Have you ever considered that the lack of eeriness can be kind of eery? In a strange sort of way, it can. Kind of. Last week we were sitting out in the wilderness late at night, glowworms about, admiring the stars and revelling in the peacefulness. In a similar situation back home in Alberta, a part of you would always be on alert for bears and cougars and sasquatches. But in New Zealand there are no bears or cougars, or even indigenous mammals at all, and I was mainly just kidding about the sasquatches. All that lack of eeriness was eery. So this got me to thinking- is there a kiwi equivalent of the legend of the bigfoot? Some local monster like the Loch Ness or the chupacabra? A wraith like my sister's duendes? So I asked.
Turns out Maori legend is replete with all manner of monsters and beasts, and of these, the Taniwha is probably the best known and least loved. (In Maori spelling you pronounce the "wh"as an "f", so tanewha sounds like tanny-fa.) Taniwhas are like dragons, though they can also assume the form of a whale, shark or even a giant grub. Cool, hey? Primarily they were malevolent and enjoyed eating people, and most stories show how the Maoris either killed or tamed the beasts. Here is some more info.
Also there is the story of the ogress Ruruhi-kerepo. She looked like an old hag, and some little girls teased her, so she popped their heads off and swallowed the bodies. The girls' bones then protruded from Ruruhi-kerepo's body, becoming sort of like spines and quills. When Maori warriors found out what happened they went to avenge the girls, but their spears just became more spikes in Ruruhi-kerepo's flesh, and she decapitated and ate the warriors, too.
There are all kinds of other stories- about wicked faeiie-like Patupaiarehe, or Tipua which are like goblins, ogres, giants and demons. Pretty eery.

Mordor 

Tongariro National Park isn't actually the abode of the dread Lord Sauron, nor is it a land of shadows, so much. For a few days it was a land of fog and rain, but even that cleared up to allow me two amazing, cloud-free days of hiking near Mt Doom, aka Mt. Ngaurohoe (or something like that- I am going by memory here). Also in the vicinty is Mt Ruapehu, also a volcano, and a third one a bit farther off that I caught a glimpse of as I hiked back to Wedge and the girls. Mt. Ngaurohoe was used as the template for Mt Doom, and digitally altered to make it more doomy. Pretty cool in real life still, though. I just got back from an overnight hike and I'm sore and tired, so my usual stunning wit and intellect are dulled somewhat- I wil return later to tell you some fascinating things I learned about Maori legends.

Waitomo
Wanna know something exciting? There are a species of glowworms here in New Zealand that have glowing blue poo! Okay, technically they aren't worms they are actually insect larva (maggots if you want to get all gross), and the blue stuff may or may not be poo. But still, blue poo! How fun! And even funner is the fact they live in caves and to see them we had to swim, squeeze, crawl and climb through a subterranean river system- the Waitomo Caves- to get to them. Here is a little info about what we did.
I see it's been a while since I last blogged, and I'vbe been busy since then too, learning all about Maori culture by attending a traditional hangi feast and seeing the haka dances, and some of the other cultural and thermal sites around Rotorua. Now we're in Taupo, by the huge Lake Taupo, seeking shelter from the rain. Could be worse, though, I hear in good ole Edmonton you guys been shovelling snow for a couple weeks already eh?
Finally got some Hobbiton pictures uploaded here, and here, as well as a variety of others. And . . . I guess it was my bloggiversary the other day! Happy Pooday to me! The winner of the contest is Tom, and not just because he was the only entrant, but also because he's so full of poo. Cheers mate, send me your address and I'll see what I can rustle up for you. Anyone else want to bribe me for a postcard or some other thing from New Zealand just send me some love- poetry or prose about bears or poo, or hobbits or anything at all really.

Hobbiton
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
Today we swam with hobbits! Oh no wait, umm, today we saw the location of the movie set for Hobbiton and Bag End. It was actually really cool even though most of the set has been restored to its original location- there are still some hobbit holes left, sans doors or decorations, but the party tree and the lake are there and lots of sheep. So many sheep. No actual hobbits, though. Or dolphins. Or bears. And we were actually in the town of Matamata, which has embraced the hobbit theme wholeheartedly- there is even a Hobbit Hole Internet Caffe (sic), though I am not there at the moment- I was too tall to enter.
I was expecting a much cheesier tour but I was pleased with how professional they are and interesting. And I was surprised by how green it was- I thought they enhanced that in the movies, but it really was tat green, and it's not even summer yet. I took loads of pictures, probably more than most people would ever care to see, but I can't upload them today, so stay tuned.
Here is an interesting fact I learned from the Silmarillion last night- the dwarves were created by the Valar Aule, and Illuvatar could have ordered Aule to destroy them but he was merciful and let them live. There's more to the story but I have to get going for now.

