As a component of the peace agreement with the hostel owner/operators who read this log, I again retract and apologize for ever giving their ilk guff.

Also, go Dems! I want to have John Kerry's love-child, and it looks like I'm not alone any more. If you donkeys keep this up in the South and the West, I may actually register for your party.

I have a message for the influence peddlers, for the polluters, the HMOs, the big drug companies that get in the way, the big oil and the special interests -- who now call the White House their home. We're coming. You're going. And don't let the door hit you on the way out. - the next JFK, after his New Hampshire win tonight

So apparently my dad grew up in Wanaka. They've since ditched the old name of 'Grand Junction, Colorado' and created a adjacently majestic blue lake. Otherwise, it's the same flat town between hills. Climbed one of them mountains yesterday, too. Mount Roy was another one of those about-a-vertical-mile-in-a-couple-hours walks, and I'm feeling it today, but I'm also still enjoying the panoramic view of the Mt. Aspiring and The Remarkables range thanks to the lil' screen on my camera.

Saw Winged Migration in the local bar/cafe/theater. True to kiwi form, they renamed in a most straightforward manner - it became 'Travelling Birds'. This tendency can also be witnessed when they refer to 'sky TV' or 'sealed roads'.

I'm getting good at this whole 'stir-fry' thing. Who knew that the key lay in the broccoli?

Penguins to beach cows by way of the steepest street in the world. I've some catching up to do, Dear Diary. It's not that I don't love you. It's that I can't afford to touch keyboards often. Nothing finer for putting carpal tunnel into remission.

Way back on the 8th, I received a tour of the Oamaru area from one of my gracious hostel hosts. He'd only been on the job for a couple months, which explains why he's not yet jaded. It's a vocation that wears at people. Like RAing. Great, but there's a ticking clock for how long you'll effectively, well, do anything. Even the most pleasant proprietors rear the patronizing head of bitchiness more than they have the right. If I pay for a night at your establishment, I don't deserve a scowl and preemptive chiding for baking a pizza simply because some unnamed culprit accidentally left the oven on two months ago. I overheard a thirtysomething German couple being scolded for showing up at a hostel at 11am, "earlier than people usually check in." I'm buying a camper van next time. For ~US$1300 fully equipped, their sustained resale value makes them hard to argue with if you're traveling as a pair.

But then I wouldn't be able to meet such neat folks when hitching. Two of the more pleasant premeds I've met carried me from Oamaru to Dunedin. They ended up with a copy of 'The Da Vinci Code' for their trouble. I try to do my part, because hitchees are inherently on the generous side. Apart, of course, from the pair of kids that kidnapped two American guys around Palmerston North recently. Forced them to withdraw cash from ATMs at screwdriver-point before being ditched and incarcerated. That's why this hitchhiker carries a duplicate dummy wallet. And a knife. Rock beats scissors, knife beats phillips-head.

Dunedin, though. Mark Twain said of the town: "The people here are Scots. They stopped here on their way home to heaven, thinking they had arrived." Kilt shops aside, the Ra Cafe, Isis Club, and Cleopatra Cabaret reminded me of an altogether different culture. My coffee shop of choice ran me into Americans - with a vengeance. Some nearly Kiwi Experience* types from New Hampshire, a snide San Franciscan, and a Coast Guard kid who almost broke my streak of not running into a single Bush supporter on this trip. He changed his story when he realized some cute hippy chicks were tuning in to our conversation. Otherwise, nice town. Passable sushi and botanic gardens. Tempting motorcycle store between the Octagon and my domicile. Couple gothic revival churches. And Baldwin Street - with the steepest section at a gradient of 1:2.86, it burns the calves. The Korean guys laughed at me lying on my back, head downhill - until they tried it and matched my own bemused chuckling. It's a natural high.

*Kiwi Experience: [proper noun] Expensive, heavily marketed backpacker mass transport network. More commonly known as 'the f__k truck', 'the big green drinking machine', and 'damn it - here they come - glad I'm leaving town anyway'. See the related 'Oz Experience'.

Speaking of Americans, I regularly shock and awe European travelers with tales of the two-ish weeks of vacation we are forced to live with in the States. The Dutch couple I rode with yesterday simply wouldn't believe me. His management position allocates him five weeks of vacation, the option of buying two more, national holidays, and ample sick leave. That's at 32 hours a week. If he works 36, he gets every other Friday off too. My current plan (and this entry will be edited before any prospective employers have a chance to google for my name) is to work for two years, quit for six months, then get a better job each time. If that falls through, I'll emigrate to Holland.

