Easter weekend is obviously very popular in New Zealand. Fortunately, besides following murphy's law wherever we go, we seem to have the luck of the Irish. We managed to score 2 of the last 3 seats on the bus and one of the last spots on the campsite. Unfortunately our neighbours had pretty big tents and pretty big cars to boot! As a result we had to squeeze our tent in an area about the size of a grape. The fact that our tent was about just as small did nothing to reduce our aggrovation.
In order to quickly escape the flock of children we headed into town soon after setting up our tent. The town wasn't much to look at, but the landscape off in the distance was amazing! About the only thing in town we were interested in was the helicopter whale watching and wouldn't you know it, that was about the only thing in town that was closed! But, we weren't in a hurry so we just shrugged our shoulders and went to the supermarket for dinner. The next day brought clouds and rain, though it reminded us a lot of home we found it hard to appreciate. Obviously this wasn't the best weather for a helicopter ride so we booked it for the next day which was supposed to be better.
We did our best to pass the rest of the day without being bored out of our minds, this involved a lot of watching TV and restlessly surfing the internet. Where would we be without technology, eh? In a small tent not even large enough to sit in, while a virtually limitless amount of water pours down on it, that's where!
As we were attending to these very important matters we received a text from Netta saying that they would be arriving Kaikoura that very afternoon. We were expecting to see them again, but not this soon so this was a nice surprise. We met up with them after dinner (and after they had a sauna, the lucky sods). They came with a friend of theirs called Chris who seemed like a nice guy. After thoroughly investigating the Kaikoura nightlife we dived into the first pub we could find. For some strange Kiwi reason they couldn't serve alchohol to people who weren't eating anything (some weird easter law), so we had to order chips for 5 people even though everyone was still full from their dinner. Even though the girls had made fun of our love for computer games on numerous occasions they were the first ones who noticed the Nintendo Wii in the back of the pub. We decided to play a game of bowling, because you can only play that with 4 people, me and Outi had to team up. But it was good that we did because we totally smashed the others! Well, except for Jasper. And maybe Netta. But we totally beat Chris by 5 points! Of course the sponsors for a professional bowling team started to pour in immediately, but me and Outi decided to stop while we were on top of our game.
The bar closed at 12 so the barkeeper kicked us out at 11:30. Apparently there weren't enough people buying drinks and we were obviously not good enough for him to stay open for us. Kiwis. . .
The following morning promised to be a beautiful day, but we soon found that days can't be trusted to keep their word because when we opened our tent the grey skies were already waiting for us. We checked back at the helicopter place to see if there were any extra people for our flight (this would save us $100 each) but there weren't. We decided to wait about an hour or two in hopes of more people and better weather. But after about 40 minutes we decided to just go ahead with it while it was still dry. When we came back to the office we paid for the trip and were then told to hurry to the helicopter. Apparently the whale had just come up to the surface so if we hurried over there we would be able to spot him. We quickly climbed into the helicopter and were buzzing with excitement while the pilot started to warm up the engine. Determined to catch the take-off on video we had our cameras ready and rolling, but after 5 minutes we were still on the ground. Even though the videos of us sitting in a vibrating helicopter were extremely interesting *cough* we decided to delete them. The pilot told us the whale had gone down again and that we could exit the helicopter while we waited a while. He gave us some quick information on the whales in the area and why they were there. Because there was a large underwater mountain chain just south of Kaikoura the current coming from the north is forced land inwards, this brings a lot of plankton and other small sea life with, which in turn triggers a chain reaction all the way up to the whales. They mainly get sperm whales in the area, though they have the occasional orcas and blue whales as well.
