Well, after what I thought was a two week long dream, here I am. To say this was a trip of lifetime would be an understatement and I apologize if this seems ridiculously rude to those of you who are just now returning to the daily grind of school or are at work, but considering my track record with spring ‘breaks’, i.e. broken tibia, fibula, torn ligaments, concussions etc. its about damn time I enjoyed myself over this long lost two week period.
I believe the key to planning this trip was in fact not to plan it at all. Sometime early in August, while sitting around our table at Rosies pub enjoying a couple of pints in front of the All Blacks game, it was decided that we should probably plan a trip around the north island of New Zealand. This being said, it was mentioned again at the climbing wall, then again around my kitchen table with a collection of guidebooks and tourism pamphlets, and again three days before we left. After all of this planning, calculating and mapping we managed to come up with a rented van for about 8 days, and a campsite for our first night, both of which were changed during the trip.
So lets just take a minute and introduce the characters in this little story of mine. We're dealing with an eight seat van, so we figure seven people should be grand. Here is where things get interesting; somehow, after all of this group meeting we had formed a posse of seven people where each would be representing their own country; how friggin cool is that?!?!? We had Graeme, our witty driver from Scotland, Martyna, our horseback standing riding gymnast guru from Poland, Gizo aka Black Magic, our German rock climber extraordinaire, Benedicte, our French expert on all things that are French who we had say English things in her French accent, Danni our New Zealand guide and gingerbread cookie maker, and myself, the Canadian self appointed van DJ. The seventh member will be revealed in a later post. All of these people plus backpacking bags, tents etc… if you weren’t comfortable with the people you were traveling beforehand, it wasn’t going to take long to get over it.
At last Monday, August 29th the first day of “SPRING BREAK 2011 WOOOOO!”, I take full responsibility for this being said way too many times throughout the course of our trip, I apologize to those within earshot. Graeme and I went to pick up the car at the rental shop that morning which is precisely when I claimed my spot in the passenger seat of the car (yesssss). As we pulled out onto the road I noticed that many of the little bits of writing on the dash were in Chinese characters which is totally useful to English reading passengers when trying to defog windows while driving down perilous gravel roads along the edges of cliffs, but lets not get ahead of ourselves here. These Chinese characters and the vans uncanny ability to ‘kick’ unexpectedly into gear earned her the name “Jackie Chan” the van. It was a she because she drove like a big boat and like many sea vessels before her it was only fitting that the van/boat should be a she.
It was a little unsettling that just moments before we left a small silvereye bird smashed into the window of one of our flats, but thankfully survived. To quote Michael Scott of The Office here, “I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious” and this bird had me wondering. Much like our feathered friends miscalculation, our GPS was trying to earn us a similar fate just a few short minutes down the road. Damn that little box of lies. Graeme of course foreseeing this problem paid it no attention and so off we went to our first destination, Napier. We started with a rural landscape pieced together with plots of farmland overlooked by the occasional windmill and as we got further and further away from our beloved Palmy (Palmerston North), we started to see snow covered peaks and radically shaped rolling hills. Alongside the road we saw a number of marshy areas that were just full of black swans which was rather bizarre but found later that they are as common as gulls were in the area.
The music for the trip started off on Danni’s Ipod and if I can remember correctly it was Johnny Cash who set us off on the right foot. However, as we rolled into Napier a song came on that would earn itself a listen everyday from that day forward. Windows rolled down heads tossed back, arms out the window “I see a little silhouetto of a man, scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango?” Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen blaring through the speakers of the car making our presence known as the loud obnoxious tourists from out of town, very nice. Our first stop was The Warehouse, where a certain someone in our car purchased a youth size sleeping bag, his name shall remain anonymous as I am currently blackmailing him. Our second stop was the Pacific Ocean which was in fact my first experience there so naturally I had to get in despite the bone chilling temperature of the water, there is video evidence of my high pitched squeals but they will be revealed at a later date.
Aside from having a beach and claiming itself to be the Art Deco capital of the world, Napier was pretty boring, they had Canadian flags which was great, and I suppose their wineries are quite well known but it was 2pm and we still had some driving to do so we chose not to do that. Back into the car and down the road we went following the coast for a bit and then into some winding roads with terrific views of valleys and forests. As the sun began to drop below the horizon we started having trouble seeing goats as they would just appear on the roads and alongside them, it was really quite bizarre.
As we were coming nearer to our first campsite or so we thought, I gave the office a ring to see if we could book it. When the woman on the other end picked up she sounded confused that someone wanted to camp at the campsite and so she gave the phone to her husband who then convinced me not to stay there because we were a bunch of no good teenagers who were going to party it up and ruin his ‘family campground’ based on five individuals that were “my age” who had stopped in shortly before I called. This coming from a man who was turning away six paying customers during the NZ winter when camping is at an all time low. Where this man was getting his information, I have no idea. We did not have a single teenager in our car, I had not given the man my age, name, and the other car that was meeting us had six people in it, none of them teenagers. After this rather rude conversation the man told us we could “drink and party it up however we liked” at a campsite about 10km’s past his in Te Urewera National Park. I thanked the man kindly for being an arrogant asshole and that was that.
It was completely dark now, and the national park was about as wild as it gets, the roads were about a lane and a half wide, gravel, and we couldn’t see what the edge of the road looked like because on one side we had a dirt or cliff wall and the other side was blackness. We drove and drove all the while watching the dial on the fuel gauge creep closer and closer to the demoralizing E. As the DJ it was my job to play songs that went well with the situation and so “Where Are You Going” by Dave Matthews came on. Unnerved and a little annoyed we pulled over and tried to look at a map to see where we were; we all thought we should have been there by now. It was at this point I turned on Hakuna Matata from the Lion King Soundtrack (yes I know you’re all jealous) to possibly lighten the mood. This feeling of having to stop because we weren’t quite sure where we were was henceforth referred to as the Jackie Chan effect because not two minutes down the road did we finally see our original campground. This then meant that we had a 10km drive ahead of us, Hakuna Matata my friends, couldn’t believe it actually worked, and that a few people in the car did not know the words, brutal.
When we finally arrived at the campsite two other cars were there with friends that were meeting up with us. The sites where we parked were right beside a boat launch so there must have been some kind of lake, but we couldn’t see a thing because it was so dark. We got the tents set up, started boiling some water and cracked open a bottle of wine in celebration. After a nice warm meal and a few drinks, we decided, or at least those of us still awake decided that we should go for a walk into the woods, what could go wrong. We grabbed a few beers and off we went through the bushes, some of us more swiftly than others. About five minutes into our little midnight excursion we happened upon a waterfall and so we decided to stay here and drink our first Tui’s of the trip. Unfortunately for one of us, he also got a taste of the waterfall.
After our day one celebration beers we headed back to our campsites helped each other into our tents and called it a night on a fairly decent start to my second “SPRING BREAK 2011 WOOOOOOOO!” Sorry, couldn’t resist.
On that note, I will be putting up day 2 of the trip tomorrow, a truly amazing day. Ha I don’t even know if anyone is bothering to read this far into it but I will post some pictures over the next few days and will be working on putting videos together for either each day, or every couple of days. Tomorrow’s blog will have a video right away as I have already posted it to my Facebook page. Until then I hope you have a great day!
Cheers,
Brayden
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