Wow, even with a punctured inflatable sleeping mat I thought I must've slept really well to wake to a rooster's call not remembering any of my sleep through the night. Looking at my watch glow the hour in the darkness of the tent I saw that my biorhythm was on time, it was the rooster crowing at midnight that was too eager.
It was my second night of wild camping on a dash up to New Zealand's Far North so I could visit my Aunty Alice in Kaitaia yesterday. An otherwise peaceful night's refuge, it was not as serene as last night's secluded beachfront camp where the next landfall, with a bit of threading through the Pacific Islands heading left after passing south of Hawaii, would be Canada, my next international destination in two weeks time.
By morning, as the sun was making its slow rise into a cloud-filled sky, I emerged from the tent to look about the empty carpark. Empty but for the dozen or more chickens and a duck ranging freely poking around the gravel for morsels dropped by day-trippers and picnickers visiting the Stone Store across the way.
A landmark as synonymous with the township of Kerikeri as oranges, built in 1821, the stately piece of New Zealand heritage is the oldest stone building in the country.
A little walk in the golden dawn to look at the Stone Store with the Mission House next door and it was then time get back on the road to return to Auckland.
With hitchhiking, occasional cycling between cities and little need for one, I hadn't received a drivers' licence until I had returned to New Zealand from my first two years overseas and was then 26 years old. In the time since, the need and indeed the opportunity to drive hadn't arisen much before - a large factor in me assuming a bike was just as viable a means of transport to get me from A to B as any other means, even when points A and B are on opposites sides of the planet.
Now here I was behind the wheel of my parents' car eating up kilometres that would take me the better part of a week to retrace by bicycle. It'd been years since I had been behind the wheel in New Zealand and I had definitely never driven so much in one go before - ever - anywhere. Like riding a bike? I guess so. The open roads of rural Northland are good places to get reacquainted with the requisite skills for manoeuvring more than a tonne of steel and glass around the place. It's faster and more comfortable than a bicycle, but I did feel less connected with the scenery I was passing through and the feeling of travel was diminished compared to touring by bicycle.
When I'm riding the bike I can see a stretch of road ahead and be reminded of a bend past fields or around a patch of forest like somewhere else I've seen similar, even if that's on another continent. On this drive through Northland I only pair roads within New Zealand. Why is that, I wonder? Pasture and rolling hills aren't a unique preserve of my homeland.
Sweating the occasional warning blink of an empty fuel tank I pulled in to Wellsford on my way south to Auckland as my criteria for pulling over to top up eased from being picky on supplier, to price, to just getting to the next petrol station I came across as the townships were still quite generously spaced and the warning light started to flicker on for longer (NZ$1.19/litre).
Motorway traffic swelled the closer I drove to the center of New Zealand's most populous city. In the time since I was last in Auckland, the number of vehicles jostling for space on unchanged streets has reached chronic levels. Rush-hour densities encountered at any time of the day, noon in my case, goodness knows what actual rush-hour journeys are like.
Back in Papatoetoe, the car was a lot easier to unpack than bicycle panniers as I didn't have to sift through multiple layers to get to the things I needed first.
My time in Cairns, Australia grooming cars at Billabong Car Rentals part time as I worked across the road as a receptionist at Inn the Tropics helped me get back behind the wheel of cars and also taught me how to wield a sponge to wash the car to a professional standard (thanks for the use of the car, mum and dad).
Checking on my email I got lucky and started a chat session with my girlfriend Cathy in Canada. While discount phone connections in Australia and New Zealand have allowed us better contact to supplement the emails and parcels linking us across the Pacific, this chat session was reminiscent of the early stages of our relationship. After our meeting in Kathmandu, Nepal, I was cycling across China, Cathy travelling through Thailand and we kept in contact with Internet chat sessions as our respective paths crossed the information superhighway. Our nine-month separation since out last rendezvous in Indonesia is about to end. It's only two weeks until we are in the same hemisphere; same side of the International Date Line and in the same room so the long held patience necessary in a long-distance relationship of the past 14 months is quickly giving way to excitement.
As common sense prevailed and we switched to using telephones, my father had arrived home from work and cooked dinner as I was indisposed to prepare the evening meal.
After my first shower in three days (it's winter in New Zealand, so I thought I could get away with it, plus drive with the windows down a bit) I drove up the road to pick up mum from her work.
Then it was a wholesome dinner, watching of consumer watchdog programme 'FairGo', a half game of Scrabble and back in the car to the Capitol Cinema in Balmoral to see how the weekend's effort of filming had come together for The Incredible 48 Hour Film Festival
Beginning with the allocation of a film genre to the participating teams on Friday at 7pm, a film had to be shot and edited into a minimum of 4 minutes run time (not including credits) all compulsorily incorporating a character called Jessie McLeod and the line "Do you mind if I have the last one?" with the final product handed in by Sunday evening 7pm sharp.
Seeing the group of people that collaborated under the direction of Bryce Groves, Matt Hampton and Grant Walls (aka: Straight to Video Productions) was like a 'Transporters' cast and crew union even though it had been only 4 days since we'd first banded together.
Screening tonight were ten teams in Group 6 from a total of 71 entries that had made it within the Sunday night deadline for submissions. Screening in alphabetical order of production house, ours just happened to be last tonight.
A spokesperson for each team rose up from their seat in the audience to introduce their effort to applause and we settled in for interpretations of themes such as religious, fairy tale, mockumentary, buddy, war, soap opera and ours, serial cliff-hanger.
Having seen our footage through the lens as camera man and knowing how our story was suppose to stitch together with the script and story board the Straight to Video trio nuttted out until the early hours of Saturday, the day of principal filming, I thought ours would compare quite favourably with the preceding films.
One stood out amongst 'the others', an hilarious buddy movie shot in the likeness/parody of cop flicks where a mismatched detective partnership has been thrown together and despite themselves, in the course of the story, they bond: buddies - a renegade cop and his new partner, a gun-toting, back-talking chrome toaster. In other films there was a homicidal dwarf, ritualistic mass suicide, Monopoly and guns aplenty (cause for an actual Armed Offenders Squad callout to one set).
The story of a team of express organ couriers racing to get little Tammy her replacement spleen when there has been a mix up resulting in the hero delivering sausages to the hospital as the donor organ is readied for the company barbecue had the most polished post-production of the night, I reckon. Funny in the right places with jaw-droppingly awesome visual effects, complete with a great faux-ad break in the middle, it rounded off the evening's viewing nicely. Amazing to think all the films were made in the same 48 hours. Fingers crossed that based on the 3-ranked-votes ballots collected from the audience on the night that 'Transporters' makes it to the finals screening at the Civic Cinema on Sunday.