After about 20 minutes we boarded the helicopter again, this time it only took our pilot a minute or two to fire up the helicopter and take off. This was such a big change from last time that I almost didn't get it on camera. The take-off was smooth but there was still something uncomfortable about it at first. It sort of felt like sitting in a cardboard box that's slowly rising higher and higher, tilting forward as it does. Soon this feeling passed however and I could turn to the scenery that was slowly expanding before my eyes. Off in the distance we could already see two of the whale watch boats waiting on the spot where the whale was expected to pop up. When we got there there was still no whale to be seen though, so we sort of circled around to see if we could spot it. As we were doing this jasper asked the pilot if he was steering with his feet. The pilot replied by saying it was a combination of things. "If I use the feet pedals I turn using the rear rotor, see?" he said as the helicopter made a few very strange maneuvers through the sky. "Then, if I want to speed up I just point the nose forward and do this." And the nose of helicopter tilted forward to a nauseating angle as it accelerated to a gut-wrenching speed. "Then if I want to quickly make a turn I just do this." And then the whole world turn upside down. The helicopter tilted so far sideways that what was once the side of the helicopter was now the bottom and what was the bottom was now the side. I hung on to my chair for dear life even though I knew this was a perfectly safe action. Probably. When he was done stunting er... I mean explaining he started to circle around again, by now a plane had joined our little whale watching show. We paid for 30 minutes of airtime and when we still didn't see any sign of a whale after 15 minutes we started to get seriously worried. The company had a 98% success rate of seeing whales, we should have known that those were horrible odds for us. Even if they had had a 99.99% success rate we'd manage to be that one 0.01%.
Just as I was wondering whether the helicopter ride alone was worth the exuberant amount of money we'd forked over for this little escapade there was some chatter over the radio. The pilot immediately cut short his search circle and raced the plane to the whale (apparently only 3 vessels are allowed close to a whale at a time). We were there first (tough luck mr. plane!) and started to circle the whale closely. I must have taken about 40 pictures before I figured I should probably look at the whale with my own eyes as well, and not just through my camera. The whale sort of looked like a sausage that occasionally had water rising up from it, but in a good way! All in all we must have taken at least a hundred pictures (and a couple of videos for good measure) before we headed back to solid ground.
We were supposed to go surfing with the girls (Chris had left to catch a plane) but the weather was so horrible that we decided not to. Instead, the girls wanted to take a coastal walk to the seal colonies. When we came across a playground none of us could resist the tempting call of the majestic sea-saw. When we got to the seal colony we found a vast number of tourists harassing the seals, blatantly ignoring the "keep your distance" sign and coming well within touching distance of the animals. Since we wished to have nothing to do with this we decided to carry on along the coast in search of some more seals. It wasn't long before we found them, in fact we nearly stepped on some that were dozing in the grass. One of them seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly as he was stretching and rubbing himself on the grass in exaggerated movements. We then climbed the hill back to the path where the girls wanted to hitch-hike back to town *cough*lazy!!*cough*. We didn't though, partly because me and jasper didn't want to, mainly because there was no-one to hitch-hike with. After a walk that seemed much longer on the way back than on the way there we arrived back in town. None of us had eaten anything besides breakfast and it was now past 4 PM so we were starving. We decided to stop and eat in the very first restaurant we saw, so after passing up on a ton of them we settled down in the burger shop at the other end of town. We then split up to freshen up. Later the girls came over to our campsite to watch the movie channel, unfortunately for them all the good movies were gone. We watched 10,000 BC and a movie directed by Ben Affleck (personal request for Ben: Stop directing movies at once!). The next day we didn't do much seeing as it was pissing rain, we tried to watch some more movies but they were all so horrible that we gave up. Then the girls received a message from Siem that he was coming to Kaikoura as well. We met up after dinner for some good old card gaming fun. They also had a fireplace with an ominous message next to it "Don't overfeed the fire, if you set off the fire-alarm you will be fined $1500." I could already see the fire-alarm going off as soon as I would light even one match so I tried not to interfere with the firemaking too much. Us guys couldn't really get a good fire going, but luckily everyone in Finland still lives in a cave where they have to make fire out of snow and frozen poo so Outi managed to get the fire going in no time. We already started our card game while the girls had to take care of some stuff on the internet, and a Danish girl wanted to join us. Now I won't bore you with the details, but I'll say this: Danish girls are weird. Of course we ended up being the very last people awake in the hostel, and by 2 AM we were hungry again. Luckily the girls had kept some rice in Tupperware containers, so we ended up eating rice with sweet chili sauce and Muesli bars in the middle of the night. Weird, but tasty.
