We’ve only been here a few days, but we’re really enjoying the place and the people. Everyone is so nice.

It feels really strange though to be:

-Wearing long pants -Wearing a jacket -Wearing shoes -Using blankets -Turning the heater on at night before bed -Driving a car (we rented one and on the wrong side of the road!)

We’re in a beautiful area named Opua. In a week or so, we’ll be heading down to Whangerie where we’ll leave the boat when we come home for the holidays. We drove there today. It’s a pretty good size town, so a good place to work on Charisma after the last year’s wear and tear. We need to haul out and paint the bottom and then renew the varnish (much of which is peeling from the tropical heat).

In Whangerie we bought a prepaid cell phone and a wifi wireless device (both from Vodaphone) to drive internet on the boat. My iPhone is way too expensive to use. Talk about simple. It took all of ten minutes to have phone, wifi device and load both with minutes of use. AT&T could really learn a thing or two from these guys. You can reload the minutes at any store or gas station. This way we know exactly how much we’re using/paying and won’t get one of those surprise $400 phone bills.

Teaching old dogs, new tricks. Here’s a good one. One of the nav lights we use when under power went out on the last night we used it. There’s a young guy here named Falcon who has been cruising with his family literally all his life at this point. I think he’s about 23 years old. So, I asked him if I could pay him to go up the mast and change the bulb. I’m too big for the winches on Charisma and I thought I could just winch him up and get it done. Well, he asked me; “what are you going to do if you have to go up sometime when you’re in the tropics at some uninhabited island?” Me; “Er, um, ah, I don’t know?” He said he’d come over and help me rig a block and tackle so I could haul myself up. I had always thought that I would be too heavy to hoist myself up, but once he got a 6:1 block and tackle set up, I sat in the bosun’s chair and voila, I could pull myself up with one hand! So, tomorrow I go up with a new bulb. Nice to know I now have the capability. Thanks Falcon!

This evening we went to a “cultural event” as it was termed. It was a historical play created to teach the history of New Zealand from the first Polynesians who came from Tahiti through the late 1800s when British Settlers came to terms with the Maouris (more or less-it’s complicated). Anyway, it was done in a beautiful ancestral house, hand carved to represent all the dozens of tribes in New Zealand. Really well done and fun.

So we now have cultural and a new phone. “Sweet as” (which is the saying down here for “cool”).

Good on ya mate.