About 5 minutes later we were picked up by a big Maori guy who said he wasn't going very far but that he could us about 10km up the road; seeing as every little bit helped we accepted and he dropped us off in the middle of nowhere.
Looking at our surroundings we were desperately hoping for a ride to come soon, because getting stuck at that place could mean a bit of trouble as there was no place to pitch our tent. Luckily within 20 minutes a car stopped for us with 3 guys in it, one of them holding a wine glass. We thought that was a bit strange but dumped our bags in their bag anyway and they took us all the way to the tip of the cape. Here we quickly got picked up by two Maori women in a beat up pick-up filled with fishing gear. They said they'd take us to the top of the hill, we had no idea where this was so we said ok and dropped our stuff with the fishing gear (easier said than done). Turns out the top of the hill was about a 2 minute drive away, so it wasn't much help and we were now in fact at a much worse place than we were at before; just behind a sharp upward turn and to top it off it was starting to rain. Luckily, after about 10 minutes, a Maori couple stopped and picked us up. They were going to take us almost all the way to Te Puia Springs so it was beginning to look as if we were going to get to our destination before the day was over. They were really nice and both taught at a local high school, teaching multiple subjects.
After an hours drive we arrived at an intersection about 28km from Te Puia and it was here they dropped us off. It was starting to get a bit late (around 6 pm) and there weren't all that many cars going past, after 20 minutes we still didn't have a ride but then suddenly we heard a truck's horn and found that a truck had stopped for us even though we didn't really try to get a ride from him (they usually don't have enough space). He drove small rocks from the quarry to the forest where they used them to create roads for the logging trucks. He was going to drop us in Te Puia Springs but had to get a load of stones first, so we went with him to the quarry where they loaded his two trailers with stones and then back to the road and off to Te Puia. He took our number and said he'd send us a text when he was back home in Gisborne so that maybe we could stay at his place, but we never heard from him again. In Te Puia Jasper phoned Teah's parents to tell em we were in town to pick up the phone, but they didn't answer. After debating on what to do for a while Jasper went into the petrol station to ask where they lived (we had their address) but apparently when they tried to call again they got through, Teah's mom said she was busy that evening so that they unfortunately didn't have any time for us, but that the next morning they'd have plenty of time. We were a bit distressed about this because there wasn't any budget accommodation in Te Puia, and after a few minutes Jasper decided to call again and ask if it really wasn't possible for us to come pick up the phone quickly and explained that it would be hard for us to travel to the next town and back again just for the phone. At this point she said she'd be able to give us the phone quickly, and after a few minutes she turned up in her car, with her being a big hyper-active dog who climbed all over me when I sat in the back. We picked up the phone and afterwards she offered to take us to Tokomaru Bay where there was more accommodation for backpackers, we accepted and soon found ourselves at a hostel called Brian's place. It was a nice hostel on top of a hill, overlooking the ocean. It was fairly expensive but we didn't really mind because it was only for one night. We slept on mattresses on the loft, but we didn't mind it was nicer than your standard dorm room and we had the entire hostel to ourselves, with the exception of a Swiss girl who stayed there to take care of the place. Brian himself only dropped by twice a day to check up on things. Our lovely dinner consisted of spaghetti and tomato sauce, we didn't bring any meat or vegetables in case we got stranded without a fridge. It was plain, but warm, and it filled our bellies. The next morning we found the owner, Brian, talking to the Swiss girl and we soon entered the conversation as well. As the conversation was reaching its end and Brian was about to say goodbye he sudden exclaimed something while pointing towards the sea. I didn't quite hear what he said and when I looked at where he pointed I saw nothing. When I asked what he said he replied "Didn't you see the dolphins?", and after that he told us to get in his van and he'd drive us all over to the beach to get a better look. His van didn't have any backseats though, so we just had to crouch and hang on the steels bars; it wasn't very comfortable but who cares when you have the chance to see dolphins. When we got to the beach we were all looking around to try and find them, but we saw nothing. We were worried that they might have swum on, but just then we saw a fin break the water and soon after 2 more fins. Quickly we raced to the edge of the water and got our cameras ready, but it proved to be a challenge indeed to get them on camera, in the end the best we managed were a few shots of the sea with a small black speck that is supposed to be a fin. The sight was amazing though, there were at least 4 of them and they hung around at the beach for at least 30 minutes. Eventually we gave up on taking pictures and Brian took us back to the hostel. The very second we had all our stuff packed up the sky opened up and a monsoon descended on us. When we looked out of the windows all we saw was clear blue sky in every direction, the rain cloud was directly above our heads, and only above our heads. It took 15 minutes for the rain to stop and we could move on again. After a short walk down to the main road we positioned ourselves opposite a small shop at the end of a bridge. Only 3 minutes had passed before a car signalled it was pulling over, unfortunately the car was pulling over to visit the shop. To our frustration this happened at least a dozen times before two guys finally pulled over for us. They worked at a car dealer and were just coming back from delivering a car to a customer and were on their way back to Gisborne. Because their boss paid them for the drive as well, they were in