Paihia
Today I swam with some dolphins, and it was an incredible experience. Not a bad consolation for being too congested with a cold to do any diving. Wow. They were right beside me and underneath me and all around, looking and playing. It was really really cold, though, but sooo worth it. And the dolphins didn't seem to mind sharing the ocean with a landlubbing bear.
On the boat I met a researcher who is studying the dolphins' group associations and other social interactions, so we got to talking about science and conservation and stuff like that. Turns out her supervising professor is doing some interesting work with DNA testing to keep tabs on Japanese and Korean whalers, in an attempt to ensure that they aren't killing animals even they aren't supposed to. At least, I think that is an acceptable layman version of what they are doing- here is more of a technical treatment straight from the actual source.

And my good friend Tom has submitted a short work of literature in order to win my bloggiversary contest. Read and enjoy, and don't let its overpowering amazingness discourage you from submitting as well- I may give out more than one prize!

Now Edgar’s Gone…
By Tom Aechtner

The man in the tuxedo stumbled twice. The first trip caused by his drunken state, which seemingly increased the grip on his artificially lustrous rental shoes. The second induced by an embarrassed jerky reaction to the first. In an attempt to regain lost face, he looked back and scowled at an imaginary squirrel that must have darted in front of him, causing him to lose balance.
“Goddamn squirrels!” he seethed, inwardly contented that all of the other wedding guests must have bought the whole squirrel story. Smiling he turned and continued on his way. The man in the tuxedo stumbled for a third time.
He awkwardly opened the exit door from the gymnasium and stepped out into the night. The strange aqua green colours of the reception decorations seemed to have acted as a visual diuretic, catalyzing the effects of the champagne. After finding the men’s washroom teeming with an excess of less-than-accurate sharp shooters, he had made the decision to step outside. Epileptically he wrestled with his fly, sure that a squirrel had sewn it shut before he had put the pants on this morning. He lurched towards the ‘Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic High School’ sign, and in an anticlimactic miscalculation his urine ricocheted off of the ‘A’ in Mary, dousing the all too perfect shoes.
“Idiot,” Berg whispered to himself. Though he wasn’t Catholic he knew better than to attempt such an odious desecration of something sacrosanct, regardless of the faith. Berg chuckled as he thought of his own religion: ‘The Immaculate Goodness of Eating Penguin Hearts.’ He fought the temptation to lick his massive polar bear chops as he hid in the bushes, watching the man in the tuxedo.
Berg was much like any other polar bear. He enjoyed swimming, and winking his double lidded eyes. But unlike other polar bears, he also enjoyed eating penguins. This, of course, is impossible for other polar bears as penguins live at the opposite pole. Berg, however, had never seen his frigid northern home, and knew only as much about polar bears as he could glean from the 30x30cm information signs that were located around his zoo pen. And these he had read in haste. One can only read in haste when one is a polar bear escaping from the Auckland zoo.
The Auckland Zoo has never had an official polar bear pen, and as a result of Berg, they probably never will. Berg was born outside of New Zealand and raised by humans after his mother died. The zoo of his birth and childhood fell into hard times and his human keepers were forced to seek help from other more reputable animal sanctuaries. It so happened that the main investor/operator/Big Kahuna of the Auckland Zoo (who would often be seen sporting a much too tight tie depicting a cartoon polar bear in a top hat) had been planning on adding a polar bear exhibit. And so, Berg found himself in a tiny chilled New Zealand pen, growing older as the zoo completed their state-of-the-art ‘Auck-Artica’ display. Finally, after months of confinement, the tight-tie Kahuna had Berg moved into the exhibit in anticipation of its surprise opening to the public. Though the Kahuna was near coronary failure in his excitement of the unveiling, Berg quickly surveyed his new quarters in distaste. Actually, it wasn’t the exhibit that displeased him (for he didn’t actually know what a true polar bear habitat should look like) but the thought of the zoo visitors. Mainly it was the snot that Berg couldn’t stand. The sticky algae coloured ooze that dripped from the smallest of the visitors. Dripping and dripping and dripping, being smeared by freshly coated hands onto the pen windows and railings. Unknown to most humans Polar bears despise the scent of human snot. It smells to them like, well, like the inside of a human nose – which is quite abhorrent to much of the animal kingdom. Incidentally it was snot that led his escape.
