Must Not Be Forgotten In Any Blog Post Thing On Pain Of The Stapling Of Delicate Parts. And I wish to formally state that I'm not typing that under any form of coercion, threat, or pointy object. No. It's all voluntary... *ahem*

Yes, so: the rest of the tour of Australia and New Zealand went not too badly. The high spots were probably the events in Brisbane** and Perth, with very close seconds coming in Melbourne at the Crime and Justice Festival. Where I got to say "FUCK!" very loudly in a convent. And it's not every day that you get to do that.

Everything post Perth is a bit of a blur. Other than the lovely woman on the way back from Singapore to Heathrow who decided to watch a comedy film at two in the morning (UK time) and laugh uproariously every fucking ten fucking minutes. And when I say 'uproariously' I mean 'loudly and flat'. Like a bloody witch that Wile E. Coyote's dropped a sodding anvil on. And when I say 'comedy film', I'm only guessing. Given the look of the woman, I wouldn't have been surprised if it was Schindler's List.

Anyway, so... Harrogate. Kinda went past in a blur this year, what with the jet-lag and all. I'm sure that in addition to being vague and wobbly I was probably grumpy too, so apologies to anyone I spoke to. Certainly I don't think I gave of my best at any of the events I was slated to do... Or rather, I gave of my best, but my best was considerably more crap than in previous years.

At one point I tried drinking heavily, and managed three whole pints before lurching off to an early bed. I did slightly better on the Saturday night, after popping an obscene amount of caffeine tablets. But that just led to me talking very quickly for three hours and then staring at the ceiling in my room wondering why the wallpaper wouldn't JUST FUCKING MOVE FOR A CHANGE!

And you know what? I can't remember very much about the festival at all. It's all a whooshy blur. With a speeded up soundtrack and a faint smell of elderberries.

From this, I think we can safely assume that jet-lag + caffeine = bad. Naughty. Not to be repeated.

But it's certainly nice to be home!

* Yup, I had a lovely meal in a VERY expensive hotel that featured a live floor show involving cockroaches. Huge ones. They couldn't sing and dance, but they did their best. All three million of them...
** Where I spectacularly managed to cock up afterwards and not meet up with Sean O'Boyle, composer extraordinaire. I completely spaced and forgot it was Brisbane I was meant to meet him in, which is a vast pain in the arse, because he does some seriously good music. I can wholeheartedly recommend his Concerto for Didgeridoo to you, because it's really rather good. Even though he'll probably never speak to me again.

Timmy’s fallen down the well?

Tuesday started, as days down under always seem to for me, far too early and with a vague feeling that someone’s stolen the sentient part of my brain and replaced it with some sort of delicious nougaty goo. I tried to get the thinking back with a warm-ish shower in a freezing cold room, followed by a nice cup of tea and setting the fire alarm off. Ah, the joys of toast.

I’d flown down from Sydney the day before, on a wee plane full of coughs and sniffles. Which is always reassuring when you’re heading into the Swine Flu capital of Australia.

It’s kind of weird: visiting someone and being given a room with en suite shower, bath, washing machine, and chunky stained glass sculpture/window; billiard room, cooking facilities, well-stocked fridge, couch, dining area, and an upright piano (with a buggered E above middle C*). I’ve stayed in four star hotels where the facilities didn’t even come close. But best of all was the outsides...

Now you’re going to have to forgive me if I wank lyrical for a moment here:

I wandered out the door, into the bush and the early morning light. The scribble of eucalyptus trees, dark against the pale blue sky. Steam rising from the scrappy underbrush, glowing in the sun’s early touch. The smell of cough mixture tainting the air from fallen eucalyptus leaves. The screech and drum of birds and frogs, hidden in the bush. And then there were kangaroos.

I’d never seen kangaroos before. Not real ones. Yes, I’ve seen kangaroo impersonators in the zoo when I was wee, and on the telly, but this was the my first, genuine, 100%, look for the union label, hopping around in the wild, kangaroo. There were three of them, frozen in the scrub, staring at us: Victorian old ladies, standing prim and proper, clutching invisible handbags to their chests. A look of mild distaste on their long hairy faces, peering through the bush.

When you see them from the waist up it even looks as if they’re wearing vast crinoline dresses -- the kind with a bustle out the back. And they just stood there for two whole minutes, disapproving of me, then they were off, bounding away into the trees. Knees together, dainty little ankles flashing saucily, dirty great big feet thumping on the muddy ground.

