Smithsonian.com

David Baggett, famed among noodlers, explodes from the water with a giant catfish in his hands. Photo courtesy of Bradley Beesley.

Cypress boughs dangle over the still, mocha-muddy waters of an Oklahoma swamp as a gaggle of drawling Southern country boys walks waist deep through the sleepy current. The men, shirtless and tanned, feel their way with their feet, exploring for stumps or root tangles—and when a foot strikes a submerged structure, the man kneels, almost disappearing, and examines the underwater snag with his reaching arms. As his friends gather around to watch, the man grins, takes a deep breath, gives a sly wink and disappears. The brown water settles as the circle of men stand by, and the seconds tick past. No: This is not some strange baptism of the swamp country, or a rendition of Marco Polo, or a college fraternity initiation ritual. Just watch.

After 15 seconds, the top of the submerged man’s head appears again, and the water around him begins to swirl. It seems he’s struggling underwater, and after several more seconds, he bursts out of the river with a wild yeehaw howl as his friends whoop and cheer. The man’s arms are reluctant to follow, however, for he is hauling something up to the surface—a living creature, it seems—and in another moment, it explodes from the water, thrashing like a bobcat, three-feet head to tail, mustached like Rollie Fingers and with a mouth like a toad clamped on the man’s hands.

The animal is a flathead catfish, the number-one target in a game of unarmed man against fish called “noodling.” In this peculiar sport of the Deep South, barehanded men (and a few women) shove their hands into the lairs of catfish and goad the animals into biting. Catfish lack large teeth, and as a fish clomps down the noodler grabs back, and once he or she has firmly gripped the lower jaw of the fish, it only takes some muscle work to remove it from its hole. But here’s the most controversial part: Noodling takes place in June and July, precisely when large male catfish sit on nests of eggs, aggressively guarding the fertile clumps from predators. The big fish, which may weigh more than 70 pounds but usually go less than 20, will bite at almost anything that meets them at the door to their lairs—whether bass, bird or hand of a hillbilly. If the catfish are kept to be eaten or if the flustered animals fail to return to their nests even if they are released, the future brood is doomed.

Noodling, which may have originated in the pre-Columbian era, began going mainstream about a decade ago when a filmmaker named Bradley Beesley, an Oklahoma native, took an interest in the sport. In 2001, Beesley released an hour-long documentary called Okie Noodling in which he follows a group of noodlers doing their thing—laughing, splashing, screaming expletives as huge cats chomp their hands, and erupting from the water in glorious slow motion with 50-pound flatheads latched to their fists. Beesley was so enthralled by the activity and the surrounding culture that he became a noodler himself in the course of his work. In 2008, Beesley released a sequel to the first film, and just two weeks ago a miniseries called “Mudcats” wrapped up, but viewers can still catch reruns. Or you might also go to Oklahoma for the 13th Okie Noodling Tournament, which arrives on June 23. The event, which Beesley helped launch in part to promote his first film, includes live music and a catfish eating contest.

In an interview last week, Beesley described for me the thrills of noodling.

“It’s the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever done,” Beesley said. It is also, he added, “the fairest way to combat these beasts.” Beesley says the sensation of having a catfish the size of a bulldog bite one’s bare hand is a particularly thrilling one. “It hurts,” Beesley conceded. “It’s painful, like a rat trap with sand paper. The fish start spinning and thrashing. You don’t get any deep cuts, but they turn your hand into hamburger meat.” But many noodlers, Beesley said, choose not to wear gloves to better experience the direct skin-to-fish contact.

Beesley is quick to explain that noodling rarely injures the catfish—except for those that get battered and fried, which may be the majority of the landed cats. Though Beesley says many noodlers let their quarry go (and that the fish go straight back to their nests), other sources, like Texas fishing guide Chad Ferguson, quoted last year in a Texas Tribune article, seem to believe that most cats caught by noodlers are destined for the kitchen. Most online videos of noodlers at work show the hand-fishers tossing their catfish into boats or clipping them to stringers, and many states prohibit noodling precisely due to uncertainty about the negative effects of removing the largest breeding catfish from a population. Only seven states, it seems, allow noodling, with Texas having legalized the sport just last year.

But killing the largest breeding catfish of a population isn’t the only concern of anti-noodling conservationists, rod-and-reel fishermen and authorities; the other is the common noodler technique of tossing junk, like large pipes and furniture, into lakes to provide catfish with nesting structure and themselves with an advantage in finding the fish when the nesting season comes.

