Thingomy.co.uk

In order to delay things such that I would arrive in the right place in the right time (or so I thought) I took the excursion to the east coast with Kiwi Ex known as “East As”; anyone that knows anything about kiwi culture will understand the pisstake there.

Anyway, it left from toupo, and backtracked to to Routorua, and proceded to stop at the same hostel as I was at a few days before to pick up/drop off, then headed on up toward the edge of nowhere known as the east cape.

We were informed that the bloke we were staying with for the first night was a somewhat interesting character, and that we would be required to sing a song after dinner. The whole group of 11(including the “driver guide”) was getting on pretty good by this stage. One perticularly dirty indevidual who looked all sweet and innocent and was actually a primary school teacher from England (but is younger than me … I feel old) produced the following adaption to jingle bells (don’t read it if you are of a sensitive nature):

Anyway, the place was fantastic, smelled a little fishy, mainly because he catches and processes his own fish. It was a gunuine familly home with converted shed full of beds. The cat came in and ended up sleeping on the bottom of somones bed too.

There was a hot tub about 30 feet from the ocien, before tea we took a swim (in the ocien that is).

After a home cooked meal with fish (snapper), roast chicken, vegi stuff, and a bunch of side stuff, we started a mass singing session, involving a bunch of slightly burchered versions of old songs, sufice to say, little of it was clean.

Next day we drove up the coast a little, and ended up at the east cape lighthouse. Now the problem with this perticular lightohouse is that it’s at the top of 700 steps… after a long hard climb, the following were taken:

a quick hop round the hill and we ended up here:

it’s a working farm with a really irate farmer, but the acomodation is good, and the activities were fantastic: horse riding, through the surf, then up to the top of a hill, there were some fantastic views, and a few sore arses.

afterwards we did bone carving — tradiionally this would have been whale bone, but the back leg of a supermarket cow sufficed. We used traditional mouri dremils to carve the shape we had selected out of ancient glossy catalogs… while the tools wern’t old, the idea was, and I’m atually really proud of the result, i had a good bit of help, but a lot of the work was mine. the bloke that was advising us on how to do it made me a little nervous, he kept givign me the “you’re a natural”, “I think we’ve descovered the hidden artist in you” and “you could be doing this for a living” it was either exageration or sarcasm, and to this day I don’t know which. Though I suspect the reason that I was the only one getting it was that i was asking more questions than everyone else “ok, you want me to work that bit down… what angle? how far? what shape should it be when it’s finished? How should I hold on to it to keep it still?” this came across as me looking insecure, when it was actually just me being an engineer, and if you look at those questions, I fail to understand how anyone else managed.

Our lovelly driver/guide took it upon herself (with a GBP3 donation each of us) to cook us a meal because there wasn’t anything better available. (the next group were left to fend for themselves while thier driver had a cuppa-soup, he wasn’t much of a guide).

The next day we headed down the coast and were introduced to a 666 meter long wharf we were told that unless we jumped off the end of it we wern’t getting on the bus again. I took the sensible route and jumped from 3 feet up the ladder, it was still bloody cold.

We arrived in a small place outside a town called Gisborne. again a lovelly place, I will be doing my best to go back on the way north.We collected wesuites and then drove for another while before we got to what is known as a Rockslide. I think I mentioned this in a previus post, suffice to say it was nuts, here are some images:

The next 2 days were filled with surfing and Ray feeding — it was a good laugh though. There are no photos of surfing due to water issues, I was planning to sty dry the 3rd day and take pics, but the weather killed it.

The group really was fantastic, I suspect I have some long term friends out of them. At 2 diferent stages I left my camera with some of them and this is the result:

Further images of random stuff are given below

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 0222 and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.