The Abel Tasman....and The Not So Able Jak and Joe!

It was an early start, I just want to stay in bed but there was much to do. We had to finish getting ready and go down to get the bus before we started our trek. Our planned route was up the inland track for about 2-3 days and then to join the coastal track around Awaroa for our way back down the coast, which would take about 2 and a half days.
I did have a better map but it didn't work for some reason, I believe Jak has one (here) but for the mean time this will have to do. Day one proved to be pretty hard going, from our start at Marahau we had an easy half hour walk before we hit the inland track. It took a lot to get use to the weight of the bag and when we hit the steep climbs of the inland track it didn't really help. It was slow going and we didn't get a good rythm going because we had to stop so often just to take the weight off. My back and legs where killing me just a few hours in, the weight of the bag was really uncomfortable and started to cause me a bit of pain but we had to keep going until the much needed stop for lunch.Because we hadn't actually started to walk until about half ten we were in trouble of running out of day light if we weren't careful, this wasn't a good thing, the ruff grounds covered in leaves made it hard to see the roots and branches that always seemed to be trying to trip you up. Not only is it harder to keep your balance with such a big bag on your back but it also means that if your not careful, that bag will drag you down the mountain. Time was really getting on and come 5 ish with the tree cover we were forced to get our head torches out and continue in the dark. This was really not proving to be much fun, it wasn't really safe but it was our only option, it is not as if we could pitch short on the narrow tree lined track. About an hour and a half later we finally made it to camp, all be it in the dark. We had a delightful dinner of pasta with sauce.....nothing else, just sauce. Still there was lots of it and it was hot which is the main thing! We put the tent up and went to bed as soon as we could!

Well we didn't get off to as good a start as I would have liked but that is all part of it.

Much love

Joe x x x x x x x x

Quote - "My feet are my only carridge, so I have got to push on through....."
Little Clue, these are lryrics from an awesome song!

Caption Comp -

Naaaaa Whats up Doc!

Stop Bugging Me!

Ok well it was our final day at the bug :-(, for a while anyway....It was bye bye interesting pictures, confortable beds, ensuite bathroom...I mean I can't stress how good this hostel was! For example the ensuite bathroom had enough room for a shower mat, sink mat and toilet mat, I know UNBELIEVABLE!

Anyway we had things to do, so not too long after our alarm had gone off we headed into town on one of the hostels bikes. A trip to the iSite had us sorted for a 5 days treking on the Abel Tasman (we couldn't afford to kayak :-(). Things were looking good now, as time went by we just enjoyed cycling around Nelson for a while before we stopped to wonder round one of the
gardens.

As you can see they where quite beautiful.

So After a lovely walk round we decided to do the mature thing and play man hunt.....it was a good laugh really! After a good half hour we were a bit nakered from running around and headed back to the hostel before walking down to the supermarket to buy 5 days worth of food and then attempt to pack. The Plan was to take my big bag and Jak's day bag so that we would be travelling quite light. This didn't work. We had to pack both our big bags which easily weighed in at 20 kg each. Great!

We were going to get an early night but then we started playing this awesome card game with this american guy called chris. It was called camps, you were in pairs and had to collect 4 of a kind. You got points by signaling to your partner when you got it but if someone caught you then they would call counter camps and you lost a point. It was really funny especially because you didn't know your partner...on a couple of occasions both chris and jak had camps and just sat there nodding at each other. I will teach you all properly when I get back!

Much Love

Joe x x x x x x x x x

Quote - "Jump back Jak, see you later alligator...it ain't no drag, his got a brand new bag!"

Caption -
Que?!

A Long Days Night....

well 16 hours on from what you last heard and I woke up! It was 4 pm! It took me about half an hour to come to terms with the time...We had both slept for 16 hours strait, it felt like we had caught up on 8 months worth of sleep in one night. If you have never done it before then book in a weekend to waste!

As brilliant as the epic amount of sleep was we lost our entire day, we were meant to be sorting out what we were doing for the next 6 days and we had no time to do it. Still it was worth it, so we decided to except the loss of our day and stay for another night at the bug to give ourselves time to prepare something. The Abel Tasman national park was supposed to be very beautiful and have a lot of treking and kayaking options up for grabs. We set about getting dinner having just woken, not really much more happened for the rest of the day, we speant some time on the internet, played some more cards and dominos and that was about it.....it was AWESOME!

Much Love

Joe x x x x x x x x x

Quote - Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.

I think I have you on this one :-p

Caption comp -
Jak's philosphy was that a bad hair day was whatever you made of it!

