All You Need to Know About DREMP

2/23/10: Queenstown, New Zealand

I have loosely divided the days of our trip into one of five categories:

1. Doing
2. Resting
3. Eating (yes, we eat every day, but here our day revolves around a meal)
4. Moving
5. Planning

This is my DREMP model of world travel. (Making acronyms out of things is one sure-fire way to get rich – the people who made up PEMDAS, VESPER, SCUBA, etc. must have been rolling in the dough in their time.) Many days can be subdivided into more than one category (Eating, for instance, is almost always combined with Resting or Planning), and lo and behold, today was one of those multi-category days.

First: Doing. Zhou, having not quite come off her rush of sitting on the couch and looking up at people skydiving, was itching for more adventure. Welcome, Skippers Canyon Jet, a fast-paced jet boat ride through the narrow canyon river where they filmed Lord of the Rings. I’ll let our pictures take over from here.

Driving perilously close to the edge of huge cliffs was half the day's fun. Here is Lighthouse Rock as seen from our van.

We aren't sure what good the life jackets did since the water was only a foot deep.

Our sister boat – we rode inches from the cliff walls over 40 kph and did 360 degree spins to stop the boat.

A view of the river we boated on from a bungee platform up on the canyon walls. (No, we did not jump.)

It's not a day in New Zealand without fantastic views.

Second: Planning. In two days we’ll begin our second multi-day trek, this time the Routeburn track through the fiordlands of New Zealand. Having conquered the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, we were worried that there was nothing left for us to accomplish as trekkers. Fortunately, the Routeburn provides us a new challenge: carrying all our own food and cookware. Today, we set out on our journey to obtain this food.

The goal was simple: eight meals (three breakfasts, three lunches and two dinners) and a plethora of snacks to keep our growing bodies growing. To keep costs down we decided we’d buy one pot and one pot only, and we’d eat straight from this pot using the plastic cutlery we’ve hoarded during our many plane flights over the past six months. This begged the question: what kind of food do two people carry that can be cooked using only boiling water? Here’s what we came up with:

Breakfast

• One dozen eggs (we’ll boil them before the trek starts)
• Six chocolate covered muesli bars

Lunch

• Two potatoes and a packet of instant cheese sauce
• Two cans of tuna and a box of Ritz crackers
• Two packages of Shin Ram Yun

Dinner

• Half a bag of penne (leftover from before) to be combined with instant cheese sauce and a can of tuna
• One Mexican Chicken freeze-dried meal for two

Snacks

• Four packets of instant chicken soup mix (in case any meal isn’t enough food)
• One bag of peanuts
• One bag of dried apricot snacks (for Zhou)
• One Toblerone and one Mars bar (for me)
• Six Nature Valley Oats ‘n Honey granola bars

I’ll let you experienced trekkers have a go at critiquing this list, and we’ll let you know if we run into any problems with it as we hike. Zhou’s first good catch: we were about to buy the cheap tuna that doesn’t have a pop tab and just before checkout she realized we don’t have a can opener. Phew!
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Picture of the Day: Life on the road: when you’re stuck with extra lettuce and extra pasta sauce, you eat lettuce dipped in pasta sauce. Mmmmmm.

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