Tag Archives: Road Trip

Mar11

The Great Far-Northern Road Trip: Days 1 and 2

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The Far-North New Zealand Road trip

 

After spending a few days in Auckland with Couch Surfers, I was planning on finding a nice Hostel and bunkering down to explore the city for a few days before my flight took me to Honolulu. Plans changed, however, when my CS host offered to lend her van to myself and two other Couch Surfers. We had debated renting a car and exploring the far-Northern peninsula, but I wasn’t planning on spending the money to rent a car for that long… but when Anais offered to give us her van for free, my decision was made up in an instant – the chance to drive and explore for only the cost of diesel fuel? Yes please! The following is a quick account of our journeys:

 

The main actors –

Anais – (Pronounced “Ahh-nye-ees”) The woman who lent us her van. A professional photographer from France, who moved to New Zealand, met a guy, and has been living here ever since. Retained a very strong French Accent.

Heloise – (Pronounced “Ell-oh-ees”) The only other driver aside from myself, she’s a girl my age from France exploring the world with her Brother.

Adrien – (Pronounced “Add-Dree-on”) Heloise’s brother, he’s been exploring the world alongside his sister. A really cool guy, though he’s a bit understated and often gets overshadowed by Heloise.

Alissa – (Pronounced exactly as you would expect) A Couchsurfer from Germany; you’re stereotypical German going on her “Gap year” between secondary school an University. The youngest of the group, but possibly the most laid back.

Myself – (I’m not giving you a pronunciation) Me. The oldest of the group, and the primary driver of the Van.

 

Day 1:

The first day of our “Great Northern Roadtrip” started out later in the afternoon and without much fuss. Most of the day had been spent with Anais, going over plans and roads and such, and so it wasn’t until nearly sundown that we started out. Started out may actually be a bit too strong of a term, looking back on it, since we didn’t actually plan on leaving the city completely – instead, we were camping out a bit outside of the city and then driving back in the next morning to pick up a fourth member of our road trip crew; a girl named Alissa from Germany that Heloise had met Couchsurfing.

So, our first day just involved a quick stop for some fast food for dinner, a bit of random driving around Auckland, and then finding a small secluded beach to park by, as we rolled out the sleeping bags in the van and went to sleep.

 

Day 2:

This was the first real day of the adventure, and as such it started off correctly – nice and early, with amazing sky and sun. I’d been able to wake up without too much difficulty recently, thanks to a rather “nice, yet annoying” problem with my sleeping pad – it had a very small, slow leak. This meant that if I inflated it all the way at night, almost exactly seven hours later it would be deflated enough that my shoulders and hips would be painfully digging into the ground. It hurt, but it did help with the whole “waking up in the morning”.

After Heloise and Adrien had woken up and mobilized we headed back into town so that I could do a bit of training with a Capoeira group (Ed Note: See post “Auckland Capoeira”), after which we picked up Alissa at her Couchsurfers house. And this place was cool – the guy was named Craig, and him and his flatmates had rented out the entire space above an autobody shop and turned it into this amazing loft style apartment. Thankfully he was as cool as his flat, and I was able to quickly sneak in and use his shower before we headed out; one of the dangers of Capoeira is that no matter where you go, you’re almost definitely going to be nice and sweaty by the end of it… not a good way to start out a road trip.

After I was nice and clean I thanked the host, and we all headed back downstairs to load up the van with Alissa’s stuff. We made a quick run to a grocery as well, picking up lots of fruits and veggies and random ingredients for breakfast, and then finally jumped into the van and made for the open road.

Since we had gotten such a late start of it, our first day of driving wasn’t actually very long. Instead of pushing hard, we made for the scenic style of traveling, and stopped in at a few pretty amazing places. The first was a small beach called Sand Spit, a very aptly named fishing town that had this one spit of beach jutting out into the harbor that you could wander around on and explore. And explore we did – nearly an hour and a half of wandering, walking, photographing and wading into the ocean followed our arrival. We had the luck to have arrived at low tide, so much of the inner harbor was actually dry land, instead of underwater, and so we were able to walk a nice little loop from the van, out to the spit, and then back via a forest trail. It was amazing, and was the perfect appetizer to whet out appetite for the rest of the far-northern coast.

As we pushed further and further North we stopped in at a few more beaches, found ourselves a few more snacks, and finally arrived in our sleeping goal for the evening – a town called Paihia. It was small, and bore a strong resemblance to pretty much every small town on Cape Cod. It was full of touristy shops, lots of seafood, and had the smell of salt water and gutted fish in the air. Not altogether unpleasant, but I can’t imagine living there for very long before going insane.

