Backpacker tales

Standard conversation between backpackers meeting for the first time:

"So where have you come from?"
"Peru."
"Oh wow, did you enjoy it? I´m going there next."
"Yeah, it was OK, but I much preferred Bolivia."
"How so?"
"Oh, more chilled out, the people are lovely, and it´s so cheap. What about you, how long have you been travelling?"
"Me? Oh, ten months now"
"Wow, a big trip then - round the world?"
"Yeah, one year altogether. You?"
"Three months, just South America. Where have you been so far?"
"Oh, India..."
"India, cool, how was it? I want to go there next..."
"Oh yeah brilliant, it´s really good fun if you just get over the culture shock thing. So yeah, there, China, South East Asia..."
"Favourite place so far?"
"Oh, almost certainly India. Stayed in places for, like, ten pence a night, did some voluntary work..."
"Yeah, same here in Venezuala."
"You went to Venezuala, isn´t it dangerous there?"
"Oh no, it was fine, plus the people I was living with really looked after me."
"Oh yeah, same here, they were really cool."
"As a matter of fact, I´m probably moving there."
"Really?"
"Yeah, the village I stayed in have made me their chieftan."
"Ah, I see..."
"In fact, they worship me as a diety incarnate..."
"..."
"...and they sacrificed a virgin for me."
"Just the one?"
"?"
"Well, in the place I stayed in they built a fifty-foot tall statue of me, in gold, sacrificed ten virgins, two cows, and a cat."
"Well, I say one virgin, it was more like all the virgins they could round up actually."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. And the president of the country has commissioned an opera of my life story. And I underwent an ancient initiation ceremony where they cut off my head and pickled it in a jar before a witch doctor sewed it back on chanting my name."
"So where are you heading next then?"
"Home, you?"
"Yeah, home."
"What are you going to do?"
"Dunno, temp for a while maybe."

Food, glorious food

I haven´t really given Chile the time I´m sure it deserves. After one night in Santiago I headed into Argentina with Sanita and Camilla who I met on Easter Island, to Mendoza, a hedonistic, relaxed little town (well, I say little, a million people live there but it just feels little) just over the border in Argentina. Mendoza is the wine capital of Argentina, responsible for seventy percent of the country´s wine production. The centerpiece of Mendoza is the relaxed and clean Plaza Independencia, a sun-peppered maze of smooth paths dotted with benches where Mendocinos hang out.

The journey from Chile to Argentina by road was worth the bus fare and maybe a bit more for unbelievable views of the Andes. The road curves up steep hills back and forth, back and forth, and huge trucks throw themselves round the bends like they´re in a race - I half expected to see a coach teetering on the edge of a precipice with a youthful Michael Caine in the back shouting "Now hold still!" to the tune of The Self Preservation Society (sorry, movie geek took over there). A train line follows the road, but in many places tunnels and track have been destroyed by landslides and rocks - the whole road has a very temporary feel to it, as if the mountains could decide at any minute to wipe it out with a few casual rockfalls, and people would have to find another way through.

Arriving at Mendoza we were taken to a hostel on the outskirts of the center by one of the guys who hangs around at bus stations, train stations and airports ready to sell a bed for the night to any backpacker who was unprepared and hadn´t booked somewhere - like us. By this time there were five of us, Michael who the girls had met in Bolivia, and Jake who I thought was Spanish, but it turns out his Spanish was just really good. A lot of the time, getting off a bus, train or plane, you can instantly spot the other backpackers who aren´t totally sure what they´re doing, at which point you sheepishly approach each other with a line like "so do you know where you´re going?" - and before you know it you´ve formed a tight-knit group in twenty seconds flat, the whole thing being safety in numbers, or maybe an unspoken reliance by everyone on the person who looks slightly more like they know what they´re doing to sort out accommodation, speak to the taxi driver, and basically be Mum.

Walking into the hostel we were taken to, we entered an airless sweatbox of a room, a dorm for about seven people so cramped that you´d be sleeping with someone´s bad socks soaking the sweat from your brow as you twisted and turned in sodden sheets, craving air and getting only other people´s farts and dry-mouthed snores. Fortunately we turned right back around and left the hostel, trying to explain to a crestfallen picky-upy-from-the-station guy that we couldn´t stay there because the dorm was muy, muy pequeno and muy, muy caliente. Lo siento, but gracias for the lift into town. After walking through Mendoza for a short while we finally found Hostel Independencia, and five of us approached the shocked-looking girl at reception to ask for a room, to which her response was that we all looked ´unusual´. It turns out after subsequent investigation that when she said unusual, it was the best English word she could come up with to describe ´sweaty, knackered and fed-up looking´.