no hurry at all to get back to proper working and offered to drop us off right at the entrance to the campsite. My lonely planet said the price of a tent site there was about $22 so we were unsure if we were going to stay there or not, but when we asked how much it was we found that it was in fact only $14 per person, which is really cheap. After setting up our tent we headed out into town to find some lunch, an i-site and food for that night. Lunch was found at the Pizza Hut where we ordered a combination of 4 pizzas, which was supposed to feed about 3-4 people but should be barely enough for us two. Or so we thought, the pizza was so filling that I couldn't eat my half fully and had to leave about 1-2 bites to be thrown away, much to my dismay. Feeling like we could hardly move from eating too much we set out to find the i-site, and after walking down the entire street we were at first told it was in we couldn't find anything. Thinking we must have probably missed it we walked back, but after about 10 minutes we still hadn't found it so we asked someone on the street who replied "You see that sign that says i-center? It's right there." Of course it is. Turns out it was directly opposite the Pizza Hut. Here we picked up some flyers on surf lessons and read some interesting stuff about a dolphin named Moko that's been hanging around Gisborne's beaches the last few months. After this we did some grocery shopping and went back to our tent. We called up one of the surf schools but didn't get any answer so we tried the mobile number, this time we got a dude on the phone who sounded a bit uninterested and when I said we'd like to book surf lessons for the next day he said he'd call us back that night to confirm. We spent the rest of the night in the lounge reading and working on our blog entries, the pizza from that afternoon still laid on our stomachs so heavily that we didn't even bother to make dinner and just ate 2 slices of bread to at least get some fibres in our body. We still hadn't heard anything from the surf guy so Jasper decided to give him a ring, he said he didn't have time for the lessons the next day but it would be possible to do it the day after. The following morning we took our time and since we had nothing to do that day we decided to just hang out on the beach. As we were sitting there reading our books and occasionally going in the ocean for a little swim in the ice-cold water I suddenly saw a large group of people gathered in the water and just then I heard someone say that it must be the dolphin. I wasted no time and rushed over there straight away and sure enough I saw a dolphin surfacing every now and then, only about 5 meters out to sea. There must have been around 30 people standing around it, most of them kids, as Moko (the dolphin) was playing with some girls body board. There seemed to be only one man really dared to get close to Moko, the rest was a bit scared because Moko was a large dolphin and immensely strong. Because of this I had the chance to play with Moko and for quite a long time too. The game we played didn't seem like much of a game to me but Moko seemed to enjoy it, and I think when it comes to playing games with dolphins it doesn't really matter what kind of game you play. He'd want you to grab the ankle strap of the body-board and gently pull the board along while Moko was waiting underwater, he'd then suddenly rise up and knock the board up with such force that he knocked the strap out of your hand too, he'd then bring it back to you and hand you the strap with its snout. After a while some other guy came to see the dolphin and he was trying to take the board, Moko obviously didn't like this and was starting to squeak and click more and more, his movements were becoming wilder and more aggressive as well. I decided this was a good time to head back to Jasper who stayed on the beach because he didn't want to swim with Moko for some reason.
The rest of the day we just hung around and that evening we used up the last of the supplies we bought in case we got stuck on the East Cape; rice with baked beans and frankfurter sausages, quite nice actually. The following morning we woke up early for our appointment with Magoo our surf instructor, we were going to have 1.5 hours of surf lessons and half a day at a place called Rehe Rockslide. He was 30 minutes late, but we didn't care too much, he looked like a surfer grown old with long blond hair despite the fact that he was balding and for some reason he ended every sentence with "Bro", he also had a small dog with him called Giovanni. After we picked up his lunch we drove to the beach (which was actually right next to our campsite) and having arrived there Magoo determined that there was absolutely no surf, and that it'd be better if we went to the rockslide first and come back later to see if the surf had picked up. So off we went to Rehe Rockslide, which was about an hour's drive away. During the drive we found out that Magoo used to be in the top 10 of NZ's surfers during his younger days, and that he went to Italy every summer (so summer in Italy) to sell jewellery he buys in Bali, claiming to make about $40.000 in the summer months.
When we got to Rehe Rockslide Magoo seemed surprised to find only 1 other car there, usually there were a lot more so it seemed the change of plans worked in our favour. The rockslide itself was a large sloped rock, almost completely smooth and with a thin layer of water streaming over it. We were given a wetsuit and a body board, and were told to just lie on the board and slide down. If you did it right you could reach tremendous speeds before you hit the pool at the bottom. Even though the surface was very smooth (with a few exceptions) it was still solid rock and if you let your legs fall down a bit too low or if you hit a bump you weren't expecting you could really bang up your feet en legs. We raced against the other people there a few times, two guys and two girls, but they were a lot better and smoked us every time. They also had a big inflatable mattress with them which you could also use to go down on and they let us borrow it a couple of times. Magoo, even though he comes there quite often, seemed very enthusiastic about going down on the mattress so the three of us went down it multiple times, and I have to say that was a lot of fun.
