Tag Archives: New Zealand

Feb22

The Great North-Island Adventure: A New Zealand Road Trip – Day 1

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It’s finally time – to pack up my bag again and move on from New Zealand. What calls me onward is not a new country, but instead a return to a home that I haven’t seen in months. I would enjoy staying in New Zealand for another six months, but unfortunately a lack of good job options and my non-infinite bank accounts have conspired together, and the clearest course for me is to return home to rest and rebuild my finances before starting out again on another world trip.

For now, what that means is that I am taking my leave of Christchurch. While the city has been amazing to me, I haven’t had the time to see anything of the North Island as of yet, and so I’ve planned out a road trip in order to remedy this.

Day 1

They key to this road trip of mine was a car. I obviously don’t own one, and I can’t afford to rent one, so what could I do? Car relocation was the solution that I came up with; a service where I volenteer to drive a rental car from one airport to another in a specific time frame. I don’t pay for the rental, and in return I make sure to deliver the car by a certain date and time. Not a bad deal, when I just need a way to get from one city to another, but want to actually see the space in between instead of simply flying over it.

So Sunday morning found me dragging myself out of bed before 8:00 so that Mike and I could drive out to the Christchurch Airport to pick up this car. It took us a while to find the renal agency, since it wasn’t one that we had dealt with before, but once we found it everything about the pickup went smoothly… though not quickly I’m afraid. I waited for over an hour and a half before I was finally given the keys to the car, but since I wasn’t paying for the rental I couldn’t really find a reason to complain too loudly. And so, after a quick overview of the car and a damage-check to make sure I would be getting my security deposit back, I headed out with a fancy new Sirion Daihatsu.

Mike and I met up again to have a quick going-away breakfast at a small place I had found earlier called Drexel’s (Yes, I think this is actually related to the school my sister goes to, Drexel University, since from what I can tell their both named after the same guy) where we chatted for a short bit and ate ourselves an amazing Breakfast… I really don’t know what it is, specifically, that draws me to Pancakes to strongly. But whatever it is, there is honestly no breakfast better than a tall stack of pancakes with Bacon and Eggs on the side.

After saying my final (for now) goodbyes to Mike, I headed out again to do a final round of goodbyes to the other folks that I had promised I’d see before leaving – Oliva, Spanish, Storm, and Rachel. In all my visiting took a bit longer than I planned, but I’m quite happy that I did take the time; these people (and many others that I didn’t get to see that Sunday) had touched my lives in so many ways, and I was, and still am, very sorry that I had to take my leave of them. But, either fortunately or unfortunately, the world continues to turn and I had to continue one with my adventures on the open road.

And that open road was… boring. Right outside of Christchurch I got trapped in almost an hour and a half of traffic caused by some accident that required the services of not one, but three fire trucks. The only consolation for me was afterwards when I got to really stretch the cars legs on the coastal highway… I had honestly forgotten how much I love driving manual-transmission cars, and driving this one around was reminding me how amazingly better it is than driving a normal automatic transmission.

But no matter how quickly I drove, or how much fun I had shifting gears to tear around the corners, I couldn’t shake the knowledge that I was going to miss my ferry. You see, I was on the south island, and the only way across is via an inter-island ferry that goes from the town of Picton to the city of Wellington. And it was set to board at 5:05… significantly before I was going to make it there. Thankfully I was able to rebook the ferry passage without trouble when I did finally arrive (nearly two hours late, but thats neither here nor there), and so I went from being two hours late, to having nearly two hours to kill before the ferry started boarding.

I burned up this time by visiting a small pub called the “Toot n’ Whistle” for a quick bite to eat, and then sitting and taking a nap in the car, since I had a feeling I wouldn’t be getting much sleep on the ferry. Unfortunately I was right, and the ferry ride ran into more than a few waves on its three-hour tour to Wellington. Yes, seriously, a “three hour tour”… not a cursed time-frame at all, no one’s ever been shipwrecked for decades from one of those… Has anyone rescued Gilligan yet? I don’t know.