The following day me and Jasper hopped on the bus and said farewell to our friends once again. Hopefully not for the last time though.
When we got to Christchurch we booked into our old hostel only to be told that we were lucky indeed because there were only 2 beds left. Luck of the Irish indeed! I'm beginning to wonder if Scheffe isn't an Irish name after all.
With 9 days until our flight to Fiji we'll probably be wandering around town a lot.
Photos
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
Thursday, 1 April 2010
Let the good times roll
Christchurch was going to be a short stop for us before we headed to kaikoura. Just a day or two and then we'd continue. The first day (well, actually the second but we arrived in the evening of the first day) we headed into town to see if we could find any travel agencies and after checking the internet we came across a backpacker travel agency. After about an hour we had picked a flight on the 15th of april and we'd return 3 weeks later. We decided to let her hold the flight and that we'd come back the next day to pay and book a hostel. We spent the rest of the day in an internet cafe. The next day we headed back to the agency pay for our flight and accomodation with a huge stack of 20$ bills in our wallet (900$ worth). When the girl that helped us the day before tried to book the flights she'd reserved for us she found that they were gone, even though the machine had told her that we had 48 hours to pay for them. After a lot of calling back and forth it turned out that the seats were gone and that there was nothing we could do about it. Luckily we could find 2 tickets for 2 days later, we then booked a hostel for the first 2 days and a shuttle to the airport (it's going to pick us up at 5:15 AM!). However they couldn't get hold of the hostel so they'd have to send them and e-mail and we'd have to come back later to see if they had space for us. Unfortunately the next day was saturday and they were closed in the weekends so we'd have to come back on monday. The whole ordeal took about 2.5 hours and afterwards we spent some more time in an internet cafe (don't ask).
That evening we made pancakes and while we were doing this we started talking with a Dutch guy who had just checked in with two Finnish girls he travelled with, turns out they were in the same dorm as us. After dinner we played cards and just had a lot of fun with the occasional outburst of singing and dancing (without even a drop of alcohol as well!). We both shared a bit of our language and we now know haw to say "I need a hug" (Mula on halipula) and "Cheers!" (Holokyn kolokyn) and we taught them to say "Hey cutey" (hey lekker ding) and "Want to kiss?" (Zoenen?). We ended up playing and talking until 2 O' clock in the morning and the asian girl that shared the room with us probably wasn't very happy with us! She got us back in the morning though when she got up really early (at 8 or 9!) and started walking in and out of the room a lot and opening and closing every single zipper on her bag. We walked to the city centre together in hopes of seeing "the wizard" (a strange fellow who dresses up as a wizard and holds speeches on the square). Unfortunately we didn't see the wizard so we just went our seperate ways; Siem and the girls (Netta and Outi) went to the library to look for jobs while me and Jasper had important bussiness to attend to in the internet cafe *cough*computergames*cough*.
That evening was filled with a lot more cards, dancing and language lessons, the girls even baked a delicious chocolate cake and before we knew it it was around 2 again. The asian girl must really hate us by now. The following morning however she woke up really early again and packed her bag to leave. We were all really wondering who'd replace her and were hoping for someone nice!