A young noodler shows off his still-alive flathead catfish at the 2006 Okie Noodling Tournament. Photo by Alan Novey.

At last year’s noodling tournament in Pauls Valley, which drew more than 10,000 spectators, 183 people participated in the hunt for catfish. Among these competitors, 37 landed fish. The biggest was a 60-pound flathead wrested from its den by Mark Rowan, who took $1,000 for the prize and also won $400 more for having the heaviest stringer of catfish—150 pounds, to be exact. The top female noodler was Brandy Sparks, who caught a 45-pounder, and the winner of the kids’ division was Dakota Garrett, who took a 42-pound flathead.

The blue catfish is another resident of American swamp and slough country, and readers of Mark Twain may remember that Huckleberry Finn and Jim caught a catfish as large as a man. That, without doubt, would have been a blue. Noodlers certainly take blue catfish, though in some states blues, if not necessarily flatheads, are protected from the harassment.

Just how many men, women and children shove their hands into catfish lairs in America is uncertain, though officials in Missouri, where noodling is illegal, estimate that 2,000 people hand-fish for cats. Meanwhile, the game is catching on abroad. In the great rivers of Europe, for instance, hands are appearing at the den doors of the legendary wels catfish, which may weigh as much as a bear and which, like catfish in America, get ornery during nesting season.

Noodling has its risks, and every year newspaper reports tell of noodlers drowned when their hands or feet or heads become stuck below the surface, or when surprise currents drag them into deeper waters. Beesley guesses that in Oklahoma, “one or two” people drown each year while hand-hunting for catfish. But alligators and water moccasins are not the threats that the media sometimes makes them out to be. “That’s been sensationalized,” Beesley said. In his 13 years of documenting noodlers at work in Oklahoma, he once saw a man surface with a non-poisonous snake on his arm, and once with a snapping turtle.

“And there was one guy who was bitten by a beaver,” Beesley said.

Finding catfish is not always easy. It takes knowledge of the swamp and its underwater geography, and it takes some luck, too—and many a noodling excursion becomes, in the end, just a walk in the woods, under cypress and sun, waist deep in the big muddy.

The European wels catfish, shown here, has become the target of Old World noodlers. Photo courtesy of Flickr user helti.

These Northern California abalone divers have bagged their limits and are out of the water again safely. On some "ab" dives, tragic accidents happen. Photo courtesy of Flickr user ingridtaylar.

They’re clammy. They’re rubbery. They’re often deep-fried in vegetable oil. And though the red abalone of California was once a staple of dirt-cheap seafood shacks, this big slippery sea snail is today one of the most prized seafoods in the world.

Abalone is also the goal of one of the most dangerous recreational games in America. Abalone diving season kicked off in Northern California on April 1, and though no fatalities have yet been reported, well, let’s just knock on wood. Because since 1993, at least 54 people have lost their lives while pursuing abalone, including eight in 2008 and seven in 2007, and rare is the season in which at least one diver doesn’t perish in the cold and rough waters of the North Coast. Yet so fervent is the urge to get in the water and bag one’s daily limit of three abalone that many divers who have driven hours to get to their favorite spot only to find the sea surging and violent just brave the waves anyway. Sometimes they die. Kelp may be the greatest of hazards to the diver, who are prohibited from using SCUBA gear. This spectacular seaweed, so gentle in appearance and symbolic of the California coast, occurs in nasty thickets in many locations. Kelp may grow more than a foot per day, and in the summer sun during calm periods, kelp forests can burgeon seemingly out of control until the fronds layer the surface like a carpet. Underwater, the long, cord-like stipes hang ceiling to seafloor. Among the rocks at their base is where the abalone dwell. Some divers wait until a large storm rips these kelp plants from the seafloor, clearing the water, while most just deal with it—the sensation of long, rubbery cords of kelp sliding over one’s legs is familiar to any abalone diver. Many carry knives strapped to their lower leg to cut through the kelp should they become entangled. Ironically, divers have drowned when their knives become snagged on the kelp.

