And the travels continue. Wrapping up the North Island.

The last week or so has offered a slight break from bush living and a reintroduction to the civilized world. We have been welcomed into the homes of friends, once again experienced the sensation of a hot shower (gasp!), and been immersed in the beautifully unique, modern, and artistic urban culture of Wellington. But, it is of course just a temporary break as we will be venturing into the truly wild and vast landscapes of the South Island in the coming days.

We said goodbye to our English friends Kit and Rich (and their van Frank) on one of our last days in Hawke's Bay. They were in a bit of a rush to make it down to Wellington (the capital of New Zealand, located on the very southern tip of the North Island) for their scheduled ferry to the South Island. To be honest, I was anxious to get to Wellington as well. Other than Auckland, every city we've stopped in has ranged from small to very small and I was looking forward to change. However, we agreed to hold out a bit longer and make sure we took in the remaining sights before reaching what would be our final stop of the North Island.

One of these sights was Havlock North (oddly there is no Havlock South), arguably one of the top wine regions of New Zealand. A cheap bottle here tastes like something twice it's price. And the expensive ones... well I wouldn't know with my backpacker budget, but I'd be willing to bet they're pretty good too. Wine is nice, but after 4 weeks of cold "showers", if they could even be called that, a real hot shower is even better. And, we got just that at Jess's house in Havlock North. Jess is a friend of Julia. They originally met in a hostel in Melbourne, Australia, and coincidentally, they ran into each other at a cafe while we were in Hawke's Bay. She showed us a night on the town of Havlock North, offered us hot showers, and let us do some laundry and cooking. Things that I had at one point thought of as a hassle, but now stick out as highlights of the week. The town of Havlock North is also the wealthiest per capita of New Zealand. It was obvious by the bleached blonde fifty something women sipping wine at small tables along the main strip. It was also apparent in the social atmosphere of the pubs. There was plenty of chat, but it remained in small tight cliques that nobody dared venture from besides the quick stuck-up jealous glances from one girl to another. Not a bad area, but you'll probably enjoy it more by driving along the rolling hills of the wine country and spending the evening at Ocean Beach as we did the second night there.

Our last destination before going to Wellington was the Kapiti Coast. On the way there, I was in charge of navigating. While I managed well for the most part, the music and scenery proved too distracting and there was this one slight turn we missed. Luckily I caught the mistake... an hour later. (shhh... Susi and I never told Julia who was reading a book in the back at the time. She has a tendency to get upset easily so we figured it best she remained out of the loop on that one). Anyways, the mistake turned out to be quite nice as it forced us to cross through this very narrow one lane (you pull over for oncoming traffic) road through misty mountains covered in rainforest. These are the same misty green mountains shown briefly during the introduction to Lord of the Rings. Other than the constant fear that I was about to die the drive and views through the area were incredible. Mental Image - picture this: A VERY narrow one way road filled with blind, hairpin corners, wet roads from the recent rain, and your driver is a blonde german girl with a lead foot, 3 weeks of left hand driving experience, and 2 years lifetime driving experience, all the while carelessly bobbing her head back and forth to the blaring sounds of some overly energetic spanish music.

As you may have guessed, we did fortunately survive and arrived at our destination, the Kapiti Coast. This coastline is a long stretch of Tasman beach that looks out upon an island called -guess what-... Kapiti Island. The island itself looks about the size of Catalina Island, only its much closer to shore, just 15 minutes by boat. The island is a protected bird refuge. Birds that are rare or even extinct on the mainland of New Zealand flourish in the island sancturary, likely due in part to the daily limit of visitors, allowing only 50 people to step foot on the island per day. Because of this, the lonely planet guide reccommends reserving a trip to the island 1 month in advance for weekday trips and 2 months for weekends... of course we didn't read this until the day we arrived, it was a weekend as well. :( But, what's better than seeing rare birdlife upclose? Another hot shower! This time, it was at the beachfront house of Su and Troy, both artists in the film industry. Su creates sculptures for scenese in movies, movie priemeres, and all sorts of industry conventions and shows. Troy's work is similar, but he specializes in scenic sculptures and painting, basically enhancing scenes to look better than they would have looked naturally. They've both worked in the industry for around 20 years and have had a hand in a number of big budget mainstream titles.

