Right hello there readership….. if theres any of you left!
so the last time i blogged we had just split up and spent our weeks part in fiji…. we now find our slightly smellier dishevelled selves in the USA , so lets fill in the gap in between !
so i arrived in New Zealand a week before humphrey…. walked out of the airport in my sandals t shirt and shorts to be greeted by a 10 degree chill…. not to my satisfaction (hard nipple central) I stayed in a hostel called the jailhouse just on the outskirts of Christchurch, as you may have acertained by the witty name in its previous life it was a jail. So there i stayed in jail cell c for a week, i made some cool friends and got to know christchurch really well!
One week later i met Humphrey at the airport…. not as he expected camped outside it with a small fire on the go becuase i had lost my passport (again), forgotten my bag and become a man of the street without him, but with my passport, with my bag… and some skittles, bonus!
our first few days reunited were spent at a the sister of close family friends….. Anne Marie met us at the airport and took us back to her beautiful house in christchurch, we spent a beautiful 2 nights with anne marie and co….. much to my mums delight we were fed lots of green things and slept in nice beds and had nice warm showers!
we had decided to spend the night before we got on the kiwi bus at the hostel it leaves from, to save us having to get up at an even more ridiculous time… so after a rather late night (i soooo nearly won the rock paper scissor competition at the bar) we got on the Big Green Kiwi bus at 7.00 AM
so this was the start of possibly our biggest adventure yet… 23 days and over 10ish destinations!
KAIKOURA…. so we got to Kaikoura after about 4 hours driving through the most beautiful scenery (this will become a reoccurring theme), we had both signed ourselves up for the first activity of our trip……… Whale watching, so once we were booked into our hostel etc we headed down to the dock to get on our boat, we got to the dock and entered the whale watching building we then realised this would be no normal whale watching trip…… it would be worthy of moby dick himself….. the sea was particuarly rough, they had put a servere warning of seasickness out and were giving refunds to anyone who wanted them, the swell was sitting at a massive 2 metres (how high from the top of a wave to the bottom i think), were the brave humphrey and couragous Tom put off by any off the health warnings?….. not on your nelly, so we got on the boat and soon realised we had made a horrific mistake, we were tavelling at 40 knots (really fast) getting absolutely hammered by the waves, coming off the top of one and then flying through the air down 2 metres till we hit the bottom again…. we were about 20 mins in and already we had at least three people being sick in the boat…. an hour later we made it to the last known location of the whales, finally slowed down and were allowed outside to see some whales and get some photos !
photos were an interesting concept, it was practically impossible to to a photo of a whale that came to the surface for a minute at a time while the boat was rising and falling 2 metres in the waves, when you were at the lowest point of your waves and the wave in front was highest you couldnt see the horizon and everything went black !
so three hours later and it emerged that i had managed to take the best photo on the boat (it will be amongst some of the ones we eventually upload, ive lost my usb cable so i cant do it at the moment)
Throughly shaken up and unable to walk in a straight line we made it back up the hill to our hostel, managed to cook some pasta, watched a film with everyone else and went to bed!
NELSON…. nelson nelson nelson…. this is where our trip really started, the town in new zealand that gets the most hours of sunshine of anywhere in new zealand… 3000 per year, also produces some of the worlds best wine (within the top 0.3 percentile) and houses the macs brewery, bet you didnt think this blog would turn into an educational hurricane did you eh!!
this is also where we met the legend that is RINGO… he was to be our kiwi driver for the rest of the south island!
so we got dropped off at our hostel in Nelson… to be quite honest it was a hotel, all 40 of us off the bus sat in the lobby and the manager welcomed us, said that we all had private on sweet rooms with 4 beds in each, that for 10 dollars (4 quid) we could have a roast dinner and free pudding… this immediately got us all listening ! he then went on to say at 5 o clock there would be a free beer tasting session of all the local beers and that they would be giving out free drinks at the bar and coupons to get you free drinks at other local bars….. had we died and gone to heaven!
this was also the day we met our travelling partners for the next month!
after the beer tasting and the meal, we sat down at a table with a guy called Dee…… soon to become an amazing friend, we were also joined by ellie dawn hannah and emily, the seven of us ended up travelling the whole of new zealand together!
after a loooong night out we got on the buses with our sore heads and made our way to westport!
