Rotorua (Blue Lake), originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

I can only assume that this weather is some kind of cosmic joke. A meteorological slap down to my electronic worship of ceaseless blue sky images plastered all over the flickr homepage. We reluctantly left Auckland under sunny skies clothed only in shorts and sun cream, arriving back at Heathrow similarly dressed, but much colder.

A brief prod of the soft news underbelly – poked by a refreshing fast and free Internet connection – revealed that England is still rubbish and sport but that hardly mattered since the entire island was about to be carted off to the North Pole by a bastard winter storm.

Such is the insanity of long haul that a mere 30 hours separates the lingering end of a long, hot summer and having your face ripped off by icy rain. My first response to all this sudden weather was to layer myself in ever more fleecy clothes, my second was to start peeling which just shows the human body is clearly fooled by aeroplanes.

In more ways than one. My jetlag is on the irritating side of properly funny with bipolar perambulations between madly wide awake at 4am and falling asleep at my desk just after lunch. To be honest, no one noticed much difference other than I Was harder to wake. The rest of the family seem to have conveniently ignored that it’s 4am in the morning most of the time, except for little Random who is suffering a few head/food interfaces.

Most of the last week – before returning to the Devil’s weather experiments – was spent idly watching the sun climb over a wave-capped pacific from the vantage point of around 100 yards. The limit of my ambition were frequent visits to the double height beer fridge and watching the kids being dragged under by the rip tides.

To say this was mildly relaxing is a little like wondering if setting your trousers on fire would be slightly distracting. The whole Beach/Bach house thing would not work well in – say – Cleethorpes, but it is failure proof in a land of deserted beaches, jaw dropping scenery, cooling sea breezes and an endless array of beer and cake.

But while the weather has been busy, my solicitor has not. At this rate of progress, we will move in just before the kids leave home or this jetlag has finally worn off. It is, however, providing an excuse to put back my fitness kick for another couple of days as CLIC-24 hurtles ever closer.

21 days with 2 riding bikes and 20 quaffing calories in many interesting and varied ways added only 3lbs** to the svelteness of Al. But I appear to have grown breasts, so it’s tea instead of beer and the drudgery of sorting a 1000 photos assuming I can stay awake that long.

Oh, and to any of you kind hearted sods that sent me one of a thousand emails, I accidentally deleted the whole lot ten minutes ago. You know where to find me, I’ll still be asleep at my desk.

* Salad you see. Refer to last paragraph for more. I’ve always found jokes are so much better appreciated if you need to explain them.

** I refuse to go metric. I was born before 1971 and therefore exempt.

Rock Colours, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

Hello from Auckland and goodbye to the funky bus. It’s been a faithful servant for 2,500 kilometres – over innumerable mountain passes, through hundreds of one horse towns**, and abandoned at every more raffish pavement angles. We’re going to miss it like an amusing but hyperactive relative. Two weeks cooped up with a similar amount of children in eighteen feet of mobile home has been a fantastic experience. But we’re ready to give it back before localised parental volcanic action will mirror that of these great islands.

Living with the motorhome is, – of course – living in it, and for all the positive experiences, there are a number of issues worth sharing. It’s only when you’ve been dispatched alone on some emergency shopping expedition that it becomes apparent how bloody big it is. Driving it is fine, reversing it less so without a willing helper or a man with a red flag.

But let us turn the eye of critique to the interior. For example take the ladder which acts as the gateway to Lucifer’a portal – or the over cab bedroom as labelled by traditionalists. It is a triumph of isolationist design working perfectly to shuttle children up and down into the roof space, while blocking off access to the indoor bog.

Well if you are more than about 6 inches wide which- ahem – at least one of us is. The resultant gap is, in fact, the exact width of my body minus the much loved wedding vegetables. So any attempted night-time entry is rewarded with an eye watering scrotal injury from the razor sharp door fittings.

However, the gas fired hob was always functional if a little slow. In fact, it would be quicker to travel back in time to pre-history and discover fire, rather than waiting for the kettle to boil in real time. The grill bucked this trend by carbonising toast in the nanosecond between the states of virgin bread and on fire***.

