Black Dog // 12th Jun 2005

G'day mates

Yes, you may have guessed that I'm in Australia by now. But first of all, please accept my apologies. It's been a while since the last email. It's been practically non-stop since I last wrote - over a month ago - and finding a place to use the internet that isn't overrun with loud-games-playing Chinese kids or that costs more than your average house in Kensington for half an hour is nigh on impossible here. The task of writing back home grows from a molehill to a fair-sized mountain pretty quickly if yI don't keep it up to date pretty regularly. Since it's been so long, I've split the email into two halves. (this is the first of said halves; the second will come at a later date). For those short of time, you'll be delighted (ecstatic?) to know that I'm alive and well, living in a flat in Melbourne.

I sent the last email from Raglan in New Zealand. Despite being the surfing capital of the country, I didn't take up the option of surf lessons, mainly for financial reasons. Also, the water was rather cold and I'll be the first to admit that I'm a bit wimpy when it comes to freezing water and that sort of thing. The few days I spent in Raglan were filled with chilling by the sea, watching bad movies, reading and generally relaxing as much as possible.

The tour that took me there was a hop-on-hop-off service. I hopped back on in Raglan and the bus took off for Rotarua via Wantanamo. This little region is famous for its underground caves, and it's possible to take expensive tours with a multitude of companies that can guide you round the intricate cave network, taking in all of the stalactites and stalagmites and crystally bits and so on. You can even go 'black water rafting' in the underground rivers. I shunned all of this, however, instead opting for what I thought could only be a once-in-a-lifetime experience...

– Rabbit Shearing –

The rabbit Shed shop is run by a group of old ladies who take their little antiquated business very seriously. The daily shearing display takes place in the corner the shop, and is a spectacle to be beheld. You're probably wondering, like I was, how you shear a rabbit; surely there isn't much fur? Let me explain. The rabbits used are a special German breed, with thick white fur all over their little bodies which makes them appear about three times the size they actually are. They're like the strange creatures from Jim Henson's Dark Crystal or The Never Ending Story. I doubt they'd survive more than five minutes in the wild; their pure white fur would make them obvious as a delicious fluffy snack for any predator. Thanks to being domesticated for their fur for about a hundred years, the rabbits now grow so much that they need to be shaved every six months or they will die from overheating.

The rabbit we saw being sheared appeared to be merely a ridiculous ball of fluff with a couple of fearful, quivering red eyes peeking out. Somehow the lady managed to fish the legs from the shapeless fur ball and tie them to the rotisserie-style shaving rack, quivering a few inches above the shaving table. The lady with the loud electric razor carefully shaved the top side of the rabbit. Her every move was narrated on a dodgy PA by an old lady with an unbelievably screechy voice, battling against the sound of the loud industrial electric razor. Once the top side of the rabbit was sufficiently bald, it was spun over for a good old belly de-furring. We could see its little heart beating like crazy once the fur had been taken away. He finished up a fraction of his initial size, and his pure white woolly fur was doomed to be turned into a tasteless item of overpriced knitwear, available for sale in the shop. I managed to resist buying something, even though the shop is apparently the only place in New Zealand where rabbit-wool products can be bought.

That evening was spent in Rotarua, a town which stunk of sulphur and whose 'hot springs' provided disappointingly lukewarm water for the hostel's geothermally heated hot tub.

I was in the bar opposite the hostel I stayed in, chatting to a couple of locals when I bumped into a girl I thought I recognised. It was Sarah Hickman, who had been in the same classes as me for seven years at Salesians School. It's a small world. No sooner had I started conversing with her than I saw my friend Oli for the first time in months. I met Olivier briefly on the Salar de Uyuni jeep excursion in Bolivia, and we worked out that we would both be in a variety of other places around the globe at the same time. Unfortunately we had missed each other in Santiago and Easter Island, so this was the first time we'd seen each other since that tour. If I ever get round to sending the email about my time in Australia so far, you'll see that we didn't just travel around NZ together; we also rented a flat here in Melbourne for a week. The first time I met him in Bolivia, he had distributed an assortment of locally-made woodwind instruments to everyone in the jeep-tours office so we could all irritate the staff by playing dischordant symphonies. He's travelling for a year in order to make documentaries all over the world, with subjects such as a Brazillian sculptor, Mongolian festivals and teaching kids to brush their teeth on Easter Island. He has a similar ticket to mine, a French accent that lands hima girl in every port and is generally a really nice guy - great to travel with. We'd arranged to meet in the bar as we knew we'd both be in NZ at the same time. The evening was well spent, dancing and smuggling beer from the hostel into the bar in order to save money once the cheap beer vouchers had run out, plus failing miserably to impress the kiwi lasses.

