Guest writer Pien weighs in

This update comes from Guest Writer Pien Huang, or "Pien" as she's known down south. Anyway, here is her post, verbatim, for which I take no responsibility. If you have a beef with it, or her, then whatever:

Everybody knows that there are more sheep than people in New Zealand. What they don’t tell you is that there are NO (native) people in New Zealand, only millions of sheep eating flowers at the base of dramatic avalanche-ridden landscapes (tree-, rock-, or snowfall), a few cows and a giant pigeon (the second biggest pigeon species in the world, says Cassandra) sprinkled here and there. There are, at least, no people on the route we took through the southern South Island, from Queenstown to Te Anau to Milford Sound and west to Dunedin. All of our waitresses were from the American mid-west, and the crowds we encountered were predominantly Japanese.

On our return boat trip from the glowworm caves in Te Anau (pitch dark like I’ve never seen before, illuminated by a thousand glows from the butt-end of hungry fungus gnat flies-- Arachnocampa luminosa --larvae; they entangle insects in suspended lines of mucus, reel them up, paralyze them, and feast) we had a nice chat with a retired schoolteacher from Yorkshire, who regaled us with stories of pitching his friend’s car off a Kiwi cliff (he was grateful for missing the crash barrier, because that would have really damaged the car; he’s still driving it, after several thousand dollars in repairs), digging sandfly bits out of his skin, and getting rollicking drunk and sleeping it off, all over the world. He also imparted evidence of early Chinese feats and their impact on world history from his newest read, 1421, and told us about the underground power plant he’d toured earlier that day. He was having a grand, if lonely, time, and he might have talked forever if he hadn’t had to pick up a tomato at the grocer before it closed, to complement the can of sardines he was carting around. The tab had fallen off, and he was planning to pierce it with a fork. In less than an hour, we learned more about Jim than about any Kiwi we’d (n)ever encounter (and maybe even more than we knew about each other).

So: in all of our driving, we’ve seen thousands of, maybe millions, of sheep, in various shades of white. When it rains, the shaved ones (the whitest ones) cling miserably to the property lines, delineated by a single row of trees, for shelter. I vaguely wondered whether there were any black sheep, and on the stretch of road from Queenstown to Te Anau, I saw a whole trio of them. Nobody else saw it. It was as if I had willed them into being through my mild curiosity. Relegated to the backseat on subsequent stretches of road, with Regina Spektor on repeat, I developed the insatiable urge to repeat that experience, as if recurring would make it more valid, or real. There were several fruitless days. On the drive west to Dunedin, a huddle of sheep seemed so familiar that I suddenly realized that the trio I’d seen had been merely gray. Not only were they typical, they were incredibly dirty, which made them sub-typical. I came to be convinced that, in my desire to see them, my senses had deceived me. I came to doubt that I had ever witnessed the real thing; meanwhile, Cassandra confirmed that a bird we saw on the first day was indeed her extremely large pigeon. Black sheep seem specifically to elude me.