road trip
i joined up with my bus to start my loop around the north island on wednesday morning, and found myself in a transit van with three female passengers, including, unbelievably, two swiss germans, my crazy maori driver nancy, and her best mate, unconverted essex girl anna. the atmosphere was thick with oestregen, so i hid on the back seat and caught up on some sleep. we arrived in hahei, on the coromandel coast, to grey skies and murky drizzle, the worst possible weather for a beachside location. still, it cleared sporadically, and the beach and limestone formations were pretty enough, though not particularly exciting.
i really bonded with nancy and anna: although nancy is our driver, she is basically treating this as a xmas road trip for her and her mate. for this to work out she need equally slack passengers, who don't mind hungover late departures and missed stops: unfortunately, she hadn't counted on the swiss. the swiss germans are a complex people, ranging from utterly, heart stoppingly, loveable, to downright cold and unfriendly. while daniella (see you in zurich for a jogurt!) is verging towards the latter, fabienne is as anal as they come, and with some swift teutonic chat has got daniella on board too. cue numerous clashes with nancy, who wanted to take it easy, and fabienne, who wanted to get everything that she paid for.
i actually have a fair amount of sympathy for fabienne's perspective, and at the beginning of my trip nancy's slackness would have driven me to distraction too. but nz has been so uninspiring for me, and left me so deflated and unmotivated, i'm pretty much just cruising through now, enjoying meeting people and having a few beers, but barely registering my surroundings. it's the complete antithesis to my normal travel ideology: normally i have my nose in my lonely planet, and am bounding excitedly from place to place. but i just think this place is such a fucking scam, and so mediocre in so many ways, that i can't lift myself out of my disinterested malaise, so am travelling in the way that i used to, no still do, hate seeing other people do it. what a waste of a month, both time and money wise.
sadly fabienne is not as weary as me yet, so the niggling arguments have continued, much to my amusement. we spent the next night in raglan, a surf beach (sea, sand, same same), and i have now arrived in rotorua for christmas. it is absolutely deserted, but i can live with that: i want new years to go off big, but i'd quite like a xmas of quiet introspection.
the irony of it all
four months in rickety old buses and asian dirt tracks, no problems at all: two weeks in new zealand, in a shiny new bus on the flat, tarmac, state highway one between wellington and auckland, the main road in this developed country, and we're stuck by a roadside for three hours. hilarious.
wellington rocks!
i arrived in wellington in the late afternoon on sunday and immediately took a liking to the place: it has a lot of cafes and galleries dotting the streets, and just looks like a good place to exist for a few days. it really hasn't let me down, although my japes have been aided by the fact that i met some lovely people on the bus from kaikoura (nuff love paul, and tinika and anneka... crazy names, crazy dutch!)
i've always wanted to try rock climbing ,and i knew there was a big indoor wall in wellington, so, having bullied paul into coming with me, we trundled off there on monday morning. in typical kiwi fashion (no liability for personal injury is a great thing for these guys) we got a sparse five minute explanation on how to use the harnesses, and we were off. i am absolutely hooked, it is the best fun you can have with your clothes on... i haven't tried it without yet, you'd probably get some nasty scrapes. it was just so good to actually be doing something active again, and not being bled dry for it: as this isn't really a tourist thing, it was $10 for as long as you want, and we were in there for over four hours. we went to the national museum in the afternoon (also free! can the people in charge here please spread the word to the rest of the country), and while the maori stuff was very interesting we could only manage an hour before having to have a restorative cup of tea.
we relocated the girls and all cooked dinner together that night: fajitas, with a three litre box of wine (captain classy) on the side. it doesn't take a genius to predict what happened, and at 3am everything had got a bit out of hand. the japes were verging on jolly.
i woke up in the morning feeling surprisingly good, and ran into a couple of welsh girls that i'd met earlier in kaikoura: it wasn't long before they had been wrangled into coming to the climbing wall with us. zoe and lai ping (barbara to her friends) are so, so safe, got as enthusuiastic about the whole thing as us, and we were climbing from midday to half seven. it was just so good, although i did almost kill zoe near the end, and my forearms are absolutely shot. we were wise to leave when we did though, my confidence was getting too high and i'd just got a slapped wrist for a cheeky free (no harness) climb. i feel like an idiot for not having tried climbing before, and already have a few more climbing walls sorted out for a some of the other cities coming up.
have to leave tomorrow, and i'm quite gutted... wellington has been the best city here by a mile, definitely a place with the elusive location personality i keep going on about. we're meeting the guy who works at the climbing wall for a drink now: he is really sound and had to deal with our incompetence for hours, so is definitely deserving of a pint.