I stood there and watched them go, grinning like I’d been dropped on my head once too often. Kanga-fucking-roos, right there, in the wild!**

And best of all, they’re bloody tasty too.

Anyway, mid-morning there was a scramble for the train, made all the more difficult by the stinky rail operators spodging something up, meaning that we had to have a tour of unknown back streets in a clapped-out, replacement bus service. And thence to central Melbourne.

My first glimpse was a tad on the surreal side, as two men dressed as HUGE seagulls buggered about pecking pedestrians, an big elephant jiggling about in the muddle distance, and a not-to-scale snail shuffling about between them all. Funky, in a ‘How much did I have to drink?’ kind of way.

But we pottered about for a bit, went to the gallery, admired the aboriginal art, then went back to playing spot the kangaroo at Adrian’s place***.

Then next day was a trip through the Yarra Valley, Adrian driving while I stared at the scenes of devastation. The terrible bush fires that tore through Victoria have left a swathe of blackened landscapes. Great chunks of countryside with nothing but charcoal trees sticking out of the dark earth. Apparently the farmland grass has come back really quickly, but the native grass and ferns are trailing a long way behind. So all you can see from the car window are charcoal-coated tree trunks, stretching away into the distance.

Many of them are sporting scrubby green patches of leaves, but Adrian tells me there’s not enough rain about for them to survive. It’s a fake revival. A dead tramp bounce. Apparently experts are predicting that up to 85% will die. Here and there we can see the rectangular patches of dirt that used to be people’s homes. The death toll was huge, and almost everyone out here knows someone who died in the blaze.

I found it bloody strange to think that in this day and age, people are dying from something so primordial as forest fires. Not just one or two people: nearly two hundred. It seems like something from another era...

* Just in case you’re wondering, the wooden upright for the hammer was broken, so it didn’t even make a clunk. And completely screwed any attempt I made at playing the bloody Moonlight Sonata. When you’re playing by ear, it’s kinda hard if you can’t hear some of the notes. It knida goes: dum, dum, clunk, dum-dum, clunk...
** No, not copulating kangaroos, that would be rude and wrong. I’m sure they have enough decorum to rent a nice motel room and put on some Barry White. Oh, yeah, you know what big feet mean, don’t you baby... Mmmm...
*** And no, that’s not an euphhemism for something dodgy.

Manly men don’t surf

Opera House hunting started bright and early at five in the morning when the alarm on my phone went off. Stupid phone. It had forgotten we were now on Australian time, not New Zealand time. So it was two hours earlier than it thought. Oh, how embarrassed the phone was when I pointed out it’s mistake, in short, angry, sweary words...

Opera House hunting started again four hours later, after more bleary swearing, a shower, an overpriced breakfast full of noisy tourist people*, and a lot of fumbling with the hotel’s courtesy map. In the end I found it hiding about three minutes' walk from the concierge’s desk. Ah yes, it thought it could best me, but I showed it! I SHOWED THEM ALL!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAaaa...

*ahem*

Anyway, so, yes: it’s big and white and looks a bit like Sydney Opera House, as featured on TV and things. Only smaller. And slightly less shiny. And with a hell of a lot more tourists** milling about. But I didn’t have time to dawdle. No: because I had to catch a ferry to the other side of the bay and up a bit, for lunch with the inestimable Michael Robotham and his family.

Circular quay isn’t a monkey’s gargle from the opera house, so I slouched over there, doing my best to look nonchalant. Yeah, I’m cool, I fit in. Tourist? No, dude, can’t you tell I’m a traveller? Yeah, I’m taking photos, but that’s, like totally research... No, I don’t want to buy a knock-off Rolex.
So then I goes up to the gal behind the ferry terminal counter, put on my best smile. “I’d like to take the ferry to Manly.”
She looks at me, the way a starving tramp looks at a half-eaten Big Mac. “You don’t need to take no ferry to Manly,” she says, licking her lips. “Baby, you’re already there.”
Mind you, given the huge hairy moustache she has, I get the feeling she got there before me ... and then ate all the pies.

If you’re ever sodding about in Sydney for a while, may I recommend taking the ferry out to Manly? It’s a surprisingly restful trip, given the damn drunken hoons that seem to be dotted all over the place. The worst bunch on the way out were French, so technically: les fichus hoons ivres. Hanging over the side of the boat and drinking beer in that irritating cock-weasely way that seems so chic when you’re fourteen and have more spots than a swimming pool full of dalmatians.

