Friday, November 30th, 2007
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…