The next day Oli managed to blag a free lift on my tour bus and we went to Taupo. We checked into the hostel, and managed to get Oli in for free. We have an ingenious way of saving money with hostels – one person checks in to a large dormitory room, thus gaining access and the valuable key, while the other one merely slips in and sleeps on one of the spare beds. Luckily we're travelling in low season, so there's always at least a bed spare. Fortunately everyone who was on the bus that day got on quite well, so we had a big group dinner in our room in the hostel before hitting the town that evening. The days took on a standard format when I was with the tour company – wake up early, get on the bus, see some scenery, avoid expensive activities, get to a hostel, go out to the local bars. Unfortunately that evening, I fell asleep wearing my lovely Moroccan cowboy hat, which fell behind the hostel bed and was never seen again. For shame. For shame.

New Zealand's north island is pretty spectacular. However, the south island is even more breathtaking. Oli and I decided to split with the tour group and head down there with the intention of renting a campervan.

After a morning spent battling the irritating phonecard system, Oli and I managed to find a lift down to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, the next day. The kiwi woman who took us was a car parking attendant from Christchurch, and was on her first holiday for three years. She had a remarkable interest in nothing at all. We made the mistake of telling her that we were thinking of hiring a campervan. This resulted in a lecture about which would be the best car park for our van under a series of circumstances ('If it was lower than 1.6 metres...' 'Of course the earlybird ticket comes into effect before 8am...'), the relevant pricing schemes and who would be on shift at those times, etc. This was accompanied by the sound of awful slushy music by artists who should by all rights be long obsolete by now - the sort of singers whose albums would be called 'All Your Lovin'', with the artist wearing a brown jumper and a ridiculously white smile on the cover. The time dragged by.

The journey lasted five hours. For Oli and I, this was small fry, having spent a good deal more time on buses in South America. Five hours is usually nothing to us. But this time, five hours was a lifetime. Five hours of mind-numbing conversation about car parks and other dull, dull subjects. The highlight of my trip occurred when I was trying to sleep in the back of the car, trying to nod off. I had just got to that lovely phase nearing sleep, when I heard a clumsy voice wake me up.
"Ollie, wake up. We're five kilometres away from Bulls. The town's called Bulls and its sign has a Bull on it."
Sure enough, five kilometres later we arrived in Bulls. And sure enough, the sign had a badly painted bull on it. That was the highlight of the journey. I repeat, the highlight. You can imagine how fun the rest of it was.

Eventually we got to a place close to Wellington, where we were to catch the train to the city itself. Here I was insulted by the arrogant ticket guard, who had a habit of repeating my question back to me as if it were obvious, for such heinous crimes as not knowing the train timetable ("How often do you think they are?!") or wanting to find out if there were toilets ("Do you have toilets on trains in the UK?!"). We arrived in the nation's capital exhausted.

We weren't in Wellington for long enough for it to have made any impression on us; we arrived one night and left early the next morning on the ferry from the north to the south island. When we got to the south island, it was miserable and rainy, and we had the task of finding a campervan. Each place recommended the next office and we ended up going round in circles. The tourist office recommended every place we'd been to, plus the aquarium.

Aquarium? Campervan hire? The guy at the front desk was as bewildered as us, until he remembered that one of the directors had a sideline in renting campervans out to people apparently a lot richer than us. It turned out that she didn't have a van available at that time, either. Even if she had, it would have been cheaper to buy one ourselves, coat it in gold and drive it off a cliff without insurance than rent one of hers. Immensely wet and tired of asking the same questions repeatedly, we decided the best bet would be to board the train to Christchurch and hedge our bets there. The journey had the best views of any train journey in the whole country. Well, supposedly. The fog made a good job of making the mountainous countryside look as miserable as possible.

We arrived in Christchurch, and after a journey with a guy who claimed to be New Zealand's youngest taxi driver, found ourselves at the home of a Chilean friend of Oli's, which would be our home for the next couple of days. Here we met three Chilean girls who also wanted to rent a campervan, so we decided to get together and rent a big van instead of two little ones.

Before we could set out in a van, we had to find one and hire it. On our first day in Christchurch we attempted to enquire about campervan hire from a company that was just about halfway across town. Christchurch is a city of just under 400,000 people, but is disproportionately spread out – a fact we learned the hard way. New Zealand doesn't do high-density housing. Once again we found ourselves getting progressively wetter and more miserable before cheering up with a delicious lunch and the lifesaving cup of tea served by a pretty waitress. In the end we gave up and headed home, strategically calling just about every company in the Yellow Pages' motorhomes section. This process was not fast.

Eventually we hired our campervan to see the South Island. For Oli and I it was to be just another week in a crazy year, but for the three Chilean girls who were to come with us this was huge. Despite all having university degrees, the only work they could find had been in bars, restaurants, factories - menial labour. Just coming to New Zealand was a big step in itself; apparently Chilean girls are brought up living with their parents' apartments until they're married. When we came back from the rental place with a large, ugly Ford Transit campervan, they were literally jumping with joy. We all lined up in front of the thing with forced smiles for a series of photos.