Our first night in Mendoza, and we went to Las Tanjeras to eat on the recommendation of the guys in the hostel. Las Tanjeras is a tenedor libre (all you can eat) restaurant, and a fine place indeed. Not just because of unlimited quanities of food (Sanita thought this was why I liked it so much and it´s a perfectly good reason), but also because the place was packed with Argentinians eating and having a good time, the whole room occasionally exploding with noisy renditions of Happy Birthday, or people banging on the tables with their cutlery. As hungry as we were that first night we all engaged in an almost orgiastic fit of eating from the numerous dishes on offer, accompanied by generous quanitities of great, cheap red wine.

With a tenedor libre the main problem is the sheer diversity of foods on offer, and having to try and eat in a reasonably co-ordinated fashion rather than throwing ten different and completely diverse things on your plate. I failed and just stuffed myself silly, from fantastic grilled lomo (steak), to lamb, sausages, freshly-cooked fish in cream sauce, salads, gratin potatoes, mashed potatoes, sauteed potatoes, pasta, spinach lasagne, empanadas (little meat pasties), calamari, fresh fruit, flans, ice cream, banana toffee custard, whipped cream and more. We could have rolled out of the place. On top of this we were served by a waiter, Antonio, who I believe is the template from which all waiters should be cut. Tall, composed, with as Jake suggested a slight hint of Basil Fawlty but none of his insanity, polite, friendly and completely professional. And this in an all-you-can eat restaurant, where his counterpart in the UK would probably be a spotty, lopsided-baseball-cap-wearing, couldn´t-give-a-monkeys teenager who´d spit in your food soon as look at you and roll their eyes if you even looked like you were going to ask for another glass.

The lifestyle in Mendoza is very Spanish, with people not eating until after ten and not drinking until after midnight - our standard finishing time was about 3 am, except for a night in the El Rancho nightclub which finished when the sun came up and the McDonalds next door was opening for the day. It wasn´t all Bacchanalian excess though - a trip out into the Andes to go white-water rafting was superb fun, with the five of us and this Argentinian in the back, shouting at us to paddle paddle paddle even as we´re totally submerged by water in the frothy rapids. That and a winery tour, almost obligatory in a big wine town but actually pretty dull, and it was time to move on to Bariloche. That is, it was time to move on after we ate at 1884, apparently the 7th best restaurant in the world, right in Mendoza and doing a mean chocolate pudding.

I really am obsessed with my stomach.

As Mendoza is wine capital of Argentina, Bariloche, nineteen hours south on the bus from Mendoza in Argentina´s lake district, is the chocolate capital, a Swiss-style town right down to the St Bernard dogs. On the shore of the vast Lake Nahuel Huapi, the background a beautiful and neverending collection of Andean peaks, the town is obviously a tourist Mecca, but who gives a monkeys when the chocolates and cakes are fantastic. We stayed for a few days in La Morada, a hostel nestled on the side of a hill and looking out over the lake, where I did nothing more than read and think, while Michael and Sanita went walking up the side of a hill and nearly needed a St Bernard to go get them back. It rained virtually the whole time, but La Morada was a quiet, calm haven with one of the best views out of the window I´ve ever seen.

Originally I only had two weeks to spend in Chile - then I went into Argentina instead - now I wished I had longer. Argentina is a great place I´d love to come back to, to see everything I missed. And eat a lot more. Chile I´ve given no time to at all save for three nights in Santiago and a worthwhile trip to the Museum of Precolumbian Art, so that´s another place for next time I´m round this way... whenever that is. It´s election time in Chile at the moment, so the TV screens are plastered with images of presidential and senatorial candidates waving to crowds, kissing old ladies, and walking flanked by their deputies. Chile has a woman candidate for President in this election, and women appear to be prominent in the election generally, in a country that has apparently just got self-concious about appearing to be chauvanist and male-dominated. Doesn´t change the fact that most of the TV programs seem to include scantily clad women disco dancing.

