A Final Epilogue…

Well it’s not really.  We’re not abroad nor are we on the verge of returning to the departure lounge of Heathrow.  I’m also reluctant to tediously describe the process of settling back into British life; I found tediously describing our experiences in New Zealand difficult enough, and that was something exotic and far-removed from Britain, or so it seemed to me this morning, when I looked down at my hands that were turning blue as I went for the briefest of runs.

I simply wished to promote the link below, a youtube video which is a collection of photos and videos from the duration of being away.  It’s quite cheesy but I think serves its purpose.  It’s quite hard to arrange 18 months of memories from 3 different countries and so what has made the cut appears on the link.  Despite the savage editing, it’s still rather long but it has a soundtrack to it so it requires limited attention, quite acceptedly background entertainment.  But put it this way, I shan’t hold my breath about receiving thousands of hits and the fewer I get, the less people have seen me in that fancy dress outfit as Nelson Mandela.

I shan’t tell you if that’s true or not. You’ll have to find out.

It’s not true.  It was Winnie Mandela.

Johnholtisnolongerabroad.wordpress.com

I chose “Johnholtabroad” as an all encompassing title aimed at reflecting all viewpoints, incidents, occurrences, opinions that happened or were held whilst I was “abroad” from the UK (that sentence is so obvious that I’m unsure that it’ll make the final edit – yes I do edit my writing, even though there is plenty of evidence to suggest the opposite).  Sitting in my old room in the Holt family house in Leeds, soon to resume a job in Birmingham, drains me of the motivation to write about overseas events, not to mention breaking the trades description act.  It is on this basis that by definition of the url address, the end is soon approaching for this blog.

Before I leave off, I feel I need to convey the confusing set of ambivalent emotions that I am currently enduring having returned to the UK, through the only fair means possible: a metaphorical penalty shoot-out.

So UK vs NZ, December 2012.

UK is currently in winter, NZ is in summer. UK 0:1 NZ

UK has central heating, NZ doesn’t and houses there are plagued with mould because they can be so damp and cold.  1:1

The sun rose yesterday about 8am and at midday was barely above about 30 degrees giving bugger all sunshine.  Plus drizzle and floods.  1:2

NZ had a tornado a few weeks back that killed a few people and has regular earthquakes.  2:2

NZ has mountain ranges, volcanoes and geothermal stuff which is far cooler than limestone.  2:3.

The population of NZ is only 4 million but is similar in size to the UK.  2:4.

With a smaller population, NZ has less of everything – choice of bars, restaurants etc, less historical places and no castles.  Larnarch Castle in Dunedin is a stately home, not a castle. 3:4

The kiwi people enjoy good coffee and aren’t limited to a choice between Costa and Starbucks. 3:5

The UK has decent ale, proper cask pulled pints.  4:5

The price of a pint in the UK is between 2 and 3 quid (outside of London) as opposed to 4 and 5 in NZ.  5:5

Into sudden death:

There’s a good atmosphere at sporting matches in the UK, both at grounds and in pubs, but it’s pretty dead at NZ fixtures. Even All Blacks games are pretty tame. 6:5

It only costs about 10 quid to see an NRL game and maybe 25 quid to see an international match – imagine that at Wembley. 6:6

Car insurance in NZ is really cheap (and optional) – as low as 50 quid for the year. 6:7

Pork products, including sausages and bacon are far superior in the UK.  7:7.

I walked to work in NZ, through a park and didn’t need to go near a motorway (although Emma did). 7:8

I was home by about 5pm most days and could even go fishing after work for a few hours.  7:9

New Zealand wins on penalties 7:9 on the decisive point that in Leeds and Birmingham I can’t guarantee being home by 5pm every weekday and it was a little tricky to go fishing in the sea after work, being about 150 miles from the coast.

As a post-script, I’d like to add that this is actually the 40th entry and as that number was about the same number of chapters that were in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens which I recently read, I feel quite comfortable about calling it a day.  17th months of writing down half-remembered, half-exaggerated, half-fabricated events (maths was never my strength) is more than I thought I would ever achieve, even though there were sometimes periods of 6 weeks or so between entries.

Thank you to all of those who have read and/or commented on any of the posts because if I’d not received encouragement nor banter (which is how I’d like to view some of the more abusive responses) I probably would have been less inclined to continue.  Additionally I apologise in advance to those who receive the Johnholtabroad collection of writing in paperback form, after I get this blog self-published and give away copies as birthday presents for the next few years.  Thank you for reading and all the best finding someone’s else’s blog to read.

