New Zealand

​NEW ZEALAND:

‘I DROWN MY SORROWS WITH FLAN’
February 18th Auckland Airport.

Rupert, in a high state of lergy (which I hope I haven’t caught off him) drives me off to Hobart Airport Tuesday afternoon, and we say our farewells; another person well met. It’s lovely to have been accepted into their family so readily, especially considering their busy circumstances and their own relationship conundrums.
The flight out to the big city of Melbourne is short and sweet (about an hour). The views of the suburbs are quite unexpectedly amazing; the housing estates all laid out in huge grids intermingling with organically winding shapes of the rivers and the more dominant free-ways. It looks very similar to a printed circuit board. It makes me think of the notion that Douglas Adams picked up on in the ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ of the Earth being a supercomputer. I definitely just flew over one of its circuit boards.
A couple of hours waiting at Melbourne Airport. So this is it – I finally am almost there. As long as the plane doesn’t crash.

I sit next to an English ex-pat discussing the relative merits of guzzling coffee to stay awake vs. just taking it as it comes as regards air travelling. This evening’s in-flight entertainment is ‘School of Rock’ which I like a lot. Just the kind of brain filler I am in the mood for.
It’s midnight (or thereabouts) and we arrive to the blinking and flashing semaphore airport darkness of Auckland in its sleepy night robes.

I’m here. Cor! There’s an imaginary welcoming party in my head, shaking me by the hand and congratulating me for finally having reached my Ultimate Destination.

I am slightly anxious about encountering the immigration officers. I pray they don’t want to see any proof of my affluence (I’ve got 250 dollars) and that I get stamped for six months…

That all works out; good! She doesn’t even ask to see my ticket. I could have saved 200 bucks and not bought a return! Oh well.
Then customs. There are signs up everywhere warning you you’ll be locked away forever if you import so much as a Guatamalan banana fart.

Thinking about the dried seaweed in my bag, I declare it. That’s okay, I can keep that. ‘Anything else?’

Thinks a moment. ‘Nope.’

‘Okay, if you could just go through to the X-ray’

A machine X-ray’s my bag. ‘What’s that?’ 

‘Oh.. Dunno… oh boot polish probably.’ 

Stiff-looking man in a peaked cap opens my bag.

It’s an onion.

‘Why didn’t you declare this?’

(Sleepily); ‘Oh… I forgot.’

‘You realise you have infringed on the New Zealand Importation of Alien Substances Law and will now have to pay a fine of 200 dollars.’

‘Oh come on, don’t be daft. I forgot. Just take it. You can have it if you want. I don’t mind. You’re not really going to fine me are you?’ I’m incredulous.

‘Sorry, it’s the law.’ He looks indifferent.

It sinks in. No leeway. Soulless little shits.
Welcome to New Zealand, the land of the famously easy-going. I am later to discover that people who wear uniforms here seem to have a propensity to get upset and pedantic by the pettiest of legal infringements. Presumably because they don’t have any proper crime to worry about. (I am later to come dangerously close to being arrested and deported for scrumping about six scabby-looking apples.)

I join a queue whereby two young Liverpudlian women confess to their wanton and malicious intent to destroy the equilibrium of New Zealand with a loaded peach.

A fine of 200 dollars.

The chap in front of me has been caught with a photo of his girlfriend with her kit off. Now the poor sod will be having to explain to her that her raunchy pose will now be cheering up the wall of the customs men’s staff room.

A fine of 200 dollars.

A suitable amount of insolence ensues; just enough and they might bend and change their minds. Too much and they might decide they don’t want a troublemaker like me in their country at all.

I can’t afford too much probing; After this fine and the cost of the ferry to South Island, I shall be left with the exciting sum of Zero Bucks in my pocket. Hurrah! (Not).
After all that, I can’t sleep, I have fourteen days lee-way in which to splash the cash. To pay or not to pay?

If I don’t pay, I’ll get taken to court, and the blurb they hand me tells me I don’t have a leg to stand on and I can’t appeal and win anyway, and I’ll have to pay the court charges as well when I inevitably lose the case.

Over an onion.
As much as I vehemently resent being criminalised because of an onion, the temptation to just not pay the fine is screwed up by the real possibility of it stupidly escalating into me never being allowed into New Zealand again. They have my passport number, and could conceivably nab me on the way out of the country, blacklisting me forever. Maybe.
I try sleeping in the airport, but it has the electro-static atmosphere of being inside a fluorescently-lit vacuum cleaner.

I go outside to some nice bushes and eventually get to sleep by about 5 am.

I wake up (eventually). Right – which way? North I think, to Whangerai.
I get my very first New Zealandish ride with a minister who I think must have been from a Pacific island somewhere originally. He picks up a couple of Japs on the way and drops me off at the Southern Highway in order that I can go north, so he informs me. Very confusing. He ‘high fives’ me three times and advises me not to abuse the kindness of New Zealanders. Not quite sure what compels him to say that.

Maybe I just look like a complete blagger.
Sitting waiting for my next ride I watch people on the other side of the road dropping off the side of a tall structure, sometimes screaming on the way down. Strange how a country can make jumping off of tall things part of it’s national culture. But then again if you consider the alternatives…

Apart from all the other usual tourist stuff, New Zealand has ‘Sheepworld’ which the free tourist guide at the airport declares is; 

‘Fascinating and fun for visitors of all ages, whatever the weather! Open every day, phone for daily shows’ 

… Bring on the dancing sheep says I. (www.sheepworldfarm.co.nz)

Also I notice there is a tourist steam-boat in Auckland called ‘Te Puke’.

See the sights, in the comfort of a boat made of freeze-dried beverage vomit. Hmm.
My next lift is with Matt who is celebrating a good work day by plying me with rum and coke. We talk about the virtues of doing all the things you want to do and thereby not having a mid-life crisis. He’s off mountain-biking with his mates up the coast. I am getting very drunk and happy.

Next ride is with Arie who is Dutch by birth. He carries on the rum and coke theme, and I’m getting quite sozzled.
It’s a beautiful area of undulating countryside. It’s pleasantly warm but not as hot as Oz. The plant life and trees are lusher and greener, like somewhere familiarly English but more exotic. 

He takes me loads further than he needs to which is very decent of him indeed. I flake out on the grass admiring the view of part of the largest harbour in the Southern Hemisphere, Ninety Mile Beach. 
How does a beach fifty-five miles long get to be called Ninety Mile Beach? Was it named by a man with wonky glasses? Or by a terminally bragging fisherman? Or by a chap whose willy wasn’t as big as he would like to have you believe?

The theory goes that to ride a horse across the beach would take you three days, and as a genral rule of thumb, a horse could travel roughly thirty miles a day. Hence the name. What hadn’t been taken into account though is that a horse can’t travel thirty miles a day on sand. Have you ever tried walking long distance on sand? It’s an exhausting slow-motion knock-kneed trudge.
After dinner (a tin of tuna donated by Matt) I thumb some more, get a ride with Jerry who’s on an 8 pm curfew imposed by the police and tells me ‘from one white guy to another white guy’ to watch out for the Maoris.

Another ride with an English couple and I sleep the night in a nice quiet spot not too far from the sea.
February 19th.

I sleep soundly and dream I am happily in Norwich, it is so vivid I am surprised when I wake up and find I really am in New Zealand.
I hitch with a Maori guy (Markus MacGregor) who is an engineer in the process of moving a house; not moving the contents – he’s moving the actual building. It’s a big sprawling wooden bungalow that looks like it has been chain-sawed down the middle. When I enquire, it so happens that this is exactly what they have down, loading and moving one half at a time.

I tell him that I had just being staying with another MacGregor in Tasmania; he was a white fella though. Pondering out loud how they might possibly be related I think I have managed my first New Zealand foot-in-mouth incident.

We go past Hundertwasser’s Famous Toilets in Kawakawa which is a nice surprise (more about him later). I don’t stop to look at them, but I will on the way back down. 

My next ride is with a nice South African woman who flashes me an unattractive go-thither thigh and more-or-less propositions me on the spot to a long term relationship…

That doesn’t go anywhere on the count that I don’t fancy her and it is all a bit sudden. Well the offer is nice I suppose.

Why is it only ugly mad women and gay men want to have sex with me?
A lady in her sixties and her pet dog give me a ride and she offers me a place to stay in her hostel. (I can’t – I’ve no spare cash.) She drops me off where I pick lots of yummy grapes from a hedge by the road for free.

I get another ride with a guy who takes tourists fishing out at sea for a living (although he says it’s hard to make money). I try hitching the last little bit of road up to the Cape, but the place is empty. I stop, get hassled by flies and start heading back south again.
A mini-lift of half a mile, some camping advice from a bloke from Leeds, and I head off walking along some dunes as the sun goes down. A quiet spot by the road, lush thick grass (something Australia doesn’t have) and I watch seven bush hens find a roost for the night, which is entertaining to watch: 

Of the seven, it becomes apparent what each hen’s role is within the group. There’s a distinct leader; the one who is going off and scouting out a good roost, then there’s another that fancies himself as the leader, but the rest are ignoring him, then the rest show various degrees of interest in following the real leader, pecking at nothing or going in completely the wrong direction. Eventually they sort themselves out with a nice tree with a couple of long-enough horizontal-ish branches to cling to for the night, up out of reach of whatever it is that they think might get them at ground level. Their whole rambling manoeuvre takes about twenty minutes and they manage it just as it gets to twilight.

There you are. The basics of human society in a nutshell. Or on a stick maybe.
As it gets dark I listen to plinky Pat Metheny jazz on my mp3 machine whilst lying back in just my sleeping bag and admiring the serenity of the Milky Way. Out here, there is no light pollution and the clarity of the stars is utterly stunning and mesmerising. What a way to end a day. Aah! Bliss! 
Several hours later a ferocious gale kicks up and hammers down with horrible hard rain. I try to rig up my flysheet by putting it over a metal farm gate to make a rough instant bivvy and I fail. Underneath the sodden sheet, which is shrink wrapping itself round me in the wind and flapping wildly, everything is getting wet; I’m getting wet. I yell at the weather in frustration to leave me be long enough to allow me to pack my stuff away. At least I get my frustration out of my system. I gather my wits to figure out how to survive the rest of the night. I decide to hastily stuff my wet things into my bags and head back half a mile to where I thought I had seen a shed in a field. I walk back up in the rain. Maybe it’s full of bulls. (The field had been full of them earlier.) Maybe It’s full of junk or cow-pats or something. It isn’t. It’s dry and habitable, although I can’t see a darned thing as I don’t have a torch.
In the morning, there is a glorious view of rolling hillside and distant low mountains. It reminds me of being in Sutherland in Scotland. The wind is still fierce, but dry this time and it’s doing a very good job of pinning all my wet things to a fence whilst drying them out at the same time. 

After a breakfast of hedgerow grapes and good scenery, it’s soon time to pack and head back down southwards to go see Mr. Hundertwasser’s famous toilets.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been caught like this by the rain and got myself soaked. It’s the kind of thing that can run me down quickly and make me ill (through heat loss); I’m not in Australia now! I’ve been baptised into New Zealand I suppose. 

The sky is brilliant, the sun is shining, the wind is blowing. A lone tree roars in the otherwise empty field I’m recuperating in. A pair of Paradise ducks fly off, squawking. I’m alive! I’ve got bean sprouts to eat and I’ve got a Julian Cope tune in my head (‘Ain’t no getting round getting round’).
I have a lovely day; I get a ride with a chap who worked with Mr. Hundertwasser building the toilets in Kawakawa, hitch with a lovely Swiss woman, two Americans from Connecticut (one of them very grumpy, wax lyrical over Newfoundland with the driver, then get to see Hundertwasser’s toilets. 
Friedensreich Hundertwasser was an Austrian artist whose radical and pioneering vision of environmental ideas fused into painting and architecture; he was Jewish but avoided persecution during the 1930s by posing as a Christian and to remain inconspicuous he joined the Hitler Youth. His name means Peace-Kingdom Hundred-Water, though sometimes he has called himself Regentag (Rainy Day) and Dunkelbunt (Darkly Multicoloured); he was something of an original hippie, before the hippies had been thought of.
It’s nice to see his creations for real. I take a photo of my rucksack next to one of his crazy mosaic walls just to prove that I was here. For me it’s almost like being an autograph hunter or something.
Feeling very satisfied, I eat dinner, then hitch with a Kiwi/Californian woman and her young daughter, then with a young giggling Maori couple to Koikohe. 

Then last random taxi of the day, I get a ride with a guy called Alec who takes me to his house, and fills me with food, beer and conversation for the next three days. Alec is a retired fisherman who recognises in me something of a kindred spirit. Staying at his house is lovely. It’s very rejuvenating to be made to feel so welcome. He is an old fella who happily recalls stories of his earlier years. Hearing of my almost penniless plight, he determines to fill me with regular doses of fried bacon sandwiches and beer. I get to heal my dodgy foot a bit more. Generally feeling very good about life and I seem to have a cheesy grin plastered across my face a lot of the time. 

Enjoying my time now in the sunshine, meeting lovely people, finally ‘living my dream’ I am able to get some perspective on some of the dramas I’d got tangled in and capitalise on them as traveller’s stories to tell.

Alec is keen to commend me for my perceptiveness. Hmm…When things are bad, be hopeful. When things are good, don’t be complacent.

I send lots of emails, saying I’ve arrived and phone my niece Jackie telling her I’m on my way.
Alec drops me off at the junction to the main road south, and we say our farewells. As I am getting out I find a marble half in the mud.

‘Hey Alec, how you doing for marbles?’

‘Well, I think I lost them a few years back’

‘Here you go, maybe this will help’ and I give it to him as a lucky memento. I wave him a fond farewell as he disappears down the road in his battered old red car. 

I get a ride with an elderly couple going six miles down the road and then with a young farming lad who is keen not to get picked up by the police, on account of him being incredibly stoned I have to presume.
We reach a small coastal village. I idle by the harbour, eat lunch and mentally untangle a bit, reflecting on what a decent fella Alec is. 

Walking on, I chat briefly to two young Maori women; something about the fine weather probably, walk up out of the harbour village and get a ride with two teachers. Another ride south with a Dutch couple takes me to the Visitors Centre of the Waipoua Forest.  

Looking around here. I am down to my last bits of food. An interesting situation bearing in mind my inability to buy food. Hmm. 

I hitch a ride with Ian MacDonald, a Kiwi, and we enthuse about Scotland; it brings a tear to my eye. On the subject of ‘living out your dreams’ he tells me he’s going to build a boat and sail to the place of his roots in the Scottish Highlands with his family. I tell him that blokes love procrastinating over their fantasies and that boats have a nasty habit of never getting completed and he should just go directly to Scotland and then build the boat afterwards. I insist this is what he should do  in fact; and I’m not generally one for insisting.
I sleep the night under Te Matua Ngahere (Father of the Forest) the second largest Kauri tree in New Zealand; It’s 5.6 metres wide and somewhere between 2000 to 4000 years old and is under the sacred protection of the Maori.

It rains, and I narrowly avoid getting wet – I sleep in my waterproofs. (You try it, it’s horrible!)

In the morning I am warmly greeted with the company of a yummy German woman. Unfortunately she has some dumbarse bloke dragging along not far behind.
Recovering from a night of mild stickiness, I walk round the forest a bit more and get some air to my knees, and then start hitching again. 

I get a ride with a young guy from Cardiff (Wales) who looks a bit like Kurt Cobain, and his two female Swedish friends from Arvika (who thankfully don’t look like the rest of Nirvarna).

He’s about to leave New Zealand and is planning on just getting another ticket back out here as soon as he gets back to Wales. I have to break the bad news to him that he has to spend as much time out of the country as he has spent in it. I feel really sorry for him cos it’s probably completely wrecked his plans. 

We stop off at Dargaville where they visit the front entrance of Woolworth’s and I successfully hit the skips (dumpsters) round the back. Lots of yoghurt, bacon and egg flan. There; that’s me in food for a few days.

When the others get back to the car, one of them says 

‘Hey, I thought you weren’t going to do any shopping?’

‘I didn’t! I went to the skips round the back of the supermarket.’

‘What! You mean you got all that food for FREE?! Didn’t anybody stop you?! Shit! I just spent forty bucks on food! I’m gonna do what you just did next time.’
These are good people to travel with, nice straight-forward types, but a lot of the journey back down to Auckland is drowned out by loud terrible noise alleging to be music, and on this count, is not my favourite ride of the trip. There’s nothing worse than having to shout over dreadful ‘music’ in order to try and have a conversation. I give up. I drown my sorrows with flan.
Auckland is the ‘largest city in the world’; large only in the sense that it is a sparse population thinly spread over a huge fifty mile-wide area. Actually the city centre itself looks tiny.

But let us let the Kiwis have their dream. They need all the bigness they can get, bless ’em.

  

I walk for a couple of minutes out of the centre to the motorway and get a ride to Manukua near the airport with a Maori guy who has just come back from a Tangi (funeral) in the north. He has just lost somebody quite dear to him; the Maori’s are more family oriented that most pakeha (incomers) but he is happy to tell me about it. 

The sun’s going down, I give up hitching and rig my tent up in a grassy field between two quiet-looking housing estates. 

A short walk in the morning, and I’m back on the motorway ramp: The same one I was on almost exactly a week ago, except this time I’m heading the other way. I eventually get a ride with a very laid back (sleepy) chap who’s just been to visit his Canadian girlfriend halfway between here and there; in Hawaii.

He’s not very hopeful about the future of it all as she wants to stay in Canada and he wants to stay in New Zealand.
At a corner of lush grass where the road forks left and right, before deciding on a choice of direction I feast some more on a lunch of the goodies I skipped at Woolworth’s. It’s like an English summer’s day. I could either go to Coromandel, a popular tourist destination with hot springs on the beach or I could go to ‘Thames’, which I see on the sign-post in front of me.
A car screeches to a halt. Lunch ends abruptly and in I jump. The driver decides he’s going to ‘pick my brains’ on good travel advice to Europe, but continually dreams up question after question before I get a chance to answer any of them. He gets very nitty-gritty about the fine details of my tent pole without hearing my super-interesting insights about said object. This bloke is either on speed or just a bit crazy.

We stop and meet his mate a little way on. They are off to do some dodgy deal I can’t quite figure out. I spot someone’s calling card under the accelerator pedal: So-and-So Well-Being and Mental Health Care. This guy’s mate implores him to let him do all the talking when they are about to get to where they are going. They don’t want to have their cars taken from them, cos they are not theirs anyway.

I don’t know what any of this is really about, but following an obvious instinct, I make my excuses and get out of the car and then leave them to it. Whatever it is. 
A water stop up at a Caltex servo run by an English Home Counties chap, then I get a ride with a camp Maori called Ray. Ray is I think possibly the most interesting ride I’ve ever had in all my eighteen years.

He is the third youngest out of fourteen; his mum is Pakeha (incomer/white person), his dad comes from a family of twenty siblings, and his grandfather has twenty-six brothers and sisters. He has 154 first cousins and they are a close happy family. I tell him he should be on the telly, and he tells me that they already were two years ago.

Christmas and birthdays are mad. He tells me twins never survive in his family so when one of his brothers announced his wife was three months gone with twins, the family all came together for two days of prayers. When the twins were born healthy there was partying and three van loads of gifts and toys to deal with.

His partner is an estate agent from Melbourne, which is very handy as they they are currently looking for a bigger house to move into as they have just adopted their son. They had had some heart-ache over whether to live here or in Melbourne, but finally, as his partner’s Greek family don’t approve of his sexuality he is not close to them, and Ray’s family are very supportive the obvious choice seems to be to settle here. And anyway, Ray is a country boy at heart. 
We pass a town with a giant concrete cow, which causes me to comment about my idea for a book about places with naff giant statues that celebrate whatever the locality is known for (however misguidedly); giant tipis, fruit and veg, animals etc. Proper rural kitsch. I am put in mind again of the fabulously named ‘Dildo’ in Newfoundland.

This then leads me to my other idea about making a book and tribute album/video of Elvis impersonators around the world. I’ve always been taken by the idea of person bearing little or no resemblance to Elvis and/or having little or no talent getting up on stage wearing the standard uniform; the wig, the stick-on sideburns, the sunglasses, the rhinestone suit. Then of course the mannerisms; the clicking fingers and wobbly legs, going ‘uh-huh!’ and looking like they are snogging a window.
When Ray susses that I’m cool about his sexuality he tells me all about his other life as an international drag artist. He hosted a Playboy erotica festival in Auckland, and has won Miss Drag New Zealand several times and Miss Pan-Pacific Islands drag contests. (There, you didn’t know such a thing existed did you?) His/her biggest success was winning Miss Drag San Francisco 2001, which won him/her a six month touring contract round California and also in Las Vegas. He has done lots of charity events and has been photographed with the last three New Zealand prime ministers, but his ultimate accolade was to have met Shirley Bassey (he was dressed as her, but twenty years younger).
He shows me some recent photos. He definitely has a head start; he’s got great legs.
We drive through Mekameka, which is where Peter Jackson put Hobbiton. I want to go and see it, but am later told that all you get to see is some dumpy little hills and some concrete holes where the houses used to be. It all sounds miserably like going to look at giant dental treatment and I’m glad I haven’t wasted thirty-eight bucks on that.
Ray drops me in Rotorua, his home town. I get out of the the car with him and we both head into a shop. Sniffing around inside suspiciously, I stand in front of the check out and raise a take-heed finger. My eyes narrow. ‘I can smell burning. Can you smell burning?’

