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Felicity Aston looks back on her journey across Antarctica. Photo courtesy of Aston.

When we last checked in with British adventurer Felicity Aston, she was just embarking on a solo skiing trek across Antarctica. On Jan. 22, she completed her journey. Aston was delayed by weather early in the trek, which she carried out on skis. By the time she reached the South Pole in late December, on a miserable day of whiteout weather, she was three weeks behind schedule. “I didn’t think there was any chance I was going to be able top do the last 600 miles in the time I had left,” she told me via Skype from Punta Arenas, Chile. Aston’s main worry was that she would miss the last airplane out, which departed from the coastal Union Glacier on Jan. 26. “But the researchers at the Pole said not to worry, that it was all downhill and that I’d have the wind at my back and that there was plenty of time,” Aston recalls.

Near the end at Union Glacier

But no such luck—at least not at first—and for several days after departing from 90 degrees south, Aston faced a brutally discouraging headwind. Then, good fortune came her way abruptly as the wind turned tail and nudged her forward. Moreover, she was nearly two miles above sea level (it’s a thick layer of ice down at the Pole) and it was, truly, all downhill to the coast. In fact, Aston more than compensated for early weather delays, and when she caught sight of the coastal mountains on January 21, she broke down in tears of victory four days ahead of schedule. The peaks stood out on the horizon as dark and steely cold blobs layered in wisps of icy cloud, but they shined with unusual brilliance—for they marked the end.

“They were like a neon sign flashing at me saying, ‘You have finished!’” Aston explained.

Aston in the tent at Hilleberg

That moment was the highlight of the trip, she told me, but there were other standout moments—including spells of abject misery on the ice. These occasions were rooted in the stress and fear of being so separated from the world, for there is no feeling of vulnerability on the Earth, Aston told me, as being alone in Antarctica, where other travelers have died. She was particularly afraid of frostbite. “I was always moving my fingers and toes and touching my face to make sure things weren’t freezing,” she said.

One especially meaningful moment came when she arrived at 90 south. Though none of the researchers present could see her approaching through the wild and snowy blizzard of that day, Aston was greeted onsite by one woman who handed the weather-worn traveler a fresh nectarine and an apple—nearly unimaginably satisfying treats at the very bottom of the world, where prior travelers in dire straits have resorted to eating penguins. Another glowing instant for Aston was the sight of the sun after a particularly gloomy spell of bad weather. She described that golden break in the sky as “a minor miracle.”

Now that she’s crossed the Earth’s most inhospitable continent on her own, what’s next for Aston? She isn’t yet sure, though she suspects it may not be in anyplace frozen. “I think it will be a while before I put on skis again,” she said, adding that she also doubts she will go solo on her next outing.

And did Aston find what she has been looking for in her long and rigorous tramps over the globe? Again, she isn’t sure. For each of her numerous adventures, Aston told me, has been a test of personal limits—and even after a self-powered trip across Antarctica, she is yet to find those limits. “Perhaps what I’m really looking for is failure,” she said, “because until you fail, you don’t know what your limits are.”

Pauline Symaniak, shown here before Volcan Lanin in Argentina, has been pedaling around the earth for 18 months. Much of New Zealand has failed to amaze her. Photo courtesy of Pauline Symaniak.

From the window of a moving car, the landscape passes by all too quickly—without smell, sound or sweat, without headwind, tailwind or even a breeze and with little sense of satisfaction upon reaching a high mountain pass or the day’s destination.

It’s a far cry from bicycle travel, and I’m a bit jealous of the dozens of cyclists we pass every day. New Zealand’s roadways are thick with cyclists, and the nation appears to be a bicycling paradise. The towering Remarkables as they rise over the Clutha River, the sprawling valleys and vineyards, the greenery of the West Coast rainforest, the cliffs along the sea—all must be especially spectacular when seen from the saddle of a bicycle.

But one cyclist I met camping at a small wilderness lake north of Queenstown has been cycling in New Zealand for more than three months. She is now three-fourths of her way into a two-year tour of the world, and Pauline Symaniak, of Scotland, says New Zealand is a notch below thrilling, lacking a blend of adventure and excitement that was never absent from the Americas and Europe.

“To be quite honest, New Zealand has been the least satisfying of all the places I’ve been,” she told me.