A worldwide truism is that Sunday mass transit schedules stink. Patience finally got me out of Dunedin, and I hit the gold mine of rides. The Sunday driver still exists, folks. She's a mutton packer, and she gave me a personalized tour of the Catlins region at the butt end of the South Island. The walk out to the world's southernmost lighthouse, at Nugget Point, is the most scenic five minute trek I've ever raced down. The appearance of two rare, inquisitive yellow-eyed penguins just iced that cake.

I apologize for whining about hostels earlier. Never should have happened. I'd forgotten about all the good ones. Like Surat Bay Lodge. Million dollar location for fourteen bucks a night. Forget the idyllic beach, cliffs and sunsets - I could see a sea lion colony from my room. Wrestling myself away from the resident one-year-old (human) took effort, but the blubbery (sea lion) bundles of joy captivated most of my days there. Despite my many-hundred-kilo disadvantage, the cows were accepting me as one of their own after I vehemently denied ever hanging out with fur seals or penguins.

After my first truly stressful day of hitchhiking, circumstances gave me ten full minutes in Te Anau to shop for provisions for my four day trek over the Kepler Mountains. Never again will I forget to double check whether or not my booked backpackers bed is eight clicks outside of the town for which it's listed. Somehow or other I found myself at the trailhead the next morning, and proceeded to walk for 80 kilometers over the next four days. It's only listed as a 67 click trek, but we Downens never do things the easy way. Just ask my dad to explain the Acura saga. Summited 1500m Mt. Luxmore after starting at sea level (me, not the aging sports car). The alpine ridge walk was the fun part. No, I didn't get the much of the famous views from one of NZ's Great Walks, but I hear that battling 75kph head winds builds character. That sort of breeze has downsides, though. An especially strong gust lifted a camping British girl, tent and all, to her death last week. Bah. That sort of revelation makes segue difficult. So I'll just mention the many hands of rummy I played at camps with the Israeli couple, then hit a couple hard returns.

Up until a few days ago, I hadn't seen anything in NZ that hadn't been matched blow-for-blow by the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest. Milford Sound changed that. I don't expect to ever post pictures of it, because they don't do the glacially carved valleys and fiords justice. It's just as beautiful when experiencing the deluges that accumulate to eight meters of annual precipitation - the ghostly vertical rock faces transform into a canvas for millions of cascading rivulets. The sunny days allow you to stand outside and spin, jaw slacked, trying to take in the majesty of the spot. There is a downside. When the Maori Earth goddess inspected the newly-hewn New Zealand, she was afraid that Man would come to Fiordland, and, inspired by its majesty, never leave. To ensure this would never come to pass, she created the sandfly. I prefer to think of the little devils as stealth mosquitoes with nuclear payloads. On a related aside, DEET cream doubles as an effective hair styling product.

The best thing about Milford, you ask? First, some background. Condiments are my life-blood. Consider me the anti-Jeremy. If I've led you to think that New Zealand is all that and a spot of tea, I beg your forgiveness. The heathens who populate this forsaken land consistently and indiscriminately charge you for sauces of any persuasion, be they based on dairy, tomato, grain, or seed. Not all is lost, though... Milford's lone building, a bar and grill, contains, in a darkened corner, every flavor of taste-added product one could hope to slather onto a burger or fry. The potato wedges in pubs here come with heaping sides of sour cream, but you can be certain I didn't stop at that.

Another example of Kiwi imperfection? Queenstown, where I type this. Not sure where to start. It's in a beautiful spot, I'll give it that. Imagine Lake Shasta with a few more trees on the one side. However, not only is the Lothlorien filming location outside of walking distance, but this is the place where A.J. Hackett literally invented bungy jumping. That's all well and good, but adventure activities went to the town's head. Peering through the endless stream of skydivers, I saw someone bungy jump from a paraglider 100m over the lake. Why bother having a rope attached? Anyway, all this expensive stuff may be fun, but I've learned that the more slickly advertised an activity is, the less worthwhile it tends to be. That and I shared a noisy dorm room with the locally ubiquitous Kiwi Experience types last night. My bag sits at my side, and I'm hitching out as soon as I finish the next two sentences. Wanaka, just to the north, is supposed to be just as gorgeous, and without the marketing department. Same same but better.

Don Quixote may indeed be regarded as the first modern novel, and it is the Nobel Institute's pick for "greatest book." In my mind, though, Cervantes simply had too badass a name to not read his opus. The circa-1600 text's unfortunate heftiness counterbalances the nifty fact that, as a foreign language classic, it's kept readable by contemporary English incarnations. The thirteenth translator seems to have given the Knight of the Sorry Face a particularly entertaining black-box treatment.

