Part 2
Auckland on bonfire night was a bit of a washout, it was like a poor mans Baghdad, a few rockets here a few bangs there but no real dramatic explosions. I found myself wandering around Borders!…
..mainly because I could, and it was better than sitting in the backpacker kitchen.
Thus follows a hypocritical rant about (many/most) young people who travel.
There are only 18 people who are traveling around the world at present. In my experience it’s like the Truman show, they keep reappearing as if they’re actors.

*1 There are 12 Germans, mostly they wear Jack Wolfskin gear and have a backpack bigger than Poland, In general they are good company and have familiar names like Christopher or Julia.

*2 There is a lone Frenchman, A complete nutcase who stands in the backpacker kitchen warming up hot chocolate in the microwave and eating dry cornflakes. Everything has a relation to France (where they do it better.)

*3 A trio of Brits. These are the annoying bastards…He wears Abercrombie and Fitch T- shirts, has a perma tan, wears ray ban wayfarers, and describes everything (in his middle England accent) as aaaaaaammazing..his name tends to be Dan, Ben, Brad or Si.
The other guy of the group used to work in an accountancy firm says ‘kind of’ and “ace” far too much and goes out with the third person of the bunch who he met in Southeast Asia.
Amelia has spent 3months in Thailand where she achieved SOOOO much it was UNNNNreal… man.

*4 TSAF…Two Single American Females, they sound like a handy proposition to a single man on the move..far from it. They are louder than anybody in the whole room, by the colour of them they look like they have had an afternoon off in Hiroshima. Moreover, they repeatedly say they have “DONE” countries.
“Hay we’ve sooo ‘done’ Australia”,
Primarily because they’ve seen a kangaroo, drunk Fosters and got sunburned.. in short twats.

The long and short of this episode is this.. I’m changing my name! My Dad a few years back got sick of being called Dave as ‘Dave’s’ always seem to be the perennial comedy prat or boring thick anti hero. Dan is becoming much of the same, an annoying snowboarding ace dude that has done everything you would love to do and killed a shark with his bare hands…he works in marketing. And listens to music you will never have heard of, cos your not cool enough bro!
A (Dan) introduced me the other night to his AAAAAAAMazing European friends.
He said
“This is aaanother…
(Rolls eyes, slight yawn..annoying) …Dan he’s a fellow countryman, but don’t worry, we don’t all speak like him, har!
What an abominable fucker,
NOW I realise why we English are generally despised the world over. It’s because the only thing we currently export are Dan’s, Matt’s, Brad’s, Bryony’s and Carling lager. Our mainstream music is fronted with shitheads like Chris Martin and Calvin Harris and our Sports teams are either overpaid shelf stackers or quintessential toffs.
Its time to redress the balance, here is my new introduction and how I hope the ensuing conversation will go..
“Hello there!”(Very clear, not hi, etc)
“I’m Daniel from Yorkshire.”
“Oh great, nice to meet you, where is that? It sounds familiar, is it near Newfoundland?”
“Well you may not have heard or seen this area on the map because it’s a republic inside England.”
“Ah ok I see. Its not on the BBC weather map, right?”
“No, no we were completely obliterated from all media forms, including the weather, after the last series of Heartbeat.”
“Ok!..err..Heartbeat I’ve not seen that”
“It was a series about a group of Doctors that performed emergency open heart surgery, high on the Yorkshire moors.”
“like flying doctors?”
“similar, only these doctors were part of a terrorist and pro ‘Freedom Yorkshire’ organisation known as GreenGrass. They were trying to save fallen comrades…It was fascinating.”
“It sounds it, please sit down and tell me more… my name’s Sarah, I only drink Tetley’s, Landlord , Guinness or good malt whisky, but you can’t buy it in New Zealand . What do you drink? I’ll get these. I’ve just won the lottery.”

Dreamland maybe, but it’s not so far from the truth. Moreover on the plus side they won’t expect me to sound like Hugh Grant or say: amazing, kind of or brill, after every other word…its foolproof.
After being kicked out of Borders, I went to cheer myself up at a comedy club and hoped for a giggle! The acts were certainly varied and pretty good, and all did well considering the small crowd. The laughs went on into the small hours and after a crap week it was possibly the best way to wrap it up.

Between a sock and a hard place.

Part 1
This week has been a bit shit. There I’ve said it.
There are no two ways about it, sometimes in life things roll along and don’t hit the extremes, sometimes however terrible things happen and great things occur. This week it has been the turn of the former. It was my intention to end a week of solitude with a bit of sightseeing, I use that word lightly. What I mean is that I had a road trip in mind, a bit of kiwiana if you will. I had the car packed, topped up with fluid, and the route sorted. Thomas Hardy would probably describe this particulary fine morning as;
“an egg laying day in May.”
Well I would, but it’s November over here, and I’ve still not got my head round the fact that it’s spring! To cut a long drawn out tale short, 17km from my first destination the arse fell out of the car…Literally. With a capital A. The engine had completely seized, I was going nowhere, well actually I’d already arrived in..nowhere. Fortunately,
(As they like to do in New Zealand,) some guys were digging up a perfectly fine piece of road quite nearby, and were able to tow me to a decent stopping point. I proceeded to ring the garage for a tow truck…Just as the nearby farmer released about 20,000, bloody sheep. You can imagine the din.
“Hello there sir could you tell me your exact location please”
“Well I’m near…”
“Are you on a farm or something I can hear..”
“NO NO I’ve actually broken down right outside an outdoor cinema, which is showing a re run of ‘Wallace and Gromit’s A Close Shave’, that’s the racket you can hear”
“Oh well that must be near to...let’s see..”
“Of course I’m near a bastard sheep farm I’m in fucking New Zealand!”
Is how the conversation should have gone, instead I ummed and arrd for ten minutes until she knew where to send the tow truck. That hiccup certainly put my plans on hold, but if that was the start of the week, there was more to come. Fortunately I had helped out on a farm in Kerikeri the week before and the owner gladly put me up for a few nights, what’s more the volunteers that had taken over from me, were still there, and seeing my plight duly rolled out the beers. In fact, the next day they postponed their plans to run me into town, we did a few things and returned to the car only to find it broken into, and Christopher’s camera stolen.
I felt like a walking bad luck charm, a two and a bit leafed clover. A kind of anti-Midas, anything I touched got the plague or turned into Noel Edmonds. It was terrible, all I can say was that in the aftermath the real Kiwi spirit came out, the shopkeeper where the car was parked, offered his car to use as a replacement, during the window repairs. A passer by even offered to take everyone out for the day. It certainly helped make an awful situation easier to swallow, we got back….
and got pissed.
The beer was still fresh in my mind the next morning when I was told the car would cost 900NZ to fix, depressed I accepted the terms and booked a bus to continue my travel itinerary. I had gained a lift as far as Auckland and reluctantly booked a night in a backpackers, and another bus ride south to my next stop in Hastings. Ah well, it had been a crappy week but I was in a relatively sunny Auckland for bonfire night, it could have been worse.