Thingomy.co.uk

I wrote this a few days ago but it never quite made it to the net until now:

If you don’t do tech ignore the next paragraph.

I’m currently having some considerable data storage issues, along with really expensive internet (at about £1.50 an hour) I have decided that I no longer trust my Chinese import eBay special hard disk gadgit, so i’m currently trying to work out how I can use dvds to take a backup of everything. This post is being writing on a random (really helpful) blokes laptop that i’m borrowing for the day (i have to save it onto a pen drive, then copy and paste it into the browser of one of the web cafe machines). And you may have noticed from the dodgy word wrap that notepad sucks goats.

I’m staying for 3 nights in Rotorua. this is an interesting town, I’ve been for 2 nights so far, yesterday i decided to have a day off following my busy time with buses and kayaks. The Kiwi experience thing the tour company I’m with. Is really cool, however it’s a really hectic tour. they have a loop that takes about a month to complete, and they have a bus pretty much every day. It’s marketed as hop-on-hop-off, it is however not like that when you get there, they assume you will be going all the way without stopping, and to change that, you have to ask the driver to give you back your ticket, buy a phone card, then phone base yourself, make the booking, then meet up with the next bus, and god help you if you decide to stay at another hostel. to put things into perspective, if you do things their way and do all of the activities, on the first day, you go sea kayaking, the second day you have blisters, the third day you go black water rafting, and by the 5th day you have stayed in 4 separate hostels. I’m going at about half speed, and i’ve already had to take a day completely off, at the second stop.

As for the day off: I slept til lunch time, went to the shop for breakfast, then spent 4 hours in the pool (outdoor, geothermicly heated) before taking a really long shower, frying up some sausages, watching a film and going to bed.

There is a second problem with Kiwi Experience; I didn’t notice this myself, but it is definitly there now that somone else pointed it out to me. they seem to be a little (this isn’t really the right word, but i don’t know a better one) corrupt. They seem to be doing the hard sell thing for the activities that they want you to go on, and using the fact that we trust them to shoot down the activities they don’t want us on. as for why, i have yet to work this out, but i do know that the drivers are pretty good friends with the management of most of the places that the go; we stopped a bakery yesterday, and the bus emptied into it, once the rush was over the bos came out to the bus and spoke to the driver, offered her a coffee, asked if she wanted anythign else, and referred to her by name. now this doesn’t seem that unusual, untill you think that the drivers only get to each town once per *month*. I don’t really know that there is anything fishy going on, but something smells political.

As for the “driver guides”, they seem really professional and all, but they then speak down the bus tannoy asking for numbers for accommodation, then hand back a clipboard for people to sign up on. Once the sheet gets back to them, the proceed to count the names, phone the hostel via a mobile phone and headset, debate with the hostel staff about how many people are in what type of room, and add up when they will get there and have a quick unrelated side conversation about the weather. This all seems fine until you take into account that they are holding the clipboard in one hand and steering with the other.

I mentioned Black water rafting above, I shall be doing this in the next couple of days if all goes well, I won’t spoil the surprise other than to say it involves a wetsuit, a rubber ring, a cave, 5 hours and glow worms.

The reasons for this holiday is 2 fold: 1) to see the world (clearly working); 2) and to work out what I want to do with my life. the first step to working out what I want to do with my life is to learn about myself, and this is happening better than I could have imagined, I am learning things about me that I didn’t know I could; I don’t even know why, it must just be the fact that I am completely away from normal life. The only thing that sucks slightly is that the normal mechanisms I have for clarifying these thoughts, and the normal people I have to speak over these things with, are not present, so I don’t feel I’m getting as much good as I could be of my time here.

On to routine stuff, I could use an update on how everyone is doing — send me an email with how life is treating you.

On a side note, how is everyone finding the blog posts? Some of them are very rushed, and there is a large void where the photos should be, aside from these known issues, is there anything I can do to improve things? There may be a possible way that I could set things up such that I can tag the posts with tags such as “has photos” or “detailed post” and people can selectively sign up to be notified only of the posts they want. There are many other things that can be done if anyone wants it, I’m open to suggestions. In terms of the people viewing through live journal (you know who you are) LJ is getting as few posts right now I imagine you want as many that are vuagly interesting as you can get, if you are getting bored, I can only suggest removing me from your default view as that’s really outwith my control, again I’m open to suggestions though.