The check-out looks at me like I’m an idiot, and then I realise my mistake. Of course i can smell burning. I’m in Rotorua you dumbhead. I skulk out, suddenly invisible.

Rays laughing, a good way to say goodbye, and I go and look at some conveniently-placed boiling mud on the other side of the road. Whilst looking at the boiling mud, a young blonde woman with dreads catches my eye and we sit on the grass talking. She (and her mum) are from Bristol, her mum is, bizarrely, an associate director of the Newbury Weekly News, the Tory bilge newspaper of my home town. She does singing workshops at a funky world music festival in my other home town of Reading called WOMAD, which is a much redeeming hobby. We all go off in Amy’s van and look round Rotorua for a bit. We check out a Marae (What amounts to being the Maori equivalent of a village hall) and I talk to a Maori chap about rugby and fishing quotas. Amy tells me about the Treaty of Whatangei and how it ripped off the Maoris (oh, doesn’t that make a change?)

I think Amy and me fancy each other but it is complicated by her mother’s presence and also that Amy’s about to disappear to Australia and I’ve only just got here. We falter at saying goodbye, she gives me a hug and I tell her she’s quite the most lovely person I have met in ages and I promptly walk off down the road as she and her mum go and book into a hostel.

I spend most of the rest of the day in a predictable turmoil, wondering what category of idiot I fall into. Several possibly.
The town of Rotarua is built right on top of the boiling mud it is famed for. Not a very smart move if you ask me, but there’s no accounting for taste. I go and distract myself from my own descending gloom by investigating the steaming pools and weirdly boiling goop. Looking really closely at the fine details, it is one of those micro-landscapes that has all kinds of peculiar miniature features that look like The Grand Canyon in Tiny-vision crossed with the surface of some unknown alien planet. I look for a suitable stream of hot water to wash in and almost scald myself in the process. After a couple of skin-reddening attempts I find a spot where two streams of water are merging; one boiling hot and the other cooler. Hey presto, and the temperature is just right, and I am able to clean myself up a bit and wash my socks of their sticky accumulation of sweat, dead skin and toe jam.

I expect I now merely smell like bad eggs but its probably an improvement.
I end this most remarkable of days feeling confused and a bit miserable watching more flubbering mud and trying to cook my skipped bacon by laying it on a crust of very hot mud but after staring glumly at it for ten minutes I can see that nothing is happening to it. I end up resorting to the normal method and do it over an open-fire so that I can have lunch for tomorrow. 
I lay my sleeping bag out on the crust of the boiling mud. The night air is cold. It’s a peculiar sensation to feel that my upper side is rather cold whilst my back is practically sweating with the heat underneath me. Sleeping out on this ultimately isn’t going to work so I move off the crusted mud and sleep nearby on cooler ground.

I am looking up mostly at stars in blackness. From the corner of my eye I can see orange sodium lights and hear cars going past off on night-time social missions.

I sleep near flubbering mud, trying not to feel lonely and failing.
I guess at some point the travel thing might end when I either balls it up financially (Hey I already did that! Twice!) or meet a woman I like who wants to do something sideways from me. In a way, meeting Amy briefly reminds me that my fantasies are of limited use if I want to function emotionally in the real world. It seems like my ‘ideal future’ not only refuses to land in one set idea, but seems like it’s also a manifestation of control freakery.
Another travel book idea: The history of American place names. A journey through the making of modern America and what inspired people to name places as they did.
February 26th.

I am now attempting to hitch to Wai-o-tapu (having a job getting the hang of Maori place names). 

I get a ride with a farmer who reckons there’s loads of milking work around. He drops me off, I walk about one kilometre to another mud pool. 

What a peculiar sight. Lots more farting splopping mud. Mother Earth has had too much curry for tea last night by the looks of it. 

 

Further down the road I find loads of blackberries. Seems I’ve been eating mostly bacon and blueberries the last few days. This almost feels like a balanced diet. I’ve thrown in quite a few red clover heads and dandelion leaves too. Fresh young red clover heads have got loads of valuable minerals and nutrients. Someone once told me that eating one a day should keep you topped up in that department. I like to eat a whole load, just to make sure.
Whilst on the way to find the multi-coloured Wai-o-tapu sulphur pools I find not far from the place itself a well-worn track through some woods which I imagine might lead me there for free. (It’s an extortionate eighteen dollars to get in.) 

I follow this mysterious and faintly Tolkeinesque-looking path (I’m sorry, I did just write that) until I reach a narrow stream. I cross it, carry on down the track and get lost. I then turn back and return to try following the stream. At first it is shallow with a gravel bed, but soon I am up to my knees in warm oozing volcanic goop and abandon the idea as unfeasable. 

I return to the part of the stream I first encountered in order to clean the mud off my legs, where it is not oozing mucky splodge. 

There I happily find that the water is just the right temperature for taking a bath.

I’m really not very likely to get a chance like this again, so I strip off and lie down in it. It’s amazing! This place looks fairly undiscovered, and I’m happy to leave it that way and not tell anyone where it is. I’m really surprised how ordinary this stream looks – no steam (not that hot) and ordinary plant-life on the banks, so it’s a real hidden treasure.
After a while I make my way back to the main road and head towards the visitors centre where I hide my pack in the bush, and try to get in for free. Following a ‘DANGER – KEEP OUT’ sign (A-ha! This must be the way!) I make my way in, down to a tricky-to-cross river. After dodging boiling sulphur ponds and crossing over, I struggle through dense bushes and a dodgy looking maze of precipices over-hanging deep steaming sulphur holes. All in full view of anyone in the visitors centre. I’ve screwed up big time. As soon as I reach the trail for members of the paying public, a warden yells at me to stop, and I get thrown out (having seen not very much at all).
The warden is scowling and says he’ll call the police if he ever sees me again, and his mate is smiley and drives me up to the main road going to Taupo.

I’m very apologetic. I used to do conservation volunteering, and I realise how crap it is for people to go wondering about on protected sites. That and the real possibility that I could have just disappeared into the gates of Hell.

The warden’s mate wishes me better luck with my travels and drops me off. I try feeling bad about what I’ve just done but it just makes me laugh. It dawns on me how monumentally stupid I have just been and upon reflection, I’m bloody lucky that I’m still in one piece, and actually still here at all.
I fancy walking down the highway, it looking quite like scenery from The Film That Shall Not Be Mentioned (cos it probably is). The landscape here looks like ancient craters turned into very steep-sided and odd-looking lumpy hills; like nowhere I have ever seen before. It must be great fun to ride an ATV on but a bugger to actually farm on, but it’s very unusual and beautiful terrain.
My last ride of the day is from a trainee beauty therapist who looks about fourteen. She’s driving a very flash black sports car which she says is hers (and I’ve no real reason to disbelieve her).

She drops me a little way later at Reporoa which is a very chilled quiet little nowhere place. After finding no free food there and watching a cat eat semi-mashed fish and chips that is lying abandoned on the pavement, I walk out and sleep on a verdant verge, all nice and flat and spongy and cosy. 

Watching the sun going down, it reminds me of Gloucester if I look one way and where I grew up in Berkshire if I look the other way.

It rains in the night, but I sleep well.
I keep seeing Kiwi ‘Adventure Explorer’ type buses all over the place. Is it just me being a cantankerous old git, or am I right to be dismayed by the sight of them? In a world where predominantly white westerners are becoming molly-coddled and numbed by convenience, even the idea of the noble art and experience of travel is being turned into an old age pensioners grockle tour for students.

Where you ‘do’ a country even though true to advertising lies it says ‘experience’ on the packet.

These buses are like laxatives, slipping people like turds through the guts of a place, minimum of contact, minimum of trouble, minimum of time. The only people you’ll meet are other Europeans. I guess that’s alright if that’s where you’re at. It gives me the heeby-jeebys, especially with so little hitch-hiking going on in the world. There’s too much paranoia in the world and not enough interaction and discovery.

Will any of these kids even get to meet any real life ordinary Maoris to talk to, or will they just have them paid to dance for them at some awful contrived motel spectacular? (‘Dance-for-a-dollar’ the Maoris call it.) 

I’m probably just envious of the fact that they all have nice warm beds to go to and are probably getting in lots of drinking and shagging.
I once casually picked up what looked like a home-shopping catalogue in someone’s house whilst I was in England, and literally dropped it in horror when I realised what I was actually looking at was a catalogue full of ‘meet the cute natives’ holidays. Go and hang with the Maasai. Watch them do a war dance and then take their photos. Go and meet tribes-people from the Amazonian Basin. Chew coca leaf. Join in a sacred ritual that is their life to them and mere entertainment to you. Take their photos.

I once came across the notion which stated that many Native Americans felt that the camera would steal their souls should they allow their picture to be taken.

Anyway, bile over, on with the day…
My first ride of the day is with a friendly Maori couple on their way to a Tangi (feast).

They drop me in Taupo where I dutifully send off 200 bucks to the Ministry of Agriculture, Sheep and Tourist Fleecing. I then go and pay the local Woolworth’s skips a visit and get myself some more free food: bread rolls, cottage cheese, some very tasty hummus, pumpkin soup in a tub, fresh egg lasagne (also tasty) and a couple of onions.
I later get my photo taken by people on some team challenge kind of thing and they want me to pretend to ask them for directions, and so I dutifully point somewhere random to create visual effect in their photo. They have ten things to do in one hour and I am holding them up slightly as I can’t take them seriously. I am pointing up somebody’s nose and laughing and ruining the picture. (Only briefly though.)

Actually I really do want directions, so they tell me the way to Hastings, which fortunately doesn’t involve travelling via anyone’s nostrils.
I sit by the lake and make a splendid salady lunch and then meet the ‘Evil Eddie’ drag racing crew who pull in for lunch too. From drag queen to drag racing. I am watching them; a whole family in the heavy-rock mould, a bit like ‘The Osbournes’ on wheels. One guy wearing a lurid black tee shirt with a luminous green skeleton design on it sees me looking at him and says ‘What are you doing here?’ in a pseudo-menacing way.

‘Oh, I’m just having lunch. What are you doing?’

‘Anything I damn well please.’

Which we then follow with quite a pleasant little chat about the whys and wherefores of drag racing in New Zealand and how he has a pommie mate called Shamrock (which I point out doesn’t make sense cos if he’s called Shamrock then he must be Irish). Anyway…
They bugger off for lunchtime drinkies, and I head off out of town and then get a lift to Napier, where I then abandon hitching for the day. I have come a reasonable distance and the sky seems to be darkening towards early evening and maybe rain. I pitch my tent some way up away from the main drag on a nice quiet estuary with herons and water birds for company. I get rather damp in the night, but not drastically so. I need to get some silicone sealant for this tent; The tent came from Darwin and is designed for the outback. It is silver to keep off the sun. It doesn’t really know what to do about rain. 
Slow hitching again in the morning, and a ride with a couple who enthusiastically share with me a mutual abhorrence of Hugh Grant and Mr. Bean. 

I has pissed me off enormously that a number of non-Brits I have met seem to have this idea that the afore-mentioned two represent between them some kind of average Englishman. AAARRGGHHH!!!! For Heaven’s Sake!
At Hastings a ride with a Mormon, then a short ride with a Christian type chap with an irrepressible grin, then another ride with a Tongan couple, who are very amiable despite their lack of English.

We stop for petrol and I go and buy a ‘Whittaker’s Peanut Slab’. I’ve been wet for a while and I deserve chocolate. I am almost within reach of my niece’s place, and this is the first time I have spent any money at all in the three weeks I have have been here in New Zealand. It tastes fabulous.
Another ride to another difficult to remember Maori-named town beginning with a ‘W’. It would help enormously if I actually had a map and got to see the names of places properly rather than just when I am coming whizzing past the signposts upon entering a place. 

I get a ride with Jonny who’s going to Feilding to mess with traction engines for the weekend; I am welcome to come along. This is great: I get to dry out, sleep in, eat food, drink beer and join them as they happily fiddle with their steam engines, huffing chuffing and crunching slowly across the gravel. 

Many of these lumbering great machines have brass plates declaring their place of manufacture; Sheffield, Bolton, Huddersfield. These beauties of English engineering craftsmanship were imported at the turn of the century to do their bit in helping build this part of the British Empire. Marvellous.

Yes I have spelt the Feilding right, in case you’re wondering. The place is named after some English military general-type geezer.
I spend an evening and morning with these trainspottery types and thoroughly enjoy the down-to-earth grease and dieselness of it all. Mid-morning they roll these great beasts out into a brief interlude of sunshine, rumbling forwards unstoppably and tooting their whistles, off on their way to a rally in the next town up. They may well get there by Christmas.

I wave them goodbye and go back into Feilding town to find out where I might be able to help with the flooding relief work; I figure this might help me out too. Everything is closed, even the police station.
I ask a local chap, and he takes it upon himself to show me round the town showing me where the river burst it’s banks, then he suggests that I go down to the racecourse where flood victims are being housed temporarily.

I go down there and it’s obvious that I’ve totally missed the boat. There’s no-one down here, so I sit in an office porch-way, listen to some music on my gizmo and wonder what the hell to do next.
I am approached by an older guy of about fifty who wants to know what I am doing sitting in a doorway (looking like a bum) and I tell him my story.

He tells me to come with him and look round the racecourse with him. I do this with him and he gets to figure me out a little. He offers to put me up in his caravan which is also on the racecourse. He tells me that he might be able to get me on his team who are doing flood relief work; shovelling silt out of people’s gardens, removing caught debris from fences etc.
I spend about a week staying in Gerry’s caravan with his best friend, his friendly moulting mutt. We drink a few beers in the evening, watch a bit of telly and talk. We are kindred spirits, both quite solitary, and we both enjoy the basics of life. A caravan to call home, a fire at night and some straightforward company every now and again. I spend my days with the clear-up crew, a bunch of ne’er-do-wells with the Work and Income people (the Kiwi equivalent to the dole) pushing sticks in their backs to make them employable. We clear up bits of debris out of people’s gardens. It’s okay. It’s worthy but not actually that interesting. It’s not earning me any money either. I’ve never been very keen on working for free alongside someone getting paid to do the same thing. I need to get to South Island and get on the apple-picking fast.
I tell Gerry my intentions. The next day I bid my farewells to the guys and I get a ride with them out towards the road to Palmy (Palmerston North). 

When Gerry and the other guys drop me off I can’t be arsed to hitch. I liked Gerry and I feel a bit sad to be leaving him. 

I’m feeling dirty, my back still hurts and my rucksack is starting to disintegrate again. I realise that I need to go and get my head together somewhere before I do anything else. I chill out up away from the road and give myself a bit of a meditational mental cleanse. A couple of hours later I am back on the road again.
I get a ride with a chap and his son who take me into Palmerston North, then I wait ages for a ride until I get picked up by a Philipino woman who’s a beauty therapist and doing a performing arts course. She has a boyfriend in Dubai who’s a bomb disposal expert working occasionally in Iraq. She’s going to join him in Dubai when her course finishes and make shed loads of money pampering the fingernails of rich women. (I could do that surely?)

I love meeting people like her; people who ‘step outside the box’ and do whatever they dream of. All good stuff.
I am standing by the road, idly thinking about how nice it would be to have sex. This is not an unusual thought particularly. 
My next ride comes with Sandy, who takes me home for coffee and to ‘meet the tribe’.

They all live on the corner of a quiet housing estate in Paraparaumu (Para-para-oo-moo, or just ‘Para’ as the locals call it). The house is full of fantasy dragon-y stuff, which reminds me of my old friend Don back home. Kids are squirrelling away at something or another on computers and a golden retriever comes and says hello. Sandy explains how this is one of those houses that always has people in it coming and going. I like this place, it has good vibes.
When the kids have finished, I check my emails for the first time in a while.

I get some bad news from friends overseas and it knocks me sideways. Someone I had spent quite some time with and had enjoyed meeting has been knocked down by a truck and has died.
I have to leave the house and gather my thoughts. When I return I tell Sandy what has happened. As consolation she offers to share her bed with me…

I sleep with Sandy which is nice but slightly weird and we spend the next couple of days hanging out and just being cosy and chatting. It’s just what I needed (thank you Sandy). Meeting Dee and her kids and a bunch of their mates helps a lot too. Everyone’s into music; there’s guitars, a bass and a drum kit. The kids are into hip hop, mum’s into rock and everyone is into Karaoke. Mates come round, get pissed and lark about. What good people I meet!
THE RAMBLINGS OF AN INTERNATIONAL BUM 

(possible book title as suggested by Sandy)

Sandy drops me off at the train station – she has very kindly given me a ticket into Wellington. The journey is beautiful. I’m sure I recognise some of the mountains from T.F.T.S.N.B.M. 

Wellington is small and cosy looking; set in a very spectacularly mountainous bay. Presumably it doesn’t get ‘the most awesome city in the world’ awards because of it’s unfantastic weather in the winter months. It certainly is a more spectacular setting than Vancouver or Melbourne. (The city that looks from above like a printed circuit board.)
I have a brief visit to the National Art Gallery, soak up some fabulous creativity and get out just in time to board the ferry to the South Island.

The ferry journey across Cook Strait is fourteen miles wide at its narrowest and is considered one of the most dangerous and turbulent straits in the world. Well that’s nice to know I’m sure. I hope we don’t sink then.
Actually, I love ferry journeys through rugged places – Fredrikshavn to Oslo, Cartwright to Lewisporte, Twassingen to Swartz Bay, and looking at the map, this one should be pretty good, and sure enough, it is, all speckled islands and crenulated headlands.

I get chatting to an occupational therapist from Alberta, and get gooey for Canada. Maybe when my six months in New Zealand is up, I’ll go back there.
Picton has the most wonderful vibes, very serene. It is set in an almost complete ring of mountains. A great place to wake up to after sleeping in it’s tiny park for the night. It seems as if New Zealand spent its formative years engaged in a lot of volcanic activity. The rings of mountain ridge both here and in Wellington would suggest it. 

I breakfast on a cold tin of beans, skipped mature cheddar and mountains. Yum!
That day, I get a ride with a middle-aged English bloke, which has an unexpectedly strange effect of making me feel somehow let down. I guess it must be having my ‘exotic Englishman abroad’ thing knocked into irrelevance. That maybe and a sort of dull reality check; this bloke happens to be the kind of English person abroad that seems to like being unimpressed by everything, like its his favourite hobby. All a bit disconcerting and depressing really.
After a bit of a wait, I am picked up by a Canadian guy who had set up a software company in California with all his best mates, made a million dollars, got bored with it, packed it in, and now he’s writing a screenplay about the hidden evils of science unleashed by an unwitting scientist who invents something supposedly benign that goes wrong. How nice to meet a laid-back Canadian with creativity and thoughtfulness. Some of my favourite qualities. What’s even better, he gives me a lift all the way to the doorstep of my niece’s house.

Hurrah for change!
Staying with Kendal and Jackie doesn’t quite live up to my imagined assumptions. Here I am, expecting to be the star of their family show. (That role turns out to be taken by their demanding two year old son Harvey.) In my terminal poverty I had imagined being fed the vast homecoming feast of the weary and bedraggled but heroic traveller. 

And then just my luck, I’ve turned up two days before Jackie’s long unseen best friend from back home is turning up for a week. They spend lots of time going out together which I get excluded from. Only the English could behave like this towards their own family.

Actually they are all on their uppers and can barely afford to feed themselves let alone me, so I end up having to go to a St. Vincent De Paul charity shop where they very kindly give me two carrier bags of food; enough to last me for two weeks. 
It’s strange how most of the people I meet are warm and friendly; some of them even invite me into their homes as an honoured guest. I suppose when you’re hitching you automatically filter out the unfriendly people as they drive past. Then being a foreigner seems to have an added interest factor as the host sometimes seems to tangibly become a representative of his/her country. You get the whole cultural exchange thing.

Yet here I am, with people who grew up in the same miserable unfriendly town as I did, Reading (pronounced Redding). It’s an unusual circumstance now for me, and oddly deflating too. 
There’s no skipping possibilities round the Nelson area, which is a complete arse.

Small towns are usually pretty good for skipping, and the Woolworth’s in New Zealand had so far been a reliable source of nosh. You tend to find out fairly quickly which supermarket chains are skipping-friendly and which ones are not. Unfortunately Nelson seems to be totally bereft of dumpster-diving opportunities, which is a bit of a bummer as I am expecting to stay here for a while.

 

Whilst in town, I am wondering how to make progress.

I saw little Harvey flipping out this morning, crying for his mum’s attention whilst she’s on the phone talking to someone else. He won’t accept this. Any kind of distraction made by mum he thinks about for a moment and then he decides to have a tantrum, but what he wants is just his mum. Love and attention.
Today I’m emotional and upset; the odds seem stacked against me. Everything seems difficult, emotional and dramatic. I’m trying to unlearn the drama thing in order to become an adult, responsible for interacting as healthily as possible in the world.

How do I get out of a situation that I don’t like? How do I maintain a sense of objectivity in order to behave with clarity and integrity? Now there’s a question.

Release the frustration. After too much of it, trying to fight it off will just get in the way of finding a calm objective mind and calm feeling in the body.

Cry. Shout. Meditate. Go for a run. Whatever I feel I need to do; to get out of mental and emotional dis-orderedness to somewhere calm, sometimes by just going through it, consciously. The other side of it IS there. I just have to want calmness before whatever else it is I am trying to achieve, because if I don’t have calmness before I start to do anything I won’t be anywhere near as well equipped to get the result I want. (It will be a hollow victory anyway if I manage to get there at all.) Maybe this doesn’t work if you’re a boxer?