To Nelson and Beyond....

After only one night in Picton it was already time to leave.  We packed our things, I managed to get onto the phone to Sarah for a while and before long we were out the door of Atlantis Hostel.  We took a short walk down to the beach with our bags and did little else other than contemplate what to do until 1pm, when our bus to Nelson would arrive.  After a while scyming stones we decided that the best idea was to just get some food and dos there for the last few hours.  It was quite nice, as you can see the view was awesome and it is quite nice to just watch the world go by whilst eating a portion of chips.  Aside from a brief onslaut from the seaguls while we finished our chips we moved ourselves round to a crazy golf course, the origional plan was to play, but seeing as we had no money we decided that it was more fun just to commentate on the other people playing, which it was!  Before long it was time to go and the bus was ready and waiting.  It wasn't quite as much of a coach as our previous naked bus rides, but more the first mini bus ever inventid!  The ride was a bit ruff, and with a packed bus I was ever so slightly worried that the bus would fall apart....The suspension seemed to be made out of steel gurders and elastic bads!

Once we got to Nelson (around 3-4 pm) we set ourselves about getting a hostel and looking at what we were going to do over the next week or so.  A number of options jumped out at us, but we opted for one of the smaller more personal hostels, called The Bug!  We were picked up from the iSite and taken the 5 minute drive to the Hostel.  It was absoletly brilliant, and by far the best hostel we have stayed in since we have been in NZ.  The room was a twin, ensuite, with a double bed and a single bed....AND it only cost us $54 A Night!!!  Awesome!!!  Once we had got our stuff into a big pile in the room and argued over who was getting the double bed we set about the purchasing of some grub.  Seeing as beef is so cheap over here (you would think it would be Lamb but where they get a good price in export they charge you a lot.), we went for STEAK!  Once we had eaten we played a bit of dominos with a fellow traveler, Steve.  It was such a good hostel, the people were nice, helpful and it had all the facilities including free wi-fi and internet, but we were so tired we couldn't keep our eyes open and headed to bed at around 10ish for what would be some much need sleep!

Much Love

Joe x x x x x x x x

Crossing the North-South Divide....

For those of you who don't know NZ at all, it is made up of two Islands (North and South respectivly). The North Island (where we have been so far) has a 3/4s of the 4 million population even though it is the smaller island, leaving the South Island hardly scathed by a small human pressence of only 1 million people with a population density of only about 7 people per sq KM. Being into my geography this amazed me quite a bit, I mean when you think about it NZ and the UK are roughly the same size in land mass and yet there are twice as many people in London alone than there are in the whole of New Zealand. When you start to look at that in terms of the whole country, 70 million to 4 million it is a huge difference! And we are not exactly high up in terms of population when you look at china and india (1.3 billion and 1.1 billion respectivly). Anyway my geography ranting aside back to NZ.....The two Islands are divide by what is known as the "Cook Straight" - the stretch of water between them, it is well known for having some rough weather and being a very dynamically dangerous place to sail across. However the large ocean liner of a ship that we were boarding didn't look like it would have much problems and from where we were standing it look like the waters where carm.

We couldn't have been much more wrong! Once we got out of the shelter of the bay and into the strait the skys blackend and the sea began to demonstrate what a fuss it can kick up when it wants to. There were some seriously high waves! I am talking double my height, and strong enough to through this huge chunk of steel we were floating in side to side. It went from a huge Ocean liner to tin can! Me and Jak managed to aviod being sea sick whilst playing cards but a trip to the toilet quickly asured me that at least one person didn't! Not nice.

After a few hours of swaying we soon hit the shelter of the south Islands, we were nearing Picton and apon hear the cries of a few kids yelling dolphins, we shot up and became little kids ourselves. Rushing to the bow of the ship, we saw them majestically diving out of the water along side the boat. It was amazing but unfortunatly it was almost impossible to catch them on camara, but I have done a little sketch to demonstrate what it looked like....

I did not actually draw this picture and it is probably copy righted so any legal action that proceeds this post should be directed towards Jak Modena of the UK!

