Kaituna

So, from the Bliss Stick factory, we drove back up to Rotorua and got on the Kaituna, a one kilometre class 3/4 with a 7m waterfall on it. With enough fitness and local knowledge you can run it in less than an hour. The extreme race boys and girls do it in 6 minutes. I had to pick up some gear from a local shop, Topline Agencies.  Walking out with a Palm Torrent drysuit, some airbags and a set of Robson split paddles later, all for £600, the owner of the shop, Andi Uhl offered to join us for a quick blitz run to show us the lines.

A little over an hour later, with total saucer eyes and massive grins plastered on our faces, we blasted back up to the van on the back of Andi's truck, holding on to the boats, the van and eachother for dear life. Andi's run the Kaituna over 1800 times, and his help was invaluable! I will publicly confess that I managed to swim in an eddy on one of the easiest rapids at the end of the river after crunching my shoulder, an old injury exacerbated by terror paddling and not warming up. This called for a few days off, which we have spent resting, eating as much protein as possible and surfing in Whakatane and Mt Managanui, cool seaside towns on the pacific ocean.

Tomorrow we head back up to Rotorua, and with a shoulder which is now feeling fine, we will get back on the Kaituna to brush up a little more on the steep creeking! What fun.

Catch you all soon, and happy birthday nan!

Sam and Doug.

Bliss Stick

First of all, this blog has been up now for 20 days now and has already got (at the time of writing) 606 views. All of that without us actually doing anything interesting! Thanks for the sterling work on the refresh buttons mums.

So, as you will know if you've been reading attentively, we have spent the last 5 days out of 6 working at the Bliss Stick factory, out in the wop wops near Taihape. Charles on the right hand side is the main man. He pours, cooks and finishes all of the kayaks that come out of the factory, 3 or so per day. His wife, Coke, makes all the outfitting and does the accounts. We stepped in for a week to do all of the labour intensive stuff so that they could get on with building boats! Doug reloaded moulds and finished outfitting while I cooked back rests and seat pads all week. Take note of the boat in the picture. It's Doug's - still in the mould, still with plastic in the space of the cockpit hole! That'll be cut out by Charles.

Cracking the mould off of my boat. At this point, fresh from being spun around for 45 minutes after being taken out of the oven, the plastic is pretty darn hot. Once it cooled, I got to lift my boat out of the mould. Not many boaters can say they've done that!

Two tremendously intrepid looking chaps, two shiny new kayaks. Lots of adventures to come! We are going to drive up to Rotorua tomorrow, then we'll make our way slowly down to the South Island, paddling as much stuff as we can on the way. Looking forward to the Kaituna!

Catch you all soon,

Sam and Doug

Portside

So, Napier, apart from being quite pretty, was also WARM. We wouldn't go as far as saying it was hot, but after a few days in Taihape, warm would do just fine. Another asset to this town is the Hawke Bay Seafood Company. It's mainly a seafood wholesalers, where fishermen in the slightly smaller harbour round the coast go to sell their fish, but they also have a restaurant on site, where Doug and I bought 5 peices of fish and two (very) large portions of chips for $14 total, just over seven quid in British. Awesome!

We also saw Napier Sailing Club on the map. We popped into the office to see if we could go for a sail, and they gave us the card of Marty, who runs a sailing school called Monkey Fist out of one of their sheds. The next day we returned at 1pm, paid $25 and were told to tack a few times in the harbour to put Marty's mind at rest, before we were allowed to leave and head out into the bay - but to make sure we were back by "half three, half four, whatever".

"Now, the tide's going out there and there's plenty of offshore wind, but these things are pretty easy to right, just make sure you don't go too far out, otherwise i'll have to put a boat in to come out and look for ya." Right, thanks. Luckily we didn't lose the harbour entrance or have to practice righting the boat, but it was still good fun, sailing around on the sea.

When we weren't sailing or stuffing our faces full of seafood, we were putting a new sound system in the van. So far it consists of a new stereo and 2 new 4 inch speakers for the dash. Unfitted but sitting in the back in a box are two 6x9 speakers, because in our opinion the current ones don't have enough bass. First world problems eh. 

Ten points, by the way, to anyone who can name what type of Dinghy it is in the comments, because we haven't got a clue. 

Catch you all soon,

Sam and Doug

The Road to Napier

So, the epic drive commenced. This is only the driveway to the factory (red kayak mailbox at the end of the road on the right), but already the road is steep. At this point, we are an hour away from the nearest town, and as we were about to find out, about 200km away from the nearest gas station. Half a tank of gas in the van.

