28/02/09

Woke up at 0715 and thought 's***, I haven't packed anything', so I brushed my teeth and placed everything in my bag, I was still ready a good 15 minutes before both the girls, they have somme serious packing issues. Got the taxi to the airport and some freaky old bloke checked us in. Spent a bit of time using the free internet in the airport, it was slower and less reliable than the dial up connection I had about 10 years ago. Got an email from Kelvin telling me that I had recieved a speeding fine in the post for doing 106 km/h in a 100 area, b******s! Got on the plane and sat down in what I thought was my seat in the isle, a few minutes later some bloke said 'can I just get to my seat', thinking that his was the one next to the window I got up to let him past, the b****** started getting really angry with me just as I realised I was in the wrong seat, I could have punched him, but its generally frowned upon to punch OAP's. Helen had the misfortune of sitting next to him the entire flight. They showed some Fawlty Towers and dished out some shortcake biscuits. We landed in Brisbane and all decided we wanted Hungry Jacks, as we got in to the departure lounge we soon found out that there was no Hungry Jacks at all so we all went for a Red Rooster. I'm never eating there again, it was far too messy.

On the flight from Brisbane to Auckland we were treated like kings. From the moment the plane had taken off the stewards didn't stop moving up and down the isle with snacks, drinks and meals. Burns had a few beers so needed to go to the bog quite a lot, Coops also needed to go a lot, I think thatas just because she has a weak bladder though. Coops, Burns and I spent most of the journey attempting to complete a Puzzle, I was a bit tired so needed constant supervision by Burns when filling in the answers. When I went to the toilet I was wearing one the beaters I got from Cotton On, and some 50 year old steward decided it was neccessary to let me know that he was gay and loved bathing nude. The flight was delayed by just over and hour so when we landed we had to pay rip-off prices for a taxi on a Saturday at just after midnight. There were so many guys walking around with skin tight jeans and big B-Ball player shoes on which made me feel a little ill. Burger King is back, no more Hungry Jacks! We got to the room checked in, the first place ever where we didn't need a key deposit, and slept.

01/03/09

Woke up as Rich and Pat left to go watch some football, but fell back to sleep easily. Didn't wake up until just about midday. The girls and I went down to see the guys in the bar, had a bacon sandwich and a hash brown. Everything seems much cheaper here than in Aus. We then went for a walk down Queen Street, the first shop we came across was Cotton On, unluckily the fire alarm was going off so we couldn't enter, 5 fire engines showed up to the scene for a false alarm, thats a good response. We wandered around various shops all day, walked up to Aiotoa Square, then back down. Popped in to Borders and found an awesome book of funny signs, burns bought the 'God Delusion' and we headed for Victoria Market. On the way we passed the Sky Tower, the largest building in the Southern Hemisphere, and no Pat, China is not in the southern hemisphere, tit. The market was a bit of a dissapointment, absolutely nothing going on, although there was a sun-cream dispenser for $1 a go, didn't seem to work but I got to watch a girl smacking it on the side as hard as she could and cursing at it. We walked back to the hostel, on the way back we saw a little kid going on one of those things where you sit in a cab and 2 giant elastic bands are stretched and they ping you in to the air. After watching him do it, Rich and I couldn't resist. It was so good, apparently it pulls 5g's, at the top it goes in to a really slow back somersault which is really disorientating, but so much fun looking down at the top of all the buildings.

We got back to the room and chilled out in the room for a bit, I couldn't stand laying down any longer so suggested we went to the park to play frisbee, eventually after about half an hour of people getting ready we were okay to go, we soon ended up deviating from the plan, as we went straight to foodworks to buy food first, on the way back our hostel was dishing out free hot-dogs, awesome!

We finally made it to the park and Rich and I had an awesome firsbee session, he kept aiming for my knees and managed to get me right in the auto-reflex area the b******. After a while a larger area of grass became available so we got some good throws on the go until Pat managed to get one to roll over a mans head. When we got back to the room Coops, Rich and I started cooking the Cottage Pie. We cut the potatoes so thin you actually see through them, they cook in seconds. While we were waiting for it to cook some guys from Texas checked in and we got chatting to them. They were really quality guys, turns out they play just about every sport known to man, other than Baseball, and gymnastics obviously. They were telling us how they play on an Ultimate Frisbee team, and how they saw 3 guys playing in the park earlier, when we told them it was us they were like 'oh yeh!'. The more we were talking to them the more we reaslised they had been stalking us, they had gone up and down Queen Street at the same time as us, were at Victoria Market at the same time listening to the same bag-pipes and had stood and watched 2 guys do the weird bungee thing on their way back. We spent the rest of the evening chatting to them before hitting the sac.