So sitting in the library, I see myself like Harvey the two year old kid, not seeing that I am too busy crying to see that my options are wider than I think.

Bottom line is, I have about ninety dollars. (Vincent De Paul gave me an emergency loan.) I can buy a WWOOF list for forty dollars, stay somewhere for four months; eat, have some kind of security and grounding.

Just because I CAN survive out of skips, doesn’t mean I want to all the time. It certainly doesn’t feel like a lifestyle option; it’s a backstop.

I have many options with life. If one door seems jammed, then look closer and I will find that another is open.

The last couple of weeks have been an exercise in learning to be chilled out. Visiting my niece Jackie is a huge non-event; her god-daughter arrived at almost the same time, and because they are close friends and haven’t seen each other for two years, I am kept in the background. I don’t even eat with them; I eat the big load of free food that the St. Vincent de Paul people give me. I have a few beers with them and that is about it.

On my birthday, I go cycling round Nelson which is very lovely. I have it down as being an almost perfect location; by the sea, nestled into the mountains and probably quite a lot of creativity going on too.

I go and buy a WWOOF list in ‘The Green Grocer’ an organic wholefood shop and am served by a very lovely middle-aged Californian woman. I ask her if she fancies going out somewhere and she says yes! And then she tells me it would only be as a friend as she’s married. I look all disappointed, she says sorry and comes and gives me a birthday hug anyway.

It’s a very international kind of area round here – meeting the occasional American has been quite satisfying, though being round English people I always feel strangely like I’m on the receiving end of an anti-climax.

I guess a certain dream-like bubble of otherness is being penetrated or burst. I guess it reconfirms the feeling I have that I don’t really want to go back to England – I enjoy being a foreigner too much. I like the differentness of it. I have a real reason to feel like an outsider.
I am out riding my borrowed bike, looking for work. There is an apple tree by the side of the road. It has already been harvested but there are a few left on it that are a bit scabby looking. Great! Some free nosh! No sooner than I have picked myself six apples, than a cop pulls up in a car, gets out and tells me that I am stealing, that I should throw the apples back over the fence, that I should be on my way immediately, and that if he catches me stealing again that he will arrest me.
HUH?!! What? For scrumping a few apples?

Beware of The New Zealand Fruit and Vegetable Police!

I have almost no money and Jackie and Kendal need to be squeaky clean in order to stand a chance of getting their naturalisation papers, so I don’t want some copper nicking me and finding out I am staying with them.

I am annoyed once again at the pettiness of all this. Clearly there just isn’t any real crime here for him to be chasing. I am left with the feeling that on the one hand, New Zealand is one of the most peaceful and friendly countries I have ever had the pleasure of visiting. And on the other hand the inappropriate use of fruit and veg is likely to incur the wrath of the Food Gestapo.
I ask unsuccessfully at a couple of farms whether they need apple-pickers. Its all looking a bit tricky. I am still feeling like I am living by the skin of my teeth.
I set off on my bike armed with my eleven dollars (three quid) and my new WWOOF book. Buying this book has used up nearly all my money, but I am hoping that it will land me somewhere that I can have a roof over my head, food in my belly and some stability so I can get myself back on track.

Nearby, in Redwood, about three miles from Jackie and Kendal’s house is a WWOOF host. I call her up and she enthusiastically invites me over to meet her.

When I get there she tells me that she is a Christian and that she hopes I am okay with that. Yep; fine. She introduces me to her dog, shows me round the house and then shows me all the jobs she needs doing.

Phew. I’ve landed. Breathe out at last…

I spend about a week at Karen’s, cutting the grass on her lawn, pruning some bushes, painting a window frame, and the best job of all, pruning her over-grown grapevine.

‘Just chuck them all on the compost heap!’ She calls out.

Not likely; some of them may be on the way to being raisins, but grapevines are something of a novelty to me and that combined with the general leanness of the times inclines me to feast greedily on them for about three days. Yummy.

Karen is a busy out-going sort of person; singing in a community choir, helping to organise the ‘Wearable Art’ festival that happens every year, she is also a musician and is generally pretty good company to be around. This is lovely after all the weirdness of being at Jackie and Kendal’s.
One day though, a friend of hers is visiting, and asks Karen who this new guy is doing odd-jobs round the garden. Karen explains to her friend that I am a wwoofer, and then she tells her what WWOOFing is all about.

This is fine at first, and I am in earshot of the conversation. I am left feeling somewhat offended though when her friend, grasping the implications, bursts out with ‘Wow that’s great! I could call our place an organic smallholding and get myself some free labour to do all the shitty jobs that I don’t want to!’
WWOOF when it started in 1971 was very specifically intended to link up enthusiastic volunteers that wanted to learn about organic agriculture with hosts that sorely needed their help in getting the organic movement moving. It has stayed like this for a long time with this core of specific intention. I think it has been since the advent of the internet that its appeal has started to broaden; now a volunteer is just as likely to be a young gap-year student or back-packer more motivated by travelling cheaply than organic farming.

In order to be in the WWOOF list, the host must be organic in some form or other, and now there are hosts who stretch the definition and seem to be little more than a work exchange for bed and board, which is not really what the spirit of WWOOFing is all about.

It is an organisation that is based on friendliness and a spirit of learning and sharing, and it seems that it can sometimes be open to abuse with hosts demanding too much work, sometimes offering little hospitality. Mind you, this is most certainly the exception rather than the rule; WWOOFing is still a great way to learn and get genuinely valuable skills and life experience.

About two days after being at Karen’s I ask at the apple orchard literally on the other side of the road from her house to see if they have any work for me. They do!! I have been warned that the money is not very good; sixty dollars a day (twenty to twenty-five quid). To me, this feels like winning the lottery.
Karen’s place. Redwood 23rd March

So here I am, picking apples, working about nine to ten hours a day, earning as promised about sixty dollars a day. The farmer hasn’t allowed me to stay on his farm, and the WWOOFing woman I am staying with wants me to work sixteen hours a week for my room. He expects me to have one day off a fortnight!

Either his decision can be changed or I’m going to have to go somewhere else. Or I busk it in the bushes until I can’t take it any more. That sounds horrible.
After my second day of apple-picking, I do a big meditation and do a huge amount of bodily untangling. I sleep soundly and have a beautiful dream:

I am in a pastoral wooded place. It’s a bright sunny day. There are people sitting under trees, in trees and by a big river. It’s very happy and peaceful. By the river some very dark skinned Africans are making boats. They are tying themselves to each other and to logs to make themselves into human boats. I float off downstream with them. There are lots of African people, beautiful African women too, all sailing down this river.

I arrive at a town; it is African. I notice I am the only white person. I could be frightened. I decide not to be as I walk further into the town. Here, there are many people, just standing around doing nothing. I notice lots of people looking over a railing down into the sea. Then I realise with a sense of revelation, ‘It’s a big ship!’ and that, dear reader is the end.
Some time later on the road, I am to meet a Maori in a supermarket who takes me home and puts me up for the night. He is a story-teller, and he tells me about one of main Maori myths about New Zealand being a giant boat that gets sailed here from the Pacific. This is the story he tells me:
The legend of Maui and the magic fish-hook:

Maui was a demi-god, who lived in Hawaiiki. Hawaiiki is the ancestral homeland from across the Pacific Ocean. Maui possessed magic powers that not all of his family knew about.

One day when he was very young, he hid in the bottom of his brothers’ boat in order to go out fishing with them. Once out at sea, Maui was discovered by his brothers, but they were not able to take him back to shore as Maui made use of his magic powers, making the shoreline seem much further away than it was in reality. 

So the brothers continued rowing, and once they were far out into the ocean Maui dropped his magic fish-hook over the side of the waka. After a while he felt a strong tug on the line. This seemed to be too strong a tug to be any ordinary fish, so Maui called to his brothers for assistance.

After much straining and pulling, up suddenly surfaced Te Ika a Maui (the fish of Maui), known today as the North Island of New Zealand. Maui told his brothers that the Gods might be angry about this, and he asked his brothers to wait while he went to make peace with the Gods.

However, once Maui had gone his brothers began to argue among themselves about the possession of this new land. They took out their weapons and started pounding away at the catch. The blows on the land created the many mountains and valleys of the North Island today.

The South Island is known as Te Waka a Maui (the waka of Maui; a waka being a canoe, and Maui being a mythical god-hero). Stewart Island, which lies at the very bottom of New Zealand, is known as Te Punga a Maui (Maui’s anchor), as it was the anchor holding Maui’s waka as he pulled in the giant fish. 
Its curious that my dream might somehow have a parallel image in Maori myth.

The dream I think comes in part from thinking about how privileged I am, just by the fact of being white; It means I can go almost anywhere I like, and almost any ambition that I have is also capable of being a possibility. Something white westerners take for granted. 
My current situation of having almost no money is one I can get out of. It does make me wonder though about the millions upon millions of people in the world whose condition are thwarted by the politics of nationality and of being born into seemingly inescapable poverty.
March or April Redwood still.

Bill and Erica are very nice people, I decide; they are going to give me a nice juicy caravan to live in while I’m working for them for five bucks a night. Life now becomes considerably more doable.
April 2nd

I’ve been getting very physically tired (and super-fit in the process), working sometimes ten hours a day for about twenty five quid. I’m starting to find a bit of rhythm with it.

Yesterday I was working next to a grumpy Israeli called Paul who looks just like Bob Dylan. Meanwhile the Czechs I am working and spending my evenings with with are Radek, Peter, George and Michael. That’s the nearest I have ever got to living with an actual pop star.

These guys buy their shopping communally. They buy a big sack of rye flour which they make bread with and a big sack of potatoes and this enables them to feed themselves very very cheaply indeed.

Our evenings usually involve drinking beer, playing chess, watching New Zealand Idol on TV, helping Peter with his English and Radek being drunk and crazy in a very endearing way.
Good Friday

We have a day off from apples, we escape to the big wide world of Motueka, a town full of shops and lovely lovely women.
Easter Monday.

Blaaaaaaahh…. Yet another day off courtesy of Jesus rising from the dead, which funnily enough, is sort of what I feel like I’m doing too after so much hard work apple-picking. Way to go Jesus.
Here in the caravan I am surrounded by a vegetable garden full of flowers. I am nestled into the end corner of a long wind-break line of poplars that shwoosh and rattle in the wind high above me.
When I eventually die, I am going to go to a cosy little slacker’s Valhalla afterlife; living on an allotment tended by ancient Viking warriors that have long since settled down into more placid activities to see them through the eternal summer of the afterlife. they all live in caravans and spend their time enjoying their garden plots, growing vegetables, gathering apples to make scrumpy, brewing wines, making their own woollen clothes and generally just chewing the fat with each other, reminiscing over long-gone glories.

Each still only five foot tall, stout, long ginger and blond bearded and with one of those leather Viking helmets with the horns on them. For old times sake more than anything else. In the assignation of their communal duties, each of them shall be deemed a god of something small but important. There shall be Ulrik the god of home-brew beer, Erik the god of knitting jumpers, Bjarni the god of growing spinach and Sven the god of sofas.
I much prefer the idea of sharing the afterlife with celestial Viking warrior gardeners rather than with Cliff Richard in some fluffy wuffy sleepy-land full of holy lift muzak.
Anyway, here is sublimely beautiful, my little rural idyll set in a landscape which I describe to Helen on the phone and to my dad as being like being in Hereford by the sea with snow capped mountains in the background.

I am still thinking lots on the ‘where next’ theme, flipping between going to Canada, canoeing down the Mississippi, going to India, England, Norwich Scotland or a combination of all of them. AAAARRRGGGHHHH! SSHHHUUUUUTT UUUUUUUUUUUPPPP!!!!
In between moments of excitedness and genuine gratefulness for being alive, mixed with some feelings of homesickness, soul-searching ‘What am I on the planet for?’ kind of stuff and nonsense.
In amongst that I have been listening to Blackadder and Fast Show mp3s and I keep getting random phrases leap up and down in the way of all my important thinking. I seem to have invented a seventeenth century aristocrat called ‘Lady Butter-Crumble’. Whoever she might be.
Johnny came home from a hard day of repeating the word ‘fish’ over and over. His mother asked him what kind of music he would like for tea, she rustled up his favourite – an aromatic symphony with violins, tubas and Jamaican steel drums. Afterwards they all sat down to watch some food. Today they are watching a cucumber and a radish. Later on, they are going to watch a particularly good potato.
Memo to self: don’t try to write when you get stoned after working too hard and you haven’t had your tea yet.
April 10th(ish) Redwood Orchard, Nelson

Feel good today about going back to England – different than I do about the other ideas – reason being that England has all sorts of comfort zone factors – being able to see Don, Glyn (my sister), dad, Sofie, Mike, Ben and Suzanne, Jane (mates) and the rest of the Norwich mob.

I’d like to tie up loose ends – I have been thinking a lot about all the significant events through my life in England – the music I grew up with, going out with Christine my first proper girlfriend, my early twenties and what I was into then.

Then, I was overwhelmed with pretty much the same possibilities that I am now – painting, music, bicycle contraptions, country living and all that. Still into Summerhill (free school) even.
I dream I go to Helen’s house, feel shunned as her eco-activist friends look down on me. Saw a film made of Helen eco-activists lives. Very weird. Rather worthy and dour.

I feel like doing what I want is more compelling than ‘doing the Right Thing’.
May 7th

I’m at Seaton Valley Orchard at Mapua. 

Last night was the last for the five of us together; me, Marisa, Bryony, Klara and Honzo. Marisa and Bryony are leaving at 9 am in the morning. It’s been great being with them, Marisa and Bryony especially.

It’s full moon and the middle of the night, I have woken up needing a piss. The sky is beautifully clear and starry. I can hear the continual low roar of the waves breaking on the rugged coastline about one mile away.

I can’t get back to sleep so I am cooking rice and packing all my stuff ready for tomorrow. It’s the end of the picking here and in the morning, Dan and Bob (two Maori guys) will be coming at 7 am to pick me up and drive down to Timaru right down in the south. The apples are still going on down there.
Well morning comes, and Bob and Dan don’t, which is no great bother to me; I’ve still got a heap of things to do this end anyway.

Honzo and Klara finish doing up their van (I help by building a cupboard) and then they leave. Their departure is soured by Honzo finding my stereo and almost driving off with it without telling me he’s found it. He knows it’s mine. Some people are just weird. Some people would call that ‘stealing’. Now they have gone; I am the only person here left.
I discover feijoas – a fruit that looks like a gherkin and tastes, at first like a cross between kiwi fruit, lemon, pineapple and washing up liquid. It is related to the guava and came originally from Brazil but can be grown in England. Hurrah!

I think they are horrible at first, but seeing as how there are dozens and dozens of them dropping off the four bushes here, I am determined to make the most of them. They are definitely an acquired taste, but it doesn’t long to get to like them (hurrah again!)
Somehow these days I seem to be carrying a ton of stuff that I never used to. This baffles me slightly. After this many years practice I ought to know how to keep things to a minimum, but it seems I don’t.  

These days I like to carry a tent and experience comforts that ten years ago I would have gone without: I never used to have a sleeping mat or Thermarest, just one thin sleeping bag. I never carried a tent; I would just dive into the nearest vaguely dry-looking shed/outhouse/garage/bush/tree/whatever. I never used to carry food; I’d just live off cheese and onion pasties, milk and chocolate.

I never used to carry any soap, or toothpaste. I’d carry very few spare clothes. I  must have been even stinkier back then than I am now that’s for sure.
Now what I really need is an entourage of camels and Sherpas and some diligent African chaps carrying large chests full of pointless frivolous guff. Maybe next year.

Apple-picking is good. It’s the kind of hard work that builds camaraderie (except when some bastard is trying to nick my stereo). The small amount of money I’ve made is enough to give me a bit more flexibility about going to Canada which is good. I went into Nelson yesterday and narrowly avoided spending a load of my hard-earned cash on pointless frivolous guff. Partly cos I don’t really actually need a multi-fuel stove (300 bucks! Yikes!) and partly cos I don’t have an entourage of diligent African camel Sherpas.
I do however have a rusty old bike and two different trailer options. Now I have the place to myself and the hard labour is over; I can fiddle about at my leisure. I have a few days before I am required to leave the worker’s hut completely.
One trailer I make by taking a knackered old bike frame, sticking a back wheel in it and attaching the front forks in to the back-stays of the other bike. After cutting the top bar out of the frame and building a triangular box to go into the hole that’s left, I end up with a three-wheeled tandem built for one. I discover the reason why I’ve never seen anyone do this to a bike is that although it looks like something out of the circus, it’s about as stable as George Bush on acid and just collapses weirdly as soon as I try to turn. It’s because the geometry is all wrong. Be thankful that I just stopped myself from going into technical details.
My other trailer is a wobbly old golfing caddy that I picked up at the scrapyard in Richmond, It works fine until I overload it with all my new found junk. Luckily most of the excess weight is from all the left-over food that the Czech guys gave me, so after about a week, my load should be significantly reduced as I munch my way through it all. (As fast as I possibly can, knowing me.)
Yesterday on the way to Nelson I was picked up by an interesting woman who runs a chip shop in Moutere. That’s ‘interesting’ as in ‘love-interest’. Oh all right then, sex. I go off into fantasies of settling in New Zealand and spending the rest of my days working in a fish and Chip shop. I think I’m going to pop in and see her on my way to Takaka, even though I may be running headlong into a future life of lardiness. 
Whilst up in the trees, I had decided to pursue making willow sculptures when the apples had finished. I’ve had three responses from the willow ad that I put in ‘New Zealand Gardener’ during the picking season. One is just curious about what it is, one wants to use my ideas (I’m no longer precious about this, so she’s very welcome to), and the other might actually result in some actual paid work, maybe. We’ll see what transpires…

I am planning to visit the community garden in Takaka, two days bike ride away, and it will be a good chance to find out where I might get a good source of willow from (and not just scrubby old branches out of hedges and ditches).
May (date unknown)

This morning is attempt number two to leave the comforts of Seaton Valley orchard. Gone will be the free apples and feijoas, the kitchen and the TV, and in its place will be something else.
The weather has been bright and sunny but the last couple of days it’s being very misty and drizzly. Anyway enough of the weather forecast; I’m off to see if I can make this trailer thing stay upright and then off I will trundle to Motueka.

I’ve been umming and ahhing about dropping in on the chip shop woman, I cycle to where I think Upper Moutere is – fifteen kilometres from Mapua next to Motueka, only to discover that my map has swapped round ‘ Upper’ and ‘Lower’ Moutere. The place I want to be is actually about ten minutes cycle from where I’ve been staying. Doh! I Feel disheartened by this; and the rain, and my overload of tat… and decide that it’s all too much hassle. That and the sub-conscious knowledge that an initially favourable shagging-to-chips ratio would gradually shift and ultimately turn me into the Pilbury Doughboy.
Instead I continue on my current trajectory, and I rumble and fumble along the road up towards Abel Tasman National Park (a tall mountainous place), stopping off briefly in Riwaka to check out their community garden and willow structure (very nice it is too).
Next day, halfway up Takaka Hill, Abel Tasman National Park:

This morning I am somewhere near heaven. It’s misty and I can see hints of hilltops sliding out from behind the mist. Who knows what else is behind all that white. Hills, valleys, orchards, river? I can hear a rushing waterfall, and the exotic bleeps and chirps of unseen birds. I’m at the roadside where I camped last night. Early morning lorries occasionally grumble past out of nowhere. Some of them are tooting me good luck – they are aware of the hill I’ve just climbed in the pouring rain yesterday.
I must be pretty high up after yesterday’s stop-start slog of dragging the bike and trailer against the gravity of the steeply meandering road that goes from Riwaka to Takaka. It must be about fifteen kilometres uphill. Downhill is going to be something else alright – especially with only a front brake and my boots to slow me down. 
I am put in mind of the time me and Gill were cycling through the Pyrenees on our way to Barcelona. (All the way from Newbury no less.) Our own pairs of knees were afforded the most fabulous rest when at the peak of our last mountain road, we coasted downhill to the town of Ripoli, gliding entirely without leg-power for a whopping twenty-seven kilometres. 

It took ages, and as a diversion, at one point I decided to see how far I could go without using my brakes. Perhaps not the most intelligent thing to do. 

We were both brought to a shuddering standstill anyway two-thirds of the way down by a lost calf standing bemused in our way. We stopped and herded it back up the hill and into a field of other cows that Gill had spotted a few hundred mtres back.
Back in Abel Tasman:

It rained heavily yesterday, and I discover that ‘Nikwax’ is a completely crap product. It doesn’t work. At all. I get completely soaked. Not much fun when I don’t have a nice warm house to return to. Oddly, I don’t feel too concerned about it. I guess these things are only temporary.

The mist has cleared a lot – good views ahead I hope!

The mist comes and go frequently. Actually I think it’s clouds just doing their thing, but the main thing is that it doesn’t rain once all day – very good for the spirit for it to stay clear after the miserable weather of the day before.
Pressing on, I zig-zag in my unwieldy wobbly way up the last stage of the steep climb. 

Near the top I stop by a house to ask for water and chat for an hour with a very friendly chap about the unpredictability of weather, his friendly Burmese cat, wild pigs and how they bugger up your garden and drain you of lots of money. He is English, but certainly doesn’t sound it. (I should have guessed by all the weather talk…)
Only five kilometres to go, and I’ll be at the top! Hooray! (I’ve already come nine and a half kilometres up this hill (no flats or downward bits).

I stop off to take photos in a roadside field of weird lumpy-holey sticky-uppy limestone rocks.

