Glenorchy cowpoolers anonymous

Better living through bovine crime.

With tough economic times starting to bite, families everywhere are looking at ways to save a dollar or two from their grocery bill – everything from buying the cheap cereal to using tea bags twice and of course cowpooling.

What’s cowpooling? Well, it’s a little dollar saving trick where you get a few families together to buy an entire cow carcass direct from the farmer and then take it to your local butcher to get it chopped up. It’s a great way to have barbeques all summer long for a whole lot less than what you’d pay at the supermarket.

Now this is a new concept in some parts of the world, but it’s been happening for quite a while in Glenorchy. And as with many things, in GY they have a slightly different approach. Here’s a guide to Glenorchy cowpooling from one of the locals… who’ll remain nameless for obvious reasons.

Wait until there’s an All Blacks game on, preferably in Dunedin, so you can be fairly sure the farm hands on the property next door will be either out of town, or at least occupied for a few hours. Gather up a few mates, a four-wheel-drive, a jerry can of diesel, a chainsaw, a .22 rifle and a box of matches.

Drive into the forest immediately adjacent to the farmer’s property, and then jump the fence with the rifle. Select and shoot an appropriately tasty looking cow uphill from the four-wheel-drive then roll it down to the fence. Carve the carcass into quarters with the chainsaw then load the pieces into the four-wheel-drive ready to be chopped up into barbeque-sized portions later at home.

Lastly, pile the head, skin and entrails up somewhere in the forest and douse liberally with diesel, toss in a match and watch the evidence go up in smoke.

With the bounty safely in the deep freeze, invite your friends over for a big barbeque the following weekend, making sure to include the farmer next door... it’d be just plain un-neighbourly not to.

Cloudy with a chance of anti-Semitism.

A few months ago I had the opportunity to spend the night in Siberia Hut. It’s a lovely little place just north of Mt Aspiring, looking out over a stunning glacial valley. However, the downside to its loveliness is it’s often a bit overcrowded.

This night was one of those occasions. The twenty-four-bunk hut was bulging at the seams with about thirty-five people. The dining room was like a war zone – flames shot from badly primed stoves, while pocket knives and hot plates flashed centimetres away from soft flesh as people blithely conversed in mutually unintelligible languages – predominantly German, and Hebrew from a large Israeli contingent.

It seems odd, but Israelis and Germans are two of New Zealand’s bigger tourist markets, sending about seventy thousand visitors our way each year. Most of these guys are young backpackers out here for an adventure, here to see the views, crawl the pubs and chase the skirts – racial tension and historical political conflicts are the last thing on their minds. But below the surface you can sense there’s a whole lot of latent animosity between the two groups. It’s just hard to gauge how much of a trigger it’d need to flare up.

In the end the two incompatible tounges co-existed perfectly harmoniosly, at least as far as I could tell. It was the Queen's English that was the troublemaker.

As the evening wore on, I found myself chatting with Dove, the hut warden. A Kiwi lad once Buddhist, now converted to Judaism, Dove was the essence of chilled out spirituality – any more laid back and he’d be horizontal - surely a safe conversational option in this slightly tense atmosphere. At least you'd think so.

Making small talk I raised the prospect of sleeping under the stars, “Looks like the weather’s going to hold, do you reckon it’s worth sleeping outside tonight?”

“Yeah, probably not a bad idea," He replied, "I reckon a few of these guys look like snorers.”

“Good call," I said, eyeing the room for likely members of the nostril orchestra, "but I hear the dews around here can be a real pain in the arse.”

Next thing I knew the conversation screeched to a halt, and I was faced with thirty people looking at me, sporks paused in mid-mouthful, jaws dropped with ‘oh my god did he just say what I thought he said’ looks.

Ahh, bless the English language. When even native speakers can confuse condensation with a religion and hence blindly wander into a half-century-old political conflict, it’s easy to see how wars begin.

Needless to say… I slept outside.

D'Urville Island in reality.

As a kayaker, the map of D'Urville Island is a little off putting. Names like Skull Bay, Massacre Beach, The Bishop's Cauldron and Hell's Gate almost glow on the paper like a red warning light.

The island's geographical location, jutting into the Cook Strait, doesn't improve matters much. It's a piece of water known for funneling massive tides, and screaming gales between New Zealand's north and south islands. When these forces come together badly it creates seas that have sunk 9,000 tonne passenger ferries.

However, maps and reputations can only tell you so much. Sometimes the reality can be very different. Here's a few photos of the island in its mellow mode from a circumnavigation last week. Stay tuned for the accompanying story.

