Finding My Fix: Chronicles of a Travel Junkie

NEWS: I am back in New York City. I have bought my tickets to Paris and back from Stockholm, so I’m definitely going to be in Europe from May 11 till August 29! But where? I don’t yet know.

So I left off saying that I had plans for dinner… Two of the divers I had met on the dive boat in Milford Sound, happened to be from Portland, Oregon, and as Americans often are, happened to be welcoming people. The van ride back to Te Anau from Milford Sound included numerous stops in the mountains for purposes both educational and decompressing. Passing too quickly from the extreme pressure 16m below the surface of the ocean through several thousand meters of elevation and back again could be disastrous to the human heart. So we made stops at the river to fill our water bottles and see some ruins of the facilities for the families of the highway workers who built the tunnel allowing passage to the Sound. We stopped at a lookout where Dave informed us of the near extinct Kakapo, a large flightless parrot. Male Kakapo blaze a trail up a mountain, perch themselves at the top, and periodically bellow out a whomp sound that can be heard for miles. Any females in range and in the mood only have to follow their trails up the mountain and… you know the rest. [read on]