Beer, a fire, a penguin, then some rain

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Note to self from last entry: try to avoid writing a blog after drinking too much the previous night.
Taking my own advice, I'm in a better mood, despite constant rain all day. Yet because I'm now only doing miniscule distances and the novelty of it still being warm, I quite enjoyed it and hope that my hair will now become curly. Come to think of it, the only hair I have IS curly, further ruminations on which now cease.
Camping beats hostelling. Except tonight, of course, with the rain. I found a free campsite by the beach in Charlestown on the west coast, tucked into a bottle of wine, watched the sunset, then wandered into the working mens club. They're proud to boast the smallest membership of any working mens club in New Zealand and given the fact that there's just a handful of houses ('baches') it's no wonder. Good folk though. Jim waxed on about mining, fishing, keeping a possum as a pet which sat on his head, finding a greyhound, flinging his body between it and an assassin's bullet and extracting the claws from other possums so the greyhound could rip them up. A mullet man (yes) tried to bate me with the wingeing pom routine, but 8 years in Yorkshire and the 'hand of god' Maradonna treatment in Argentina have immunised me from offence and let me see it all as the fun it is, then dean, who'd been drinking treble whiskeys all night, suggested a drive down the beach and a fire. Great idea, says I and a dreadlocked Kiwi cyclist who'd also showed up, so we had an off-road tour of the village and the bush, going through the bush and narrowly missing more solid parts of the village, arriving at the mouth of the mighty Nile river, where it ran across the sand and into the sea. The fire was a monster, Dean jumped off a high rock into the river, and then we found a little blue penguin with a gammy foot, which we cooed over and, no doubt, scared witless. Then back over grass banks, through more foliage and I was back at my tent at 3.30 am, having vowed to stay the next day and come to the club's sunday dinner of ham and veggies.
I lied. Not at the time, but in hindsight, as after 3 or 4 hours sleep the sun decided to cook me inside the tent and I couldn't face the wait and the inevitable further drinking. So I packed up and cycled down the coast to a much less charming campsite, but an altogether better night's sleep. I did enjoy myself though.
The coast is choc a plenty with surf and beaches on one side (the right) and lush greenery on the other (the left), with palm trees now making their appearances and a cacophany of cicadas and birdsong.
The novelty has been the rain. which as I said has poured down today. So I've holed up in a little town and had a fantastic wodge of fish and chips.

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