Other divers die of exhaustion or heart attacks, sometimes collapsing on the rocks after a particularly strenuous dive. Among the least of dangers is the great white shark—though the fear of being eaten is one of the most persistent and haunting. In 2004, a well-known diver in Mendocino County was decapitated by a shark in one swift attack. Though dozens of abalone hunters have died from other causes since, Randy Fry remains a name that Northern California divers speak with a tone of regret and unmistakable dread. Today, many divers, as well as kayakers and surfers, wear “Shark Shields,” a relatively new device that emits an electric field that may deter sharks as large as great whites.

So, what is all the fuss and excitement about? For many people, abalone means nothing more than an excuse to get wet in one of the world’s most beautiful underwater settings. For some divers, it’s a treasure hunt—all about locating the big snails and prying them out of their crevices and holes. For a few divers, eating abalone isn’t even the point—collecting them is. After sacking their limits an driving home, they hand out the snails to their friends. (I recently joked with one such diver that she might just hunt for rocks instead and leave the abalone, which may be decades old, to their peaceful business.)

For others, abalone hunting is an obsessive game of numbers. These dedicated trophy hunters will take nothing but “tens,” that is, abalone at least 10 inches wide. (The minimum legal size is seven inches.) So particular are “ten divers” about this hallowed but arbitrary dimension that they usually measure and record their catches down to the hundredth of an inch, with the difference between a 10.64- or 10.47-inch abalone being a worthy distinction. The shells they polish and display on walls, and there is even a website dedicated to the hunt for huge abalone called Abalone Ten. Large abs, as divers often call their quarry, often occupy dark crevices 20 feet or more beneath the surface, and one may wonder as shivers creep up the spine how many divers have drowned with their heads stuck in an underwater cave.

A red abalone in its natural habitat—unwittingly being pursued by some 35,000 divers. Photo courtesy of Flickr user NOAA Photo Library.

The snails, meanwhile, keep meekly minding their business. They slide slowly across the seafloor, seeking kelp scraps, their chief food source, by day and returning to cracks and caves by night, and little do they know of the storm that their existence stirs—a storm of economic activity, weekends spent camping, poaching busts and car chases, photo ops, celebrations and family feasts … and funerals.

By the numbers:

Of about 35,000 licensed abalone hunters in California, more than 50 have died in the past 20 years.

Of about 300,000 licensed hunters in California, 27 died in accidents from 1994 to 2009.

20: Fatal mountain lion attacks in North America since 1890, including 6 people in California.

934: Commercial fishermen killed in America between 1992 and 2007.

6,000 to 8,000: Estimated total number of mountain climber deaths on Mont Blanc.

The Great Blue Hole of Belize was named by Jacques Cousteau as one of the world's top diving sites. Photo courtesy of Flickr user DrJohnBullas.

I am not a SCUBA-certified diver and I may never be. Instead, I free dive and have been for about 13 years, mostly along the coast of California, and I have no interest in introducing tanks, tubes and pressure valves to the simple relationship I have with the water. I can only imagine the burden of swimming with all the mechanical gadgetry and gear on my back that tank divers must wear, or the logistical nuisance of having to fill the tanks prior to each dive. Free divers must fill only their lungs, and sometimes just 5 or 10 feet beneath the surface we find all that we might ever hope to: the mangrove thickets of Belize, alive with nurse sharks, reef fishes and even crocodiles, or the kelp beds of California, where many divers spoiled by tropical reefs may be born again as they discover this unmatched habitat. But SCUBA technology grants access to a deeper world that I, again, can only imagine. And I think that the magic of SCUBA diving can be simmered down to one flat and obvious fact which an old friend and diving buddy once illuminated for me as we debated the pros and cons of air tanks:

“Dude,” he said. “You can breathe—underwater!”

There’s no arguing with that. And so we go, tanks and tubes and valves flowing with pressurized air, into the finest SCUBA diving destinations in the world.

