Words

20 January, 2008

The Odyssey and the Smelliad

The idea seemed extraordinary on the brochure in my mind. 14 luxurious, sun-drenched days, cruising the islands of New Zealand. Top down on my rental convertible. Wind waving through my shimmering hair. Going where I want to go. Doing what I want to do. I would be like a European oceanic explorer from the 1500’s, mapping previously uncharted territory and discovering new adventure in every single sea-splashed alcove I came upon (except that I flew here in a 767 and am doing all my ‘discovering’ on already paved roads). Everything would be on my time and at my leisurely pace.

12 days later, the only thing about me reminiscent of a European sailor is the musky, salty odor I’ve developed over time. I’ve just taken my second shower in two weeks, if it can be called a shower - a quick bombardment into the chilly ocean in pouring rain, waves pummeling me from every side. Bringing soap with me into the water was merely hope-based cleanliness, as the bar only served to grind minute particles of sand into my sunburned skin rather than dissolve the layer of dusty, briny grit.

Traveling abroad in the first world is new to me, especially in an independent manner with my own vehicle. I am accustomed to journeying at the whim of the heart-attack-inducing chicken bus driver in Guatemala or on the back of a freelance taxi driver’s moped in Phnom Penh. That’s the easy way to travel. No maps. No insurance. No filling one’s tank with the wrong kind of gasoline and sputtering up the hillsides. In the third-world I simply get on the bus, put my faith in the hands of Allah, or whichever local deity provides transportation security in the country I’m in, sit back and enjoy the bumpy ride. In the developing world I normally would never attempt to conduct any sort of vehicle. Obeying the unwritten rules of the road would prove impossible, not to mention avoiding obstacles such as children, bicyclists, donkeys, ducks, rickshaws, camels, motos, pedestrians and other vehicles while screaming down a narrow, unmarked road become four-lane, third-world, second-tier Formula One track. Those situations make first world driving seem easy. Other than driving on the left side of the road instead of the right, I figured driving in New Zealand might be exhilarating and advantageous, as far as exploration is concerned.

The way I reasoned this car rental nonsense is the following: hostels want about 25 dollars per night to sleep in a dank dormitory room full of a dozen snoring, odiferous, dread-locked travelers. Not that there is anything wrong with snoring or odor. On top of that, the buses are almost prohibitively expensive. With these prices, I was looking at spending 50 dollars a day for just accommodation and transportation. So I figured, if I was going to spend that much on transportation and accommodation, I could probably rent a cheap car (ever seen the likes of a Nissan Bluebird? It’s clearly tops in its class), pay for gas, forego the depressing hostel routine by sleeping in my car and ultimately come out at the same price, about 60 bucks a day. Plus I would have ultimate freedom. And can freedom be priced? Yes, it can. 60 bucks a day. So I was off. The Bluebird had taken flight.

It immediately became apparent to me that I was limited in many ways. I did not have a proper room to sleep in. To make do, my ride became my bedroom. I did not have any way to prepare food. My car became my kitchen. I had no space to stretch out and put up my feet or curl up with a feel-good book about the heinous environmental degradation occurring across the globe. The Bluebird seat became my recliner, the passenger side my den.

I had been hoping to pick up hitchhikers along the way to supplement my petrol fund and my bank of hilarious traveler anecdotes, but there turned out to be so few rideless souls on the lonesome stretches of desolate highways. Good thing, because I had transformed my sedan into a compartmentalized kingdom. It was almost like living in the 21^st century. I mean the, uh, 22^nd century, where everything was at my fingertips. The Sun comes up each morning and I awake in my bedroom (reclined driver seat). Time to brush the teeth. I Reach behind me into my toiletries cabinet (backseat) and grab my toothbrush and toothpaste. Breakfast? I Lunge into my pantry behind me, slide over into my kitchen (passenger seat), prepare a meal (pour oatmeal and water into the bottom of a cut-off two-liter Pepsi bottle) and grub down. It’s the good life. Later in the day: Oh, look! A lovely vista out the right-hand side of my vehicle! I Grab the essentials from my photography studio (center console) and snap away. My trunk became my grubby dresser and so on. The only thing missing was a bathroom, which provided me a good reason to leave the ‘Bird now and again. Basically, as limited as I was on space, I had the equivalent of shelter - a roof over my head containing most everything I needed. That’s the positive way of looking at it. The negative way is that I was one step away from being homeless.