I had a report that there were some issues with the image zooming on some browsers refusing to display properly on some browsers, who’s experiencing this, what des it look like, and what browser are you using?

So anyway, yesterday was fairly quiet, we stopped to see a reasonably interesting waterfall, that was about the most excitement there. I’m now in Toupo (as in the large town next to the lake of the same name) I decided at the last minute to change plans and stay for 3 days before heading east, so I have a bit of time to kill here, but that won’t be a problem.

The day before yesterday however was the most surreal experience I’ve had in a long time.

We got to a small town village called Waitomo, on entering the village we immediately pulled in next to a small shed with a large sign on the front saying “angora rabbits sheared daily”, before I know what was going on, I was standing in a room watching someone with sheep shearing gear sorting out a 12Lb rabbit.

2 hours later I was getting ready for black water rafting.

There was a group of 9 of us, with 2 guides. They got us kitted up with wetsuits, climbing gear and helmets, shooved us in the back of a minibus, and drove us to a small hole in the ground.

They had us abseil down said hole 36 meters to a platform below. We were ten attached to a zipline and dropped further into the cave (in the black dark might I add).

After hot drinks they issued us with rubber rings and got us to jump of a 10 foot cliff into water, in such a fashion that we landed in the rings. now for tis part I had to take of my glasses, I also forgot to switch on my light, to top everything off, I had my eyes closed. Now it doesn’t matter what you do , if you land in 11 degree water from 10 feet up, it goes everywhere, the ring is really effective at making slowing you down, but it’s also really good at making a really huge splash. Suffice to say, I got water in places I didn’t know I had. And back to the 11 degree water thing, it’s sodding cold. Wetsuits are really good at keeping you warm, but they work by keeping a small amount of water near your skin which your body can effective heat up. When you first enter the water how ever, it all gushes in so fast it’s not funny.

So we bimbled around remarkably still water in rubber rings for a wile, and admired the millions of glowworms down there — which are actually quite mingin things, and really are not very polite, it’s actually their shit that glow for a start…

The end of the trip involved some basic caving, and clibing up water falls and the such, quite fun.

It was a fantastic experience, I’d recommend it to anyone, I’m not sure if I’d do it again, but certainly worth it once.

On a side note, appologies for te extra special spelling in this post, but i’m in a lousy webcafe, and some of thhe keys on te keyboard aree sticky, I’m rying not to think about why…

I spotted an opertunity today to do somthing I never done despite having loads of opertunities (ish — long story).

I went on a sea kayaking trip.

I’m currently in a place called Mercury Bay (so named not for heavy metal polution, but because some explorer, Cook I believe witnessed the transit of the plannet Mercury here)

For UK#25 I took a 2 minute ferry crossing to the other side of the inlet, got picked up by a car and drove 20 minutes down the road.

There was a group 9 of us on the trip, with 2 guides, they got us all kitted up and we pushed off into surf, and managed to get out through it without getting too wet. we took a 3 hour paddle down the coast, and pulled in at Cathedral Cove (pictures later) the site of the most photographed rock in NZ.

The guides then produced from the back of one of thier kayaks capachino making gear and took drink orders.

After a brief intermission and a load of group phototaking fun we headed back out though the surf and proceded to punch through a bunch of surf and got a littel damp.

The whole thing was really cool and lasted about 3 hours.

I also met some really interesting people, including one that was wearing a kitty collar (hehe, long story)

Anyway, having real trouble concentrating as there is a TV in the room.

Yesterday I went up the above.

I took many photos, but I have no way to process them with the software i have here, so can’t show them. I hope to sort this when i get to computer equipment soon, but it may not be possible.

On a side note — Kiwis have really good taiste in music. The radio stations play song after song of the best of what we have at home with none of the shitty screechy stuff that 13 year old girls listen to.

I went to the MoTaT transport museum today. fantastic place — huge, 19 Hectares, although large parts of that didn’t really have much to do with anything.

I saw a bunch of real steam engines working, and had a good long chat to the bloke running them. they have a large pump house that used to be involved in pumping water for Auckland on site, and are in the middle of restoring it’s engine, and it’s huge.

it was well worth the UK#2.50 that I payed to get in as a student.

I also bought a may of NZ today, Auckland is really complicated with inlets everywhere.

Having escaped form both alcatraz and the shitehold that is LA, I boarded a 747 and zipped across the pacific.