Great Blue Hole, Belize. Jacques Cousteau visited this site in 1971 and declared the Great Blue Hole of Ambergris Caye to be among the best diving locations in the world. The Great Blue Hole is a wonder of geology, a 410-foot deep sinkhole located within the Belize Barrier Reef system and was created through forces similar to those responsible for the underwater caves of the nearby Yucatan Peninsula. The Hole is more than twice as wide as it is deep, making it less like a bottomless pit than a huge pothole, yet the vertiginous void may offer divers something of the feeling of facing off with the edge of the world. Descending into the hole, one will encounter local residents like groupers, various sharks, great barracuda and a diversity of other species. Bottom topography consists of sand, reef, many varieties or coral and ancient limestone stalactites, as well as caves and dramatic outcroppings that look like cathedrals. Visibility may exceed 150 feet and surface water temperatures rarely dip below 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Wrecks off Papua New Guinea. Things under the sea may be categorized into two classes: naturally occurring or the far less common anthropogenic. And that’s where diving can get creepy—coming across tools and devices and vehicles, objects that weren’t supposed to end up here but which, through some mishap or disaster up above, sank into watery graves. The sea floor is littered with manmade stuff, and few underwater adventures may be more thrilling than exploring a wreck. World War II was an era in which Davy Jones acquired a wealth of collectibles for his locker, and a great many planes and ships went down around Papua New Guinea. The Boeing Blackjack B-17 bomber is just one of the region’s popular dive wreck dives, sporting a very recognizable cockpit and turret guns. Discussing the “best” wrecks seems a bit callous, considering that many people have died on them. Some wrecks, though, are sunk intentionally, without casualties, as tourist draws and habitat enhancers, such as Papua New Guinea’s Pacific Gas, which has rested in 145 feet of water off of Port Moresby since 1996. On the wrecks where human lives may have ended, dive with respect.

On the Thistlegorm wreck in the northern Red Sea, divers find intact cargo from the World War II era. Photo courtesy of Flickr user mattk1979.

Red Sea, Egypt. Surrounded by land, the Red Sea experiences a temperature range much like that of a continental lake, with waters in January as cold as 65 degrees Fahrenheit and, in the late summer, as warm as the high 80s. Furthering the flux in temperatures is the north-south extent of the Red Sea, which crosses almost 15 degrees of latitude, from 30 degrees north into the tropics, where its waters touch the coasts of Eritrea and Yemen. The Red Sea wreck of the Thistlegorm, a British vessel sunk in 1941 during an air strike, is said by some to be the “best” shipwreck anywhere, with motorbikes, guns and vehicles still intact and viewable. In the realm of living things, whale sharks occur here in some abundance, and they’re just the biggest of the 1,100 fishes to be encountered in the Red Sea. About 200 of these species occur nowhere else. Marine mammals include the sluggish, vegetarian dugong, which grazes on sea grasses in the shallows and in lagoons. Further from shore, the sea floor plunges to some 10,000 feet deep. In many ways, the Red Sea is much like the equally splendid Sea of Cortez in Mexico—a sea also two miles deep, also a product of tectonic activity, also ranging from tropical to temperate, also of giant temperature range, also surrounded by desert and date palms, and also one of the most beautiful places in our mostly salt-watery world.

Great Barrier Reef, Australia. The most renowned diving location, the Great Barrier Reef is also the biggest barrier reef and, like nearly any tropical reef, a hotbed of colorful coral snags and zillions of striped fish darting in and out of the cracks and, well, you know—all the same stuff you’ll see in the travel brochures and computer screensavers. We could, I’m sure, go on all day about warm-water reefs—of Bermuda, Thailand, Micronesia, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean. Those and others like them are the places that most “best diving” lists consist of, and the Great Barrier Reef, like them, deserves every medal it wears around its neck. But what more is there to say by now about clownfish and big friendly grouper and how clear the water is?

Monterey Bay, California. And so I come home, to the waters of the American West Coast. They’re often murkier, surgier, spookier and gloomier than the seemingly airbrushed beauty of the tropics—but I’m just one diver of many who first fell in love with the world underwater in the stately kelp forests of the California coast. Those of Monterey Bay might be the most famous, teeming as they are with rockfish and surfperch in the water column, lingcod on the bottom, abalone in the rocks and, backstroking over the kelp fronds on top, sea otters. The average “vis” in places—such as Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, just south of Carmel—is 30 to 40 feet but can be as much as 60 on the best of autumn days. A jaded SCUBA jock who lives in a thatched beach hut in the Maldives might spit on such conditions and go back to bed, but for temperate-zone divers, even just 25 feet is like magic. The waters off Northern California, too, are frigid. Go in without a hood here, and it’s an instant head-freeze so shocking that you might almost pass out. Many divers even wear drysuits, though most can pull off several hours in the water with a 7-millimeter wetsuit. But for the beauty below sea level here, it’s worth braving the elements—the towering trees of kelp, the shafts of sunlight slicing through the canopy, the schools of fish silhouetted against the gloomy blue. Kelp forests grow all along the West Coast, Alaska to Baja, as well as around the world, from New Zealand to Chile to Japan to Scotland. Almost anywhere, in fact, where water touches shore is worth a dive—with or without air tanks on your back.