Island Time

In different locations around the world, I’ve heard several synonyms to that of “Island Time”.  In Tanzania it was known as “Swahili Time”; in The Gambia it was simply “Gambian Time”; in India I’ve forgotten what it was known as (“Indian Time” is a little unimaginative) but it did exist, and out in Vanuatu it is “Island Time”.  No doubt there’s a “Peruvian Time”, a “Haitian Time” and maybe even an “Antarctic Time” but those 3 places I’m yet to visit.

For those lost as to what I’m referring to is that these phrases all represent a resistance to Western time efficiency.  In these places timetables are less common and if present rarely accurate, often to the frustration of the bureaucratically raised European who has been informed that the bus will leave at 10:38am, left waiting for a good length of time before a departure is imminent.  To be honest, the prevalence of this concept appears to suggest that having rigid schedules is perhaps the abnormal behavior here, not the other way around.

So Vanuatu operates on “Island Time” which has been frankly perfect for the last few days.  No sense of a rush; no urgency; no crises; no worries for the rest of your days, even though the local people haven’t heard of the phrase “Hakuna Matata”.  It’s been a consistent 28 degrees in the day (blissful) and an equally consistent 27 degrees at night (a restless night’s sleep with no air con).

I say “no crises” like everything has been plain sailing and of course this is inaccurate as there were both large and small scale issues to overcome.  The first was Cyclone Evan which was the worst storm to hit Samoa and Fiji in 20 years and was plodding along the pacific in a westerly direction but fortunately that wussed out in the colder southern waters.  Then we lost a day because Virgin Australia kindly delivered us to our transit point 6 hours late, meaning we missed the connection and arrived a day late in Port Vila.  By the time we had got to our luxury resort day 2 was pretty much over so we really had only days 3-5 to do stuff before flying out on day 6.

Before expressing your sympathies for such hardships suffered, that second “lost” day involved sipping cocktails and drinking beer in a pool that overlooked the resort’s private beach; having dinner at sunset and watching a perfect night’s sky emerge; and eating locally sourced crab piled up into an enormous portion.  So it’s just like being stuck in a Travellodge for the night.

As for activities, probably the highlight for me was going on a couple of dives.  It’s my new favourite hobby and frankly if you can swim and would snorkel if on holiday, you should do it.  I was firmly in the “yeah I would like to but it’s expensive and how often am I going to go diving after paying for the course?” camp but now I’ve firmly adopted the “even if I go twice more in my life – not just once mind – it’s been worth it” stance.  I did 2 dives: one along a coral reef in which I touched the shell of a 1m long green turtle, swam up to a few Nemo clown fish, and as well as pufferfish, which wasn’t as inflated as I’d be let to believe.  The second dive was a wreck dive around a ship that sank about 25 years ago (it wasn’t an 18^th century galleon unfortunately) but was just pretty amazing to swim through all the old rooms, and yes I did have a little Titanic moment perched on the end of the ship.

Other than that we took a drive round the island, went to a traditional Vanuatu village and saw some people walk on fire, which I’d been wanting to see in the flesh since reading “The Incredible Tale of Henry Sugar” by Roald Dahl as a child.  We went swimming at some beautiful spots and ate a Melaneasian feast.  All I heard was buffet and I was in there.  Whack it on the plate and ask questions about what it is later.  Em just shook her head at me at my greed but it was paid for and the local cooks seemed pretty happy that their food was being appreciated.  You can take the boy out of Yorkshire and all that.  In addition to a massage that Em had by an aggressive local masseuse, the final activity of note was when we walked up and through a 100ft waterfall, which as I write doesn’t sound as exciting as it was.  Maybe it was just a hot day and it’d taken half an hour of uphill hiking to get there, so plunging into naturally made pools with water cascading down was immense. Before I complete my work for the Vanuatu tourist board I thought I could just make a few sweeping generalisations based on our very limited experiences. Vanuatu has been twice voted the happiest country on the planet – it’s good to hear that bloody Scandanavia isn’t the best at everything, bloody show offs with their effective education and low crime rates – and it shows as everyone you meet appears brilliantly buoyant with optimism.  One tour guide burst out laughing when I said my name John, which is more uncommon than you may expect, but as later he pointed and announced a “this is a local bantum tree” and a similar explosion of laughing followed, I sensed that this was just his style, and the comical style of the Vanuatuan people.  A great place and if you meet Fraiser, send him my regards with a bellyful of laughter.

“One tiny [cough] hiccup”

So Brisbane is a pretty nice place.  It’s pretty warm, got fairly decent hotels and the airport facilities are reasonable I suppose.  I didn’t know much about the place apart from it being the home of the Broncos RL team.  But now we’ve spent a night here I feel fully acquainted with that charming city.

