Antichristchurch

Well, after leaving Wellington, things have been a bit up and down, and are now firmly on a downer in Christchurch. I've been stuck here for about two weeks now, after really only intending to be here for a couple of days. It's flat, and the population seems to be mostly neo-nazi dickheads and foreign pensioners. Anyways, enough of that... time for a quick update on progress so far.

Started in Picton, headed into the Marlborough Sounds. Spent my first night in a place called Hopewell in possibly the best backpacker hostel ever. I rented a kayak for $10 and paddled around, and it was very much fun. I even took the F65 out with me and took some photos while I was out there. Next night involved some shady mountainous dirt roads on the way over to a place called Titirangi. The weather was crap when I arrived, and my passport fell out of the van on the way over (long and silly story), but the next morning, all was clear and sunny and I even managed a swim in the sea, something I really don't do often.

Next was Elaine Bay, a bit further over to the western side of the sounds. Cool spot with a wee pier and stingrays floating about in the water, and I got chatting to Simon, a Canadian fellow van traveller. All was great, except my legs got absolutely annihilated by sandflies. Carried on to the relative civilisation of Nelson, met up with Simon for a beer and only partially successful attempts to chat up some girls from the Kiwi Experience bus.

Headed up to Motueka, did Karaoke for only the third time in my life, waltzed with an old Maori alcoholic woman, and hung out in a very Phoenix-nights hotel/local pub. Headed on up through Takaka and its hippies on my way to Cape Farewell. Headed back down into Nelson, then back over to the West Coast. Was blown away by the delights of Westport, failed to find penguins on a beach in the middle of nowhere, and eventually ended up staying in Greymouth.

Drove over the Lewis Pass, which would've been pretty amazing if I could've seen any of it (the clouds were low, and it was raining). And then Christchurch. As I said earlier, flat, bland, and full of weirdoes.

Next move is a fishing trip up into the hills, back to Christchurch once more to sleep it off, then I'm gonna head over Arthur's Pass to the West Coast again, and hope the weather's not too crappy when I get there!

Wellington

So, this may be my last update from Wellington for a while. I'm planning to leave this weekend (Sunday 15th Feb) and head off on an adventure to the South Island.

Things have been going pretty cool here - the house I'm staying in is great, and the work's been pretty cool too. I even managed to find a colleague with a similar taste for horrible doom metal, which was nice!

Biggest problem so far has been the van over the last couple of days. First of all, some b*****ds tried breaking into it. Thankfully, the most valuable items inside were the road atlas and a cheapo rugby ball, so they didn't bother taking anything. They did attempt to hotwire it by the looks of things, but thankfully didn't go all the way through with it. They also seem to have tried to nick the radio, which beggars belief, as it's crap and doesn't actually do much due to having a cassette adaptor jammed in it! It does even less now that they tried to remove it, as it's now reverted to "security code" mode. Of course, I don't have the code, and I'm certainly not willing to shell out for ford to reset my code or buy a new hifi to listen to music through some crappy tinny speakers!

I'll be getting some new locks for the doors soon (the burglars damaged the locks in the break-in), and it's just got a whole new set of tyres on board, so hopefully I'll be all rockin' and ready to go come the weekend

In other news, I've just picked up a super cheap Nikon FM film camera body, so I reckon the Olympus Rangefinder will have to go to make room for it. I had been borrowing a Holga for a wee while, but I'm definitely not a big fan. It'd be a great camera for a few quid, but it's proper crap for the money the lomographic society like to charge for them. To put it into context - over here a Holga is $169 NZD, where my FM body was only $99, and it's renowned as one of the most solid camera bodies ever built.

I also went to check out an excellent photographic exhibition earlier on today, quite by accident. Or maybe it was fate? The exhibition was in the Bowen Gallery on Ghuznee Street and Featured photographs of Antarctica by Wellington photographers Mike Wilkinson and Grant Sheehan. I had been reading a lot about Antarctic exploration on the internet recently, and decided I really want to go there at some point if I possibly can. I had just decided to go for a wander and take some pictures around the city on my way home from work via a different route from usual, and found the Gallery, which I didn't even know was there before. So that was cool. The exhibition details are all here on NZLive.com. Just a nice wee sly plug for my work and all that!

