The 10th was mostly a chill day. After getting up early in the morning, and walking through the tunnel down to the beach, I realized I was in a place that I really would like, except for is a little bit bad timing. The weather wasn’t great, raining a little bit, and there wasn’t any reception at all, which wasn’t very fun for either Chase or me.
But the biggest issue was that the tide was once again rolling in. We keep always getting to the beaches at the wrong title times. At least, if you want to enjoy the attractions on the beach that we wanted to enjoy, such as snorkeling just east of Gisborne or enjoying the hot water beach at kefia hot water beach south of Ragland, etc. This time, though the beach and the coastline was gorgeous, we couldn’t do much exploring without getting ourselves in dangerous situations because the tide was coming in. Chainsaw a couple of waterfalls off in the distance, and we were able to at least get close to one of them, but the tide coming in made it too dangerous to get all the way to the one let alone getting to the other one.
Still, it was a beautiful, secluded beach that my guess rarely ever saw visitors because just getting to the beach was quite an out of the way drive.
Those are my favorite beaches, though. Had it not been for the fact that we had zero reception in a Time for both of us when we were really wanting reception, we very likely would have stayed longer. So we enjoyed it while we had it.
As always, I tried to grab a little bit of trash from the beach to leave the place better than I found it, this time finding a old mildewy sweater that I didn’t want to wring out and put in the car, so I tied it to our roof rack letting it slap in the wind at higher speeds, until we found a trash can to throw it away in.
If I haven’t already mentioned it, New Zealand is much more progressive, or whatever you want to call it, in its management of its country. They have a national objective, apparently, to completely eliminate smoking. And as I think about it, we haven’t really seen that many people smoking in new zealand. At least I haven’t. They also don’t have trash cans and dumpsters everywhere like we have in the united states, so it can be a bit of a challenge to find a place to take our trash when we need to get rid of our trash. It is nice, however, that we can at least find somewhere. It’s just a good bit harder than finding the huge trash cans that are all over the place in the United states.
Another thing that I don’t know if I’ve mentioned is that they work very hard in New Zealand to recycle and to use sustainable materials. In some cases, the sustainable materials are kind of junk, like for example when we bought our first disposable cutlery. It’s basically made out of a hard cardboard, so if you press against your food too hard, your cutlery bends in half and is no longer useful. We actually had to work to find disposable cutlery that would function well, eventually finding some stronger wooden disposable cutlery.
Despite the inconvenience, I actually like how much they focus on sustainability. It’s bothered me for a long long time how much of a throwaway society we are in the United States and how much we just tend to trash places and not really care much about the environment or the future. Fortunately, I see that changing in the United States as well. We just seem to be quite a bit further behind a lot of the rest of the developed world.
One thing that I miss but also don’t miss at the same time is real big box stores. I’m not a fan of walmart, but at the same time I’m a fan of walmart. I like knowing that there’s a store that I can go to and get just about everything that I’ll need. Case in point right now is I’d really like to buy myself a set of hair clippers, but I don’t have a clue where. The stores, even the big box-ish stores out here are much smaller than ours. There are some that are large, but even the large ones are barely on par with some of ours back home, and certainly much smaller than others.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but so I want the ease of being able to get whatever I want but I want it, at the same time I hate commercial buildings and areas of all that, and I don’t like the idea of cover New Zealand, and I would love for it to remain as natural to leave it.
Anyway, from there we headed south down the beach, or coastal highway better said, until we eventually got to New Plymouth.
Bring the drive, I believe, I worked on updating catching up on my blog posts, I haven’t gotten myself nearly 2 weeks behind.
Once in New plymouth, we stopped into one of the New Zealand big box stores called the warehouse if I haven’t mentioned that already, and I thought the backpack to replace the one that I bought in Costa Rica that it finished wearing out. That one was like a $4 backpack, so I was happy that it lasted for my Costa Rica trip and a good bit of this trip. The new backpack that I got is much better quality, so I’m guessing it’ll last a lot longer.
I forget what else we bought, but oh yeah, Chase bought a portable heavy duty speaker that wasn’t much bigger than a couple of put together. Probably actually smaller than that. We also went over to torpedo 7, super high-end adventure store, where is bought a daypack and some other gear so that he’d be properly prepared to climb Mount taranaki which we planned to do as soon as possible.
I don’t remember the exact order of things, but Chase found a place to take a shower at and aquatic center right on the beach, I continue to working on my blog post catching up while he did that.
Stopped off at a pharmacy for me to try and get some migraine meds, the ones that I brought with me from the states had gone rancid. I also wanted to get a refill on one of my stomach till prescriptions. I didn’t know how possible that would be, but I asked the pharmacist, and he said that they actually sold that same prescription as OTC truck, so to speak. It wasn’t available on the shelves: it was back behind the pharmacy counter with all the other drugs, but he was allowed to sell it to the general public, so he told me a huge bottle of it. Heck of a lot more than I needed, I think, and quite expensive, but at least I have it now.
They didn’t have migraine medications, so I bought the ingredients to make my own migraine medications. Getting a couple of different kinds of pills that together make up all of the main ingredients in the meds that I’ve been taking.
Lastly, Chase it suggested that I get some melatonin in an effort to help me sleep better, since I haven’t really had probably even a single good night sleep for the month since we’ve been here, and who knows how long before that.
So I looked around inside the store for melatonin, and when I couldn’t find it, I asked the pharmacist about it, and he said that in New Zealand they had made melatonin a prescription required medication. Apparently, there were reports that middle-aged men taking melatonin were a lot rowdier then they otherwise would be, so they reclassified it as a prescription drug. I didn’t ask him what he meant by rowdy, but it seemed funny nonetheless.
Oh, I’ve also been having a lot of trouble with my stomach, not getting my pills taken properly I should cover and eating foods that I shouldn’t be eating, so my stomach have really improved it all coming in some ways might actually be worse. In an effort to take better care of myself, I went back to the grocery store and bought foods that hopefully will be less aggravating on my stomach.
I’m really hoping that it works, my stomach has been getting worse and worse and worse lately, pretty much constantly giving me issues with only small bits of respite in between.
So I bought carrots and mushrooms and bland soups and whatnot to aid in the effort. The problem is that I’ve been eating so many sweet granola bars that now my mouth is craving the sweetness, so when I’m just eating the less exciting stuff, I still find myself hungry, but mouth hungry, not stomach hungry.
I don’t remember the exact order of things, but Chase and I drove to the mount taranaki visitor center that night, as we were planning on climbing the mountain the next day. The weather, at least according to the report we looked at, was going to be pretty nasty for the next two weeks or so after that, so we figured we had just one chance to do it.
So we camped out at The visitor center parking lot, and at some point in time I think actually earlier, we watched an episode of the expanse.
Given what we were told by one of the workers at the torpedo 7 store, we figured we needed to get up early in the morning to start the climb. We planned to start about 5ish or 4:30 or whatever it was, so we set our alarms, but didn’t actually get to bed until about midnight I think. That meant it was going to be a very short night’s sleep right before a very long and very strenuous hike.
But we were there, and Chase wanted to climb the mountain, so that was the plan!
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 