About one kilometre further up, I stop for a lunch of pasta and chilli sauce christening my brand new stove.

Various people are pulling in to have lunch too, mostly in motor-homes.
Having a bike is always a talking point, and I get to talk to three Kiwi retirees on their holidays from Auckland, a retired chap in a car from Austin, Texas and a Kiwi woman with her English bloke who’ve also come down from Auckland and are off on a fungus foray. Apparently he’s discovered a new species. We chat about Reading – she lived there for four years as a kid in Caversham of all places (a place I knew as a kid where some of my family lived) – remarking how Reading is always changing. The three oldies also have family in Reading. I don’t know why so many kiwis seem to want to live in Reading; I think it’s a dump. Oh yeah, money that’s it. That and because it’s the first major town the train stops at after London has fried your kiwi countrified sensibilities to a crisp.

The fungal couple give me some ciabatta bread and smoked fish which makes an absolutely wonderful change from my usual basics.
Up the hill, some hippies are having a groovy sounding music session way down in the valley below.

I reach the top! 

‘I’ve been up so very damn long, that it looks like down for me de-doww,der der dow dow-dow dow-dow…’ (Jim Morrison, inverted.)

What took me exactly one day to go up takes about forty minutes to go down the other side again. My front wheel gets over-heated through having the front brake on continuously, the rim is covered in melted brake-block goo, I am forced to stop using my boots as a brake as there will soon be nothing of the soles, and halfway down, as I get faster, something goes adrift and I can hear a loud grating sound. I expect it to be some plastic sheet rubbing on a wheel, but when I stop, I discover that the high speed excitement is too much for the tiny old wheels on the golf cart, and both their cracked and perished tyres have come off. I walk back up hill a little way, and discover one tyre on a tree stump and the other halfway way up a bank on the other side of the road.
The view looks like western Norway. I know this cos I’ve been there. Today I can see little patches of farmland way down in the gaps between the clouds. I stop to investigate a waterfall, a workman takes a photo of me as I hurtle, sorry; tootle past him, and then as I gather speed, my tyres fly off again. As I come to a stop, they both come bouncing along and overtake me, one on either side of me.

Oh, the humiliation.
Along the valley bottom, I spy a line of pollarded willow which looks suitable for my uses. (My brain has gone into sculptural mode now.) I pop into a nearby house to check out if I can have some. The chap I talk to is an old guy who is born in Newbury and lived in Overton all his life before he came to New Zealand. Yet another ex-pat from my home turf. How come they all seem to be in this part of the world?

We chat for a bit about how willow shavings left in water overnight makes a good rooting mixture and about the virtues of the good old country skills of hurdle-making and hedge-laying.

I stop a little way down the road for the night in a convenient patch of grass by the roadside.

The next day I cycle off further down the flat-bottomed valley, hemmed in on either side by two high ridges of ancient mountainside.

Wading through the dense morning mist I stop a little way on to have breakfast; three very large and crispy yellow apples left on an otherwise bare tree. Some insect or other has had a go at them already but they are mostly intact. They are doubly well received as I ran out of water last night, so the juice go down well.
An hour later, after the sounds of excited mooing cows waiting for their milkings, I find an enormous quantity of crack willow coppice on the banks of the Takaka river at Paynes’ Ford. I ask at a nearby house and am told it belongs to the council.

May be useful for a possible project at the permaculture community I am about to visit.
After about four miles I arrive at the Takaka community gardens, hang out and have breakfast there. I get the chance to properly dry out my soggy socks and sleeping bag. It’s a very good vibe here, my favourite: hippy/community/purposeful/permaculture type place – I like it.

I encounter an English couple here who when we get chatting we realise we know a lot of the same people in England including my friend Helen, and we are left wondering why we have never met before. How odd is that? And they’re not even from Reading.
The rest of the day involves trying and failing and trying and finally succeeding to do various willow business email internet shtuff; sending pictures of willow and then getting my website on the net. I go to ask the council about the willow and hey – guess what – they aren’t very helpful.
Back at the community gardens my sleeping bag and socks have dried out. It’s a rum old situation when that becomes a high point in my day.

I end the day camping out at the mouth of the Takaka estuary, with various hooting chortling whooping oyster-catchers who are not in the least bit bothered by my presence.
I spend the night in my tent wishing I was out dancing and chatting up women somewhere.

I feel hampered by not having somewhere I can just dump my stuff and go out without it. I can hardly go to a disco with two rucksacks with me. ‘Hi I’m Richard, you’re nice. Can we go back to yours – I’m homeless right now?! Oh, and could I use your shower first?’

I drown my loneliness by walking up the beach listening to ‘Stay Human’ the wonderful Michael Franti album.
This morning I’m sitting reading back on things and writing loads. Early morning black swan cygnets and the oyster-catchers are doing their thing in the estuary. This morning I have a small but definite feeling of self-determination. Just the very fact of my being here tells me I can achieve what I like.
Right now I have few possessions, but still too much to carry. I probably need a bath. I have very little money. My surroundings are beautiful but cold. 

I’ve got hot porridge, and possibility.
I spend the day writing this and reading a novel; about the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s. I wake up in the night, thirsty and without water. I eventually decide to sneak into the garden of a nearby house which I have the feeling is unoccupied. I hope it’s not just wishful thinking. There’s a garden tap and I fill my bottle. No-one comes. Good. I speak out loud to the dark quiet house. ‘I’m very sorry if I’ve disturbed anybody, please don’t worry. I’ve only come to get some water’. No response. Good. I think.

I lie awake wondering what on earth I’m going to do with my life to make a living.

I tell myself to go back to sleep and save thinking for the daylight.
Some small creature is poking about under my stuff. Probably a lizard of some kind.

In the early morning, the oyster-catchers are all hooting like crazy as usual. Why do they do it? Do they wander about in the night and call to each other in panic when they discover in the morning that they’re not where they thought they were?

Maybe it’s just joy.
Seven black swans swim in the shallows of the estuary mouth.

I sit by the sea

the sea is my friend

I can see by it’s movements

that change never ends.
Do these oyster-catchers share the the same ancestors as the British oyster-catchers today? I can’t imagine them migrating of their own accord all the way to here and they can’t possibly have evolved separately. I think they must have followed in the wake of ships travelling from Europe. The swans I easily imagine being brought here by well-to-do British people keen to populate garden lakes in their newly transposed lives to make them feel more at home. 
After my morning ritual of sitting about wondering which way is up, I can hear a car about a hundred yards away having trouble starting. A small sky blue saloon is coughing it’s guts up.

I go over and see if the driver needs help. ‘Hi! My Name’s John, I’m From Queensland!’ He almost yells as he thrusts his hand out to shake mine. He has a very brusque manner, quite in-your-face. I’m am slightly taken aback; the Kiwi’s are generally pretty mellow, and ‘Ockers’ (an Aussie term roughly meaning ‘red-necks from Queensland’) are not noted for their subtlety…

We get chatting and I have breakfast and coffee with this old Ocker. He offers me a ride up to a place that may have interesting rocks that he wants to check out, near the end of the peninsula beyond Takaka. We go there, are bored by it (no interesting rocks), visit a desolate cafe and come back again.
He’s into gem-stones; jade and gold and says he makes his living from it, though a pretty skin-of-the-pants one by the looks of things. He goes to the States and goes to mineral fairs and such-like. We venture round some of the roads in Abel Tasman National Park, just for the ride this time and it’s really really beautiful. John shows me how to get oysters. As much as eating raw oysters is like eating large wet bogies with brains, I am surprised to find that I like ’em. It’s funny what poverty can do for your taste-buds. It’s as well that oysters don’t have mouths so I can’t hear them scream as they go sliding down my throat.
I find lots of feijoas that look like somebody has tried to sell them by the roadside and then given up, just leaving them in a heap. More free food. My favourite meal.
I ditch the bike where somebody can find it for themselves and keep the golf caddy. I still have too much tat. I spend three days with John, just trucking around.
I am waiting to find out whether someone near Auckland has decided to commission me to make a willow seat for his garden. I was rather hoping to head further down South Island but money rules supreme at the moment. I figure that even if he decides against it, it gives me the chance to go and visit Rob in Wellington; the guy I met in the Californian Redwoods.
I hitch back towards Nelson. I don’t know what to do about Chip Shop Woman. (Nothing most likely.) 

I get a ride with Dave, a potter, we get onto the subjects of alchemy, spirituality and Zen within pot-making. It’s one of those conversations where each time one of us says something, the other has three or four conversational threads they can pick up and follow.
I get out at Mapua, to-ing and fro-ing about going to Moutere to see Chip Shop Woman. 

I stand by the road and get a lift with Edward, who is a gruffly spoken chap. He’s in a male voice choir, and once did a tour to Cardiff singing. He’s a Christian, works in a night shelter in Nelson, gives me half his meat pie and used to be a hard drinking fisherman.
Stand by the road at Nelson listening to ‘Happy Families’ by Blancmange and then a very good Depeche Mode singles collection.

I get a ride from Nelson to thirty kilometres further down the road with an Englishman from Surrey who talks about football, something I neither know nor care about but never mind; he’s anice chap and that’s what counts.

Then a teacher from Denmark who has come here for the lifestyle.

Next, a kiwi who lives and works on a fishing development project in Papua New Guinea and got made a chief. Bizarre story. He’s quirky and I wonder if he’s on speed. Good chap though.

Then, in the dark, thirty kilometres from Picton, a ride with a Maori woman of about fifty; she tells me loads of interesting Maori stories. None of which I can remember. 
At Picton I get my ticket for the 9.30 morning sailing to Wellington. I spend ages showering and washing my socks, drying them out under the hand drier over and over for about an hour.

Eventually I emerge from the harbours shower block.
I suspect there may be adventurers out there more inspiring and fun to be with than the flakiness of the Fabulous Furry Floating Neutrinos… Admiring the boats on the quayside, there is one particularly impressive wooden schooner about ninety foot long. All glossy varnished timber, lustrous and golden, white sails folded away whilst docked. It makes me think dreamily of the other world that sailors live in; crossing two thirds of the Earth’s surface, belonging to no government and living by different gods and demons. 

A woman appears from nowhere and comes and says hello. She’s French and lives in Motueka. She was hoping to sleep on the big wooden boat but its people aren’t aboard.

We spend half the night bedded down in the nearby children’s park having very cosmic conversation, then we sleep under a playground-style wooden pirate ship being guarded over by a slightly menacing and badly made giant concrete Mickey Mouse.
In the morning I try chatting up a rather buxom Maori gardening woman, which is fun to do even though she’s hitched. She says to come and have coffee when I come back down this way next.
I’m tired. I watch Starsky and Hutch on the ferry. We get to port in Welly. I Phone Rob, whom I had met for all of five minutes at Humboldt National Park in California. 

‘When you get to New Zealand, call me up’.

We go drinking for the rest of the day. Rob has to be at work in the morning and is living at someone else’s house so he can’t invite me back to stay over. Fortunately, I carry a spur-of-the-moment Plan-B-for-everything around with me at all times.
I go to sleep in a quiet spot in the city with a beautiful woman with a swanky car (two adverts on a hoarding over my head). I have found a little bare patch of concrete with high walls around it so I am completely protected from city weirdness. Cities aren’t my favourite place to sleep, but fortunately I am very very drunk and this makes the dusty bare concrete bearable.
I spend the next day doing loads of typing, and go for a walk round Wellington. I really like Wellington. It’s tiny, but still manages to cram in it’s very own skyscraper. It has a big museum, is  surrounded by mountainous bush and has loads of exotic dramatic coastline. My favourite city, definitely.
At the end of the day I get the train to Redwood and go to Rob’s friend’s house. The house is stark and is decorated completely as if it’s the 1960s. It’s stunningly weird, as is, I am soon to find out, Wayne it’s owner.
I stay with Wayne and Rob. We go out and explore Wellington, have ‘fush and chups’ in nearby Seatoun (settled by Scots of course), get some ‘wikki’ in and me and Rob get astonishingly stoned with his mate Shane who’s very down to earth indeed. Shane is asking me if I have ever heard a Tui singing, and right on cue, one starts to sing in the bushes not far from where we are. What a sound. Very special moment.
The next day we drive out and explore Colonial Knob, a local hill. I find magic mushrooms, so we pick loads. Me and Rob get very very trolleyed indeed. Back at Wayne’s I have to sit in the garden and talk to God. I can’t handle being indoors, especially in a house that’s as weird as Wayne’s. Wayne comes outside and ‘dads’ at me ‘You’ve got to come indoors, the neighbours will talk!’

That must be a measure of how exciting Wayne’s neighbours must be if someone sitting in the garden becomes a talking point.

Maybe I’m behaving like a total monkey without even realising it. Don’t think so.
The next day, Wayne walks me down to Redwood Train Station. I ask a woman standing on the platform when the expected time of the train up to Paraparaumu is. She tells me and after asking me if I wanted some work, she takes me home to do gardening and eating. Her name is Diane and she’s a total chatterbox, She also runs an art gallery – she looks at the photos I took of fabulously multi-coloured walls in Merida; she says they could be presented as a book or an exhibition possibly if I spent money on getting them all framed.  

She is an enormously active woman; she’s a climber, a tramper (kiwi for walker), a sailor and a gallery curator. She also lives in a mind-bendingly untidy house with boxes of junk everywhere. (The complete opposite to Wayne’s house which is scarily spartan.) I spend some time looking through loads of old photos of her family history, New Zealand art from the beginning of the settlers. She says she hasn’t been here long and hasn’t had the chance to sort it all out yet. What a mess.
It’s been an amazing few days; I’ve met some really interesting people; it feels like I’ve been having one of those times where every person I meet and every conversation I’m having just all slots together like an easy cosmic continuum jigsaw rollercoaster thing. 
By email, the people in Tauranga say yes to having a willow thing in their garden. 

I hitch to Palmerston North, meet a Maori chap at the supermarket and he takes me home and reads me stories (amazing!). We have very good conversation about positivity. He’s a Christian, but it’s not an ‘issue’. 

He lets me sleep on his floor and I get lift with him to Feilding in the morning. 
It’s a beautiful clear day like it’s Spring; everyone seems a bit more cheerful than usual. 

I get a ride with a skinhead and a bloke with two black eyes. Not totally convinced I should get in the car, but it ends up being a surprisingly okay ride.

Listening to ‘Stay Human’ by Michael Franti between rides: 

‘Every soul is poem written in the palm of God’s hand’

The sun is still shining and the air is crisp.
I ride with a Maori truckie to Wanganui. I re-name the town ‘Wankernui’ on account of it taking four hours to escape its grasp.

A quiet ride, no conversation, with a farmer in his brand new Ute to Stratford. Glorious views of Taranaki (Mt. Egmont), which looks exactly like Mount Fuji.

The film ‘The Last Samurai’ was filmed almost entirely here;  with an American film crew and a Japanese cast. Bizarrely, Mount Fuji got CGI’d over the top of Mount Taranaki in the final analysis.

Getting out of the car, it’s particularly cold. There’s a totally clear sky; it’s probably going to be frosty.
It’s getting dark. I stick out my thumb and start walking towards somewhere quieter to put up my tent. I unexpectedly get a ride with a chap to New Plymouth. He’s an oil chap (lots of oil and gas round Taranaki) and he’s been to Calgary.

I sleep by a river down by a water treatment place. I get a very good night’s sleep.
Hopefully today, I will get to Tauranga.

Another days hitching; I get rescued from New Plymouth, a horrible traffic-ridden place by a car already very full – a young Maori family; proving that anything is possible if you put your mind to it. When they stop for me, some of them get out and re-arrange themselves so that we can all cram back in into a non-existent space. I feel like I’m almost family. 

After them, I meet a cyclist who tells me all about his own family troubles, then a ride close to Auckland with a truckie; this is the point where I finally tire of expressing wonder at the scenery – New Zealand is so beautiful everywhere you go that I finally realise what a strangely redundant observation it is. Crap – now I will have to find something else to say… 

Next, a ride with an ageing ‘hoon’ (hooligan/tearaway) who seems quite fun; a seventy year old with an eighteen year olds attitude to fast cars – a lanky bloke wearing a baseball cap on backwards.

In a field not far from the highway, I sleep out in some long grass which affords me just about enough protection from a cold night wind.
Still not at Tauranga!

The next day I get a ride to Katikati with an old chap doing horse riding with disadvantaged kids. 

In Katikati I meet John from North Carolina who when I tell him why I am coming to Tauranga, he gives me some advice on good woods to use with my willow sculpture.

John is a woodworker. He introduces me to his workshop and his international team of carpenters; they all seem to be guys in their late thirties from various parts of the world; South Africa, Canada, Scotland, America, Australia.

John has discovered that the wood used to make shipping pallets from the US are very often made of high-quality hardwoods such as cherry, oak and other more unusual woods.
John being a carpenter saw that the pallets having done the job of transporting goods from one place to another were usually burnt or thrown away. Seeing an opportunity, John now reclaims the wood and builds truly beautiful furniture out of it all; tables, chairs, chests of drawers, wardrobes, beds. You name it.

John shows me how his furniture is made; carefully excluding nail-holed wood, but he also makes some furniture leaving the ‘history’ of the wood in it, which gives his work a wonderful instant-agedness. He tells me people very often want their furniture with the feel-good obviously recycled factor. Nice.
Another ride with a Maori family takes me right into Tauranga, and in the space of two hours I’ve managed to find myself a shed to sleep in at the end of somebody’s garden. It seems like it’s a vocation of mine.

When I first get into town, I decide to do a little research to see if I can find a local source of willow for doing this chair sculpture job. I accidentally find a community volunteer resource shop and this seems like a good place to start. I tell the woman running the place what I am up too, and at her suggestion I telephone the local council. 

I call, and the receptionist at the other end tells me that I need to speak to ‘Richard Terry the Willow Development Officer in Rotorua. Unbelievable! Some one with the same name as me! AND he’s into willow! I am amazed at such an incredible coincidence!  She tries to put me through to his office extension and the phone just keeps ringing for ages. It is long enough for me to imagine having some excited banter with this person who must surely be some magical Antipodean doppelganger. The phone rings for ages and ages and eventually the receptionist cuts in and suggests maybe I should call again when he is in. In my disappointment I feel forced to conclude that after all it must just be that the woman at the other end is getting her wires crossed.
Another woman in the volunteering shop has over-heard all this, and asks me if I need a place to stay in town. This is brilliant cos as I was coming into town I had been idly wondering how I was going to manage to do a paid job whilst not having a proper base to be in. So now I have a base and it seems much more do-able. How the gods provide; most unexpectedly.
Tauranga is a booming town. Houses going up all over the place. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much building going on in one place. I get weirded out by the idea that I could sort out my financial troubles by getting a career in house-building. This troubles me, and I can’t quite pinpoint why exactly.
I have been housed in what amounts to a stable at the end of the paddock. My host Sheila gets me to do a days worth of gardening in exchange for being able to stay there for the time I need to do the willow job. And she is throwing in free hot dinners. It is raining outside and I am feeling cosy but I am feeling a little bit lonely with her family slightly uphill at the other end of the paddock in their nice busy home. I spot the occasional sillouette of movement through a distant kitchen window. I sometimes miss the home comforts of company, electric lights and TV and cupboards full of nice food.
I am sharing part of my current space with two sheep and a llama. I’ve never met a llama before. They are rather like four-legged ostriches with camel’s heads. This one is very curious and friendly. It has a dark patch over it’s eye that makes it look like a daring pirate.
Getting across town to sort out getting wood for the willow job is ridiculous and stressful on account of the extremely infrequent buses. One Saturday evening I end up having to walk about seven kilometres cos I miss the last bus at 4.15 pm. There’s a hundred and one things I’m in love with over New Zealand. Tauranga is not one of them, and neither are New Zealand’s bus services which are the worst in the world. Excepting perhaps Antarctica which I can only presume is marginally worse.
I have a strange dream.

I dream I am in a running race. Everyone is American. One person is gloating ‘I got a game plan! I’m gonna beat yer! You don’t win if you ain’t got a game plan!’

While we are running I become aware that after three miles we are all going to be shot dead. I get some friends together, and we duck off into the woods hoping we are not spotted. We steal a car and bugger off. Sod the stupid race. I kind of get the feeling that with various encouragements out of it, the rat race is not my caper.

I have another dream that I squeeze a huge pus-ey zit and the pus mysteriously turns into a hat. I squeeze another zit and that turns into a hat too.

I can’t work that one out at first… maybe it means my creative juices are more worthwhile than I previously let myself believe.
I’ve been having a bit of a no-girlfriend-where-after-New Zealand direction-less thing (again).

Making the willow seat for Dan and Jasmine has re-lit my confidence in my creative self-worth. I’ve started to have some positive pro-active ideas about the rest of my stay in New Zealand and maybe onto Canada (rather than just having to look forward to more meaningless fruit picking type work).
I move out from Welcome Bay, say goodbye to my llama companion and move into a block of kiwi orchard next to where I’m making the willow seat. The orchard is hemmed in by a shelter belt of dense eighty foot high pines, effectively a hedge about 300 metres down one side and a hundred metres down the other. It’s totally surreal, like something out of a children’s fantasy book. These trees would make an amazing outdoor theatre space if they were arranged in a circle about 150 foot in diameter. Really awesome.

Live your dreams even if you think you can’t. Harm no-one. This is your power.
I finish the willow seat – Dan is ‘rapped’ (same as ‘stoked’ or ‘chuffed’). He pays me two thirds of the money for the job and says he will bank transfer the rest. He gives me a ride out of town, and I hitch eastwards past Whakatane. On the way, I fill my pockets and feast on loads of feijoas I find at the the place where he drops me off. 