The Van

I just bought this on DVD from a local supermarket for NZ$5. That's about £2 for any readers back in the UK. Check out the trailer:

Massively looking forward to watching it now. Full review (probably not) to come.

New Toys

I'm a happy boy, because over the last couple of weeks, I've added two new cameras to the collection. It's a bit silly, I know, but they were just cheapo impulse buys from Trademe (like NZ's version of ebay). The two I've added are this lovely wee Olympus 35DC Rangefinder which arrived yesterday, and a Nikon F65, which arrived at the start of January.

The wee Olympus is as-yet untested, so I'm not sure how that'll go. The Zuiko 40/1.7 lens stuck on the front has a good rep, and the rangefinder seems in pretty good shape. However, the light seals are knackered (all gummed up), the leather covering on the body seems to be coming unglued, and the battery indicator doesn't work, even though the meter seems to be reading fairly correctly. I've stuck a roll of Kodak Ultramax 400 in it, so we'll see how that turns out.

On a more practical 35mm note, the F65 has been great. It works with all of my Nikkor lenses from the D700, and it weighs next to nothing. The F65 and AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D actually weigh less than my Olympus OM10 and Zuiko 50mm f/1.8, something I never thought possible! The 50mm's pretty much lived on it though, as the F65 does look a tad ridiculous with the 80-200/2.8 mounted! You can see all the photos taken on it do far here

Other than the new toys though, I'm currently trying to fix my website after discovering that it looks a bit rubbish in anything other than internet explorer. Guess I'll just need to start brushing up on the CSS!

Intercontinental

From LA, my next leg was a hefty flight on a Qantas 747 across the Pacific to Auckland. While this sounds like it could be the worst thing imaginable, it was surprisingly not bad. I managed to get to the airport nice and early, so I was one of the first to check in. This gave me the very hefty advantage of being able to ask for one of the emergency exit seats. For those of you not aware, I'm quite a tall guy at six feet and three inches (or about 190cm for those of a metric inclination). If you've ever travelled economy on any airline anywhere, you'll probably be aware of how the seats offer a degree of legroom to proportionally increase agony levels with every inch gained in height above five foot nothing.

Thankfully, I got the emergency seats, and the associated additional legroom. However, when I got on the plane, I was faced with a bit of a weird situation. The guy in the seat next to mine looked like a bizarre genetic experiment splicing John Travolta and Gary Glitter into one weird, weird looking human being. Of course, I had the added benefit of being stuck right next to the air hostesses station, so at least the view was quite nice in one direction.

The flight was pretty long, about 14 hours in total. It wasn't a particularly fun experience, and even my favourite thing was spoilt. My favourite thing about flying anywhere is watching the moving map on the TV screens. When your plane's over the middle of the pacific ocean, the map shows a bunch of blue stuff with a wee grey plane in the middle for about ten hours. Oh well, can't win them all...

Photo Credit: Steve Downe

So Cal

After my adventures round and about Northern California, I was left with very little time to explore much of the south. I had planned to visit San Diego, but that plan had to go out the window. I was left with only two days between leaving San Francisco and my flight departing from LAX for Auckland, so I decided that after a few weeks of living out of my rucksack going between youth hostels, that I would treat myself to two nights in the Radisson Hotel out at LAX airport.

Just about everyone I'd spoken to had said that LA was a bit rubbish, and I was inclined to believe them. When I got there, I just found the place a bit horrible. Everything's just sprawled out - there's no definable focal point for the city, and the people seemed more concerned with being seen than whatever it was they were doing at the time.

I have to admit, I loved the Radisson when I first arrived - room service pizza, VERY comfortable beds, a huge big room, and no room-mates snoring through the night. After the initial novelty wore off, I actually realised just how much I missed staying in backpacker hostels. The hotel being situated near the airport meant it wasn't very close to much else, and hence the room service pizza was pretty much my only option for food. The biggest thing I missed was the company though - the best thing about hostelling is meeting all kinds of new and different people from all different parts of the world, and staying in a hotel didn't come with that kind of fun experience.