After spending a number of hours in his new sanctuary the Kahuna dropped by to visit Berg. With evident, almost nauseating pride, he gawked at Berg and sang the praises of the exhibit. In sweat filled glee he circled around to the zoo keepers’ entrance, and tossed a number of fish over the top of the metallic gate. They smacked the ground in front of Berg, who was always eager to squelch his monumental appetite. As the fish disappeared in the grand slaps of his saliva foamed mouth, Berg noticed the Kahuna hanging his arms over the gate, cleaning off the scaly fish slime from his hands with a well used handkerchief. Berg twitched his nostrils, and stopped crunching the fish head that rolled tastefully along his tongue. In horror he watched as the handkerchief, previously filled with the Kahuna’s defiling snot, was accidentally dropped inside his pen. The Kahuna looked over the gate at his dropped rag, then at Berg, back to the rag, before shrugging his shoulders and walking out for the night. Berg could not move, barely able to swallow the last gill as he thought about the abomination that now lay inside his new home.
Later in the evening the zookeeper made a visit for a last feeding, not aware of the paralyzing disgust that had consumed Berg’s nervous system. In his left hand he held a bucket of fish, swaying as an expended pendulum. Grinning thoughtlessly, like the slightly evolved primate that he was, the zookeeper toddled up to the entrance gate. He scratched his armpit, smelled his hand, and then proceeded to open the door to the pen. It was at this moment, the point in which the zookeeper took his first step inside, that Berg’s impression of human snot was to change in an explosive way. The zookeeper’s foot landed on the snot soiled handkerchief before skidding forward, and then launching into the air like an illegal firework. In a chi-like kung-fu counter balance of a drunken master, the zookeeper’s head rocked backwards, landing on the cement as an impotent comet. At first Berg’s paralysis continued; not in fear for the zookeeper’s safety, but by the thought that now the snot might have been flung deeper into his domain. And then, in a moment of clarity usually reached in bears only after breaking the final bonds of hibernation stupor, he realized that the gate was open. Berg jumped over the unconscious zookeeper, and fled for his freedom. ‘Alas’, Berg had thought in paradoxical laughter, ‘Though human snot was my bane, it is also my liberator!’
And so began the fugitive story of a bear far from home. He was instinctively superior at losing his pursuers through the tangled forests that coat New Zealand; finding himself in pure, though hot, freedom. After a number of months his wanderings led him into much personal meditation, and he began to chase the shadow of what it meant to be a true polar bear. Finally, as he struggled relentlessly to understand his own xenotypic foundations, his claws gripped a discarded newspaper. It was inside this newspaper, in the slightly stained comic section, that Berg discovered an apparent revelation. A cartoon drawing called “The Farside,” which depicted a polar bear cleverly disguised as a penguin, sitting on an iceberg amongst many more of the flightless birds. One of the dumbfounded penguins was quoted as saying in a less than sherlockian manner, “Now Edgar’s gone… Something’s going on around here.” For the second time in his life a blubber dissipating epiphany quaked Berg’s mind: Polar Bears are supposed to eat penguins!
Unfortunately Berg never realized that it would be difficult to find such penguins at his particular coordinate. After weeks of unsuccessful reconnaissance operations in nearby towns, however, he came across the biggest group of penguins that he had ever seen. The Smith-Tory wedding was like an iceberg buffet, with giant penguins strolling about with no evidence of any instinctual fear of predators. They looked like the emperor penguins he had read about in a discarded National Geographic, although much bigger. Their size, Berg reasoned, must have been due to their lavish kingly diets, bought by the extra-high taxes that such monarchial emperor birds would impose on other lesser avians. In marxian logic Berg deduced that eating one or two of these penguins would not only fulfill his polar bear dietary calling, but allow him to become an ursine Che Guevara for the animal kingdom!
And so Berg watched from the bushes as the man in the tuxedo whispered curses into the night. The man took out a handkerchief and began to blow his snot sodden nostrils. It gently fell to the ground from his limp hand as yet another penguin was dragged into the New Zealand night.