The ferry ride itself was slow and long, and found me starting to understand how ancient sailors could have believed in sea monsters so easily. It was pitch-black outside, even with the running lights of the ship lit on the decks, but every once in a while you’d notice something in the water, some small reflection of the light that would catch the eye and cause the brain to go into conniptions trying to figure out what it could possibly be. And the result was always “something big and scary that wants to eat you”. The fact that the ship would be creaking and moaning around me didn’t help any, let me tell you. Even with my headphones and movies playing on the laptop, I was unconvinced that we’d ever make landfall, and doubly convinced that some sort of sea-serpent was waiting for us just below the waterline.

Once the ferry did finally arrive, I quickly made my way back to the car, and onto the highway looking for a place to stay. At the rental place I had commandeered a whole book of accommodations, and so I had found a cheap place that I was planning on staying that night – just a small campground about 20min outside of the city. It took a bit of searching to finally find it, thanks to the horrendously early hour, but soon enough I was laying out my sleeping bag and pad on the grass, and dozing off to sleep under the stars.

Feb15

Aruandê Capoeira meet up in Motueka!

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Feb 9th 2012 through Feb 12th, 2012

 

After spending two days in Nelson after leaving Takaka and the Hangdog campground behind I took a bus up to Motueka, a town just about halfway up the side of the Abel Tasman national park. What brought me to this tiny town, with a population barely over 10,000? The semi-annual Aruandê Capoeira meet up, of course!

That morning had seen me take a bus from Nelson to Motueka, thanks to a failed coordination of rides. On the bus I had gotten a chance to talk to a mother/daughter group from Auckland, who gave me more than a few tips on places to travel in the North Island for my upcoming road trip. After the bus finally arrived, late thanks to a series of roadworks, I had made a bee-line to the cheapest backpackers in town – Motueka Backpackers. There I talked to the manager, who told me that all of their dorms were full. “Unless… do you mind sleeping in the camper van? It’s a bit cramped and cold, but you’d have it all to yourself” “Umm, it’s the same price, and I get a private room? Yeah! I’m ok with that!” And so, instead of sleeping in a dorm filled with sweat and people, I ended up setting up shop in a camper van with my sleeping bag, relaxing all by myself.

I didn’t have time to relax much though, since the meet up had officially started at 10:00 on Saturday morning, and the bus hadn’t arrived until 10:30. But when I finally walked into the hall at 11:15, I found out that they had started on “South American standard time”… AKA an hour late.

 

Day 1

Yet again, I find myself extremely happy about my innate sense of paranoia. I’m sitting in the Memorial Hall in Motueka as a friend of mine nicknamed “sushi” wraps a bandage around my knee. There are two quick stories here; one involving a knee, and another involving a kiwi guy being given a Japanese nickname. Lets… start with the knee, shall we?

One downside of long backpacking trips are the aches and pains. And in my case, these aches are located in my knees and lower back… the back pain was limited to a dull soreness, but the knees were a different and much more painful story. A while back I bashed my right knee out rock climbing – nothing bad enough to warrant a trip to the hospital, but something that left me with a nice limp for a few days. And ever since, its bugged me when I’ve done long sections of downhill while hiking, especially if I happen to have a heavy pack on my back. Well, the knee had flared up after the first day of the Abel Tasman, and I had started favoring it I guess, which lead to a complete blow-out of my left knee on the last day of the trail. I’d been resting it all through my time in Takaka and Nelson, but when I started practice with the Capoeira group, I quickly realized that it needed to be taped up.

The story of the Kiwi guy being given a Japanese nickname is a much quicker story – my friend Nick started Capoeira about a year ago, and had his Batisado, or Baptism of Fire, a few months after. Now its traditional to be given a new name during your batisado, to symbolize your rebirth into the culture; Nick had thought up a few, but almost immediately after the Mestre saw him, those ideas were thrown out the window. You see, Nick looks very Asian, and the Mestre noticed this, mentioned it, and decided that the nickname should fit the man. Thus, Sushi was born.

Anyways, Nick/Sushi was taping up my knee. The practice had been a good bit more grueling than I had expected, though I’ll admit that I didn’t really know what to expect when I first signed up for the meet up. I guess I was expecting seminars and talks, demonstrations and a big huge convention hall full of people. Instead, we got something that I actually enjoyed a significant amount more – a class. Simply what Pontual usually does… except with a number of new people who happen to be instructors.

