Near the city a new shopping area has developed using containers. It is a remarkable and innovative use of containers which seems to work well. Plus they are strong and re-usable if the site is redeveloped. At present they are expected to stay there for two years. There’s certainly a nice feeling walking around the mall – there seems to be plenty of room and the containers are not claustrophobic, with multiple containers working well.
Christchurch had two major earthquakes, occurring on a previously unknown fault. The exact details are complex, but basically at 4am in September 2010 a major quake occurred with no loss of life but significant weakening of the buildings. Then 6 months later a large quake occurred at midday causing widespread collapse of already weakened buildings in the centre of Christchurch and significant loss of life because of the time of day. In addition liquefaction of the soil in the eastern suburbs caused major damage and flooding.
In all there have been over 11,000 aftershocks, big and small, from the first earthquake – some causing more damage. Tremors are still felt.
For us, who have never been in a major earthquake, and only twice in minor ones, the damage was hard to comprehend. Basically the centre of the city has been destroyed with barriers erected around most of it. It has become a building site – demolition and rebuilding are everywhere.
We stayed with a couple in an unaffected suburb and, naturally discussed their experience of the quakes. The effect on the city was severe – many businesses simply closed down. Many re-located to suburban areas which have boomed since the centre went. Large numbers of people simply left, but some are returning. Others were put out of work and are trying to rebuild a career – resulting in a lot of opportunistic businesses starting up. Many people have become fatalistic and a lot less materialistic.
Inevitably there has been a huge problem with insurance companies trying to avoid paying out for damage, with the attendant disputes involving lawyers and engineers. Claims and counter-claims are still being fought in the courts with, as usual, the little people losing out because they can’t afford to fight and the big companies spending fortunes to win fortunes.
Some areas of Christchurch have been compulsorily purchased and cannot be built on again, and the building codes have been strengthened (though the strict codes in existence limited the damage in the quakes). Many buildings have been condemned and will be pulled down.
We lived with cyclones in Exmouth for 5 years, surviving two devastating ones when many others lost lives and property. We were glad to leave and I don’t think we would live again in a cyclone area. The impression we got very strongly from our visit the Christchurch was similar – just don’t live in an earthquake-prone country.
The first half of our trip was in a campervan – we’d never used one of these before and wanted to try it out. The upshot of our experience was that it’s good – convenient to have everything laid out, easy to stop and have a sleep, sit or eat without the need to put up a tent. The van is a bit cumbersome to drive around, but not as much as you’d think.
We brought a tent and sleeping bags intending to camp, but the number of midges and the clumsiness of having a tent – especially in the rain – has finished off that idea. We will use hostels/motels/bed and breakfast in the latter part of the trip. The cost of eating out, rather than self-catering in the van, offsets the lesser cost of a car.
I’d rather have a slightly bigger van – this one has virtually no spare room when the bed is down, making it a little inconvenient. Otherwise the whole experience was a good one.
The next bright idea was to put everything we used in the van into separate cardboard boxes to make it easier to handle in the car. This turned out to work well.
Castle Rocks – a valley full of these uncharacteristically round-shaped boulders en route to Christchurch. Famous meeting place of the Maoris.
This was rather a nice swing bridge. One of the things about swing bridges is (you guessed it) they swing. In fact they swing quite well if you find one of the nodal points of its natural vibration frequency and rock it. The Millenium bridge in London was one of these – badly designed. It swayed so much when people walked across they had to put damping on it. People were getting sick and some fell over. The Tacoma Narrows bridge is the famous one which shook itself to pieces in a high wind.
This is the same type of bridge, so naturally we found a nodal point and rocked it back and forth as much as we could, achieving a very satisfactory amount of twist and undulation in the walkway. Unfortunately the builders had anticipated this sort of frivolity and put stabilising wires on the structure so we weren’t able to actually break it up.
From inside an electricity pylon. Betcha don’t see that so often?
(We went for a walk to some beautiful falls. Well, they were OK, but the pylon was better).
These sweet little parrots
Have been known to
Eat the back axle out of a tractor.
And if you don’t believe me – here’s what happened when some tourists left their van unattended in a car park for 20 minutes:
This is a bridge on the Arthur’s pass road. One of the wonders of NZ engineering – and it is, given the span and the route across a valley full of unstable rock and earth tremors. Helluva challenge.
Rather sadly there is a sign nearby written in such mind-numbingly dull bureaucratic language that it makes a brick look smart. Where do they get these guys from?
