Spaceship Road Trip

This is our spaceship Nasa.




This is the camper van that took us travelling through New Zealand's Northlands from Auckland to the tip of the island at Cape Reinga, then east to Bay of Islands and finally, Jude and Roger's wedding at Mokau.




Dan was our handsome and indefatiguable driver and I was navigator, cook, en-route provider of water and chocolate and chief music maker. We only got lost twice and neither of those occasions were truly due to my incompetence - just small hitches in an otherwise perfectly executed driving experience.

After weeks in strange hotels, hostels, friends' homes and on loving sister's floors, it was an exciting proposition, a home of our own and the freedom that goes with it. Freedom to sing Simon and Garfunkel out loud with broken voices, to adorn our home with drying underwear (must be careful not to drive off with the brown underpants hanging from the wing mirror) and to cook up our weird and wonderful cravings.

Here I am making pasta at Kai Iwi lakes campsite. Kai Iwi means food of the people and our leek, mushroom and creme fraiche spirali - a dish that would be just passable at home - is transformed into something approaching delicious by these lakeside circumstances.

Dan is just out of view drinking red wine ("we'll only have one bottle tonight, love, as I've got to drive lots tomorrow") and there's a man called Steve just further out of view playing guitar. Later on Steve invites us to join a group of Irish campers and we listen to him singing Simon and Garfunkel songs, his own voice slowly breaking and faltering as he polishes off his box of red Velluto classico. The camp guardian joins us for a song, but he's too shy to either sing or play, and another camper brings her recorder but it's a bit flat and so she does a bit of random harmonising. It's one of those lovely evenings that just hangs on the brink of something hilarious and ridiculous and every time I feel like ruining it with my cynical heart and sniggering I concentrate on the stars above me and the buzzing of the mosquitos. After our second bottle of red wine ("we'll set off later tomorrow after a reviving swim"), we crawl to our spaceship and spend our first night. Awkward sleeper that I am, I sleep more soundly than I've done in weeks, despite the fact that I am bedding down in the back of a people carrier and everytime I roll over I roll into either Dan or the back seatbelt bracket.

The Irish kids wake up the next morning freaked out and freezing. Four of them, three girls and a guy, in one very small two-man tent (much to the delight of guitar man Steve who reads rude things into this), and still cold. Some Blair Witch branch-cracking action occured in the night too, although that might have been the kids in the next camp catching a stupid possum in their possum trap. That's camping in tents for you. People Carriers are the way forward. Just look at the view through our sun roof:



The next morning, not at all hungover from our redwine singalong, we swam in the lake which was clear and warm and with a ridged, rippled bottom that felt good underfoot.