There are no clownfish or coral fans or gentle reef sharks here, yet the kelp forests of the California coast provide underwater scenery that no tropical reef can quite equal. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Diving_Mullah.

Cloud, sea and sun create a morning sky as spectacular as it is serene as Matt Rutherford enters another day on his solo voyage around the Americas. Photo by Matt Rutherford

After Columbus, Magellan and Drake; after Steller, Nansen and Amundsen; after the golden age of exploration fizzled into the era of idleness and suburbia; after the deepest jungles of New Guinea were finally mapped; and after the conquest of the solar system—still there remained one thing undone.

And now Matt Rutherford is doing it: He is on the homestretch of a nearly one-year journey that should make him the first person ever to circumnavigate the Americas on a single voyage. The 30-year-old sailor from Annapolis, Maryland is currently riding the wind northwest through the western Atlantic Ocean. The journey runs 25,000 miles from the edge of Arctic Canada to the tip of Patagonia and two oceans in between. He’s sailing alone, though that isn’t essential to the record.

“Nobody, period, has done this before,” Rutherford told me by satellite telephone on March 8. “Not on a 100-foot boat with a crew of 50, not on an aircraft carrier.”

Rutherford’s boat is the sort, as he says, that could be moored at a wharf and not attract a second glance. It’s a modest 27-foot Albin-Vega with a tendency for mechanical things to break and a ceiling so low that the 6-foot-tall Rutherford bumps his head any time he wakes up and forgets where he is. Rutherford, a sailor since 2004, has not set foot on land for almost 280 days, with an estimated 30 left. When we spoke, he was about 200 miles north of the mouth of the Amazon River and moving homeward, and certainly the most perilous parts of the journey are in the sack.

Indeed, right after setting out last June, he tackled the once almost mythical, now plain legendary Northwest Passage. Then he braved the nasty Bering Sea, and southward he went along the West Coast of Canada, the United States and Mexico. He entered the 30-to-35-degree latitude zone of famously windless weather, often called the “horse latitudes,” where many a sailing ship of the old days was stranded for sweltering, thirsty weeks. But Rutherford sailed through and into the sticky, balmy tropics. He paid little notice to the Panama Canal—the lazy sailor’s gateway to the Atlantic—for Rutherford was taking the scenic route. Ecuador, Peru and Chile sailed by before the American faced off with the tip of South America. As most sailors do when they find themselves in this neighborhood, Rutherford slipped through the Strait of Magellan, which brought him back again to the ocean he knows best, and the final leg of the trip began.

Rutherford has been fishing, he said. He trolls a lure behind him and, about two weeks ago, landed a mahi mahi worth a few good meals. He took a mid-sized yellowfin tuna off of New England early on and has lost a good many lures to strong strikes that broke his line. Those may have been sharks, swordfish or bluefin tuna. But the ideal catch, Rutherford explains, is a skipjack tuna, since they’re big enough for a feast but small enough to not to be wasted.

He is also eating freeze-dried foods provided by a sponsor, Shelf Reliance. The Utah company’s products are of high quality, Rutherford says, and he’s been preparing restaurant-quality soups and stews.

“All the great freeze-dried foods come out of Utah because of the Mormon ideology that you should have at least a year’s worth of freeze-dried food on your shelf,” Rutherford explained. “They make good freeze-dried food. You’ve gotta go to the Mormons if you want the good stuff.”

Rutherford has fought through just enough nasty weather to keep him on his toes, and he had a close call in the Bering Sea when an icy wave nearly flipped him over. Elsewhere, he has seen about 15 gales, he says, adding that he respects the ocean but doesn’t fear it.

“If the boat sinks and I drown, so be it,” he said. “That’s just how it is, but there’s no sense in being scared all the time.”

Somewhere in the Canadian Arctic last summer, Rutherford soaks up the chill, the fog and silence of the Northwest Passage. Photo by Matt Rutherford.

His vessel has had a few technical problems – not the least of which was when his water desalinator conked out off of Newfoundland. More recently, off Brazil, his engine petered out. Rutherford’s engine has served mostly as a generator for various appliances and lights, not for locomotion (he is, after all, a sailor). In each minor crisis, nearby vessels came to his assistance, tossing him the parts needed to make repairs.

