Sailing Afrikii

The camper van is a thing here. It’s a thing for sailors especially who come to NZ to sit out the Pacific cyclone season. In NZ, there’s an accepted culture that it’s perfectly normal for a middle-age couple to toddle around in a van, sleeping in places like parking lots or beaches, waiting in line for the single public toilet – with the rest of unwashed hippies half their age. But there is also a midlevel camper van culture, and that’s RV-ing closely resembling a North American vibe – with communal kitchens and hot-water showers. I found that returning to the boat from a stint working in the Arctic and hopping into our new camper van for a 6-week loop around New Zealand was going from one crazy extreme to another, and I had trouble adjusting to life on the road at first.

I didn’t really understand the aimless wandering in a Lord of The Rings film without a mission – combine this with suffering through camping cooking and timing pees to the availability of public toilets (albeit, NZ has a significant number of public toilets). I romanticized the idea of living in a camper van until I actually lived in a camper van. In hindsight, the timing was off. After a stint at work, I really needed a softer landing, less stimulation and more comfort.

But Ian was patient and I only freaked out a bit at the beginning. One strategy to adjust was to find a mission. Ian is averse to any significant hiking so instead I ran in the morning to take advantage of all the trails that NZ is famous for. Our other mission was to track down the famous Bluff oysters. We even packed our oyster shuckers imagining regular opportunities to forage for them or pick them up at artisan foodie fish shops. BUT even though we were coming into oyster season, NZ does not have a familiar oyster culture and these crazy overpriced Ostreidae were only sold in supermarkets already shucked and brine-packed in a plastic tub called a pottie. WTF

So we headed to the source – Bluff. To be clear, there is nothing in Bluff except the ferry to Stewart Island, a shark cage-dive company, and an oyster processing factory. But it turns out, Bluff was a blast.

Walkers and cyclists doing the Te Oraroa /Tour Aotearoa trail from the top of NZ to the bottom were arriving in Bluff, the southern tip of the southern island marking the end of their 1-6 month journey. We camped in the parking lot of the backpacker hotel and ended up meeting a bunch of tired, celebratory people whose outlook on life gives you hope for the future. The hotel is run by this lovely salt-of-the-earth woman who’d never heard of shucking your own oysters but she directed us to the processing factory where we sourced fresh live unshucked oysters for about $3 CDN each. Enjoying the oysters and the good company, I was reminded that the mission is the journey not the destination.

Yep, that’s frost on the window of our camper van. Many mornings were chilly cold though we were warm in our Canadian sleeping bags. NZ was having it’s coldest summer in over a decade.