I'm going to let you in on a secret. I have a bad memory. That's not the secret. Everyone knows that. The secret is that Sam's memory isn't as good as everyone else is led to believe. Oh sure, he's got a much better memory than I have by a long shot. But if you've been reading his series of posts about our trip, you've probably been thinking "Wow, this guy remembers EVERYTHING!"

So now I will let you in on the big secret of Sam's brilliant memory, which I myself discovered on day 2 of our trip. He TAKES NOTES. I've heard of people keeping trip journals, or log books, where they write down daily the things they had done or seen. But Sam seemed to take it a step further. He kept his notebook with him pretty much wherever we went and wrote things down immedietly as they happened.

When I discovered this, I realized how truly insane Sam is about recording things that happen to him. To me, note taking is a chore. I almost don't like watching bad movies now because I have to take notes on them because I know I'll want to do a review for IABBBBM, and my memory is so bad that I need to take notes to get *anything* worth saying into the review. So seeing a person avidly taking notes while on VACATION was completely alien to me. Several times I wanted to take the notebook from him and bonk him over the head and say "Just look! Look! It's beautiful! It's exciting! Just experience it, don't record it! Exist here and now, don't worry about posterity! BE! DO! Don't collect!" But it wouldn't have done any good--the first thing he would have done when he got the notebook back would be to write "Dave took my notebook and bonked me on the head and yelled at me."

And anyway, it's not like it's a bad thing. Just because I don't like it and wouldn't enjoy it doesn't mean Sam feels the same way. But I wouldn't be Dave if I didn't take every opportunity to mock something Samish. It's a bonding thing, you know.

So on with the "Good Parts" version of our tale. A little about Puck--I had only seen pictures of him before I arrived and had only chatted very briefly with him. Basically, he was an unknown quantity to all of us. And he only knew *me* as "the single guy my girlfriend chats with" so I had *no* clue how we were going to get along, and I was quite afraid it might not be the most comfortable experience.

Fortunately, things went better than I could have hoped for. Puck is a Software Engineer (the same as Sam, when he has a job) and I'm a Systems Administrator, so we had technical jobs in common. He's extremely intelligent and can talk knowledgably about a great many things, which makes conversation enjoyable and easy. Plus, as Sam pointed out, he's a huge jokester, so you can never tell if you're supposed to be taking him seriously or not. My only problems were that he was soft-spoken (as most New Zealanders seem to be--they think of Americans as loud for the most part) and that, coupled with his accent, sometimes made him hard to understand. I found myself nodding and smiling politely until I had time to decipher what he had said at times--and being the jokester that he is, I'm sure I nodded and smiled politely at several cutting remarks without even knowing about it, much to his chagrin. Oh well, ignorance is bliss, as they say.

At Candyland I first discovered the nasty truth about US food. There's sugar in EVERYTHING here. We got tons and tons of chocolate and other sweets at Candyland, but some of it seemed to not taste quite right (although the fudge was intensly amazing!) I realized later, after experiencing other foods that turned out to not be as sweet as I remembered, that the missing ingredient was beautiful raw sugar. For instance, I had no idea that peanut butter had sugar added to it until I bought a small jar in New Zealand. It tasted like mushed up peanuts. OUR peanut butter tastes like mushed up peanuts doused with wonderful beautiful processed sugar. In the US, if something has no extra sugar added to it, that fact is proudly and boldy trumpeted on the front of the packaging; "NO SUGAR ADDED!!!!" In NZ, that's the norm. I'm surprised they don't have labels that say "CONTAINS EXTRA SUGAR!!!!", although I suspect only US tourists would buy those products.

I think it was the lack of sugar in my diet for the last two days that nearly killed me at the cave toobing place. Well, that and the fact that I'm grotesquely obese. There's no way in hell that an attraction like that could stay open more than 30 seconds in the US. Let me just do a rundown of all the things that would have elicited a lawsuit in the US.