Anyway, I’d met Michael at those ITV3 crime award things last year and he’d foolishly said, ‘If you’re ever in Sydney...’ as you do, never expecting that the ghastly person you’re talking to will actually turn up on your doorstop. But like a bad penny, or smell*** there I was. Hahahahahaha! But being the consumate gentleman that he is, he took me on a wee tour of his home town.

There's something really weird about Manly: it’s full of blokes dressed in wetsuits****, usually stripping off at the side of the road, showing off their shampoo-commercial hair and unfeasible abs. Clearly surfing isn’t a manly pursuit. Even if they’re actually surfing in Manly... I mean, if you’re really a manly man then surely you don’t have time to spend all that time sitting up and washing your hair. You're too busy putting up shelves, mowing the lawn, and working the barbecue. Stuff like that.

Looking at these golden-tonsured poo-heads, Michael told me why he never surfs any more (it involves stitches), and then took me back to his house for a lovely lunch of slow-roasted lamb with assorted vegetable delight. And very nice it was too. For a bloke that's sold 1,300,000 copies of his first crime novel***** he’s remarkably down to earth. If it was me I’d eat nothing but caviar and wipe my bum on pink parakeets.

But maybe that’s just me. Certainly when I conducted a covert search of the Robotham family bathrooms there was no sign of a parakeet dispenser.

After a very tasty lunch Michael took me to a wee beach of his acquaintance so I could go paddling in the Tasman Sea. I’d tried to do this from the New Zealand side, but it was going to be pretty suicidal, so Russell talked me out of it. Sensible chap that he is (if you ignore his millinery choices). It was lovely to stand in the surf on an Australian beach while the sun went down. And not get eaten by sharks, stung by deadly jellyfish, or bitten by venomous spiders out for a day at the beach (and probably sporting eight little inflatable water-wings*****).

After that it was back to the ferry for me, leaving Manly behind, but forever carrying it in my heart. You know, in a manly kind of way. Not a hair-washy, ab-crunching kind of way. My abs don’t need crunched. Well, they probably do, but I’m relying on self-delusion to see me through to the end of this paragraph...

* Because I’m over here on business, I’m a traveller. Not a tourist. And if you see me standing in the street gawping at things, then taking their photograph, it’s research. Yes. You heard: research. Not tourism. No, because obviously I’m way too cool for that.
Shut up.
** But not me, because I’m a ‘traveller’, as we have already established.
*** Like for example, the kind produced by a New Zealand Fantasy writer.
**** Like a big rubber-fetish pervert convention.
***** You heard right: one point three MILLION copies. I'm thinking of erecting a statue in his honour. ****** Spiders not being the best swimmers in the world. That’s why they always envy their relatives the crabs, and never invite them to Christmas dinner. Mind you, no one ever jokes about Paris Hilton having spiders, so I suppose they can't complain too much.

Yeeee-haw...

A lot of people think the Fourth of July is a purely American holiday – one where they celebrate getting rid of the steeeeenky British Aristocracy and it’s crapulantly corrupt parliament* - but it’s also an important day in the New Zealand calendar. Yes, the Fourth of July is officially ‘Try To Drown A Scotsman Day’.

But they don’t do it in a hands-on fashion. No bag over the head, concrete block round the ankles and into the nearest harbour for the Kiwis – oh no, no, no. Everything in New Zealand has to be environmentally friendly these days, so they use the weather to give Scotsmen a watery grave...

I was fifteen minutes from the slightly manky** hotel I’d ended up in after the event in Hamilton, when the attempt on my life was made. It was bloody stoating it down, bouncing back off the tarmac for optimum wetness. By the time I’d gone half a dozen paces my trousers were sticking to my legs like ... wet trousers. I’d spent the morning in the Auckland museum, looking at the Maori exhibits and wondering why everything seemed to be so incredibly lifeless. More than a little disappointing, to be honest, thought they’d made a much better fist of it with the volcanic exhibition.

Unfortunately there wasn’t time to get dried off, so I had to spend my taxi ride to the airport in a small steamy fug, with squishy shoes and squelchy socks. Never a good look for an international bearded write-ist. Finally managed to get the feet dry by performing vaguely-obscene contortions beneath the hand driers in Auckland airport. The socks were a lost cause, so they were wrung out and stuffed into a plastic bag -- so they wouldn’t leak all over my hand luggage -- but I was stuck with the squishiness of shoes. Aha, thinks Stuart, I know, I shall stuff them with paper towels! That’ll do it.