And the fly-screen lacks a certain winged bitey blocking efficacy. In truth the gap between door and van was such that anything in the bird family from a pterodactyl down would fly in unobstructed on a well known trade route to my tender parts****. At night, many of these blood bloated parasites would get trapped under the duvet and attempt to tunnel out through my ankle.

Joining up the multitude of throbbing bites in a dot to dot style would spell “scratch me now”and boy did we want to. Eventually this urge became too strong to ignore, generally during a dull spell of distance driving. Which was slightly perturbing as your spouse would suddenly disappear from view, except for a nonchalant finger resting lightly on the steering wheel.

The rest of her would be under the dashboard desperately scratching at the never ending itch. And that’s generally fine due to the total lack of traffic but occasionally a orgasmic ahhhhh would be firmly interrupted with a shriek of “CLIFF AHEAD” from the passenger seat.

Talking of gaps as we are, the floor to ceiling distance between Cab and Slab is around 5 feet. I am 6 feet, or at least I was. I am gradually being whittled down through attritional smacks round the back of the head. Over the last two weeks, my retreating summit has been glacially eroded to 5ft 7, and all my hair is falling out. Although the latter has been going on for some time, based on some recent and disturbing photo evidence.

As observed in an earlier post, there are certain mechanical traits which smack of genius including an electrical system which operates on both 12v and 240v without exploding during the transition between the two, and a complex two tank water system which somehow fails to irrigate the road in your direction of travel. But some quick work with a calculator establishes that three tons of ventilated brick – driven mostly on full throttle – manages nearly 23 miles to the gallon. That’s not genius, that’s bloody magic.

Tomorrow we’re trading in the bus for a normal family sized car. This strange and small vehicle will transport us to the Coromandel where most of the family will spend in different rooms adjusting to a non motorised house. Except for this one who’ll be substituting “lying on a beachâ” with “ragging round a mountain bike trail”

Less than a week left. Tell me the UK has magically become warm, clean, inviting and deficient of about fifty million people.

* Random had transported some illegal hair termites into the country. Which means someone in her class has some explaining to do.

** Although in most cases, the horse had died of boredom.

*** This is known in academic circles as Schroedinger’s Crumpet

**** This did solve the nocturnal problem with needing a wee. I’m sure you can work it out.

Milford Sound, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

The hedgehog truck has finally reached the East coast on our last full day in the South Island. We’ve just spent a couple of hours being taught how to swim by friendly seals. Although since a fur seal spends 90{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of it’s life sunbathing, fighting and shagging, there was also much comedy bobbing about in buoyant wetsuits waiting for them to go seaborne.

And because I am sure you really aren’t interested in what we did on our holidays, I am instead going to talk about the hierarchy of camper vans. But before that, it is worth explaining that Carol and I are just about mountain’d out. As we crested yet another spectacular mountain pass sheltering fathoms of perfectly formed azure lakes, glances were exchanged and a quiet nod confirmed that’d just about do, thanks.

Because when the superlative barrel is well and truly scraped and a million electrons slaved to capture the picture perfect*, a certain blase replaces the ground state of awe and wide mouthed pointing. When we’re stuck in traffic on a shitty late winter’s day back in the UK, we;ll laugh about that. Probably.

Anyway, Vans. On the South Island, every third vehicle is a truck** which- as they perambulate wildly at almost no speed – must really piss off the locals. About three companies corner a hugely profitable market with the rest forced to scrap it out with beaten up cheap vans or niche offerings.

I must admit to a spot of motor-home envy during the trip, a worthwhile discourse to be properly covered in a later post. Our happy bus is a big diesel Merc with the standard slabby body kit bolted on. The engine is well into its’ third century of kilometres and the interior design is only a couple of woodchip walls away from the whole seventies experience.

Continue reading “Vans, tans and plans” →

Lake Pukaki, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

As the famous beverage advert almost goes. A week has already passed in a blur of stunning scenery, epic mountain passes and a thousand comedy moments in the big sleeping truck. Somewhere between high speed jetboating, more relaxed boat trips through fiords, glow worm caves and innumerable photo stops we’ve covered a thousand kilometres on the South Island.

