Napier

All right people, this blog is a bit of long one since it’s been almost a week a since I last wrote one, I'll also update it with pictures soon since the camp site I am currently on has limited,slow internet access but in the meantime I hope you enjoy!

Lloyd and I left Raglan and drove over to Rotorua, the drive didn’t take us that long so when we arrived we booked ourselves in to a hostel then went out to explore. Rotorua literally stinks the whole town smells of sulphur as it was built on a geo thermal site and I have to admit there’s not a great deal to do in the town centre. We decided to spend 2 nights there so we could go and do some white water rafting, I wasn’t too sure at about rafting at first, I’m an artist, I value my life, I don’t like the thought of throwing myself off bridges or from planes but I’m glad I did it as the whole experience was a good laugh even going off the end of an 8 meter high waterfall was good fun. I have to say as well I look pretty damn good in a wet suit, I think I’m going to buy one and start rocking the surf/rafting look around Leeds city centre when I get back.

We left Rotorua the day after and decided to pick up some camping equipment and start camping for bit, so with tent and sleeping bags in hand we set off again and found ourselves a camping ground, the grounds keeper seemed a bit weird and I wasn’t sure if she was going to come and kill us in the middle of the night so we decided to go get a bottle of vodka and get drunk, we had a few beers left from previous nights in Raglan so we thought we should finish those as well. Getting drunk while camping was great fun and the booze helped get me off to sleep!

We left the camp site at around 10am the next morning and set off for Gibson, we decided to take the scenic coastal route. I’ve decided that I really love New Zealands coast line; it’s really rugged and baron and beats Bridlington and Scarborough hands down. This scenic route took us longer than we expected and we arrived in Gisbon quite late and with a storm brewing we had to get our tent up pretty quickly, that night it absolutely chucked it down, I was woken by the rain splashing off the tent and the wind howling outside luckily it stopped raining long enough for us to pack out tent in the morning.

Since we are going back to Gisbon to do some more WOOFing we decided to head down to Napier to camp for 2 more nights. When we set off to Napier we had a quarter of a tank of petrol left, I noticed this and said to Lloyd ‘’do you think we should get more petrol’’ Lloyd remarked ‘’no we’ll be fine’’ If I ever hear those words leave Lloyds mouth again I’ll probably burst into tears and start screaming. We were about 100 Kilometres from Napier when the low petrol light came on, at the time we were driving through the hills with no houses or petrol stations in sight, the only thing we could see were rolling hills, rain and low level cloud. We drove along nervously half expecting the car to crawl to a stop but luckily just as we were arriving in Napier we found a petrol station.

Napier is a nice looking town, all of the buildings are in an Art Deco style, I think I read somewhere that the city was destroyed by an earthquake in the 40’s and rebuilt in the Art Deco style (let me know if the dates etc are incorrect). The city is built by the coast so we took a walk down to have a look at the beach; the sea was absolutely wild I’ve never seen it as rough as it was here. We’re due to travel back up to Gisbon to start our next WOOFing job, our hosts seem very friendly and have been given really good feedback plus they can also get us discounted surf lessons, I really enjoyed surfing In Raglan so weather permitting I’m sure as hell going to give in another go, we also have another job lined up after that and then we plan to start moving our way down towards the south island where fingers crossed we will get a job working a ski season somewhere. I’m just about ready to get a job and find somewhere to settle now, I’ve ben travelling for about 4 months and it really has been a great experience but I’d really like to be able to at least unpack my bag for a while and really get to know an area properly.