This time we took the car to town in hopes of catching a glimpse of the wizard but we were disappointed once more. However there was a funny Scottish guy swalling swords and electric breadknives, he even walked over glass! We went our seperate ways once more as the girls went to the library again to look for jobs, Siem went to park his car and would join Jasper and me in the internet cafe later. The three of us ended up spending the entire day playing video games, the girls were very disappointed in us for wasting our time so badly and called us to ask when we were coming back. We then headed back to the garage where Siem had parked his car only to find that the garage had closed 15 minutes earlier. Siem decided to let his car in there until the next morning. That is, until he remembered that all his stuff (including his sleeping bag) was still in the car and that he'd need it to sleep. As we were thinking of what we were going to do next a girl said that she'd already called the security agency to come and pick up her car and that they'd arrive in a few minutes. 1 minute later they showed up and opened the gate; they had to pay but because there was two of them they could split the cost. We hung out with an American girl called Evelyn for a while and me, Jasper and Siem made pancakes for our group. After the pancakes the girls thought it might be fun to go to to an arcade hall. We had to hurry a bit because the hall closed at 11 and we didn't finish eating until 8:30 but we ended up having a lot of fun there playing dance dance revolution and guitar hero and the likes. The girls also wanted to use one of those asian photo booths so we had something to remember eachother by. the photo's ended up being extremely tiny but it was still worth it.
This time it wasn't a chinese girl we were waking up, but two german guys (who according to Netta and Outti weren't very nice). They retalliated by rustling plastic bags all morning. Siem was going to check out and continue today (he was actually planning on doing that the day before but decided against it). Before he went he agreed to come into town with us to use up our last arcade hall credit and have some last minute fun with us. He had found a wwoofin adress and was going there that day, but since he never said what time he'd be coming he figured he could arrive whenever he wanted to. After we played some DDR and Guitar hero (I even beat some guy who wanted to play against me!) the girls went job hunting again and us guys went for a last round of computer gaming. By the time we snapped out of our computer game state it was 7 and started to walk back to the hostel (Siem decided to leave his car there after what happened last time). However as we approached the hostel Siem's car was nowhere to be seen. We were afraid it was stolen, since it had all Siem's stuff in there as well, it turned out to be towed away. We waited with the girls while he went to the police station to get his car back. When he finally returned after two hours it turned out that he couldn't get it back that evening; his car had been towed away because it was within 1.5 meters of a drive-way though it wasn't blocking it at all. We had some carrot cake that the girls made, which was peculiar but very nice. After another fun night of cards and music we each headed to our own rooms (we were too late to get the same dorm again so we were split up all over the hostel). The following morning we all said goodbye to Siem and me and jasper headed into town with the girls to book our busticket to kaikoura. The girls wanted to do something fun on our last day (they were going on the next day as well) so we went to the gondola just outside of town. After a 20 minute busride we arrived at a barren landscape with a couple of hills scattered around. The gondola and the hill itself weren't impressive at all, even the most interesting attraction (the time tunnel) was closed. Still, we all had fun hanging out. When we got back in town we all had an ince-cream before the girls went off job-hunting again (this time they found a job that they really liked, I hope they get it).
The following morning we had to say goodbye to them, unfortunately, as they got picked up by a friend of theirs.
Now we're waiting for our bus to Kaikoura.
What was supposed to be just a day or two turned out to be well over a week, but it was time well spent!
http://s713.photobucket.com/albums/ww138/lingonlas/NZ%20April%202/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QorGHvqpP8E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-0XEaipuP0
That evening we made pancakes and while we were doing this we started talking with a Dutch guy who had just checked in with two Finnish girls he travelled with, turns out they were in the same dorm as us. After dinner we played cards and just had a lot of fun with the occasional outburst of singing and dancing (without even a drop of alcohol as well!). We both shared a bit of our language and we now know haw to say "I need a hug" (Mula on halipula) and "Cheers!" (Holokyn kolokyn) and we taught them to say "Hey cutey" (hey lekker ding) and "Want to kiss?" (Zoenen?). We ended up playing and talking until 2 O' clock in the morning and the asian girl that shared the room with us probably wasn't very happy with us! She got us back in the morning though when she got up really early (at 8 or 9!) and started walking in and out of the room a lot and opening and closing every single zipper on her bag. We walked to the city centre together in hopes of seeing "the wizard" (a strange fellow who dresses up as a wizard and holds speeches on the square). Unfortunately we didn't see the wizard so we just went our seperate ways; Siem and the girls (Netta and Outi) went to the library to look for jobs while me and Jasper had important bussiness to attend to in the internet cafe *cough*computergames*cough*.