So it was that I spent an hour and a half on a plane from Auckland to Sydney, wearing no socks and shoes lined with paper. Like a crazy person. All I was missing was the wool-and-tinfoil hat.

Still got through immigration though. They didn’t even want to clean my hiking shoes. Though that might have had something to do with the presence of my bare feet, newly developed eye-twitch, and angry muttering in a French accent. Well, everyone’s got to have a hobby, right?

By the time we landed in Sydney it was dark, so no dramatic view of the opera house from the plane window, just a huge carpet of lights stretching away into the darkness. Jordan*** -- who’s going to be my minder for the eventy part of proceedings here in OZ -- was waiting at the gate, clutching a review copy of Halfhead. Which was pretty damn cool to finally see the thing after all these years in proper book form. Strange to think it’s actually going to hit the shelves in September. I imagine the hate mail will start flooding in a couple of days later from people telling me I have no right to write anything that doesn’t feature Logan McRae and Aberdeen. And can they have their money back. But for now, it’s pretty damn cool.

Tomorrow I go hunting for the opera house. With a pointy stick and a butterfly net. That’ll teach it.

* Insert topical ‘thieving cock-weasels’ reference here.
** ‘Slighty manky’ in the same way that the Atlantic Ocean is ‘slightly moist’.
*** No, not the vacuous plastic tart so beloved of British tabloids and gossip magazines.

Just like the Hulk, only shorter and less green...

Friday morning dawned about three and a bit hours after we finally got to bed in Christchurch. Bloody dawn. Bloody damn drunken hoons... I had to be up and sensible* for a live telephone interview, pimping Blind Eye to the unsuspecting Kiwi audience, with a bit of extra event-related pimpage thrown in for later in the evening. For this was to be my inaugural event on the Bearded Wonder Down Under tour: Penny’s Bookstore, Hamilton.

Now that Russell and I had survived not only the snowy battle through the mountain passes, but a whole week in the car together, the end was drawing near. Like a motorbike hurtling towards the back end of a lubricated elephant. Or something. All we had to do was hop on the plane back to Auckland, then survive lunch at a service station on the way down the motorway to Hamilton.

Jesus, and I thought the food at the BUFFET OF DOOM was bad...

The event went reasonably OK, I think -- given the tiny amount of sleep involved. Everyone was arranged in a semicircle of chairs just outside the front door of the bookshop, which put them right up next to the escalators in the shopping centre. Meaning that every time I got them all to swear in Polish, their rude words echoed around the whole place. Which was kinda fun.

And then, at the very end of the evening, when the last book had been signed, Russell and I said our goodbyes, shook hands like manly men do, then he walked off to his car. Free at last from the bearded Scottish bloke. It was a bit like that bit at the end of the Incredible Hulk TV series, only without the ‘Doo-doo-deee-dooo’ music playing over the credits.

In a way this past week’s been a bit like a huge sprawling fantasy novel. Two disparate characters from foreign lands thrown together to travel over fantastical landscapes, hunting for food (some of which was truly awful) huddling around camp fires (of the three bar electric variety) talking in outrageous French accents (not so common in fantasy novels, but I’m sure it’ll catch on). One traveller is tall and bearded; the other is short, has hairy feet and a novelty woolly hat. Their trusty steed a Subaru estate thingie with almost enough power to haul the clingfilm off a British Rail sandwich ... almost, but not quite. The only thing we didn’t do was kill things with swords, though Russell’s morning emanations would have been more than a match for even the toughest Uruk-Hai.

I’m certainly going to miss the little fella. Not only is he an excellent tour guide, fixer of iPods, producer of noxious smells, promoter of obscure-yet-finky** music, prone to lapsing into a strange French accent, and wearer of an ever-expanding wooly hat***, he’s a damn fine bloke too.

It’s going to be very odd going on to Australia without him.

‘Doo-doo-dee-dooo, doo-doo-dee-dooo-dooo, dee-dooo...’ etc.

