The cats

Both Puzz and Ted are beautiful cats, but so very different. Puzz wasn't very affectionate at first and practically sat by the woodburner all day, keeping out of everyone's way. He would eat anything and eat it all day if we'd let him, which we didn't. Although he did catch a mouse one afternoon. And ate it. He also tried to lick the cheese grater, luckily Cliff caught him just in time.

Ted had a bit more self-control. He would head off out all day getting some exercise and then would sit on your lap all night. He did this really cute thing where he'd hide his head in your chest.

I don't think that they like each other very much, there were a few stand offs during our stay. One afternoon, we came back from town and found that Puzz had climbed up onto the high cupboard and had knocked the food container down. A bit of a mess. And Ted sat there as if to say 'nothing to do with me!'

The Queen should not be amused

I really can't believe the picture they have of our (and their) Queen on the New Zealand banknotes. What do you think? I can't believe the Queen has approved that image. The thing is that most Kiwis respect the Queen enormously so I'm sure it's not an intentional slight on their part. Liam says it's a travesty.

Elvis found!

Well, we got quite excited when we saw this in Paeroa one day. Sadly it turns out that the local paper were just covering an Elvis impersonation contest. The guy who won was described as not being the best look-a-like or even being able to sing like the King. But he apparently did have the best singing voice. I think Cliff should have entered, he probably had a good chance of winning.

Back to school

Liam's been doing really well keeping up with the year 7 maths, english and science work and he has moved onto year 8 in maths, We thought that it'd be a good experience for him to spend some time in a NZ school, meeting some kids and having some time away from us!

As we'll be in Hikutaia for 5 weeks we thought we might be able to get him into the local school. Well it turns out that they break up for holidays on 2nd July. And whilst we knew that we'd probably have to seek an international student permit and pay the school some fees. It turns out that we wouldn't have been able to secure one in time and also the school we had in mind (at the end of the road) couldn't take Liam anyway because they don't hold a 'code of conduct signatory', which is a Ministry of Education requirement for international students. So, the headteacher came up with a solution; Liam will attend school as a visitor a couple of afternoons a week. For free. This seems ideal for everyone concerned. The class Liam will be visiting consists of about 25 kids, it's a small school so three years are taught in one - years 6, 7 & 8.

Today was Liam's first day in Mr Flanagan's class - I'll let him take it from here:

My first afternoon of school started with silent reading for half an hour, I started reading a book about the war, the only quote I remember is "Don't cry! It's what Hitler wants!" As I read, I couldn't help thinking I could read at home!

The boy who sat next to me was called Slade and wouldn't stop pestering me with questions. The boy in front of me said 6 times (as if we hadn't heard him the first time) "This isn't 100 questions!" After watching everybody write down their targets, people read out their stories that all had to start with the sentence "Sean opened the forbidden door" - pretty straightforward but that doesn't mean they had to make their stories even the least staightforward. This is a shortened version of what this kid wrote: Sean opened the forbidden door and inside the room were guns on the walls everywhere, he ran around looking at all of the guns and on a table he found a box with marijuana in it. He picked up a crossbow and played about with it. He tripped over a big gun on the floor and it pointed at his face and fired, his mum and dad found him dead. The end. From bloodthirsty beasts to very hungry zombies, nothing was too far fetched. After this, school ended. We didn't get much actual work done, oh well, never mind.

Liam gets a haircut

We finally threw in the towel with Liam's nits (don't worry, he didn't keep them all to himself, he shared some with me too). After getting them first in Vietnam we've tried two different types of the special shampoo and have constantly been using the nit comb. They just weren't having it but were insisting on staying on his lovely shiny long locks. Liam thinks they're some kind of super-nit and was quite worried about bringing alien species into NZ.

In an attempt to give them far less living space, Liam finally reluctantly agreed to a hair cut. So we went to Warehouse this afternoon ('where everyone gets a bargain') and bought a set of hair clippers. I did it quickly before he changed his mind. He's mourning the loss of his hair but the little buggers have gone. Victory! And he looks super handsome.

I have seriously considered going for the same solution. But have instead opted for one last treatment with the special shampoo. And I supplemented that with a new remedy - mayonnaise. I think it might have worked but I did smell odd (okay, more than usual) for a few hours.

Is anybody out there?

Feel free to leave comments people, we'd love to hear from you! I've just added a new feature where you can just leave a reaction if you're not feeling talkative.