One thing I hadn’t considered was hygiene. The mental brochure I read promised nothing but blue skies and warm showers underneath crystal-clear rainbow-misted waterfalls. After several days of rainy conditions, where I stayed mostly in my vehicle, becoming drenched any time I tried to leave it, I began to smell like the caged animal I literally was. The odor crept up slowly, silently at first. But soon my pungency overpowered the 40 cubic feet cage in which my existence was limited. Originally I had planned on showering in local lakes. I had envisioned myself prancing around nude in the luminous alpine wilderness, bathing in and drinking the fresh and pure local water, a fish jumping into my frying pan then instant I felt a tinge of hunger. But the cold, true reality was that, along with my odd fantasies, the possibility of lakes had dried up.

I had missed the scant opportunities for cleanliness in the region the lakes were most widespread. This was a mistake because I wasn’t able to shower for many days after. I presumed the lakes would magically reappear on the horizon but they never did. Only rain clouds came into sight. So instead of lakes, I was expected to bathe in the salty, sandy ocean. At first, as the rain began to pour down for several consecutive days, I was utterly averse to such testicle-freezing blasphemy. I already loathed cold water, but covering myself in a layer of marine brine that would dry and stick to my skin sounded worse than the layer of terrestrial grime that was already covering me. Making matters worse was that I couldn’t properly wash my clothes. They wouldn’t dry in the midst of cloudy, drizzly weather. Rain-soaked, they only added to the mildewy, wild animal stench growing from within the Bluebird’s bowels.

After so long, I contend, a smell doesn’t really become much worse. Instead, it begins to permeate. The pile of clothes in my trunk, a week on, was nearly a living organism, its metabolic output reeking of a mix of rotting forest sludge and month-old, unrefrigerated, decaying Thanksgiving gravy. In my humble shelter there was no avoiding its menace. Even plastic bags were saturated by the odor.

Eventually the smell, among other things, finally got to me. It all happened during a period when I am generally quite vulnerable: the morning. I awoke in my passenger seat, neck tweaked, to a greasy, sandy clump of tangled hair stuck to my face. I itched all over my unwashed body so I turned on the radio to distract myself. But New Zealand radio is subject to the same problems as US stations. They play about 23 minutes of actual music per hour, the rest of the time filled with advertisement and blabber. Unfortunately, that 23 minutes is the same twelve songs repeated ad naseaum. At that moment, a Nickelback song seemed to be the new hit of the day and had already repeated twice before 7am. Meanwhile the sunlight beamed in though the Bluebird’s windshield and steamed it up like a greenhouse, exacerbating the effect of the itch and sweat and grease. I ripped off my wool hat and jacket and peeled off my clammy, sticky pants as the lead singer of Nickelback bleated on in his fraudulent screech-whine about how great it is to be a rockstar, with endless cheap drugs and women throwing themselves at him after every show. I began to take stock in my situation.

I was homeless, more or less, living out of a car. Foul-stenched, frustrated and homeless. The time for action had come. I turned off Nickelback and dived head-on into the chilly ocean and, with my bar of soap, began to scrub, hopelessly transferring the salt/sand/silt layer from one part of my body to the other. Waves crashing overhead, I tried to clean my hair but the ocean wash from heavy surf just lodged millions of fine particles of sand throughout my greasy, nappy-headed-bro hair. Shivering and scouring away in my boxers in waist-deep whitewash, I questioned myself and my intentions, as I tend to develop a split personality when spending so much time on my own. It’s almost like having a travel companion. “So this is the freedom you spoke of?” I asked my twin.

At that moment I resolved to read the fine print on the mental brochure next time before I set off.

The Bluebird's sleek interior