The first night we stayed at their house Troy showed us some video he recorded documenting his and Su's latest work together on a film by director Roland Emmerick, known for his movies of epic scale such as Independence Day. It was inspiring to see on video the place they called their 'office' for the 3 months of work they did for the film near Queenstown on the South Island. They woke up each day at 5:00am for the rugged cliff-hugging drive to these surreal mountain top views of the sun rising in a brilliant display of colors, cloud formations, and a layer of fog that sometimes looked like water turning the tips of mountains above into little islands. Every day was its own individual artistic display. Su and Troy were great hosts and made it clear that it was very important to them that we feel completely at home and welcome in their house. They made delicious meals of pasta with a spicy organic sauce made from scratch with a sweet and tangy side salad, pancakes bacon and grilled banana halves in the morning, and following a long leisurely day on the beach behind their house we had sauteed shrimp for an appetizer before feasting on lamb, veges, and sweet potato. All enjoyed from the second floor deck looking out to the beach and Kapiti Island. For a brief moment I was no longer a backpacker. I was royalty.

After the second night at their house, we all made a convoy to Wellington for the Waitangi Day celebrations. A little Waitangi Day history lesson: Waitangi Day is the day in which the Waitangi agreement between the Maori's and the European settlers was signed. As I've come to learn, the agreement has been and still is a source of controversy and tension in the country. One of the major reasons for the disagreement is that there were actually two versions of the treaty, one in English, and the other in Maori. The translation to Maori was less than perfect with some items being added and others ommitted, resulting in the two parties agreeing to slightly differing terms.

We celebrated by going to the massive Reggae flavored 'One Love' festival in the city. The music was great, featuring the top reggae influenced groups of New Zealand. The crowd was friendly, saying hello to strangers and picking up conversation with the people sitting next to you. They had had a cool hacky sack and poi section, and of course it wouldn't be a festival without beer and clouds of that thick pluming smoke floating through the crowd. We stayed as long as our bladders and freshly sun baked skin could hold out before parting with Su and Troy, each on our way to get our own versions of munch... er... food; sushi for the film industry mogles and 2 minute noodles for the backpackers.

That was Tuesday, leaving us one week to explore the whole of Wellington before our scheduled ferry to the South Island on the following Tuesday. I'm writing this as of Friday night, about half way through my time here in Wellington and so far I love it. In all aspects of the city there is a richly modern and historic artistic influence, from the skyscraper and building architecture, to the open air cafes with walls of abstract paintings populated by people with diverse clothing styles and backgrounds, to the street side sculptures, pieces of art you can walk through, insane waterfront contraptions that spin, bend and spray water, and poems embossed on solid stone lying amogst a pile of rocks like they were always there.

I've spent a total of 8 hours over two days exploring the super modern, newly built Te Papa museum littered with high tech interactive displays and ground breaking designs and still have yet to see it all. I've walked along the waterfront and marveled at the huge skate and bmx scene that's developed around the skatepark. On the outside walls of the skatepark are these cool wall climbing zones with this interesting rubber ground that's easy to walk along, but once you put a lot of weight on it, it absorbs the impact like a trampoline. They have the same material beneath all the kids playgrounds, which by the way are way cooler than the skin scorching, steel slides I slid on as a kid. Instead they have a practice skateboard half-pipe on rails, and a pyramid net that climbs up through trees. The water in the city bay is incredibly clean like the rest of New Zealand, but I still find it hard to believe given the the size and relative business of the port. The water isn't just for looking either, all along the wharf are ladders to climb the 15 feet out of the water and oddly enough there more than often happens to be a big structure to jump off of nearby as well. I jumped off some wood planks jutting out from the side of the wharf yesterday and today saw a crowd of people looking on as a guy climbed 20 feet up a waterside building and jump off followed by another guy climbing a 35 foot crane next to the water and jumping. The nightlife is equally exciting with a load of live bands everywhere, cheap to free cover charges, and its legal to drink in the streets so instead of shelling out $7 for a beer, you take a break from dancing and grab that $0.80 bottle you hid in the bush before you walked in. There's so much to see and admire, I actually had a lot of fun spending an afternoon walking around the city listening to the ipod and watching the people and places descreetly behind a pair of sunglasses. It seems that every piece of the city is worthy of a long hard look. It's obvious that a lot of passion and thought lies behind it all.

After my breakfast and morning swim tomorrow, I'll be packing a lunch and spending the day at the 'X-Air 2007' events. They're the New Zealand equivelent of the x-games and happen to be taking place in Wellington while we're in town. On Sunday, we'll catch the second part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The theatre here in Wellington was the site of the world priemere showing of the final Lord of the Rings and has sort of become a mecca for fans of the series. It's probably the most pristinely decorated and furnished theatres I've been to with intricate details all along the walls and light fixtures, marble floors, extremely high vaulted ceilings, and plush leather seats fitted with gold tags on the arm wrests, etched with the names of the friends and family of the Lord of the Ring producers. Recently, they began showing the trilogy sequentially, one part every Sunday. We caught the first installment last Sunday (we saw Troy's name in the credits).