As you can tell from the above paragraph, we’re not sipping cocktails on our dream Pacific island yet.  And the evident tone should indicate that we’re not exactly over the moon about it.  We were to fly to Brisbane and then onto Port Vila in Vanuatu yesterday and the 3 hour connection time ought to have been enough for things to go wrong.  However our flight was delayed by 6 hours meaning that we arrived too late to continue on to Vanuatu as 2 flights a day from Australia would clearly be over-working the air traffic controllers at Port Vila International Airport.  The result anyhow was that we got forwarded onto Brisbane regardless so we could be someone else’s problem and then were put up in a pleasant but pretty soulless inner city hotel on Brisbane’s Southbank.

So after a night of food (but apparently no alcohol) paid for by the airline, which was as long as we used the hotel café that did their very best to hide the fact their food was microwaved, and several more hours in the airport this morning, we should be getting on a plane in an hour or so.  I’ve already dropped an email to our insurance company about the loss of a day’s holiday, the costs we’ve incurred and the fact we had paid for accommodation last night in Port Vila and of course they treated me like a long lost friend, offering to pay us for everything and more.  The insurance company we used can be found at http://www.‘What happened is not our problem; read the wording in your policy document you idiot’.co.uk.  I think I’m going to use them for a fall I had at work that wasn’t my fault too.

Coffee and Cars: Part 2

Reflecting on my priorities in life, it’s probably true to say that this blog has now recently fallen fairly low.  It sits somewhere between taking the rubbish out (which I would love to neglect but apparently attracting insects to our general waste isn’t “real’ pet ownership) and maybe cleaning the car.

On that point, I resent cleaning cars for 3 reasons: firstly, the type of person who cleans and waxes a car probably also watches Top Gear religiously and reads Jeremy Clarkson books – I don’t think I need to elaborate any further.  Secondly I worked for one summer cleaning Lexi (the Alan Partridge plural of Lexus) at the London car show about 6 years and spending time cleaning cars brings back memories of 12 hour shifts wiping grubby fingerprints off cars most people couldn’t afford anyway.  Thirdly, as the job in London proved, I’m not very good at it.  Mostly I manage to make cars dirtier after cleaning than they were previously.  At the car show as I circulated the different models of Lexus, the other cleaners used to follow me to make amends for what I was unintentionally inflicting on the car.

So the long and dramatic opening to this blog comes from the fact that I have now found time to write because I’m sat at a car fair in which there are nearly no customers and those who are here are showing no interest in our Honda Integra, known to some as Toots (Em likes to name our cars, this one  surprisingly after the reggae legend that is Toots from The Maytals.  I bet none of you knew of Em’s encyclopedic reggae trivia).  In addition I did a botched job at cleaning the bird crap from the bonnet this morning, which brought all those anti-car-cleaning-jeremy-clarkson feelings to surface.

Regular readers may have noticed the cliff-hanger I ended the last entry on; on the other hand I didn’t attempt to advertise that blog so I don’t think it attracted many hits apart from my regular Brazilian and Saudi Arabian readers (no joke, I have 2 followers from there, most likely by accident but they all count).  And “cliffhanger” probably over-exaggerates the suspense created.  I think I ended on a comment like “I may have some good news soon” – it’s hardly the end of an Eastenders episode, although that would probably work as the climax of a Shortland Street episode, with a teen pregnancy and skipathon thrown in for good measure.  Go back, have a read.  See if you’re hooked.

Welcome back. By now most people know what the news is of course.  To sum it up unromantically (which is out of character I assure you), Em and I got engaged a couple of weekends back.   There is a full story to tell, inclusive of an ice-cream interval, but my version of events too often tends to focus on the little insignificant details (they upgraded our hire car, I forgot to pack a coat, I had poached eggs for breakfast etc.) and I’m too scant on the important stuff.  Therefore I will very briefly surmise what happened with, as Gertrude instructs Polonius in Hamlet, “More matter less art” (That could only be more pretentious if I began inserting self-critical parenthesis…)

Saturday December 1^st was our 6 year anniversary so on the Friday the day before, we went for a nice meal up the Skytower in Auckland, a bit like the CN Tower in Toronto if you’ve ever been there.  Decent feed with a view of the city, that’s all you need to know.  The next day we flew off on a morning flight to Queenstown (Lord of Rings backdrop country), hired a car and drove up to Wanaka and met up with some friends who are living there currently.  Of course Em was only told one step at a time so was oblivious to what we were doing.  After that we went to Puzzling World which essentially has a giant maze.  Em’s been wanting to go there since when we were last in Wanaka and my brother and I outvoted her desire to go in favour of a hike, which I’ve been reminded of several times over the last year.  Next we drove up further north, passed Lake Pukaki where you get a beautiful view of Mount Cook/Aoraki, New Zealand’s highest mountain at just over 12,000ft.