Well me being an idiot to one side, it really was amazing and just arriving on the south island proved to be quite a beautiful experience in itself. It was a very short coach journey to the hostel we were staying at that night (the coach driver was kind enough to drop us outside, Hail to the NZ Bus Driver!!). We had picked Atlantis to stay, not the hidden city but the hostel in picton (http://www.atlantishostel.co.nz/index.html - the website if you are interested). It was ok there, we wasted a few coins on some arcade driving game and the pool table before we decided to shop for some food. Because we had a lot of flour and eggs left from all the pancakes we had been making, we decided to make toad in the hole. After buying all of the ingreediants and then walking past a chip shop we also decided to get fish and chips for tea and cook that the next day! It was nothing in comparison to the British Fish and Chips but hey ho, at least we didn't have to cook. We didn't really do a lot other than sleep from then on so I will call it a day until next time!

Much love

Joe

x x x x x x x x x x

Quote - "The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing" If any of you get this without cheating then I will be shocked!

Caption comp -

Joe decided to go for the wind swept look for his ocean voyage.

The Rest of Wellington......

Ok so as you know I am a bit behind on posts and a day trek

 without a pc didn't help, however that is for another post. For now I am going to sum up the rest of our stay in Wellington. On the whole it didn't get much better. I am sure it is a nice place but with an over priced hostel we couldn't afford to do anything more than eat. Day 2 (20/05) brought little more than time spent blogging, drinking tea, doing a puzzle, drinking tea, watching history boys (Great Film), drinking tea, playing Table Football, Drinking tea, Playing Monopoly and drinking tea (also went to the toilet quite a lot for some reason?????).

Well with that whirlwind of excitement out of the way day 3 had to have a bit more promise, it did. Aside from a few repeats of tea and table football in the morning we went out to explore the town a bit more (at least the free bits lol). We found ourselves in Te Papa

 (http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/Tepapa/English/) which is the museam of NZ, I will be honest and say that parts where a bit boring but then I am not a huge museam fan....One cool bit was the giant squid exhibit and a video on the kakappo (WATCH THIS!!). After the museam we decided to make something of our evening and seeing as Wellington is famous for the movies we headed to the cinema. We went to see the new star trek movie which was actually quite impressive and definatly worth a watch, even if your not a big treky fan. Day 4 meant it was tim

e to make a move, after oversleeping slightly it was a rush to get out at the 10 am checkout time. A quick shower and breakfast later we handed our key in at 9:59 before wondering down the road to the ferry terminal to cross the cook strait....it was a short wait to board and from then on we were out of wellington so I will move onto the next post.

Ok so there has been a lack of comments so as encouragement I am going to ru

n a caption competition and quotes.

Caption Comp - 

Camping indoors was more fun than jak first thought!

Quote - 

"Welcome to Hollywood! What's your dream? Everybody comes here; this is Hollywood, land of dreams. Some dreams come true, some don't; but keep on dreamin' - this is Hollywood. Always time to dream, so keep on dreamin'."

Name the movie. 3, 2, 1, GO!

Going to Wellywood!

After the disaster that was Monday we didn't really have anything planned for today (18/05/09) other than getting the coach. The one thing I was dying to do however was talk to Sarah, I knew the internet cafe wouldn't open until 9:30 but my plan was to look for another one that might open at 9 am (making it 10 pm uk time). I got up at 7, text Sarah to see if she was planning to have an early night to recover from the moon walk and then jumped in the shower and have some breakfast. To my dismay I got a text to say that she was too tired, the word damn came to mind! It got things off to a bad start really, I mean it was bad enough not being able to see Sarah but when I can't even hear her voice......argh! Anyway getting away from the negatives we gradually packed up and put away the tent (avoiding the rain too!) before we left for town and the booking of a hostel for wellington before we got on the bus. After trawling through the lonely planet we settled on a zebera painted hostel called "Wellywood". For those of you who don't know, Wellington is like film central for NZ, home of the astemed director Peter Jackson it played a big part in a number of films including Lord of the Rings - hence Wellywood. So with that out the way we left and waited for the bus to arrive.

When it did, we got on and took the backseats again accept this time there was this quite weird guy there too. Me and Jak where having a discusion about the hostel we had booked and the distance from where the bus stop and this guy shhhhed us......I looked at him and he just closed his eyes?!?! I mean he was wearing this orange and black patterned jumper, a football (american) jersey over the top and then a dark green body warmer, I just stared in amazement. Here is where the word, ANYWAY comes in to play.......The rest of the journey sucked a bit, I felt a bit sick and had a head ache as well. Didn't work out too well for me. Anyway got to Wellington and it did turn out to be a short walk to the hostel and we headed got some food and hit the sack.......

Not much else to say and I can't overly excite you about the next few days either other than an awesome table football tourney!!!! (one hand on keeper for the win ay Sam!!)

Much Love missing you all, sorry I am a bit behind on posts again :-(.