* Well, up at any rate.
** Which is like funky music, only less inclined to attract people wearing flares.
*** It was head-sized when he bought it in Dunedin, but by the time we got back to the North Island it was big enough to sleep six. Like a knitted condom for a sperm whale it was. Which would probably be kinda scratchy, now I come to think about it. Did you ever get a hand-knitted Fair Isle jumper from your granny? We did: they were hell with sleeves. She might as well have knitted the damn things out of stinging nettles and fibreglass insulation. I’m sure these days it would count as a kind of child abuse.
And if a sperm whale did use Russell’s hat as a condom, it’d go even baggier in the water, which would probably make it a pretty inefficient method of contraception. That’s why knitted prophylactics never caught on amongst marine mammals.

Damn Drunken Hoons...

Thursday morning failed to dawn. We’d been staying a slightly more swanky motel than normal, one with a couch and a microwave and a kettle and stuff. And, as an added bonus, just because Russell and I were so damn manly, they threw in a power cut.

Now that doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Little power cut. OK, so we couldn’t use the microwave, or the kettle, or the shower, or the heating*, or anything else powered by the magical electric pixies, but we still had the couch, right? We could sit on that to our heart's content. And we did. Man, we sat the hell out of that couch.

Apparently what happened** was that a pair of hoons*** ran out on a $500.00 bar bill at half two in the morning, screeching off in their hight-powered sports car for the sort-of-nearby town of Franz Joseph. Looking for somewhere else to get another bucketful of the demon drink. Now this is a pretty long, wiggly waggly road that threads through the mountains, across floodplains and glacial moraines, but hoons are hoons, so off they went. About five minutes from Franz Joseph they careered off the road and into one of the big concrete poles that hold up the power lines. BANG! Wiping out all the power from just south of Franz Joseph to somewhere I can’t remember how to spell way, WAY down the coast.

Then they drove off. Damn drunken hoons.

So the early start Russell and I were meant to get, never materialised. It’s a lot more difficult to pack your bags when it’s pitch dark outside and you’ve got no lights.

After yesterdays glacier-related disappointment -- couldn’t actually get anywhere near the damn thing, remember? -- and the horrors of dinner**** we were planning on doing a shoot to Franz Joseph to see if their big chunk of moving ice was feeling any less shy. Only with all the sodding about, it meant we couldn’t leave Fox until the sun was far enough up the watery sky to let us see our own socks.

In order to make up time, we skipped breakfast in Fox -- probably not a bad idea, I get the nasty feeling that if they’ll happily marinate fish in Fanta, they’ll probably serve rice crispies with Marmite-infused semi-skimmed – holding out till Franz Joseph instead. Where we blundered into the World’s Grumpiest Waitress competition. Semifinals.

Then Russell and I clomped our way through the mist and fog down the valley carved out by the glacier, picking our way over boulders and through the concrete-like silt deposited by the beast as it retreated back up towards the mountains. Battling like manly men across the debris, fighting our way through the weather, surrounded by waterfalls crashing to the valley floor from the hills above, and Japanese tourists pushing wee kids in baby buggies, grinning and taking photos. Which kind of spoiled the whole Sr. Edmund Hillary thing we had going.

But the glacier was well worth the trip. A huge wall of dirty ice, forty-feet high, with a heart of unnaturally glowing blue. Apparently it’s been growing for the last few years, slowly making its way back down the valley under the weight of all that snow.

Slightly more intrepid souls than us were clomping their way up the side of the mountains for a guided tour in the drizzle, but Russell and I didn’t have enough time to be intrepid -- due to those damn hoons and their power-cutting antics – so we had to do with a few photos, a bit of drinking it all in, and then a slog back down to the car park. Next stop Christchurch.

At least that was the plan. By the time we’d driven the four hours to Arthur’s Pass, it was closed with snow. So we turned around and drove another two hours to the next one up ... and that one was closed too. By now the whole place is in darkness, and the snow’s hurling itself out of the sky. The roads are getting increasingly crappy, and Russell decides that as I’m from Scotland I’ll have a lot more experience driving in snow than he has. So for the first time in the whole trip I am entrusted with the car. Woohoo!

Or it would have been, if we could have gone much faster than three miles an hour on the slithery tarmac.

So instead of a couple of hours, straight across the country to Christchurch, we ended up having to go all the way up the west coast, and around the northern tip of the South Island. By the time we finally pulled into Christchurch it was three in the morning, we’d nearly knocked down a couple of seals*****, everyone was asleep, and the lovely roast lamb the lovelier Ange had made was all cold and clingfilmy in the fridge.

All in all, not the most relaxing of ways to finish the last day of our Great South Island Adventure. But if those bloody idiots hadn’t crashed their car into that power line, we would’ve been over Arthur’s Pass long before the snow hit.