Look at how they have built a shelter for the scree to fall over the road, and another for the creek to run overhead. Remarkable.
Sally went tubing into a canyon, and an underwater river. Cold, but she had a great time. I did it last time with Katie – excellent trip.
Even on a calm day there were some vicious waves kicked up. There’s a memorial at the end of the pier to all those who have lost their lives here.
The Grey River, incidentally, is named after Grey. A grey bureaucrat who was responsible for introducing gorse, rabbits, stoats and bureaucrats into New Zealand. None of which have done it any good.
A working city, exporting coal and sheep from the docks, processing tourists, selling jade, not much else. when I was here 8 years ago I thought it a pleasant place – now I’m not so sure, more of a nothing town really.
Pancake Rocks. Famous for it’s ability to suck in busloads of tourists with shops full of trinkets and tawdry crap:
And here, by the way, are the rocks themselves. Interesting weathered limestone, but surely not worth all that ballyoo?
Sit inside the motorhome and watch a bunch of Dutch people go for a walk.
This is what the lenticular clouds we’d seen in the mountains were all about.
Just driving past and saw this guys bit of land. About 20 trucks, pretty old makes, heavily cannibalised, all in a line. Kinda picturesque.
This bird snoofles around in the bush picking up stuff to eat. It goes “weka, weka, weka”. Guess what it’s called. Yep, you got it.
And along came a bus, off loaded about 30 young whippersnappers who promptly walked right in front of where we were sitting next to out bus here at the railing, took a bunch of photos, yakkered a bit, jumped in the bus again and off they went. No evidence they even saw us.
There was a thriving goldrush settlement a bit down the road. Now a park with nothing remaining. The boards tell the tale of some rough characters and the pictures show a lifestyle we would find hard to take these days.
This shows the mine – in those days it was profitable to run a mine on 1/2 oz of gold per ton of rock. This one was taking out 20 oz per ton! Incredible profits even by modern standards.
This photo is taken from the same place as the above
There was a big earthquake in 1926 which shifted the earth 5m. This path shows it – makes you think a bit about earthquakes.
Nobody was killed, but a lot of damage was done to the road and the nearby town.
Amazing activity round here in the late 1800’s with a goldrush. People were dredging creeks and panning creeks. The Buller river area is now part of a different goldrush – they are mining tourists. I was here with Katie 8 years ago, and it’s got a bit more run-down and seedier, though perhaps it’s just a bit out of season. Kate and I did the flying fox which she liked (so did I). Tourists walking across the swing bridge with some trepidation – a bit exacerbated by some unnecessary extra swinging on my part.
The bridge looks flimsy, but it’s very strong:
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but all the mountains in NZ are more or less the same shape – peaky with steep sides (at 33 degrees if you want to know, according to my iPhone theodolite). And with plenty of rock screes, landslips and the like.
Well, it’s all to do with what the mountains are made of. Here it is:
This is the stuff at the top. Called ‘greywacke’ as you might expect. This was underwater only recently – it’s basically flooring material. Stands to reason that if you make mountains of it – which is basically sandy stuff with stones in it, then they aren’t going to last. And they don’t, they simply fall apart. You won’t get more than a couple of million years out of shoddy material like this.
In fact they reckon that in the last 15 million years the mountains have risen 20,000 metres, but because of erosion they are still only 4,000 metres high.
Quality, mate, quality is what matters. Just imagine if they had used granite instead of this rubbish. Mountains 20 km high by now. Everest phooey. I rest my case.
I had worn a hole in the heel of my socks on the walk. And whaddya know, someone had left a new pair on the railing.
The last time this happened to me was in Switzerland in the 70’s when I was hitching around, wearing out socks. A tractor went past and a pair of replacement socks dropped off, just at the right moment.
Instantly I realised everything is connected to everything else, just like the buddhists have been telling us. (At least in the sock department)
The morning was bright and clear, as was lunch, but just as we started to descend these flat, dense clouds made their appearance over the peaks. In conjunction with the high wind clouds above they presaged an approaching front, which developed rapidly as we descended.
By the time we got to the bottom of the mountain the sky was filling with cloud.
Around mid-afternoon this glider came over, swishing low over our ridge and heading across the valley to the opposite mountain. The pilot then crept from buttress to buttress, going a bit higher each time till he got an updraft which pushed him over the top and into the next valley. It would be pretty spectacular in the driving seat!
