On the Road Again

I set off the other day in Magoo with two new traveling companions. Sofie is from Helsinki and has lived pretty much everywhere including NYC and London. Gabriel is from Bavaria; they both just finished tours of Oz and now they have nothing better to do then sit in my station wagon.




Our first night started off on a high point camping at a secret hot springs that is known only to locals but with some tips from my hotel concierge friend in Christchurch we knew where to look.
There aren't many better ways to sit under the sky and drink some wine out of a box. Considering we started off on such a high point it was likely that things would go downhill from there. A rainy day and car full of sandflies proved that point.
We settled in the historic gold mining town of Ross thanks to couchsurfing and used it as a base to explore the west coast.
When the boat was in Christchurch the family and I took a massive drive to the town of Arthur's Pass in order to realize we had no time to explore and to immediately turn around and go back to the city. We decided that we didn't have enough time to see this viaduct that we had been told about. We were wrong because I came from the other direction this time and it was literally 2 minutes from the edge of the town and it was incredible. There used to be a harrowing mountain road carved into the side of the range. The viaduct finally created an easy link between the coasts.




I had heard stories about the aggressive behavior of the native Kea birds and this was my first encounter with them. They are very curious and have the habit of landing on your car and ripping all of the little rubber bits off of it. Therefore you need to keep one eye on the incredible surroundings and your other on the annoying birds flying around your car. It reminded me of my epic struggle back home with The Bird in my parent's house. Except this time I didn't have the sink sprayer handy to blast the Keas.




Take a look at the V shaped barriers to protect the support columns from rockslides.




We then headed north on the West Coast to Punakike in order to see the pancake rocks. It was a series of tidal pools and blowholes with the added feature of distinctly layered limestone rocks. It was cool and did make for good pictures.








Next we are off to places further south.

My New Car

It was my observation that many people seem to buy a car in Auckland and sell it in Christchurch. Being a Jew I decided to buy a car in Christchurch and try and make some money when I sell it in a couple of months.
NZ is not a country where much haggling is done. I had to walk away from a few cars that I liked simply because the owner would not haggle with me and that is half the fun of buying a car. After working at a car dealer for a year and a half I consider myself decent at haggling and was intent on getting a deal.
After spending 3 days doing a circuit of the notice boards in all of the hostels in the city I found a car that I liked and an owner that was willing to haggle. The inspection process here in NZ is extremely strict and only lasts for 6 months. Therefore I needed a car that would not need a new inspection while I had it because I have no desire to throw money at the car. Luckily this one fit the bill. I managed to get it for considerably less than the advertised price. The car isn't perfect but it has heaps of space, runs fine, and as you can see it came with tons of gear. There are 3 of us in the car right now and it is completely full up with stuff. It is actually too much stuff and I plan on parting out some of the camping gear as I get close to the end of the trip.
For some reason the previous owner (a Dutch guy hence the Holland sticker, Walter!) removed the the bottom cushion in the back seat. So on my first day with the car Renata (my American halfway house buddy) and I went to the junkyard to find a new seat.




With some help from Renata and the city of Christchurch we decided to name it Magoo. The starting odometer was 302756 km, lets hope there is a bunch more when I write the end distance and that it comes on my terms instead of the car's.

The Soccer Match

In another impulsive pro sports trip I convinced Carey and his flatmates to go see New Zealand's only professional Soccer team. They play in Westpac stadium which due to its shape has affectionately been called the Cake Tin by the citizens of Wellington. The stadium seats approximately 40,000 people. We had a record crowd of just over 7,000 but luckily the management decided to encourage all of the crazy fans to sit in one section. Therefore there are smatterings of people all over the Arena and one beautiful corner of drunken flag waving New Zealand insanity.




The chants were some of the best that I have heard at a sporting event. While I don't see much need for a dirty Aussie chant back home however the ones involving the referees would fit in well at the Garden. Carey has a great list here.
The Wellington Phoenix play in the Australian pro league which consists of 8 teams. Luckily we were playing one of the worst and slaughtered them 3-0. There was even a goal song but it had more than two words so I wasn't able to follow along.
This was probably the closest that I am going to come to a hockey game on this trip. It really isn't the same having the entire season compressed down into a few minutes of highlights every few days.
It was nice for a few hours to be able to scream obnoxious things at the top of my lungs and pretend that I actually cared about the outcome on the field.