02/03/09

Got up at about 9 and enjoyed our last proper shower. Checked out of the hostel and took a taxi to Apollo CamperVans near the airport, this guy charged a much cheaper fare than the other night. When we got there, there was a huge queue of people waiting to pick up their vans, so we were treated to a DVD showing us all the details of the Camper. After much waiting we got to the front of the queue and it was then that we were hit with all the hidden costs. We managed to sort out the inability to pay a bond by paying for insurance, then we had the gas bottle filling costs, charges for having extra drivers the list goes on and on. In total we ended up paying an extra grand between the 5 of us. Then came the bigger headache, attempting to split the cost by 5, 4 of which wanted to pay by card which would add an extra 1.75% to the cost and I paid by cash. It was then that their system went down and we lost Helens reciept and Rich ended up being charged 30 bucks less. After an hour or 2 of pissing around with a calculator we thing we all ended up paying an equal amount, and we finally got the chance to drive it off.

We headed straight for the nearest car park, which was literally 100 yards down the road and I selected a parking space to practice reverse parking. I managed to reverse the beast perfectly in to the space first time in about 5 seconds flat (check the pictures when I put them up). We spent the afternoon shopping in Foodworks to get food for the next few days and unpacking all our bags and putting our things in the cupboards in the camper. It's so much easier to access all your clothes now they're placed in a cupboard. Everyone made full use of the free public toilets, then when we realised that we had a limit of 180 minutes in the car park we thought we'd better move on. I was driving and Coops was the navigating. The map that Apollo had given us wasn't very detailed, we made it on to Walmsley road and found out where we were on the map and decided to head towards a camp site for the first night to be on the safe side. After driving towards it for a little while we saw a Walmsley road, after consulting the map again we realised there were many different Walmsley roads. By using the old stlye of where the Sun was setting we finally managed to make our way to Ambury Campsite. Without squashing any ducks we parked up on the grass and all hopped out and had an epic game of frisbee. The girls didn't seem to getting involved so we whipped out the bat and ball and played rounders until the sun started to go down and we couldn't see the ball any longer.

We retreated to the camper to cook our first meal on the gas hobs there. After we'd chopped up all the potatoes and put them in the saucepan we couldn't seem to get the hobs to work. After much fiddling with the gas bottles and hobs we still couldn't get the b****** working so we consulted a couple that were living in the exact same model on the other side of the campsite, they soon informed us that both our gas bottles were in fact void of any gas. We decided to have sandwiches, Helen went nuts and had 3 butter sandwiches. We cracked open the new card game we had purchased in the Airport, Billionaire, it was great fun, we were all just shouting out numbers between 1 and 8 as loud as possible until someone, usually Pat somehow, won. We started to play scrabble but were all too tired to concentrate so cleaned our teeth and set the beds up. When I got back from the sinks I had been allocated the bed above the driving cab which I would be sharing with Burns. Coops managed to get the bed to herself behind the drivers seat and Helen and Pat got the one at the back of the van. What a disaster! Coops was in hysterics at me and Burns attempting to get our bed made. Two people kneeling on a bed whilst trying to put a bed sheet on it doesn't work, we managed to get one side down before realising that it was on the wrong way around, so we had to turn it, Burns was moaning that my arse was in his face, then when we finally finished it I managed to nick the side nearest to the entrance/exit of the den, Burns was not happy. I spent about 10 mintues trying to explain to Burns that he could use the extra sheet I stole from the Quantas flight as a cover instead of using the spare bottom sheet as a cover so we could have one spare whilst we wash the other, he didn't understand at all, and just used the sheet anyway. We decided we were going to sleep top and tails. I got pretty much no sleep all night because I had Burns right next to me, shifting up and down, snoring, turning over and over and farting constantly. After a brief period of sleep I was woken up by burns moving some part of his body under the sheet repeatedly ever 2 or 3 seconds, it worried me a little so I had no chance of getting any more sleep and just waited for morning.

