Still in Queenstown

I really believe that the best element of this trip so far has been the ability to meet people out of our "socioeconomic element" (so to speak). In San Francisco, the vast majority of people I know and deal with regularly are college educated, America, white, from the suburbs originally, upper middle-class, protestant Christian folks. On this trip, we've interacted with Italians, English, Scottish, Kiwi, Dutch. We've had hostel interactions with Americans, Swiss, and so on. Some have college degrees. Many from poor (or rich) backgrounds. All over the map.

We spent yesterday driving to Milford Sound on a rickety bus driven by a Swiss river rafting guide named Pierce who moonlights as a bus driver on the side. He (I'm not joking here) was EXACTLY like the bus driver in the Simpsons. He was jamming the whole way up and back on music on his headphones, sometimes singing along. Pierce would stop and call out sights. Or, he'd cheerily try to tell us the upcoming plan and we'd try to decipher what he was saying in between his broken English and slight stutter. Shandelle translated for me so I could participate as well.

Milford Sound is amazing. Truly. It's the result of an Ice Age glacier carving a giant gorge out of the granite mountains. It's difficult to represent it in words, but imagine you're in a 75-foot boat in a 1km wide body of brine. 1500 meter cliffs and mountains are on both sides of you. The tops of the mountains are shrouded in clouds. Water is streaming down from the cliffs in magnificent waterfalls, some reaching 2500 feet high. One km across the water is another boat under another waterfall. It's just a tiny speck in front a huge cliff of granite a half-wile wide. At this point you are really small in comparison to the size of the world.

In the end, all this has given me such a great respect for how small we really are. The power of glaciers, large bodies of water, mountains up to the sky, just make one appreciate just how small is life's day-to-day turmoil. Tempests can so easily appear to engluf the world, yet in reality they're stuck in a teapot. And, as they say, don't sweat the small stuff. The funny part is that New Zealand seems to teach one that it's all small stuff.