Back on the farm

We headed over to Hikutaia in the early evening to meet Arnica and Remco again and to stay the night. They offered Liam their spare bed but he opted for a final night in the van with us; our first night in the van without power. There had been a frost overnight and that morning we saw the first ice inside the van.

The next day both Arnica and Remco were up early for work (they had a half day before their holiday officially started) and when Remco came back about 11am, he walked us around the place so we knew where everything was (animal feed, etc). They left for the airport about 4pm and then we were on our own.

Well, as on our own as we can be with three cows, two alpacas (Arnie and Herme), three chickens (no names, although we call them all chook-chook) and two cats (Ted and Puzz). Their sheep have gone on a little holiday of their own and their dog has gone to some friends, much to Liam's dismay.

Miranda (again) and Thames

We arrived in Thames by lunchtime so picked up some things to eat, checked out the film times at the 'multiplex' - yes it's really called that - they have 3 screens and drove out the 20 odd km to Miranda where we'd be staying for the next couple of nights. We are due at Hukutaia on 8th June to start our housesit and Thames is only 25 minutes down the road.

After lunch, we headed back into Thames and Liam and I went to see Prince of Persia. The cinema is housed in an old theatre and the original interiors seem pretty much intact. Cliff opted to stay in the van and read, he only goes to see films he really wants to see these days. Can't blame him, although our choice today did have a fairly good plot and was a bit of fun. Ben Kingsley is in it and I've read that he insists on everyone calling him Sir Ben. That's not very modest is it?

When we left the cinema there was a strange warm wind blowing; just like it was summer, but no worries; it was soon back to the incessant rain for the next day or so!

Coromandel Town

What's to say about Coromandel Town? The only excitement was when we nearly ran someone over. Cliff was only driving at about 30km per hour and this teenage girl ran out backwards into the road, right in front of us. I'm glad to report that Cliff's reactions were fast and the brakes worked. And a lady at the side of the road (completely unrelated to the girl) waved her thanks to us. And that was pretty much it for excitement, it's another one-road town and it starting raining again when we got to the camp site. To be fair, Coromandel Town used to be a main port serving the gold mining and kauri industries and today it's mainly tourism and mussel farming. You often see stalls set up by local schools or groups raising money by selling mussel fritters (or hot dogs).

We had the communal kitchen to ourselves, the majority of the people that turned up later were in large RVs. These have their own kitchens and WCs so are pretty anti-social really. At least by using the communal kitchens you get to meet people and have a chat. For example at both Waihi and Hot Water Beaches we met up with the same lovely couple from Manchester who were on their extended honeymoon.

It was still raining heavily the next morning when we left to head south towards Thames.

Hot Water Beach

We headed north to Whitianga and had a stroll around their Saturday market. Only a short drive further north and we were at Hot Water Beach. And the name says it all really. Just before low tide at 6.30pm we headed down to the beach with our rented shovel and dug ourselves a big hole in the sand. We weren't alone of course, there were about 40 people there. As the holes fill with water, you can bathe in them because the water is red hot - heated from the underground hot springs. You can actually see the water on the surface on the sand boiling which is pretty amazing really. You have to be quite careful as some of holes you excavate are actually too hot to sit in, or like ours where we had some cold water funnelling in which was cooling down our pool. It got dark pretty quickly so we headed back to hot showers and some food.

Anyway, there's nothing like that on Brighton beach!

Waihi Beach

From Papamoa Beach we headed north to Waihi Beach (can you see a pattern here?) We took advantage of another stay 2 nights, get one free deal. We were across the road from the beach and parked right next to the new facilities and the pool. Liam had a fine time in there (bit too cold for me) although we did have a couple of sessions in the infrared sauna - a dry heat, much nicer than a steam sauna.

We discovered a new board game (new to us anyway) - Stratego. Again the weather was a bit changable here, sunny one minute and then without seeing a rain cloud in sight, it tips down. An Australian I met said he's been in NZ 10 days and it hadn't stopped raining. I think we'd been lucky with our sunny weekend in Papamoa.

We picked a fine, sunny day to take our walk along the beach though and we walked up the start of the Orokawa and Homunga tracks. It was a good walk through bush and there were steep drops and cliffs along the way. We got about half way up before we ran into a quagmire of orange mud, the recent rains had caused part of the slope to collapse. We decided to head back down.