Later I get dropped near a beautiful cove and spend the night feeling a bit vulnerable. I go to sleep with sounds of the sea under a crisp clear starlit night.

I let myself feel a bit wobbly and kind of cuddle myself. I look forwards to not playing solitaire. It’s moments like this that I entertain the feeling to give up and just go back to England and all it’s familiarities.
In the morning, I wake up still feeling out of sorts. I catch myself and re-focus on being pro-active about being alive instead of wading around in emotional and mental aimlessness. Emotions I figure are good in that in the quiet moments they tell me how safe and good I’m feeling (or not). I don’t think I want to run my life by them any more though. I guess I’m still trying to find a balance.
I stick my head out of the tent to find a glorious sunrise just climbing out of the sea.

This really is a beautiful spot; a good place to start the day, and a good antidote from being in Tauranga.

A fisherman comes and checks his lobster pots. A jogger bounces past, and I chat with an old guy who’s getting his daily exercise whilst he walks home from doing the shopping.

Ahem; I’m about due for an Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhh!

There, that’s better.
This morning I earthed out by doing my favourite thing; watching the forces of gravity working water against stone and sand. It absolutely fascinates me.

It seems like I’m watching a model for the human mind and soul in actual motion, low persistent forces create, mould and break down boundaries to make an ever changing form, but that always is still made up of the same elements.

Ultimately, it’s predictable, but within that it’s all still unique and surprising.
I eat porridge and a found grapefruit. Time to pack up and walk.
I walk high up the cliff face into bush to get round to the little town round the corner, full of the swanky Frank Lloyd Wright and other arty-farty architectural styles the Kiwis do so well. This probably used to be some quiet little fishing village minding it’s own business. It looks like the Tauranga/Auckland overspill has got it’s greedy mits on it already.

Here I am, with just about two months left, and I still haven’t seen round the South Island! Winter’s drawing in and it’s time for me to make plans for the next step – whether I go to Canada, try to meet Sophie, go to Australia for three months or go back to England or what; I need to do some information finding about teacher training in Britain for one thing. It seems that it may be possible to do only one year of teacher training in order to get qualified. It would make a nice change to be able to earn a living from doing something socially useful and not have to strain my back doing brainless spade work so much.

The last ride of my day is with a Maori mother and daughter; I’m now in Gisbourne (‘Gissie’). It’s seventy per cent Maori here; the highest proportion of Maori left in New Zealand.

 

I wake up the next morning on the rock-studded beach at Ohope, between the sea and a Maori cemetery on a small hill. A shag is perched on a rock keeping a watch out for his breakfast. A blackbird is battering something on a rock. Eleven fantails are performing a twittering aerial circus act with each other about ten foot away from me.

I remember a car sticker I saw the other day and decide to expect a miracle. 

I breakfast on porridge and pack up. Leaving the beach I fill my water bottle at a toilet and pass two horses, one of them a brumby (a wild horse), though you can hardly tell the difference. I’ve noticed there seems to be quite a lot of horses down in this part of the world. 
Walking off a little way down the road, I am feeling sublimely chilled out – this place is the perfect antidote to Tauranga. There’s almost no traffic, usually a hitcher’s disaster, but in a place like this, I don’t really care. The vibe feels different down here. 

Now I am past all the land-grabbing house-building property development spread of Auckland and Tauranga; all the arty seaside houses have dribbled to nothing; now its just long grass and the sound of the wind blowing through it. Fantails doodle their song across the morning sunshine as it sparkles through the trees.

I’m feeling miraculous.
I get a ride with Paul a Paua farmer. He takes me a little way down the road and takes me in to show me his big shed full of white plastic trays growing Paua. (Pronounced pow-a with the ‘w’ like a soft ‘v’. Also known in English as abalone, or ‘abs’ if you’re Australian.) The paua take four years to grow. There’s not much money in it, but he’s doing it for the lifestyle really. We ponder just how exciting for shellfish sex probably isn’t.

With the gift of two chocolate muesli bars later, I wave him goodbye and tootle off down the ever-winding coast road, steep hills towering above and glorious sunshine. 

The first vehicle to come past stops and I get a ride with a chap going to a school to fit an internet connection. He spends most of his day just driving along the coast. Now there’s a nice way to earn a crust. 
My next ride is with Albert, a Maori chap who ‘introduces’ me to Gissie. He makes his money growing weed (‘the primary industry down here’) and likes to spend his time up in the bush hunting deer and wild pigs on horseback. The hills look very steep and the Manuka (Tea-Tree) bush looks very dense. Horse-riding doesn’t look possible.

We pass two young heffers dropping cautiously down the side of a hill and they look a bit freaked out when they get to the bottom. I’ve never seen cows in such tricky terrain as this. Albert drives up to a high headland with two wide open bays, one on either side. Quite spectacular. One doobie later and we’re off, further down the coast and I get dropped off next to a small motel and camping ground. 
Ten seconds later I’m picked up by George, a youngish Maori wearing a Moku, a face tattoo; lines radiating over his eyebrows and swirls over his nose and his ‘third eye’. Some time later, I am to discover exactly what the symbolism of the Moku is all about. According to tradition then, George is a bit of a murdering-type geezer. 

George seems very animated and a bit wired. I’m a bit stoned and don’t quite know how to react appropriately to the sight of this guy with the most full-on tattoos I’ve ever been up close and almost personal with, so I’m just blunt about it.

‘Is that a Moku?’

‘Yes, but I’m having it taken off.’

‘Have you been naughty or something?’

He grins ‘Umm… sort of.’

I figure he must be a bad boy from the ‘Mongrel Mob’ in Auckland. Probably caught up in drug-running and gangs and he’s ended up disgracing the iwi elders, either that or he’s a born-again Christian (or both).

‘Are you a Christian?’

‘Yes!’ he beams ‘Would you like to meet some of my Christian friends?’

So here I am with a manic born-again Christian with a scary tattoo inviting me into a culture I know nothing whatsoever about.

‘Er.. no, I’ll just carry on down the road thanks.’

‘Oh! I feel deep in my heart bro, that I’d really like you to meet my friends and I know they’d really like to meet you too.’

Oo-er. What’s this all about? Is this guy for real? Are his mates as full-on and freaky as him? I’m in the middle of nowhere. I might be about to be robbed at gunpoint by dope-heads or happy-clappy’d into some embarrassing Christian casting-out-of-devils or something for all I know.

‘Err.. all right then.’ I can always leave I guess if it looks weird.
As soon as we get to an ordinary old-style wooden house George leaps into a ‘sharing’ session with a middle-aged man that he describes as a pastor. So I guess at least that’s the being held at knife-point factor out of the window.

Not sure how to ‘be’ in this strange situation in a room full of Maoris, being stoned and all (and not used to it these days). One guy beckons me over to him in the corner of the room. What’s he going to do?

He shows me his Whakapapa (family tree).

‘Look at this – I’m as English as you are!’

Showing me his family tree, he’s descended on one side from Henry the Fourth, and in part from a Portuguese sailor from whom he gets his family name; Hovell.

There are a few Portuguese/Maori Hovells on the East Coast. The original Hovell eventually settled in Brazil.

‘So you’ve probably got Amazonian Indian relatives too!’ Pretty surprising stuff.

Don’s wife is part Maori part Ukranian and she looks amazing; with the round face and high cheek-bone of the Ukranians mixed with the fullness of a Maori.
I get invited through to the ‘boys room’ which is the much older original house next door; a slightly dilapidated but characterful hundred year old shepherds house. It’s wooden, cold and draughty. It has pictures of Marilyn Munroe all over one wall; this bold cultural connection I find reassuring.

A smoking session ensues with ‘Pic’ (short for Piccolo); a very large long-haired chap and Francis a young chap. So I am told, Pic could have played for the All-Blacks, but he missed out for some reason I have forgotten (stoned again)… Francis used to be a horse-riding champion. It briefly crosses my mind to wander why these two people haven’t followed through with their sporting abilities. I get the impression that dope has something to do with it.
As I explain to Don, Pic and Francis: I grew up in a very white world and pretty much never had any social interaction with people from other cultures. Nothing significant in England, Canada, Mexico or Belize. It feels like a real privilege to actually be with people of another culture who can speak English so we can talk together, and who I feel are open to me. Back home, with our crap cultural history, usually my encounters with people from other ethnic backgrounds are often uncomfortable. I am at risk of making a complete dickhead of myself (if I haven’t already), but it is the only way I can explain myself.
I have never before had any real conversation with anyone that wasn’t from my own ethnic background. At my age; ridiculous. I never was a city kid and in that respect I’ve had a very sheltered life. It’s a bit mind-blowing, aided by being somewhat stoned no doubt.

 

One evening I wander outside to get some fresh air and to admire the stars. Some time later Don wanders out to see if I am okay.

‘I just had an amazing thought.’ I say.

‘Yeah? What’s that?’

‘You see that up there, that’s the Milky Way right?’

‘Yep.’

‘It just occurred to me, that that’s the biggest thing I have ever seen. Like, how big do you think that actually IS, as a single definable object? It must be billions of miles long and here we are, both able to see something so big together. That’s just amazing…’

A very wow moment… and it was quite something to share it with Don. I haven’t smoked so much dope in years.
To add to this, they talk about going fishing off the rocks by the sea, going eeling in the river, hunting pigs and deer in the bush. Kids in the nearest town go joyriding on horseback up and down the middle of the street where the few shops are. Don says to me, you really don’t need any money here on the coast – you can grow and catch all your food.

I have several double-takes and still can barely grasp that here, people are living a life that hippy types back in England for the most part can really only just dream about. And here are people living it as an ordinary old-fashioned way of life. The subject turns inevitably to land rights and the current foreshore issue that’s in the news so much right now; The Maoris are mounting a legal bid to reclaim the beaches and coastland from Queen Elizabeth, the ‘legal’ owner of it. 
As I explain to them:

I spent the second half of my growing up living on a private estate with my parents playing second-fiddle to a lord of the manor whose land we lived on. Even from the age of ten I could never understand why one person should have so much land whilst the rest of us had to do his bidding in order to have a roof over our heads. It all seemed to boil down to his ancestor’s beating the crap out of my ancestors and then declaring his will as law. A load of rubbish if you ask me, so in a way, I can relate on some level at least, to the whole Maori feeling of wanting to reclaim stolen land.
The lifestyle here is the kind that I immediately feel comfortable with. No expensive aspirations towards posh furniture or gadgets. The old house is kind of run-down. It could probably do with having sorted out all the holes in the floor and walls where the air blows through. And then I realise that they don’t do winter here, not like I know it anyway. The place doesn’t need a paint job. That would spoil the feel of the place.

One night me and Francis go out the back and try to get some eels out of one the streams (unsuccessful, alas).
Another day, we all head out to the local school to give them a hand removing an old building. When I mention how I like the voluptuousness of some of the Maori women, Don and his sister, say to me ‘If you decide you want to stay, we can find you a nice Maori woman, one with a bit of land and some foreshore’.
One day, Don and me go out to visit some mates of his. I go for a walk up a hill to a lighthouse that marks the most Easterly point in New Zealand. 

Don tells me how everyone came out here and partied to welcome in the new millennium of 2000 and that the only people to see it in before them were the Pacific Islanders.

I meet some Pakeha tourists. It’s quite odd meeting white people. They seem to exist in a different reality. One that seems a bit rigid and restrained and dull.
Whilst Don is chatting, I sit out on the back porch admiring the view of the coastline. I had picked up along the way how Maori like to give their landmarks, particularly their hills, a kind of personified mythical significance, so one big hill would be a frozen warrior, others might actually resemble animals and so on. This particular stretch of coastline looks for all the world like a very relaxed reclining naked woman. With one arm behind her head, she lay, wrapping herself round the bay, with the foam breaking over the peninsular of her toes that are dangling in the sea. It isn’t one of those slightly wonky images that requires a bit of imagination to interpret; there she is in all her fully-formed, anatomically sensible glory…

Don is about to leave. ‘Come on, we’re going now’

‘Hey before we go – check her out… Can you see her?’

I don’t know who she is or whether anyone has noticed her before, but she is beautiful.

I think it’s one of those ways of seeing that comes if you are into nature. It seems to open out more if you have ever used dope or mushrooms at all.

Don and his mates had never noticed her lying there before, but when I point her out to them, they are in awe! So now they have a new neighbour to talk to…
Living in Llanberis in 1991 whilst doing conservation volunteer work, there was a waterfall behind our house which we liked to go and visit. On the way to it we would have to walk past a certain rock which, particularly during the full moon, would look like it had a small boy sitting in it, with his arms around his knees. It was quite uncanny, and depending on your frame of mind either somewhat scary or really quite a cosmic comfort… It was visible because of the way the moonlight would draw out just the right shadows and monotone blues and greys. It was completely invisible the rest of the time.
The day comes when I decide to press on with the previously planned mission to go round the South Island. I am really quite reluctant to leave in so many ways. I could stay. I tell myself that it would be great but the dope would drive me insane. These guys are total weed-heads; I’m not.
I get a ride with a Maori engineer who tells me which tribal group is responsible for which area. Don’s bunch are Ngati Porou which is the tribal group for the Gisbourne area.
A little way on I ride with an English chap who turns out to be a social worker called Chris from Manchester. He lives with his missus June who is also a social worker. They thought they would escape the drudgery of English working life but when they got here they were shocked how ‘antiquated and backwards’ the New Zealand social care system is.

I end up staying with them for three days, chewing the fat and snaffling Chris’s mp3 collection. He’s got loads of music that I grew up with and then threw out in an adolescent fit in the name of ‘Growing Up’. A brilliant chance to rectify my teenage cock-up.

Apart from that, it’s very nice for all of us to have an exchange of new Englishness with each other. Me and June go out walking their dog on their own almost completely private beach. (They share it with a thousand sheep.) 
It was hard not to notice that there was some tension with Chris and June. When Chris is at work, June finally spills the beans and tells me how she had had an affair with a big muscly Maori sheep-shearer not so long ago.
It’s a strange life. I have met a number of people who have the idea that totally changing the world that is around them will make the internal difficulties go away. And then they make the move and then when shit still happens, they have the shock of realising that it might actually be themselves that they have to change.
Slap bang in the middle of the bay is an island which I am told is actually a rabbit. Looking at the island completely does my head in and spoils what should be a perfectly serene vista. I’ve got it into my head that it’s not a rabbit at all, but a large pork pie hat on the head of a giant Jamaican that is about to surface out of the sea. A kind of Neptune plays Ska thing. It’s like getting an irritating tune stuck in your head that won’t go away…aarrgghh!!!!

Apart from that, it’s very nice to meet them and their dog, in spite of their difficulties.
Further down the road I travel with a very nice chap indeed called Graham who happens to be a geologist and takes great delight in stopping every now and again to show me various bits of strata and formations in rock faces by the road, showing me how this bit of coastline came to be – mostly from earthquakes and accumulated lava flow and lava sediments being brought down in huge molten rivers to the sea.

Kind of like glaciers, but red-hot and faster I imagine.
He invites me home for tea with his family, which I of course happily accept.

Entering his house, I am not sure what to expect. I am immediately met by two very cheerful children who want to know who I am, and then that established, would I like to see their books, toys, drawings and so on. I manage to pat their cat and dog who are also equally enormously pleased to see me. It’s a gloriously chaotic moment of enthusiasm. I manage to surface from it occasionally to offer a brief explanation of who I am again to Graham’s wife and yes I’d absolutely love a cup of tea.
Dinner is served as we are all ushered to the kitchen table. Calm is brought together and Graham says Grace, thanking God for the good things the children have done at school, for the goodness of a whole meal and for bringing me to their table.

Here I am with these lovely people, bringing some thoughtfulness to their day. I am truly touched by this moment. 

I tell them how amazing it is that this morning I was travelling down an unknown road, with no idea of where I would end my day, and here I am having this marvellous plate full of good food (it is toad-in-the-hole with mashed potatoes and greens) with such very kind people. This seems to me to be a real miracle, in something so simple as a shared meal.
I think this is one of the best moments of my time in New Zealand, it is giving me a renewed sense of appreciation.

I sleep soundly on the sofa, and in the morning I eat a hearty breakfast and get myself loaded up with sandwiches for the on-going journey.
It’s quite a cold day, and a wind is blowing. Internally I am still glowing. I have been worrying about Dan in Tauranga not paying me 300 dollars as he has promised, I decide that it isn’t worth worrying about.
Upon reaching Napier, I get picked up by a Samoan couple who are only going to Hastings, a mere ten kilometres down the road. When we get to Hastings where they live, they have some unfathomable discussion between themselves in Samoan. Then the guy driving says to me ‘If you don’t mind waiting a bit, I just have to visit my mother, and then we can take you a little way further, would you like to do that?’

Fine with me.

These guys are so eager to help me out it’s kind of over the top. Each time we get some way down the road to the next village or town, the woman looks at me all concerned and apologetic, saying that this is as far as they can go. They stop; and then they start driving again before I can get a chance to get out. This happens three times and once I actually get as far as actually getting out of the car – they then come back down the road again, pick me up again, and take me even further! They eventually let me out for real at Woodville, which is about eighty kilometres further down the road than they were originally going to go. And even then they still seem like they feel they haven’t done enough. Maybe they really just want to take me home and look after me. I feel slightly embarrassed and undeserving of such treatment. Hey ho, best not look a gift horse in the mouth and all that. It’s in strange contrast to the events of some the previous few encounters not so long ago and more than a little perplexing.
It is slowly starting to dawn on me how much difference to my life meeting these particular people is having. Their positive friendly and honest attitude really makes me realise that this is such a beautiful way to be with other people.
Looking around, it’s starting to get dark. I’ve been to Woodville once before and decide to head for the almost abandoned freight-train station. There’s probably a likely nook somewhere there.

There’s a car here for some reason. When I go and say hello I discover it’s a security guard keeping an eye on some rolling stock that’s parked on the rails here.

Talking to the guard, he’s more than happy for me to spend the evening talking with him to keep his and my boredom at bay. At some point late in the night there’s a changing of the guard and I go and find a way into one of the very abandoned waiting rooms and bed down. I’m aware that it’s getting colder each night. We are heading into winter, and I’m heading south, right into it. I’m really glad I’ve got this minus ten sleeping bag. (I bought with some of my willow money.) It seems to do its job very well so far. Good investment.
The next day brings me to just north of Wellington again…

I spend two days with Diana at Paraparaumu and prune her date palm and chop up garden debris. She talks to fill gaps, with no regard to any signs of interest, indifference, murderous intent,  suicide attempts or otherwise from me.

Her house is still chock-a-block full of junk. I decide that she is batty but harmless.
I go skipping in town at Woolworths, then go and spend three days at Wayne’s with Rob too. Do lots of computer CD’s for Chris, Leona, Rob and Chris and Dawn. Lose lots of sleep because of it. Computers are bad for my health. Wayne is his normal weird self. He is quite a straight-forward honest kind of chap though and I appreciate him for it. Rob is a rather different kettle of fish, someone who obviously has rather a stressful life and has an awful lot of steam to let off. This in my ordinary humdrum way, I find rather alarming at times. I’m just not party party enough. Or as Rob would put it (with can of beer in hand): ‘WWWOOOOOEEERRRRRGGHHH!!!!!!HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!’

Rob and Wayne are really quite opposite. Unnervingly so.
Monday morning at Wayne’s house, Redwood:

I am feeling like I need to grasp my bearings. Lots of factors flying around in an unpinned way.

I give up smoking dope. It’s bad for maintaining good levels of togetherness, motivation and self-esteem though it is good for accepting external situations I suppose. All things considered, I like feeling straight. I don’t really like fuggyness. I wasn’t born fuggy, I didn’t grow up fuggy. I meditate. Meditation is good. I phone Sofie in Belgium, and have a short but lovely chat. I love her; she’s a soul mate. Right now I’m tired and jangly.
I have one and a half months left before I have to leave New Zealand. I have lost focus and haven’t figured what I really want.

Girlfriend; settle down somewhere not English. Work focus. In a shop. More with people, less physical on my back.

Teaching? Would be a good solid focus, though I’m concerned it would be more mentally challenging than I could cope with. Would like to get stuck into a place where I have rights of employment and can stay for longer lengths of time, though I am aware of people that make a lifestyle of swapping between countries for a long time. (Wayne’s Canadian friend who’s been doing it for fifteen years; six months in Canada, six months in New Zealand.)

Go and see Chip Shop Woman? No.

Just go to the south of South Island. I can always come back. Wibble wibble wibble….
I am with Rob and am considering how lucky I am that I don’t have the kinds of stresses that he does with dealing with the abstract world of business obligations and deadlines and people pressures. Why do people give themselves lives like that? MONEY!!!

After meeting such beautiful and kind people like I have been recently, I’m starting to find Rob and Wayne’s combined weirdness a bit too much to bear.

  

A hop and a skip on the ferry and I’m back on South Island again:

At night in Picton under the wooden ship again. No sign of the earthy buxom Maori gardener. 

I hitch a ride with ‘Doodle’ in her van. Thinking my luck is in with this yummy voluptuous blonde Aussie woman, I go down the East Coast with her to Kaikora instead of west as I had planned. I soon discover it’s no go with her; she tells me she’s just met the man of her dreams two weeks ago. Just my luck. I later discover she has no idea what ‘The Holocaust’ was, and is generally all round not such a smart bunny. Lucky escape then maybe. She drops me off at a road leaving Kaikora. 