At the moment I´m in the VIP lounge at Santiago Airport, where I have access to unlimited free drinks, biscuits, Internet, and a good shower complete with complimentary toothbrush, mouthwash and razor. I´m here after buying my way in for fifteen dollars, after realising when I got to the aiport that my flight to Lima was twelve hours later than I thought it was. This caused mild panic, much like when I was woken this morning at the hostel after sleeping through my alarm clock, with the taxi to the airport waiting outside. It´s all the fault of a bloke called Phil who I bumped into after meeting initially on Easter Island - he wanted to go out for a drink, so I ended up with three hours drunken non-sleep last night. One very strange thing happened last night, that I do remember - I wished a man who wanted to sell us nasty plastic jewellery outside a bar good luck, saying to him ´Via con Dios´- ´Go with God´. I only used this because Keanu Reeves did at the end of Point Break and I thought it sounded good. The man however craned himself over my shoulder and said very quietly:
"We... killed... your... son". I know sometimes things get lost in translation, but he said the same in Spanish, so what the hell he was talking about I wish I knew.

So late tonight I get to Lima, Peru, and the start of a fourteen-day tour including a hike up the Inca trail, still counting down the days to the end of the trip. I´m just off to do some stretches and walk around the duty free shops a few times, I think I need the exercise.

Rapa Nui

I included Easter Island on my trip because I was so curious about it, and it turned out to be easy to do on the way to Chile, whereas for most people it´s an expensive flight or two to one of the most remote populated places on Earth. I knew about as much as most people - that it was small, remote, and had a lot of big stone heads on it. There is that movie, Rapa Nui, with Jason Scott Lee in it, but I never paid any attention to it, and apparently neither did anyone else. I half imagined the only way to get there would be in a biplane piloted by a mad Chilean who would land us on the high street, dodging horses as we skittered to a halt to be greeted by a gruff customs official with an unfeasibly large moustache and a cigar the size of a demi-baguette - but it turns out they have a proper airport, and the plane was a very modern Airbus on its way to Santiago. Furthermore I can confirm that Easter Island has one ATM, Internet access, cars, and wheelie bins. Reality has almost always been more mundane than I expected things to be, except for India.

Leaving Tahiti, I boarded the flight to be greeted by LAN Chile air stewards wearing scary black and red uniforms that made them look somewhere between concentration camp commandants and dominatrixes, but maybe that´s just my twisted mind. Easter Island was the first sniff of land we saw since Tahiti, and you get an idea how small the island is when the runway virtually cuts across the whole thing. The airport is one of those very small places where you walk off the plane down steps and across the runway, not through a tunnel that makes you feel like a gerbil in one of those combi-cages that´s all connected by tubes. Outside the airport I met a friendly lady called Sandra who took me back to her residence, a ten minute walk from the airport in Hanga Roa, the only real settlement on the island. Guest house (residence) owners are waiting at the airport every time a flight comes in, shouting "Sir! Sir!" across the arrivals hall, even as you stumble numb-headed and back-packed around trying to remember where you put your passport.

They speak Spanish in Easter Island, as it´s part of Chile and many if not most of the people there now are Chilean, after most of the original Rapa Nui were wiped out by in-fighting, disease, cannibalism (apparently), and being taken from the island by waves of slave ships. My Spanish wasn´t too hot after I got my GCSE in it over ten years ago, and I also kept getting confused after only just having got the swing of French on Tahiti, so I kept saying Oui when I meant to say Si. The quality of Spanish used by the average tourist is pretty poor unless they´ve been practicing for a while, so questions will be asked in Spanglish, e.g "Hola Señor, donde est the bathroom, por favor?". The locals often answer Spanish questions in English, presumably as they´d rather not listen to you mangle their language for the next five minutes or look embarrassed at them before saying "No hablo mucho Espanol, sorry..."

After propositioning Camilla and Sanita outside a restaurant in Hanga Roa, I had people to share a jeep with to explore the island, so we took off in a 4x4 to see the sights - while Easter Island is pretty small, it´s not all walkable unless you take whole days to do just that, so the preferred way of getting around is a hire car. Four or five car hire places in Hanga Roa for a place the size of Easter Island may be overcrowding the market a little, but that´s obviously where the money is.