Camp was quickly set up, and dinner cooked on the back of the van: We camped in a small packing lot out back – me in my tent outside and the other three in the van beside me. Dinner was amazing though, easily enough to offset my lonelyness at being the only one hanging out in the great wild – pasta with an amazing veggi sauce that Heloise made. We all ate, drank (I had bought a six pack of nice beer) and laughed until nearly 11:00, after which I headed back to the tent and read for an hour or so before falling asleep to the sounds of a small river rolling towards the ocean next to me.

 

Feb22

The Great North-Island Adventure: A New Zealand Road Trip – Day 2

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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 2

Drizzle… why does it always have to drizzle and spit when I try to sleep out under the stars? Seriously, I love the idea of sleeping out without a tent or anything, but its starting to get silly how often it rains on me just enough to be annoying. I actually ended up moving into the car to sleep off the final bits of the morning when the rain started coming down enough to worry me, which wasn’t nearly as cramped as I expected it to be… but still not anywhere near as comfortable as the nice soft grass I had been in earlier.

After a bit of stretching and popping of joints, I finally roused myself for action. After paying for the campsite I took to the road nearly immediately, not wanting to waste any time that I could be spending exploring the awesome city of Wellington. I had gotten more than a few recommendations on things I should see and places I should go, and so after a quick trip to the i-site to get a city map I started off to find myself something delicious to eat for breakfast/lunch.

And what food there was to be had… Wellington reminds me of the artists section of New York City, in that it’s full of neat creativity and amazing small coffee and lunch shops. While wandering around I saw some amazing murals and art installations, but I think what caught my mind more was the simple Feel of the city; the fact that creativity and invention was simply in the air surrounding you. Forgive my hyperbole; I know that sounds corny, but its the best way to describe what walking around Wellington actually felt like, without actually taking someone there.

After a rather nice little lunch of Nachos (Ed Note: Finally a city with actual fake-Mexican food!) I moved on the the national museum – Te Papa. The outside of the museum was impressive, to say the least, but inside it actually reminded me a huge amount of the Museum of Science back in Boston – A large open center lead out to each of the main exhibits, with amazing shapes and lights peaking out from each of the exhibit halls. My main goal for the museum was to check out two of the biggest shows that Te Papa’s known for – its Colossal Squid and its Earthquake / Maori history.

The squid itself was gigantic and more than a bit intimidating, though it was quite different from the giant squid that I’d seen in the Smithsonian in Washington DC… Colossal Squid are the heaviest squid in the world (that we know of), but Giant Squid are the longest. A small difference it seems, but it means that the Colossal squid is nearly a meter in diameter, ten meters long, and weighing in at nearly 500 kg (over 1100lbs). However, a Giant Squid is nearly 20meters long, while only weighing in at 275kg (600lbs). And yes, I do feel that this information is quite relevant to my roadtrip to Auckland.

The Earthquake and Maori history section of the museum was quite interesting as well, but didn’t really have anything that I hadn’t seen before, so I worked my way through it fairly quickly, wanting to head onwards to my next stop in Wellington – The Weta Cave! Weta is the group that does props and special effects for many of the biggest Holywood movies – notably Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia. Since so many people kept coming to their complex asking for tours, the folks at Weta put together “the cave”, or a place to showcase some of their best works and show a short film about what they’ve done and how they do it. I got to see the original statue of Lurtz (the Uruk-Hai Captain from Lord of the Rings), Narsil in its broken state, and many other props from many other movies… And even a few video games as well. The video that they showed was quite interesting as well, and did a great job of showcasing the extent of Weta’s work, and some of the New Zealand film industry too.

After the Weta Cave, I jumped back into the car and got on the highway again, heading up towards the town of Taupo. Most of the way up the highway was just what I had expected – small winding roads traveling through amazing scenery and landscapes. I did have a few fun moments and frightening situations though – I took a turnoff to explore the “Adrenaline Forest”, what I thought was a cool woodland that I could check out. Not so – it was a kids camp. Disappointment.

The rest of the drive was quick and simple, but it took forever. For every kilometer that I had to go, it seemed that I had to drive three or four, and I found myself averaging just about 30kpm… or just about 17mph. On a main highway. I seriously do not understand how that held true, but this evening was just not happening for me. My original plan had been to camp out in Taupo so that I could hit the thermal pools that night, or maybe early in the morning. When 10:00 rolled around and I had been tearing away at the last 100km for an hour, I finally gave up on the fight and pulled off at a picnic spot to set up camp.

At first, it seemed like a near-perfect spot to set up my sleeping pad and just lay out in my sleeping bag. But then the bugs started showing up. I seriously don’t know where they came from, or what they eat when I’m not around, but I found thousands of sandflys literally coating my headlamp and the light in the car. It became so bad that I could barely see the light from the car, there were so many bugs. But it was nearly 11:00 at this point, so I set up the tent in the dark, and somehow was able to keep it out of the bug-radar until I was snugly inside with the screen zipped up and my sleeping bag snuggly around my neck.

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.