Pauline began her journey in 2010 in Edinburgh. After quitting a relatively lifeless job working for the government, she pedaled through France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal. She hopped aboard a cargo ship that delivered her to Argentina, where a continent in the height of summer lay at her wheels. She crossed Patagonia and the Andes, and went north into Bolivia, to Lake Titicaca. Then she boxed up her bike—always a logistical pain for cyclists—and flew to Miami, took the Greyhound to Boston, and from here pedaled with an old college friend across America to Seattle. Time was unlimited, with money in the bank, and so she flew to Auckland.

Symaniak has been sleeping in this cozy cottage each night for the past 18 months.

And then her fast adventure slowed to a puzzlingly sluggish pace, and it took Pauline a few weeks of exploring to realize what was going on.

“Even in America, there is history and magic, in layers,” she said. “There’s culture.”

But New Zealand, it seemed to her, lacks something. This country has tremendous wilderness, vast and unexplored, with thrilling mountain ranges scraping the sky like looming murals and beautiful coastlines of cliff and sea—but it is also orderly, tidy and tame, clean, trim and polished. None of which is bad, exactly, but for a woman who has left her job and home to circle the world on a bike, New Zealand may be too cozy for comfort.

In Pauline’s words, “New Zealand is great if you want to be comfortable.”

Even from a moving car, I can see it: There seems to be no dirt or imperfection across the land. Almost every turn in the road is marked with a neat sign and labeled on the map. Fences demarcate the country like a checkerboard and line every roadside. There is meanwhile an overbearing tourism industry that keeps a wet blanket over the spirit of true adventure. We’ve seen this in towns like Te Anau, Wanaka, Franz Josef and Queenstown, which all somewhat resemble Aspen, Tahoe or many other squeaky clean tourist magnets. In places like these, nearly every conceivable travel experience has been snatched up, polished, packaged and marketed to tourists. In almost every coffee shop and campground office we see posters and pamphlets for guided wine-tasting tours, hiking and river rafting “safaris” and so much else for tourists unable to see that New Zealand is beautiful even without tour buses and guides. Other experiences have been invented from scratch and pumped full of adrenaline, like flying lessons, skydiving excursions, water skiing and heli-biking (for mountain bikers unwilling to fight gravity).

"Heli-biking," one of innumerable adventure activities for New Zealand tourists, takes laziness to new heights.

Pauline, like many cyclists, gets her thrills from simply watching landscapes come and go. Speaking of which, she soon leaves New Zealand and flies to Australia. After a brief tour of the Aussie East Coast, she will go to Istanbul, Turkey—where, as almost anyone who has been can attest, the thrills and beauty of discovery will resume. She rides west from there. As she goes, Pauline is blogging; follow her journey as she continues around the world.

Meanwhile, we have arrived in Kaikoura, a town flanked by sea to the east, flat green farmland to the west and staggering mountains to the north, and the beauty here has restored my faith in the possibilities of New Zealand. In fact, while my family is scheduled to go home, I have called the airline to extend my stay, and I’ll be reporting soon from the saddle of the sweetest vehicle and adventure-powerhouse I know: my bicycle.

Brushtailed possums, shown here in their native Australia, are among the most destructive pests in New Zealand. Photo courtesy of Flickr user wollombi.

New Zealand is a nation large enough to host hundreds of millions of invasive pests but just small enough that the federal government sees an honest chance at winning the war against them–and so the battle is on.

I met a young couple this morning in the campground kitchen–Jo and Jason, of Invercargill–who told me all about it. We began talking about trout and diving, but it soon became apparent that they hunted and ate more than just fish and abalone; pigs and deer were also favored quarry. What’s more, Jo told us, she, Jason and their relatives are guns-for-hire, quite literally, and spend two-week family holidays shooting feral tabbies, rabbits, brushtail possums and other non-native mammals in trade for room and board on Stewart Island–a cat-and-rat infested island national park off the southernmost tip of New Zealand. On one recent vacation to this wilderness, they spent 11 days in a government cabin eating food bought with government vouchers, all provided by the New Zealand Department of Conservation, which only asked for an honest-to-goodness effort to stomp on vermin in return–which the family did. (A request for an interview with a D.O.C. pest control officer about this volunteering opportunity went unanswered; he was reportedly swamped with duties.)

“We shot nine kets ‘n’ twinny-somethin’ possums,” Jo said cheerily. “We also tre’apped a lot of retts.” Jason’s preferred game was pigs, he said, and he pulled up his pant leg to show us a vicious scar below the ankle. “Got misself bit by a pig hee’ya,” he said happily as he launched into a detailed and bloody account of the 180-pound boar that fought its way through a pack of pit bulls, broke one’s jaw plumb in half and slashed Jason’s ankle before the young hunter tackled the kiwi-killing swine and forever silenced it with a knife to the heart.

