Category: Travel

Cold From Above, Hot From Below

OMG WHAT A LONG DAY! Literally did so much stuff today is hard to think it’s all happened in one 24hr period!

Woke at Sally’s in Auckland and finally, after 3 days of talking about it, the weather was good enough to go paddle boarding… Good enough, but not great as it started raining. But I was wet anyway from falling in often enough it didn’t matter. We probably were only out for 45 mins but it was long enough for my stomach. I’m definitely a land based mammal… Paddle boarding was good fun tho, if a little tricky to master. I was on the longest, largest, most stable board and I still looked like a kangaroo on an electric fence, not graceful like Sally and Asha.

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Recovery Road

Last night was awesome, but I’m paying for it this morning. After breakfast, a lot of water and an aspirin I’m feeling better. I decide to go for a walk into Paihia to see what was going on. Turns out not much, it’s a really small town. However most of the tours and activities leave from here into the Bay of Islands. There is even a helicopter parked on the beach waiting to take people for rides!

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Paihia Party

Out of auckland, if you want to head north, you take the State Highway 1. It’s really the only road to get you clear of the sprawl and is much like any other highway. But soon this generic road turns into a (moderately) high speed roller coaster of a road. Its sweeping curves loop around the geological features and farms. It looks uncannily like middle england except as a dream your remembering where everything is picture post card pretty and the roads ripple like a ribbon into the distance. It even lead to Snells Beach in my fantasy.

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Strolling Through Sky Town

I like to learn the history of a place, but I’m not a fan of guided tours. Not so much the tour, but having to share street space with a group of tourists. I find it incredibly annoying and rude watching a group of people all taking the same photo, that you could have found on google, while a guide is trying to tell you the history of a place. People who basically walk around with their cameras in front of their faces documenting EVERYTHING aren’t actually experiencing anything more than life through a camera screen, so they may as well have stayed at home!

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Bathroom Plans

As a bloke, it’s an unwritten rule that you don’t talk to each other while in the bathroom. No one wants to be addressed whilst holding their junk. And for good reason, the automatic response is to turn and face your new friend, which you wouldn’t keep very long if you were mid flow…

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Hooternannys

We had chosen to stop at a caravan park last night because we thought it prudent to shower before meeting our friend for a night out. After 4 nights wild camping with only a brief dip in the ocean to quell the growing stench, we could not have chosen a better place. The campsite facilities were amazing with actually hot, powerful showers and decent washing up facilities.

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Ice Bath

There is a joke in England that throughout the ages, after all the clan wars were done, the political arguments settled and the bar brawls ended, the border to Scotland is actually demarcated by the sudden absence of the midge. A vampiric little blighter that serves no other purpose than to make the inhabitants of Scotland want to peel off their skin for the itching. Luckily, up to this point we have avoided them. However I think this morning they had a meeting and realised they had let us slip past so converged on us in mass at sunrise. Buzzing around the van, there was a midge cloud so thick you could have described it as midge soup. Instead we chose to drive away and fix breakfast somewhere less dangerous for our skins. They must have been so annoyed not to even get a taste of our exotic southern blood.

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#VanLife

Grey misty weather greeted us, like a fluffy throw that’s been left in the summer house after a rain shower. It was dank but still comforting as the warmth of the sunshine attempted to start the day. In the words of a young boy from skye, “What makes a great view – distance”. The clouds smothered any hope of a view from the top of Old Man of Stowr and as beautiful the coastline is, there was no distance to be had this morning.

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