Eventually, after one of the other guys accidentally slid over the mattress in the pool and launched himself, we got the idea that maybe we should hold the mattress up slightly and turn it into a ramp. And no sooner said than done we had ourselves a bonafide rockslide ramp, it required at least two people to hold it up but the airtime you could get on that thing was amazing. Eventually a lot, and I do mean a lot, more people showed up and we started to have to wait in line to go down the slide so we decided this was a good time to move on and we said goodbye to the other guys. I was pretty glad we were moving one, because one of my knees had swollen to twice the size of my other knee and I had cuts and bruises all over my legs and feet. We stopped by some champagne pools, as they were apparently called, to have our lunch. The pools were basically just natural circular pools, but they looked very pretty. Unfortunately there were a lot of drunk youths sitting around there as well, so we didn't really get much of a quiet lunch. When we were in the car and driving back to Gisborne Jasper asked "where's the dog?" and a distinct "Oh crap" expression appeared on Magoo's face and with screeching tires he turned the van around. When we got back to the pool we picked up the dog and were on our way to Gisborne again.
In Gisborne Magoo asked if we maybe wanted to get some ice-cream before surfing, and we though that was a silly thing to ask; of course we want to buy some ice-cream! The ice-cream was really nice, but unfortunately the surf wasn't, there were some waves there but Magoo concluded we'd be wasting our time if we tried to surf those. Instead he said he'd give us some instructions on dry land and he'd let us have the boards for free the next day so we could practice all day. The next day we woke up early (9am) and headed out to the beach. There was some kind of school competition going on so we were forced to walk further up the beach, but it was a lot quieter there anyway so we didn't have to worry about surfing into other people. At first there didn't seem to be that many good waves, but every once in a while a good big wave would come along which we tried to catch. The first few times neither of us managed to stand up, the boards we had now were a lot smaller than the ones we had in Raglan or even the ones Magoo gave us instructions on and therefore harder to stand up on, but after a while Jasper managed to stand up and I followed soon after. It wasn't long before both of us were standing up fairly regularly and were managing to ride to waves for longer than 5 seconds. Suddenly we saw Moko with some surfers a bit to the right of us and we decided to paddle our way over. When we got there we found that Moko had a new fun game, called "Knock the surfers off their board" and he decided to make me an active participant. He swam next to me and at first gently nudged my board, when I didn't fall off he tried harder and harder. I was hanging on for dear life because I was afraid he was going to try and steal my board even though I was still attached to it, but eventually he managed to knock me off. Fortunately he didn't try to steal my board and simply went on to knock his next victim off his board, it was actually quite funny to see him go around knocking all the surfers off their boards. We then went for some quick lunch before we came back to surf some more. We were really getting the hang of it and standing up was getting easy and we managed to ride our waves longer and longer. When we had enough we headed back to the campsite and stayed at the lounge for a while.
By then my foot was starting to ache really bad and I went to put a band aid on it, it was then that I suddenly realised I couldn't find my toiletry bag with my contact lenses as well as my toothbrush etc. in it. I had probably forgotten it in the toilet block that morning when I went to put on my swimming trunks, but when I looked there it was nowhere to be found. I went to ask at the reception to see if they had perhaps found it, but unfortunately they hadn't. I was starting to panic a bit, because I really didn't feel like forking over a few hundred dollars to buy new contacts, so I wrote a note saying I lost my bag and if the person that found it could please give me a call on my cell phone and stuck it on the door to the men's room. When I went to the bathroom an hour two later I found that the note was gone, I asked the reception for permission before I posted it so I knew it wasn't them and figured someone was being a jerk (I didn't receive any calls or texts) and I made another note. When I went to brush my teeth that night I found that the note was gone again, and still I received no calls. A bit depressed I figured whoever took my bag wanted to keep it to themselves for some strange reason and conceded to having to buy new lenses along with everything else. That night a wound on the sole of my foot was aching particularly badly, it was obviously infected and my whole foot felt sore. I laid awake for hours while the throbbing got worse and I started to hope it wasn't some horrible flesh eating virus. I could already hear the doctor; "I'm sorry, but we're going to have to amputate your foot." "Not my foot Doc! You might as well cut off my leg!" "I'm sorry son, but there's no way we can save it".