This hostel has skype, vacilities, so if anyone wats a call, say so.

LA airport is also a dump BTW, a few duty free shops selling the usual suspects, and one or 2 food places, many newspaper shops, but edinburgh’s shopping is streets ahead. The fact they are in the middle of major refurb work doesn’t help things either.

I got completelly turned around over timezones and things, added to that the air hostesses woke us up at 4:30 local time to give us a breakfast. when i say turned around, I don’t mean jetlag, I mean really confused.

I got some post cards sorted out in the US, then forgot to post the buggers, so i have 2 postcards with us stamps on them, in NZ. I’m tempted to post them in order to see a confused looking postman.

America was certainly worth doing. If I do it again, there will be a longer amtrak session, likelly a 30 day pass, and i will be organising ot meet people on it, not at thier place.

In other news I’ve just found that myblog doesn’t render properly in IE6, which is slightly amusing.

– only photgraphy giberish to follow–
I found a load a small photography shops in sanfran, and managed to score a genuine Kenko 2x TC (wibbly cammera bit) for about half the price it should have been. I was taken a back when I said “I’ll think about it” and he started haggling with me, I wasn’t really trying very hard as I really niether needed it nor perticularly wanted it. I paid just over 50 quid for it.

I found some real junk with sales pitch in other places, wide angle adaptors — “what is vignetting? … oh yes of course you get the fish eye effect. To get rid of that all you have to do is zoom in a little. he tried ot add an 82mm uv filter for free too, and you know what that does on a “10mm” lens. I didn’t even check for CA, but I imagine it would have been dire. the distortion certainly was.

San fran was good, saw alcatraz, did the cable car thing, then hopped on the train down the coast, worked really well with driving up the coast, only it was much quicker.

In 8 hours I fly to Aukland

Nothing else much going on here.

Not much time…

I hitched a lift up highway 1 with a bloke (and a friend of his) that I met on the train to Grand Junction, (and the one to Denver), and then met again randomly in LA…

The coast was fantastic, reminded be of the trip to sumburgh, but much higher.

Taking 2 days and 3 nights here before taking the train back down the coast (which i got free due to the derailment incident)

Managed to get a cold so have been feeling crappy for the last couple of nights.

Alcatraz tomorrow.

Right, got to go

I took the weekend in Austin. It was a slightly odd setup in that there was a bunch of about 8 of us (I lost count though…) going to help somone move house.

While there I saw a film, Across the Universe. It was odd, and is certainly not my normal type of film, but it was certainly worth seeing. My policy on these things is to (within reason) try anything once.

We stopped by a place called Coopers BBQ for lunch and found a really odd setup, it was however the best beef I have ever taisted, by a huge margine — it’s dificult ot put inot words, but i have never seen anything like it before.

Photos wern’t tremendiusly abundent because driving down a road for 3 hours really only yields a handfull of shots, but I did take one snap that I think summs up america perfectly, I’m really proud of it.

The party was a good laugh, but there wern’t enough people there to put across the atmosphere in photos, and really a few people sitting on chairs surrounded by boxes doesn’t really come out well at all.

From Sacramento I boarded the no 6 train to Grand Junction in Colorado. There were a bunch of people on the train from the rail museum that were staying on as for a Reno to give commentary on the building of the rail network in the area (the Sierra Nevada mountains). There was some very interesting stuff; they gave regular height checks. They mentioned one situation in which there was significant problems getting the line through because of a very steep drop, the line had to take a tunnel through into the next valley and make a dogs leg the wrong way up it.

The scenery was utterly fantastic; we had no derailments, and were pretty much on time throughout. This trip was the best part of a day and a half, including the night in between, now the seats on these trains are good, but not that good, they recline a good way, but not far enough that you can actually lye down on them, so sleep was problematic and on waking up we were approaching the foot hills of the Rockies. Taking pictures while having to hold one eye open is a problem.

On the way into Grand Junction (which is the meeting place of the Colorado and some other river) I got speaking to a couple of guys from there. One of them asked me if I was going to see the monument. Now I’d heard that this place existed, but had no idea what it was, I know it was about 3 miles out of town though, and had no interest in trapsing 6 miles to see some statue with a name tag under it. I was informed that it certainly was worth seeing, and one of the blokes immediately started phoning people to see if anyone would be able to get me a lift out there.