I did manage one day trip out of the hostel along to a place called Manhattan beach, which was apparently the world beach volleyball capital or something like that. It was a bit weird, with all the tanned, toned and surgically tweaked bodies being shown off all over the place. Definitely no comparisons to Saltcoats shore and the fish-supper-fuelled efforts down there! My only real shooting was a wee bit of night stuff underneath one of the airport runways, doing a bit of a Wayne's World... WAAAAAAHH! I also found the adverts for the local ambulance chasers quite amusing - made some of the UK's claims direct ads look top class.

Nor Cal

The adventures in San Francisco didn't end at the Pet Cemetery, thankfully. Actually, thinking about it, if they had, it would've made quite a nice horror B-Movie, but that's a different story altogether.

I hung out with Roxanne a little bit more around the city, taking some cool little trips around a bunch of places. One of those cool places was Corona Heights, a hill looking down over the city. The sun began to set as we were up there, leaving the sky resembling what Roxanne called a "Golden Soup". I'd never heard the sky compared to soup before, but hey, it worked!

Soon enough, we'd decided it would be fun to take a wee trip up to Roxanne's home town of Stockton, then on up towards Lake Tahoe, where she needed to pick up her car. We jumped on the Amtrak, spent a night in Stockton, then met up with Roxanne's friend Katie. The drive up to Tahoe was pretty immense, some real big mountains and cool desolate scenery, and especially cool colours in the vegetation, as Autumn was just beginning to set in.

We spent one night up in Katie's family's cabin out in the woods. I think the girls had maybe expected a little excitement after buying me a bottle of beer called "Kiltlifter" in a supermarket on the way up! Sadly though, despite its 7.5% potency, we were all a bit too tired for any kilt-based antics and just hit the hay. The next morning was spent helping Katie's dad ready the cabin for winter. This involved not only locking away anything that wasn't bolted down (because of bears and very heavy snowfalls) but also dismantling an old stove that needed to be taken down to civilisation to be repaired and refurbished.

Heading back, Roxanne and I decided a trip around the shores of Lake Tahoe would be in order. Heading down the road from the cabin to the main town of South Lake Tahoe, we met Nikolai and Eve, a Bulgarian couple who had lived in France and were now living in San Jose. They'd pulled over at a little layby to take a picture down the impressive valley, and had managed to get themselves locked out of their car, with the keys inside. After many attempts to call their insurance company to arrange assistance, eventually a Highway Patrol officer passed by and was able to help them out, so Roxanne and I got on the road. Our trip around the lake was a bit of a non-event due to some Rotten Weather, but I did at least get to say I'd been in Nevada!

Next stop was back down to Stockton again where I stayed at Roxanne's for a few days. Stockton is the home of alt-rock legends Pavement, and nearby Modesto was where Grandaddy (one of my favourite bands!) hailed from, and being around there, I could kinda see where their sounds came from. I got to hang out at the excellent, but now-defunct Stockton Cycles, meet some gangstas, and try skateboarding and fixed-wheel cycling for the first time in Stockton, which was all kinda fun!

While Stockton was fun, I needed to head back into San Francisco where I'd catch my train to LA. My second visit to SF was considerably quieter, but just as fun, hanging out with Roxanne and more of her friends and just enjoying the excellent California sunshine.

Been Too Long!

It's been far too long since I last posted on here! I have steady, regular access to the internet now, so I'll try and get a few things updated. Works in progress include charting my travels on a Google Earth KML file so that everyone can see just where I've been.

As for the current situation, I'm now based in Wellington, New Zealand. I'm currently working for the Ministry for Culture and Heritage helping keep their events website NZLive.com up to date. I'm living in a nice house in the Mount Victoria area, and all's good.

Keep your eyes peeled for more stories from my travels!

San Francisco

San Francisco is just an excellent excellent city. As soon as I stepped off the bus, I could just tell that there was something nice about the place that I was going to like. To be honest, I think the sunny weather had a lot to do with it!

