Sunday, January 20 - We're reunited with the kids!

Breakfast of champions     

    The morning after the surfing competition we were eating breakfast at the camp kitchen when a bear of a man sat down with us and began chit-chatting. He had a strong beard, curly sun-tinted dark hair, a barrel shaped torso, and looked about 45 years old.  A native Kiwian, we talked about our countries, I asked him about kayaking in NZ, and then we got onto the topic of surfing.  I asked him if he surfed much, and another guy sitting at a table next to us informed us that he had won the knee-boarding championship just the day before.  Evidently surfing started out with long boards from the early days, then in the '60's evolved to shorter boards that the riders could do tricks on, which they first rode on the knees.  Now most surfing is done standing on the shorter boards, but knee-surfing still remains as a legitimate form.  I asked him if his mates carried him up the beach on their shoulders after he won the competition and he laughed, saying they talked about it, but with him at 240 pounds no one volunteered.  I understood, it is a long beach. 

Back to five

      After showering and getting our stuff in order we drove into Auckland.  The kids were scheduled to arrive at about 1 pm, but first we wanted to go to a library to use free wifi and get insurance for the car.  That accomplished, we drove to a shopping center in the suburb where we had stayed and met up with the kids.  Yay, we were together again!

    We had some work to do before we could return the car.  First Diana and I vacuumed our van, then we transferred all their stuff to the van, and they cleaned up their car before returning it.  As we stacked their stuff into the back of the little Townace it sank lower and lower, until I was afraid we'd be riding on the rear wheels.  Great!  What was this going to mean for our trip?

    Oh well, we didn't have time to worry about it, we wanted to get out of town. I've driven vehicles with heavy loads that sagged in the back, and I'm sure I'll do it again. (More on that in a later posting).  Diana and I drove into town and picked the kids up at the car rental place, and we headed south out of town.

     We drove for a couple hours and ended up at a small campground in the countryside.   The host was quite an interesting fellow.  He is a beverage bottling manufacturing engineer, probably ten years older than us. He has worked all over the world, and had tons of stories.  He and his wife lived in Rhodesia for 12 years, experiencing the revolutions and turmoil and overthrow of the white government and the beginning of Mugabe's reign.  Later, he worked two jobs at the same time, managing the installation of a Coke plant in India and a Pepsi plant in Pakistan.  Because they were at war with each other at the time, he had to fly through Saudi Arabia to go from one place to the other.  But his best story was he and his wife driving Africa from top to bottom in the late '60's to get to a job in South Africa in a 800cc Renault R4.  They experienced broken axles, bandits, and many dicey border crossings. They crossed the sandy roads in the Sahara by moving 'sand ladders' 10 feet at a time.  They thought it would take three weeks, it ended up taking three months. I guess it's a miracle they made it at all.

It's no Landcruiser, but it got Peter and Carol through places
that hadn't seen a European in almost a decade.

     Everyone else went to bed, but Peter and I stayed up talking.  Well, I mostly listened.  He had some interesting theories about many things.  For example, with his demolition expertise he's absolutely certain the the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks were a preset demolition job.  Also, he's believes the Celtic Cross is actually a Medieval navigational device that allowed Irish sailors to accurately measure longitude centuries before the invention of the chronograph, thus explaining the presence of Europeans in the North American continent half a millenium before Columbus.  And, he's convinced that the Maori people didn't arrive from the Polynesian Islands, but rather from Africa, because in years working there he saw many people living there who looked just the same.

     Everyone else had gone to bed before midnight but I stayed up to hear his stories and theories.  At around 1 am, he asked me if I wanted to see some 'real' glow worms.  Who wouldn't.  He grabbed a powerful 'torch' from his campervan and lead me on a narrow trail back into the woods behind the campground.  I followed his circle of light as we worked our way up a hill until we came to a spot with a rocky cliff side dripping with moisture.  He turned off his flashlight, and I could see a replica of the night sky right there on the rock wall.  It was pretty cool.  Similar to our experience in Oz in the Blue Mountains, except this time I had a character straight from a Graham Greene novel as my guide.