The stone heads, Moai, are to be found all over Easter Island, looking inwards from the sea - over eight hundred of them in all, half of those unfinished, lying around Rano Raraku, the volcanic crater from which they were carved. Most of the Moai at major sights of interest are once more standing tall, after having been toppled during inter-clan conflicts on the island in around the sixteenth century. Easter Island is mercifully free of souvenir vendors at every site of interest - you just drive up and take a look with relatively little hassle. My first sight of the Moai felt a little like a dream come true - they are impressive, big (most are several meters tall), but more than that they are a symbol of a place that was always a very, very long way away, and to see them it´s still a mystery quite how, and why, these giant monoliths were carved from the hillsides of Rano Raraku and erected all over the island. Rano Raraku itself is fascinating - half-finished Moai stand still embedded in the sides of the hill, some now no more than giant faces peering skywards from the grass.

Easter Island has a nice feel to it, with locals who are neither obsequious nor aloof, just friendly and relaxed. You get the feeling that because so many people don´t get a chance to come here, it´s never more crowded than one or two flights a day can make it, the place is running at a happily relaxed pace. The bars and restaurants are expensive - not compared to home, but compared to a budget destination I suppose. That said, Te Moana in Hanga Roa served great food and cold beer, had great staff (and, sorry, but they were all beautiful), and had live music most nights - altogether a more appealing proposition than trying to cook with the overpriced, wilted vegetables from the local supermercados.

While there, I also got to go snorkelling in crystal water just off the coast, with clear visibility twenty meters down to the ocean floor, to see my old favourites, parrot fish. The coast of Easter Island is another great feature of the place - dramatic, jagged outcrops of volcanic rock jut into the water where they are pummelled by runaway trains of waves, huge, tsunami-like monsters that churn the surf up so much it goes as white as milk. Easter Island even has a beach of clear waters over pinkish sand, where fish swim around your feet and vendors sell barbecued chicken, cold Sprites and souvenir mini-Moai, a row of Moai looking inland at the back of the beach as if they disapproved and turned their backs on the whole thing.


On Easter Island I saw one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my life, and it was a complete surprise - it almost made going there worth it all on its own, and when Camilla, Sanita and I reached it after over an hour´s uphill walk from Hanga Roa, we all went silent. The volcanic crater at Rano Kau on the Western tip of the island was an utterly unspoilt place of simple, stunning natural beauty, with an emerald lagoon in the base, and a view out to the endless Pacific through a break in the wall of the crater. It´s places like this, that I had never really heard about before, that blow my mind. Just don´t tell anyone about it.

Next, Chile for one night, and Argentina, one of my favouritest places yet.

Tahiti

Some places live up to expectations, some exceed them, and some just plain suck. Sorry for the poor English but you get my drift. I`ve found so far that the places that the guidebooks tell you to go to, the places that are `famous´, the places that come heavy with the weight of expectation, rarely satisfy. What charm they may have had is diluted by aggressive hawkers, greedy taxi drivers, indifferent locals and drive-through McDonalds restaurants.

One of the images a lot of people have in mind is of a golden beach, bathed in sunshine, with a swaying palm tree and a woman in a sarong. It`s only when you actually get to the beach that you realise just how clever photographers and marketing people are, as the beach pictured on the brochure didn`t show the dog crap and broken glass around the paths, the overpriced drinks and fetid snacks in the restaurant, or the fat Germans pacing around in minute Speedos shouting abuse at the underpaid waiters. The more time I`ve been away, the more I`ve seen that there are hardly any places that have the power to surprise, to really satisfy, to exceed your expectations and leave you speechless. But I´ve still found some. Tahiti wasn`t one of them.

Tahiti embodies for some the idea of an island paradise, just the name does it, like a trademark. It was in Tahiti that the crew of Captain Bligh´s Bounty stayed for ten months collecting breadfruit plants - they loved the place so much that they rebelled when they had to leave. I went to Tahiti out of curiosity, because it was on the way somewhere else, not expecting too much. It turned out to be OK, but it´s no paradise. I stayed at a small pension (guest house) on the outskirts of town, Pension Teamo, looked after by the amiable and fussy Marie-Claude, just her name taking me back to school French lessons and the Bertillon family. Roaches scuttle over the floorboards in the evenings and noises wake you in the dead of night like someone is actually attempting to check the size of their room by swinging a cat, but otherwise it was comfortable, and the place comes with the added bonus of two small Gauloise-smoking Frenchmen who look like they`ve been there since the 1970s. Speaking of the French lessons, I must have paid more attention than I thought when Miss Benfield was spitting down the microphone in class, as my French dusted off almost respectably - French is the main language in Tahiti.

