April 30th/May 1st (Piha to the Coromandel Peninsula)

Kelsey and I met two Swedish girls in Piha who had just graduated from high school and were nearing the end of a trip eerily similar to ours. Sometime in the middle of our conversation I excused myself to check on the raspberry Jello we had placed in the fridge a couple hours earlier. Undoubtedly intrigued by the exquisite dinner they had just seen us devour, one of the girls inquired into what we had for dessert. As I brought it over it became clear that they had either don’t have Jello in Sweden or it exists in some other form under some other name because they regarded it with caution bordering on unease. I relate this to you as a preface in explaining our one and only in-joke of the trip so far. Kelsey and I have constantly been either boasting over our possessions or jokingly attempting to one-up one another for one miniscule reason or another ever since I asked her if she was ‘jelly’ (read: jealous) of some sushi I had bought in Auckland. The phrase ‘you jelly?’ has become something of a contest whereby we try to evoke jealously, all in good fun of course, towards a cause that is ultimately pointless. If I’ve lost some of you, here’s an example. Kelsey bought a fairly large chocolate muffin so, naturally, I needed to buy a massive chocolate frosted cookie with macadamia nuts generously embedded within. Kelsey takes a bite thinking I will be jealous of its tastiness and says ‘you jelly, Colin?’ My response being to produce my oversize cookie, take an inappropriately large bite and reply ‘YOU jelly, Kelsey?’ while I smile with chocolate stuck in my teeth and crumbs falling all over my lap. I figured this explanation would be important so you could appreciate my amusement in asking Kelsey if she was ‘jelly of my jelly’ in reference to the raspberry Jello, to which the Swedish girls became infinitely confused but Kelsey did not shy away from trying to explain our stupid joke. We started out the next day with the intention of going to the town of Thames on the west coast of the Coromandel Peninsula, hoping to either do a bush walk or rent some kayaks. Being a gentleman I manned the wheel for the 3 hour drive only to discover that Thames was kind of a dive. This judgment was probably compounded by the torrential downpour that tormented us the entire way so we decided to buy some groceries for dinner and push on to the next big town on the map, appropriately named Coromandel Town. Despite it being a sublimely gorgeous drive, akin to what driving along the fjords of Norway must feel like, I was not jelly of Kelsey who had taken over command of the wheel. The highway, if one can call it that while keeping a straight face, was nothing short of a deathtrap. In fact we did end up having to stop the next day to receive instruction from a police officer in how to bypass the queue of police vehicles present to deal with a van that had plopped off the side of the road. In the end we were quick to realize that some small towns could exist anywhere and no one would be able to distinguish them. Although it wasn’t quite yet the off season, the town was still completely dead. Our hostel guide certainly had no reservations about hyping up the hostel we ended up staying at as a hip, happening place. What we found was an empty dorm room and a common room populated with five morose-looking people outside the backpacker age demographic reading bad fiction. Luckily Kelsey had planned ahead for this sort of thing and picked up a 6 pack of kiwi beer at the supermarket. We almost felt guilty making noise as we fried up our mushroom cheddar burgers for dinner in the kitchen attached to the common room. Our escape plan was to head down to the local pub and see what was going down but we bumped into a woman from London, Ontario who managed to keep us occupied with conversation until about 8pm. By this point it had been pitch black outside for a couple of hours. Feeling adventurous, possibly due to the brews we’d put back, we ventured into town only to find that everything was shuttered up and it resembled a horror film set in a sleepy western town in the late 19^th century. Store signs creaked in the wind and the few streetlamps on the main drag cast an eerie glow, emphasizing the emptiness in the immediate surroundings. We returned to the hostel a little dejected but glad to have burned off a little of the beer and beef. The bathroom attached to the dorm we had to ourselves had the delightful quirk of having no shades on its windows. Had the hostel been anywhere else but the middle of nowhere, some lucky passerby would’ve been treated to a show of our naughty bits as we took our showers. The rains intensified overnight with the wind being so powerful that it pushed open the door that I had purposefully shut. I know now that I’m never going to be cut out for small town living. Seclusion within reason, yes, but I’ll always need a little action to compliment my remoteness, in other words, it’s all relative. To sum this up succinctly with everything I’ve just written, let’s just say that I’m not jelly of anyone who lives there.