The Road Not Taken

I am losing track of my movements right now. I forget where I have come from and am not sure where I am going next. It is a wierd feeling.

I have been in Christchurch for the last two days at a hostel out of the town centre. It was a little too quiet. I had to play free pool on my own! However, I did go rafting with Rangitata rafts and that has been a highlight of the trip.

The day started with sunshine and no clouds. The bus trip to the rafting place takes just under two hours across the Canterbury plains. The lodge where they run the trips from is nice and has two very friendly dogs, “Brown Dog” and “Duck Face”. The guides are a good laugh especially Bob who said he was back to rafting after a long break so he may not be too good. We ended up with BOb as our guide…

He was joking of course, he was a great guide. You get a good 30 minutes of floating along getting to know fellow rafters and have a few jokes. I was at the front with Sam from London and behind us were Sams wife Lucy an American couple Eric and Cathy and another English girl Gemma.

Gemma wanted to be tipped at some point if we did not go in one of the rapids so Bob did just that when we were not expecting it. It was pretty refreshing in the water and after that any splashing from other rafts meant nothing as we were already soaked.

The whole trip was great, you get to swim some parts of the river and even float through small rapids where you tend to swallow a lot of water. We did manage a good “surf” at one point where you face up river and hit the rapid from behind so to speak and you surf the wave….at the front of the raft you get soaking wet, absolutely fabulous though.

I thoroughly recommend this trip as you get to do Grade V rapids!

Today I was up at 6am to get a shuttle to the airport to fly to Nelson. Yes another flight…but you get to view the scenery from the air. The little planes get totally thrown around up there which can be daunting and if you are at all scared of flying do not take these little planes!

So, back in the Paradiso hostel again. This place is very friendly, most people who stay here are open to chat although most are very young indeed, I still have a problem with the age difference, I feel like I am back at college most of the time. Get over it Steve!

Typical, I have not booked the Abel Tasman trip for tomorrow. This place makes you so lazy. It is a great place to relax. Free soup is at 6pm and I have paid my $6 for the dinner they cook up here. I may stray into town later with Dermot from Limerick and TaiChi from France who are in my room. They are both on working holidays for a year.

I am still tired from rafting yesterday and need a kip. Perhaps tomorrow will be a pool day….life is hard up here in the north of the south island. It may be even harder once I get to Pahia and the Bay of Islands ;0).

Like an idiot I left my book on the plane this morning but I called Origin Pacific who found the book and kindly said they will hold it for me. So I have to either get a ride to the airport or I will fly out to Auckland and pick it up then. I am really enjoying this one too so I was annoyed at myself.

The book is called “Ghost Riders” by Richard Grant and basically it covers the history (and current interviews) of Nomads in the American West. I recommend it as a good travel read and interesting history lesson too.

I have little idea of what is happening outside of NZ so please let me know if anything exciting happens.

Tags: New Zealand

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 9th, 2004 at 5:07 am and is filed under New Zealand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.