A week from a tearful farewell to Steve and Elisabeth and we’re back out to the airport to collect Dave and Jodie. Awesome.
Learning our camp ground error from the trip with the folks we headed up the east coast to a DOC site knowing only that it was somewhere off the highway between Mangawhai and Ruakaka. We finally stumbled across it based in Uretiti, a town name providing great mirth and killer banter from our fellow Brits.
Brother in law Ben had lent us his wagon despite our previous track record with borrowing people’s cars and breaking them. (seriously, 3 other cars had not been so lucky) Brother in laws are great, they’re like brothers but better cause they still help you and yet never pick on you. I think I have a particularly good one.
We scoped the site and found an awesome pitch, secluded, flat, near a tap, a loo and beside a massive pine tree providing much needed shade. I had to put this pic in below, we started pitching at the same time and 20 minutes later Dave and Jodie were still….um…pitching, or rather, looking at the tent, looking at the poles, looking at each other, looking at the tent….you get the gist.
Pete took over and Camp Uretiti was made. No… Uretiti.
As the rain clouds began to blow over we headed over the dunes to the beach and were greeted by heaven. For the next four days we didn’t budge.
And it was here that we spent Pete’s 28th Birthday. We began the day with Pete’s favourite breakfast - eggs benedict, complete with hollandaise and bacon (no mean feat on a couple of mini bunsens). Surfing was the order of the day for Pete and while Dave, Jodie and I lay back on the dunes with our books he bobbed about out in the ocean watching baby rollers hit the shore while trying desperately not to make eye contact with the nudist swimmers.
We spent days on the beach and evenings drinking homebrew, stumbling through the dark to the loo and generally putting the world to right. Life doesn’t get better than this.
Day three and we took a drive further in land to check out a hike through farmland to caves filled with stalagmites. (this is how you spell stalagmites, I looked it up, and all these years you’ve been saying stalagnites eh?)
On the way we were lured by a sign saying ‘waterfall’ and turned off down the metal road. About halfway down and Pete and I started getting a strong sense of deja vu. When we finally drew up to the waterfall track we realised that we’d been lured by this very same sign before. Good job tourism New Zealand.
We’d barely reached the base of the falls and Pete was down to his shorts. The water was icy and he plunged in like it was a hot bath. I tried to play my ‘freak em out with eels’ stories but Pete’s brazenness had ruined any chance I had and Dave was in minutes behind him.
Pete ever the supportive mate pissed himself laughing as Dave lamaze breathed his way across the pool toward the base of the falls.
Eventually we left our Uretiti Oasis and headed back to Auckland to celebrate my 30th, yep, 30th, but that’s another blog.
We took a day trip down to Rotorua, cause you just gotta show foreigners Rotorua. I wasn’t super excited about the trip as we’d been there just recently with the olds but that was until we came across this.
This thing in the pic above? was the best contraption I have ever been on. It made your stomach bottom out and your eyeballs roll around in your head searching in desperation for a steady horizon. It was like being on a roller coaster…only better and it was so simple. Just a curved vertical bar and a platform for your feet and the whole thing swung round like a spinning top. I have never laughed so much in my life.
Pete and I love Adventure Parks and in all honesty there’s not a single ride in them that gives me the willies and this, this poley, spinny thing? as soon as you got on it you felt so mixed up it was all you could do to hold on for dear life. It was kind of like spinning with your head on a broom handle and then trying to walk along a cliff edge.
Then it was off to the luge.
Pete had something to prove as the first time we came to Rots I raced him down three tracks and won every time. In the year we’ve now spent in NZ he’s a changed man, racing a go kart down a mountain? pah, like swotting at flies to Pete. Brakes? who needs brakes, I didn’t stand a chance. A new bench mark has been set.
Dave exercised a little more caution, letting loose on the strips and breaking heavily on the bends. Jodie, well Jodie was different, lets just say there was a enough time at the bottom waiting for Jodie for us to decant the race and smoke a cigarette.
Coming back up on the luge chairlift.
Posing with luge helmets: Pete’s doing an Evel Knievil pose while I fancy myself as a Formula One Champ, Jodie’s got the hot lady that drops the flags to start the race pose.
Guess what’s got our attention?
Ooh, mud burp.
This picture is called. I AM DAVE.
And like all good kiwi adventures, we ended this one in the pub, watching the …um, Superbowl.
The morning after and Dave and Jodie flew out to a cyclone damaged Fiji. It had been so good to have them here and is nice to think they’ll be back in New Zealand again one day soon.
Best of all the car survived, ahem… minus three hub caps.
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