The more I re-read my journal from the last time I was in New Zealand the more I look forward to our next trip. I'm sure, Ninja, the rottweiler, will love living here while we are gone too!
Sooo wavy flashback lines as we travel back to 2003...
Somewhere over the
Rainbow
Dorothy traveled "somewhere over the
rainbow" to get to Oz and at the end of April 2003 I think I found the
Rainbow. Well, the Rainbow Warrior to be
precise. It was a choppy day and the
boat trip out was two hours long.
Arriving at the dive site, shaken but not stirred, we donned our wet-suits and hit the water. It was a
cool nineteen degrees Celsius which was a whole ten or so degrees colder than
what I’d been used to in Cairns. So when
I jumped in, one of the first to do so, I squealed so much from the shock of
the "cold" water that I scared the other divers.
The wreck was twenty-four meters down, and it was
beautiful. Covered in jewel anemones
which were literally every color of the rainbow, this was one Warrior still
fighting to be a Rainbow. We went into
one of the cabins, briefly, because I was a bit of a scary cat at this point. There
were hundreds of nocturnal fish hanging out waiting for the sun to go
down. It was a bit freaky because it was
dark and there were so many. They were like the marine versions of
bats/vampires. Perhaps I was narked. I spent longer than I really should have
down there and got back on the ship with only ten bars in my tank. It was just too hard to leave. I hadn't really been that into diving wrecks
before but I think this may have converted me somewhat, though I still find it
a bit creepy and ghoulish. It’s like
walking around graveyards.
We arrived back to Auckland that night where we visited the sky
tower and then ended up in the casino bar.
I don’t know how that happened.
We were sitting for a while watching all the people gambling and I was
just saying to Fiona, "Where the hell do all these people get money to
literally throw away?" and then in the next breath I found myself saying,
"Let's put twenty dollars in each and play till it’s gone". So that's how all these people must do
it. Seeing as how I taught Fiona how to
kayak, she decided to teach me how to play Black Jack. It was a fair trade. To cut a long story short, we lost all our
money, but as Fiona pointed out, it took us an hour to lose it.
We traveled south from Auckland on the Kiwi
Experience. It was an early start, as
usual. This adventuring lark was hard work.
We stopped at a beach called Hot Water Beach, where we
were told you simply dig up the sand to find hot springs underneath, so you get
your own hot pools. At the start, we
weren’t having much luck. About ten of us dug around randomly, sticking a foot
in the hole to see if it was hot. The
beach looks as though it had been attacked by giant prairie dogs. However, there were actually only two hot
springs. The power of advertising had
led us to believe these things simply covered the beach, but it was fun and a
good opportunity to get chatting to the rest of the folk on the bus, about
twenty-five people in total.
Fantastic scenery surrounded us all the way. Unfortunately,
the weather turned so we couldn't go kayaking in Cathedral Cove. It was said to be "some of the best
kayaking on the planet" quoted from the same book that told us about Hot Water
Beach.
We had begun to realize that we simply couldn't do
everything, and there was so much to do here that we had to make difficult
choices. We were given the option of
carving a bone pendant in traditional Maori style, but I decided to be boring
and went to the hairdresser – backpackers
are people too you know! Afterwards, all gorgeous, of course, I met Fiona in
the pub where we ate a mountain of green-lipped mussels for the equivalent of
three quid each.
Again we were up early the next day and we all
grumbled in a good-natured way getting on the bus. We were all getting to know one another and
the group was good craic even if a little young – nineteen to twenty-three year-olds. I felt a bit like the aunty on the bus.
The driver told us about each town that we would be going to as we drove
along and every time he mentioned Taupo my heart missed a beat. That was where we planned to skydive. It was weather dependent, but it was now
striking fear into my heart. I'd run out of excuses as to why I hadn't already
done a sky dive, except for the obvious one – That jumping out of perfectly
good plane twelve thousand feet in the air was just plain nuts. It looked like I was going to be doing it,
and soon. We were due to arrive in Taupo
the next day.
For the moment, I was content to soak in some more hot
springs and maybe treat myself to a massage.
Thinking about skydiving was just so stressful. Fiona often said, "Don't sweat the small
stuff.” So did that mean it was time to
start sweating?
What a nail-biting time we had trying to get our
skydive fitted in. We stopped in Taupo,
booked it and waited for our lift the first afternoon. It was so nerve-racking, that I hadn't been
able to eat all day. As soon as our
driver came to collect us telling us that it was cancelled, hunger crashed down upon us,
and we went for another feed of green-lipped mussels.
The next afternoon, we were brought out to the airport
and shown the video. Personally I think that
this was cruel as it only served to heighten our anxiety. I preferred the idea of going about the
skydive BA Baracus - style, (ref: the A Team) whereby I get knocked unconscious
until the bit where I am shoved out of the plane by my tandem buddy.