"As far as being blanket-tossed again, I can't make any promises, because those kinds of mishaps can't always be prevented, and if they do come your way there's nothing to be done but curl up, hold your breath, shut your eyes and let yourself go wherever fate and the blanket take you." - Sancho Panza (Part 1, Chapter XXI)

The blanket of fate's heaved me into New Zealand's busiest tourist season ever. Having to book a lowly dorm bed two days out was not part of the backpackage lifestyle I signed on for. Whatever the culprit - deserved travel magazine laudation, Lord of the Rings, fear of large and painful 'bangs' in other international destinations - the hostel operators I've asked have never experienced demand like this. The landscape's by no means overrun, but I'm simply not good at knowing where I want to be two nights from any given moment. Being a tumbleweed isn't as fun when you're on a carefully delineated track, even if that mixed-metaphor leash is of your own design.

That blanket's a fickle mistress, as she's also bestowed me with antarctic birds. The blue penguin claims to be the world's smallest species of tuxedoed fowl, standing ten inches tall when not hunched over, cowering from humanity. Or up to 20km out at sea, where they spend their day fishing before waddling back up the shore to their nests at dusk. Darkness now falls around 10 o'clock this far south, so tuck the toddler in before seeking them out. Here in Oamaru, one has two choices when camping the birds. The corporate route involves paying your way into a specially designed grandstand facility with a hundred other bipedal mammals where you can see little shapes sneaking up the beach at a great distance. Otherwise you can befriend a local, extract tips, break into the recommended seaside lumber yard, make like a rock and sit silently amongst them as they noisily crawl into their nests. You can guess my preferred algorithm. It really is a scotopic endeavor - a stabilized 15-second exposure I took of a static bird still didn't have enough light to come out decent. Doesn't help that my lens is the size of a trimmed pinkynail. The mad scientist who invents a pocketable manual-control digital camera with monstrous precision optics will get at least one pleasantly worded letter of thanks.

The combination of British familiarity with Beatles song titles and American SAT-nurtured skill with word games made the Worldwide Backpackers' "Seven O'Clock Wine Club" unstoppable in the hotly contested trivia night competition at Murphy's pub. The magnificent trophy (otherwise thought of as a $50 bar tab) was ours. And the fish & chips there weren't bad either. Wellington's well missed - when else do I get the chance to concurrently hang out with Gary, Gareth, and Guy - any of whose names I'll answer to.

I'm now in Christchurch. There is, indeed, a church here. Not much more to report on the topic of this city. Except that it's on the South Island, and to get to the South Island, I took a ferry. I liked the ferry. My dad works with ferries.

Speaking of which, the Puget Sound beats the Marlborough Sound on the prettiness scale, but only by a minute margin.

But the seafood's better here. Because bottom-crawlers aren't kosher, an Israeli gave me a massive crayfish he'd ended up with. It was worth a cool $50, so I don't fully understand how he accidentally acquired it. A chartered vessel was involved, though. Two Swiss doctors helped me boil properly it while a couple Brits took notes. I shared it with a Dane, and I'm convinced a finer-tasting crustacean has never so internationally met its maker.

I traveled through the hills of Rohan to come this far south on the east side of the island. I'm sorry about overusing the Tolkien references, but it's easier than thinking of adjectives to describe the stunning scenery. (We'll try this one: golden hills guarded by majestic ranges. Err... Yeah, I'll stick with prepackaged visualizations.)

The only thing missing was the horses, but I attribute the lack of hoofed animals to the neon blue ocean immediately on the left. However, I saw plenty of sheep and cows on tramps around Kaikoura. And bulls and cows and pups. The last three should be clarifyingly generalized as fur seals. As I jumped down off a ledge, I nearly stepped on the rear flippers of a concealed male. It might have been trouble, but I had my camera out. He likely mistook me for a National Geographic photographer, so I wasn't mauled. Conversely, the distrust I was shown might have been due to the walking stick I had with me. Vaguely club-like. My curiousity had already scared the rest of his colony, so at least I know I was thorough and got them all.

I discovered what seals do all day while lazing about on rocks: they fart. Despite the ocean breezes, it lingers. The blubbery things stink, which is something I'm glad I didn't know while dragging that fluffy momma seal doll around through toddlerhood.

Hitched a ride from an American bartender. Who works in Northwest Portland. And who wears the same obscure Vasque shoes I do. We parted ways because it was getting a little freaky.

For the last few months I've been keeping lists. It started out with my trip highlights to date. Moved on to tracking changes I've noticed in myself. Books read while traveling. Cooking ideas. Date ideas. It kept going. By the time I got around to tabulating the visible scars on my body, I knew things had gone far enough. Does anyone know of a support group?

Fourteen scars with original wounds recollected. About half have good stories attached.