But after about 2 or 3 hours the throbbing started to subside a bit and instead of the heat that accompanied the throbbing I now felt a warmth around the area where the wound was. I realised the worst was over and I finally fell asleep. The next day we planned to go into town and replace all my lost items and get something for my infected foot. When I woke up and looked at my phone however I saw that I had one missed call, and when I listened to my voice-mail I found that it was the reception and that someone had turned in my toiletry bag! I was very relieved to find that everything was still inside it and I wouldn't have to replace anything. The rest of the day we rested, mainly for my foot but also a bit because we had nothing more to do. The next day we headed out for Napier, after a gruelling walk through town in the burning sun we finally arrived at what seemed to be a good spot for hitch-hiking. It wasn't long however before were driving past yelling at us that we should go further down the road a bit more, so eventually we decided they were probably right and walked a bit further. Here we were picked up by a lady and her 3 year old son, she wasn't going to Napier but she took us to the exit that way which was a huge help. From there we got a ride from an old man in a pick-up truck who would take us all the way to Napier. He turned out to be a really nice guy and we talked pretty much the whole way there. He turned out to drive a motorbike, one of those Japanese road bikes, and he loved to race it down the South Island which seemed a bit strange for an older man but we thought was awesome. He also stopped by an ice-cream shop along the way and bought us and himself some ice-cream. He said that that was one of the best places in New Zealand for ice-cream, and when he ordered a 1 scoop ice-cream and got 3 scoops instead I could see what he meant. I couldn't imagine how big a 2 scooper must have been. He dropped us off at the local holiday park and said goodbye. While we were at the reception to book our stay we also booked a trip to the aquarium, where it was apparently possible to dive in the big tank to feed and swim with the sharks. For dinner we had some take away from the on-site restaurant and the burgers were surprisingly good, though the fries were, as usual, not very good.
While we were reading in the lounge Jasper received a phone call form the reception that the guy who had picked us up had called to say we left something in his truck. As we were thinking of what we could have possibly forgotten in his truck we walked to the reception to get his number. I called him as soon as we got his number and when I asked what we'd forgotten he replied "What you left in my truck was an invitation to our Christmas dinner", apparently he had told his wife about the two guys he picked up and how they were celebrating Christmas all alone far away from home, at which point his wife told him to call us up and invite us over for Christmas. We were both pretty excited about this and though it was also a bit scary to have to meet some stranger's family we were happy we were going to have at least something of a proper Christmas.
The next day we went to the Aquarium and as we were standing outside the campsite trying to determine which way we had to walk a car stopped next to us as it was exiting the park. "Are you going to city centre?" the woman behind the wheel asked, and when we replied that we were going to the aquarium she simply said "Hop in". We now arrived at the aquarium way too early but this gave us the opportunity to look around a bit first. The main attractions were the kiwi house where we could see a live kiwi, unfortunately kiwis are nocturnal and you couldn't use flash so I didn't manage to get a good picture of it, and also the big tank with the sharks in it. At first the fish in the big tank didn't seem to be too impressive, sure the fish were big but the sharks weren't. It wasn't until my second round through the aquarium that I spotted the big shark in the back, he was about 3 meters long, had a huge mouth and we were going to swim with him. At 1 pm we geared up because we were a bit early we were allowed to snorkel through the tank first, so we could get a feel as to what swimming with sharks was about. The sharks were quite shy though, so during the snorkelling we didn't see too much of them. When it was time to feed the fish me and Jasper swam to the right spot with a bucket in our hands and descended to the bottom of the aquarium. The fish were swarming around us with huge kingfish and snapper impatiently trying to grab the pieces of fish out of our hands. The stingrays kept trying to eat our flippers, so we soon fed them some fish as well. The trick was to lay the fish on your hand and keep your hand flat while he swims over it and grabs it with its mouth. You had to be careful he didn't eat your finger though, because they had sharp teeth. Unfortunately the sharks didn't seem to be very hungry and only some of the smaller ones came around to steal some fish.
After the food was gone we were allowed to swim around in the aquarium, and this time the sharks came a lot closer, it was quite scary to see the big shark swimming right towards you, only to turn around at the last second. When we'd swam a few circles around the tank and were starting to feel a bit like goldfish, we began to look at the people walking through the tunnel that passed under the tank; especially the little kids were funny to look at as their mouths were always wide open in disbelief that there was someone in the water with the sharks. When we got cold and bored we decided to head back out again. It was a lovely experience and it looks hilarious in our dive logs, so well worth the money.
The next day we did our laundry in an attempt to have some half decent clothes for our Christmas dinner.
it seems I forgot to post the link to this gallery, they're older photo's mainly of our canyon trip. http://s713.photobucket.com/albums/ww138/lingonlas/NZ%2027%20November/
hey.
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful live you lead.
And how special to celebrate christmas with stragers. That's the true spirit of christmas.
Make sure you keep infections well under controle! you do want to keep both your feet.
Have a great new Years eve. Whishing you both a very happy new year
X Marina