Long White Clouds

Well we didn’t make it to Bali but see what happened in Asia here www.longwhiteclouds.co.uk/lookslikerain

So that’s it. After 15,000 kms in our yellow van and 68 blog posts, 1,709 shutters clicked, 388 bowls of porridge, 237,600 Kiwi fuits packed, 7 weeks of beatbox blues, 1 mouse and 2000 crutched sheep, 22 finished books, 1 great walk, 76 goodbyes, 9 fast months, and a Penny Farthing we’re leaving New Zealand. Our flights have been booked to fly to Hong Kong and then on around South East Asia and Indonesia. The next part of this trip is going to be amazing and way different, but I’m only taking one 35mm camera and no laptop so this will be the last post from Aotearoa, The Land of the Long White Cloud. Hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Our last few weeks in New Zealand, in vans with Max and Adam waiting for our flights and living as cheaply as possible.

It’s gone! We let our van go for $1100. We spent a bleak night in a tent and have been given the keys to a broken down van that we can use for a week. We’ve made friends with a local hobo called Shane who lives in a cave down the road.

In 9 months you accumulate alot of things, and now I’m selling everything to pay for a ticket to somewhere warm in Asia.

We’ve being staying in Mount Maunganui and working in a Kiwi fruit pack house doing night shifts. Nights are dark at 5pm and it’s raining a lot so we have taken up residence in someones garage/pool room. There’s been 10 of us sleeping in a 3 bed house so there’s always someone up watching films. The van is up for sale and we’re making plans to leave New Zealand… with a little stop over in Asia on the way home.

It had to happen.

There are 7 great walks in New Zealand and it would have been rude to leave without at least doing one of them, so before it got too much colder we got on the Waikaremoana tramp. It’s 46km, 4 day hike staying in cabins at night. The lake is at 600m and the hike rises another 400m so it was super cold when the sun went in and the first cabin had a terrible gas heater that everyone staying there huddled their beds around it all night. The others had woodburners that were brilliant which were so hot we cooked on them. We took carrot cake, scones, pasta sauce in glass jars and massive apples, we had no thermals, no waterproofs, jeans and leather shoes… We were un-prepared but luckily it stayed dry and we made it out. Oli enjoyed crossing the finish line and I got to test my new camera.

The following day I thought I lost the film after a two hour drive… so I drove an extra two hours looking for it re tracing all our steps the whole day. It turned up the following day in Oli’s knicker bag.

We met Rog and Lisa at the campsite through Rachel. They are moving up the East coast with Miery and Orongo to start living from the land, and will be planting and building everything they need from what they have there and it will be amazing. We went up to help them for a weekend cutting and peeling native Manuka poles for their vege patch fencing and learning good composting techniques. Their compost loo has the best views over the valley. They taught me how to make sour dough and Oli about Bees and we now have a great stock of sweet sweet honey in the cupboard. Good luck and thankyou so much.

Rachel and Justin look after the Tatapouri campsite in Gisborne with their two girls Pita and Tima. They let us stay in a cabin for a month and we cleaned and weeded and made a compost heap. They have a good couple of goats too and the sunrise from here looks amazing. Thanks for having us, we’ll miss you.

Begged, borrowed, stolen.