Other vessels have been less helpful—like the one in early March that approached him in the middle of the night and began circling, coming closer and closer at each pass until, when the strange boat came to within 20 feet away, Rutherford fired a gun twice into the night sky. The boat departed in a hurry.

Asked whether any peers have criticized his voyage as haphazard or foolish, Rutherford said, “With these kinds of trips, it just depends on the outcome. If I had failed early on, then it could have been easily ridiculed, like, ‘Oh, you can’t do that trip on such a small budget or sailing alone, or on such a small boat.’ Basically, I either fail and everyone thinks I’m crazy, or I succeed and I’m a hero.”

Rutherford’s journey is a fundraising venture for Chesapeake Region Accessible Boating (CRAB), a nonprofit sailing program for people with disabilities, and donations can be made via his website. His progress can be followed through his blog. Rutherford is an experienced adventurer and a self-titled “gypsy,” and this journey will not likely be his last. He has already pedaled a bicycle around Southeast Asia and spent 2008 to 2010 on a 32-foot sailboat zigzagging between four continents in the Atlantic Ocean. Next up may be a return to the Arctic, where Rutherford hopes to film a documentary. But first: home, where he says he’s anticipating “a cold beer and a hot shower.”

This scene from Lake Wanaka captures much that is great about New Zealand, like the Southern Alps and the country's many gleaming lakes. Photo by Alastair Bland

With seven weeks in New Zealand’s South Island now under my belt, it’s time to take a look back at what was great about this country, and was not. I’ll start with the disappointments:

1. The lack of through roads. On the map, we see the spine of the mountains running the length of the South Island, and from north to south there are clusters of lakes and river headwaters that we would love to visit – like Lake Coleridge, Lake Sumner, Clearwater Lake, Lake Heron and others. Problem is, the roads in usually have no exit – one-way deals, whereas in other places there would usually be a dirt road that climbs over a pass and down the other side. Not here. For cyclists, there is little else more frustrating than having to ride over 20 miles of gravel and shingle all the while knowing that they’ll be seeing every foot of the way a second time. I became so frustrated by having to backtrack out of mountains that I gave up on the high country altogether several weeks ago.

2. The stock trucks. These huge vehicles, usually two-trailer arrangements, careen endlessly down the highways delivering sheep and cows to the slaughterhouses – day after day after day. Why, I wonder, can’t the meat companies utilize trains – a more fuel efficient transport method that also reduces the risk that a trucker will squash a cyclist, like me? These trucks were no more terrifying than other trucks; it’s the bloody business they were up to that makes them seem more fearsome. I would see them pass on their way north, filled with moaning animals and reeking of manure. Meanwhile, a stream of stock trucks came the other way – all empty. (I don’t eat red meat, so I can complain all I want.)

This line of eateries on a street near Ashburton showcases some of the bland cuisine of New Zealand. Granted: The author didn't try all these restaurants. Would you?

3. The food. As virtually anywhere, what sprouts from the ground in this fertile nation and swims in the sea is excellent colorful stuff. But it’s what comes out of New Zealand kitchens that lacks in luster. Consider the placards placed outside many restaurants that read “FOOD.” Food, eh? If I’d been a starving man I’d have jumped through the door, but I like some passion and artistry in what I eat. Even in the larger towns and cities, the main drags were lined with dodgy diners offering fish and chips, BBQ and game pies, a local specialty often made with farmed venison, some even with possum – and one thing that disappointed me: In seven weeks of traveling every day, I encountered not one farmers market. They occur here, but there seems to be a shortage. Meanwhile, there is, at least, growing interest in good wine and beer throughout New Zealand.

4. Too much hype about adventure-adrenaline tourism. Give me a farmers market. Give me a quiet dirt road that crosses the Southern Alps at 2,000 meters. Give me a bottle of barleywine ale that I can afford. But enough with your adventure travel packages. Skydiving, jet boats on rivers, water-skiing, bungee jumping, heli-biking and heli-skiing and, I dunno – is there heli-fly fishing? The thing is, these all have nothing to do with your beautiful country and make a lot of noise and commotion.

5. Sheep. In particular, there are way too many. They overgraze and, along with a multitude of cows, trample river banks into mud and manure. They are mammals – and nonnative – and they number, what, 40 million? Sort of like possums. Sort of like pests.