We then arrived in Lake Tekapo and I had booked a little hotel suite in a fancy place by the lake (the hotel room had herbal tea and a cafetiere – definitely posh).  After a bit of dinner we then took a tour up Mount John to the observatory up there from which you are supposed to get the clearest night sky in the whole of the Southern Hemisphere.  Naturally we wouldn’t know anything about that as there were about four layers of cloud.

The following day we took a walk up Mount John to a bench where you can view the lake and township with the mountains in the background and that was when my knee started wobbling, and against the odds Em said ‘yes’.  But typical us, there was no time to enjoy the moment as we had about 250km to drive in about 3 hours to get to Christchurch airport to fly back.  As it turns out, arriving at the domestic departures terminal with 25 minutes before the plane was scheduled to leave, was in fact about 5 hours too soon as our flight had been cancelled and we didn’t depart until much later.  That meant arriving late at night in Auckland with work the next day looming over us.

However I must add getting hold of friends and family to reveal the news has been a pretty tiresome effort hence why we resorted to a Facebook announcement last week.  It’s hard to ask to speak to someone on Skype without giving it away that you’ve got important life-changing news to share. What you get back is contextually inane comments (as they don’t know the significance of your conversation) like “your Dad’s in the garden mowing the lawn.  He only wants to be disturbed if it’s important.  You know what’s he like about that lawn”. After he was persuaded to join us what followed was a few lawn-related anecdotes before we could say what we had stayed up until 1am on a Sunday night for (that reference was to my parents).  We also got “your nan’s gone shopping.  It’s Monday, she always goes to Tescos on a Monday.  Fancy you trying to get hold of your nan on a Monday morning” (that was Em’s family).  By this time it was 24 hours after we had been back in Auckland and the cleaner at work knew and had seen the ring but key family members were oblivious.

So to sum up (as my international students have learnt by rote to end all their essays with), in short, Em and I have got engaged and I’m trying with no luck to sell the car before we fly out of New Zealand on Monday, heading out to Vanuatu which is fairly near where Cyclone Evan is currently causing havoc.

Thank you to all the lovely Facebook comments, messages and emails.  It’s been noted and you all stand a better chance of being invited to the wedding; those who have been sluggish/too lazy to comment, that has also been noted and all I’m saying is that you may want to raise your game or there’ll be no wedding profiteroles for you.

PS, the cryptic name comes from a title of one of my early blogs and a comment from my friend Dan when he complained he’d rather read ‘Coffee and Cars Part 2’ that about endemic racism; and the fact that I’m sat with a cup of takeaway coffee in my car at present.

The Bucket List Update

Progress has been made, I’m happy to announce, on the bucket list.  I’ve completed the PADI dive course so I’m a certified open water diver.  Because it was crap weather I did all the training in a freshwater lake, rather than in the ocean, that’s visibility was on par with an English canal.  But it means that when we go to Vanuatu on the way back to the UK, I won’t be taking the beautiful fish and coral for granted; equally if I see a perilous-looking tyre, I’m experienced to deal with it.

We went to Rotorua at the weekend and did a Zorb, as did Emma.  Definitely worth doing, a great one off experience, but it’s not going to become a regular past-time. Not at $45 a pop. Then we went and watched kiwis in their natural habitat i.e. not in indoor pens where the kiwis are confused into being awake in the day and asleep at night.  So we went at dusk and saw them shuffling about in their comical way, and despite the annoyingly loud Americans doing their best to scare away these notoriously shy birds with their primitive accents and aggressive waist lines, it was really cool to see the birds at night umm doing their thing I guess.

So a couple more completely ticked off (ok the kiwi one still wasn’t in the wild) but definitely making progress.  And I’m thinking after this weekend, we may have a few more done.  In  fact readers, it’s possible that some exciting news may emerge in the next few days via this blog but I’ll leave you on that cliffhanger.  Speak soon!

Celebrity Connections with Facial Hair

Just a brief update today.

Firstly, Em came home last week complaining that she had yet another addition to her Year 7 class – her roll is up to 34 I think now but she can’t put up too much of a fuss as some classes in her school have 38.  Anyway as if that’s hard enough to accept, not only has she joined the set when the end of year assessments are occurring, but also name is “Avery”.

After about 15 minutes of hearing a monologue about how unfair this all was, she mentioned that I would probably be interested because apparently Avery’s dad played rugby league.  I have to admit on hearing this my interest was still waning.  So her Dad plays a bit of league in New Zealand; haven’t we all? (For the record I’ve not touched a rugby ball since being out here but I tell people I still play).  No, he used to played for the Warriors, I was told.  Ok, so maybe he was involved in one of the South Auckland feeder teams to the New Zealand Warriors. Still not a big deal.  No, he played rugby in England for the Warriors.  At this point I did wake up a bit as I began to realise that I might be being told something I wanted to know.  Wigan Warriors? What’s her surname? Car-something she says.