To cut a long story short, for a small fee (most of which was for gas) a very nice friend of his gave me a 4 hour tour of all the interesting bits to see. He also explained to me that the monument was actually a “monument built by god” – turns out that the thing is a sodding mountain. In those 4 hours I took somewhere in the order of 500 pics and we drove about 30 miles.

Back on the train fro a quick 8 hour stint into Denver. The Rockies were pretty cool, the train follows the upper reaches of the Colorado River (that’s the one that made the grand canyon, and stretches from the middle of the continent to Mexico) seemingly it’s the only passable route through the area, because the interstate runs at the other side of the river for most of it.

At the top there is a piece of countryside that is just too impassable to get over, it’s known as the continental divide, all the water that lands on the west ends up in the pacific, all that lands on the east end in the Atlantic so there is no significant water running past it to smooth it out. They put a tunnel under it, a tunnel that never gets fully cleared out of diesel fumes, so we couldn’t move between carriages in there; 11 miles springs to mind.

We had an hour stop at a small ski resort near the top, there were some line repairs going on ahead. There was a rumor that there was a small pub round the corner, so half the train emptied down the road.

Denver was ok, I went to the natural history museum, including an IMAX screen which frankly sucked, it flickered constantly and it’s content was seemingly made for the sole purpose of visual impressiveness. Their planetarium on the other hand was a really cool big cinema style room with the whole ceiling covered in a curved screen with a load of digital projectors, again the content was geared toward visual impressiveness, but at least it had some decent content.

I was amused to find the there was a viewing gallery at the top of the museum, an open air balcony type affair with a really good view of the city, with good sight lines of parts of downtown. I won’t have the pics of that till I get back to the uk due to technical reasons (I shot it all in raw). The amusing part is that it was dedicated to the Anschutz family.

The rest of Denver was frankly an average city, not much to say. The only interesting thing about it is that it’s a mile above sea level. The humidity was something horrific, being so far inland Denver is really dry, it gave me a blocked nose and minor nose bleeds most of the time I was there, very unpleasant.

All in all I was really impressed with the train journey, and have got a $66 voucher to use with them again as a refund for the bit with the derailment, the food was pretty good and net excessively priced, given that it had a fully watered service and was on a train. I can especially recomend the mississippi mud cake, it’s the best I’ve ever seen.

I assume yall know that if you click on an image it gets bigger, then (on my real site) if you click on the right side of the image it brings up the next one?

Right – this is going to have to be done in installments at there is a lot to say. I had trouble accessing affordable Internet while I was on my northern excursion, so now that I’m back in Texas I’m going to have to update on everything.

The last decent post I made was on Seattle. The last morning in Seattle was interesting. I managed to sniff out an opportunity for some fantastic scenery in the form of the *Columbia building* http://www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=columbiacenter-seattle-wa-usa in Seattle. There is an obs’ deck near the top, with a $5 entry fee, well worth it though. On walking up to the window you take a sudden step back as it is so high, one of the folks in the hostel had a photo looking down on a helicopter. I proceeded to take a panoramic photo of the whole view; the weather was a little murky, but it was still well worth it.

I then made a B-line for the train as it started to rain, to end up with it was dripping off my nose. The train left 2 hours late due to a fault in a carriage that had to be replaced. Once we got going all was well I saw some really cool scenery.

This was a 22ish hour trip, at about 5pm, an hour south of Portland, Origon, we stopped, trains regularly do these things, we assumed that we were waiting at a red signal, or something other basic like that, a few minutes later there was an announcement over the PA: “Ah folks… we’re having some major technical issues with the locomotives here, we’re going to be a while”. Now you know that something is far from right when they say something like that, they normally play down any issues they are having.

From about 6pm til about 10pm we were sitting there with the lights off (due to the lack of a connected locomotive), no air-con, no toilets, and some glow sticks to light the place.

We eventually got into Sacramento, Ca 9 hours late. Not impressed.

On the upside the entire train carriage started speaking to each other, and I met a load of people that I wouldn’t have otherwise, and I got to see the north Calafornia scenery during the day.

On arrival in Sacramento (1515 rather than 0615) I went to the hostel and found a most incredible place, the Sacramento International Hostel. It was a former mansion. It is directly opposite City Hall, ad is about 4 blocks from the main mall.

I had a look around the town, but found that it’s not a very useful place to be in the evening as everything closed really early, including the rail museum, which is noted to be one of the best in the country; it closed 30 minutes before I found it.