East Cape, New Zealand

New Zealand - The Land of Rainbows, Twisters and Skaterparks.

I was expecting to see loads of sheep while here in New Zealand. The population of Homo sapiens is 4 million. The population of sheep on the otherhand is 40 million. There are 10 sheep to every person! But, I've seen a lot more cows than I have sheep. They must be hidden away somewhere.

Rainbows - I have seen more rainbows here in the past ten days than I have in the last five years. They're everywhere you look! You can even see the double rainbow sometimes. While driving to Rotorua we saw a rainbow in the distance. As we got closer I noticed that it was infront of the trees just ahead of us. As we approached the trees and made the bend in the road, the rainbow (believe it or not) came through the windscreen and was sitting just by the wheel! I was screaming at Reena - "Look! I can touch it!!!". It was crazy! Unfortunately there was no pot of gold left in our van :(

Drift wood on the beach at East Cape. Most of beaches here have a grey, black sand - I'm guessing due to volcanic rock.

While driving to East Cape, the most easterly point in New Zealand, we were really surprise at how quiet the roads were. You could drive for two hours without passing anyone on the road. Granted it was dark and raining, but we didn't think New Zealand was that unpopulated. It wasn't until the next morning that we found out that loads of twisters had touched down all over the north island that night. We were just the stupid ones to be driving through a storm chucking out twisters all over the place!

We were 19,880km away from London.

When we arrived in East Cape (at 01:30am), we attempted to find the camp site in the jet black night. We eventually bumped into it 20km down a dirt track. It didn't look like anyone was around, but we thought we'd drive in to take a better look. Big mistake. It was a massive hilly field, absolutely deserted, and utterly soaked by the rain. On the drive out, Reena got us stuck in the mud... She even left smoking burnt rubber on the ground! While trying to reverse, our back right wheel started going up this really steep hill. I got really scared that we were going to tip our zebra over in this field and no one would see us til the morning... so I jumped into the drivers seat and came to the rescue! I managed to reverse the van (straight!), and after a second attempt at bombing it up the hill we evetually escaped the mud's evil clutches! Too much excitement for 2am... We found a spot in town to park our van and got to sleep. We didn't get up for the sunrise, unsurprisingly.

East Cape Skater Park. Every town we go to there are skater parks. I've not actually seen anyone use them though. You still see all the kids in carparks and shopping malls though.

We left East Cape at noon and headed for Napier further south on the East Coast.