6. Finally, an underlying but potent element of racism. I encountered this several times without digging for it – Caucasian Kiwis confiding in me that increasing cultural diversity (call it immigration, if you want) is becoming a problem. “It’s really dark on the North Island,” is something I heard said at least twice. And some people told me about “the Asian problem,” though I never understood what the problem quite was. My latest incident occurred just outside Christchurch, where I stopped in at an honesty box and met the two owners. “How is Auckland?” I asked as we chatted about the North Island. The man and woman – folks in their 60s – rolled their eyes. “It’s all Asians and Islanders.” Sounds interesting to me – but they carried on. “And in Christchurch it’s becoming a problem now, too. You like Asians? Plenty there.” I do, in fact – and I asked if there was, by any chance, a neighborhood or community of Asians – with Asian grocery stores, too. They both sighed and nodded, distraught at what was becoming of their island. “Yep. Blenheim Road,” the man said, and I made a note of it. The next afternoon, I rode up Blenheim Road, visited Kosko Asian Supermarket, and there found the joy I’d been without for seven weeks: durian, the crowned king of the fruit world. I ate a full pound of the flesh that night, thinking that this must be one of the greatest pleasures of a multicultural world.

Now, the positives:

1. The Molesworth Station wilderness. A banner highlight, this was a rare back country experience that required no backtracking to get out. For there are two roads leading all the way across this almost half-million-acre farm at the north end of the South Island. I took the Rainbow-Hanmer Springs route. The region is drained by several rivers, including the Wairau and the Clarence, and off the road, out of sight, are many hidden ponds teeming with big trout. Molesworth Station also demonstrates what a fine arrangement can be made between private landowners and the government’s Department of Conservation, which encourages public access into remote areas. There is a cash entry fee required – $25 for automobiles, $15 for motorcycles, and just $2 for bicycles (thanks).

2. Honesty boxes and other roadside produce sales. I wrote about exorbitant prices early in my trip – but that was before I discovered honesty boxes, where buyers pull over to the side of the road, drop a few coins in a piggy bank-style box and grab a carton of eggs or a bag of vegetables.

3. The Southeast Coast and Catlins. While the West Coast draws millions of tourists with its glaciers, Milford and Doubtful sounds and its steaming rainforests and fern groves, the opposite side of the island has its simpler wonders – and lesser crowds. Here, quiet rolling hills of grass meet clear kelpy waters and tide pools, and small roads almost void of traffic welcome cyclists to explore.

4. No fishing license needed for ocean angling or foraging. This is a nice gesture from the government. While most travelers aren’t going to spend their days here renting wetsuits of watching the tide charts with dinner plans for lobster or mussels, by allowing passersby to spontaneously visit the beach and take home a portion of edible critters (there are legal bag limits, so do your homework before hunting), the New Zealand federal government is encouraging engagement with the country’s marvelous marine environment.

Just the sight of the Kaikoura Range, which skyrockets from sea level to almost 9,000 feet, is a thrill. These mountains are, however, almost inaccessible.

5. Outstanding scenery. They filmed the Lord of the Rings films here for a reason – simply, the landscape is often jaw-dropping, whether on screen or in real life. The Southern Alps, whose peaks are buried in snow even in high summer, may be the crowning jewel, but almost everywhere else, dramatic geography and a general absence of people make a recipe for beauty and wonders. There is greenery almost everywhere, beautiful wild rivers in the mountains, the Seaward Kaikoura Range that tops out at almost 9,000 feet just miles from the ocean, the endless fjords and waterways of Marlborough Sounds, the deep bays, hills and remote shores of the Banks Peninsula, the underwater sights to be enjoyed by snorkelers and divers and much more. From Stewart Island in the far south to the Surville Cliffs in the far north, New Zealand is a country almost as geographically diverse as the United States, crammed into a thriving, gorgeous landscape only a slivering fraction of the size.

6. Finally, Luggage Solutions. This is a lifesaver shop at the Christchurch International Airport which carries a variety of bags and packing materials, including cardboard bicycle boxes. For cyclists, this is a tremendous convenience, allowing us to truly finish a journey by riding all the way to the airport. Note: Luggage Solutions charges $25 for a used, folded, crumpled box. They’ll help you assemble and secure it adequately, but the price is a bit steep.