Long post, but its been a pretty exciting week or so. The next post will be from the South Island, later!

............

*Rrrrrrrrrr*
(The sound of car tires screeching to a halt)

As usual, it took me a couple days to get everything above posted up on the site. Since then, through the below series of events and some long consideration, I've decided to part with Julia and Susi. They will be moving on with the van to the South Island and I will be staying to live and work in Wellington for the coming months.

I met a couple guys from Auckland, Ben and Anthony that were camping out in their car next to us in front of the beach. They came down here for the x-air show, Ben was actually competing in the motocross water jump where he attempted a double back flip but only made 1 1/2 rotations. After parking all day in a grocery store parking lot, they ended up getting their car towed. To make matters worse, they only came with money for food and gas and couldn't afford to bail their car out. So they decided to get jobs and save up cash until they could afford to get back home. After asking around at every bar in town, Anthony was offered a trial at a trendy bar where he would work that night from 10pm to 8am without pay and if he was good enough he would get a job. Ben couldn't find a job. They were screwed.

The whole situation was quite funny because it basically doesn't get worse than that. They had about $20 between the two of them, no place to sleep, and no food. That night, Ben and I, along with some Irish sisters we had met the night before, wandered the main party streets, checked out some live music, and walked along the beach. Ben, with no place to sleep for the night, was looking to crash at their hotel room with them. I knew that they were staying with their parents in a hotel room and that he had no chance but I didn't have the heart to break it to the guy. Inevitably, at the end of the night, the girls and us parted ways and it looked like he would be stuck sleeping on the beach in the freezing wind. But, we had a break.

At about 2am, as we were walking back to the van in bitter defeat, we saw a group of people swimming (we thought skinny dipping) at the beach. Ben had the idea of heading down and asking them if we could use their phone to send a text message. A brilliant plan, because it of course led into the unbelievable story about his current situation. So, we got to talking to the group of 4 girls and a guy. We kept them laughing and did our best to keep the conversation up as we walked with them down towards their apartment. They were all staying at the apartment of one of the girls Grandmothers, and as we neared the place, without asking they invited us to stay the night. This was no regular Grandma apartment, it was the top floor, corner apartment of a high end waterfront complex. Richly, and modernly decorated of course. We were stoked. We all stayed up drinking and talking of nothing. We couldn't help but feel a little guilty when thinking that Anthony was deep into his shift at his overnight shift at his non-paying job. Oh yea... Anthony.

It turns out Anthony had wandered back to the van and was sleeping there, between Susi and Julia. I'm assuming he was uninvited but they didn't want to talk about it. They were angry. And the anger was directed at me just as much as Anthony. They weren't fond of Anthony, and neither was I to be honest, but without saying so, it was clear they blamed me for him sleeping in the van.

I walked away and thought about the situation, trying to figure out what had led to the obvious factions that were forming. In the last week it seemed that arguments were creeping up too easily between us. Simple things, like questions of who was supposed to wash a pan or dish were becoming difficult. Conversation was often limited to one sentence questions and answers. It was clear we were all getting on each others nerves.

I've come to the conclusion that while we could easily be good friends, and even live together in a hostel room without a problem, there are very few people that you can live in a van with. We were together all day and all night. We shared a little space where a little mess could quickly turn into a catastrophe. Everything we did and everywhere we went had to be agreed upon between the three of us. This alone is difficult for an extended period of time. Now add in a language barrier and I'm impressed we did pull it off for a month!

So last night I informed them that I would be staying in Wellington as they moved on to the South Island this coming Saturday (we rescheduled the ferry). We were all sort of sad to see the end come, but I think we understand it was the best decision and nobody is angry about it. We'll be working out the money situation tonight, but it looks like I should just about break even when taking what I owe for fuel and supplies and subtracting that from what has been paid for the van.

So I'm off now to continue the job hunt here in the city. I have one job lined up as a Kitchen Hand that I'll be starting tomorrow morning. I have a few other interviews lined up with various places (Internet Cafe, Night Club, Movie Theater, Game Retailer). Most likely I'll be working 2 or 3 part time jobs in an effort to save up as much cash as quickly as possible. I plan to live in a hostel or campground, if I can find one, for the first week or two then I'll hunt for a room for rent. I'm pretty excited about working and living with some kiwis. It's probably the best way for me to be involved in and experience the culture. Who knows, I might even pick up some of the accent!

Sorry if that made your eyes bleed. Thanks for reading, I'll update soon.