“It’s good fun,” he chirped.

Stewart Island is just one site of earnest pest-culling schemes in New Zealand. Throughout the nation, multiple deer species severely overgraze low-lying brush, plant species that never knew, until the 1800s, the unpleasant reality of being stalked by ravenous, cud-chewing ruminants. The animals were introduced as quarry for gun-slinging outdoorsmen–but populations ballooned out of control. By the mid-1900s, the government was actively trying to cull or eliminate the herds. Using helicopters to access remote areas became popular in the 1960s, with hunters sometimes shooting from the chopper, and the practice remained common for decades. Many culled deer are sold commercially as venison, and helicopters are still used to hoist bundles of carcasses from remote areas back to civilization. Only occasionally do hunters still shoot from the aircraft. (According to Jo, whose father works with the Department of Conservation, showers of blood and gore have sometimes drained from the helicopters and splattered cars and properties, sparking groans of bemused c’est-la-vie-in-New-Zealand annoyance in the rural communities below.)

Possums, of which New Zealand is the host to 70 million, pose a tremendous problem. They were introduced in the 1800s by entrepreneurs hoping to start a healthy fur industry, but today the nation–and its fragile plant community on which the fluffy buggers graze–is overrun. Possum traps lie everywhere in the bushes, road-killed carcasses litter the roadsides and at least one elementary school has held a gala in which the children shot possums and competed afterward in a possum-throwing contest.

Many of New Zealand's pest control projects are efforts to save the national bird, the kiwi. Photo courtesy of Flickr user The.Rohit.

Meanwhile, 30 million rabbits and countless millions more of rats, hedgehogs, feral goats, seven deer species, weasels, stoats and many other pests swarm New Zealand and live more or less happily together, even though some were released as means of eliminating others. Consider the stoat–a predator in the weasel family intentionally introduced to New Zealand in the 1880s to control rodents and rabbits. The stoats turned out to prefer kiwi (the feathered kind). The stoats are blamed today for the extinction of several New Zealand bird species and are often considered one of the worst mistakes made by colonists. Rabbits and rats remain as abundant as ever.

And there are Canada geese, of which 18,000 have been killed recently in organized culls.   

The good news is that locals and tourists can get involved in culling many of New Zealand’s peskiest problem animals through a variety of NGO and government volunteer programs that takes ecotourism in a unique blood-and-bullets direction. I’m not criticizing; New Zealanders are in a tough jam and have got to do what they’ve got to do–but it’s fair to say that in few, if any, other nations are people so encouraged to kill.

Fish Report: We caught one two-pound brown trout at Lake Wanaka. Later, in the streams running into and out of South Mavora Lake, we found excellent fishing for rainbows – hard-fighting, fat and muscular 17-inchers – and caught two brown trout. Each was two feet long and perhaps six pounds. Many other browns just as large hunkered in the slow, clear waters, among silken ropes of algae, like submerged logs. New Zealand trout fishing is truly phenomenal. The trout all have pink flesh like salmon, and we’ll be doing our best to cull this invasive species.

Butchering begins on a 6-pound brown.

Don't be caught drinking until this Georgian man is done toasting. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Shioshvili.

The Turks were so patient for putting up with me this fall as I cycled around the western half of the country. I cringe now when I recall the many times, while in conversation with strangers, that I lifted my feet and showed them the mucky gobs of fig seeds mashed into the underside of my shoes, accumulated through day after day of standing under fig trees and foraging off the branches. And, when shop keepers asked if I would like anything else with my groceries before paying, I often shook my head and touched my middle finger to my thumb – that gesture which to many Westerners means, “Everything’s just fine.”

Turns out, showing a person the sole of your shoe and making the “it’s-all-good” sign (which was originally coined as sign language by SCUBA divers) are both grave insults in Turkey. It’s a miracle I wasn’t thrown to the bears. It was only weeks later that I learned what a klutz I’d been. I was gleaning a website on faux pas commonly made by travelers, and idle amusement quickly turned to mortification as I recognized descriptions of my own misdeeds. There is nothing to do now but laugh at how many blunders I’ve unknowingly committed through years of visiting strange lands. Anyway, as global travel increasingly links cultures around the world, people everywhere may be growing more accepting of know-nothing travelers like me—and perhaps today the idea of the clueless foreigner is more charmingly comic than it is gravely offensive.

