Arglesfarg.

I had a dream the night before last that we went back to New Zealand for another three weeks expressly for the purpose of shooting a sequel to Kiwiland, Ho!, my overly long and less than exciting documentary. When i woke up, things that had happened the night before seemed distant memories, as though i had actually been gone for those three weeks. Even in the two days since, i've been feeling as though i've actually lost that time. So i figured i'd pull another story from the most fertile story-telling ground i've got, those three weeks in March of 2008 that i spent abroad.

I've often said that there is one reason that i'd really like to go back to New Zealand, and it is related to video. As our trip progressed, i had been diligent in taking a quick video tour of every hostel, hotel room, cabin, and campground that we spent a night in. Out of twenty nights in the country, i only missed one of our accommodations, and it is perhaps the only one that really mattered. I am speaking of course of the anachronism that is Wilson's Hotel in Reefton.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008, the ninth day of the trip. I began my original blog entry for this day with the word "Arglesfarg," which i went on to explain that i had no idea why i did. For lack of better title for this post, i've chosen to use that.

We spent the day driving many kilometers out of our way to observe geological features with names like "pancake rocks," "blowholes," and "Crazy Paving Cave." On that day we saw the only flowing water in New Zealand which was not a beautiful blue color; it was still perfectly clear, but it was tinged a rusty red. We called it the River of Blood. I'm sure we're not the first to christen it that. I don't know what its real name is.

We stopped in Westport for dinner, which was probably one of the better meals of the trip. I've noted in my log that i ate Chicken Cordon Bleu, so you know it was a good day. But with night looming, we needed to pick an ending point for the day and get to it. After all, if i haven't underscored this enough in my previous New Zealand stories, the country shuts down pretty darn early. 6:00 is pushing it in most of the big cities, let alone the smaller towns (by "big cities," i mean "clusters of more than 100 houses." There aren't many.), and it was already going on eight.

Amanda selected Reefton as a good target, primarily because it was near to the hot springs we wanted to visit the following day. We consulted our hotel guide (our "second bible") and selected Wilson's Hotel. If i'm not mistaken, we made that choice because it was the only one in Reefton. We called ahead, and the lady on the other end of the phone gave us a 9:00 deadline to check in. It was 80 kilometers away.

Under normal circumstances, 80 km is a perfectly reasonable distance to travel in an hour. The speed limit on most roads in New Zealand is 100 kilometers per hour (roughly 60 miles per hour). This was true of all the roads between us and Reefton, even.

The natives, the Kiwis, would have even traveled at that speed along the roads between Westport and Reefton. That is because Kiwi drivers are certifiably insane. I never saw a native slow down for anything, including the random 200° turns on the sides of mountains with sheer cliffs to your right and no guard rails anywhere. New Zealand does not believe in guardrails; they seem to believe that if you are stupid enough to fall off the road, you probably deserved it. You'd better pray that you land on a sheep, because it's your only hope of cushioning that fall. There's actually a fair chance of that happening; at last census, sheep outnumbered people 20:1 in New Zealand. Cows 8:1.

As if the roads themselves weren't problematic enough, daylight was shrinking and fast. And we weren't only losing daylight because the sun was going down; no, the process was being expedited by the big, fluffy gray clouds rapidly moving into our area. When the rain started coming down and i was forced to slow down even further, we started to become worried about making our rendezvous. I'd look warily over the edge of the roads as i made yet another turn that left us facing farther around than the complete opposite direction, sometimes seeing trees below, more often seeing nothing but bare earth and boulders, trying to gauge how much faster i could actually go with an acceptable margin of safety. We probably should have just stayed in Westport.

Somehow we made it to the hotel with seven minutes to spare.

We were greeted at the door by an older lady who was completely out of place for this century. I'm talking serious vampire potential here. She could've just stepped through a portal from 17th century England. She probably did. She was overly accommodating; even at 9:00pm, which may as well be the witching hour, she offered to bring us tea and milk to our room. We politely declined, but thanked her for her hospitality. The whole thing just screamed "Twilight Zone." If i had the budget to film a ghost story anywhere in the whole damn world, this is where i would do it.

We ascended the rickety stairs with well-tread carpet and an elaborate wooden banister to our room. The room featured two beds with a communal reading light, an enormous closet, a mirror, and a sink. Yes, a sink, right in the middle of the room. I can't really come up with much of a logical explanation for it, other than maybe when the hotel was built, in the Victorian period, shaving was a more private matter than bathing and pooping, and could not be carried out in public facilities.

Speaking of public facilities, as soon as we had our luggage in the room, i made my way quietly down the empty hallway toward the bathroom on the complete opposite end of the building. I can't even begin to describe the creepy vibe i got on that journey; the low lighting, all the closed doors, the creaky floorboards, the blood red paint on the walls and the matching drapes drawn across all the windows. I was all alone and there was no ambiance ("silent as the grave," perhaps?).

The restroom was dark when i entered. I groped around fruitlessly for a light switch. Eventually i discovered it next to an entrance on the opposite end of the room. I never did find out where that door led, or why it would possibly be more important to have a light switch there than next to the main entrance.

Furthermore, each of the stalls had its own light switch. The stalls themselves were actually completely enclosed rooms in their own right, kind of like if somebody had installed a toilet in a walk-in closet.

Verbatim from my journal:

As I sat on the toilet, a moth fluttered around, trapped in the room with me, and irritated me a bit. Then it landed on my back. I began talking to it, saying things like, "I don’t mind you in here, sharing the most intimate of moments that I won’t even let my girlfriend in on, but do stay off of me! And my clothes!" because it kept crawling into my drawers as they sat on the floor. Moths eat clothing, don’t they? In the end, after flying around crazily and whacking himself so hard into the walls that I thought he’d squash himself like, well, a bug, he flew himself into a spiderweb. By the time I was finished in there, he’d gotten himself out, and when I opened the door, he flew away.

My return to the room was no less entrancing, but i made it at a considerably increased clip. When i opened the door to the room, it scared the shit out of Alyssa, who was lying on the bed with a horrified expression splattered on her face. Amanda stood near the door in a fighting stance.

Amanda woke up first in the morning (not unusual), and slipped off to take a shower. When she came back, rather than yelling at us to get out of bed (which would have been par for the course), she jumped eagerly back into bed with me, shouting about how there was no hot water and she'd just bathed with entirely cold water. Alyssa opted not to take a shower that day (Amanda and i calculated this as her fourth consecutive day of hippie living), but i, a smelly, smelly man, didn't think i could avoid it. I had no trouble with the water. It was lukewarm at first, but i had a good steam going in that bathroom by the time i was done. To this day Amanda curses my name for it. It's not my fault she was the first person in the entire hotel to try and bathe.

I don't think that we saw another tenant the entire time we were there. When we checked out, the hotel clerk was in another elaborate ancient-looking dress. She was just as engaging as the night before, offering us tea and to fire up the kitchen and make us breakfast. We again politely declined; we were already horribly behind schedule and wanted to get going. New Zealand is laid back like that; early to bed, late to rise. Reefton had no gas stations, and at 10:30am, the only convenience store was still closed. Not very convenient, now is it?

So that's the tale of Wilson's Hotel, by far the most interesting place we slept on our trip and probably the creepiest place i've ever let down my guard enough to go unconscious in. I'm not kidding; if you don't believe in ghosts, visit this place.

By the way, i know it's a little late, but happy Guy Fawkes day everybody.