When we arrived in the primarily Maori town of Rotorua, the combination of the foul weather and the equally foul smell of the sulphurous geysers throughout the town motivated us to pass on to Taupo, where we stayed the night. We spent the night chatting, reminiscing, and lamenting Noelle's imminent departure. At 2am, we took her to her bus and tearfully bid her farewell.
The next morning, Franca and I decided to forego the Tongarino Crossing, reputedly the best one-day hike in the world, because the folks at the Department of Conservation (DOC) advised us that we wouldn't be able to see anything anyway. Instead, we headed directly to Wellington, passing through the pastures of amber grasses that I'm fairly certain were used as Rohan in LOTR.
Neither of us fell in love with our hostel in Wellington, which was large and impersonal and made socializing difficult. They also charged exorbitant fees for internet, so we chose to head down to the waterside for sunset and to use the free internet there.
Strange sculptures and installations dotted the harbor side. Looking at one particularly puzzling piece, I asked "What the hell is that?" Franca shrugged. "Art." My adoration of her was growing by the minute.
Later, we cooked our first meal without Noelle, and I was delighted to discover that Franca had been hiding her own culinary talents. She started my cooking tutorial that very evening. Much fun, but we missed our little Spaniard.
The next day, the sky was gray again, but we decided to make the best of it and take the famous Welly cable car to the promontory above the city. The beautifully restored old car let us off at the top of the hill at the entrance to the botanical gardens through which we wandered.
The gardens were nice enough, but the rich and heady smells outshone the blooms themselves.
We spent the afternoon conversing and meandering at a leisurely pace. I remarked on my fascination with Franca's German pronunciation of "v". She always said "willage", which I understood, but I couldn't wrap my head around her saying "wivid." "Why don't you say 'wiwid?" I asked laughing. For her part, Franca was amused to no end by my constant need to reapply sunblock.
The most remarkable thing to happen that evening was our discovery of a note in our kitchen locker that said simply, "Broke ya code." We were baffled; the lock had been put back in place and nothing appeared to be missing. Clearly some people just have too much time on their hands.
For our last day on the North Island, we decided to rent a pair of bikes and ride around the waterside, depute the fact that the weather hadn't improved. The bike path wound for several kilometers along the docks, bays and beaches of Wellington.
We stopped at a store which I'd like to call "We'll Make Anything Out of Sheepskin." This place looked like one of those crazy tourist traps you always see in American road trip movies, but the goods were truly of high quality. I'm not sure I've felt anything so soft as the sheepskin rug atop a pile of such hides.
Eventually we reached the end of the traversable road, from which point we could see the CBD opposite us. We took a moment's break and headed back from whence we came, with Franca in the lead.
We had gone about two-thirds of the way when the bikeway and walkway, which had merged earlier, split again. I thought Franca was taking the wrong path, but I didn't see how it mattered.
It mattered.
The path took a hard turn, blindly splitting into two levels around the bend. Franca fortunately happened to come around the turn in such a way that she remained safely on the upper level. I wasn't so lucky. As I took the turn, my wheels teetered on the very edge of the top level for only a second or two before they slipped off to the bottom. You know that moment, which is really only a split second, when you know exactly what's going to happen and there's not a damn thing you can do about it? Franca says that she remembers thinking, "Hmmm, this is kind of dangerous. I hope she doesn't..." Cue crashing noise.
My legs hit first, scraping the pavement. I had put my hands out to protect my face, tearing them up in the process, but I hit the ground with such force that I skidded forward onto my face anyway. My handlebars dug into my right knee, ensuring that my disfigurement wasn't all one-sided.
I felt a burn, but jumped quickly to my feet, by which time I could already see my left cheek swelling out of the corner of my eye. I almost asked Franca how bad I looked, but her wincing made the question unnecessary. I lightened the mood substantially by asking, almost immediately and in all seriousness, if she thought my wounds would heal in three weeks, before I would see James in Australia. Clearly, my priorities were in order.
We waited a few minutes before remounting the bikes and pedaling gingerly back to the hostel, walking the bikes the last few blocks with passersby gawking at my appearance openly. A Japanese tourist even snapped my picture.
When I had cleaned my wounds, I moved the car again and stopped in to McDonald's to use the internet. I had already taken to walking in a cowed stance with my head down to avoid stares, but this approach motivated the manager of the Mickey D's to inquire as to whether or not I was being beaten. I thought it was pretty nice of him, actually.
Later that night, we made dinner and as I prepared dessert beside a German guy in the room beside ours, he asked to get a look. I lifted my face toward him, and he replied with a creepy grin, "I can't believe that's all it took to get closer." Ew. See again, the picture above of me looking like Quasimodo.
We had planned to meet up with some CouchSurfers, but I was so sore and we had to get to the ferry by 1am, so we opted to watch some crappy movies and play an impromptu game of "Name That Country" with other hostelers. Midnight rolled around, and we packed up the car and headed to the ferry pier.
When I had ordered the tickets, I had used a 10% discount that I had heard about, but for which you needed a membership card for a national hosteling organization to which I did not belong. I pretended to have left my card behind at the hostel, blaming my negligence on the hoopla surrounding my crash. I pointed to my wounds, pathetically. They had to be good for something, dammit. The sweet, smiling ticket agent sympathetically let us pass, and I felt terribly guilty immediately.
Karma, however, had a sense of humor. We had been sitting on the ferry dock for nearly an hour, with only a few minutes to go before we were due to drive aboard when the battery died. Panicked, we started tapping the windows of every car in our vicinity asking for assistance, much to the annoyance of sleeping passengers inside. We found someone with jumper cables, but his car stood too far from ours. The driver beside us begrudgingly allowed us to use his car, and between our jumper cable guy and the pack of bikers just in front of us, we got the car running again just in time.
We availed ourselves of the free hot cocoa, wrapped ourselves up in Franca's sleeping bag, laid out across a couple of chairs, and settled in for a few hours of poor-quality sleep.
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Location:Wellington, New Zealand
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