So... do you want the good news or the bad news first?
I guess I'll start at the beginning. My last few weeks in Gayndah were pretty uneventful... though I do look back on those times wistfully as a time when I was surrounded by good people, many of whom I hope to stay in touch with. All good times must draw to a close though so I left Gayndah on the 20th of September, planning to have a nice relaxing trip down the coast to Sydney, from where I would fly to New Zealand to meet my family...
My plan was destroyed after only two days when I left my van for an hour to use the internet at a MacDonalds in Surfers Paradise and returned to find that someone had broken into my van and stolen a bag containing, among other things; two hard drives, my speakers, all of my power adaptors and cables, some notebooks, and my passport! Obviously my passport was the most urgent issue, but the thing that hurts the most are the two hard drives... They contained ALL of my photos from over two years of travelling, a huge collection of ebooks, over 300 films, about 15 full TV series, a large selection of porn and various documents including the originals of all of these blog posts! As you can imagine this hurt tremendously... especially the photos... After all, most of that stuff can be replaced, but the photos were unique, and I'll never see a large number of them again... Luckily I have uploaded a large number to facebook, but the quality just isn't the same, and I was hoping to print out some of these photos when I eventually return back to England and use them to decorate my pad...
I cannot describe to you how losing all of this made me feel... There is a kind of internal dislocation that takes place when you lose something like this. Something that you have had for a long time, and that you have always assumed that you would always have... Your brain has to adjust its whole way of thinking, thoughts you never even realised you had will lead straight to anger as you realise that part of your world has been violated...
As for my passport... obviously this would just have to happen days before I was due to fly internationally! I reported the theft to the police, and they gave me the phone number of the British consulate. Speaking to them I realised that my plan of a leisurely trip down the coast was out of the window. I would have to race to Sydney and get to the consulate buildings by 10 am on Friday in order to get my emergency passport arranged. If I didn't make it on time there would be no way to get an emergency passport, and no way for me to make my flight on the Sunday! All I could do was hope that my van could withstand the 1000km+ journey that was required...
I set off down the highway, undergoing my own version of therapy... This mostly involved turning my music up very loud and singing along to it at the top of my lungs while shooting down the motorway... This seemed to work... After a couple of days I was more or less back to my usual, laid back self.
To cut a long story short I made it to the consulate on time, got my emergency passport, and made it to my flight... Next stop... New Zealand!
I've taken up a lot of space with that story, so I'll just give you a brief run-down of the New Zealand experience so far.
For a start New Zealand is beautiful... The landscape really does look like Hobbiton in the lord of the rings, with rolling hills and grass covering most available surfaces... While I've been here I've been sailing, climbed mount doom, jumped off a bridge (actually a cantilever... but who'se splitting hairs?), been scuba diving and been to some thermal springs. Check the links (click on the underlined words) for the pictures.
It is all as awesome as it sounds!
(Especially the jumping off a bridge, see my realmanproject blog for how that experience was.)