Now we’re going to kick back a bit as it has become obvious that three weeks doesn’t even scratch the surface of this fantastic country. We’d like to spend less time on the tourist trail and a little more time exploring. Our biggest regret so far is not pushing on one night to stay at the side of Lake Gunn on the road to Milford Sound.

The whole camper van experience has been great fun. It works fantastically well with kids and while the big camp sites are cheap, clean and convenient, being totally self sufficient provides the perfect opportunity to just park up in a DoC rural site and enjoy the solitude. Except for the kids of course who seem to have embraced the whole experience with the kind of cheery noncholance that we could all do with a bit more of.

We’ve less than a week left on the South Island and have started to cull our list of things to do. And that leaves plenty of time to head out to the Franz Josef Glacier, dive into the hot springs at Hamner and wallow around with dolphins in the sea at Kaikora.

Heading over to the North Island, I’m really looking forward to the Te Papa Mauri museam in Wellington. The kids are looking forward to it as well, as I’ve promised them they can return to splashing and giggling in return for looking intelligent and interested in some history for an hour or so.

There are so many things we’re not going to have time to do, it seems I’ll need to find a grandmother to sell or rent out hides for “cabbage watching” so we can come back. Right now, with the warmth of the summer and the New Zealand people, this seems like the best place in the world to be 🙂

No it’s a flying drill. After the first flight ended shortly after take off – and some twenty feet up a tree – Carol felt that maybe, until a proper adult was present, I should curb my enthusiasm to smash it up again.

But always ready with excuses for why things cannot be my fault, I pointed out that the tail-plane exhibited fifteen degrees of lateral movement, which was in no way controlled by the electronic servos. Although the reason for this sorry state of affairs was a multi-bottled Cava assault on the build from the man with legendary MTB mechanical skills.

Ahem. Er. Moving swiftly on…

After restoring flying status, by exhausting the spares box and bandaging the accident damage with duct tape, we walked over to a field with significantly less in the way of spikey trees. I couldn’t help but be faintly embarrassed that I’d broken the plane, after a fifteen second inaugural flight, not by stuffing it into a tree but by wrestling it out from twenty feet up. Woody bruises and a broken propeller narrated our failure to catch it as it fell.

An yet, the plane is festooned with anti-crash technology. Which is good because – assuming the MTB crossover persists – I have crash technology essentially burned in from birth. However the super clever, sensor driven anti dive algorithm doesn’t actually operate below about a hundred feet.

Now I’ve not flown planes much, but most crashing I’ve ever been involved with tends to happen closer to ground level. And while the manual does trumpet the plane’s forgiving characteristics and apparent effortless flying capabilities, it does go on to strongly recommend your first flight is taken under the wing of someone with an unhealthy obsession of all things miniature fly-ee.

A quick probe into the forums suggest these people are slightly more geeky and even more self obsessed than Mountain Bikers. I honestly thought such a thing was not possible on a planet colonised by humans. Maybe – I’ve occasionally pondered – there is some alien race who are as single minded as a needle and twice as obsessive.

But no, these people are all around you. And they have committees and rules and Gala days. And beards. Lots and lots of beards.

The second flight was great and it went on for ages. The plane was either disappearing over a far horizon or pinging back like a boomerang with a vendetta. Much comedy over-controlling pitched and yawed us back over the field and a landing – that actually made use of the wheels – was affected. Affected by tufty grass and poor skills so the plane had an arse up repose, but amazingly nothing was broken. Except, maybe, my nerve

Flushed with success, of we went again and things went bad almost from the start. As the wind strengthened, my tenuous control weakened and an inevitable nose down furrowing crash followed shortly after. Second prop broke, game over.

But because the company that makes the plane secretly admits that all the anti crash stuff is nothing more than marketing guff, consumerable spares are cheap and readily available. A bit like ISIS bottom brackets except for the cheap part.

Still, this plane is currently costing me about 2 quid a minute to run. Which happily upgrades my Mountain Bikes to a status of “outstanding value per mile”

Build. Try. Crash. Grin. Flash cash to repair. Repeat until broke. Great hobby, sound familiar at all? 🙂