Love, fear and other cases of mistaken identity

If this bridge is rockin’…

Another Valentine's Day bites the dust. In its wake there will no doubt be countless readers out there in blogspace looking at their love life, wondering how they might go about adding a second person into it – Romeos looking for their Juliet, Barbies looking for their Ken, Parises looking for a Paris (or Nick, or Rick, or Stavros, or…). For those people I have but one piece of advice: fear is your friend.

It seems a little counter-intuitive, but next time you’re out to impress that special someone, the best approach mightn’t be roses and candle-lit dinners but instead some sparsely bolted overhanging rock, maybe a spot of downhill biking or even a double-black-diamond ski run if the snow’s in good shape (but remember, the goal here is to gently frighten – not kill or maim). It sounds insane, but it’s based on solid evidence.

Back in 1974, psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron from the University of British Columbia, put together a series of experiments involving rickety bridges and sexy researchers. Their hypothesis said that people should find an attractive person really attractive in the presence of a strong emotional stimulus – like fear.

The two canny Canadians set up a series of experiments, the most famous of which involved a good-looking female researcher who would interview randomly selected male subjects half way along two bridges – one safe; one high, windy, unstable and scary.

The at the interview she’d go through a series of decoy questions, then show the subject a picture of a young woman covering her face with one hand and reaching out with the other and ask “tell me what you see here”. At the conclusion of each interview she would hand out her phone number, “just in case you have any questions about the study.” The researchers then rated the sexual content of the picture responses and counted the number of calls, comparing between the two bridges.

The results showed the sexual content of the picture responses on the scary bridge to be double that of the sedate bridge and nearly five times as many subjects phoned the researcher after being on the scary bridge, compared to the sedate one. The conclusion; the unsuspecting guys were ‘mistaking’ their fear-induced heightened state of arousal for being head-over-heels love-struck for the researcher!

Other experiments in the study, as well as subsequent trials have, on the whole, confirmed their findings. These days the body of knowledge they developed is known as the “misattribution of arousal paradigm”. If you’re feeling geeky, you can check out the original study here.

Who would have thought, the secret that’s kept ski instructors’ and rafting guides’ beds warm for decades is actually an established scientific principle. Why isn’t it surprising that that the Canadians discovered it.

Culinary fundamentalism

What's with the backcountry food feud?

OK, you’ve checked the weather, booked the huts, fished out the map and left a note for the flatmates. All that’s left to do now is call the team and see what people want to do about food. That should be pretty straightforward, right? Wrong.

On most backcountry trips trying to get agreement on camping food is like herding cats with a stick. In any group of three or more people you’re certain to have at least one mountaineer who insists on going as light as possible, and one gastro-trekker who refuses to forgo even the smallest culinary detail.

Before you know it, normally chilled-out friends will be arguing with quasi-religious fervour over what to eat and how. The mountaineers will be proposing olive oil as an entire meal. The gastro-trekkers will say “not unless it’s served with flatbread and dukka... and followed by another three courses!”

If you’re lucky a grudging cessation of hostilities will hold long enough for the trip to take place. But many backcountry teams have split acrimoniously over culinary differences before ever heading into the hills.

So what’s the deal? Why can’t we all just get along?

Well, just like any good debate, both sides make a compelling argument. Proponents of the light and fast approach say travelling with less makes for a purer wilderness experience - and that means making some necessary compromises on the food front. Plus depriving yourself a little while on the trail makes that first meal at home taste all the better.

Whereas the gastronomers argue that good food will make a great wilderness experience even more enjoyable – why let a grumbling tummy take the shine off the moment. And besides with a little intelligence you can bring the finer things along without breaking your back.

The only thing both sides seem to agree on is that the worst thing of all is a compromise. The middle ground of leaving the wine and cheese at home but not going light enough for serious adventures is considered an abomination by all concerned.

It looks like the knives... forks and camping spoons will stay drawn for some time yet.

Aristotle and the modern dirt jumper.

Applying ancient greek ethics to today's biking scene.

Back in the fourth century BC, Aristotle, one of the first great minds of humanity, came up with a system of ethics that said virtue is the middle ground between excess and deficiency (or something like that in Latin). His theory says the virtue of courage is the middle point between rashness and cowardice, wisdom lies between ignorance and cunning, forgiveness lies between vengeance and injustice and so on.

Flashforward a few thousand years to the opening of Queenstown Mountain Bike Club’s dirt jump park yesterday and you have an interesting demonstration of the old guy’s idea in action.

