July 22nd to 24th - Depature From Wellington/Auckland Part II

It was 48 hours until my departure from the city and I was beginning to get desperate to find someone willing to take my place at #1 Sydenham Street. I had arranged for one final viewing and while I waited in the kitchen with my fingers crossed one of the dogs felt it was necessary to sneak into my room and leave a steaming coiler on the carpet right before the gentleman arrived. I sprayed the area with stain remover and strategically placed a vacuum cleaner over the darkened spot but I’m assuming that the eventual refusal could’ve been influenced by that faint odor of canine fecal matter. Shit luck or not, pun intended, I hopped on the overnight bus to Auckland still paying for a room I wasn’t occupying. My stomach felt a bit off on the ride; I’m assuming it was a combination of stress over the room as well as the fact that I decided to try and eat as many of the things left over on my pantry shelf as I could in one odd last minute meal rather than throw them out. This was only exacerbated by the junk food I was limited to at the all night McDonalds at the rest stops along the way. I met up with Jaclyn at Auckland International having only had 1.5 hours of sleep through the night. Throughout the day that followed I was able to find my second, third and fourth winds from someplace within I didn’t know existed. We picked up our rental van, the ‘’spaceship’’ which they’ve labelled Avatar, and drove to the hostel I stayed at on my first night in the country. The mixture of déjà vu and nostalgia was overwhelming but in a good way. I seemed to be retracing the steps I took with Kelsey, so naturally we ended up at the Auckland Harbour Bridge Bungee. Jaclyn took it like a champ and I got some excellent footage of her leap of faith from a comfortably safe vantage point. Despite being high on life we couldn’t fight the exhaustion forever. We had thought of capping off a solid first day of NZ experiences by heading into town to find a pub to watch the first All Blacks fixture against Fiji. We first made a delightful dinner of kumara and chicken and afterwards I sipped tea and played my guitar under the overhang in the rain but by then we couldn’t keep our eyes open and ar 7:30 we were sawing logs in our hostel room. We awoke exactly 12 hours later feeling like a million bucks; we celebrated by doing a 5km run and Jaclyn fried up some French toast. We spent the entire day walking around downtown Auckland, checking out the Maori carvings at the museum and getting pictures with the Sky Tower. In the afternoon we hopped on the ferry to Waiheke Island, one of the highlights of my first adventure, only this time we would have the pleasure of staying the night with a local, a certain Ms. Jessica Alloway, a violin prodigy who I met while she was staying at my house in Wellington for a couple weeks. Before meeting up with Jess, Jaclyn and I ate Thai takeaway with Vanilla Coke on a beach that we had pretty much to ourselves. Thinking like true backpackers we decided to keep the Tupperware containers that the food came in so that we could reuse them when we were living like homeless people out in the bush. While on the bus to Jessica’s house, I spilled some of the sweet and sour sauce on my jeans and dropped all my belongings in shock after I noticed what I had done. After getting off the bus in pissing rain and pitch blackness I realized that I hadn’t recovered all the items I’d dropped, more specifically, my wallet. This was especially bad because I had taken out several hundred dollars from an ATM that morning to last me quite a while. Thankfully we were on a very small island and the bus depot was literally around the corner. The driver and his friend were in the process of coming back to the last bus stop to come return the wallet to me so what could’ve been a major disaster was averted and I was able to make it through that predicament without completely freaking out. Jess had just come back from a performance where she was trying to raise money to travel to Switzerland to study a Master’s degree in music. Her family were all dressed up in their nicest clothes but welcomed us filthy travellers with open arms all the same. Within the hour I had downed three tall glasses of wine and was being offered some homemade rum. What we had imagined would’ve been an early evening given our tiredness at about 8pm became a wonderful drunken mess that lasted until 2am and featured a late night jam session with guitar, piano and violin. I love how pitch black it gets here in the evenings with the lack of street lamps in lots of places. You are always met with a welcome surprise when you see just where you were the night before. The natural surroundings are always astoundingly beautiful. After taking the Alloway family dog Gypsy for a walk on the beach it was time to go. On the ferry back to Auckland I decided to head to the top deck for some pictures and the wind was so strong it blew my sunglasses right off my shirt and into the sea. Upon arrival we hopped on another ferry, this time to Rangitoto Island, and uninhabited volcanic mass that was the site of gun turrets in WWII. It was an epic walk to the summit but the views were worth it and I finally got perspective as to the size and prettiness of the Auckland region. After eating a massive dinner at an Asian cafeteria called ‘Food Alley’ we drove to my old roommate Elspeth’s sisters house where we were offered a free room with a double bed. So far we have been exceptionally lucky with all the hospitality we’ve been offered but despite the pampering, I’m excited to get out and try my ‘’spaceship’’. Matamata, better known as Hobbiton awaits, and our campervan has a DVD player and it just so happens we have a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring for after our tour of the movie set!