My stay of a few days was spent wandering the capital Papeete, were locals drive huge pickups they bought on credit and a small kiosk on the waterfront was the only place to buy remotely cheap food, and heading out to see the coast with some folks I met in the pension. I never got to see the rugged interior of the island, an unpopulated area of forest and jagged volcanic peaks, so my lasting image of Tahiti is of new housing being built on ledges cut into the hill-side, a Carrefour supermarket bustling with shoppers, and the buzz of vans and cars on the streets of Papeete, with the occasional comical sight of a cyclist`s pilion passenger playing his guitar as the bike wobbles down the street.

Your image of the food on a Pacific island may be of mouthwatering tropical fruits, colourful fish and yams, served on huge banana leaves. In Tahiti that`s sadly not the case. Most of the food is dried, preserved, processed and tinned, shipped in from thousands of miles away. The island has almost no food production of its own. The only place we found to get reasonably priced, reasonable food was Les Roulottes, a huddle of food vans down near the waterfront serving steak frites, fish, pizza, Chinese dishes and crepes to a mixed crowd of locals and tourists, while a local band played plinky-plonky Polynesian music in the background.

Nights in Papeete took on a slightly seedy quality, especially at the weekend, but the place felt basically safe. Dealers attempted to call you over to dark corners, and girls in very short skirts hung around the neighbourhood of our pension by the side of the road, including a beautiful Fafafini with the longest legs I`ve ever seen. Fafafini are transvestites, but more than that, they are boys who have been raised as girls - a tradition in Polynesian islands, when a family has no female children.

Tahiti was good harmless fun for a few days - but no more. Easter Island, next, had a completely different feel, and something incredible that I wasn´t expecting.

Island hopping and going doolally

The first problem I have to tell you about is that I am using a French keyboard, which for some reason quite beyond me has all of the keys in the wrong places; they apparently don't think that QWERTY is a sensible layout. As a result I am typing at the speed of someone who is scared of computers and taps away very slowly as if they are afraid the keyboard will give them an electric shock and a sharp slap and tell them they're stupid.

My photos are much more up to date than this blog at the moment. I've been taking pictures but for a little while haven't had the time to write, and wasn't in the right frame of mind either, in fact for much of my time in New Zealand I went a bit potty. I'm not so sure that it has worn off yet. Bleep bleep.

So it's back yet again to where I left off, with more digressing than Ronnie Corbett (in his big chair with his story about heh heh heh what the producer said to him) and Doubtful Sound. I took an overnight trip with Real Journeys, a pretty slick Kiwi tour operator, after deciding not to see Milford Sound, which is the big draw in New Zealand - a good reason not to go for fear of competing for space to enjoy the place with ten other boats and fifteen kayaking Kiwi Experience trippers barking woo and yay at each other with gay abandon. Doubtful Sound was named by our old mate Captain James 'Imaginative Names' Cook as exit from the waters of the sound was made doubtful by low winds. Judging by his previous efforts, Doubtful Sound could easily have been called 'Not Totally Sure Sound', 'Unsound Sound', or 'Oooh I Just Don't Know Really Why Don't We Wait A Little While And See What The Wind Does Meanwhile Let's Have A Nice Cup Of Tea Sound'. I realise that last name is a bit much.

Doubtful Sound is a very, very beautiful place. When all of the engines of our boat, the Fjordland Navigator, were turned off at night, we were able to stand on the bridge of the boat and listen to the perfect quietness, broken only by distant bird calls and the trickling of waterfalls from the previous day's rainfall. The Fjords tower above you, somehow still shrouded in trees and greenery despite there being no soil on the rocks to support them. Whole clumps of trees occasionally fall from the faces of the fjords in giant 'treevalanches'.

Ours was the only boat on the water, so we had the whole place to ourselves - sharing it only with the birds, a colony of dozing fur seals, and a pod of inquisitive bottlenose dolphins that swam with the boat, leaping over the bow waves, until they got bored and left us alone, still going "oooooooh", with big grins on our faces. Dolphins just seem to have that effect - pure, unadulterated, contagious joy. For all I know they were swimming with the boat to see if there was a way they could get an innocent tourist overboard to eat them or perform cruel experiments on them, but joy is how it came across.