An hour later I discover I’m trying to hitch down a road that only goes for another one mile. It ends in a car park just round a headland from where I am. Well that’s 1-1 draw in the ‘unsmartness of bunnies’ stakes then.

I bump into Doodle on the way back into town, and we say goodbye (again).
Very occasionally, certain types of people that pick me up think they are rescuing me from some kind of imminent danger that only they seem to be aware of; presumably the car-driving ride-giving axe-murderer that must be following them about and would have picked me up if they didn’t.

 

I hitch a ride with an interesting middle-aged couple driving a swanky car. This is really cool, cos they look just like the kind of people who would never ever give me a ride. They take me all the way into Christchurch, where they recommend a good graveyard to sleep in. What fantastically unusual people. They are well-travelled people who are refreshingly free of the usual ‘Ooh err, isn’t it dangerous’ cobblers. 

I am doubly impressed by the matter-of-fact suggestion that a graveyard in the town centre is a good place to sleep. Obviously they are astute judges of character. More people like them please!

The graveyard becomes home for the next three nights. An inch of groundedness.
Scraps…

Reading in Christchurch library about ‘Supersilent’ a Norwegian improvisational jazz/computer types. Hmm. Mildly inspiring.

Travelling with barely enough money for food is like riding a bicycle with no tyres up a beautiful mountain.

Fruit picking is not my first choice of financial occupation. It does have the advantage of me meeting other travellers, but the money is slow to accumulate. It would be nice to earn my money a bit more intelligently.

Scooby dooby doo

Cock a doodle doo

Dooby dooby doo

Didgerydoo.

(So there you go.)
I charge up my stereo at the bus depot, and get the west-wards bound 84 bus to Russley out of town.

After getting off the bus at the wrong place, and accidentally trying to hitch back to Picton, I realise my mistake and head for the 73 that goes across the famous Arthur’s Pass over to Greymouth and the West Coast.
I ride with a young electrical engineer keen to get home to the West Coast and who doesn’t have too much to say.

He drives at breakneck speed and I have to listen to ear-trembling miserable heavy rock for the entire journey. I’m not sure whether I’ve got mountain overload, or it’s my method of carriage that renders the journey quite so discomforting. He’s riding the road like it’s a roaring tarmac roller-coaster.

Having some teenage git on the stereo screaming ‘If you ain’t got a woman, you ain’t got nuthin nuthin nuthin’ over and over again at me certainly doesn’t do much for my sense of occasion.

I’ve had an arduous day already and I feel old and tired. This is the last thing I want.

I watch the bold mountains slowly sliding silently past. I retreat into my imagination, and I know that outside the glass, it’s peaceful and magnificent. I feel strangely cheated.

At the end, I sleep in a dreary bus shelter on the corner of a T-junction. What an insalubrious place to finish an insalubrious day. 

Later, I am to become very glad of my dreary shelter as it pisses down with rain rather heavily most of the night. Welcome to the West Coast.
In the morning, I get a ride with a dairy farmer who’d once been on a cricket tour in England and had played a game within the walls of Windsor Castle. He remembers seeing Prince William riding past on a bicycle, and remembers what fine cows the queen had. (Well of course! – they are Royal Cows.) He was surprised to find a farm within the castle walls. (Me too.)
Greymouth or ‘Grey’ as it’s excitingly known by locals, feels I’m alarmed to say, like being in Canada. It’s the low cloud over the mountains, clapboard houses, doom-laden skies and the threat of impending rain that does it. As soon as I write this in my diary it starts raining, threatening to splodge what I’ve written into oblivion and disarm my pen.
I get picked up by a young German woman Lena and Johans her Swiss chap. We drive down to Fox Glacier. (A place uncuriously devoid of mints. Very crap English joke. Sorry.)

On the way we have a ‘What’s your favourite music?’ conversation and I get them to listen to ‘Carolyn’s Fingers’ a Cocteau Twins tune and one of the most wonderful pieces of pop music ever. When I was in a loony bin years ago, I remember this being the  tune I played on a day we shared our favourite music. Strange how times change but my tastes haven’t.
Find some good sayings on the wall in the hostel the two Germanic types decide to stay at:
Challenge: Winners must have two things: Definite goals and burning desire to achieve them.

Goals: Effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.

Team Work: You can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.

Success: There is no trying, only doing and not doing.

Neck Ache: What you get from reading too many highly elevated signs on walls.
Okay, I made the last one up.

Feeling better about life today.

I walk about one kilometre down the road, and reach the turning for the Glacier access road. I stash most of my stuff under a bush and start walking up a road that passes alongside a broad shallow river. Each of it’s myriad stoney tumblings culminating in a relentless sparkling and echoing roar that passes along the valley bottom. I camp out halfway up the road just as it’s getting dark. 
I’m in a huge wide bottomed-valley. Miles away in the distance, huge mountains covered in trees with snow on top. This really does feel like Lord Of The Rings country. I can just imagine an army of ferocious warriors marching over the wide flat river bed or Gandalf standing arms outstretched on top of a mountain pretending to be Jesus.

 

It’s full moon and I have the place completely to myself.

I can see snow being blown by the wind off the tops of the peaks; it looks like the Northern lights. I see a shooting star. The atmosphere is so clear, for the first time ever I can actually see the individual flames of the shooting star.. How on earth can a bunch of atmospheric gases make a rock burst into flames? If it was made of match heads glued together I could understand it. Nature’s amazing. Amazing enough to stop me worrying for a bit.
It must have been minus eleven last night cos my sleeping bag is only designed for minus ten. I woke up with ice all over the inside of the piece of thin blue poly-propylene tarpaulin I am using as my tent. And I’m only halfway down the country. Blimey.

I feed on hot porridge and kick the ice off the inside of the tarp before I can pack it away.

Today I’m going to see a glacier. Oh yeah, nearly forgot. Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh!

Fabulousness.

 

The glacier is pretty neat. I ignore a ‘Don’t come up here it’s naughty’ sign and trek uphill alongside the edge of the glacier’s reach. It’s a muddy dirty spectacle and easy to follow. Clearly very many other people before me have also totally ignored the sign and I can’t hear any distant screams for help so I guess it must be okay.

This pathway is obviously no danger, but trying to walk out over the glacier would just be an invitation to disappear into a frozen netherworld forever.
On the way back out I thumb a ride with two young women that have also walked up to see the glacier. One of whom I have a strong feeling I should hang out with. But don’t, as per bleedin’ usual; they are going north and I am going south. Pre-determined route wins over spontaneous meeting. She’s of a scruffy Gothy inclination and ‘Wants to make the films that Hollywood does not’. Anyway that’s last we see of each other.
My guts yearn as I make the mistake of not going the same way as them. I stick my bottom lip and my thumb out again and get a ride with Alina (kiwi) and Ethan (Canadian), two volunteer mountain hut wardens on holiday. We connect reasonably well, get stoned and then stop and have a bonfire for the night. They sleep in their car and I sleep in my tent. It’s a good job I am pretty wrecked, cos it absolutely hammers down with rain, and the rain does a fairly systematic job of demolishing my tent which in my stonedness I have managed to rig up spectacularly badly anyway.

In the morning I disentangle from the collapsed plastic mess, impressed with myself for having slept so well. 

We fuggily travel onwards to Wanaka, down towards snowboarding country. 

They have a ‘Friendship Book’ that they offer to new friends they meet along the way, I decide to write in it that ‘the landscape is ‘rugged up to the eyeballs.”

We stop for a poo break at the wonderfully blandly named ‘Pleasant Flat Recreation Area’, which is then more than made up for name-wise just down the road in a yin-yang kind of way;
We find ourselves getting caught up in a minor tailback at a place called ‘The Gates Of Haast’. It’s an old stone bridge crossing a wildy roaring greenish glacial river crashing across huge old granite boulders. Everything has stopped for a road gritting machine. The combination of science fiction name with dull worldly activity intrigues me. Like Gandalf doing the hoovering or something.
We stop later in a cafe for a much needed fry-up and I chat to an Aussie guy with his Hong Kong wife. We chat about the exotic joys of travel. This is another one of those conversations that for me is always life affirming and more than the sum of its parts. To step into a roadside cafe expecting a cup of tea and a bun and to get to meet someone who has chosen to live outside the normal prescribed box always does something good for my self-esteem. It’s always good to be reminded that there are other people who live something like I do too (apart from backpacking students, who usually just bug me slightly for some reason).
We reach Wanaka and go see the instantly forgettable ‘Kill Bill 2’ (not my choice) in the Cinema Paradiso which has sofas and armchairs for seats. The cinema is famous in New Zealand. (Admittedly it doesn’t take that much effort to get famous in New Zealand.) On the left side of the auditorium, half a Morris Minor has been hacked about and turned into a seat. One woman has tried sitting in it, but has clambered out of it again in a fit of self-consciousness.
That night they book into a hostel and I sleep in their car. We are going to go snowboarding, but it rains.

I get the feeling Ethan and Alina are into some sort of three way sex thing or maybe I’m just too stoned. Ethan seems to be a bit defensive and a bit of a know all, though he does have a very interesting life up in Nunuatuktut in Nunavut taking part in a social care scheme for the Inuit up there.
Next day we go our separate ways at Queenstown. It’s still raining and a bit grim. I get a ride with two slightly unpleasant stoned guys who’ve been out on the piss the night before and gone to a prostitute for the first time. They tell the woman they are called ‘Geoff and John’ (who they aren’t). They tell me that the whole experience was crap; ‘Not like having a real woman’. I somehow suspect that this isn’t her fault; them being horrifically pissed probably had something to do with it.
At Glenorchy I discover that I’ve come the wrong way to get to Milford Sound.

The region is very mountainous and to correct my route will involve doing a lot of back-tracking.

It’s still raining. I find a large porch-way in a village hall to sleep in. It’s all too dark and depressing to stay there, so I dump some of my stuff somewhere dark and head for the pub. Sitting next to me at the bar is another English chap called John.  We sit and talk inevitably about Good Old England. John had left the Motherland for the adventure of it after he had split with his girlfriend at the time and didn’t know what to do with himself. Now he’s all grown up and is angling for a managerial position with Watties, New Zealand’s baked bean giants. Meeting up with John changes the whole outlook of my evening…
I spend the night sleeping in John’s huge black shiney SUV whilst John enjoys the luxury of a Bed and Breakfast.

We spend the next day in Queenstown booking skiing for him and snowboarding for me. The next day we go up Cardrona ski-slope and have a great day. I am unsure about spending 150 dollars in one day, but it is great fun; it is about as difficult as I had expected it would be. By the end of the day I have almost mastered the beginners slope. I fall over less than I succeed. I get it up to about sixty-five percent control and thirty-five percent luck. I do almost rip off some blokes gonads though – I am dodging a slow moving skier and in the process go straight into some bloke down on his knees. The end of my board goes straight between his legs. Ooh, nasty.

Apart from nearly ruining some poor bloke, It has been a highly satisfying day – I’ve been wanting to try out snowboarding ever since Canada. I’ve been practising in my head a few times too, and I think that must have helped. In the evening we look at each others holiday photos. I’m kind of regretting not having a camera any more since the weather and my rucksack finally killed it.
John is on a five month sabbatical. He’s lived in Napier on the east coast of the North Island for the last twelve years and originally was a goth from Windsor. He’s just split up from his partner and his two  and a half year old daughter and is in the process of ‘finding himself’. He’s going through a whole load of processing stuff which he talks about a lot and seems to be enjoying releasing his pent up spring.

He’s pretty easy to be open with. It’s a really nice break for me to spend a bit of time with someone in an easy kind of way and to be able to have a decent conversation.

He asks me what it’s like being on the move all the time, and don’t I get lonely?

I tell him:

I meet hundreds of interesting people and with some I have what I describe as ‘gloriously superficial friendships’; In the brief half an hour that I might spend with a person they will usually share with me all their ‘best’ bits; how they think life works or maybe some dark secret that they can’t tell to anyone that features in their everyday life. These brief encounters can sometimes reveal some gems from the people it’s my privilege to meet.
On the way out of Glenorchy we slide on some ice and come off the road in a fairly gentle but still slightly scary kind of way. We are very lucky; we land at a slight angle with absolutely no damage to the vehicle or us. If we’d come off the other side of the road we would have dropped steeply a few hundred feet and down into an icy lake. We sit there, shocked into uselessness. 

A passing Queenslander on holiday comes and offers help; moral support is a great thing at a time like this, but luckily we are able to get out surprisingly easily for a two ton SUV.

We fiddle about in Queenstown then I drive us to Te Anau whilst John focusses on calling Watties to do his job interview over the phone. Ending the day, John books into a hostel whilst I sleep under a huge gum tree by the lake, and nestle into its spreading roots. I wake up with all my usual lifestyle quandaries racing round me nut.
I exchange hellos with a passing early morning photographer. Two Tuis are thrashing about and tootling above me dramatically. 
Southern New Zealand has a very small Maori population. Maoris predominantly live on the North Island and historically came to the southern end looking for green-stone (jade). It’s bizarre that whilst at one time the Maoris were here looking for their special rock, the later new Europeans and Chinese incomers were out here looking for theirs; gold. (This was happening in the mid nineteenth century.) One lot’s treasure worthless to the other lot.
Most of the Chinese disappeared back to China when the gold-rush was over; there was a lot of racism. (Oh that makes a change.)

Only about two  percent of Otago is of Maori descent. Scots names abound, and you even see place names that are a mixture of Scots and Maori e.g, Gleniti (‘Small Valley’).
I dream I am caught up in a Viking raid. I’m not sure whose side I am on, (a Pictish/Scots lot I think) but the Vikings are coming. I have no weapons, but I pull lots of arrows out from somewhere. There are lots of archers but I have no bow to fight back with, so I just throw them instead.

I have had this dream in various forms quite a few times over the years. Usually I’m in a Native American tribe. We are always under siege and the odds are never on our side. One time we are Celts versus Romans.
I read this sign-board describing a little local history: 

Road building up to Milford: ‘It was about 160 miles from Invercargill to the tunnel portal… A Hindu gentleman bought up vegetables and sometimes more profitable cargo. Alcoholic liquor was not permitted and so numerous consignments were addressed to ‘Clark Gable’ and other exotic nom de plumes’. (D.U White, Engineer-in-Chief.)

The road from Te Anau to Milford was built 1929 by workers with only shovels and barrows. They were held up in the winter by avalanches and floods.

Early Maori came here long before Europeans for Pounami (green-stone); original Maori names here are Kotuku (Martins Bay). Piopiotahi (Milford Sound)
We get to Milford and enjoy the spectacular view. I am wishing I had a rifle so that I could shoot the irritating selfish git shitting all over the peace on his stupid pointless jet-ski. God they are such a crap invention. Only to be used in places of restful tranquillity. Wankers.
Knowing what we know after our slip, it’s scary driving back from Milford; we are in avalanche territory too.

After the Homer Tunnel, John and I go our separate ways after an invitation from him to come and visit him in Napier sometime. He drops me off at a hiker’s shelter by the road then I stash a load of my stuff in the bush; I have a mountain to climb nearby, Harris Saddle, and there’s no point in carrying it all if I’m coming back this way anyway. 
I hitch a short ride with a German in a hire van – I tell him he has to drive slower – it’s dangerous round here. I walk down the Hollyford track and sleep out by the road. One car goes past all night.

Another short ride in the morning in the swanky bus of a local tour operator. He drops me off at ‘Murray’s’ which he recommends as a good starting point for my ascent. Murray’s is a quirky looking place. Murray quite plainly is a very grumpy old man. I buy some toothpaste and some chocolate digestives that turn out to be three and a half years out of date and very chewy and tasteless and possibly some of the most disheartening things I have ever eaten.
Another one kilometre on, I leave a note at the bottom of the worryingly-named ‘Deadman’s Trail’ in a very obvious spot, saying who I am, when I went up, and when I expect to come down again. I thought this would be a good idea; that maybe I might be about to bite off more than I can chew. Not that I have ever chewed a mountain before.
I am told that it’s a very steep climb and I would need crampons and ice axes to reach the summit of Harris Saddle itself. I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere near the snow actually; just above the tree line would be good. (I’m two thirds of the way up as I write.)
For the past few days I’ve been thinking with the ‘Something Amazing Is Coming My Way/Expect a Miracle’ principle.

After a hard bout of walking/climbing/ascending it comes to me that I really love the idea of working in a free school a la Summerhill. I register that I feel very good and peaceful about this idea. At the end of the day I set up camp and almost succeed in lighting a fire. Oh well I get a bit warm, and now at least I smell nice… Exhaustion means that I sleep very well indeed.
In the morning I idle under the trees and eventually haul my motivation together and head further up the mountainside through the bush. As I ascend further, it starts to get snowy underfoot. The going levels out for quite a while through a boggy snowy wooded area. Eventually, going upwards again, I reach a clear area a couple of feet deep with crusted snow, just about solid enough to walk on its surface.

I realise that to go any further would be dangerous. Taking in the view, I attempt to find the poignancy of the moment. Somehow in my mind, climbing up here had come to represent the peak of the whole trip. Climbing mountains isn’t something I generally indulge in, so the moment seems even rarer to me.
I take all day to bounce back down. Large parts of the route pass through a windy muddy track with large stone steps in many places. Coming up it was quite a challenge to some pretty unused leg muscles, but coming back down I have a job keeping up with my own momentum; it requires some keenly aware leaps and bounds.
On the lower part of the descent I am accompanied by a fantail, who is a very welcome companion. My legs have gone like jelly. I am exhilarated at the same time as being rather surprised and very grateful. Coming down so rapidly, it’s a wonder that I didn’t make any wrong moves and hurt myself; it’s as if the subconscious takes charge. 
At the bottom I still have another eight kilometres to get to the ‘main road’. Walking is an unpleasantly strange experience, like my trousers are suddenly full of big lead weights. The flatness of the road feels utterly bizarre too; it’s as if my legs have lost all their intelligence. 
At twilight, just in time, I hitch a ride with a South African family from Cape Town. I get them to stop off at the place where I’d previously stashed my gear and I manage to find my stuff from inside the bush even though it’s now dark. It took a little explaining to get them to understand why this random hitch-hiker wants them to stop in the middle of nowhere in the dark. Fortunately they are very nice people and we have connected very comfortably.
Some way on they drop me at Knob’s Flat where there is a visitors centre. It’s darned cold but I sleep in the toilet which has an electric heater. (Oh WOW! Luxury!)

In the morning, I am invited to have tea with the warden who finds me when he comes to open the place in the morning. A well-timed cup of tea is very good for the soul.
Back in the Great Outdoors again after a decent scrub-down in the loos, I hitch to Te Anau with two young Spaniards where I go skipping (dumpster-diving) and get chicken sausages and organic yoghurt. The chicken sausages are dodginess central, but beggars can’t be choosers.

I email Booroobin Democratic School (a ‘Free’ school in Australia I am considering volunteering at), mend my broken boots, and hitch nine kilometres out of town with an American and a Kiwi. I camp in some bush overlooking a lovely big bend in a river. I get a good fire going and cook the sausages for tea whilst listening to Lenny Henry on the mp3 machine (English comedian). Staving off an initial loneliness, a fine evening is had by all.
In the morning I hitch to Manapouri with the first car that comes past. I then spend most of the day trying to get out of the bloody place again. I get very pissed off at the sporadic traffic; eventually acting out my worst-case scenario of leaping up and down in the road yelling my nuts off, which strange as it may seem, always fails to get me a ride. But fuck ’em anyway. They’re all a bunch of bastards.
Eventually the Great Norse God ‘Givethepoorsodabreak’ finds me a ride with a scrap metal man on his way to Lumsdon. I have no idea where Lumsden is, but most importantly it’s not HERE. I gibber my thanks at the miracle of there still being decent human beings in the world. It’s quite possible to end up doubting any memory of there ever being decent folk sometimes. 

Back on saner ground again.
I travel to Winton with a young couple. We discuss the importance of parents encouraging their kids to do positive things with their lives, especially when they live in quiet rural areas where the easiest things to get excited about are Play Stations and drugs. Its one thing to visit beautiful isolated rural spots and admire the scenery, but I often wonder how the people that live in these places actually fare.

The back-country is a place where it might be possible to thrive in solitude, or if you are unlucky, get bored beyond belief and go spectacularly bonkers with no-one around to keep you on track. The great wildernesses of the world often seems to go hand-in-hand with alcoholism.
Upon arrival in Winton, I dine out on chips and pumpkin soup (brilliant combination!) and then go and sleep in the croquet ground on the other side of the road. What kind of town has a croquet ground in its town centre? A very very dull one quite possibly.
Next day; It’s grey – unusually so – and I have to talk myself up from being a grump; eating almost only skipped chicken sausages for the last two days (eurgh!), having to wait five or six hours to get out of a tight arse little place called Manapouri (no-one should ever try to hitch there, ever), and I have become somewhat kippered from sitting next to camp-fires. 
My legs still hurt like hell from all the up and down of Harris Saddle. I work out that since Nelson I’ve been living on an average of ten dollars (three quid) a day, and that’s including buying a swanky sleeping bag and going snowboarding.
I am feeling all ‘travelled out’ and have to have a mental fantasy of what I would do if I could do anything in the world: Stick all my clothes in a washing machine, have a bath for about an hour, sit on a big squishy sofa in front of a TV watching either ‘Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines’ or an old Ealing comedy and be snuggled into a duvet drinking hot chocolate and eating tomato soup and toast and have a nice happy cat on my lap.

In Winton I buy three black bananas and some cheap rice crispies and some other out-of-date stuff for four bucks.