At this point the penny dropped.  George Carmont, the ex-Wigan centre (named in the Super League Dream Team twice) and previously Newcastle Knights player as well as the Samoa captain, born and brought up in South Auckland, has recently retired from rugby league after a 4 year stint at Wigan, and I had read somewhere that he was returning to NZ.  Is this new kid’s dad George Carmont? I ask.  I don’t know, I’ll find out. And the next day comes back the confirmation in a newly confident voice, as if I was the one who was unsure – yes Avery Carmont is George Carmont’s daughter, the ex-Wigan centre.  Well to be honest the evidence was there: she told the school that she was a level 6b in English when in fact was a 3a at best.  Typical Wigan: all noise and no delivery as well as an inflated view of their own abilities.

Secondly, with a some hesitation and partial embarrassment-partial pride, and along with about half of the male Facebook community, I’m in the middle of Movember currently.  Emma hates it and the upkeep of the tache is pretty annoying.  Why anyone would maintain one permanently is beyond me.  Beards I can understand; it’s the absurdity of keeping yourself clean shaven apart from on your upper lip that strikes me as pretty odd.  And I’m nowhere near looking like Tom Selleck.

So, if you feel so inclined, you can visit my movember page: it’s http://nz.movember.com/mospace/5321521 and you can donate in NZ$ (the rate is about $2 to a quid – can’t find the pound sign on a NZ keyboard).

Don’t worry I’m not one of these obsessives that has daily facial hair updates.  In fact at present the only photo on the page is me having a ginger beard about 5 years ago, making me look even more hobbit-like, so I should really upload another.  Here I am currently anyway.

As I’m sure you all know, the cause is for men’s health, including in particular prostrate cancer and depression; but more importantly you are contributing in the knowledge that I am experiencing all the downsides to having a moustache,  namely looking French, the tache letting water into my mask when I go diving/snorkelling, and getting disgusted and mistrustful looks off both Emma and nextdoor’s cat.  Only 2 weeks to go now!

The New Zealand Bucket List: Or How I learnt to Appreciate an Emergency Helipad

If you can delve below some of the major headline-grabbing stories lately, underneath the coverage of Hurricane Sandy (I’m not sure I agree with personifying storms, especially as I now think of Sandi Toksvig unleashing her fury on North America), or the Syrian civil war, or the Leeds United fan assaulting a goalkeeper, there is another piece of breaking news: that Emma and I are returning to the UK this December, aiming to be returning to work in the beautiful West Midlands by early January.  To give a few specifics, we fly to Vanuatu (near Fiji) on 17th December, spend 5 days there working on my full body burn, so that we can arrive back in the UK on Christmas Evening,  me looking the perfect seasonal lobster dish.  No doubt I’ll try to get out to the pubs in Headingley on the 24th by about 8pm, fall asleep in a corner, and maybe even return home for 8:20pm and a repeat episode of the Vicar of Dibley.

Having an end date to our 18 month holiday has meant that a ‘bucket list’ has been written so that in these last few weeks we can do as much as we can whilst out here and hopefully then we won’t have that “we never did pop in and have tea with Sonny Bill Williams like we promised” feeling that you get after leaving somewhere (Em watch the youtube clip of SBW’s rugby jersey getting torn in last year’s RWC a fair few times – probably why that example jumped to mine).  I say “was written” like it was inscribed by Moses on large stone slabs; I wrote down a handful of things I wanted to do before we left and then this piece of paper got stuck on the wall, to be forever enshrined in law.  But now the challenge: how many can be crossed off before we leave?

So, the list stands at present:

1 – Do a PADI Scuba Diving course

2 – Go sand-boading on 90 Mile Beach

3 – Visit Tane Mahuta (the largest Kauri tree in the world)

4 – Climb Mount Ngauruhoe (or its Mordor name ‘Mount Doom’) and deposit the ring into its flames

5 – Go on a fishing charter and catch multiple big fish

6 – Visit the South Island again

7 – Do a Vineyard Crawl, possibly on bikes, around Waiheke Island (on the Pacific side of Auckland)

8 – Have a go on the Zorb at Rotorua

9 – Do a skydive

10 – Go back to the Coromandel and visit Hot Water Beach where you can dig yourself a jacuzzi in the naturally geothermally-heated sand

11 – See kiwis in the wild

12 – Run up at least 10 volcanoes (Auckland is built on something like 52 dormant volcanoes)

13 – Run a half marathon

14 – Go to Puzzleworld in Wanaka.  This was Emma’s only contribution and it was added to the list without proper consultation.

