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Published: November 27th 2012
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The next day we moved on and made our way to Napier. As soon as we arrived there Mark took us up to an amazing spot where he'd been before. We literally drove up a mountain and ended up at Te Mata Peak, a fantastic lookout point where you get annihilated by the wind. The views from here were astonishing though allowing you to see for miles. That night Mark and Inga decided to sleep in the camper van up at the top perilously close to the edge of the cliff face which drops down, well, far, very far. I was seriously worried for them and didn't actually expect them to spend the night there as the wind that night back down at sea level, where we were staying, seemed as strong as it did earlier at Te Mata Peak. So it must have been unbelievably windy up there that night. Throw in to the equation an earthquake and they would've ended up, well they would've ended. Full stop.
The next day the girls had planned to go horse riding and wine tasting, leaving myself and Mark to have a lad’s day out. So what did we do? In good
old fashioned male decision making form, we did nothing. Well we drove around for a bit and went to McDonalds to use their free Wi-Fi. We did try to find something interesting to do but there simply wasn't much going on in Napier, apart from winery tours and art deco stuff. Well we did actually check out a gypsy fair and played with a tennis ball on a pebble beach trying to knock each other’s beer bottle over. Shit that’s a point, I still owe Mark $5 because we put a bet on that game, which I lost.
So after Napier we headed back to Wellington. That night we got trolleyed. Simply put. Bottle-o-whisky and some pre drinks in the hostel before heading out to a few bars. Whilst we were back in a city we decided to try again, this time properly, to sell the camper van. This needs to be gone soon as Mark will soon be leaving and heading to Australia. We put another ad up on the backpacker boards online and printed off loads of a4 sheets to stick up around hostels around the city. We had a few people interested. One lady who was
with loads of friends camping somewhere like 2 hours away from the city. Always up for a road trip Mark and I decided to drive to this remote location to try to find this bird called Sophie. This ended up a massive failure as we couldn't get hold of her due to the remoteness of her location. You get no phone signal in New Zealand unless you're within a certain radius of built up areas, and this was literally in the middle of nowhere. We did find the camp site, but we couldn't find Sophie. So after sitting around for an hour or so waiting for any sign of Sophie we gave up and drove back to Wellington. We did have another viewing on the van but they never got back to us so the next day we decided to take the 8 hour drive back up to Auckland as we'd have a better chance up there.
The drive to Auckland, although 8 hours long, was quite pleasant. We took it in turns to drive obviously, and it seemed to go quicker than I expected. Driving through New Zealand is never boring, the scenery is always beautiful and never
tiring. As soon as we got to Auckland we had a viewing on the van after posting another ad on the internet. We gave the van a quick clean and drove to meet the German couple who showed more interest in the van, probably due to our stories we provided about our journey in Percy. They took it for a test drive and Mark and they agreed on a figure. And that was that, Percy was gone, no more camper van 😞 Sad day. That night we were checked into Freemans Lodge, a really nice small family run backpackers hostel about 30 mins walk from the city centre.
One night without a vehicle and we couldn't go any longer so we rented a car the next day. A pokey little 1.5L auto something. Can't remember what it was but it was faster than we expected and we didn't know where to take it. We called up a friend we made the night before, Chris, who worked in the bar at the Base hostel in the city centre and asked if he wanted to come on a road trip somewhere. We decided to drive to Waitomo because Mark wanted to
go caving on the trip I did with the Kiwi Experience. We got to Waitomo and after a massive amount of umming and arring Mark decided on the trip he wanted to do and Chris and I set out to do a bit of tourism around the area whilst waiting for Mark. We'd been told about a waterfall, a natural bridge and a cave which was about an hour or so drive from where we dropped Mark off. So we set off in our little car and after about an hour we realised we'd been driving in the wrong direction because of the misleading map we'd been given. Turn around, try again. We needed to be quick in order to see all of this cool shit before Mark finished his caving thing. Speed tourism is the answer. We drove up these amazing twisty roads, and eventually got to the tourist sign for the waterfall. When we got there we ran down the track to find the waterfall, took some pictures, ran back and set off to find the cave. When we found the cave we did the same. Ran down the track, took photos and ran back. Same goes for
the natural bridge. Running was the only way we could be sure to see all of this and get back to Mark before he got pissed off with waiting. Speed tourism, new thing there. Why piss around when you can run around.
The next day Mark had a flight to catch to Christchurch to meet back up with Inga, so we checked out of Freemans Lodge and I dropped him off at the airport before returning the car to the rental company. I then walked through town and checked into Base where Chris was staying so I still had a friend. There was a pub crawl that evening organised by the people at the hostel so I gave that a bash. Basically for $25 you get 6 free drinks, one in each bar and a load of people to crawl around with. I got it for $15 though because I was mates with Chris who worked there, so I got a bit of a bargain I couldn't refuse. Had a good night, found some cool bars and some good music too which was a first. This was one of my last nights in Auckland though as I'd got myself booked onto a flight to Wellington as I'd been given an opportunity when in Wellington before to maybe have a DJ set on a local radio show in a pool bar.
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