03/03/09

I was awake and cold as the sun rose started coming in through the window into the den at the top of the camper. There was dew on the grass for the first time in our travels. We all got up and showered then put everything away to stop it falling off the side while we were driving. Our first point of call was back south towards Apollo to complain about the lack of gas and the faulty readout on waste water monitor that told us it was full even though we had a full tank of water that would need the space to drain in to. Apollo told us that both gas canisters were in fact full, bull s***, and the monitor is just a guide and shouldn't be used to gauge the water levels. Whats the point in having a gauge if it's so unreliable you can't use it. We set off to central Auckland and parked in the car park opposite the Fat Camel hostel. It was mental getting the thing in there, it only just fit under the price sign and we couldn't fit it in a single space we had to have a special space allocated to us.

We got on the free Stray tour of Auckland and were taken to the Sky Tower where we watched a guy free fall from the Obs Deck, didn't look all that fun, he jumped then the wires slowed him to a stop about a third of the way down and then dropped him again. All the while this was going on the girls and I were chatting to some crazy Canadian woman that seemed to know a hell of a lot about Couch Surfing and was telling us about all her favourite places in the States to go visit. Our next stop was a viewpoint at a memorial for the first MP to give rights to the Maori. It overlooked a mountain, called Blood Sky or Fire Sky. The first half of it was shot up from beneath the sea in 8 hours and the second half formed over the following week around 200 years ago. We were then taken to the top of Mount Eden and were told that Auckland is the 4th largest urban sprawl behind LA, Toyko and Sydney. It is the only spot in the world other than in Chile where you can see 2 different oceans at once that do not actually meet. There was also a sacred site where Europeans had entered Auckland under the pretences of peace and had stabbed a Maori chief in the back in the crater atop the mountain.

We stopped off at a bar / inn / pub, where we ordered some snacks and had huge argument about what made a bar a bar, a pub a pub and and inn an inn. We decided that Inn's are pubs with rooms available above, and we are still inconclusive about pubs and bars, according to Coops, its something to do with the building having booths to sit in. Our next stop was the bridge walk, on the way the tour guide was asking anyone if they fancy a bungee. When we got there, after we had both egged each other on so much we decided we had to do it. So we got kitted up and walked to the middle of the bridge and checked out the view of the harbour. Burns was selected to jump first, I was hoping that he would do his classic dive off the platform but kinda just fell off. I couldn't see the rest of it because I was having my leggs strapped but apparently he struggled with the cord to pull his legs free at the end and was hanging upside down for ages. My turn came, I'd decided that I wanted to actually fall in to the water. Pretty much all I can remember is the guy telling me to wave at the camera and saying 3, 2, 1 and then I just swan dived off. It has to be the best feeling ever, just looking down at the water approaching really fast, I was waiting to dip in to the water but they must have worked out the weights wrong because I was about a foot away from touching the water with my fingertips, at least they overestimated my weight rather than underestimated it. I couldn't stop smiling all the way up, can't wait to do the Nevis now.

When the tour had finished we wandered around Auckland, Coops and I picked up a new pair of flip-flops each, Pat got a new camera and we chipped in for an iPod FM tuner for the van. We then all got a free sausage from the hostel. I managed to sneak in there by presenting a spare key-card that I had found the other day and asking a cleaner to let me in to the room because the card didn't work, I managed to get Pats ball and the frozen peas that we had left there as well as some more bog-roll, a sharp knife and a salt cellar. We then went to take a photo of the Maori Creation story of NZ which was painted on a wall. Maori, a god, wanted to fish with his 8 older brothers who told him he was too small, so he hid and went out to fish without his brothers knowledge. He used his magic hook and when he got a bite used his super Demi strength to pull up the fish. The fish is the north island and his boat the south.

We left Auckland and drove north until the sun set and we pulled up on the side of the road. We cooked the potatoes that we had prepared yesterday and cooked them with the gas which now worked and had gammon, mash, peas and gravy. We spent a bit of time attempting to plan our next few days using the maps provided and the Lonely Planet, it took us a while to discover that e's and o's as well as k's and p's are interchangable between to two, so it took us ages to find places we wanted to visit on the map.

Played a bit of boggle, Burns got his best score ever, and then we went to bed. I remembered to take my iPod to bed this time and actually managed to get to sleep. I woke up in the night when the van was shaking back and forth and I could hear footsteps outside, I thought a guy was shaking the camper around. Luckily Coops was awake and could hear them too, so I had a peek, it turned out we had parked at a gravel yard and people were stopping off, filling trucks up with gravel and leaving.