I I just got back to our little caravan, saw young a bunch of young cows on the way back and gave one of them a stroke over her head but felt sad when I saw that she was marked on her ear. I know I’ve probably said this before, and I am sure that I will say it again, but how can anyone hurt cows (or any animal for that matter)? It doesn’t make any sense to me, not at all.
I know you guys haven’t heard from me in a long time. I am currently out on the country side and almost have zero connection to the world of social media and/or internet. A lot have happened since last time though. I went back to work for a few weeks after the holiday with the Marsdens ended, but on New Years Eve I had my very last day as a part of the supporter relations team at Greenpeace NZ. It felt sad saying goodbye to my little team, but at the same time very exciting to know that the end of this chapter also meant to beginning of the next one - a grand tour of the New Zealand South island for 5 weeks before breaking up and take a fight to Bolivia.
Before ending up here in the caravan, before taking that flight down to Christchurch and everything, we had a beautiful Christmas with the Auckland gang on the beach, I cooked way too much vegan Christmas food, we ha some amazing vegan burgers from the Burgerie on K-road (YES they have a whole vegan menu in this burger joint!), we had loads more visits from Fidel (“our” little cutie cat, who always knew when it was a good time to stop by our house for a cuddle) and celebrated the New Year by going back to Bethlehem, Tauranga and have a house party with amazing company and sleep in a shitty little tent.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, we officially broke up with our life in Auckland. Moved out from our house, got rid of a lot of stuff, packed what was rest and headed down to Christchurch for a few nights. We did feel that we spent a night too many here. Because we didn’t have a car, we felt as if there wasn’t that much to do around here and to be completely honest, it felt pretty sad being here. The memory of the massive earthquake a few years ago, lay as a shadow over the whole city center. There are construction work going on everywhere you look and even though there were loads of cool art work (and it is really cool how they’ve managed to do all of these amazing arty things around the city to make something that was such a sad part of the citys history, into something beautiful) it still felt sad to be there in a way. It seems as if more is going on in the outskirts of the city nowadays.
In Addington for example, we found this cool little coffee gem where I could’ve spent hours. Cool atmosphere, nice people and they even had a laundry machine = perfect stop for a coffee for backpackers!
In another part (which I really cannot bring myself to remember the name of, sorry!) we found the Lotus Flower - a fully vegetarian restaurant with plenty of vegan (what sounded like) yummy things. Due to the backpacker wallet, we are trying not to eat out that much, cause let’s fa sit - New Zealand is expensive, so we only tried a smoothie full of nutritious goodies, each and they were divine!
We also had a lovely picnic one day, in beautiful botanic gardens before visiting the Canterbury museum.
On our last day in Christchurch we picked up our little silvery star of a car and left the city (and hostel) life and began our roadtrip around the south island. First stop was my favourite spot from last time - the sushi place in lovely Kaikora where we met up with Danni, Scott & Emelie for a night.
After saying our good byes for this time to them yet again, we did a few nights freedom camping (camping spots where you pay nothing, but then there might not be running water etc there either) and for the first time in New Zealand it really felt like we were hardcore backpackers. We had our portable cooker with us and cooked some meals on that by the side of the roads. One that we are not so proud of was when we just HAD to stop at by the side of the road in the heat of Queen Elizabeth Scenic Drive. We were just too starving to find a better spot.
Then last week we started the biggest adventure so far, when we entered the Abel Tasman National Park to do the Abel Tasman Coastal Track. I didn’t think that much about it at first. I just knew it was going to be a walk, where we had to spend 4 nights in a tent and in total over this time, walk about 60 km. I just thought that I would enjoy it. I mean walking, how hard can it be? I LOVE taking walks, I love heights and white beaches!
It wasn’t until we packed up our backpacks for the trek, that I realised how much you actually have to carry around to be able to do something like this. I might be good at walking and running, but I have no muscles. I mean my shoulders get soar just from carrying my bag from the bus to the airport and my right shoulder always aches as soon as I even carry my string back with like, a wallet in it.
Anyway, we realised that to be able to do this, we couldn’t bring our cooker and like half of the cooking gear that we had planned to bring. So we didn’t and instead we bought loads of rice cakes, bread and tinned beans (one for dinner each night) that we didn’t have to cook or anything. And of course some Oreos, just to keep the sugar strength up as well. Thanks to my coffee addiction, I had to mix my instant coffee with cold water every morning, just so that I wouldn’t get a headache.. One might say that we could’ve planned this much better. This was my thought many times, especially that evening when we had to wait for the tide to go down to be able to continue to the camp site for the night and it was raining and we were sitting in our crappy, cheap rain ponchos that broke as soon as we took them off again with sand flies biting us e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.
Okay, so this all sounds pretty shit. But despite all the bites, the soar muscles, the sleep deprivation (however spoilt it may sounds; I don’t know if I will ever get used to sleeping in a tent, basically on the ground without a pillow), the achy feet, all hills up and down, the heating sun burning in the face and all insects everywhere I am so happy that we did it and proud of us for making it through. It was definitely much harder than I could’ve ever imagined, but oh-m-g - it was so cool. Packing up and and packing down the tent became a habit pretty quickly, and a five hour walk always went by so quickly, because of the beautiful nature and views that we saw and of course because of my partner in crime who always have patience with me when I need him to have patience with me the most.
We met funny rangers, had a morning swim in Cleoptras Pool (a cool little waterfall with a slide made out of mother nature herself!), saw cute birds and really felt as we had accomplished something huge when we finally reached the end of the trek.
That feeling of finally getting back to civilisation was amazing and so we went straight to hippy town Takaka to celebrate with the vegan pizza that they have at the cool cafe Dangerous Kitchen (wow-my-wow this pizza is amazing and it makes me hungry only to think about it now). For being a hippy town though, I am not impressed with the range of vegan food, or vegetarian for that matter around here, I expected a lot more when I heard that this was the town for yogis and tye dyes.
I still have burn marks from the backpack on my shoulders now when I’m sitting here and writing, where we ended up that same evening when we finished one of the Great New Zealand Walks, close to the little village of Collingwood in Golden Bay, where we live in a caravan in the farm hotel The Innlet, where we do HelpX for the forth time since coming to NZ. We’ve been here for exactly a week now and it feels like we’ve already done pretty much everything that are the touristy things to do here.
The other day we did the hilltop walk to Wharakiki beach - it was awesome climbing on hills and seeing the pretty view from the top of Cape Farewell.
Yesterday we walked for an hour to find some cool caves, which was actually pretty scary as we were there totally alone.
We’ve done the bush walk that is only in the backyard of the hotel, gone to the chocolate house (Rosy Glow) in Collingwood where more than half of all the hand made chocolate happens to be vegan (and super yum!) and we’ve found a few other cool tracks around the area where we've see waterfalls and the clearest water in the world. It’s a good thing my Guy and I likes walking, eh!
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