That evening was filled with a lot more cards, dancing and language lessons, the girls even baked a delicious chocolate cake and before we knew it it was around 2 again. The asian girl must really hate us by now. The following morning however she woke up really early again and packed her bag to leave. We were all really wondering who'd replace her and were hoping for someone nice!
This time we took the car to town in hopes of catching a glimpse of the wizard but we were disappointed once more. However there was a funny Scottish guy swalling swords and electric breadknives, he even walked over glass! We went our seperate ways once more as the girls went to the library again to look for jobs, Siem went to park his car and would join Jasper and me in the internet cafe later. The three of us ended up spending the entire day playing video games, the girls were very disappointed in us for wasting our time so badly and called us to ask when we were coming back. We then headed back to the garage where Siem had parked his car only to find that the garage had closed 15 minutes earlier. Siem decided to let his car in there until the next morning. That is, until he remembered that all his stuff (including his sleeping bag) was still in the car and that he'd need it to sleep. As we were thinking of what we were going to do next a girl said that she'd already called the security agency to come and pick up her car and that they'd arrive in a few minutes. 1 minute later they showed up and opened the gate; they had to pay but because there was two of them they could split the cost. We hung out with an American girl called Evelyn for a while and me, Jasper and Siem made pancakes for our group. After the pancakes the girls thought it might be fun to go to to an arcade hall. We had to hurry a bit because the hall closed at 11 and we didn't finish eating until 8:30 but we ended up having a lot of fun there playing dance dance revolution and guitar hero and the likes. The girls also wanted to use one of those asian photo booths so we had something to remember eachother by. the photo's ended up being extremely tiny but it was still worth it.
This time it wasn't a chinese girl we were waking up, but two german guys (who according to Netta and Outti weren't very nice). They retalliated by rustling plastic bags all morning. Siem was going to check out and continue today (he was actually planning on doing that the day before but decided against it). Before he went he agreed to come into town with us to use up our last arcade hall credit and have some last minute fun with us. He had found a wwoofin adress and was going there that day, but since he never said what time he'd be coming he figured he could arrive whenever he wanted to. After we played some DDR and Guitar hero (I even beat some guy who wanted to play against me!) the girls went job hunting again and us guys went for a last round of computer gaming. By the time we snapped out of our computer game state it was 7 and started to walk back to the hostel (Siem decided to leave his car there after what happened last time). However as we approached the hostel Siem's car was nowhere to be seen. We were afraid it was stolen, since it had all Siem's stuff in there as well, it turned out to be towed away. We waited with the girls while he went to the police station to get his car back. When he finally returned after two hours it turned out that he couldn't get it back that evening; his car had been towed away because it was within 1.5 meters of a drive-way though it wasn't blocking it at all. We had some carrot cake that the girls made, which was peculiar but very nice. After another fun night of cards and music we each headed to our own rooms (we were too late to get the same dorm again so we were split up all over the hostel). The following morning we all said goodbye to Siem and me and jasper headed into town with the girls to book our busticket to kaikoura. The girls wanted to do something fun on our last day (they were going on the next day as well) so we went to the gondola just outside of town. After a 20 minute busride we arrived at a barren landscape with a couple of hills scattered around. The gondola and the hill itself weren't impressive at all, even the most interesting attraction (the time tunnel) was closed. Still, we all had fun hanging out. When we got back in town we all had an ince-cream before the girls went off job-hunting again (this time they found a job that they really liked, I hope they get it).
The following morning we had to say goodbye to them, unfortunately, as they got picked up by a friend of theirs.
Now we're waiting for our bus to Kaikoura.
What was supposed to be just a day or two turned out to be well over a week, but it was time well spent!
http://s713.photobucket.com/albums/ww138/lingonlas/NZ%20April%202/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QorGHvqpP8E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-0XEaipuP0
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