The next day, Christmas eve, I headed down to Taihape, again, where I was going to buy a new boat, a Bliss Stick Mini Mystic creek boat for the rivers of the west coast. I arrived just as my boat came out of the mould, just about the last Bliss-Stick boat made in 2008, and I helped put the seat in to make it.
I was planning to stay at River Valley Lodge in Taihape, but on arrivel I found it compltely empty, except for a few new arrivals who were as confused as I was about why noone was there. I decided it wasn't the most lively place to have Christmas so roared off in my new four wheel drive Subaru to get to Wellington.
I had unfortunately forgotton that my Subaru was not a higly tuned rally car, but an old wreck, and after a few miles of driving like a rally car the steering wheel started to shake, and it became undriveable above 30 km/h. I nursed it back to a hostel and realised there was no way it was going to get repaired around Christmas, getting to South Island was going to be more of a challenge than I imagined.
I woke up the next morning and realised Taihape was no place to spend it. I decided to risk driving to Wellington, if the car broke down/blew up, whatever. Somehow the car seemed to heal over night and made it down to Wellington with no major problems.
I arrived in Wellington on Christmas day knowing noone. It only took as long as it took to park the car to find a Christmas party though. I parked the car next to a van full of strangers who invited me over for a drink, it turned out they were backpackers from France and Germany who had all met by chance over the past few days. More people turned up throughout the day till we pretty much had all the countries of Europe reprosented in a gathering on Christmas day under the sun in a New Zealand car park. One thing we didn't anticipate though was that it is illegal to buy alcohol on Christmas day in New Zealand. Our stockpiles of beer rapidly ran out as I ate my Christmas dinner, a chicken kebab turned out to be the closest thing available. Just after 12 we managed to find a kebab shop which could sell us alcohol and we finally had our Christmas party.
i woke up on boxing day with a ferry to catch in a few hours, I bought some roofracks and wandered around Wellington by day before heading to the ferry where I would meet some random guy called Pete from AUCC.
Goodbye North Island