And that’s the key right there – instructorS. Up until this point, Pontual was the best that I’d seen, aside from movies and videos on YouTube. And now, I was seeing the people who taught him, and people who had practiced along side him for years… and let me tell you, it was impressive.

We spent the entire day alternating between practicing sets of movements and random workouts, and getting together in the roda (pronounced “ho-dah”, thanks to the Portuguese “R”) to test the movements that we had learned against each other. It was honestly amazing, and was easily equivalent in awesomeness to a full day of rock climbing at my favorite crag. The energy that I felt there was excellent, and getting to see people training who could actually land kicks and takedowns on Pontual on a regular basis was eye opening – I think I’m going to enjoy training Capoeira for a long time to come.

After almost five hours of training we all got the instruments together and walked out of the hall to the center of town to do a live demonstration for the population of Motueka. I hadn’t known about this part of the plan, but in hindsight it was an amazing idea – the main point of this meet up was not only to train and get together as a group, but also to raise awareness for the Motueka chapter of the group… and raise awareness we did! I only got to play two or three rounds myself, but we kept playing for over an hour total, and for most of that time we had a very good showing of random people stopping by to watch the roda. It was really cool being the center of so much confused attention, and I think the better capoeiristas enjoyed the chance to really show off their skills to some easily impressed bystanders.

After the outside roda we all went back to our individual residences to take a quick shower before meeting back at the hall to drive down to Nelson again, for a classical Brazilian dinner that a friend of a friend had cooked up. After another few hijinks and misadventures we finally all met up and headed out onto the hour-long drive, where Spanish and I chatted long and hard about moves and counter-moves, pronunciation and technical terms, and even into roda etiquette.

The meal itself was amazing, but the party afterward was of a particular excellence that I haven’t seen in ages. For the meal we ate some amazing meat mix with rice, potatoes, and spare ribs on the side, washed down with a generous offering of some quite good New Zealand beers. And then… the music began. I learned firsthand that Cai Cai, an instructor from Australia who had flown over, was an extremely skilled break-dancer. I also learned that Spanish is a quite good dancer as well, and that I… am not. That fact had no bearing on my rocking out though, and I hate to admit it but I ended up pulling out all the stops and actually went 70s disco on the dance floor when I was called up to dance. From the funky chicken to the funky big rig, from the funky lawnmower to a funky shop trip, every horrible dance I knew was played out in front of the group. And then mirrored by at least one or two people, who pulled out some moves that even I could never have imagined trying. The night… was awesome.

I did have to leave a bit early though, in order to catch a ride back into Motueka so that I could get some sleep before practice the next day. Thankfully Vovo, the instructor from Motueka, was driving back and offered to give me a lift. We spent the drive talking about traveling around the world, and he took some time to explain the intricacy of the Capoeira culture and its history. By the time we got to the Backpackers my head was so full of new information, and my body so completely drained from the day of practice and the night of dancing, that I was asleep before I even got myself completely inside my sleeping bag back in the camper van.

Day 2

The daylight broke through the tattered curtains of the camper van, transforming my slightly unique accommodations into a bright little slice of heaven. Backpackers are amazing everywhere I’ve been for their cheapness, and the chance to meet lots of interesting travelers… but the downside to them is that its always hard to fall asleep there, thanks to people constantly moving around. Here in Motueka I had somehow found the perfect situation where I could sleep easily, and yet still meet lots of interesting people. Though I’ll admit, in this situation most of those “interesting people” had only walked up and talked to me because they thought I had weed. Dreads are awesome, but it seems that they come with a steep price.

Anyways, after waking up I didn’t have enough time for any breakfast more substantial than a quick fruit-snack bar and a can of chicken that I had leftover from backpacking, so I quickly gulped down what I could and then headed out towards Memorial Hall. I arrived a bit late, but thankfully “South American Standard” time was still in effect and I ended up getting there a bit before Perere and Vovo arrived to unlock the hall for the morning.