About twelve people on the boat out of sixty or seventy were aged below sixty-five, and half of them were the crew. The rest were on the more mature side, a fearsome tour group of silver-haired troublemakers, recklessly emptying the tea urn, foolishly taunting the wildlife expert while he gave an excellent slide show, and impishly having sing-alongs with the piano. I know I'm being cheeky here, but in all seriousness, the elder tourist is amongst the worst behaved I've seen, particularly on airplanes, where they're still deciding what seat to take and moving their bags while the plane is actually taking off, air stewardesses frantically trying to get them seated at high speeds on a forty degree angle.

From Doubtful Sound, I headed for Queenstown, the tourism capital of the South Island, and then left just as quickly as I got there after I realised that the place put me in a foul mood as soon as I arrived. Not being in the mood to jump off a bridge or out of a plane, and not being interested in sitting drinking overpriced designer fruit smoothies with a po-faced bunch of snowboarders in expensive sunglasses, the place had nothing to offer me. Luckily about an hour up the road I found the far friendlier and easier-going Wanaka, a toned-down version of Queenstown. The highlight of Wanaka for me had nothing to do with snow capped peaks - the superb Cinema Paradiso shows movies in a small theatre, where the seats are old sofas and armchairs, and even an old Morris Minor, where you crash out in the back seat and watch the movie through the windscreen. Great quality food is available to eat before, during or after the show with not one heat-lamp hot dog or greasy nacho in sight. It was like crashing out at home to watch a movie, only with a great big screen.

After Wanaka I stopped at the stunning Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers, with blue ice creaking like a great living thing, then pootled up the lonely West Coast where endless stretches of rocky beaches are pummelled by the sea and perpetually shrouded in spray, and drove through Arthur's Pass, back to Onuku Farm Hostel outside Akaroa. It was the first place I stayed at in New Zealand, and I'd been looking forward to getting back there. Driving around the South Island had been good fun, but often lonely, apart from meeting some cool people briefly along the way, and I was craving company. One thing this trip has taught me is that while I'm happy in my own company, I have my limits, and I need to be around people. A lot of time on my own in New Zealand gave me plenty of time for thought, a luxury I didn't really have on this trip until that point, and it wasn't such a good thing. I realised somewhere in the South Island that I felt absolutely exhausted - with traveling, with seeing new things, with being a stranger - and felt like quitting the trip and going home.

I stayed at Onuku for a week, doing a little work in exchange for a place to park the van, with the intention of staying there for the summer, leaving out South America and getting home via the US or back through Asia - then I changed my mind again and decided to carry on. I've done this since about five or ten times, so have been beating myself up for being a doddering indecisive berk. The time that I was at Onuku, again, was great - Steve, Erina, Tim, Babe the dog and two orphan lambs, amazing quiet and peace, and the chance to cook proper meals and feel at home, sleeping in the van at night under a sky groaning with stars. I was sad to leave, but the irony of it was that maybe stopping at Onuku allowed me to relax enough to feel ready to move on.

From Onuku, I made a beeline for the North Island, and I'd hardly set off before I started losing the plot again - recently my concentration span seems to make a goldfish look bookish and focused, and I have less patience than a small child in Asda. After an uneventful trip across the Cook Straits between the South and North Islands and a day out in Wellington, I drove to Worldwide Backpackers, which I'd booked by phone earlier that day, thinking I was being really organised. I wanted a private room after having been by myself in the van for five weeks and being unable to face the prospect of a dorm, what with all the conversation, snoring and waiting for the shower.

Having driven back and forth and round about Wellington's one-way system for about forty minutes, thrashed the van to within an inch of its life, and finally managed to park on the one remotely nearby piece of available road at a one in two incline in a ropey area, I finally entered the backpackers so wound up my hands were shaking and I was looking slightly like the Hulk immediately before shirt-popping time. To top this off I was greeted by a girl with no discernible sense of humour and huge unblinking eyes, who told me I'd have to find somewhere else to park. When I decided I couldn't be bothered I told her I'd just cancel the room if that was OK, to which the response was 'vell, I vill charge you sixty dollars' - damn fool, I gave them my credit card number when I booked. Relenting, I paid the girl for the room in cash, plus a twenty dollar key deposit, took the room key, and went to find somewhere else to park.

