04/03/09

Woke up at about 9 and spent a good hour and a half getting ready to leave. There was the classic predicement of where the girls could go to the toilet, on three sides the main road was visable and on the other a train track crossing which was frequently being used by trucks to stock up on gravel. They chose their time well and managed to finish just before a car drove down towards the train track. We left the layby at around half 10 and drove to Waipu. I parked the van in a huge space that we found, but we were asked to move as they were expecting a bus to arrive any time soon, so I had to shift it in to another space, it looked ridiculous, it swamped the people carrier it was parked next to. We got out and explored Waipu, it consisted of a single street with no ATM and a couple of shops, after 5 minutes walking around the shops we set off for Whangarei.

We attempted to drive to the Whangarei caves to begin with but ended up at the look-out. The weather wasn't great, we had patchy rain and it was very overcast, so it didn't make for the best view. We then managed to find Abbey caves and walked down towards them, as we aproached the signs changed from Abbey caves to Organ caves. I scouted ahead before anyone else dared enter, after clambering down the slippy, mossy rocks I came across some knee deep freezing water. After wading through it I turned off the torch and then saw hundreds of luminous green glow-worms, it looked like I was just looking up at the stars or something. When the others heard that there were glow-worms they decided to come in for a look. Pat and the girls were wearing trainers so had to take them off, for some reason they all decided to keep their socks on. Rich decided to stay at the top, as the girls put their feet in the water they gasped and moaned about it, but they were happy when we got a bit further in and they could see the glow-worms. Another guy we met down the cave was using a 15 second exposure and managed to get some photos of them, we had no luck. On the way out I saw a few cray-fish scuttling around. We then headed back up through the Rock Forest which looked awesome, jagged green rocks everywhere, looked a little bit like places out of Lord of the Rings.

We got back to the camper and the girls were both bursting for a wee so went down an alley while I rinsed all the crap of my feet. We headed towards the town centre and found a shop called Pack'n'Save which was like a warehouse above a supermarket, so everything was really cheap. We picked up a few utensils we were missing and each bought 340g of cadburys chocolate because it was all so cheap. On the way back to the van Coops managed to smash her head really hard on a sign. We then drove to the Waterfall and went for a walk around it, the best waterfall all travels so far, couldn't swim like the one in Chiang Mai but much prettier. Helen slipped over and nearly dragged Pat down with her, Coops wouldn't shut up about some kids TV program that 'The animals of farthing wood' had apparently ripped off. When we got back to the van we all attempted to have a number 2 in the public toilets, I was unsuccessful. The challenge is for no one to use the campers toilet the entire 63 days.

We headed off towards Russell taking the coastal road. Pat had a shocker whilst navigating, ended up taking us down some crazy route towards Matapouri instead of staying on route 1. The road soon changed in to a dirt track. When we finally realised we were heading the wrong way Burns went to swing the van around in field entrance, as he did so the front lifted up and the back tilted down causing the exhaust to drag along the road making the loudest scraping noise ever, luckily he was able to reverse it out and we headed back to the main road. Whilst we were driving we noticed a stray cow in the road, it looked a bit lost and was trying to get back in to its field, we had the dilema of whether or not to let it in, we decided to leave it. We finally got to a place called Oakura where we decided to stop as we could park in a layby next to some public toilets.

The girls kindly cooked us a chicken stir-fry which tasted brilliant, although the sauce was from a packet so was qutie 'sorty'. When dinner was done with Helen noticed that Coops was drawing in her diary and moaned about how she couldn't draw. Coops informed her that the more she tried the better she would get. This soon escelated in to a bit of argument which I couldn't resist getting involved in. Helen put across the view that it is impossible to learn new skills if you have no skill to begin with and wouldn't accept the fact that it just makes it harder and not impossible. It was a good argument, probably the first one I've enjoyed in a while.

05/03/09

I woke up at about 9am and used the public toilets to kinda wash myself, I'm now starting to feel a little bit rank from a lack of showering. The weather today was looking rather s***e, it was raining sideways. We headed off before 10 towards Russell via the coastal road. We pulled over for breakfast and then continued, managed to find a campsite where we were allowed to refill our water tank which was now empty for free. As Pat hopped out to go for a s*** the entire camper started to reak of s***, it was seriously nasty, the smell rivaled Burns travel towel and Pats sleeping shorts from KL. It wasn't until Pat returned that he told us that it wasn't him that had farted. Someone then opened the fridge and the waft came back again. We got all the meats out and found out that the left over chicken was making a bit of a pong so we ditched it in the bin. As we were leaving Coops chucked the empty box of beers in the bin and a woman started having a go at her for using her bin, and asking why we hadn't paid to use the water. We explained that we were told we could fill it up for free and got the hell out of there as quickly as possible before she noticed the rotten meat in her bin. We arrived at Russel and it was still hammering it down and blowing a gail, later in the news we would find out that the wind speed was 156 km/h. There appeared to be feck all to do in Russell whilst it was raining so we spent about 20 minutes wandering around some peculiar shops and trying to do 2's in the public toilets again. Burns and I walked up to the Tourist Information centre to enquire about ferry prices to Paihia, the sign told us that it was open from 7:30 am 'till late, it was closed due to bad weather. We drove off to the ferry, surprisingly it only cost $17.

