Tramping in Karamea with hitchhikers.

David wakes and runs by 7 on a narrow path along the wide Buller River, which looks a little like the flat parts of the Shenandoah River near Great Meadows, Virginia. Weka scuttle in the undergrowth and Tui sing thrillingly in the trees. After a time … forgive this change of “person” and I beg forbearance for what I’m about to write, but I need to write it.

I see a bouquet of plastic flowers in the crook of a tree, in the middle of nowhere. A small notecard encased in plastic dangles beneath the flowers: “In remembrance of Emily Joy Richardson.” I look around. There is no gravestone, no other marker. This place is simply another stretch of secluded path with about 20 feet of trees and scrub between it and the river. I wonder, did this person drown here? Was she murdered? Was this a suicide? Why this remembrance here? It makes me think of Ravi Shankar, who died three days before my trip began. He must be remembered; he was a friend. So …

I met Ravi where he worked in the front window of Drilling Tennis Shop where he strung racquets so fast his hands were a blur. He was thin and had an infectious smile and almost a full head of black hair. I admired the courage and perseverance he must have had to leave his home in India, where the tennis academy he founded was respected and admired and sought after far beyond Delhi. He had fame in his own time in his own land but he chose to expand his horizons.

He rarely looked down at the strings he plyed while we talked about tennis or the nature of time or his desire to have a noteworthy tennis place of his own.

And the place he eventually created … the Tennis Zone … was a special place. He attracted the best and the brightest players and the men and women who worked with him had to constantly restrain him from his ever-present desire to fulfill the needs of others, too frequently at his own expense. His dizzying array of discounts, gifts of clothing and racquets and equipment large and small, and free lessons to help players good or bad get back in their groove were as prolific as his memory for each client’s preferences for …, well, for everything.

I cannot think of anyone I know who was more genuine or empathetic, who wanted the best in others. His trademark greeting with the long, drawn-out vowels — “How ARE you?” — will ring in my memory for a long, long time. His response, if you asked the same in return, was always the same, head thrust toward you, eyes wide open to take you in completely, “Good. Ya. Yaaaaa. Pretty good right now.”

Ravi danced in a darkness, though. This good, good man had such a light step on the court and off it. A graceful, gentle kind of light that always made me glad to see him, and a quiet energy that he often used to bring out the best in others…. An energy that, perhaps, he spent too much.

The last time I saw Ravi, he was giving a lesson to a youngster at Georgetown’s Yates Auditoriam. The kid finally hit a nice forehand across the net, strong and deep near the baseline. Ravi said nothing but he pointed to the ball and smiled such a wide, radiant grin at the kid … just staked the moment in the kid’s memory with a smile of such pleasure and acknowledgement as radiant as the sun.

Time should stand still for people like Ravi. It should embrace them and never let them go. To quote Algernon Charles Swinburne:

From too much love of living

From hope and fear set free

We thank with brief Thanksgiving

Whatever Gods may be.

That no life lives forever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

I will never pick up a racquet, never play another game of tennis that I will not think of Ravi.

I apologize for the digression, but I guess that part of travel, as it often is, is to think about life and death and all that arises in between.

So, Cynthia and I motored north, picking up two German high-school graduates, Paula and Henrietta in their gap year, in a town named Granity. We sling their 40-kilo packs laden with yoga mats, sleeping bags, pots, pans, tents, shovels, food, clothing, cosmetics and perhaps the rest of a serious outfitter’s wares into our hatchback space and, Cynthia gabbing with them a mile a minute, make our way at an average speed of 25 kilometers an hour … wait for it … up, down and around New Zealand’s many volcanic hills between Westport and the desolate stretch of beach and hillside called Karamea, about 40 kilometers and two hours north.

We get off the two-lane and shake, rattle and roll up, down and around a rutted, gravelly dirt road headed into the interior where we wind up behind a van going even slower than us. Its driver waves us down, says she’s worried about how much gas she and her companion have, and could they hitch with us to see the Oparara arches at the end of the trail, leaving their bags in the car and the car by the side of the road. We cram Johanna into the back with the luggage and Conny into the back seat with Paula and Henni. They’re ALL German. Old home week.

We get to the parking lot at the end of the 14-kilometer dirt one-lane road that scares the #%$& out of David every time a car approaches head on (absolutely no shoulders. Stick a tire into the gully on the left side of the road and you’re spending the night … maybe a few days). We agree to meet at four and go our separate ways to see two aches, a mirror tarn, some caves, and, if we’re really lucky, some rare and endangered whio (blue ducks. very dusky but with brilliantly colored blue feet).

Cynthia and I tramp alone beside the Oparara River, which is a beautiful burnished copper color from all the tannins its waters carry from the forest it runs through, and see the arches and the tarn and, amazingly, as it starts to drizzle, a pair of blue ducks putting on a great feed as they glide down the copper river.

We all meet up; we drop off Johanna and Conny at their car and take Paula and Henni a little further north to the south end of the Heaphy Track, one of New Zealand’s 10 greatest tramps, but not one Cynthia and I are doing today. We return to Westport on the same narrow, twisting roads that brought us to Karamea, have dinner, and David falls asleep by 8:30 as Cynthia does laundry and plans the rest of her spouse’s Australasian adventure.

Another day in Paradise.