After getting lost in one-way streets, steep, steep hills and finally ending up on a motorway heading northwards out of Wellington with no way to turn around, I just kept going, finding a campsite in the arse end of nowhere and mailing the key back a day later. The rationale I employed when finding the campsite was a reflection of how buggered my mind was - I wouldn't turn off to a place called Avalon because it was named after a Roxy Music song, but I did turn off at a place called Whitby because I went to Whitby on my holidays in the UK once and liked it.

The North Island of New Zealand didn't do it for me as much as the South, but then I didn't really give it a chance, concentrating on getting to the Far North to see Amy, a girl I met in Cambodia and spent time with in Vietnam, and get away from the heavily touristy areas. Brief stops at Waimangu and Lake Taupo were a good chance to explore areas of geothermal activity, fields that belched steam from between the tough gorse, where the smell of bad eggs hung in the air and the ground made noises like a hungry stomach.

Finally, I got to Monganui, and Amy's parents' cattle farm, where I spent a few days helping to move stock from field to field, riding around on the back of a quad bike, watching a calf being born, feeding thirsty calves and getting covered in slobber and cow shit out in the fresh air. It was superb, and Amy and her folks made me feel totally at home, even though her dad called me a 'Dingle Pom' because I couldn't put string through a loop for an electric fence without getting confused - I guess I'm a clueless townie.

New Zealand was fantastic - diverse landscapes, beautiful wildlife and great people in a place that felt like home, but a greener, grander place. No wonder so many people are moving there.

So, after spending the last few weeks not being sure whether I want to call off the trip or keep going, I'm in Tahiti now, and flying to Easter Island tonight - keeping going out of curiosity, but feeling ready to go home, so it's a good job I'm going in the right direction. Tahiti is very French, very hot and humid, and pretty expensive, but its been good for a few days, partly down to meeting some more cool people. They're all surfing on Moorea now, I'm off to see big stone heads.

Heading east

I really have been sloppy with my blogging of late, for which I am very sorry. Nevertheless, as my blog's statistics suggest, people have still been coming to the site through search engines, and invariably being disappointed with what they've found, if what they've been searching for is anything to go by...

Search engine queries used to find this site, exactly as they were entered:

• Gay full body massage Chennai
• Are celebrities overpaid?
• Counterfiet [sic] watches
• How to pack for a trip to London in November
• How big is my van
• Weird massage experiences
• Porkinson sausages
• Photos of a drunkards liver
• Nathan smells

I'm in a list-writing mood, so here are some facts about New Zealand, now that I have been here for thirty-eight days:

• There are more sheep than people in New Zealand.
• Sheep have been trained to sniff for drugs at airports, and are now used as seeing companions for the blind as well as in bomb disposal.
• Sheep who fall off hills and land on isolated rock ledges can survive for years on the grass they find there -they are known as hermit sheep. Their wool grows so long that they cannot see any more and resemble giant balls of wool.
• A sheep called Tundra in the South Island just off the West coast can talk, draw simple diagrams, and re-wire household electrical appliances.
• Green spaces and squares in Christchurch today were once used to grow potatoes to send to England after World War II.
• New Zealand's less well-known food export after lamb and wool is cheese, which is extracted from mines near Rotorua. New Zealand has been mining cheese since 1867. The cheese is infused with gases common to that area produced by geothermal activity, imparting a distinct flavour and scent. It is most often packaged as The Laughing Cow, Dairylea, and Tesco Value Cheese Spread.
• Maui rental campervans are predominantly hired by Germans with no sense of humour.
• Wellington has a bitch of a one-way system.
• Coin-operated showers at all campsites are all set to operate for precisely fifteen seconds too little.
• The Cosy Corner motor camp at Mount Maunganui has the nicest smelling toilets in New Zealand.

I can't provide proof of all of the facts above.

I left things off in the last entry with a trip to Doubtful Sound, which now seems like ages ago, and opportunities to get on the Internet have been few and far between. Nevertheless, I will be catching up with things as soon as I get the chance - I've seen lots of places, met some great people, and gone slightly mad. Now I'm in Auckland, and in a few hours I fly to Tahiti, about which I know nothing more than a perky-breasted maiden there once got together with Fletcher Christian and sparked the mutiny on the Bounty. The next entry therefore will hopefully cover the rest of New Zealand, including Doubtful Sound, stunning glaciers, musical toilets, the day I nearly gave up the trip, chasing cows, getting lost in Wellington, and much more.