On arriving in the USA Hostel on Post St. I immediately crashed out for a hell of a sleep after not getting enough rest on the train - I was absolutely knackered. On waking up, I made a most horrendous discovery - that I'd left my beloved black and grey stripey hoodie on the train. Thankfully, on a quick nip down the road to H&M, I managed to find the exact same hoodie on the out-of-season sale rail, the last one of its type left - a great relief. Also managed to find what may have been my closest contender yet in my quest for the perfect wooly hat.

I took this first morning as an opportunity to go up and look at Lombard Street, but I was kinda disappointed when I actually got there. I guess I should've known - it's just a wiggly road down a hill at the end of the day. Next came a bit of lens shopping, taking advantage of the weak dollar to buy me a nice Nikkor 85mm f/1.8. It got its first use in anger after meeting up with Kelley and Francis again, the couple I'd met on my first visit to Portland.

In the afternoon, Francis and I went on a little expedition to a dump. Thankfully however, the reason was that there was an art show on at the dump with a bunch of works made from found objects. It wasn't great in terms of the artwork, but it was quite an interesting setting and did a good job of saving me from getting trapped in tourist hell! That evening, I was invited up to a pleasant wee dinner party at their flat, where I mostly admired Francis' extensive collection of horror movie memorabilia.

The next day, I had decided to just go for the tourist thing and make a trip out to the golden gate bridge. The bridge itself was pretty impressive, but I found the area around the bridge to be a lot more interesting. There was a pretty cool old historic fort at one end of the bridge, and a pretty cool pier where a whole bunch of old guys were out fishing. I even managed to catch sight of a Sea Lion out for a wee swim, which was pretty cool.

That evening, I met up again with Roxanne from the train journey, and she showed me around some of the cooler sights in the city by night. The next day, Roxanne, her friend Meredith and I would go on a nice wee adventure to what I'd definitely call the highlight of my trip so far - the Pet Cemetery in the Presidio. It was a totally surreal experience, with the majority of the ex-pets belonging to servicemen and women who had been stationed there when the Presidio was still a big military base. Although the cemetery had officially closed in the 70s or something, there were still a lot of "new" burial sites, implying that the cemetery lived on!

After the bizarre joys of the cemetery, we carried on down to a lovely wee beach on the Pacific coast and sat for a few nice hours in the sun.

I have to stop writing just now, but I'll carry this on in another post soon!

Portland (Slight Return)

After the many joys of Seaside, I was glad to make my way back to Portland for one more night before hitting the train to San Francisco. The plan was to arrive back mid-morning, spend the day just hanging out in the city, spend one night there, and have a nice lie in, catching the train early the next afternoon.

Unfortunately however, I was without the experience of one of the most vital lessons I've learned on the journey so far. The simple lesson being do not rely on people you've only ever met in the pub when very drunk for a place to stay the night!

You may recall from my previous blog posting from Portland an episode involving drunkenly dancing in my kilt. Well that night I'd met some people in the pub who'd offered me a place to crash on my return to Portland, knowing I'd be going down to Seaside for a few days. Arrangements were made the day before I was due back up, and all seemed rosy until I ended up in Portland, when all of a sudden phones were ringing out and text messages were going unanswered.

With no place to stay, I got in touch with the HI Hostel where I'd been staying previously, and thankfully managed to get me a bed there instead. While I was there, I met some excellent people - Roxanne, Ramon, Douglas, Jessica and Jennifer. We all went out for a stroll around the streets near the hostel, and ended up at the Blue Moon for a few beers and found out that all of us but Jessica would be travelling down to California on the same train the next day.

The train journey was a bit of a beast, 21 hours in total, but thankfully the good company made it a whole lot more tolerable. The train had plenty of legroom and comfy seats, so it was a nice relaxing journey, even with the woman sitting behind us whom we were sure was trying to communicate with ghosts. Jen left us at Sacramento, Roxanne at Martinez, leaving myself and Douglas to carry on to Emeryville, then making the short bus transfer across the bay to San Francisco.