The hut was pretty spiffy, with all you could wish. They have to be booked in the walking season, and there are penalties if you turn up without. Long gone are the days of the casual bushwalker!
Good to be up a mountain, haven’t done this for a while.
We planned to climb one of the mountains – the one on the right to be exact. The morning didn’t look too good for a ridgewalk, with a low cloud base, but we set off anyway.
We got to the campsite at Lake Rotoiti, full of midges and just as full of campervans.
Chose a nice quiet corner next to a babbling brook, among the trees and more midges than the grains of sand in the universe. Very peaceful. Until two large motorhomes turned up (those ones with side things that expand to give them more room inside. Brash. Parked about 2ft from our front door and started yattering away. Lowered the whole tone of the neighbourhood.
So we moved to an even quieter spot nearby. And just as we did three more motorhomes came along and parked right next to our erstwhile neighbours, got all their stuff out and started yattering. Serves them right.
We took off into the forest for a walk – peaceful, empty apart from birdsong.
And, just for the record, we heard the Kiwi trilling away that night next to us. A rare and shy bird which hides in the forest and is hardly ever seen. Woohoo.
I had to stop the van and walk back to check this one out. Automatic log splitter. You can see the big blade and the log laying across the top. It gets chopped into pieces, which drop into a hopper below the saw and are then split with a hydraulic ram. Then a conveyor belt runs them up to the top of the woodpile. Neat.
More impressive than the springs is this gizmo for seeing underwater. A couple of big mirrors allow you to look at the weeds and whatnot in the springs. I’ve turned the photo upside down so you can see. Not as much as you’d want however, because the dudes who built it didn’t think about the stray light getting in, which reflects off the glass and spoils the effect. If they had made the roof a metre or two longer, you could have stood in the shade and seen the underwater world in all its glory. But they didn’t.
These are the biggest springs in NZ and Australia. And they are indeed impressively big. Not however, living up to their name which is “Jumping Sands”. They are supposed to spurt sand high into the air somewhere out in the middle. Now that would be impressive. Actually when you get there you find that ‘sometimes’ sand gets spurted upwards to about ‘half a metre’. Not actually very impressive.
But what I remembered about them is they put out 40 bathtubs a second of water. That’s impressive.
Golden Bay, on the NW tip of S island, is a gem of a place. You go past the commercialisation of the Abel Tasman National Park, over a mountain range, and come down into this fertile plain running in a huge arc up to Farewell Spit, backed by mountains.
Originally it was a goldrush place (hence the name), and there are numerous diggings left behind – characterised by these piles of stones made as the miners took rocks out of the creek beds to pan for gold. There’s still gold to be had – a couple of jewellers left over from the hippy days and now running a successful if laid back business showed us gold nuggets they melt and make into jewellery.
The valley was discovered in the 70’s by those wanting an alternative lifestyle. Most of them have now grown up and either moved on or got jobs. The result is a remarkable number of artisans, many making really nice pottery, sculpture etc. And still a few communes left – ironically now sitting on a fortune as the land values have gone up.
Finally the valley was settled by various nationalities, including a lot of germans. Road signs are occasionally in English and German.
Nice spot, might go back one day. Very laid back.
This is an oystercatcher, right? Right. (I know it’s black, but they have the All Blacks in NZ so who’s arguing).
Well:
a) Oysters don’t need catching. They just sit there, snoofling a bit of seawater through their gills, but not actually going anywhere.
b) I’ve never seen an oystercatcher catch an oyster. Mostly they zoom around picking up morsels, or, like this one, stand there doing nothing.
c) In the unlikely situation where an oystercatcher did it’s job and caught an oyster, it wouldn’t have a rat’s of opening it with its dinky little beak – I have trouble with a knife.
I rest my case.
Personally I prefer Lammergeiers, vultures, eagles and hummingbirds – birds with a bit of engineering.
Probably the sweetest ones we’ve had, off the beach right next to the campsite
. Big enough!
This didn’t work as planned. The flowform kite should have performed well, but didn’t fly too good, and more worser after we’d fixed it. This one, the Fled, worked well, but the camera had got itself in a knot and took overexposed pictures. Ho hum.
The northwest is hippie country. Lots of alternative stuff going on, including Hobbits.
NZ isn’t all fun though, everywhere you go there’s these little buggers. They bite and they itch. We bought some organic stuff from the national parks lady, which only worked because the midges disliked it marginally more than we did. We still got bitten.