Hitching out of town it’s zero degrees, wet on the ground and in a strange way, pleasantly dour in a way that reminds me of hitching in England in Winter.

After Invercargill, I shall be heading back northwards to the warmth again.
New Zealand memento: sound recordings and pictures of Tuis and fantails. seedlings to grow of Punga, cabbage trees and feijoas. Things to remind me of New Zealand. Actually I quite fancy having a tattoo of a fantail (as well as one of a crow, my other favourite bird).
Having come as far south as you can go without island-hopping, I try hitching out of Invercargill with almost no success. I get a ride back into town and get the bus to Gore and go to see Shrek 2 at the cinema.

At the cinema I get to 

A) Not be in my head. 

B) Watch a nice escapist film. 

C) Warm up and dry out properly.

I come out in a better frame of mind. 
I decide that I like Gore. Gore is one of those quiet unassuming little places that exists solely for the purpose of selling gum boots and sheep dip. I am met with a considerable degree of friendliness, which after the non-events of the last couple of days, is very welcome and strangely disarming. I sleep out in a nook by a church.
I spent the morning in the library looking at architectural creations made by idiosyncratic type people. There’s too much possibility out there for me to want to settle down into some unstimulating career.
At Puroroa, the middle of nowhere Southland New Zealand. I am beside an empty road in the middle of the night. I am under a line of old pine trees and hemmed in by huge circular straw bales to keep me slightly warmer. I am in need of a bath and a clothes wash. I have been living off rice crispies and meat pies for the last two days. I go to sleep as soon as it gets dark.

I am alive! Despite whatever might be generally regarded as hardship, right down inside of me, deep in my sleeping bag is the realisation that I am alive and surrounded by the creative force of LIFE.

I’m not going to call it religion, that’s way too narrow. I’ve been reading books about tree-houses, making pottery, about tiles. Some other books about how people live in other parts of the world, different foods, gods, cultures and colours; all alive.

I have my arms and legs, I can see, hear, smell touch, taste and make sounds. I have probably another fifty years in which to explore it all. 

I meet some ‘hoons’ who give me a ride in their car to here. What are they doing with their lives? Smoking, drinking and just driving round. What if they decide to explore their creativity and put on an art exhibition, form a band, put on a theatre show or do meals on wheels for old people? They could make their little town just a little bit bigger. It’s easy to become bogged down in the hardships of living, but beyond all that, trees still grow, and flowers will still push up through cracks in the pavement. If I am breathing I still have possibility on my side. I don’t believe in god, I believe in possibility.
I have a fantasy about standing on the streets on London or San Francisco selling ‘Alien Penis Coffee’; wearing a silver alien suit, talking with a silly alien voice and serving hot coffee from out of a silver-painted dildo between my legs. Why? Because for me, it’s life affirming. A chance to make people laugh and to give people something unexpected. Proof of possibility.

I seem to be coming back round full circle to when I was a teenager, but with a little bit more comprehension of ‘the human condition’.

I’ve met an a lot of pretty cool people. I’m amazed by how much variety there is to people.

Having seen so much ‘from the outside’ and having tip-toed down a few ‘edges’, why would I want to go and blow it all by going and narrowing my life down to one type of experience?

If I must, then let it be the kind of living that bubbles over with creative expression, with enthusiasm and dancing and singing and music and beauty and by holding out an open hand to those that need it and are keen to express their aliveness.
I have slept well, safe in a good sleeping bag, ear-plugs in, free from unwanted road traffic noise. Out of sight surrounded by a straw bale wall.

I wake up this morning to a pale insipid pinky blue sky. The field I am in is clods ploughed earth, frozen solid with a rime of frost all over it. Where I am, under the trees, is still cold but frost free.
I try for water at semi-derelict gas station just across the road from where I have been sleeping. The water is either disconnected or it has frozen in the pipes.

After packing up I have to walk. A nights sleep leaves me with a slow metabolism, and very little warm blood passes through my fingers and toes when packing up.

It’s a process I do with a complaining growl in my voice and it leaves me with a knot of tension in my guts afterwards.
Walking out onto the nearby icy road I mentally brace myself. This could potentially be an awful day: the bitter cold combined with an apparent southern disregard for hitchers can seriously wind me up.

Six cars go past and I get a ride with Paul who’s twenty-four and runs sheep with his seven dogs. Boy am I oh so grateful for the ride. This guy saves me from a day of probable hell gone frozen.

He’s off to see his daughter in Dunedin. What is it with blokes in the southern hemisphere being unable to hold a relationship together?
Result! No more hitching for me today.

We stop for breakfast en route – I have Hoki (fish) and Chips. An odd choice but good value. Anyway with my current random lifestyle, breakfast may very well end up being lunch and even possibly dinner too if I really screw up.

At Dunedin Paul gives me a bag full of rump steak and we say our farewells. He tells me I should write a book. (D’you know, I might just do that…)
I wander into town, drooling over consumer goodies that would look good in my rucksack and then head for the nearest hostel. I urgently need to wash everything as I’ve gotten pretty stinky.
The hostel is run by an unhappy Chinese chap called ‘Bruce’ (real name is ‘Moo’) who’s studying western plant medicine when he’s not running the hostel. The Chinese get loads of abuse from the Kiwis, and I suspect this is the root of his misery.

He says he can’t wait to go home and continue his medicine studies. All cleaned up, I cook my steak and spend all evening twanging guitar and chatting with Chris from Perth, Scotland who’s spent the last year in Australia. He’s been in New Zealand three days, and is still dressed for Bondi Beach. It’s great to talk to someone from back home and we empathise on our mutual guitar playing inability, the crapiness of ‘Kiwi Experience’ tours and not having much money. A fine chap. I give him my road map of New Zealand and tell him that instead of using New Zealand’s crappy buses, he should save his money and take up hitching and have an adventure. 
I’m in the top bunk of a bed that’s squeakier than a bunch of rats in a punch up. I try sleeping on the sofa in the TV room which works fine until some miserable bastard decides that watching golf at 3 am is somehow very important. Presumably they put golf on at that time of day specifically to send insomniacs back to sleep.

Sadly, it has the reverse effect on me, and I feel that I have been short-changed on at least two counts.
In the morning, Me and Chris are going to go and look at wildlife on the peninsula. The Korean woman in the tourist information building in town says ‘Do you just want albatrosses, or albatrosses with penguins?’ My sleep-deprived head can’t cope with the way this woman is presenting the whole thing as if she’s selling me a Chinese take-away.

‘Um, yes, I think I’ll have the penguins, and the albatrosses as well please. Does the rice come with that or do I have to order that separately?’

Either way sixty bucks each is waaaay too much money. Chris says farewell and goes and phones his brother to plan his next move, and I go and check emails; one from John Hanson the wannabe baked bean manager and a YES from Booroobin free school in Australia. I spend two hours reading about the school. (A ‘free’ school in the UK usually means a school that doesn’t follow state guidelines and where in some schools, children get to choose how, what and when they learn thus giving more focus to a child’s sense of self-determination.)
I walk out of town and hitch a ride from Portobello Rd (absolutely nothing like the one in London) with a half English/half Kiwi chap and his young son, and they take me halfway to Portobello the village.

It’s lovely out here. It’s like I’ve suddenly been transported to a misty Cornish village. Nice vibes.
Two bars of chocolate later, standing in the drizzle I get another ride with a couple who graciously drive me out all the way to the end of the peninsula.

We talk of freedom and confidence (in regard to free schooling). She wants to go to Mexico, so I tell her about WWOOFing. Getting out of the car, another couple see me in my waterproofs, carrying all my stuff.

‘Ooh! That looks miserable!’ says the thoughtless onlooker,

To which I respond ‘Naah! It’s laaarvely!’
Along with a small but dedicated audience (never mind the drizzle or the fading daylight), we watch the penguins come trotting out of the water at dusk. About twelve of them, one foot high. I see them for about fifteen seconds and then they wisely disappear into the shadows away from me and the small bunch of Swiss German tourists gathered here. I am surprised the penguins were so tiny. The Swiss German tourists on the other hand are the same size they usually tend to be.
I rig up my tarp over a picnic bench and settle down for a very cosy evening. The rain is thrashing away on the tarp and being right next a cliff, I hear the sound of the waves making a deep bass ‘wuump’ as they slam into the rocks in a tight little cove below me..

The two sounds together is like poetry. Like the high notes and low notes on a piano. 
I wake up feeling satisfied. Right. Now to go see me some albatrosses (no rice).

I’ve never seen an albatross. 

Incredibly, they fly all the way round the world landing only at a few points in New Zealand, South America and one or two Pacific Islands. Their huge wings mean that they can just hang in the air and let the wind carry them along like hang-gliders. 

By gliding very close to the surface of the sea, they are able to trap the air between their wings and the water below them and this creates an air pressure that they able to glide along on with practically no effort, indefinitely. 

One of nature’s greatest bits of evolution I think, and I imagine the albatross would agree with me.
Albatrosses (not albatrii?) have only one mating partner in their whole life and can recognise their partner in amongst a whole squawking flock even if they have been apart for a year or longer. These ones that I am looking at here on the tip of the headland are involved in the very arduous job of being asleep. Fair enough if you’ve just hung-glid round the planet. (hang-glided? Hung-glod? Hong-gludded?)
I hitch a ride back into town with the warden and go window-shopping again.

I bump into one of the blokes from the hostel and he plugs me for Words of Advice about Travelling Round The World. After my Helpful Tips he too suggests that I write a book…
Hitching out of town I end up getting a lift with another pair of English social workers who take me home and feed me. Their home has that certain eighties English student digs feel about it which is kind of satisfying. It’s like stepping into a different and familiar reality for a moment. 
Some time later in Temuka…

I pitch my tarp over another picnic table in the middle of a small 1950s housing estate, decide it is a miserable way to spend the evening, and go to look for a suitable pub. I chat with someone called Gill and his missus; they don’t take me home for a warm night in. I feel forlorn about not having a woman in my life, which is only accentuated by my current lack of enthusiasm for sleeping rough in winter. 

Back in my temporary den, I listen to Eddie Izzard to take me somewhere else. I sleep well; wake up at daybreak, and it’s very cold and frosty outside the tarp. I wake up feeling lonely and wondering what I can do to make the situation better.
Yesterday I was feeling fed up with having to explain who I am and the ins and outs of travelling over and over and over again; I am bored of answering the same old questions with the same old answers. I have been doing it almost no-stop for about two years. I decide that next time someone asks me what I do for a living I’ll tell them ‘Go places that interest me, meet interesting people and try to find as much self-expression as I can.’ 
I kick all the frost off the tarp. A Maori chap approaches, and we talk. He too spent last night dossing in a bush just a little way off under some trees. We have a very good conversation. It’s nice to meet someone in my own position. A relief in fact. An elderly chap comes out of his house and over to us to find out what we’re up to (either friendliness or nosiness I’m not sure which) and he invites me in for a cup of tea to warm up after he has come back from going down the shop to get the morning paper. When the old man goes, me and the Maori guy have a smoke. Whilst  stoned, the painfulness of having to put away icy gear is registering in a strangely detached way whilst I am doing it, enabling me to pack without having to stop and warm my hands every thirty seconds or so.

I realise afterwards that I’ve had no ‘defences’ up at all with dossing Maori chap, which I realise is a very good thing indeed. He points out to me that it is only me that is being invited into the old man’s house. ‘You know how things are Bro. Don’t worry, I’m used to people like that. Go on, you go and get yourself a nice cup of tea.’ He shrugs his shoulders in a people-can-be-weird sort of way, and I feel quite strange that he’s not coming in with me. I almost don’t go in. I’m not sure what the right thing to do is exactly.
I go in with the old fella and we chat over tea in his house about farming, genetic engineering and such-like. He seems like an all-right sort of a chap. I always find it deeply weird how apparently nice people can at the same time turn out to be racists too.
Feeling mostly good about my morning so far, apart from a mild niggling sense of betraying the Maori guy. I go to the shop to get a bar of chocolate to munch out on, and when I come outside the shop to fiddle with my bags, the bin next to me is full of yesterday’s rolls, sandwiches and wrapped shortbread. Excellent!
After the sandwich find I sit by the road and do nothing but relax. I can’t be arsed to do anything. I’m nearly always on the move. Sitting on the grass spacing out is my equivalent of sitting on the sofa watching TV I guess.

A bloke yesterday suggested I could get residency into New Zealand easily by becoming a policeman. God only knows what kind of policeman I would make. Not really my cup of tea somehow.

Travelling has become practically a profession. I seem to be increasingly regarded as some kind of travel expert to some, a vagabond to be taken in, looked after and filled with food by others, and by a very few to be regarded with open distaste. It’s all becoming increasing strange.

Martha Beck. Found in Christchurch library:

‘The social self (superego) is avoidance-based, conforming and hard-working; the essential self (id) is attraction-based, inventive and playful.

The essential self is incorruptible. Energy levels are it’s navigational tools.

In circumstances that poison your core, all the subtle mechanisms that make for smooth social behaviour get gummed. (Link between interest and energy levels – near coma chatting to in-laws, but up all night reading a murder mystery.)

It’s not what happens to people but between people that matters.

Apply yourself to fulfilment. What is happening in your life when you were last ill?

Why listen to those who do not have your best interests at heart. Which activities cause you to forget time? With whom do you deeply relax?

Self and context are united through empathy and through joy.

Happiness is humanity’s truest ambition, and all else is compensatory.

Due to our basically good inner nature, we can be happy only if we live moral lives, complete with integrity, compassion and sometimes self-sacrifice.

Joyful activity adds real value to the world.

I don’t know what the hell is going on, and that’s okay.

There are no rules, and that’s okay.

Everything is changing, and that’s okay.’

End.
Christchurch onward.

Its a Friday. Back in Christchurch I phone Tamariki free school. I hang out for the weekend putting pockets in my Swan-dri that John Hanson gave me. (‘Swannys’ are thick checked farmers shirts, very popular in New Zealand.) I hang out in the library and put some non hitch-hiking silent relaxed cosy armchair warmth back into my bones. After that I go and apply for teaching English in Japan jobs. The woman at the WINZ (Work and Income New Zealand) is looking at me like I am something thats got stuck to the bottom of her shoe, a very unusual occurrence; this only ever used to happen in the more unfriendly ends of England. Odd that I should encounter it here. Well that’s dole offices for you I suppose.

I am starting to feel like a homeless bum, which is pretty much what I seem to be when I’m hitching around being an international tourist. Summer travelling is fine. The sunshine makes everyone feel that little bit more relaxed, that little bit more open. In winter it becomes a concerted effort to stave off the wearing effects of the cold, to maintain a certain level of warmth and dryness. Psychologically everything is just that little bit harder.

I end up getting stressed about the teaching in Japan thing, feeling like its too much newness. I don’t have the required ‘spring’ of internal resources to get me there from here.
Sunday night I meet some seventeen year old kid who’s full of bullshit bravado, but basically is trying to steer clear of drugs.

I get all paternal over him. He invites me to stay at his place, but all his stories seem to involve trouble as a punch-line, so I make my excuses and tootle off. I find a strange spot, a half constructed shopping mall with quite an old fashioned Victorian style about it. There’s a light coating of concrete dust everywhere. It’s quiet in here and the acoustics are lovely. I sit playing guitar to myself. Occasionally people wander through. A gang of rowdy but friendly teenagers all about thirteen ask me if I am a bum. It’s curious how when I am in the sticks I am a traveller to talk with. In the city I become an almost anonymous statistic.
Earlier on in the day a friendly woman in the Starmart news and chocolate shop is asking me what I am doing with my day and manages to mishear my reply of ‘reading’ as ‘drinking’ which is a bit confusing and humiliating. I guess she’s already decided what I am all about. It puts a knot in my stomach even though I think she is well-meaning. There are certain people in the world that will go out of their way to be nice to you if you look like you are only just scraping by. It’s weird when I’m on the receiving end of that.
Monday morning I visit Tamariki Democratic School. I spend three days in total at the school, spending my evenings between sleeping under some nice cosy bushes in a nearby scrap of park next to a minor river. The first day at the school I spend only talking to the adults mostly, asking all the usual questions that they must get. The second day a few of the kids are coming up to me, asking me who I am, showing me round and getting me to do stuff with them. In the morning I take part in the siege of a castle, after lunch I play guitar with a couple of the older lads and after that I end dressing up as Elvis with a nine year old girl who is also dressed as Elvis. She’s Dude one and I’m Dude two. We swan round the entire school making endless grand entrances. Wot a larf!

I think if I am never to have any children of my own, then being part of a democratic (free) school would be a great way to be around kids. Right now I think I may have found a vocation in life.
Misconceptions about New Zealand

When you think of New Zealand you’ll think of Lord Of The Rings and you’ll think of sheep. New Zealand’s famous for them. There’s ten sheep to every person. You’d be forgiven for thinking that your average kiwi will be obsessed with them, will go starry eyed and knock-kneed over the supposedly prolific woolly maggot.

Actually I think I see more deer; but no-ones going on about them either. I think it must be a southern English thing to write off whole nations as mere sheep stations (i.e. Wales). I think it must be sheep envy.
Dunedin is the Gaelic name for Edinburgh and it looks nothing like it’s namesake. The locals don’t sound Scottish. One or two Victorian Scots terraces and a vague burr to the accent that sounds as much American as Scots.

Christchurch has a narrow river – the Oxford – with weeping willows and one or two humped bridges with twiddly ironwork. Ta da! Oxford England!

I think I’m having a cynical moment.
CHCH (Christchurch) July 21st
Hmm… Okay chaps. A smattering of conflict regarding whether to go for teaching English in Japan. (Then follows a whole ream of mental noodling crud too dreary to type out for this…)
Full moon, Christchurch.

I guess I’ve got numerous ‘reasons’ for feeling down: barely any money, sleeping out every night in sub-zero temperatures, rarely any friends around, being ripped off. (First by Brett in Melbourne and now by Dan in Tauranga.) It feels like I’m getting plenty of practice of being in the shit. Plenty of chances to feel abandoned by life, like a baby when it’s mother walks out the door. Each time it happens, I have to brace myself. Watch for the reactions. What does the reaction achieve in me emotionally and mentally? That’s my bottom line. Anything else is missing the point; leaving me open to victim-hood and closed away from hopefulness and the possibility of change.

This I guess is growing up. I almost put ‘just’ growing up, but I dropped the ‘just’ because it’s a wonderful experience in a weird way. Like straining to give birth maybe.

All that from sitting with myself alone every night from dusk til dawn.

I suppose the feelings of loneliness are being replaced by something more meaningful and useful. Maybe I’m just high cos the moons up. I don’t want to presume having really climbed any particular psychological mountain. That’s usually just asking for trouble.
Thinking a lot this evening about people I know and love in Norfolk; About Paul and Helen and Andy, how much I still feel their warmth; though conversely I still run frown their politics. I’ve always felt there is something childish about devoting so much energy to decrying things. Maybe it’s just my own unwillingness or inability. I’ve never been an ‘ist’ or into ‘isms’. I figure sitting on the fence is an objective place to sit.

Climb down on any side and the first thing that happens is that you automatically shut out half the world. Maybe I’m right maybe I’m wrong. 
If anything is important to me now, it’s an ever increasing vigilance over my own tendency to treat myself like a victim.

Climbing out of it is like re-discovering the joy of salad after having spent years of eating cheese and onion pasties and chocolate.

I guess it’s developing an ability to mentally view the emotional distress and choose to do the Right Thing rather than drown in self-indulging pity.

Having said all that, I’m still getting large doses of mental overload I don’t know what to do with regarding ‘Where what and who with’.

I guess that’s the time when the emotional response comes into it’s own. I don’t know; I only just thought of that.

(This is the type of stuff you write when you spend too many evenings outside in Winter in the dark with barely any money to spend on fun things.)

Spotted in Christchurch town centre, van with ‘Schindler Elevators and Escalators Service Team’. Schindler’s Lifts no less.

From Christchurch I get an evening bus and sleep somewhere random and likely looking out at the north of the town. It’s minus five, I sleep lightly and the next morning I wait a dozy three hours for a ride. Eventually an Irish guy who has hitched down the East Coast of Africa gives me a ride. He drops me off halfway to Takaka. I go into a roadside cafe where I talk English things with an English kiwi. The sun is shining, it’s a bit chilly but with a nice cup of tea inside me and an English chat, it’s turning out to be quite a nice day!
I get a ride with Raimond, a German woodworker from Takaka who is very easy to talk to. (We talk about death, including both our mothers.) After him, I wait a whole three minutes and get a ride with a Maori woman, who I have a really interesting conversation with about language and culture (though I’m buggered if I can remember what we said). I get out of the car feeling like we have a mutual respect for each other. Cool. 
In Richmond I go see Jackie and Kendal who are having the wobblies over their immigration process; they are waiting to find out whether they have been granted citizenship and it has taken them two years of jumping through bewildering and nerve-racking legal hoops.
Leaving Jackie and Kendal a couple of days later I wait at the bus stop and meet a couple of young Mormons; ‘Elder’ Goebal (Samoan) and his Californian sidekick. I get talking to them about the excitement of seeing other countries and meeting people and manage to sidestep the whole God thing, which afterwards I think confuses the American guy. Surely all his conversations are about him getting someone else into the God thing?

A grumpy old woman moaning about the lateness of the bus brings home to me just how lovely life is when your head’s in a good place. Clearly this woman’s isn’t, and it’s a comical reminder of how not to be.