When travelling, you find that reading materials are of inestimable worth- before I left I raided my girlfriend's classroom supply of old National Geographics for a quick and discardable source of fascinating material. All over Malaysia there is a trail of National Geographic back issues, and I hope young Malays are picking them up like the birds in Hansel and Gretel, and turning into young conservationalists. In fact just today I went and bought a bunch more (a buck each, can't go wrong) to wile away the upcoming hours of the next leg of our journey which will take place in our rented campervan. Soon I will be able to discourse on all sorts of interesting facts concerning the Ibises of Ibiza and the Oryxes of Oris. Or something like that.
Also, I will finally dive into The Silmarillion tomorrow- even though I have read LOTR umpteen times in the last twenty years (yeah, since 1984), I have never been able to penetrate The Silmarillion, but since we are in Middle-earth there is no longer any excuse.
Just today I finally finished a book I started in Melaka (as much as I love to read it is hardly my first priority while travelling) which I enjoyed: The Amulet of Samarkand", by Jonathan Stroud.
Hey I just remembered it's my second bloggiversary next week! Umm, for the contest send me . . . i dunno . . . any kind of creative work (story, poem or drawing) about polar bears in New Zealand, or South Polar bears or something like that. Or anything really, I don't care. Just send your submissions to nwaddell (at) gmail dot com and the winner will get a no-expenses paid vacation to NZ to join gabrielle and me for Christmas! Heck, you all win one of those! And the rel winner will get at least a postcard from me while I'm here, and maybe I can find something cooler, like a kiwi fruit or something. Sadly there are no cassowaries on New Zealand. That I know of.

Auckland
Even though New Zealand is really great, one very troublesome factor is their complete lack of an indigenous ursine population. No bears at all! Although obviously I have improved that situation somewhat with my arrival. Tomorrow we will go off in search of whatever bear-like creatures or cassowary-like kiwis can be found.
Oh yeah, but i can tell you that the toilets here have a cool innovation that is environmentally more sound than the ones at home- you have the option of a half-flush or a full flush, thus saving a lot more water. So, you would only do a ful flush if you have just engaged in the activity to which this blog is devoted, and a half if you didn't have quite that much to do. Pretty cool.
And rustyangel has set up a mirror site for our pictures, which you can check here if you like: http://photos.design-culture.net/?album=adventures-my

Pulau Perhentian
Hi! Did you miss me? Allow me to reintroduce myself- my name is Homie Bear and I am a certified PADI Open Water Scuba Diver! (Technically, we are back on the mainland now, and actually in Kuala Besut.)
We went away to the tropical island paradise of Pulau Perhentian to relax and lay on the beach and generally do nothing, and it was reallyreallygreat. But on what was to be our last day we went snorkelling and had such a great time that we decided to stay and take the scuba course. Why not, eh? That's what travel is all about. I LOVE diving, it is so much fun.
We were at Flora Bay Resort, and the attached Dive School is where we took the course. I highly recommend both.
Anyways, the last nine days were pretty fine,and now we are heading to New Zealand. See you there!

Kuala Besut
As I get ready to depart Malysia's beautiful shores, I would like to share with you some of the linguistic discoveries I made here. A small Malay primer, if you will, should you ever find yourself in Kuala Lumpur without a phrasebook.
Selamat datang is the first thing you need to know- it's their greeting,their welcome phrase, so it's very common and useful to know. Easy to remember too, since selamat is tamales spelled backwards. And datang is gnatad spelled backwards.
Terimah Kasih means thank you. When I say it it seems to mean "Everyone laugh at the foreigner who says terimah kasih wrong!"
Tutup is closed, as in "America is tutup", as Tom Hanks learned to his dismay in The Terminal.
When we were up in the KL Tower I noticed the viewing telescopes had some Malay writing on it, and one of the words was matahari. I have no idea what it means but it's cool that the legendary spy was actually a Malay.
Finally, the most important word you need to know: Beruang Kutub. That means polar bear.