Nonetheless, there are a few things best not to do when traveling—and this list is a start:

1) In Japan, accepting a business card from a Japanese person without using two hands or acting like you are sublimely honored. Because a Japanese person isn’t fooling when he or she hands you a business card. In addition to receiving it with two hands, one is supposed to bow deferentially. Forbes.com addressed precisely this matter, with no intention of parody, in a 2005 article on etiquette pointers for the traveling businessperson. It makes that scene from American Psycho seem not so ludicrous after all.

In Japanese culture, deference and humility must be shown when exchanging business cards, as seen here. In this image, former mayor of Hiroshima Tadatoshi Akiba has also apparently paid respects to the Hawaiian culture by receiving a lei; to refuse one is like slapping a Hawaiian in the face. Photo courtesy of East-West Center.

2) In Georgia, drinking at the table while another is making a toast. Toasts in this former Soviet nation come many times per meal and may last as long as five or 10 minutes. They are sometimes almost hilariously theatrical until one realizes that Georgians are totally serious when they raise their wine glasses and begin speaking. If a guest is present, especially, the melodrama gets thick as the speaker praises the two represented nations, the honor of playing host to a foreigner, the guest’s good fortune as he or she continues their journey, ancestors, God and so on and so forth—though not always in a single toast. I spent some time in Georgia in 2010. Even at such informal sites as the side of the road, men drinking wine sometimes called me over, filled me a glass and embarked on lengthy verbal voyages. It’s a wonder, looking back, that we ever managed to squeeze in a drink.

3) In most of the Middle and Far East, walking into a home with one’s shoes on. Been there, done that—and with gunky fig jam caked to the soles of my cycling shoes, to boot. Yes, I was a walking disaster in Turkey, day after day committing insults so dreadful it’s fortunate I didn’t make the old ladies faint—or the young men call for their weapons.

4) In the Hindu and Muslim world, greeting a person or eating with your left hand. I cannot begin to imagine how many times I have absentmindedly done this in Turkey. Locals, it turns out, traditionally wipe themselves with the left hand. A tad bit presumptuous, isn’t it, for them to assume that I do, too?

5) Also in the Muslim world, eating during daylight hours during the holy month of Ramadan. Being the old hand at social blunders that I am, I’ve committed this crime many times. I was in Turkey during Ramadan in August 2010, and when I caught myself and sheepishly apologized, the folks around me said I had done nothing wrong. I have never known if they were simply being polite. Because in Dubai, anyway, foreigners seen eating during the Ramadan fasting hours can face jail time.

6) In Hawaii, refusing a lei. Don’t feel like wearing a rosary of tropical blossoms round your neck? Tough luck. Put the lei over your head, offer a generous hug in return and consider yourself formally welcomed to the islands. If you really can’t stand the thing, Hawaiian culture considers it acceptable for one to re-gift the lei to one’s spouse—but not, heaven forbid, if she’s a pregnant woman! Tread carefully. Stay vigilant.

7) In Russia, refusing vodka when offered, and sipping it once your glass is filled. Instead, you must gregariously chug your shot glass of Eurasia’s favorite booze. What’s more, having three drinks is sometimes obligatory at an event for one to demonstrate a baseline level of friendliness and social prowess. Meanwhile, women in Russia might do wisely, as custom sometimes demands, to leave the vodka to the men and drink wine instead.

8) And this one may come as a surprise: In Germany, discussing sports. So I read in this Vagabondish post from Amy Baker, who says German people may think someone “uneducated” if he or she is heard discussing a sporting match.

9) In the United Kingdom, holding up your index and middle finger with the back of your hand facing outward. Britons: Please don’t laugh. Because in America, most people are unaware that this is the equivalent of giving someone the middle finger—and please understand that it’s a mistake if someone makes this sign while ordering two beers across a noisy pub.

10) Finally, in the United States, relieving oneself in public. That’s right, all you gentlemen from France, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic: Turning your back on a person or a crowd and emptying your bladder may be business as usual where you come from, but in my culture, many people consider it dirty and disrespectful. Why, I have friends and relatives who would keel over dead if they saw such an act in public.

Me? I’ll forgive you.

Anyone want to offer travel faux pas number 11? Or do you have any embarrassing or comical miscommunications worth sharing? Tell us about them below.