It seemed that posing for photos in this way would be a one-off. After all, it's quite common to have the predictably-posed group shot before an expedition of any kind. I have numerous out-of-focus group shots from Macchu Picchu et cetera, filled with faces whose names escaped me long before the films were processed. I hate these photos. So forced, so uninspired. Everyone pulls that oh-so-natural pose that you pull after half an hour of being photographed with everyone else's cameras, with each person in turn yelling instructions to the elected photographer on how to use their camera. I thought the bad group shot would be a rare thing on the trip; maybe one at the beginning and one at the end.

But no. The girls were intent on filling up their cameras' memory cards with as many pictures of me-in-front-of-something shots as possible. We'd drive for hours to get to a picturesque spot, jump out for five minutes and enjoy a spot of fresh, bracing mountain air while the girls posed the same pose for the same photo once more. Often they'd miss the picturesque scenes entirely. One of the favourite places to pose was sitting in the middle of the road, cross-legged and smiling, reulting in a million shots of the same scene.

I know what you're thinking. Three Chilean girls and two guys like Oli and I in a campervan. No, it wasn't the hedonistic bliss you'd imagine, and we didn't even exchange email addresses at the end. Still, it was a fantastic experience – the girls planned everything, from when we woke up to what we saw and the roads we used. As I wasn't driving (damn youthfulness stopping me from being able to be insured), I didn't have to think about anything for a week. I woke up some mornings not knowing which town we were in or which side of the island we were on. The style of travelling was so different from everything I've experienced before that it was quite a refreshing change.

On the first day, we hit a large stone and punctured two tyres on the left hand side. The van was fitted with some incredibly rare and expensive tyres that proved impossible to find on the south island. I won ;t bore you with the details, but that took up a significant amount of our time. We also damaged the roof of the van on a low tree in a forest, which wasn't too cheap.

One of the girls had a laugh straight from a vampire movie. A sort of head back, mouth open, two syllable affair which wouldn't have been out of place in Nosferatu. Another one had the most high-pitched, cartoon character-like voice I think I've heard. All three took the same photo a million times.

One of the highlights was a place called Milford Sounds (this was near to Doubtful Sound – I wondered how it got its name). Here we took a boat round some amazing mountains and things, with the most amazing views (one of the boats was called 'Pride of Milford', which sounds so much like a cheap beer from the Sheffield region, don't you think ?). We did hardly anything that you had to pay to do, instead travelling for agood deal of the time and taking in national parks and the like. The scenery for pretty much the whole week was pretty breathtaking to say the least.

At one point we stopped at a place called the 'Mirror Lake' – named for its reflective qualities. The girls took their photo in front of the van and went back in pretty quickly, despite having driven for about an hour to get to the lake itself. I went closer to the lake to take some photos. Unfortunately this was cut short by the smell of defecation when I crouched down to take the first photo. I looked down and noticed that my crisp white shirt had a large amount of faeces splattered on the front – my camera had somehow swung into a large lump of poo and transferred this nicely onto me. I've never got undressed so quickly. Passing a whole tour bus of Chinese tourists on the way back, scantilly clad, provoked some interesting looks.

On the last day of the tour, we were in Dunedin. Before heading back to Christchurch to drop the van off in time for my flight the next day, we drove up to the peninsula on the east. What looked like a simple half inch on the map took a lot longer than most other half inches, thanks to the incredibly windy (windy as in lots of bends, not lots of wind) road and poor acceleration ofered by the frankly unaerodynamic van (its engine gnarled like a vicious beast the whole time, but never actually gave out much power). Not having much time, we decided to stop halfway at a little beach. While the girls were taking 'the photo', Oli and I investigated a strange looking black lump further up the beach.

At first sight it looked like a binbag, but the light reflected in a strange, almost satinlike way. As we got closer, it became more apparent that it was actually a sleeping seal. We got within a foot of the animal and took a great deal of photos. Seeing a wild seal that close was phenomenal. He was perfectly happy to have us looking at him closely while doing a spot of sunbathing, occasionally (and for no apparent reason) flicking sand onto his back with his front flippers. We were also treated to the sight of it excreting a large sludgy faeces.

This takes me to the end of my time in New Zealand. From Christchurch I flew to Melbourne on the 25th May. That is where this email will stop; I'll update you on the Australian leg so far pretty soon. Currently I'm in Melbourne, living in a rented flat and living as cheaply as possible – New Zealand was quite expensive, so money's on the tight side. All the more of a challenge though... In a couple of weeks Mum and Abi will be flying out to Sydney to see me (just in time for my birthday), which needless to say should be fantastic. I can't wait...

Please keep me up to date with all the latest stuff, things and et cetera.

Ollie