Ginger DJ Rob

Van packed in perfect time and ready for the Eurotunnel journey. Despite some M25 slowness from an earlier accident we made with almost an hour to spare. As soon as we parked up another campervan driver came over to smooze us over the van and kept chatting for a good 20 minutes! Eurotunnel facilities weren't quite airport standard but liked the 'walkies' area for holidaying dogs to get a last stretch and pre-travel poop. All went very well until we came off the train when a couple of warning lights showed up on the dashboard - service and airbag - but had to put it down to a loose wire. Bloody attention-seeking van! Our first toll road was 21 Euros and was a great, unstressful drive to Epernay. Stopped a couple of times to change driver but couldn't handle the heat too long outside. The satnav on the tablet worked well despite the bright, reflective conditions but our cigarette charger didn't work so luckily I downloaded the same app on to my phone. When we arri...

Woke up to the sounds of Shakin' Stevens, and feeling a little worse for wear. It took us about 3 hours to have breakfast and get ready for our next site visit. The legendary toilets and getting higher with people's poop as they forget to flush and keep piling it on and upwards. At least the weather's behaving itself and when the sun's out it's warm. With very little energy we headed anywhere we could sit or lie down so the Cabaret tent was our first stop with Simon Munnery performing. Missed most of his comedy set so drifted around watching the side shows and street performers. At this point the Twitter plan was starting to go fail as everyone needed their phones charging at the Orange tent, especially Sony Ericsson owners like me. Unlike the chilled-like atmosphere outside, everyone was either paranoid their phone was going to be stolen or were desperate to get a charge point. We spent 20 minutes circulating then left in a huff: the Twitter experiment would soon b...

Woke up with the plan to leave the campsite for a less crowded one but our drinking excess and the Summer daylight savings cocked this up. The 10am checkout had passed so resorted to finding a better spot to park. Skydiving and the Shotover Jetboating were both cancelled because of the weather though with the hangover I was feeling it wouldn’t have been a good idea. We met up with James and Emma in town later for a chocolate based lunch. The guilt of the extra calories and the thought of not wanting to waste a day we hired some mountain bikes and explored the lakeside park. The evening was kept short for the first Shotover slot the next morning so opted for the best takeaway pizza courtesy of Hell Pizza . We loved the creative touch that the box would convert into a cardboard coffin (as modeled by Kerry and a camp James). Sounds like they’ve upset a few Kiwis with their other creative touches as per this Family First website . As this is a short entry here's a summary of what we li...

As soon as we got back to Methven we started our long, long journey to Fox Glacier , the other side of the mountain range and opposite coast. We were expecting a 5 and a half hour drive! This was possibly the most breathtaking but demanding journey I’ve ever taken. We really should have driven during the day to fully appreciate the scenery and we couldn’t help stop every half an hour to take photos. Highlights were: A jaw dropping gorge in Canterbury Plains ; A shortcut away from the main highway (from Lake Coleridge to Lake Lyndon) which turned out to be a 24 km dust/grit track through the driest part of NZ vibrating the campervan and us to bits – slightly worrying; Arthur’s Pass was slap in the middle of the highest mountains I’ve ever seen with roads reaching extreme heights; The sunset shadows and last rays of the sun over the peaks; A mad descent reveals a rock shelter like tunnel and a massive industrial size drain pipe to protect the road but trying to avoid sight of the sheer...

We drove all the way down to Wellington via a place called Tai Hapi, the gumboot throwing capital of NZ under the advice of the Brass owner. Before reaching this place, we'd read about a giant carrot statue in a place called Ohakune in the Lonely Planet as pictured. The carrot has something to do with this festival . Tai Hapi turned out to be slightly disappointing and like a lot of small towns, its identity statue made from corrugated metal – a giant gumboot. More amazing scenery along the way with multiple cows and sheep filling the fields. Stopped at Mangaweka which had a café in an old Dakota plane and stocked up on the lovely NZ chocolate and coffee. Another stop at a place called Bulls which it seemed every business used the town name as cheesily as possible e.g. the medical centre is Cure-a-bull. We approached Wellington, the country’s capital without a real idea of where to stay and it turned out to be quite stressful finding somewhere which allowed campervans, close enou...

Couldn’t deal with the coldness of the van so delayed getting up this morning. First on the hot thermal roadshow was Te Puia , a Maori and geyser theme park. Entry was quite steep at $50 but it was the cultural part that was worth it. More smelliness and walking around but didn’t quite compare to the extremeness on White Island. The main geyser was quite interesting but took awhile to really kick off.  The Maori midday ceremony was very special for me the guide asked for someone to act as visiting chief which I volunteered for. There’ll be a couple of YouTube videos of this coming soon but in essence I had to accept a peace offering and rub a few noses on stage. From my ‘throne’ (ok maybe not throne but best seat in the house) we watched the song and dance show which included Poi, the catching sticks game and a few warrior moves. The second smelly place was Wait-o-tapu or Geyserland which had loads of multi-coloured pools with some creative names like Champagne Pool, Artist P...

We’d booked our boat trip to the volcanic island off Whakantane (pronounced Thakatanae) weeks ago but according to the captain, gale forces were on they way. Strange really as it was a beautiful, still day so totally gutted we’d wasted our time. We then looked into an alternative to getting there calling the Vulcan Helicopter tours instead. It was quite expensive at $400 each plus another $400 to pay for the extra empty seat unless another party came forward. We took the chance and were treated to another exclusive trip and have the island to ourselves. It was a short drive outside the town to a toy-town airport and Mark, our pilot dismissed the weather forecast. It was a wasp-like chopper (similar to Magnum PI) taking 20 minutes passing Whale Island. It was certainly windy but the pilot did well to land it on the crater like island. We were given a safety helmet and gas mask in case the volcanic activity misbehaved. The landscape was incredible and felt like walking on the Moon or...

We were on the first Waitomo Caves boat tour as we had to travel to the East coast for tomorrow’s White Island tour. It was quite tame compared to yesterday’s tour but still worth doing and a lot more glowworms. Fact: Glowworms are actually fly lava with glowing poo in their arses. They have spider like threads catching other flies. The caves were spooky and the cluster of glowworms very pretty like night stars. We posed for the end tour photo pretending to be hooded muppets but the camera missed us. We headed for Tauranga and the Bay of Plenty stopping off at a few places en route. First stop was the Otorohanga Kiwi House , a native bird park to view real Kiwis. Taking photos of MC Hammer trousered dudes were quite tricky being nocturnal and housed in a dark room. Outside were other NZ birds just as cute. Keas are parrot-like and just as clever plus we timed our visit for their feeding hour. Left the aviary for more animal filled scenery passing cows, sheep, goats, deer and e...

Image by Ginger DJ via Flickr Jetlag strikes back with a vengeance waking us up at 3am and our bodies refused to sleep again. With a couple of weeks without TV we took advantage of the hotel’s facilities and watched the morning programmes. There’s a right character who presents their GMTV equivalent whinging at every opportunity amusing us. The taxi driver for our trip to collect the van was very helpful lending his mobilephone to speed up the Maui van hire process. Lucky really as it took ages setting off a little later than hoped after 1001 instructions on how to use the campervan. The traffic to the main motorway was quite busy by NZ standards but after a few kilometres out of Auckland only a handful of vehicles were sharing our journey. One story suburbs dwindled away for lush green countryside dominated by hills, sheep and cows. We were lucky to arrive on time at Waitomo Caves after stopping for some food and booked into the campsite opposite the meeting point. There was...