Less than 48 hours to go...

...and I'm very grateful for everyone who has supported me - THANK YOU!!

The competition closes at 12noon on this Tuesday Sept 8th, when the 3 blogs with the most followers will proceed to the round of final interviews, and possibly another challenge!

I've moved up to 5th place, and am knocking on the door of 4th place... spent yesterday hanging out with the competition - Craig & Linda - and had a great time. Everyone I've met in New Zealand is so warm and generous ...even if they are competing with me for an amazing 3-month blogging trip around the country!! Here's the vid we shot together yesterday:

Co-Opetition, what a concept!? Oh yeah, and spot the guy from Hawaii wearing 3 layers and a huge jacket while the Kiwi guy is crusing in his t-shirt!! Seriously though, if I could pick the top 3 candidates then it would surely be Craig, his lovely wife Linda, and of course me! Great people! ;-) Check out their site and consider doing the same for them.

Be sure to check out this very quick and fun little video touring Auckland City - what an amazing town. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and the harbour is full of sailboats. Ate a delicious home-cooked meal last night: fresh green-lipped mussels steamed in coconut milk and red thai curry sauce last night, yum! Life is great.

Don't forget to keep spreading the word through Facebook, Twitter, or any other [legal] means - if you've got an iPhone on you then don't be ashamed to sign up the person sitting next to you ;-) ...and click FOLLOW at the right side of this blog to help me win this dream job and share the wonderful people, places, and culture of AOTEAROA with you!!

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Arrival in Christchurch

CHRISTCHURCH CITY SQUARE BY NIGHT

Christchurch is cold, wet, and wonderfully misty as I am driven to my hosts’ apartment at one in the morning.

The streetlights infuse everything with a warm orange glow, and I’ve already made new friends while standing in line at customs.  I like New Zealand

Marina [a.k.a The Swiss Temptress] and Matt [a.k.a. The Vagabonding Kiwi] are my Couchsurfing hosts for the next couple days as I make preparations for a short roadtrip south to Queenstown for some snowboarding fun.  They met at a Backpackers’ pub in London and between them have traveled through Europe, South America, the United States, and Japan; we are meeting up later tonight at a CouchSurfMeet held on the couches of,  Le Plonk of course, with some of the local Couchsurfing Crew.  Should make for a fun night out…

LE PLONK, AFTER A COUPLE GLASSES OF LE PLONK

Breakfast this morning was at an organic café called Vic's 5 minutes walk from Matt’n’Marina’s home that makes the world’s best fresh bread.  Think home-made sourdough and honey ciabbata and rye loafs – I love the smell of fresh bread in the morning!

Christchurch is one of two cities in the world whose drinking water is so pure that it comes out of the tap untreated.  The other city?  Evian, France.  I am drinking the equivalent of expensive, pure bottled spring water straight from the tap.

Lunch à a café-come-boardroom aptly named, well, The Boardroom where you can meet clients for a cuppa, or hire a private conference room for more privacy.  I’m here to interview Peter ‘Pink Gloves’ Taylor, Organizer of Christchurch’s Greendrinks event, and all-around Sustainability Marketing Guru.  He quickly turns the tables on me and produces his own video camera to record an impromptu interview with me …

Peter is a bright-eyed man with a quick wit and twinkle in his eye who is involved with a projects in the business and political areneas, all focussed on helping businesses and community embrace and adopt sustainability.

There are many different accents and faces in the streets of Christchurch as I wander around to sort out my new cell phone and find an internet café (there’s a good one next to Starbucks in the city square, $3/ 1^st hr, highspeed wireless connection).  The sales girl at Vodafone hasn’t heard of the EntirelyWorldFamous competition, so in a fit of shameless self-promotion I take it upon myself to educate her about it, and of course ask for her vote.  Thanks Hannah!

Dinner is a yet another café (there are some good ones here) called The Honey Pot that is a favorite of Matt’n’Marina …serving breakfast all day, this is my kind of place. 

STEAMING HOT BLACKCURRANT

The customer favorite on the dinner menu here is the B.B.C. - Chicken breast stuffed with sun-dried tomatoes ad smoked cheese, wrapped in bacon and served with baby potatoes, panfried seasonal veges and a spicy BBQ sauce.  Fowl Play is also recommended, while Hot Lips and Jimmy The Fish also look like good choices.

I opt for the breakkie customer favorite: The Breakfast Muffin - strips of chunky bacon,  fried egg, sliced avocado smothered in home-made hollanaise sauce - and am not disappointed [thanks for the recommendation Sharla!].  It lasts about 2 minutes as I wash it down with some Hot Blackcurrant, a wine-colored drink that tastes medieval and warms my insides.

There is all kinds of art on the walls and a mellow roots-reggae soundtrack soothes and chills me out.  

Welcome to New Zealand!

STOP PRESS: Aotearoa here I come!!

Theme Song for the Day:

1. "The Matty Lynch Song", by Funk Harmony Park

I WAS BORN FOR THIS JOB!

Christchurch-based travel company Entirely Kiwi has the following position on offer:

• World Famous New Zealand Expert on Everything New Zealand
  

The Dream Job exploring the Land of the Long White Cloud on an all-expenses-paid three month tour of Aotearoa. Job Duties include:

• meeting the locals and sampling the local brewskies
  
• rapelling into GlowWorm caves of Waitomu
  
• lounging in the mud baths of Rotorua
• base jumping from the buildings of Aukland
  
• fish the Bay of Plenty
• scaling the cliffs of Wanaka
• bombing the snowboard runs of Queenstown
• cross the glaciers of the South Island
• explore Marlborough wine country
• hike the mystical Fiordland wilderness
• fly fish Norfolk Island
• and whatever other adventures and misadventures we can think up!
  