At present, crossed off the list fully are: 2, 3, 10, 12 and 13.  Sand-boarding and the kauri forests I’ve written about and posted photos of I’m sure.  We went to Hot Water Beach last weekend, timed it with the tide and dug relentless to create a pit that filled with disappointingly cold water.  However a friendly kiwi family had dug a hole that had water in it that was about 60 degrees (far too hot for me); but after they left I managed to filter their hot water down into our more tepid water making a gorgeous 30 degree spa pool.  Em just sat in the hot water calling me a “poof-ponse”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for running, I’ve run up 10 volcanoes although I’ve still got the big one to go which is Rangitoto, an island just off the Auckland coast, which you have to get a ferry to.  As insane/pointless as that challenge sounds, there is some logic; we’d walked up a few before and you get the most amazing views of the city and surroundings, and reward is amplified by the fact that you’re exhausted having run up a massive hill.  And these runs helped me complete number 13, a mountain half marathon (actually 19.5 kms not 21).  This run was in a beautiful gorge and through old gold mining tunnels, and then up a mountain to then slide down the mud slopes on my arse during a 2.5 hour deluge that was as close to a monsoon as you get out here.  Still, the entry fee included a beer and a burger afterwards, albeit at 11:30am, which helped restore my body a bit closer to normality.

The partially crossed ones off are: 1, 5, 11.  For the diving course, I’ve enrolled and am a diving student, attending evening classes for 3 weeks before we go diving in the sea in later in November.  I won’t go on about this one as I’m hoping I’ll have loads of exciting things to describe soon; so far I’ve only got that in the theory sessions I resort to being a naughty school kid by rushing my homework (if complete at all), chewing gum during the lesson, daydreaming and not paying attention, swinging on my chair, and talking whilst the instructor is talking.  So clearly whilst I try impose positive standards of behaviour onto my students, this appears to be a two way process.  I’ll let you know if I get a compass out and engrave “Holt was ‘ere” on a table in the classroom.

Yesterday I went on a fishing trip which, to be brutally honest, was a bit of a dour experience.  Firstly, it was booked for about 3 weeks ago but it was lamely cancelled due to apparently “strong winds”; this meant that me and my 2 mates I’d booked with had to reschedule and we couldn’t all go on the same day.  So I was on my tod for 8 hours on a boat, during which I caught 1 snapper which was under the legal limit to take home so I had to put it back, meaning that I didn’t manage to fulfill the task of bringing home a huge catch to then cook on a bbq.  In fairness, other people faired even worse than me so it wasn’t a great day for fishing, but it does make me feel that I have unfinished business with the fish of the Hauraki Gulf.  If I catch a few decent sized ones from the shore before I go, I think I’ll have established some closure on the whole debacle.

As for no. 11, I think I wrote about this previously, going out into the middle of a forest at night time and seeing some cool nocturnal wildlife but we could only hear kiwis, therefore this stands as attempted but not complete.  As they only live in the wild in certain pest-free and well protected areas, it’s becoming a little tricky to cross this one off; however there is a place down in Rotorua which we’re going to in a few weeks, that has night-time viewing of kiwis in close to their natural environment, which could count.

That leaves still a few to go and I’ll update the blog with our progress.  As for the “emergency helipad”, this comes back to our trip to the Coromandel last weekend.  By the camp site we stayed at (fear not, Emma did not stay in a tent; we hired a cabin for the night) there was a seemingly neglected field with the following sign next to it.  To clarify, all the basic features of a helipad (namely a large, flat space with markings on it) were all absent.  But you can just imagine the conversation:

Kiwi Bloke A: Hey bro, what’re you doing?

Kiwi Bloke B: Hey Bro, just putting up a sign.  It’s for an emergency helipad, aye. I’m stoked about it.

KBA: Sweet as bro.  Why are you doing that?

KBB: I don’t know bro.  I just thought it would be pretty sweet to have a place that a helicopter could land, aye.

KBA: Good work bro.  Is it likely a helicopter would come to this field in the Coromandel?

KBB: Yeah, no, I dunno bro.  Maybe, I just though it’d look pretty sweet, like America or something.

KBA: Yeah no, bro.  It’s sweet as.

So through ‘bucket list’, I learnt how to appreciate the better things in life like an emergency helipad in the most random of places.