Finally we bought some DEET which upset them more than it upset us. That worked.
A live one
The best sort – dead
Oddly enough some of these trees have patchy mould.
But on the patches, other mould is growing. How bout that?
Quite often we came across these blackened areas of forest. If it were Australia you’d think it had been burned. Not so. This is a black mould.
It shows that the trees are infested with sap-sucking insects (aphids and the like). They excrete a sugary substance which the mould feeds on. It doesn’t harm the trees unless it covers the leaves, blocking the sun.
About 200,000 people walk this coast every year. About 199,000 of them have new backpacks and boots.
This rock is called ‘Split apple rock’. How imaginative; funny looking apple is what I think. More like a pear. Or a rock.
There are three legends about it.
One is that Zeus was fighting with Neptune for the favours a lady called Dione. Zeus gave a mighty biff, missed, and clove the rock in twain.
Yeah right. As if Zeus and Neptune came all the way to South Island to have a fight about a girl. I know they were gods and all, but actually they were Europeans and hung around Greece and Rome for centuries. On holiday maybe, like us?
The other legend is a Maori one. They said two gods wanted the rock, and clove it in twain to end the fight. Well, if they did, they didn’t want the bits badly enough to make off with them. I mean, what’s the point?
The third option, given to us by the boat dude who tells you everything about anything, is that it is legendary because it was in a NZ tourist board TV commercial. Well, that one sounds right to me.
Hydraulic. All these boats launch onto the beach, so they have mechanisms for poking the gangway off the front. Impressed me anyway.
Nelson is a nice little town, a mecca for holidaymakers but having a character of its own. A lot of artisans live here, including, famously, the guy who made the Lord of the Rings ‘One ring’ (sadly he died before the movie was released).
However, its coast is the most commoditised touristified area in South Island, along with Queenstown. Here’s a supermarket approach to brochures selling the ‘experience’.
Not our thing at all.
Cable logging is a way of logging steep slopes. There are various ways of doing it, but essentially logs are attached to cables and winched off the ground up the hill to a de-branching area and/or down the hill to a yarding area. You can see the cable tower on the right below. It allows logging steep and fragile slopes. Of which NZ has a lot. Makes a bit of a mess of the hillsides, and allows pine trees – introduced species – to spread into the native forest.
In the Marlborough sounds they are trying to remove the pine trees by felling and poisoning, hence the dead pines on some of the slopes.
Last time I was here I slept in the schoolroom previously occupied by Ernest Rutherford. Great honour. Rutherford discovered radioactive decay, alpha and beta radiation, developed the nuclear model of the atom, first one to split the atom, and named the proton. For which he was made Lord Nelson. Whew. I like to think I got a bit smarter while I was asleep, but unfortunately there is no evidence to support that.
We had a few of these. They wouldn’t fit in the pot, so we shelled them and fried them in butter with garlic and soy sauce. Eaten in 3 big pieces, taste just like normal sized mussels – delicious.
There’s a steel thing on the dockside at Picton, bought no doubt by the city fathers who, wanting to be right at the cutting edge, installed this for the comfort and convenience of the council. Not for the visitors that’s for sure – it’s more like the bleeding limit.
Signs on the side written in alien script suggest it’s a toilet for men, women and wheelchairs (I didn’t know they needed to). Have you noticed nothing is written any more, it’s all in some kind of pictogram. Which is fine if you understand the pictograms, but not everyone does. I reckon our civilisation is regressing, and we’ll all be using heiroglyphics like the Egyptians before long. Picture language invented by the aliens living among us.
Aliens? Yep. I have a theory that aliens, far from being out there on the third planet on the left after Aldebaran, actually landed a long time ago (probably in Egyptian times) and are now living among us and playing golf. Stands to reason. Nobody on Earth would think that putting an otherwise useless little white ball in a distant hole in the ground was best accomplished by using a steel stick with a funny end. I mean, for goodness sake, what’s wrong with your legs – if the ball really has to be in the hole, just walk over and put it in.
I hope I am not offending any golfers reading this – please convey my deepest regards to your leaders and say that we Earthlings only want to be left in peace on our little planet.
That morning I had a slight touch of the yoghurts and thus needed to use the steel thing – which turned out to be a toilet of such ineffable modernity that the whole experience left me shuddering. Here’s how it went – those of you who have read ‘1984’ or seen ‘Soylent Green’ won’t be alarmed, the future is now:
Little buttons glowed outside the two cubicles to tell you what was going on inside. I went inside, slid the door closed pressed the lock button (nightmare movie – trapped in a steel toilet in Picton docks) and an American voice said (I kid you not) ‘Welcome, you have 10 minutes’. Then started some loud and unpleasant muzak designed I’d say to get you out of there a lot quicker.