Damn drunken hoons.

*New Zealand in the depths of winter, remember?
** And I say ‘apparently’ for legal reasons, this is just what we heard.
*** A great New Zealand term for ‘young tosspots’.
**** Not as bad as the BUFFET OF DOOM, but still pretty horrible: fish fillets in a citrus sauce with boiled tatties should have been reliable enough, but the cirtrus was orange, and the sauce was sweet. So it was a bit like someone pouring Fanta all over a packet of fish fingers. And the tatties were ... let’s be nice and call them al dente.
There seems to have been a bit of theme in New Zealand cuisine where they like to put sweet sauces with meat. I think it’s meant to be all nouvelle and swank, but it’s actually seriously sodding nasty. Stop it! Bad New Zealand chefs, naughty!
***** When the weather’s crappy they like to shuffle out of the water and up onto the road, where it’s a little bit warmer. Doesn’t help that they’re the same bloody colour as the tarmac in the dark.

Glacier Mints and a small resurrection...

I have come to the unlikely conclusion that Russell Kirkpatrick* is a pocket genius. When I say ‘pocket genius’ I don’t mean that he does new and exciting things in his trouser pockets. That would be unwholesome, especially whilst driving. But there’s certainly a whiff of the clever about the man** -- remember my iPod died the death of a thousand swearwords yesterday? Well Russell managed to bring it back from the dead with a small amount of fiddling with the buttons. Also known as a ‘reset’. I didn’t even know you could do something like that with an iPod Nano, but you can, and it works too.

So I am with tunes again! Hurrah!

This meant I was able to join in with the ‘play-weird-music-in-the-car-athon’ competition as Russell drove us out to the West Coast and up to the Fox Glacier.

Eight o’clock in the morning and Arrowtown was absolutely sodding freezing. A real nipple-stiffener of a day, complete with thick blue shadows and vast plumes of smoky breath. it’s really dry in this part of New Zealand, so the cold’s deceptive. It’s a dry cold so you don’t really notice it to begin with, not until it’s leached all your body heat away, leaving you shivering like a jelly on a spin-drier. Good job I’ve got the special naughty hiking socks I bought yesterday, or I’d probably have lost a dozen toes by now.

The road out to the west was crap, winding away under a thick pall of dense grey cloud that hid most of the mountains from view. What’s the bloody point of coming half way around the world to ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Ahhh!’ at the scenery if you can’t even see the sodding stuff? Grumble, grumble.

The clouds stayed with us for mile after mile, until finally -- and all at once -- they buggered off and everything was blue skies and spectacular vistas again. I got to see my first sub-tropical rain forest too. It’s huge. Mile after mile of untouched virgin forest***, all dusted with frost and deep-frozen at its heart. Next time I’m going to try tropical rain forest, none of this ‘sub’ malarkey. It’d be warmer on the nip-nops if nothing else.

But the point of this six hour driveathon was to get to the Fox Glacier in time to see it in all its icy goodness. And we did. Sort of.

We took a helicopter tour up the glacier, which included scaring the living bejesus out of a mountain goat at 9,000 feet, and then chasing it along the ridge with the rotor blades. Imagine it’s Cary Grant, the Cook Mountain is a corn field, and the helocopter’s a crop duster with a machine gun fitted to it, and you’ve sort of got the picture. The damn goats up here must have Velcro feet, because the one we saw was defying the laws of physics in general, and gravity in particular.

Then we landed on the top of Fox Glacier, had a poke about for ten minutes, then were shepherded back in the helicopter for the trip back to base. About 40 minutes start to finish. And as Russell and I still hadn’t had our fill of all things glacial, we drove up the valley to view the great icy beast from up close...

Or at least we tried to. The closest you can get to the glacier’s snout is now about half a mile, due to two tourists getting themselves squashed with falling chunks of ice. The joys of Health and Safety. So we never got anywhere near the actual Fox Glacier, instead we had to make do with standing on a muddy path behind a rope cordon, swearing curses of doom down upon the Department of Conservation. Really disappointing, given that this was what we’d just driven six hours to see.

Poop. POOP, I say!

* Or Russell Fitzpatrick as he likes to be know while planning, or carrying out a heist, just in case the rozzers are after him.
** Along with other, more recently documented whiffs.
*** Though the boy next door has been peeking through it’s bedroom window, trying to catch a glimpse of it in its bra and pants.