Joe x x x x x x x x x x

What Do You Call a Fish with No Eye?? No Eyed-deer?

I don't know, I am still tired from waking up so early...plus I only caught this giant metal fish and that had eyes.Well eyes or no eyes fish is what we were after, at 5 am.........WHY!!! WWWHHHHYYYYY!!!!!!!!!

Well anyway crazy screams aside let me explain there origin (and I don't mean my vocal chords). So as planned we got up real early, just about managing to claw ourselves from the warmth of our sleeping bags, we collected everything together and began what promised to be a fairly long walk and turned out to be a really long walk. We went through town, onto the lake and the started walking to try and find this so called fish haven. An hour later we hit what was potentially our jetty, got our rods out, rigged them up and casted out onto the lake, strait onto a lack of fish and a lot of rocks. After catching both our lines on reads at lease 3 or 4 times each we decided to move further round. We found a slightly deeper section but it appeared just as fishless. About 2 hours after we had started fishing we gave up on the lake (or lack as I feel it should be better known). It was then another grulling walk back to the camp for breakfast before we headed out onto the river.

This is what we did, the river held a lot more promise we had a few spots to try, but aside from seeing 2 or 3 people unsucessfully kill themselves by jumping off a cliff (for some reason they had some sort of bungie cord attached to them, I mean that is never going to work) we had absolutely no excitement for quite sometime. Luckly the weather was holding off from pissing down on us for the most part accept for the odd sprinkle here and there.....

and then.....

....BAM....

.....Jak got his line caught on some bramble, and despite our best efforts the line snapped leaving us with just one lure attached to my rod....dissmal I know....but somehow.....somewhere.....there was a tiny bit of hope hanging on. So we moved up river to see what we could find. The first thing we bumped into was a sewage treatment plant, didn't catch any fish there! What seemed like a fishless decade later we were sitting on the river nearer to the town now. It was definatly the best spot that we had found, We even saw a couple of fish swimming around, I think, we may have just been delirious at this point so don't take my word for it, and yet, all that happened after almost an hour was for me to cast out repeatly and jak to fall asleep on a rock (he wasn't feeling too good, some sort of "de-fish-encicy" - thank you faye!).

It was way past time to give up now, we wondered into town handed our rods back with glum faces and then went to the internet cafe to play on games (an attempt to numb our minds from the pain of the day) before Jak "skyped" faye and I blogged away (poet didn't know it again?).

Another walk back in the rain left us in high spirts, although I think that was more the steak and beer we were about to consume rather than the rain lol.

Anyway, I guess we will just have to "keep on dreaming, keep on dreaming......".

Much love

Joe x x x x x x x x x

PS for those of you who don't know the answer to the joke should have been "FSH"......Get it!

Other brilliant nautical and fish related jokes include...

..."what did the fish who swam into the wall say? DAM!!" - Rebecca Pike, Laughter Enthusiast and BlackBerry Crew Member.

I am sure you can comment some more for me, or just call me an idiot for getting up at 5AM, WHY!!! WWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!@!?!@!!!*#^!?$##!?@^&!@#!$!

The One that Got Away...and the others that just didn't bite at all.

Sunday started well, and by well I mean with pancakes for breakfast. I thought about Sarah a lot today because I knew that she was doing the moon walk over night while I was awake, and after the poor excuse for a phone call the night before I had her on my mind even more than normal. That said once we actually got up and wondered in to town to find something to do it was easier to find distractions. The idea was to do a bit of shopping, find out about the possiblity of doing some more fishing after our sucess in the bay. We asked at reception and we where the best place to hire might be and Tony (other half of Kim, in terms of marridge and manager) told us that the best place to go would be greenstone. We enquired and sure enough after investigation it turned at to be the cheapest. The problem with taupo is that there are a lot of restrcitions when it comes to fishing for example you are only alowed to spin fish the lake and one of it's tributaries where as you can fly fish in the whole area, and you are only allowed to use lures and no bait. Still we decided that if we hit the peak fishing times of dusk and dawn we were bowned to land ourselves dinner and ever the enthusiasts some big trout as well.