So vote for me by clicking here [join my Facebook fan page] and here [rate the YouTube clip] ...and all of your wildest dreams will come true!

THE JOURNEY BEGINS


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Travelog Redux - backpacking New Zealand

STA TRAVEL CENTERS MEAN BACKPACKING TO ME!

Thought I'd post an entry from the Travelog I kept in 2003 while backpacking New Zealand. I booked my flight into Aukland, and nothing else, deciding to figure everything out once I got there..."spontaneous travel", I called it. One of the best trips I have ever done [so far] in my life! No pics, only some images from my sketchbook at the time....enjoy:

9pm, Janus Hall Backpacker's Lodge, Wet All Day

....Waitomo Caves Gloworm Adventure Tour was well worth it, what an adventure!!

30-meter abseil into a hole in the ground starts things off...the hole looks like, well, a hole about 1/2 meter wide an 2 meters down, then you squeeze into the opening and find yourself hanging in a limestone chimney 30m off the cave floor....

...then down a narrow path to a short flying fox run (in the dark), quick break for tea & a biscuit a.k.a. cave cookie a.k.a. NZ Granola Bar...we dangle our feet over the edge of a 10-foot drop and peer into the still, pitch-black water below...can't tell how dep it is (or isn't)....we jump off the cliff into the freezng water below and paddle our way upstream where our guide shows us a chamber full of gloworms & tells us of their lifecycles:

"They are acually maggots of a certain kind of fly, the only maggots known to catch their food by using a light on their arse...only maggots known to trap their food with snot-like fishing lines they dangle to entangle their prey...after living as larvae for many weeks, they pupate into flies which live for three days & shag until they die of exhaustion....they have very short life cycles, but very large penises...what a trade-off, aye?? "

Then, after paddling uptream for about half an hour, we sit on our inner tubes and form a human chain, shut the lights off on our helmets...and float down the stream in the darkness, with only the pale glow of the maggots to light our way.

It is a surreal feeling, drifting downstream in an underground river in total darkness, with 7 other people crazy enough to want to do it with you, and your guide....you lose all sense of space & it feels like you are drifting in the cold vacuum of space; the glow worms look like the stars of distant galaxies....then *SPLASH* our other guide scares the s*%t out of us by making a god-awful noise which breaks the spell and heralds our arrival back to our entry point, where we came in on the flying fox & jumped into the water.

We ditch the inner tubes, turn our lights back on, and follow our guide downstream into the icy black water towards the roar of what sounds like a huge waterfall...we twist & urn & stumble thru a series of rapids, not knowing what lies beneath or where your foot is stepping, just trusting to your numb feet that tey will find the way.

"Watch out for the big eels" they say, and we cannot tell if they are joking or not...although I wonder when they tell us to keep our fingers out of the water lest they be mistaken for earthworms or grubs. Down a slide, we turn a corner & continue downstream, sometimes ankle-deep in water, sometimes chest-deep, sometimes paddling to keep your head afloat as the river bed drops away beneath you.

We pause and our guide points out a few stallegmite formatioins that remind them of different things: T-Rex claw over here, fairy castle over there...then the crown jewell, a formation that looks like a sheep farmer having a little too much fun with his sheep, doggy-style if ya know what I mean...

We press on despite the fact that I can no longer feel my toes, and the cave gets smaller and smaller, pressing in around us. We are crawling our way thru some spaces now, our guides have given us directions and we are now leading the way, the blind leading the blind...

We duck under another low ceiling into another cold pool, and Ritchie, our Maori guide, runs forrward to a nook in the wall and exclaims, "Check this out, it's Cecil!!" "Cecil" turns out to be a 1.5 foot-long eel who resembles a catfish with no eyes, and who is, apparently, asleep.

I am immediately reminded of the "shrieking eels" in [the movie] "The Princess Bride", an also reminded of the earlier warning at our entry point into the caves...yech...10 feet long, they said, 6 inchess in diameter...my skin crawls at the thought of such a creature wrapping itself around my leg, and with a shudder, we move on. Bloody uncanny those creatures, seems like they could live anywhere....their grey skin is unnatural, reminding me of Gollum.

We turn another corner and are given a choice....the easy way out, or do we want our money's worth...nobody objects, so we take the right fork and crawl under a tiny gap in the wall...to emerge under a 10M waterfall. We climb up one at a time, and squeeze through a narrow passageway to come to another waterfall, and...daylight.

It is with mixed feelings that we greet the daylight; sad that our adventure is coming to an end, glad that we are out of the cold...and on our way to hot showers & soup & bagels...what an amazing experience!

Two hours underground with complete strangers, and we emerge with the strange bond a shared experience creates. We know each other pretty well now: there are the 3 Italian guys who don't speak much English but laugh at everything you say...the Smiling Swiss, Felix, who beamed at you every time you looked his way...the Aussie couple, Danielle and her hubbie The Plumber, true-blue Aussies with that "no worries" attitude that meant they were up for anything thrown their way...Sharon, the British girl who teaches English in japan and was petrified the whole way, but who made it thru, foggy glasses and all...and, of course, Bigi [my Austrian travelling companion at the time], who is just...well, Bigi, making friends with everybody, and loving every minute of it.

What a great day!
12/21/2003

WARM AGAIN:
THE VERANDAH GRILL BACK AT THE BACKPACKER'S LODGE