The Cricket Match

Life in Auckland was THAT boring. It was a crappy few days with nothing to do but hang out with the hostel crowd and catch up on magazines in the library. It got to the point where a Boxing day match 20/Twenty Cricket match seemed like a good idea. Now, I have mentioned my thoughts on Cricket before here but I had heard from multiple sources that apparently 20/Twenty is the interesting version of the game. So Carey and I set out to get to Mt. Eden park where the game was being played. First things first, the stadium is about a 20 minute drive out of the city center. Luckily the downtown train station has trains that go right there, however, since it was Boxing day the train wasn't running so we went to take the bus. Of course since it was Boxing day there was only 1 bus an hour. So after sharing a cab with some high school students we finally arrived at Eden Park. We logically sit in the cheap seats (The Terrace) for an exciting afternoon of Cricket. It is tough not to notice that half of the stadium is missing since it is under construction. Since we were in a country that bows to the British specter of health and safety the construction company had to have a worker on Boxing day to stand in the site to retrieve the ball when it got hit there, which was often.




The rules of 20 Twenty are simple, each team tries to score as many runs as possible in 20 overs (6 bowls or pitches make up an over.) If however the other team gets 10 wickets first then your time is up. Basically one team bats for an hour and a half and then it switches to the other team. Since the players fielding have to stand around for so long doing nothing there exists a man who has the greatest position in all of professional sports: The Twelfth Man. This is a full player of the team whose job it is during the game to walk around the outfield with a cooler and give the players a drink if they are thirsty.




About half the time the players are just dicking about and not doing anything on the field so the crowd has learned to take things into their own hands. It seems that the true point of the game is not to watch it being played but to have an excuse to sit in the sun for a few ours, get smashed, yell curses, and throw bottles. Even though the chants were nothing compared to the vile smut that I would hear at the football game they were still enough to make the professional sports fans in America seem like a bunch of toddlers afraid of getting soap in their mouths.




In the end NZ lost but nobody really seemed to care. It was well worth it because now I am convinced and justified that Cricket is a completely retarded, pointless, and amusing game.

P.S. How awesome is this shirt?

Beached As

Sarah and Dan from the cruise whom Walter and I stayed with on our day through Hamilton were kind enough to invite us to their place in Tairua for New Years. As Carey explained in his timely posting... Tairua is a lot like a NZ version of the Hamptons. We were staying in Quogue across the water from the blue bloods in Pauanui. It was a solid week of sitting around drinking beer, sitting on the beach, grilling, and mostly doing nothing. New years was a surprisingly decent fireworks show and some more drinking. Nothing off the hook or particularly crazy but certainly a nice contrast to the typical ass freezing in NYC. The highlight had to be the smugness that Carey and I had knowing that all of you were still stuck in 2008.

A Plane in my River

My ride to work when I worked at Cooper Classics took me down the Hudson river every day. A highlight of my commute was when the Intrepid returned and for the few short weeks before I left for NZ I could see an SR71 Blackbird every morning. I really enjoyed my planes in the Hudson every morning.
Which is why for the first time I was truly jealous of everyone back home when I read the news the other day. First of all, I don't understand why my friends were still online as soon as they heard about it. I mean seriously, we will cause a miles long traffic jam so we can all gooseneck an an accident but you guys won't drop everything your doing to immediately go gawk at a plane in the river?!?!? I would have spent all day at Battery park watching every bit of the whole removal process.
I missed the blackout, I missed the subway strike, and now I missed this. Why can't something cool happen when I am around?

The Skydive

New Zealand is known as a place where most of the de riguer activities involving some form of falling. I knew that at one point I would do a skydive and a bungy jump on this trip. My travel guide mentions about 17 times that the cheapest skydive in the world is in Taupo. You can imagine where I decided to do it. Luckily Walter had the same exact thought process as me and we set off from Rotorua to go hurl ourselves out of a plane.
We had made our reservation a few days earlier knowing that the day we chose was going to be some of the best weather that week. Since it was dismal weather that day the jump center was staffed by a lone employee who told us an interesting story about how a woman had gotten a free jump the other day and now they insist on collecting credit card information before people jump that way they can't just walk off after the jump like she did.
We had been told that the whole process was like being in the army. Hurry up and wait. We were forced to endure a 10 minute upsell explaining why we had to have the DVD and the Handycam package so we could show all of our friends and family our skydiving experience. Considering it almost doubled the price I was fine with just jumping out of a plane. Walter with his superior Euro exchange rate decided to go for it.
After some posing in our flightsuits we met the people who we would be strapped to. Luckily my guy was Swedish so we were able to talk about some Swedes who we both admire : Lundqvist, Forsberg, Sundin, etc...
With some handy rubber banding George was able to go for a 15,000 foot adventure and since Walter had paid for the photo package I gave him the monkey.



There were no adventures upon landing and the monkey made it down intact. Now all I have left is some bungy and my huge splurges in NZ will be over.