WESTPORT…….this was where the phrase…. id quad bike this was coined!
so on the way to Westport there was a stop at a small activity centre where you could do horse riding, jet boating and quad biking! Myself, Humphrey and Dee were the only people to sign up for the quad biking, so we were taken to get our overalls etc… then we headed off into the forest to learn how to use our new beasts…. for the next hour and a half we trounced around muddy tracks… up 40 degree inclines and through rivers…… best time of our lives…. but from that day forth walking just seemed so boring… spawning the phrase “id quad bike this”
POO PUB…. so a bit more about the legend of Ringo our bus driver…. he had what many of my family label me with “verbal diarrhea” most bus drives started with him on the microphone spending a solid 5 minutes going “sweet as sweet as sweet as” constantly….. the Poo pub is one of the more famous stops on the kiwi route simply because you take over the whole pub and hostel and get to meet 86 year old Les who runs the poo pub….. every bus that passes through the Poo pub has a themed party in the bar that night, so you stop off in town before and get your outfit, our theme was come as your country, or something that symbolizes it… so after many discussions we decided to go as St George (even after the genius idea that we go as harry ron and hermione, we missed out if u ask me) .. so between me humph and Dee we brought a few swords some white t shirts and some red paint!… amongst the best costumes we had on our bus were, a bottle of jameson for ireland, a wind mill for holland, and the queen in drag!
FRANZ JOSEPH…… it was along the windy roads to franz joseph that ringo taught us to bus surf….. the basic concept being that as we travel round the 90 degree bends up the massive mountain range, you have to stand in your seat and try to “surf” the bends…… highly impossible but extremely fun ! The town of Franz Joseph is so named because of the massive glazier in the mountains just next to it, the main reason for stopping at franz joseph on the bus is to see this glazier….. unfortunately due to the incredible rain that they had had in the last few days the river that you normally cross to get onto the glazier had risen far to high for you to cross….. so a full refund and alot of very disappointed faces later we found ourselves spending the day in the local outdoor heated pools, fed by glazier water….. so i suppose technically we got onto the glazier in the end, just after it had been melted and few into a swimming pool !
LAKE WANAKA…… lake wanaka so named because the town is set next to a massive lake that sits in between the mountains….. although the lake was beautiful wanaka was about 1 thing and 1 thing only……….KARAOKE NIGHT !
you will be glad to no me and humph were up there with dee, singing our hearts out to such classics as “time of your life”…. you no the dirty dancing one… all the girls “ahhhh patrick swayze”…. and “love shack” my favorite!
QUEENSTOWN AND MILFORD SOUND BABY……. so there is no mistaking the fact that queens town is known for three things….. the parties, extreme activities and furgburger!
on our first day in queens-town we did 2 things, first of all was the luging…… 3 men….. a massive hill and 3 gravity driven luge carts…. we did our own little grand prix over 6 races… i just managed to clinch victory from dee and humphrey, but not before a horrific crash of epic proportions ending up with me upside down skidding across the tarmac and humph ramming into my now driverless luge.. (i still won my luge crossed the line first)
so up n to this point i had been slowly physicing humphrey up to do something crazy in queens town…. the canyon swing being my main objective….. on the second day we booked it and we were away…. the basic premise of the canyon swing is stand on one side of a canyon 210 metres up…. jump off… fall 60 metres and then begin to speed up as you hit the arc of the swing!
we both did it twice and in 2 different ways, i have got my vids up on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPPD1fz7icY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrOp36aTpuc&feature=channel_page
on the third day we had booked ourselves to go on the Milford Sound day trip… ringo had bigged this up especially saying it was the sole reason alot of people come to New Zealand and that it has some of the most beautiful scenery of anywhere in the world, so we had decided to book it, we were somewhat tentative at first though because alot of our time on the bus during the day was spent driving through some of the most amazing countryside and seeing amazing waterfalls etc, after a while you almost take the view that after you seen 10 waterfalls or lakes the rest wont impress you……. but i’m glad to say that Milford sound blew us away.. its really hard to convey what we saw in words, so as soon as i can get the pictures up onto the web hopefully they can help show you what we saw!
our fourth night in queenstown was based mainly around one thing….. a massive pub crawl, over 2 or 3 hundred of us from the kiwi bus all took part in it, heading round town with a crowd that big is a rather surreal feeling, but a great one at the same time, the perfect way to end the perfect week in my opinion !
