Well, we said farewell to gumboots and free wi-fi a few hours after our last post – Mr. Scoobs made a miraculous recovery thanks to some good luck and a very talented local mechanic, and we made it to Wellington only four hours later than expected. We’re in a lovely idyllic hostel in Picton now, waiting to catch a boat up to the northern end of the Queen Charlotte Track. We’ll spend the next two and a half days hiking back down the track along the Marlborough Sound, and then we’ll reconnect with the Stray bus on Sunday. Especially after not being able to do the Tongariro Crossing earlier this week, we’re both really looking forward to getting out on a trail for a few days (assuming Dusty’s ankle holds up!).
One of the ironies that we’re disovering about this whole blogging thing is that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of stuff we have to write about and the amount of time we have to write about it. The last week was full of all kinds of adventures and silliness and a few frustrations – all very blog-worthy stuff – but we were so busy doing all of it that we didn’t have time to write about any of it. Not complaining of course (it’s been made VERY clear to us that we’re not allowed to complain about ANYTHING when we’re on a year-long vacation! :), but mostly we just wanted to explain the radio silence over the last week. That, and an absence of easily available internet, are also the reason we’re resorting to longer, journal-like entries and not frequent short updates, even though we’d hoped to do more of the latter.
So, for now I’ll try to start getting us caught up by writing about our first official day with Mambo and the Stray bus… and boy, was it a doozy.
We left Auckland on a gloriously sunny morning and stopped on top of one of the big craters outside of the city to get a great view of the skyline, and then hopped back on the bus to (hopefully) see the last of Auck-bland until our flight out of NZ to Australia.
Sacred volcano crater with Auckland in the background
As we wrote earlier, we liked our driver Mambo immediately, even though he forced us to do a “getting to know you” game as soon as we got on the bus where everyone switched seats every 5 minutes and had to tell the other person where they were from and what they were passionate about. In the end it was actually a great icebreaker, but between the early morning hour and the sweltering heat of our mobile sweat lodge, we were less than excited about it at the time. There were about 25 of us on the bus, only one other American, a whole bunch of Brits, a few Dutch, a few Germans, one Israeli, and god help us, two Irishmen (who I knew I’d be blaming for at least one hangover on the trip).
We were headed towards the Coromandel Peninsula, and we stopped along the way at a pretty kooky, hippie-run winery called Puratangi. Beautiful, pastoral setting, but it turns out that hippies don’t make the best winemakers (shocking, eh?). Dustin nearly spit out his first sip of Pinot Grigio, not that the crazy, manic guy behind the counter would’ve noticed… he was too busy doing the parrot sketch from Monty Python to pay attention to us.
After that, we were off to our stop for the afternoon/evening — a little beach town called Hahei on the peninsula. Despite a few showers earlier that day, by the time we got to Hahei the sun was shining and the stunning blue water was sparkling.
We’d signed up to do a half-day kayaking tour, and had a great time on the water, despite some pretty bumpy spots in what our guide Adam refered to as “the washing machine.” We kayaked into beautiful Cathedral Cove, where Adam took our coffee orders and somehow magically produced our new favorite coffee drink – the flat white – on the beach.
Once back at our home for the night, a holiday park/hostel right on the beach, Mambo was leading a crew in preparing a giant BBQ feast for dinner. Everyone had pitched in NZ$10 for our supermarket run earlier that day, and we feasted that night on juicy burgers, steaks, local green mussels, mashed kumra (local sweet potato), and a lot of beer. A LOT of beer. Backpackers and Kiwis, it turns out, like to drink beer. Who knew?
The BBQ, among many other examples over the course of the next week, demonstrated the difference between a decent Stray driver and a great one like Mambo. He had volunteered to do the elaborate BBQ so that we could all have a chance to get to know each other better — other drivers probably would’ve just elected to have the sunny afternoon and warm evening to themselves. Time and again over the next week, Mambo would treat us to experiences like this one that went above and beyond the Stray itinerary — and ones that we never would’ve found in a guidebook.
Another example of this occurred later that night after the BBQ. Hot Water Beach is one of those New Zealand freaks of nature that the Kiwis have managed to turn into a natural playground. Basically, geothermally heated water seaps out of the sand right at the beach. At low tide, you can dig big holes in the sand and the hot water (which can be totally scalding if you pick the wrong spot!) will pool there, creating temporary ocean-front hot tubs. Normally, the Stray buses try to make low tide at Hot Water Beach during the day, but the noon ebb tide had been too early that day… so we figured we were out of luck. But Mambo rallied the troops at 11:30pm that night, and off we went with our bathing suits and headlamps in Mr. Scoobs (who at this point, had commenced his Little Miss Sunshine impersonation). Because we were staying in a holiday park, we had to drive the first half-mile with the headlights off. Then another half-mile later, we stopped on the side of a road and Mambo mysteriously exited the bus and headed towards the open garage of a home across the street. He returned to his perplexed passengers and the ceaseless whine of Mr. Scoobs with five shovels (or ‘shuvels’ as our friend Nathan calls them) in hand. No explanation — we simply needed shovels and Mambo procured them. Done and done.
When we arrived at Hot Water Beach around midnight, the nearly full moon was literally lighting our way along the beach. We found a few other folks already there in their own self-made hot pools, and we grabbed our potentially contraband shovels, started digging our own holes, and hopped in to the very hot water.
In some cases, the pools got so hot that we’d have to fill plastic bags with ocean water to cool them down; in others, the temperature was never more than a warm bath. We stayed there in the water until about 1:30am and then headed back to our hostel (returning the “borrowed” shovels to the garage on the way), to get a brief night of sleep before starting the next round of adventures bright and early the next day…