Under a flawless blue sky with the sound system cranking and the barbeque serving up the best two-buck sausages you’ll ever have in your life, Queenstown’s bikers were out having a blast. Thowing themselves at some pretty intimidating leaps - giving it their all without a prize cheque anywhere in sight.

If you looked closely at the eclectic crowd in attendance, you could see them falling pretty neatly into Aristotle's three camps; the deficient, the virtuous and the excessive.

For every biker there were three pudgy, sunburned rubberneckers, deficiently scoffing sausages by the sidelines, clicking off the occasional photo but never actually entertaining the thought of giving it a go. “Are you kidding! I might get hurt.”

Then there were the virtuous participants giving it their all, throwing a few tricks, having a few crashes, but mostly just having great fun.

If you take a look at the face of a guy who’s just landed a thirty-foot jump on a five hundred dollar bike, you’ll see an ear-to-ear endorphin grin combined with a look of pure calm of which a Zen master would be proud. It’s not surprising really; after watching the ground racing towards at you from a couple of storeys up it must be hard not to feel a deep sense of calm when it’s all over.

Then there’s the most interesting bunch, the professionally excessive. This event attracted a few. Riding their own brand of bike, travelling with a dedicated video cameraman, photographer and manager. It seemed as though they’d sacrificed so much and made so many compromises to get to the top of their game that the fun had left the building a long time a go.

It’s pretty easy to spot these guys in amongst the rest of the crowd. Rather than that look of calm, they’ll be supporting a competitive scowl, cursing at jumps that didn’t go so well and screaming, “Who da fuckin man!” into the camera lens when things went right. It could all be genuine, or a bit of an act to help drum up sponsorships, it's hard to tell. But either way it’s pretty ugly to watch.

Pigeon holing asside, seeing that display of passion on wheels certainly gets you fired up to get out on the bike. As soon as I’m finished writing this, I’ll be off for a spin with a few mates. We won’t be doing any big jumps and we won’t be setting a world record pace but it’ll get the endorphins flowing and burn enough calories to justify a beer or two afterwards… and that’s just fine with me.

Vive la médiocrité!

What’s biting you?

Understanding - and escaping - the dreaded New Zealand Sandfly.

The New Zealand bush comes with good news and bad news on the bugs front: The good news is that, unlike in Australia, none of our insects will kill you. The bad news is the sheer quantity of one bug – the sand fly – may, with their tenacious and persistent biting, drive you to kill yourself.

Maori legend has it that Hinenui-te-po, goddess of the underworld released the sand fly near Milford Sound to prevent humans becoming idle and freezing to death in the face of Fiordland’s natural beauty. These days the little bloodsuckers are found wherever there’s flowing water and bush – most of the country really.

The female sand fly, which are the ones that bite (read into that what you will) live for about six weeks, in which time they have to hatch, develop as larva while feeding on aquatic algae and bacteria then metamorphose into flying insects, mate and feast on blood to get the sustenance required to lay eggs in a fast flowing stream to perpetuate the cycle. It’s a pretty short life, and getting a meal of your blood is one of the highlights – so it’s really no surprise that they’re so enthusiastic about it.

If you don’t want to be bitten, and don’t mind resorting to nasty chemicals, insect repellents with a high concentration of DEET are best. But remember it’s a strong solvent so will do horrible things to plastics (like your expensive outdoor gear) and has known side effects including; seizures, confusion, acute psychosis, nausea and vomiting and skin irritation. It’s also suspected of being a contributing element in Gulf War Syndrome.

If you plan to have a long and healthy outdoor career the herbal repellents are a better option. There is a range of products out there that work almost as well as the DEET based stuff, without the stress about contracting some awful ailment down the track. Be warned though, some of the best contain lavender oil which can sometimes result in exchanging sand flies for bumble bees!

Covering up as much as possible with light-coloured clothing will minimise the need for repellents. Tuck your trousers into your socks, wear thin polypropylene gloves and a fine head net then put your bug repellent of choice on any exposed bits left - and you’ll be sweet as bro!

If you want to explore some alternative bug solutions, some people think that consuming large doses of Vitamin B gives your sweat a repellent quality. I'm also told the early loggers in Fiordland apparently drank a glass of diesel each day to achieve the same effect. However, I’ve never had much luck with the Vitamin B theory… and I’ve never tried the diesel approach!

Once you’ve been bitten expect some pretty nasty mosquito bite style welts to arrive within a few days. Calamine lotion works well for the itching, but really all you can do is leave them alone, and console yourself with the fact that your body develops an immunity to sand fly bites over time, so each bite makes you a little bit better prepared for the next.