Paying off my kumara debt and other stories

A common half-serious stereotype of teachers held by those outside of the profession goes along the following predictable lines: “it can’t be bad leaving at 3 everyday, having a holiday every 6 weeks, free coffee and cakes at work”.  In the UK I may have protested; however, with the exception of the free cakes being provided only every few weeks, my current life style feels quite close to that portrayal.  Not because I’m actually home to watch the New Zealand equivalent of CBBC, but as a result of not being hounded by Birmingham City Council for non-payment of council tax, we permanently feel like we’re on holiday over here.  A 17 month long holiday baby.

So, true to form we spent a few days away last week as we were both on our long overdue spring holiday.  It’d been a whole 11 weeks since we headed across the Tasman for our last break so we felt a mini-road trip up north was on the cards.  Northland (the name that creatively describes the area north of the Auckland region) had left us a tad disappointed last time we visited.  This was partly the fault of some pretty dire weather and a drunk bloke firing a child’s bow and arrow at me in a pub, which I’ve definitely got over and am still not seething about.  But in the same way you shouldn’t judge the West Midlands based on a rough experience in Dudley, and that there is fortunately more to the north of England than Wigan, we felt we ought to give the top tip of the North Island another go.  All things considered, this was a good call.

Our tiki tour began heading up the west coast towards the kumara region of Dargaville.  Kumara is sweet potato in Maori.  There’s evidence that the Polynesians migrated across the Pacific Ocean about 1000 years ago and even landed in Central America, taking a few cheeky sweet potatoes back with them when they returned to Hawaii and Tahiti amongst other places.  When in the 14^th century the 7 great Maori canoes docked on the shores of ‘Aotearoa’ (NZ’s pre-dutch name) they ensured that the kumara came with them.  And Dargaville kumara are probably the best on offer.  I know this because last time we were here I pulled into a farm that had sacks of kumara for sale with an honesty box on show and being the scumbag that I am, I short-changed them.  In my defence this minor theft occurred in the middle of a deluge and soaked through I was trying to scrape together all the change available.  But my conscience has struggled with this since last December so when we went passed the same farm, still selling 5kg bags of kumara for $5, I picked up a bag and even tipped the box a dollar or two as a sort of rebate for permitting last year’s knocked down price.

Our first day’s drive ended at a camp site by Trounson Kauri Park, where we stayed for one night and did a guided night tour around the park to see, amongst other nighttime creatures, kiwis in the wild.  We saw eels, glow-worms, weta, morepork, crayfish and of course enormous kauri trees but alas no blooming kiwi birds, although we could hear them in the distance.  We have seen them in captivity but it’s not quite the same.  Lions in the Serengeti are a little more impressive than in Dudley Zoo (I’m not consciously knocking Dudley today; it’s just a convenient place for making a point).  Of course a kiwi doesn’t roar or prowl and is will often shuffle about enduring bouts of flatulence whilst picking for worms.  Nonetheless I felt a stint in NZ should involve seeing a kiwi or two.

After Trounson we headed even further north up on to the Hokianga Harbour, popping in to see the ‘God of the Forest’ Tane Mahuta (a 2000 year old kauri tree) on the way.  There’s not much to do when you see a massive 150ft tree that is estimated to have sprouted around the time of Asterix and Obelix: you take a few photos, remark “that’s a big, old tree” and then wander back to the car, to then proceed on your way which for us was towards Ahipara at the foot of 90 Mile Beach, which leads up until to the very northern tip of NZ’s north island.

90 Mile Beach is in fact 55 miles long which is about 88km. Rumour has it the name came about not by a geometrical error but to trump Australia’s 80 Mile Beach, which sounds about right.  What the standard thing to do here is to take a bus tour that drives along the beach at low tide; at the top do some sand-boarding down the sand dunes at the northern end of the beach; go up to Cape Reinga, which is the very northern tip and where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Oceans meet; and then take the more pedestrian road back south whilst the tide is high.  The reason you don’t take your own car is that your car insurance won’t cover trips onto the beach.  All you need is the beach to have been hit a little heavier with rain and you have quicksand that will take your car down.  So we did the bus journey but in reverse, taking the beach route on the return leg.  This made the afternoon a pretty exciting end to the day but the morning pretty dull.  I felt like a pensioner on a day trip, in which we had frequent toilet stops, a guide who was pointing out some dry facts about the avocado farms in the region, and even a compulsory ice-cream stop.  It was 10:30am – I didn’t really need a big dollop of tutti-fruiti but we felt coerced into it.  I say ‘we’, Em was loving having ice-cream for breakfast.

So by lunchtime we were up at the top tip of the country and I have to admit it is better than it sounds.  It is wild and windy up there and you could can see the precise point that the colder, harsher and greener Tasman currents meets the warmer, milder, and bluer Pacific waters.  I guess it’s a bit like a tropical John O’ Groats with more comprehensible people.