It’s a well known fact that men sit in the toilet much longer and make more smells than women. I know because I read it somewhere, or made it up, can’t remember which. Anyhow, given my condition, I wanted to make sure the engine room was spotless, so I settled in expecting to spend a while ensuring it was. Enough time to read the New Scientist ‘Feedback’ and ‘Last Word’ pages anyway. Reasonable use of my time, you might say, but not to the liking of the toiletoberfuhrermeister because, just as things were tailing off, the muzak stopped and the Voice came back saying “Yourr taime is up. Please vacate this facility. Yourr taime is up. Please vacate this facility…..” over and over. No more mister nice guy.
Not being used to this sort of thing (well, not since my public school days in England anyway) I ignored it. However it became persistent and annoying so I looked for toilet paper which I got by pressing a button (why was I surprised). What did surprise me was I only got about 200mm of the stuff, which, given my present task was not only inadequate but insulting. What the hell do the designers of these things think people do with toilets? Probably they never fart, hardly ever go to the toilet (where they dab themselves with 2 soft tissues) and always look cool. And of course play golf. Aliens – now you begin to understand, don’t you? I’d wandered into a toilet for aliens.
Pressing the button for more toilet paper only worked for a while. After about 6 goes it stopped altogether. I made do with what I had (he said with all the delicacy he could muster).
I went to wash my hands in a recess in the wall. After a while I worked out that putting your hands at one end gave you a dollop of soap-like goop, in the middle came a squirt of water, and at the other end the briefest puff of air. I’m not that dumb, just colour-blind, and the indicator was a red light…. By the time I’d figured it out I had used up my allotted 3 goes. The thing stopped after the soap delivery. Doh.
All the while the Voice was telling me to leave: finally, no more messing around, the supplies of soap, water, air and toilet paper being cut off, the door lock opened with a clunk and it was over, ready or not.
I left with soap on my hands and a slightly unclean bottom.
Picked up a bag of mussels on the walk. Delicious.
says something about our artefacts and nature, but I’m not sure what.
about $500,000, with house attached.
Catching a few Z’ds at the end of the trip.
Our hero struggles through the bush.
They didn’t mind the smelly feet either.
Part of the deal for which we paid was a meal at the end of the trip. We were all for eating the usual fare of cheese and bikkies, but the lady at the tourist bureau persuaded us to go for the $9 lunch.
We expected a few slices of package ham, salad with ice lettuce and orange, and a pot of yoghurt. Cheapest deal off the supermarket shelf without actually costing nothing.
Not a bit of it. When we got to the other end we found the Furneaux Hotel, a 1930’s style building on a greensward in a cove, lovely garden, tables on the verandah.
And a choice from the menu – the $25 and up part. So we had the sirloin steak – $34 for $9. What a deal.
But that’s not all – the chef was some kind of wizard because that was the best meal I’ve had for a very long time. Followed by Creme brulee and delicious coffee. Gadzooks!
When we got off the boat this guy said hello. Name of Tom (names of course have been concealed to protect the innocent). Who had a wee pony tail, grey hair, academic stoop, wire rim glasses. Lived on a meditation retreat in the hills near San Francisco where he welcomed people with problems. You know the sort. Walked with us. Nice guy.
Except.
He talked.
Now some people go into the bush to listen to the boidsong and look at stuff – mountains, flowers, clouds. All that. ie me.
Others just like talking. ie him, and Sally, as it happens, who has been clocked at 10 days solid talking in USA (to our mate Sue in the back of a 4WD) without pause (either of them) except possibly to eat – or swallow at any rate.
Very soon it became obvious that something had to be done. I did it by changing gears and zooming far enough ahead to leave the noise of the human voice far behind. Peace, no talking.
Finally I got to the top of the ridge where I met this little fella. Who didn’t say a thing.
If you look carefully the guy in front partly hidden by the trees (missed the full photo, sorry bout that) has only got one leg – the right one. Amazing. All dressed in bicycling lycra with labels and two crutches strapped to the bike, he zoomed ahead of the rest using one pedal only. He needed the other guys to lift his bike through gates etc, but that’s all.
