Desperate for Internet in Invercargill

Starved of internet access for at least three days, we made another stop in the town of Invercargill to check in, upload a few photos and finish off a few travel posts.

[A quick aside: If you're wondering why this blog is lagging reality by anywhere from a few days to (soon) more than a week, it's a combination of two reasons: us deliberately keeping our emailing, news reading and stock market checking to a bare minimum (or at least what Dan considers a bare minimum....), and our efforts to avoid burying our readers with content in the form of huge, multi-chapter posts that contain everything we did each day. It might be a logical way to organize a travel blog, but it's probably not the most interesting way to read a travel blog. So in many cases we'll describe events that occured in one day in posts put up over the course of a couple of days, although the events will still be listed chronologically. We're hoping that this will make for a more fun and engaging read for you.]

So we wandered into a Post store (they're all over New Zealand--for USA-based readers, the closest thing to compare it to is a Mailboxes, Etc store), and asked for internet access. And in a total breach of all rules of network security, the clerk let us plug our laptop directly into the store's own network. Dan literally pulled the network jack out of their PC and plugged it into our laptop. She left us alone on the computer for well over an hour and only charged us for one hour of access.

That's how things seem to roll here. Everyone's helpful, friendly, and there are no worries.


After regrettably learning that the Dow had fallen 900 points since we left the States (should I send Dan back?) and catching up on a few other things, we stopped off at a local bulk natural foods store called the Bin Inn (pronounced "Bean Eeen"). We picked up a 1kg bag of muesli for NZ$8.99 (about US$6) that ended up feeding us breakfast for the next four days, and yet again had a nice chat with a perfect stranger, the checkout girl, who asked "Are you on holiday?"

It seems to be a common question we get whenever either of us fumbles with unfamiliar one- and two-dollar coins.

And just before we said goodbye, she made an offhand comment that made us fall in love all over again with New Zealander helpfulness and wit. It probably won't translate all that well in this post*, but she said, "Be careful on the icebergs!"

One final note: we've talked about how it's been difficult wrapping our minds around the fact that it's summer here, so imagine how warping it must seem to see Christmas decorations throughout town!


* Our friendly cashier was helpfully referring to a recent and fairly big news story here about two young Australian men who walked past obvious warning signs, ropes and barriers to get up to the very edge of the Fox Glacier. They were unfortunately killed as the glacier's edge collapsed underneath them.