Our workout started out a bit slower than the day before, but it quickly moved into some rather complex acrobatic movements before slowing down again when we grouped up and started practicing the music side of campoeira – learning the instruments and melodies.

There are four main instruments to the Roda – the Berimbau (pronounced “Bid-eem-Bao”), the Pandeiro (pronounced “Paan-dare-oh”), the Atabaque (pronounced “tah-bah-k”), and the A-go-go (pronounced exactly as you would think). The Berimbau is really interesting to look at, since its a pole with a wire strung just like a bow with a gourde attached to the bottom of it… but it’s the lead instrument of the roda. The Pandeiro is a standard-issue tamborine, much like anything you’d see at a faire. The Atabaque is a huge drum that comes up to above my waist which gives the roda its bass beat, and helps to keep the time that the Berimbau sets. Lastly, and A-Go-Go is a set of metal bell, and its actually an instrument originally for samba, but has been added into the roda. For most of the time I played the pandeiro, and I actually had a pretty cool epiphany while playing.

When I was first trying to learn the guitar a friend of mine told me to keep trying because “you don’t slowly understand it, you just keep working through your confusion until suddenly, one second, everything snaps into place”… I didn’t snap and understand all of music, but I actually started to hear the melody differently, and to understand the beats and where each instrument could fit into the greater song. It was an amazing feeling, and when I moved over to the <drums> I was able to understand a way to freestyle the beat a bit, and to improvise some new sounds that I really enjoyed.

We ended up spending nearly all afternoon singing and playing the instruments, but after a while we did set up one last roda for the weekend – the roda to burn ourselves out on. It was really quite impressive, though I’ll admit that the energy seemed a bit lower than what we had the previous day while playing outside. Possibly it was the fact that we’d been practicing all weekend, or maybe it was the lack of spectators, but either way we made up for it by playing that much harder – and watching Pontual and Cai Cai have their last duel was a match up that I don’t think I’ll forget any time soon.

Everyone started packing up and cleaning out the hall after our final cheer, and we had Memorial Hall back into full cleanliness in record time… literally less than 8 minutes. I only remember the specific number because we only had the hall until 3:45, and we didn’t finish the roda until 3:37… not usually a worry, but I guess that another group was coming in to use the hall at 4:00, and we needed to vacate the premises right away.

After cleaning up and packing the gear into cars we started the long process of saying goodbye to everyone; chatting, exchanging contact information and trying to remember the last few moves that Perere had shown us. We actually convinced Pontual and Cai Cai to perform the main three sequences out in front of the hall so that it could be caught on video so the rest of us could practice later on. The whole process actually started taking a bit long, and so we finally packed everyone into the cars after some of the drivers started reminding us about the 6+ hour drive that we had ahead of us.

Thankfully the drive went quickly though, and after a quick stop in at Harriet’s friends house for showers we were on the road back to Christchurch. I spent the drive reading Lord of the Rings in the back seat of the car, curled up in the corner with either Sara or Carla, depending on who was stuck in the middle seat at the time… it was actually surprisingly comfortable (especially considering Harriet does not own an extremely large car), and so I found myself back in Christchurch again before I knew it.

Feb14

Relaxing at the Hangdog campground after the Abel Tasman

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This short and slightly low-key adventure stems off of my hike of the Abel Tasman Great Walk – See the entry about Walking the Abel Tasman to see the backstory

07 Feb 2012 through 08 Feb 2012

I had arrived at the Hangdog earlier in the day, thanks to the help of a very friendly German couple giving me a lift into town, and had quickly gotten bored of just sitting around the campground reading and writing up stories on my barely-charged laptop. And so, thanks to the very generous nature of the Hangdog staff, I borrowed one of the lender-bikes and headed into town to find myself some food, and possibly a bit of distraction.

The first order of business was the food, and so when I got into town I started wandering around looking for somewhere that could serve me up a good hamburger. I wasn’t able to find a particularly good hamburger unfortunately, but I was able to find a cheap hamburger… yet another one of the wonders of New Zealand Fish and Chip shops is that they serve a whole variety of horribly cheap and greasy foods, one of which was a nice plate of chips (french fries), a hamburger, and a nice big soda. Horribly bad for me I know, but after a whole week of actual good food I think its an acceptable lapse.

