Month: June 2008

Our last full day in New Zealand, and what better way to sign off our stay in New Zealand than jumping off something. However, the only thing you can jump off also happens to be the tallest structure in the southern hemisphere, the Auckland Skytower, standing at about a third of a kilometre tall. Donning a rather fetching jumpsuit and stepping into the familiar harness I was standing in the lift with a glass bottom watching the floor disappear beneath me, trying not to think about the fact that I’ll need to somehow convince my legs to throw me off. In mere seconds (it was a quiet day and a slick operation they run) I was outside, standing on a ledge 192 metres above the ground, clammy hands gripping on to the rail, coming close to hitting the abort button in my head. But no, must do this one last jump. Waving to the camera with what can only be described as pure apprehension, I moved to hang on to the final two rails before preparing to let go, and passed on the invite to look down. A short countdown and somehow my hands let go of the rail, moving quickly to grab the harness for an odd sense of safety. Hang on a minute, this is actually fun! After a few seconds of hanging around, the wind started whistling past my ears, and the ground started moving up. The fall felt quite relaxed, even though moving toward the ground at 85km/h the harness still pulled back so it wasn’t like a freefall. 12 seconds later and it was all over, would I like another go for free as it was so quiet? Damn right!
P.S. Cat – That jump was a cracker, right?! It’s so easy to imagine you calm-faced jumping off that ledge, in fact did you run off? 😉

The end of an era has come: 5 months, 3 vans, 2 countries, and 22,000Km on 5 islands and our campervanning days are over, for now. To say we’ve had fun is an understatement, and whilst we can’t deny there’s been times we wished to have more than a few cubic metres space to live in, I’m sure we’ll do it again sometime.
With our belongings nearly shoehorned back into our rucksacks we checked into the Auckland hostel and marvelled at the space afforded to us, and the fact that we didn’t need to convert the bed each night.

I could be wrong, but it appears that Papamoa is the world centre for Blokarting, the sport where a sail is attached to three wheels and the wind does the rest. All was going well until we sat in the kart all prepped and ready to go when the wind died down to a whisper. Fair play to the two guys running the place who were determined to get us going and pushed the karts in the hope that the wind would carry us on. The furthest I managed to get was one complete lap before slowly grinding to a halt, and no amount of me pushing would get the kart going on it’s own. I’m still not convinced how you get it to go into the wind, but I’d definitely like to try it again on a windier day.

Sounds odd, having a day off when you’re on holiday, but with our stomachs complaining due to a probably dodgy curry (that does not bode well for the India visit!) we were not up to much.
Caroline did manage a half day visit to Kelly’s school whilst I found some waterfalls with no water, but in the afternoon there was nothing for it but to enter the dark sanctum of the cinema and veg out to Indiana Jones, ah bliss…

The good thing about staying with the locals is that you get to go to the good places you’d otherwise miss. Paul took us out to the gentle slopes at the back of Rotorua for a quick mountain bike, and despite Caroline’s previous experiences, she still came along. The whole of the forest is a maze of tracks to be explored, and are designed for bikers with gentle slopes along with weaving downhills and jumps to test your balance. The bike’s lack of toe clips meant the bike and I parted company on one jump, gravity brought us back together with a bump though. Apart from that I only came off once, the pedal clipping a log and throwing me off onto the soft forest floor – haven’t had that much fun on a bike since my school days. Caroline chose to skip those crazy downhills, maybe she has really retired now, or is just more cautious when I say “fun mountain biking”…