Sam and E-J's Adventure

We arrived back into Auckland around 12pm and met up with friends of ours from London who were heading to Chile that day. After a brief lunch and exchange of places and ideas about South America, New Zealand and Oz, we said goodbye to our friends, Dave and Elle and headed to the campervan company.

After a brief instruction on what and what not to do, Sam managed to successfully reverse the van out of the drive.
We were then on our way and within two minutes E-J managed to get completely confused with the directions to the supermarket! We stopped less than a mile from the campervan depot, so that E-J could drive and Sam could direct! Next was buying food supplies. On first parking the car, E-J decided to change spaces pretty quickly, when she noticed the porch parked next to her had a white scratch mark on the door; looking uncomfortably similar to the colour of our van! After a brief and successful shop, we escaped the supermarket to finally hit the road!

Next was finding somewhere to stay and being novices at this campervan malarkey, we decided to play it safe and stay in Hamilton just outside Auckland in one of the lonely planet recommended campsites. Finding it with nearly no problems, we thought the place looked a bit depressing with all these other campervans parked up around us. We decided this wasn't going to destroy our joyful spirits, so tucked into a good bottle of wine and enjoyed a ready cooked roast chicken and salad. This was the life!

By 8:30 am the next day we were on the road and heading to Rotorua to do the first of our many dare devil challenges, a Zorb ball. For those of you unaware of what this is, it basically looks like a hamster ball which you get inside and then throw yourself down a hill at great speed.

When we got there we were advised to do the option with water and after the necessary briefing and reading the small print that if you were to die it was not the company's fault, we were driven up the hill to begin our experience. E-J at this point was starting to go slightly white and feeling terribly nervous. Having just seen children of the age of 10 and 12 years old throw themselves down a few minutes earlier, E-J felt she really couldn't bring herself to pull out at this stage. E-J decided to go first and then Sam followed. E-J could be heard the whole way down, screaming for dear life. The guide informed Sam that he hadn't seen someone so petrified all day! Sam was silent and unimpressed with the lack of thrill factor involved. As we left this place to continue on the journey, E-J could feel her neck seizing up and realized she had somehow managed to crick it and was in complete agony! This left Sam the duty of taking the wheel!

We decided that we wanted to see as much of the North as possible so chose to follow the highway 35 all the way around the East Coast. This was quite a long distance to our night's destination at Hick's Bay, but we took great delight in taking in the lush scenery and indulging in the rather empty and windy roads.

By the time we reached Hick's Bay, it was 7pm, so we found a campsite for the night and Sam cooked a delicious carbonara while E-J indulged in a bottle of white wine to numb her pain!

Sam's comments: Hitting route 35 across to the East was beautiful. With Hellman's mayonnaise in the fridge I couldn't be happier!

E-J's comments: I'm loving the freedom of having a van. It's great to be able to take off whenever we want rather than having to wait for a bus as we had, had to do in South America. Also despite the fact that the bad weather keeps following us, I am still enjoying the beautiful green countryside and the sparseness of cars on the road.