KAIKOURA (AGAIN)………. so as many of you avid readers who havnt died from boredom yet will realise we are now back at Kaikoura… our loop of the south island complete we now head up to Picton to get the ferry to Wellington
WELLINGTON…… this will be a short one as there isn’t much to do in wellington….. we went to a local museum. which unfortunately turned out to be crap….. was meant to be in the top ten in the world….. but in my book nothing beats the science museum….. u can sits in planes and everything!
the rest of our time was spent partying…. exciting for us to do… very boring for you to read about !
TAUPO……. taupo taupo taupo… what is there to say apart from this quickly came to be known as
“the worst day of our lives” between me and humphrey and dee!
basically the main actraction in taupo is something called the tongariro crossing which is a nine hour hike that is rated within the top 10 walks in the world!….. it is also over the mountain made famous is lord of the rings… called mount doom…. for anyone thats interested!
so we set off up this mountain at 6 in the morning, we had amazing views and sunny weather, for the first two hours it was kind of flat and we had pretty good weather….. then at the 2 hour mark we hit the part of the walk called the devil staircase….. so named because they believed the devil must have created this part of the walk…. just before this moment we had just climbed what we thought was a fairly big hill… and naively thought we had done the devils staircase…. this lead to the three men standing at the top involved in a coversation much like this … Tom: “hah devils stair case that was easy”…. humphrey:” call that the devils staircase, more like angels staircase”….dee:” i could have done that in my sleep”….. how wrong we were. We spent the next hour climbing up the steepest set of stairs ever… consider even the tallest set of stairs you’ve ever climbed has probably only taken you 10 minutes… we spent and hour plus doing this one!…. the scene at the top of the real devils staircase was more like this…. three men crying with joy, hugging each other whooping jubilantly!
so up to this point the walk had been hard and long, but the weather had been really nice and the views were immense… so no pleasure without a bit of pain right?…. this is where the mountain turned evil and decided to try and kill us…. the weather became really bad, massive wind….. worst rain ever and fog so bad you could only see 20 feet in front of you, we had this for the next 6 hours of our trip….we had thought this would be a nice walk so we were only in t shirts and jumpers… at some points the track was so narrow (5 feet) and with 800 feet drops on either side we had to slide down on our bums or hands and knees!
eventually we made it …… not without huge mental scaring and the motto that if anything bad ever happens to us, we can just think back to that day and instantly think… its not as bad a mount doom!
i still havnt been able to wear a pair of shoes because of the blisters i got… thats over 2 and a half weeks in sandals….. (insert sympathy here)
so next up was a small stop off in a place called waitomo, me humphrey and dee had booked oursleves in for an activity called black water rafting !
this involved getting suited up in wet-suits and boots and then absailing down a 50 metre hole in the ground, below to a network of caves…. once we were inside we were attached to a zip line, and we sped across this underground canyon to the other-side…. once there we were given hot chocolate and some flap jack (thoroughly English i thought) and we sat on the edge of the canyon and watched the glow worms in the pitch black!
we all then picked a rubber ring and had to hold it behind us and then jump into the river below…… it was a good ten of fifteen feet to the river below, so i decided to go first and jump into the pitch black abyss…. once we had all done it we turned our helmet lights on and floated downstream together…. a while downstream we got to a waterfall which we were able to jump off and say such witty things as CANONBALL…. thank you will…. after crawling through some ever increasingly smaller holes and climbing back up a dew waterfalls we finally made it back to the surface and were given some hot soup!
so this is pretty much the end to the blogable parts of the trip…. there was a big party in auckland on our last night and lots of goodbyes but not much else!
i am really sorry about the horrific length of this post….. i shall personally give anyone who manages to read the whole thing 100 pounds…. all you have to do is fly out to meet me !
lots of love to everybody…. less that 15 days till you have me back in you lives people…. isnt it wonderful !
Tom….. and humphrey (hes here i promise!)
well, I might just come and claim my £100! My feet still tingle though from watching the videos. How could you do it?!
Thanks for taking the time to write [pity Humphrey is illiterate and can't help you]. It’s very vivid and sounds mainly fun, sometimes scarey and always interesting.
We heard a bit about you both from a friend who met Rhonda in Paris [remember her? It's a long time ago that you were in Sydney] and I spoke to Chelsea while you were at the game in LA. Lucky they had not been staying on a pig farm in Mexico, and only had colds!
Happy Birthday for Friday.
Thanks for making BOTH mothers happy with your update!
Yes Tom, I might just join you at Dave & Evelyn’s to receive my dosh! You could be even more skint than you thought! The thought of some of that Miami sun is VERY appealing.