Skip to main content

It's camping Jim, but not as we know it...

The more astute amongst you might have intuited that my rate of posting on here has dropped off just a tad lately. There was no shortage of  things to write about. The problem was, there was no shortage of things to write about and they took up all the available time.

Things quietened down a bit just before Christmas, and between Christmas and New Year Clemency and I went camping. For as long as we've known each other, that is about 40 years we have done this. For a while it was in our 1962 Volkswagen Kombi. In company with Megan our Rough Coated Collie we parked the Kombi on DOC sites and lakesides and remote beaches quite literally from North Cape to Bluff; sometimes because we liked the view, sometimes because I had to lie under the van and fix something. When the kids arrived we progressed to a series of tents, culminating in an orange and brown 15'x9' frame tent. Because we had been to so many places in the Kombi we knew a good number of out of the way spots where no-one was going to object to us parking up for a week or two; so we would load stuff on the trailer drive for a few hours, pitch the tent, dig a slop hole, build a fireplace, erect a toilet tent (where "tent" is used in the widest possible sense of the word) and put the solar shower in the sun to warm up. It always needed at least 20km on a gravel road, to keep out the undesirable elements (IE those who didn't like gravel roads). Kaiaua Beach on the East Cape was a favourite place, as was Eight Acres in the Urewera National Park. The Abel Tasman was great until it got discovered by North West Christchurch and utterly ruined. Pureora National park was OK (very cold but there were saddlebacks) and the West Coast of the South Island was always worthwhile. What was not OK was camping grounds with lots of neighbours and people with jetskis and a lounge with a TV set. Our daughter Catherine still thinks that it hasn't been a proper holiday unless there has been at least one meal cooked over an open fire and a cup of tea made in a thermette. There are standards to be kept! Lines which should not be crossed!

The last few days we were in Surat Bay in the Catlins. In a camping ground (blush). In a (double blush) caravan with a shower, a flushing toilet, a stove, and a flatscreen TV hooked up to a DVD player.  To mitigate things, I might mention that the camping ground was smallish and was at the end of a short stretch of gravel. Behind it was a beach about 3km long which ended in a notched headland. Climb over the notch and you arrived at the breeding ground of the Royal Spoonbills, and on the way to look at them you were bound to encounter sea lions and penguins. Most days, when I took my morning stroll, mine were the only footprints on the beach. On the day it rained we spent almost a whole day watching episodes of Ever Decreasing Circles, a British sitcom from the 80s which has dated pretty well except when it comes to gender issues, and catching up on Facebook via the camp's wifi connection. We sipped red wine and there was beer from a boutique brewery in the fridge.We didn't dig a slop hole. We didn't even take the thermette.

In a few days we will head to Nelson to see the whanau. Normally, we would drive straight up in a day, perhaps tossing a pup tent and sleeping bags in the back of the car in case we decided to stop on the way. This year, I think we will take a few days over the journey, both coming and going. And I think we'll probably take the caravan. 

Comments

Elaine Dent said…
Welcome back to posting. Hurray for camping (in its many variations). Hurray for summer (as I look out the window with snow on the ground). And blessings on traveling wise men/women. May you return home renewed and by a different road.
Zane Elliott said…
Happy New Year.Enjoy the journey.

I hope that craft beer was 'Stoke'!
Kate said…
Yeeesss! Camping! Childhood New Zealand summers. Off-milk, flies around the long-drop, sting of sunburn, sand in the groin, the murmur of adult voices and flicker of torches on the tent wall, first love's kisses, the feel of pipis with the toes, the hissing of the primus...
I will renew my acquaintance with that sublime form of existence some day.
Meantime I might sleep out in the garden in the compactavan again this summer.

Have a super holiday!
Kelvin Wright said…
What on earth is a compactavan?
Kelvin Wright said…
No Zane, the Stoke....er.... disappeared days ago. It was Bouncing Czech
Kelvin Wright said…
...but I think, after your generous contribution to the argument and after sampling one or two rather fine beers from small breweries that my original point still stands. There is nothing that can quite compare to real English ale, brewed in a real brewery and served in some ancient,woody, warm English pub.

No one makes bread better than the French (well.... alright, maybe some Italians and Spanish)and no one makes beer better than the English
Wynston said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
Wynston said…
Welcome back to posting and Happy New Year. May it be an excellent one in every respect.

Sounds like a great camping holiday simply upgraded to meet the needs of an older body.
Anonymous said…
Hear Hear!!
Kate said…
This is my compactavan...
http://delphine-angua.blogspot.co.nz/2008/12/my-bedroom.html
Zane Elliott said…
I suppose I have to accept your original point, BUT is there anything in England that compares with the experience of a gorgeous February day sitting out in 30 degrees sipping on a hop packed life-changing beer brewed by two guys in garage-like set up, and almost tasting the new world approach to beer?

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old