We got to Paihia and when we stopped the rank smell was still lingering around, turns out it was coming from the sink, so we found a layby to pull over in to and we let the waste water out. The water reaked, I have no idea how water stink that much, there must have been residual waste in the tank when we picked it up. We decided to stop off at a proper camp site to charge things up and shower. It cost $15 a head, so we wont be doing it very often. The weather was so s*** we couldn't do anything all day, we did a couple of loads of laundry, and Coops and I spent the rest of the afternoon doing various puzzles from the book. The puzzle book was pretty s***, quite a lot of the answers for the crosswords didn't actually fit in the spaces. In the evening Coops and I prepared pasta with tomato and sausage. The pans we have in the camper are not big enough to cook for 5 people. We had to use 2 saucepans to cook enough pasta for everyone, which left only 1 hob left to attempt to cook 12 sausages in a tiny frying pan. The whole process took ages and we ended up having to drain the pasta in to a bowl and keep it in the microwave while we chopped the sausages up and finnished them off in the saucepan so we could fry the onions and peppers off in the frying pan. The last saucepan was used to cook the tomatoes, and it actually all came together rather well. We had a fairly late night, not sure how as we didn't actually do anything because it was raining all night.

06/03/09

Got up and gave the trampoline a go. Worst trampoline ever, so noisy and not bouncy in the slightest, could only get enough height for a single, definately no doubles. We had power so the girls thought they'd have toast for breakfast, as they put the toaster in the fuse flicked out, the toaster they'd given us was a heap of s***, so they used the campsites instead and came back moaning that they had hard cold toast, which I finished off. They then decided to have tea, but because we had mixed 2 cartons of milk together to save room in the fridge, when it was mixed with hot water it curdled, funny thing was that it took the others so long to understand why it was happening. We drove up to the water supply so we could flush our water through and empty our grey water to try and stop it from stinking. After half an hour of moving water through one end of the camper and out the other we were done and had no rancid smells. It was Burns' driving so he headed off out the campsite. I told him to watch the roof of the camper on the roof of the reception because there's not much room for error. On his way out we heard a rather nasty creeking / scratching noise. We pulled over and checked it out, a huge looking green and brown scrape down the top right side of the camper, we were all pretty worried, but the weather was good, sunny and warm so we just forgot about it and headed off to Kerikeri.

We arrived at Kerikeri and stopped off at the tourist info where we picked up the mandatory hundred brochures, leaflet and coupon books to clutter the campervan again. On the way out we stopped alongside a mound which we could use to reach the roof. We set to it with a scouring pad and all the marks came off with a bit of elbow grease. After about 20 minutes work you wouldn't know anything had happened unless you'd been told. We first stopped at the StoneHouse, which seemed to be a museum of absolutely no interest to anyone, they had one section dedicated to old boxes of cereal. We went for a walk around the park and got bored fairly quickly so headed off after Helen and Burns had used the public toilets.

On the way to the next stop off, Helen and I planned the next couple of days. We arrived at Coopers Beach, and Coops decided that she was bursting for a slash so went in a bush. We walked down to the beach but couldn't find the correct path, we took some grassy alley between 2 buildings, when we got to the other side it turned out to lead in to the back gardens of all the beachfront houses. We got some right dirty looks as we hopped down on to the beach from their gardens and went for a paddle. We had lunch in the park when we got back to the campervan, Coops, Rich and I had cheese, lettuce and cucumber sandwiches, Pat had soup, and Helen had crackers with maple syrup, the maple syrup wasn't viscous in the slightest, it may as well have been in the drink section of the shop, it was well funny watching Helen trying to keep the stuff on a cracker and get it down her gob.

Pat was washing up his crap from lunch and as I was getting in I noticed water pouring out from near the footwell, when I got inside I caught Helen under the sink with a tea-towel and water dripping everywhere. The plumbing under the sink was a heap of s***, the pipe had come loose so I took it all apart, cleaned it out and put it back together a little bit better. It seemed to stop dripping from then on, but we could hear a weird sloshing sound when we pulled away.

The girls told me that we were heading to Doubtless Bay next, I told them that Coopers Beach was in Doubtless Bay and they then didn't know where we were going. We pulled over a few Km down the road to use a pay phone to book some stuff and we noticed a guy eating what looked like the best ice-cream in the world. We had to stop and get one. I had the best flavour ever, orange choc chip and tripple chocolate chunk, so good. We spent the rest of the afternoon laying on the beach and chilling out, making to most of the scorching heat. Pat and I went for a swim in the sea, the waves were huge and wiped us out much worse than any of the waves in Aus. Later a load of Boogie-Boarders showed up and started doing some mental tricks.

We left the beach at about 6:30 and got to Kaitaia at around 7. We parked up at a completely empty car park and went for a walk. We soon noticed that the town was a complete pikey fest, there were youngsters hanging around everywhere necking rola cola and running around. We found a cheap place to buy take away Chinese so we got one of those and headed back to the camper. When we got back there were loads of cars with neon lights and louts getting hammered so we headed off to the Pack'n'Save and parked out of the way. I desperatley needed a s*** so went to the public loos nearby then went to McDonalds to type up this blog. After a while everyone else randomly showed up as they thought I'd managed to find free internet, they each used the McDonalds toilets and we went back to the van at the Pack'n'Save.