I have found something that, in overall amusement factor, ranks up close to my number one which is watching horsepower ladened shows like Monster Machines on TLC. It's amazing I had to come to the Kaikora Peninsula on the Eastern seaboard of the South Island of New Zealand to find it.

Before leaving the States, I bought a khaki colored Columbia PFG shirt and similiar colored North Face pants. When these two items are combined, they make up my Zookeeper suit that turns me into some kind of American Crocodile Hunter.

The Kaikora Peninsula...

View image of victim

lays at the mouth of a giant trough off the coast. Just 1 KM offshore the water drops to a depth of over 9,000 FT. A warm water current runs below a cooler one which churns up all sorts of goodies and trinkets from the depths of the trough. This attracts giant sperm whales and thousands of seals that feed year-round in these waters. The normal thing to do in Kaikora is to pay $150 to get on a little boat and hope to God you see a whale stick its ass out of the water. I instead got up, put my zookeeper suit on and started walking South along the peninsula. I figured the seals had to hang out somewhere and I was going to find it.

The first seal colony I came to has a sign that says "Do not bother the seals as they are trying to get a nap." If I hadn't had my zookeeper suit on, I might have minded the sign. I took some pictures and tromped around the colony before deciding to head further South along the coast. The tourists quickly dissipated and before long it was me and the peninsula. Brad the Zookeeper came across his second colony of seals and paused for a moment. The seals were all sprawled out on the rocks, snoring and growning as they waste away the afternoon. Little did they know I had "Welcome to the Jungle" cranked up in my iPod preparing to ruin their afternoon. The signs earlier had mentioned that disrupting the seals causes undue stress on them. I can assure you there are several seals that will need Dr. Phil to make them better after their encounter with the me.

I would sneak up on these bad boys as close as I could before they awoke with a good hiss and a roll onto their belly. These are the laziest animals I've ever seen and the LAST thing these seals wanted to do was get up and go to the water. They would hiss and open their mouths real wide to share a little seal breathe... I would do the same. They would snort and flap their flippers... I would do the same. They would eventually get pissed-off and waddle down to the kelp ridden shoreline. Some may think this would get old quickly, but I spent 5 hours and about 5 miles of seal-filled coastline stressing these puppies out.

I took a train down to Christchurch and spent 2 days living big city style. There were not any rooms in town the first night I got there, so I went to the pub to find some accomodation. After confirming Jennifer Aniston was not going to invite me back to her house, I settled for a guy that had a cottage in the back of his house. His Pakistani roomates mother usually lives in it, but they kicked her out for the evening and let me squat there. Great smelling room.. very enjoyable.

Hitchhiked South yesterday trying to get down to the college town of Dunedin. It is about 5 hours from Christchurch and I was prepared to make this a 2 day journey. Got 2 short rides out of town from a strawberry farmer and a gravel truck driver and then a 33 year-old woman stopped and offered up a ride all the way to Dunedin. She is a breast cancer survivor of a year and said she had stopped because she saw my Lance Armstrong bracelet (Lance, if you're reading this, and I'm sure you are, thanks). Her name was Di and she gave me a hug, introduced me to her Shnauzer Clyde (name after the J.J. Cale song "Clyde" depicting him "tough, he won't move an inch") and we were off.

It was an amazing ride talking to her about her fight with cancer. As avid Lance fans we got along well and both started belting out our favorite quotes from his books and she related them to her cancer battle. She told me about her thought process' from the time she found out she had cancer, through all the painful chemotherapy, and personal struggles she went through. We listened to David Bowie the entire ride, as I later found out she had timed her chemo treatments around a big Bowie concert in Christchurch that she said fell on the only night she felt like a human.

She has put together a team to compete in the March Relay for Life race supporting cancer research. Her team is called the "Headlights" in reference to an anatomically sound set of love pillows- but her jersey, post-masectomy, has a picture of a motorbike on it. It was a truly inspiring evening of driving.

One of the great things about being a travelling American is that, in the absent of any British, you are the one to come to for free English lessons. I was hanging out with a big group of folks from Israel the other night and they kept trying to teach me how to say things in Hebrew. They would say this God awfully hard sentence and then I would try and repeat it back to them. They were having a blast as I suffered through the session. Attempting to say some easy sentence, they told me what I was saying meant "Mother's Ass." I gave up quickly.

This works in my favor the majority of the time. I still have not seen anything more funny than when this guy from Japan looked at a girl, and after my instruction, belted out "That dog'll hunt!"