Craters of the Moon

But Taupo reached too high -- it exploded, again and again, raining down fragments like memory throughout the landscape, which still boils and steams in the shadows of its history. The craters of the moon gurgle in the night, a few hours return from Huka falls if you can navigate the natural logic of the logging roads (now graded by cycle difficulty).

The land, like Cherry Island, is held privately. Cherry Island used to house a nature park on its flats, where small children would pet smaller birds while their parents drank tea, but now all one can do is read: keep out, private property, keep out, keep out, keep out. "'Nature Park' closed." A gang of youths cling to skateboards and sit in front of the barred bridge to the island, where an old woman looks warily from her house.

The craters have a different fate. Every day at quarter to six a great siren rises over the landscape and the paying tourists begin their migration back to cars and campers, and at six the cry is raised again and the landscape is utterly barren. Feign ignorance, or better yet, _be_ ignorant, and there remain old back doors from when the land was public. One just says, "No bicycles permitted", nothing against public entry, so you climb around the barbed wire there and tramp over the warm ground which crumbles under your feet to reach the boardwalk.

Then you are in and you haven't paid a red ten-cent piece.

There is little to commend to the place other than the pervasive smell of sulfur wafting into your hair and clothes and exploring that until your next wash. The field is large, but Yellowstone is larger. The features are unique but so is every place. The feeling creeps from below, through your feet, that you are not meant to be here, that neither land nor persons want you, and that generator purring in the distance belongs to some force which has you in its grasp.

So it is back around the barbed wire and the replanted woods, over the churning falls and through the unset, passing the hot springs where empty beer bottles congregate, and meandering through the darkened town. That is Taupo, where everything costs money but may not be for sale, and the tourists lust for adventure like caged animals.

I had to find my own way out.

Best shortcut ever?

30km to the next town. That's normally not something to complain about, but the bike has its own mind about which hills are easy and which are hard.

Oh, you know, let me throw some background on NZ roads at you.

The roads are signed all sorts of different ways, but from a user's perspective, the differences are minimal. All roads are two lanes, with or without a dashed white line down the center, with essentially no shoulders. More impressive sounding names, such as "Highway 1", indicate greater traffic and aspirations but no greater width or speed limits. Perhaps the lesser roads, which cyclists avoiding the holiday traffic on 1 are likely to use, are hillier. Perhaps much hillier.

My map made me an incredible bargain. There was a bike trail, in its planning stages, running the length of the river that I would otherwise have to bike a long hilly loop around. I suspected the trail to be flatter, since it was pictured as abutting the river, and thus quicker, or at least a welcome respite from traffic. And that it existed could not be denied, because it was right there, running alongside the road where the map called it, and I had seen numerous signs and brochures describing it.

You already know how the story ends: the trail decayed as I distanced further from the highway, losing first its fine gravel cover and then entering spotty sections of sand. The design was full of climbs and downhills that I'm sure a mountain biker would appreciate, but for the most part I felt I was pushing my road bike through the wrong side of a Mountain Dew commercial.

It ended on a logging road, which had a huge tree down across it. To be frank, this detour was beginning to get awesome. I had to break out a huge section of the tree to roll my bike through it, and the road kept getting increasingly remote. Then there was this part where I was desperate for water, and all I could find, because the river had completely vanished, was this tiny red stream -- but when I drew the water it was yellow. This tiny stream ran through an enormous logging valley utterly devoid of shade; there were only dead stumps and dirt all around, and I had to circle three quarters of it with no shade, and --

Wait, I think I forgot what blog this was. Shades of "a little floating adventure" are haunting the page. Let me exorcise them here. Basically, what I'm saying is there is a huge marketing opportunity for drink dealers in the middle of that dry valley. Call it the Draughts of Mordor, and sell it to lost cyclists. It fits, because a more desperate landscape I have not ever seen. I'm not saying that you'd make money every day, but you could get pretty good rates on what you have, and perhaps even charge for your air-conditioning services and sunscreen.

(But, secretly, the adventure continued. It was the kind of trip that feels awesome because you know that the misery is limited and the stories aren't; that even when the camp site you were completely relying on for water and toilet is on the wrong side of the river, the tiny scratch of earth you can make to lay your head on will be just as comfortable, and as you go to sleep you are surrounded by this blue glow -- just these tiny blue dots in the darkness, on the ground -- glowing out of attraction or death, because they seem to peep out from where you disturbed the earth, and they drown out the stars, if any, above you, and all other concerns, like where your next sip of water will come from. Just sleep.)

That little booth in Mordor can sell run-on sentences to make Henry James drool, because they seem to be in plenty supply in New Zealand. You know what? Let's get back on track here. What eats are worthy for an enterprising entrepreneur to take over in this country? Let's look at a couple alternatives:

Burger Fuel: This chain produces bizarre concoctions Dagwood never dreamed of. First struggle to fit the sandwich into your mouth, second grab a hundred napkins to wipe the beet juice off yourself. Verdict: worth further investigation.

Hell's Pizza: With a stark red and black decor and menu items named after the seven deadly sins, this is a restaurant chain sure to keep the children asking uncomfortable questions. Posing as a gourmet pizza joint, it falls short in this goal. In Minneapolis, Luce is never more than a scenic walk away and has superior taste and texture in every way. Verdict: pass.

"Kia ora," or, Utterly Defenseless

My infiltration of the Newish Zealandish nation was well-planned. I packed a variety of papers offering a plausible itinerary of my travels, including manufactured names and addresses associated with phone numbers of confidants who can vouch for the trip. This after all, is what you typically need for traveling between the United States and Canada, and moreover you must have it memorized so that you can repeat it verbatim while being hosed naked in their interrogation chambers. Any mis-step and you will be sent to Gitmo or one of the CIA's black sites for further processing.

New Zealand doesn't care for such proper, well-regarded defense procedures. They instead caqll you to their little booths, squint at your "Unetid Staats" passport without a glance at you, and send you on your way. I exaggerate of course. Other travelers report that they may occasionally ask about camping equipment or fruit, which the Newish Zealandish have a particular fear of: throughout customs and immigration there are posters of decaying, vampiric, zombified fruit as if ready to attack, which apparently is what the Newish Zealandish people think of when they think of fruit. It is probably best that on a reconnaissance mission such as this I did not bring anything to set off their fruit detectors; my AR-17 got through without any difficulties.

Don't think this open attitude is limited to their immigration checkpoints. Everywhere you go in New Zealand people will greet you with the traditional, unpronounceable welcome "kia ora," which, applying my investigative and literary skills, roughly translates to: "Please take whatever you want, just don't throw any fruit at me." And so it was, I went to a stand, showed my over-21 ID and purchased a holster and a banana, and nobody gave me any trouble the entire day of my arrival.

There you have it: New Zealand is an utterly defenseless, virgin land ripe for the taking, with its unplowed skyscrapers and parking meters, its open fields of concrete, and extinct species of giant birds.