Drink Problem
30 January 2017
Drink problem.
Earlier this month, back home, we went on a whisky tour on the misty island of Islay, off the west coast of mainland Scotland courtesy of David and Caroline, the country's trialists for the new sport of outdoor slipping. Slipping granite stones along lengths of ice is called Curling. Plain "slipping" is when you fall on your bum trying to achieve the former. Anyway, on Islay David and Caroline treated us to visits to Laphroaig, Ardbeg and Bowmore distilleries where we sampled a dram or three. Happy days. (Hint.....if you get invited on such a tour, take one driver, one tee-totaller and a friend who's done the tour many times before. That way by 11:00 you're in a fine mood!! Where's the dancin'?!!
Back to now, here in New Zealand we went on another tour, this time a tour of a kiwi fruit farm where we got a slice of kiwi fruit and a medicine sized thimble of juice. Oh well......
New Zealand is quite a big place. As we are finding out. We've been on the road now for over two weeks and we are all of three or four hours from the boat.
We stopped after the first hour to visit/gloat at Colin and Izzy, sailing friends from Largs who were antifouling Endorphin. We stayed in our first ever AirBnB. Absolutely brilliant. For the very reasonable price of $40 we had a two bedroom apartment, lounge, bathroom and kitchen. And welcoming hosts. Our trip continued around the Coromandel peninsula arriving in the old frontier gold mining town of Thames where we parked up outside AirBnB number two, "Cozy Room" a single storey wooden house that might well have been the "Before" picture in a reality show for Fixeruppers". Good news was the owner obviously had a sense of humour asking us to remove our shoes before stepping onto the dirty horrible, manky carpets. Yuck. We should have turned around and walked out. After a cringing night we left only for the muppets to claim $10 insisting we'd stolen the cloth tie back for the single, worn, drooping, curtain.
However, the next AirBnB restored our faith with beautiful accommodation in a new build ranch style house just outside Tauranga.
En route we had the embarrassment of arriving at a T junction in Coromandel where, across the road, there's 50 Harleys, and their gorilla like owners, all long hair and bulging tattooed bare forearms and leather waistcoats straining over their well tended beer bellies.
Was this the Mongrel Mob biker gang we'd heard about? My only hope was they couldn't hear my iPhone music which was on shuffle and the bloody Carpenters were playing.
Onwards we went towards Taupo to meet up with, more friends from Largs. Popular place Largs! Taupo is one of the many adventure capitals of New Zealand. All bungy jumping, steaming volcanic lakes and hot waterfalls among some very pretty scenery.
As regards my drink problem......I simply can't afford it. $9.50 for a weeny bottle of Steinlager!!! I'd ordered this New Zealand brand as, in foreign places I like to support the local economy. At $9.50 for a thimble of beer it seems I'm supporting the whole flaming New Zealand economy.