At this point it had stopped hailing, but we were in the hills and our clutch started giving up. With warnings about bad brakes ringing in our ears, shifting down through the gears to control the descents was accompanied by a horrible screeching noise whenever the clutch pedal was brought back out. About 25km before this picture was taken, the petrol gauge read zero. We drove through five tiny towns, so tiny that we passed through most of them just assuming that they were just densely packed farm houses. They looked much bigger on the map but obviously didn't have petrol stations. Each one we passed through we thought of stopping and asking for fuel, but we pressed on. This was our saviour.

After about an hour on an empty fuel gauge, we pulled into Hastings and stopped at this place. Doug put 59.26 litres into our sixty litre tank. Our sphincters relaxed. After a quick cruise around Hastings we decided to make the 20k trip over to Napier, where we stayed for the next four days. It's been our favourite town so far.

More on that when we get some internet tonight, when we return to the Bliss Stick factory to make some boats!

Catch you all soon,

Sam and Doug

Taupo to Taihape

So, we've left Taupo and it's eponymous lake and driven through the Rangipo desert to the Bliss Stick factory, near Taihape. We were greeted by Charles and Cokes' massive sound system and the cats and dogs which run around the factory, which is essentially just a big shed with a kiln and some moulds in it. You can see Charles birthing a little baby Bliss Stick here.

Charles and Coke generously let us camp out on the embarrassingly flat ground at the back of their factory for two nights. Embarrassingly flat because we got the van stuck. Twice. Here we are discussing how to get the van out with Derek, Callum and Merissa, all NZ locals who were working at the factory in exchange for cheap boats (something that we plan to do starting on Monday). What the picture doesn't portray is that it was properly baltic and we woke up to everything covered in snow in the morning.

In the meantime, before we start work on monday, we find ourselves in Napier; a long, long drive across quite steep nature reserves which our van and us didn't really enjoy. More on that next time (epic cliff hanger!)

Catch you all soon.

Sam and Doug.

Paddle Wagon

So, with the fantastic help of Des and his mates in Rotorua, we have bought ourselves a van. It's a 1991 Ford Evonovan Maxi fitted out in the back with a heater, fridge, sink and (outdoor) hot shower. It purrs like the genuine white tiger print seat covers, and works much better in the mornings than Douglas. We camped next to an almost identical one in Rotorua Thermal Springs and got chatting with the owners. Known problems with them include overheating, not starting (spark plugs) and not stopping (brake failure). It's all good then!

For $7,500 we've not done too badly. We've stayed in her two nights so far, one at a cool campsite in Rotorua with geologically heated swimming pools (a bit smelly) and another down by the Waikato River just upstream of Huka falls. Obviously we were looking for lines (left) and where to get on and off without getting caught.

Our first attempt at rigging our awning wasn't too great, you can see one of the guy lines wrapped around the front of the van, but the camp site was pretty nice, and free to stay at for the week. New Zealand knows how to treat it's campers.

Next stop for us is probably the Bliss Stick factory, a little further south than us. After that we'll probably head up north - we've heard rumours that it's not wet, rainy and cold up there and we want to check them out!

Catch you all again soon!

Douglas St

We were getting quite delirious. We'd walked around the suburbs of Auckland for about two hours by this point. Douglas was much, much too happy about this sign. The strange thing is that it hasn't worn off by this morning and he's insisted that I post this picture to the blog, threatening that he wouldn't talk to me for a week unless I did. When that didn't work, he offered me a coffee. So here it is.

We've arrived.

We've arrived in Auckland. Once the beast was burdened, it flew us over Singapore, past Australia, the Tasman Sea and finally dropped us off at Auckland International. It didn't take us long to find a pub.

The Brewery Britomat brews its own beer on site (in the vats that you can see behind the bar, and also in the adjacent tap rom). It smells good and also sells pizza. We have one more night in Auckland, before heading down to Rotorua to check out the boiling mud (which will hopefully mask Doug's toxic arm pits) and hopefully sort out a van. Psyched!

Baggage Allowance

Well, everything is just about packed, an hour before driving off to the airport. Aside from my bulging at the seams 150 litre dry bag, my hand luggage is filled with an assortment of items that I expect to come in handy for the 24 hour flight; 50 meters of nylon rope, 8 quickdraws, a pair of climbing shoes, two chalk bags, a sling and biner and a toothbrush. Expert packing Sam, expert packing.

Place Holder

Well, here it is. Photos and videos of Sam and Doug's trip to NZ coming... well, when we arrive! 3 days to go.