Brunei

Well due to the fact that this is being written from the departure lounge of Brunei airport, this is going to be a story by pictures. I'll fill in some words later, honest.

We arrived at Auckland airport, on time, with 2 hours before departure. The queue took ages, but the lady behind the checking desk took longer. Checking in a "Philip John Rayner" and a "John Robert MacDonald Rayner" totally confused the poor lady. At one stage dad had 3 boarding passes and I had none. Anyway she did such a great job that when we got to the departure lounge they had to re-key in my boarding pass as the info in the computer was incorrect. Later aboard the plane, before they closed the door they took Dad and mines passports for a walk. They returned 20 minutes later after sorting out the administrative error.

Australia, the land of ex-Convicts. We arrived for our transit to find the theiving Ausi's taking candy from a baby. Worse. They were taking the duty free off an elderly couple. It doesn't get much lower than that. Stealing Alcohol, the one joy, off people with not much time left on the planet. Some rule about "anything over 100ml could be a bomb". But we bought it in Duty free. Well it's ours now silly Kiwi's. Imagine how mad I got when the lady wanted to take my tooth paste off me as it was 110g, which means it's over 100ml. The fact it was half empty made no difference. I put up a fight, as I challenged the customs lady to show me where it said that even if the tube was half full it still had to be "quarantined". She got pretty arsey at me (because she couldn't find such a statement in her precious brochure). The head bitch (customs official) was no better, but luckily a man came along who had managed to find the sentence which made my colgate Total whitening with tartar control the Ausies. I bet if it had been Great regular flavour they wouldn't have looked twice at it. Theiving bastards.

Ironically once we had cleared security checks we walked straight back on the plane we'd just walked off. Could have stashed the damn tooth past on the plane. Next time, next time. The old joker in the seat behind me who's wife had lost her 120g $8 a tube denture toothpaste came up with "They asked me if I had any criminal convictions, and I said "Shit mate, I didn't know being a convict was still compulsory in Australia".

The flight was fairly uneventful, the movies being Spider man 3 (ok I guess), and the Hoax (quite good actually).

We arrived in Brunei to discover that the lady in Auckland had been more incompitent than a labour finance minister. My bag arrived, but with Dads tag on it. Dad was not so lucky however, is bag still in Auckland.

We headed out for a quick feed at the food market across the road from our hotel. Aside from mishearing the price of the fish as $2.10, when the guy was trying to say $13, the meal passed with out incident (sorry no photo Graham).
 

He speaks

Yes its a well know fact that I'm bad at communicating. Ok, not just bad, really bad. I don't do it often enough, well enough or rar rah rah rah rah ....I'm sorry you were trailing off.

Well on the odd chance that you'd like to see what I've been up to, I've started a blog hugamathingy. It won't be as witty as Grahams, as in depth as Matt's, or like Rivers at all.

So for those who don't know I decided that work wasn't for me, and took 5 weeks off. The first was to have a week snowboarding, and the next 4 to attend my cousins wedding in Portsmouth, and then travel around a bit.

Well the snowboarding was simply fantastic, Rhys and I drove (Rhys drove I slept) on Sunday morning, and arrived to a bumper day in Whakapapa. We headed out west and spent most of the day out there, awesome. We caught up with Ben, Kelly, Carl, and Ryan. An I ended up staying at the Sole timeshare for a couple of nights. Awesome digs with a great spa. Monday was  Turoa, and I spent most of the time on the Giant. Tuesday was back to Whakapapa, and the Waterfall was the run of the day due to the closing visibility. It ended up snowing about 2pm, and about 2:30pm most of the crew could be found in the cafe at the bottom drinking beer. Not a bad end to the day at all.

Tuesday night was a big one. It started out as 4 hours in the spa, sipping single malt on ice, and downing 1 or 10 beers. Then we realised dinner might be the order of the day so we headed down to the PowderKeg. We were just in time to get some pretty great Pizza. Jesse (one of Rhys's friends) joined us with his 17 year old girlfriend Rose and her friend Rachel. We had a few drinks there and tried to get into the pub next door. We got denied because Rachel and Rosie didn't have ID! Long time since I've been with anyone that has to worry about that. Anyway we made the most of the PowderKeg, initiated dancing on tables though I'm sure we weren't the first ever to do that).

It ended up being quite a late one (2:30am), and so our start the next morning was slightly hangover delayed.  Luckily Rhys is just a go go go kinda guy, so even though the weather looked horrible, and the day before had completely closed in, we headed up the mountain. The visibility wasn't too bad, but the best was yet to come. The day just kept getting better and brighter, so much so that I just had to Pxt the office (sorry Travis), and Ben & Co back at National park. Luckily I convinced them to get their buts up Whakapapa, so they got an awesome afternoon in. It was the pick of the week, not many people (they all thought it would be crap), and the best fresh powder.

Thursday was just rubbish, aside from wishfully hoping each snow report update, more and more of the mountain seemed to be closed. In the end it was just happy valley that was open. No thanks. So we meandered through town, and had a big breakfast (totally organic) that really hit the spot. This got our enthusiasm up and we decided to go mountain biking. The guy at the hire place said most of the proper biking tracks were under water, but that there was a good one off the end of a 4 wheel drive track. Knowing what a madman Rhys is at motor cross, and given that Jason owns his own outdoor business, I thought I'd be left for smoke. It was up hill, and uphills favour the fit, so it was me who burned them off. I had to keep stopping, or just gliding (yes gliding uphill, I am a machine), and waiting for them. Eventually after some pretty grueling up hills we reached the end of the 4x4 track, it went down to a single lane. Well this has got to be down hill we thought, gota be, but oh know it kept climbing. Fallen tree's and increadibly tight spots led us to believe this was not in fact a mountain biking track. In fact it became a pretty lousy walking track as we only managed to stay on it by sighting the odd pink marker. Time to turn back. On the way back down we noticed a couple of detours we had missed. All dead ends. It was raining by now, but we were all soaked to the bone and pretty determined not to just go back the way we came. We found a detour that was 4x4, ah this has to be it. We headed along the detour for about 20 minutes, it was mainly down hill, so not too taxing, but eventually it narrowed. At first it seemed pretty cool, a few jumps, a collapsed bridge that was just bikable, but eventually the path began to disappear beneath our feet until once again we were only spurred on by crazy flip saying "I'm sure just up here we'll hit the road". One last surge up to the top of the ridge where I practically had to carry my bike the whole way while bushwhacking revealed no road. Nope, being sensible and the fact it was now 4:40pm and getting dark, it was time to turn back the was we'd come. This was mostly uneventfull, apart from finding that the continuous uphill that most of it was on the way up, was now level at best, so the easy glide home worked out harder than we'd hoped.

Just as we neared the start of the track where we'd parked the van, we saw two hunters in full camo, guy and girl. We got to the van and put back a well earned Speights. I was quite surprised when the hunters came up and asked us where the main road was. Turned out they were completely lost and had thought they were about to have to setup camp for the night. Not something they'd planned to do when they sent off for a "quick stalk" that morning. We drove them back to their car and they were very happy hunters. We hit the spa again, and were very happy warm people. This time a medium night in town followed, with less shots, but still finishing at 2:30am.

Friday turned it on for us and was amazing. Alas Turoa didn't turn on the High noon express (main 6man chair lift) until 2pm. It was a great day with slightly hard packed conditions under board. With the exception of one wayward excursion out west my runs all went well, and when I found out just how bad Ryans run out far west was, I was much happier. Ben and Kelly kindly agreed to give me a lift, so I returned to Hamilton with a full day to prepare for Brunei.