We were told we had ten minutes to go, and Fiona and I
set up a relay race back and forth to the toilets. Then, just as we were about to get into the
lovely red "Jump" suits the sky clouded over and the jump was
cancelled. After we had our
complimentary muffins to abate the whoosh of starvation that engulfed us, we
were brought back to our hostel and we retired early to bed under the
conviction that our rescheduled jump at seven
thirty am would be third time lucky.
At seven am
I rang the skydive center. The weather was awful
and the skydive was cancelled, so we had a big fry-up for breakfast.
Later on, back on the Kiwi Bus, we traveled down to
Wellington for an overnight stop and then on to the ferry for the trip to the
South Island. Our bus had been whittled
down to a core group of eight of us who got on very well together. Whilst on the three-hour-long ferry trip we
devised a great game. Sarah, a crazy nineteen-year-old
American girl, had a digital camera. She would set off and take a photo of some
random punter on the boat, then come back and show us the picture. We seven had to split up and see who could
find him in the shortest time. It was
hilarious. We also had a breath choking
moment when one of the guys, Steve, wanted to know where exactly in the South
Island Mordor was? He thought it was a
real place. But he did add he wasn't
expecting there to be a big ring of fire over the mountain as in the
movie. Hours later we stopped laughing.
In Nelson, we picked up a full bus, and made lots more
new pals. This included two other Irish
guys one from Monaghan, Seamus, and the other from Dublin, Ian.
The bus was quite entertained, and baffled, by the constant slagging we gave
each other – all in good humour.
We stopped at a beautiful coastal national park called
Able Tasman and I went on a kayak trip.
Unfortunately, I managed to land myself with the only
"unpleasant" person on our bus, a rather sour English girl who really
did not appreciate my navigation skills.
Okay, so I went the wrong way. It was a fifty-fifty chance. Anyway, despite the obvious sour milk which,
I couldn't detect, but which must have been floating around if my humorless
Kayak buddy's face was anything to go by, it was a beautiful kayak trip. Lots of big rock formations and interesting
little islands, and some submerged rocks, which must have been where the milk
was spilled, perhaps by another boat that had previously grounded on them, just
as we had.
But my personal highlight for this section was the
Horse Riding. Fiona was going horse
riding. If Fiona was going to jump out of a plane, then so was I. Thus it
followed that despite an allergy to horses, I was going horse riding too. Tanked up on anti-histamine, we set off in
our welly-boots looking suitably “horsey-set” to find our mounts. Fiona's horse was a rather grumpy black mare
called Lady who kicked any other horse that got too close, much to Fiona's
horror. My horse was a frisky little mare
called Pixie. She liked to eat grass all
the time but we soon learned who was boss.
She was. So we got grass reins to
stop her guzzling and off we went.
Even before I’d gotten on the horse, I was surprised
at how scared I was of them. They were
very big and tended to look down their noses at me. This more due to their anatomy than their
attitude, but it still unnerved me. I
was not comforted by the guide's advice to calm down once I was on Pixie
because “...horses can tell if you are nervous...” I guess it was those shaking knees at her
shoulders that gave it away.
Pixie and I came to a tentative agreement. She could go whatever way she wanted so long
as it she followed the other horses. The
best bit was having a go at cantering. We
started by learning to trot. I found it
a very bumpy and ungainly form of transport. The next stage, actually cantering,
was more of a rocking motion. It brought
me back to my old rocking horse. We’d
had the best rocking horse a kid could ever want, and as a child I’d traveled
all across the plains of North America with my rocking horse and my
imagination. Now, I was approximating
that for real. It was a wonderful
feeling.
The following day we went to Franz Joseph. This was another skydive venue up in the
mountains with spectacular glaciers. So,
as we were staying for two nights, Fiona and I put our names down for the Heli-Hike on the glacier and the sky dive.
Guess what – the sky dive was cancelled.
The Heli-Hike involved a trip in a helicopter on to the glacier and a
two-hour hike with some ice climbing and exploring ice caves too. We couldn't wait. Alas, that morning it too was cancelled. Fiona threatened that if she did not get to
do her skydive in New Zealand, she was going to jump out of the Air New Zealand
plane on the way to Australia.
At this stage serendipity called. We decided to walk the five mile round trip
to the glacier to have a look. Well, I
hate walking, so the plan changed to hitch hiking and as there were two of us,
we felt safe. We got a lift in a ‘64
Daimler driven by a ZZ top reject who was really nice. We had a look at the glacier. The up-side to having our booking for the
helicopter cancelled due to rain was that we were treated to the most stunning
rainbows across the glacier. You simply
can't pre-book a rainbow.
The scenery was heart-achingly beautiful. I wished I
was spending more time here.
We decided to hitch hike back to the hostel and two
English girls stopped to give us a lift.
They mentioned they were going to the Glacier in the next valley and we
asked could we go too. It was even more
beautiful and the four of us had a great day together. They were teachers on a career break
too. We planned to meet up with them in
Wanaka the next night. That’s where we
would make our fifth attempt at a sky dive or Fiona was going to be requesting
the emergency exit on her flight to Australia!
