I’m going to continue writing… sometime. Here is two weeks of travels, the next one is hopefully coming up soon! 🙂

 

Amber drove me to the airport, where a hard journey would begin. Getting on the flight to Los Angeles was the easy part, and when I arrived there late in the night I just put my air mattress up.

I had a few hours of sleep, but should have brought my sleeping bag as they always make it really cold inside in the US, while it being 30°C outside. I went to check in, with seven hours left, but at first they didn’t want to let me. According to their papers I needed a visa before arriving in New Zealand. I showed them the NZ immigration site, which clearly stated I would be able to enter the country and get the visa after I arrived, and after two and a half hours they finally let me check in.

I asked at the boarding desk if there would be any more problems, and they said no. While I was boarding, 25 minutes before the flight was supposed to leave, they stopped me and told me something else had to be fixed, but I managed to convince them to let me fix it at Hawaii instead.

At Hawaii I asked them twice to see if everything was in order, and they said yes, and let me on without making a fuzz. In New Zealand I got my visa when I arrived, and everything worked out as I thought it would. This picture reminds me so much of last year!

Hawaiian Airlines gets 2/5 from me. Nice and kind people working there, but outdated/wrong info, and no food for any special diets or allergies, even if you through to book it long before the flight.

I arrived in the night again, so I slept at the airport until four in the morning. My plan was to hitchhike south if nothing else came up, but with a lot of help from Lily I ended up staying a couple of nights at her aunt and uncle’s place. It was really nice to be able to settle down a little bit, plan my journey, and also to learn the basics in blacksmithing!

I made a bottle opener, to have some practical use for it. It went really cool!

Now, the 25th of October (to give you a sense of time), I started hitchhiking north. I wanted to visit a friend from last year who lives in Whangarei and also check out the dropzone in Bay of Islands. It was a bit hard getting out of Auckland, but after that I got to Skydive Auckland (50 kilometres) fairly easy. The weather sucked, and the forecast looked bad, so I converted my skydiving license and hitchhiked to Whangarei, another 150 kilometres. My friend wouldn’t arrive at home before the next day, so the lovely lady who had picked up me up drove me to a camping.

I met up with the crazy Scot again, which was awesome, once again. This was the same Scot who drove us up to Cape Reinga to start the bicycle journey last year. Sadly, though, the dropzone in Whangarei had ceased to exist. To get some jumps I hitchhiked up to Bay of Islands the next day, left an application for work, did two jumps and hitchhiked back.

Jim (the crazy Scot) had a friend working at the newly started dropzone in Mercer (south of Auckland), so I decided to go by there and see what it was like. Before leaving Whangarei, I visited another friend, Ana, who I stayed at a bit south of Whangarei last year, but she had moved up here now!

The friend, named Sam, picked me up close to the airport. I stayed there for two great nights, had a few jumps, and managed to fall out of the airplane. I should learn to exit from the smaller ones.

As my bags were really heavy, and the bigger one was felling apart, I had two choices; I would either buy a new bag, or just buy a car.

Buying a car would help with other stuff as well, as I could keep it locked with all the stuff in it instead of carrying it around, and get to places a lot faster. There are a lot of free campings as well, which sometimes are pretty hard to reach. In the end, I decided to buy a shitty car which would be big enough for me to sleep in. I found a Subaru Legacy 1997 for 1200 NZD (about 7000 SEK), so I hitchhiked there and bought it. As I arrived late I also got to stay a night at their place, which was a really cool way of living. They were living in an old, big bus, still working properly, and they had built a garage and a big roof with movable walls as working room and living room. They even made curtains for me, so I could have some privacy in the car.

The next day I drove (Wooo!) to Rotorua to visit another friend from last year. It was now the 31th and Axel was arriving the morning of the 2nd. I was going to pick him up, so I spent the day fixing a few things in the car. The 12V charger didn’t work, and apparently it was just a cable that had popped out. I put it back, and also saw that the radio needed converter cables if I would ever get it to work. I spent the night at a camping on the way to Auckland, where I would stay another night before picking Axel up early.

I did not really remember that it was Halloween, but a cool girl on a horse came by the camp!