Various other people at the bus stop get freaked by the Mormons asking them to take a photo of them and me together. Everyone looks shifty and refuses. They’re only asking for a photo! Who knows where it might lead?! No trust. 
I bet it can be a lonely business being a Mormom when you know an extremely large proportion of society actively doesn’t want to know you. Good job you’ve got Jesus in your pocket and a mate to go and drink coffee with.

It’s a lovely day, I’m feeling high. I’ve had some great conversations these last two days and the weather’s been mild.
Boogying in the side of the road, I get a lift with Scots guy who lives here. We chat about British Sunday afternoons, watching Countryfile and the Eastenders omnibus and having roast dinner with the family. Oh England… When I get together with ex-pat Brits, it does seem to be an excuse to wax lyrical about back home and/or slag off the locals. We do like to let off a bit of steam given half a chance, what?!
I pass through Picton again for the fourth and last time. The act of travel has a habit of encouraging my head to pick favourite places, places that encapsulate the best bits of so many other similar places. I think it’s my brain’s attempt to rationalise and cut down on too much input, to produce a more handy summary for the memory.
Picton is one those places. A little village really, but anyone that wants to travel between the North and South Islands must pass through here if they using the roads. Small but busy and therefore alive. It’s hemmed in by mountains giving it a very cosy feeling with wildness immediately on your doorstep (unlike so many ports which have a habit of being industrial and hideous).

Sailing boats nestle in the harbour, promising daring voyages out around the rocky shores of New Zealand or perhaps across the Pacific to Polynesia or maybe even Antarctica.

It’s here that I flirted with a Maori gardener who told me to meet her for coffee next time I am coming back this way.. but even now she still isn’t here.

It’s here that I bumped into a French woman and we pitched camp in a playground under a pirate ship, sitting up half the night talking about cosmic stuff. She gave me her green socks and I still wear them.

I’m supposed to be leaving New Zealand. I cry. I don’t want to go.
Needless to say I’m sad on the ferry back to Wellington. I’m supposed to visit Rob and Wayne but I can’t really face them. I’m too sad for either Rob’s stresshead craziness or the sheer oddness of Wayne’s time-trapped throw-back emotional sterility. When I get into the city I phone one of the WWOOF hosts within the area of Welly. Miraculously, Judith the host that I call offers me a place to stay at her’s right there on the spot; pretty good considering it’s 9.30 in the evening.

She meets me off the train at Petone, two districts out of Welly, and where Peter Jackson is about to do some of the filming for his new King Kong film.
Judith spots my sadness, and is wonderfully maternal towards me. Just the ticket. Judith is a middle-aged music teacher with a sense of adventure and a glint in her eye, a woman still with a sense of joy about life. Needless to say I really like her.

This is quite the most urban WWOOF place I’ve ever stayed; she lives in an ordinary row of bungalows and has the speckiest of gardens. After spending a day sorting that out, she gets me to do handiwork and I build her a cute outdoor table out of bits of junk wood. 
I go and visit Rob and Wayne because I don’t seem to be able to wriggle out of it without looking like a git. I’m feeling apprehensive and quiet. Some ‘being real’ would be good. Rob is in his usual state of blowing off steam because of his crazily stressful computer job. We barely meet mentally. This depresses me further. Wayne is altogether more sensible and easier to be with. Actually if Wayne got any more sensible, he’d make Mary Whitehouse seem like an Ozzy Osbourne groupie. What a bloody weird pair.
The next day, I go on a music copying mission in Welly City Library using the stereos that they have in there. Plainly, it’s not allowed. A short-arse white guy librarian sees fit to stop me, order me down to the police station, ban me from the library and give me a load of blah blah blah. He passes me over to the jurisdiction of a very tall Samoan security guard. He in turn looks very smiley and like he wouldn’t harm a fly. Being built like a brick shit-house though I don’t suppose anyone would ever feel inclined to test him on this.

The guard tells me his name, asks me mine and we shake hands. He tells me how he’s been around a bit too and suggests that maybe the other guy needs to get out more. As he walks me to the cop shop conveniently next door, I get the feeling that if I do a runner this Samoan guy wouldn’t pursue me. I might of course be wrong.
Inside the library guard explains to the duty sergeant why I’m there. They both look nonplussed by the apparent need to bring me here. I get seen by another cop who also can’t quite add me up as a criminal. He gets me to sign a piece of paper that effectively bans me from Wellington library for two years. He has to do something just to keep the library happy. 

‘No worries, I’m leaving the country in a couple of weeks anyway.’

‘Oh no harm done then!’

Curiously, he has the word ‘FISH’ written on his left hand.
I’ve been nicked a few times, and it’s usually a pretty surreal event, the combination of emotional ‘Oh shit I’ve been caught!’/adrenalin space-out and the hyper-formality of it all. Sometimes there’s a gap for a bit of common friendliness.
Me and a guy known as Potty Phil (full name Potty Phil the Squeezy Geezer with the Ginger Minger) were out one night during the Newbury Bypass anti-roads protest of 1996 and we’d nicked some seventeen foot long scaffolding poles at three in the morning from a building site. The intention was to make them into a tripod for someone else to stop diggers getting through a gateway. (You sit up in the top of the tripod and try not to freeze.)

Anyway, we’d been spotted with our load on top of a knackered Ford pick-up known as ‘The Pig Magnet’ due to it’s widely known arrestable tendencies during the anti-roads campaign. We tried out-running the racey police pursuit car in this hunk of junk and of course failed. The cops flagged us down. Phil says ‘Don’t say anything! Just let me do the talking!’

Up strides a tired copper.

‘All right lads! What are you up to then?’

Phil: ‘Oh, umm, we’re builders and we are just off to work at a farm. We just wanted to get an early start.’

‘What, at three O’clock in the morning?’

‘Umm yes, we’re very keen.’

‘All right then, I think you two had better get in the car with us. I’m nicking you both on suspicion of theft.’

Wow! Good story Phil! That worked! (not)

After being arrested we sat in the back of the police car watching another copper driving the said hunk of junk in front of us. 

‘We’re supposed to be in the Pig Magnet. What are we doing in this cop car?’ I said, somewhat deflatedly.

‘I know. Innit?’ replied Phil, grimacing.

It had been a long day, a sleepless week and a crazy campaign. After the midnight adrenalin of nicking scaffold poles, I felt a little delirious. At about five in the morning we reached Andover police station where everyone’s eyes were on stalks from too much coffee. The fleuro lights glared horribly. We were welcomed by three very bored tired cops, one of whom sighed and said

‘You have the right to remain silent but anything you do say will be taken down as evidence and may be used against you in a court of law.’

‘What? Can I say anything?’

‘Yeah, of course.’

‘Got a pen handy?’

‘Yep.’

‘Okay… It’s a fair cop guv, you’ve got me bang to rights and no mistake. There. I’ve always wanted to say that. Did you write that down?’

‘Nahh, don’t think I will.’

‘Oh go on! You’re supposed to you know! It’s the law!’

I ‘no comment’ed my way through an interview (one story is an alibi, two stories is a crock of shit, so i agreed to let Phil invent another fantastically unlikely tale. 

Miraculously they let us go without charging us. We figured either they’d put a tracing bug on the pick-up to make following us in the future more easy, or they were secretly on our side, or they just plain couldn’t be arsed with the paperwork. All three were likely to be true. 

I make my way up to Napier to visit John Hanson again; It is lovely to see a proper friend again. He asks me if I am looking for work. Wow! Yes please! And very soon I get a try-out with Des his landlord for a couple of days of shovel-wielding. Once my usefulness is confirmed, Des gets me a place to stay in an empty B&B farmhouse property he has. This then becomes home for the next month or so, out on the coast of Te Awanga just up from Cape Kidnappers.

The location is lush; right next to a vineyard and the sea is about a quarter of a mile from my door. At night all I can hear is the gentle rush of waves on distant pebbles.
Des shows me how to do concrete-related work which is going to stand me in good stead in the future, employment-wise. We put in land drains for the vine yard, and one day Des asks me to drive a flat-bed van with a load tipper on the back and deliver a load of gravel to someone. Make sure I am back before five cos he’s got to give the van back to the guy he borrowed it from. Right okay. Will do. I go to the delivery place. I press the button in the cab, the tipper goes up and the gravel hisses out. I press the button again like Des showed me and… nothing happens. I can’t get the tipper down. Oh. Bugger.

I look all over the vehicle for something that looks like it will let the tipper back down. Nothing works. I try calling Des. His phone’s not on. I have twenty minutes to get back. I try looking all over the van again. Nothing doing. Try phoning Des again. Still no answer. Knowing that I am breaking the law big time, I bite my lip, hold my breath and drive all the way back across town with this bloody stupid van with its tipper still up, feeling like everyone that sees me must be on the phone to the cop shop right now. I get to Des’s. ‘What’s the tipper doing up?!’

‘I couldn’t work out how to get it back down’

‘What you drove all the way here with it UP??’

‘I had no choice’

Des tries sorting it out but it seems that it had broken. Have I broken it? I don’t know. It’s a doubly squirmy-idiot moment for me as a new employee.

Things improve after that and Des is grateful for someone to talk to and to hold the other end of things. Also I have a younger back.
Sometimes we go and hang out with an older guy called Roger who lives next to John in an old bus with no wheels.

Roger is a very relaxed chap who’s always good for a certain style of scruffy tea and biscuits that you’ll get with anyone that lives in a bus with no wheels. There is something enormously satisfying and earthy I like about it, like when I was staying with Gerry in Feilding in his caravan. No airs and graces. No attempts at showiness. No pretensions or aspirations. Just plain old comfortable basic functionality.

His living next to John means that I get to see John fairly frequently too.
Back in Te Awanga, Des rents a chunk of barn space from his mate Kevin next door, and Des has been ordered to tidy it up. After clearing out a load of metal junk that we weigh in at the scrap yard load by load, its time to say goodbye to a pig. Des keeps three, by the end of today there will be two, and rather a lot of bacon.

Des calls up a Maori guy, Andy, who has a mobile pig rendering device which is a trailer with a hot water boiler and a bath-tub mounted onto it. Mercifully me and Des are required to be elsewhere working whilst the deed is done, but we return in time to find the pig hanging upside-down above the tub having his bristles melted off with boiling water whilst the pigs internal bits have all been caught in the bath-tub.

Andy gets some bucks and gets to keep a leg and the deal is done.
Hastings Sept 20th

Judith calls me from Welly and tells me there may be a possible job as a trainee cabinet-maker with a couple she knows over at Seaview, just round the bay from her. Am I into it?

Wow! A chance to stay in New Zealand AND I get to do a proper job I’m into. I go and visit this couple and they strike me as a bit odd. I can’t quite put my finger on it but the vibes are weird. After spending a couple of weekends with them I get it figured.

He’s an over-weight bad-tempered self-confessed Nazi (he tells me that Hitler was right about killing the Jews) with very few people skills and she’s a new-age head-in-the-sand all smiles Jewish gold-digger. 

I go for all the bureaucratic form-filling to get temporary residency, but I immediately get it in the neck for admitting that I had been doing apple-picking without a permit. I plead with them that I only did it because I had been robbed in Melbourne. This doesn’t help. I can tell by the way that bureaucratic eyes are glazing over in a monumentally disinterested way.

Hmm. A fat Nazi and a Jewish new-age gold-digger. They were right weirdos anyway.
October 15th

My last day at Te Awanga.

I go fishing with Des. This is our end of working together day off thing. I am anxious that without having work to do, I really don’t know how I am going to be with him. He’s brash and beery, and I’m an intellectual jellyfish. Anyway we eventually end up unintentionally doing the dolphins swimming alongside the boat thing whilst scooting about trying to find a school of fish to catch. When after nearly an hour we do start to get some bites, everything goes a bit crazy with Des shouting at me in his testosterone-driven way and me trying not to cry. I feel like shouting at him and pushing him out of the boat. Great fun. At the end of it, Des’s hormonal excitement has worn off and he’s his usual thick-skinned self. Over beers we have a barbie with Barbara his missus and the day ends much better.
Te Awanga and Beyond

October 16th

Well here I am at the end of my extra two months in New Zealand, and gratefully, I’m feeling much more ready for ‘the next thing’ than I have been in the time I’ve been in Te Awanga. The two months of being here have been real battery re-chargers. From being practically penniless to having enough financial security to buy me a ticket to Canada. From sleeping out every night in winter conditions to having a beautifully situated flat with a lovely garden, a SOFA (!WOW!!), a TV and a kitchen. From being very withdrawn (I didn’t realise how withdrawn I’d become) to a bit less so.
I am packing; moving out and about to be on the move: A mental gear-shift.
I’m sitting in an armchair looking at my half-packed rucksack. It looks burst and deflated, contents spewed all over an Arabian carpet on the living room floor.

It takes me back to all those times in the past when I would spread the current version of my possessions all over my old friend Don’s living room floor.

Don was the father of an old girlfriend and both had become almost something like a new bit of family to me, as I had found my real family to be something of a non-event. Between all my venturings out to different places, I would return to his house and recharge for a few days before going off and trying out some new mission somewhere else. Him and his house are a place of grounding and familiarity, especially welcome as I have a habit of hanging out with some rather oddball characters sometimes. Packing to go always took time;
It has always been something of a ritual. ‘Big Journey’ packing always takes longest.

Cassettes – which ones? The familiar favourite ones or the ones I never play. If I try the one I never play, I can ditch it if it’s not much cop. Which socks? What type and how many? One pair of thick winter socks or three pairs of thin ones worn over each other? Six socks was the maximum; I rarely possessed actual pairs. Gloves if winter; usually found, also not matching. Hat, ditto. Trousers. Coat. Tidy or comfortable, depending on whether I am anticipating having difficulty hitch-hiking or was expecting to be up to my armpits in a Scottish bog at my arrival point.

Book – luxury item, only comes for the ride if I’m feeling strong in the back, bored or decadent.

Hmmm… other maybes… felt tip pens…

Sleeping bag. Actually itemo primo, of course.

I’d sit back and weigh it all up into neat piles. 

Picking clothes always took the longest. Trying to anticipate what type; balancing practical weather protection against favourite jumpers stretched full of holes against the shirts that a special friend has given me, the groovy coloured trousers and weird tidy stuff that went in a head-scratcher of a pile called ‘respectable’. This stuff usually only went in if the rest of the garments looked lift-inhibiting for hitching, or if I was starting a new conservation project or trying to impress a new girlfriend.

I’d fill Don’s living room floor, transforming it into organised chaos for an hour. He’d sit back and watch, accompanying the proceedings with one or two pots of tea and either several bowls of shredded wheat or tinned spaghetti on toast to aid concentration. Don would look on and provide pithy remarks and then extra lunch on top (just in case I needed it). If I’d started getting ready to go a bit too late, we would have to stop halfway through in order to watch ‘Neighbours’ on the mid-day TV slot.

At the end of it, Don would marvel at my ability to write high speed high quality sign writing on the backs of old cornflake packets stored in the cupboard especially for my hitching sign use. The sign would have the name of my first destination and would always have ‘PLEASE!’ tagged underneath.

I’d peruse Don’s library and maybe borrow a book on Renoir or somebody. There was often an apple-shaped crevice in the rucksack that I could pack out too. Extra bananas on top would mean not doing the top of the bag up too tight so that I could take them out again and munch them before I’d even reached the end of Queens Road where he lives. Bananas travel badly. The number of times a forgotten banana has squelched its way round everything else on its intrepid journey to the bottom of my bag. Unspoken rule of travel no. 16: Always Eat Bananas Rather Than Trying To Carry Them.
Anyway, back to Te Awanga and my Antipodean living room floor.

The crow-barring myself out of familiar comfortable places leaves me staring blankly at my stuff, remembering the place, feeling sad about what should be and will eventually become happier memories. All part of my usual up-and-down travelling process;
Hitching back and forth to Wellington, Wellington itself, the large mountain-ringed bay with a small cute city planted in one side. Did I say ‘cute’? yeah – I did. Meeting Judith, a very welcoming middle-aged woman, her Chinese lodger Linn who wanted to get into my pants. The Zimbabwean woman and her refugee story, telling of how Mugabe’s Zanu-PF henchmen had killed her husband for being a leader in the Movement for Democratic Change, and so she has left and come here to work as a nurse. She leaves me feeling amazed for two days. A serious reality check.
The landscape and its names: Wellington, Paekakariki, Paraparaumu, Manawatu, Woodville, Norseville, Dannevirk, Te Matea, Haumauana, Te Awanga, Cape Kidnappers.

Another road strung with names that will linger and glitter inside me, maybe for months, maybe for years. It can sit with all the others I have collected from various parts of the world, hidden away from anyone else’s understanding. 

For a while at least, I shall wear the names on a necklace of memory. Then there are the rare but sweet occasions when I meet somebody who joyfully shares the memory with me of a place we both know of.

A well-remembered route is like a poem or a good cinema film or a work of art. It has a beginning, a middle, an end and it’s own flavour. 

It will sit back and live in me, causing my mind to wander even when the body does not. Sometimes the memory is sweet sometimes it’s just bedevilling.

What on earth is the point of so many collected snippets?

In an analogy that Carl Jung would approve of, my head sometimes feels like it’s a house full of beautiful but wildly mis-matching furniture.
Saturday, Napier – Taupo road.

It’s beautifully sunny and generally I’m feeling liberated. I’ve earned 2200 bucks, which is very bloody handy and I’m in ‘open road’ mode. No lifts so far, but in the hedgerows there’s fresh fennel shoots aplenty to keep me fed. Saying goodbye with Barbara and Rose is good and I feel able to speak freely with them, mostly about Des being a grumpy bugger, and about the fact that I am going to see my dad.

I spoke on the phone last night to my dad, and he sounded awful. I am considering flying back to England to see him. I’ll phone family first to find out what’s up.
Hitching up from Napier is a really enjoyable journey. Roger drops me off on the northern side of town and there I wait two hours for a ride, listening to Manic Street Preachers and munching on more roadside fennel shoots for breakfast.

Glorious sunshine and I’m feeling good to be alive. The kind of feeling of hitching at its best: liberating. 
The guy who picks me up is going almost all the way up to Auckland. Recalling the idea I had yesterday, I bang on enthusiastically about how road trips are like songs, especially when you know a route well; each part of the route has its own character and creates a particular feel for that place. I figure that the hills that rise up gradually away from the coast just south of Taupo must be a chorus that descends back down to Taupo’s lake. I’ve always felt place names of a route can reel themselves off like a poem; especially if the names sounds exotic or evokes a story of its possible origins: Haumauana, Cape Kidnappers.

American place names smell of crazy pioneer days: Eureka, Goldrush, Medicine Hat, Truth Or Consequences, La Cidade De Los Angeles; The City Of The Angels.

English place names must be absolutely hilarious to outsiders: Tutt’s Clump – who was Tutt? And why was he so possessive about his Clump? Clump of what? Weird.

Little Snoring, Piddle-On-The-Stoddle. Totally made up by drunken 16th century peasants no doubt. Imaginary conversation in sixteenth century pub:

‘So ol’ Gumble, you’s got you’self a bit o’ laaaaand then?’

‘Arr…’

‘Do it gots itself a naaaame then?’

‘Nope, not yet, I be drinkin’ these forty two pints of goats piss for inspiration on that one.’

‘Arr?’

‘Arr… come to think of it, oi think oi’ll call my new plot of swamp, Grungler’s Splodge.’

‘Grungler’s Splodge? Whys that then?’

‘Oi’ve absolutely no bloody idea.’

‘Tis cos he’s a bloody idiot that’s why.’

‘Roight Lumphead that’s the last time oi let you shag my best cow.’

These days, if there was anything left to name we’d call it places things like ‘Wibbly Bits’ or ‘Snotty Dogs Arse.’
Waiti Beach, Coromandel.

Unless I go hide in the bush or become a brazen over-stayer, this is my last day in New Zealand. It feels like falling off the edge of the world. I have to remind myself that as serene as the sea-shore here is, it’s just as serene a million times over round the world. Same as for the landscape, the peculiarities of building styles and the people. I’ve fumbled over the last couple of days to make sense of things, to find a spiritual connection. I have met one or two Christians recently who have reminded me that I have forgotten.

So too tired last night to talk to God, I sleep: behind a sand dune with a full carpet of yellow lupins and other yellow and purple flowers. For a while, I Feel displaced and homeless on a global scale.
Failing to find God, I write instead. Maybe the fact that I haven’t written in all the two months I am at Te Awanga has been part of me losing the plot. It’s a handy excuse anyway. Writing this now helps detach me from here. 
The rides today are great: I get propositioned again by a rather spaced-out new age type who is edging her way out of a disintegrating relationship with a German ‘breath-atarian’ (trying not to eat anything) and is writing a book called ‘The Brighter Side Of Suicide’ which despite the alarming title, actually sounds like a good notion; that the urge to suicide is the misunderstood need to totally start life over again – except some people don’t realise that you don’t necessarily have to physically kill your body off in order to end the life that you’ve currently got. Very sensible actually.

After watching her daughter in a water polo game in Hamilton and getting over-new-aged very quickly, I realise that this is not the gone-bush shag-fest that I had earlier hoped it might turn into.
I get a ride with a really interesting bloke who I connect with really well – we talk of pagan things, archaeology and maps and old stuff that stirs the soul. We have a smoke and we park next to the Maori royal burial ground for the northern iwis (tribes). I didn’t even know that they had a royal family.
I am rather wobbly but happy by now and get a ride all the way to Auckland with a very friendly chap who drives me right up to the airport and expresses an interest in maintaining contact, though I am quite baffled by this; I suspect I am too stoned to make much sense, but there you go.