Sand-boarding is worth a mention.  I don’t think I’d ever seen a sand dune before.  I still need to cross off North Africa, the Middle East and the Arab Peninsula from my list of places to visit. (Despite the Arab Spring, Facebook told me of three or four friends who’ve been to Jordan in the last year, I suppose doing the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade tour).  Well our bus drove down a little brook that goes from the road to the beach with a huge sand dune on one side.  So the bodyboards (for the adults) and the sledges (for the kids) were hauled out of the boot of the bus and with absolutely no health or safety precautions taken we marched up to the top of the sand dune and threw ourselves down the slopes head-first.  There were some tears; men, women and children fell off their boards, getting mouthfuls of sand thrown into the bargain.  I’ve certainly got some good footage of Em involved in a pretty dramatic crash but in fairness she got up and had another go which didn’t end painfully.  No photographic evidence of that one though.

Once we’d measured out our fun in coffee spoons (remember we were on a bus tour so we would never have been allowed to stay longer than the prescribed allocation of time) we headed down the beach in the bus which was less eventful apart from seeing some wild horses (kept thinking of the Rolling Stones song) that lived in the pine forest by the side of the beach, as well as a single lonely seal pup (kept thinking of…well…Seal) that was crawling back along the beach towards some sea rocks.  This ended our tour and our trip up north as the next day we would head down back to Auckland, along the east coast this time.

The only stop of significance on this 5 hour drive was Matauri Bay where there is a monument to the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior that sank just off that north-eastern New Zealand shore in 1985, sunk by French intelligence services, and killed one activist.  It’s one of those scandals that’s hard to comprehend how more wasn’t done about it; the French government paid out compensation and briefly imprisoned a couple of the agents involved before releasing them once the hype had gone down.  Apparently the wreck is now a prime diving location.

That brought us back to Auckland and ended a trip that did manage to alter our perception of Northland as worth visiting and a place of dreadful weather only some of the time.  Next weekend, I’m running a half-marathon through an old gold-mining region and river gorge followed by a fishing boat trip off Auckland’s east coast harbour into the Hauraki Gulf the next day; it’s just one long holiday out here.

I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat (not to mention the Mr Muscle)

My Dad and I currently have a few things in common: other than the fact we’re both Leeds Rhinos fans, both have wiry hair (see last blog entry), and both inhale our food, we’re also both off work.  But whilst I’m on a typical 2 week term break, spending this week on my tod as Emma’s school has not yet broken up, he’s now retired from a 32(ish) year career in law and sailing the Mediterranean, and on his return he will be free of that back-to-work-after-a-holiday feeling.  Now that’s not an advert for burglars to head over to north Leeds as my Mum and her army of operatic lodgers will be there holding the fort.

So in contrast to Big Bad Bob dropping an anchor off the Greek island of Lefkada, Ithica, or Cephalonia (or to wherever else his friend Mike chooses to steer the boat), I have a few days at home attempting to complete the ‘to-do list’ before we head up north next week for a few days on our tiki tour. Number 1 on my list is “mould”.  After our wet winter I can quite safely conclude that mould has won the majority of the battles against our rather casual attempts to keep it under control.

I heard from someone who knows about these things (which always an indicator that you shouldn’t believe what you’re about to hear) that a worrying number of houses in New Zealand fall below WHO standards.  I did try Google this fact and nothing came up supporting these claims.  However, based only on anecdotal evidence, kiwi houses are bloody freezing, full of mould in the winter and provide shelter for ants in the summer. In addition everything over here is regulated much less thoroughly which I assume also applies to about 150 years of building history in Auckland (that is to make a distinction between housing before and after European settlement; I’m sure traditional Maori whare were structurally sound and not done on the cheap).

Unfortunately the outcome of whether or not there is any truth in the above premise doesn’t improve the fact that I have to spend a few hours scrubbing windowsills until they look a whiter shade of pale.  It just seems to me that despite some of the abhorrent student digs I found myself in over my time (Alton Street in Selly Oak springs to mind), the only blue mould I had to remove was from dairy products left in the fridge over the long summer off before beginning my 3rd year of uni.

This blog is indeed a form of procrastination, delaying the inevitable but it has allowed me to consider two striking contrasts: that of mine and my old man’s weeks without work; and secondly how if our flat (which is generous term for the 1 bedroom unit we rent) had been constructed more effectively, by builders who were used to following more thoroughly regulated  guidelines and didn’t fall back on phrases like “yeah that’ll do bro, it’s about right”, I wouldn’t have to do this crumby job and could enjoy my holiday, safe in the knowledge I’m living in a well insulated and mould-free abode.  Amen.