So we finished up our shopping popped into the internet cafe to kill some time and hired the rods out for 24 hrs starting at 4 pm. We quickly marched back up to camp cooked ourselves some pasta and venison (deer) sausages, which was pretty nice, packed a bag and headed out around 5-5:15 ish. It was a 20 min walk to where we were fishing and the light was already begining to fade. By the time we got there it would have been great to cast strait off I imagen but we had to rig our rods (for the first time ever) and even though it only took us 20 mins or so it was pretty much dark and we couldn't see our lines to keep them tight. With our head torches on we decided to prevail for a while. This seemed to pay off, when Jak hooked something that wasn't a rock and attempted to pull it in. We were casting off the rocks which didn't make life easy for us, I think his line must have been rubbing on the rocks as well as being pulled by some big ass fish! I was a bit doubtful as to whether or not we had a big fish or a big rod so we tried letting the line run, and it did just that. A good 15/20 mins later and we were still trying to pull the thing in. Jak was working up a sweat and then..............out of no where.......

......BAM.....

....The line snapped, no fish and a lost lure. It was very frustraiting, after a few more casts and not as much as a nibble we decided to head in before we fell in. Tired, cold and fishless we started the walk back. "Well that's fishing" we said. We decided to get up early the next day when we would be sure to catch with the intel of a jety on the lake that promised fish for those who got there early enough. "6 am, no 5:30, no 5 am, yeah 5 am sounds good" (how 5 am ever sounds good I don't know.). Anyway we had a cheese toastie (this one goes out to Lloyd) and a beer before hitting the sack ready for the day to come.

What will tomorrow bring you ask???? So did we!?!?

tune in next to find out.

Going South - Arriving at Taupo

It was yet another early start to catch the bus, up at quater to 6 on a Saturday (wouldn't be seen dead doing that in the UK lol). Some last minute packing and check and being grateful for free food from my Auntie (we love you even more now!). My Uncle Pete then gave us a lift to the bus station (Thank You!) and we waited to get into Auland. We got there at about 7:45 (I think) for a 8:15 bus which gave us enough time to brush our teeth in the harbour toilets just across the road. Once we were on the bus it was another 6 or so hours to Taupo with not much other than a snooze and some cards happening on the bus (edge of the seat stuff right?).....

Anyway moving on (literally) We got dropped off right outside the iSite in Taupo and asked about places to camp (it was time to test the tent). The nearest one was about a half hour walk from the middle of town but had really good facilities including a kitchin, lounge/games room and a hot pool!! It was not a pleasent walk with our packs weighing over 20kg easily and the ground being pretty wet. After a little tiff about which route would be quickest it took us just over half an hour to walk into reception where a really lovely lady called Kim and her dog, Poppy, where waiting to welcome us. She actually knocked down the price from $18 to $16 for us as well with me doing very little other than saying hmmmmmmmm......$18 per person per night for 3 nights is........... After playing with the very cute dog we pitched up on pretty dry ground and got all our stuff sorted in the tent. There was acres of space inside and we managed to get set up pretty quickly, it was then strait to the thermal pool! It was gorgeous and really helped with the aches of carrying a big bag around. After we had litely boiled ourselves it was off to the showers, so it was turning out a good start to the day.

Once we were dressed and sorted we decided to have an early tea, the shepards pie my Auntie had given us, even though we microwaved it, it still went down a treat. We decided to go into town and find an internet cafe at around 4 or 5. The clouds quickly turned from just looking threaterning to spitting. We found a cool little internet cafe which even had a $2.40 happy hour from 5 till 7. We did very little in the way of what was supposed to be a blogging session and played on some of the games available instead....woops. At around half 7 we made a few calls to home (8:30 am UK time). I only got to talk to Sarah for a few minutes because we were running out of credit on skype, it really really SUCKED, and actually got me on a bit of a downer. I mean I wanted to have a proper chat with her, about the moon walk and all the stuff I had done but basically all I got in was, "Hi, I love you, Bye". So I was in a bit of a crappy mood after that (sorry Jak). But on the upside I did get to chat to my mun and dad which was nice (hope your weekend away in belgium was nice?). Once we had finished, not blogging lol, it was time to face the very wet walk back to camp. I have to tell you the rain did not improve the walk even if we didn't have packs (seemed like a bit of pathetic fallacy to me - imitation of emotions in the surroundings ie feel rubbish, weather is rubbish). Still our early dinner tacktic had left us hungry so we ordered Pizza and then decided to run through the rain for 15 mins to go and get it. It was kind of worth it because it filled a gap even if we did get a bit wet the rain stopped for the walk back so that improved things a bit.

Back to camp, a few beers and a game or two of cards before it was back to bed.Well not the best day but it was bound to happen in a 6 week long trip and things are fine now, so all good I guess!

Much love another post coming soon, I am aiming to be up to date over the next few days.

Much love

Joe x x x x x x x