There are dolphins all around the sounds. These, bottlenose, came to play in the wake as we came into the jetty.
We decided to walk along the Queen Charlotte track which runs along one arm of the Marlborough sounds – an amazing area of deep fjords lined with coves which are peppered with isolated holiday homes.
And here is what a seal looks like, OK? Seen one, seen ’em all.
Kaikoura, a couple of hours N of Xchurch, is billed as the spot to be. Got the brochure. Wowee. Unfortunately totally touristed.
This probably used to be a wonderful area with cliffs, mountains, rocks, beaches and seals, whales and dolphins.
They’re all still there, but now the overwhelming impression is that a wonderful place has been turned into a commodity – everything you can think of. And some things you can’t – sheep shearing demonstration for instance. Well, I know New Zullund has an awful lot of sheep, but surely it’s a bit out of character with all these marine things going on. And anyway if they shear one sheep a day – at 3.30pm if you want to know – then what about all those sheep waiting around till the end of the season. Get pretty hot I reckon.
The sad thing about these touristified places is that what you came to see is subsumed by commercialisation. It’s just not possible to get a sense of nature as it is, it has to be nature as interpreted by some commercial operator. Or the park dudes – who provide the better kind of information, but, these days, always heavily laced with eco-dogma and conservation-speak.
Whether you like it or not (and we don’t) you simply can’t shut it out and see the natural landscape – what with roadsigns and brochures and advertising everywere. So the original attraction has gone forever.
There were about 10 things to do in Kaikoura – seal watching, whale viewing, kayaking, sailing and on and on. Thing is, we’ve done all that (and don’t want to pay for it thanks). Even sheep shearing.
So what we did is bugger off out of it.
When I was a kid of 10 – that’s now 52 years ago, amazingly enough. (Hoodathort). I did geography at Prep school.
One of the facts that stuck in my little head about New Zullund was the “fertile plains of Canterbury”. Growing fruit, crops and sheep.
Well, voila: the fertile plains themselves. Another thing I don’t have to worry about again.
Did you hear about the study they did on the blood pressure of men and women going into supermarkets. Women’s bp drops as they enter the zen of shopping. Men’s rises as they enter a jungle of stuff that isn’t hardware. (Blokes BP goes down in a hardware store – bit of a no-brainer, that).
I was employed as trolley driver. Dodging a phalanx of women determinedly pushing shopping trolleys in (apparently) random directions. I’d pick a backwater out of the flow, and stand there meeting they eyes of the (very) few other blokes standing near their trolley. All of us with a haunted look in their eyes (as if their bp was going up), sneaking off to look at chocolate bars, steak and beer, wishing we were in a hardware store.
Round about when this picture was taken I was about 50% over the line on the gauges. Into the danger zone where I get increasingly grumpy and am liable to buy something – anything – just to get us closer to leaving (never works, but I have to do it).
Sally, sensibly enough, reckoned we’d got enough and left. Whew.
Forgot the rubber bands though – something that was to cause trouble later…..
While sorting out the SIM card there were a whole lot of numbers to be entered in the phone (as always – everything is numbers these days, you noticed?). One of the numbers was 8088.
“Nice number” I said to the lad doing the selling. “That was the number of the original IBM CPU in the first desktop computers. I used to know the machine codes for programming it off by heart”
Thought he’d be interested, what with him being wired an’ all.
Instead he gave me the sort of look I used to give, at his age, to old geezers who told me they remembered when cars had crank handles.
“Dozy old dinosaur” I heard him think.
“Bah! Young whippersnapper” I thought.
As I stumped away, wondering what the young people of today are coming to.
No respect.
Hmph.
We had to get a bank account activated, buy a cheap bag for the kite photography gear, get a SIM card and data allowance, and food.
So easy, all in one shopping centre.
I reckon I spend about 5 times as long on the internet figuring out how to get a data allowance for my mobile to act as a hotspot for the computer (courtesy of which this blog is being brought to you). Eventually I got fed up of the internet and just rang a shop in NZ. Did what they said and it was all over in 15 minutes ($5 Sim card, $50 data, Telecom NZ store. Just like that).
Cracking spot, NZ.
After years of bagging the big campervans as being used by people without enough moral fibre to sleep in a tent, we decided to try it. This is a moderate sized one – big ones are way to expensive for newbies like us.
Here we go checking it out. And figuring out how we’re going to drive a big thing like that around (easy, as it turns out, just be careful of its length. Bit like having a trailer on the back of a car).