First, the vans. If they had seatbelts, I couldn't find them. Somebody would sue about that, just on general principle. Then the roads. Like a *lot* of the roads in New Zealand, they were unpaved (or "unsealed" as they say there) for much of the way to where we were going. Somebody would get carsick and sue. Then, the hut/barn thing we changed at. It was dirty. Somebody would have gotten a splinter or stepped on something tracked in by the last crew and sued. We all changed together, seperated by sex but with no privacy otherwise. Somebody would have sued for mental anguish if they had to change with a fat guy like me. Then the wetsuits--it was obvious they didn't actually *clean* them between "adventures". Same with the boots. Somebody would get athlete's foot or some other vaguely communicable disease and sue. The electric fences--we had to actually CLIMB OVER electrified fences on the way to the caves. Sure, there were wooden rails to hold onto and to prevent you from grabbing the electrified parts, and they *did* warn us about it, but rest assured SOMEBODY in the States would grab onto one of those things, get a nasty shock, and sue. Then we had to walk down grassy hills in wet rubber boots. A few of us slipped and fell. That's a sueing offense right there.

Mind you, this is all even BEFORE you get to the caves! The caves themselves are just one big lawyers DREAM. Starting with the slick ladder you have to climb down (through the narrow hole) to get into the place. First person to fall would sue the place for all its worth right there. Then there's the water itself. First idiot to get a cold after coming out of the cold water of the caves would sue, and God forbid someone actually drank the water by mistake, because who knows what they might catch, what with all the thousands of smelly yucky tourists who trek through it in unclean wet suits every day. Then the part where they had us jump into the water with our tubes. There were at least five things that could have gone wrong there to cause someone to sue in the US. First, you could bang your head on the outcropping that was above the place we launched backwards off of--that's a lawsuit. Then, if you didn't jump far enough out, there was a rocky ledge you could smash your legs onto--lawsuit. If you jump *too* far, you smash into the other wall of the cave. Lawsuit 3. Then there's the water--It splashed in my face when I jumped in, and some got up my nose. I refer you to the part where I talked about drinking the water. Lawsuit city. Finally, there's the general silliness of jumping off a small rocky cliff backwards into an inner tube. Some person would get their feelings hurt and sue for mental abuse.

Then you tube down the underwater river in complete darkness. I don't remember them asking about fear of the dark on the questionaire we had to fill out before hand, but even if they did, that never stopped anybody in the US from filing a lawsuit when they got scared and peed themselves. And oh man, the first tourist to get sick when they realized that they were looking at glowing maggot turds would sue the pants off the place.

Before and after the tubing, we walked a lot over rough rocks--one guy got cut and I nearly cut myself on some of those rocks. We also had to go through a place where we were several feet off the ground walking between rocks--first person to fall and crack their heads would sue there. First person to lose their boots and have their feet go numb during the "swimming" section would sue. Then, finally, was that interminable climb BACK UP THE HILL. I nearly didn't make it--four hours of trudging blindly through the Mines of Moria broken up by about 15 minutes of actually TUBING was nearly enough to kill me--when I realized that I was now going to have to walk back up that damn hill, I almost died. I took off everything that would easily come off to get cool, and still I hyperventilated and had to stop several times on the way up. The worst of it is, they could have easily brought the van back down and trucked us back up for the last half of it, but they didn't. Let me tell you, in the States witholding convenience is a MAJOR suing offence.

However, it was all worth it. At the end, I was greeted by the sight of the two European women Sam described prancing around in their bras, seemingly unconcerned (or perhaps enjoying?) that there were horny US male tourists (or at least one) watching them. That made the whole thing worth it. (Although some prude in the States would sue over THAT too.)

Finally, there's the fact that this whole cave tubing business would never have even gotten to the point where someone could do any one of the things I described, because the tree-hugging environmental eco-terrorist hippy liberals would have shut the caves off from the world by declaring them fragile works of nature not to be disturbed by crass humans before anybody could so much as think about charging tourists large sums of money to nearly kill themselves stumbling blindly through the Underdark.

But, except for the part where I almost died (which was pretty much *every* part, up to and including the shower I took at the end), it was insanely fun.

-- Dave