After quickly chowing down on my delicious grease-fest of a late lunch, I started wandering around the town looking for something to catch my eye. What I found was a whole series of really neat paintings done on the sides of buildings and used as street signs; for example, instead of having “slow down” traffic signs, they had a full painting of The Flash yelling “You’re going too damn fast!”. I loved it, and spent a good bit of time wandering around and taking pictures of pretty much anything that happened to catch my eye.

After a bit more wandering, and a quick visit to an internet cafe to catch up on email, I headed back into camp for a quick bite to eat before what I planned to be a quite strenuous evening of reading and chilling with some most excellent climbers. Unfortunately for me, the last part of that plan did not happen to be in the cards – instead of the campground being populated by awesome climbers like it had been on previous trips, it was instead populated almost entirely by a group of rather insular Germans who had no interest in talking to other people… or at least people who didn’t speak German.

Thankfully I had picked myself up a rather substantial dinner while I was in town earlier in the day, to supplement what I had remaining from the trail, and so I was feeling fairly full and sleepy quite soon after the sun went down that night. I found myself nodding off in my tent before 10:00 even hit, though I had quite the time actually falling asleep, thanks to the volume of the campfire songs being sung around the camp. Some were horrible country songs from the States (sung by the few Americans who knew enough German to join the group), but most were old-school-style German songs; the negligable amount of German that I know allowed me to understand just enough words to know that yes, in fact, they were singing in German, no matter how off-key it was.

The next morning dawned bright and early, though the amount of dew on my tent made it clear that it had rained during the night. Thanks to my early evening I was awake extremely early, even for my new sleep schedule, but I found myself falling back to sleep repeatedly. I think it was a combination of the most-excellent dreams I was having about flying a spaceship through an alien star-system and the fact that the horrid songs the night before had kept me up longer than they should have.

Either way, once I did finally get myself mobile I started into my chores for the day with a passion. I braved the bug-storm that erupted between the rain-fly of my tent an the inside (a downside of having a dry spot during a rainstorm, I guess) and cooked up some breakfast, took a shower, and even did my laundry. One of the things that I had made sure to pack with me when I left the States was a length of accessory cord which I turned into, this time, a clothes line outside of my tent. Hey, the New Zealand sun is quite intense, I may as well make use of it, right? Once everything was set up I headed out again, this time to the crag where I sat and edited pictures and wrote up stories for nearly four hours, eating bites of snack as I worked.

The rest of the day is a bit of a blur, since nothing particularly interesting happened. I chatted with a few new faces around the campsite, but everyone who was interested in talking seemed to be keeping a low profile. It’s a danger of campgrounds like that – if you get a good group, it can really end up overshadowing everyone else in the campground. And in this case, the “good group” was not accepting new membership. And so I relaxed and kept to myself, a good continuation from my solitude of the trail. I enjoyed it, and the day faded quickly into evening as I read about the adventures of a group of brave little Hobbits.

The third day at Hangdog started out early and with a lot of work, as it found me packing up all of my gear and setting out on the trail yet again. I got delayed for a bit chatting with one of the old-timer climbers, a guy named Jay who talked for ages about the advantaged of a raw vegan diet and how communes make the world a better place.

As strange as it is to say, I found the conversation interesting, since Jay actually had a strong background and knowledge-base that he was speaking from, instead of the usual dirty-hippy-blather that’s spouted around a campfire. I learned that Jay is a programmer who works on video games for children, and that he’s been working his way around New Zealand for months now; doing a bit of coding here and there and sending it back to the main office when he finishes a game. Interesting, and definitely a neat way to travel, since it lets you take advantage of good days, and get some work done when the weather turns against you.

I have to admit that I left fairly quickly once the topic turned to communes, and more people started joining into the conversation, turning it from a dialogue into a sounding booth for hippie ideals. As strange as it is, I cannot stand hippies who think that everyone should be organic and live life in a commune full of raw vegans. It’s not that I don’t like the ideas in small doses, but the self-righteousness grates on me. And so, with that fairwell, I headed back into Takaka to catch a bus back to Nelson.