the n'd

"Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future." 

- Christopher McCandlass

Thank you for reading Noah's Blog!

~Noah bo Boah~

And Back Again

I'm not really ready to go home. I've learned a lot about myself. I'm a traveler. My mind is open and my spirit is fresh, I'm hungry for more life and worldly experience. I've slept in parks, by train tracks, in strangers homes, hitch hiked a country, met amazing people, crazy people, enjoyed the adventures of traveling alone for an extended period, and the adventures of traveling with a friend, climbed volcanoes and mountains, swam oceans and walked beaches, trekked 5 solo days through a jungle, got by on extreme budgeting as little as 5 NZ$ a day, hitched with no direction just to see where I ended up, busked late nights on the street for extra money, and laughed for 3 months straight.

I Fly home tonight, 15 hours. Not sure how long I'll stay at home for. The lure of adventure pulls strong, and I have my sights on Iceland. I want to spend months and years in the midst of wonder. I have till September before I go to college at evergreen. We'll see what I end up doing with that time.

Here are the last photos from the trip

Zach Chasing Children

Books and Music and Squid

Hello! Found myself back in the small surf town of Raglan. Been camping on the beach for the first two days, but due to being overly smelly, and not showered in 6 days. Decided to get a Hostel for a night. I'm now ultra clean and smell better than ever! And the Hostel was one of the best I've been in. It was a really nice complex full of double beds, hammocks, good music, bikes, and for cheap. And randomly running into a few friends we met on South Island months ago. It's been a nice rebooting 3 days. Reading books in the Library, I recommend "Lammas & Empanads", and buying excessively cheep squid rings for most meals. But it's time to get back on the hitch hiking road. Headed to who-knows-where today we'll see where I end up!

PHOTOGRAPHS from the past few weeks.

Fish n Chips n Crackling Music

The End of New Zealand

Windy Windy Windy

Sunsets in Raglan

Typewriter Tip Tip Tip

We have had a crazy last few weeks. Last you heard we finished climbing the volcano. We then started hitching north. By the end up the day we got a really amazing ride where the guy took us to a fancy restaurant and bought us a huge dinner with gourmet dessert included. That night, and the following, we found hot springs to sleep by. Woke up every mourning to a relaxing hot pool. then started to head to Northland. This whole post is going to be very very sparse due to time restraints. Zach and I have been getting around the past week by just hitching and seeing where we end up. Picking a direction on going. We've ended up in some amazing and some crazy places. No time for all the stories, but the best was we got to a town, where we still don't have a full idea on where it is, when it was raining unbelievably hard and were forced to skip on our usual sleeping outside, to find a place to sleep. This town was so out of the way and so small there was no hostel. The place we ended up sleeping was the most ramshackle place ever. It was basically a bar with a few rooms above it. The room we got had peeling wallpaper, no table, a bunch of crates, and broken beds. We got fish and chips from a small shop and went back to the room to eat. It was one of the funniest scenes I've seen. Zach and I were sitting in who knows where, eating food that was wrapped in news paper on a table we made from the crates while listing to old crackly russian and indian music on some cheap speakers Faye and Julian gave us. It was the best ever. We were laughing the whole night. It felt like we were in eastern Europe. A few days later we were on the very very tip on the north watching the Pacific Ocean clash with the Tasmin Sea. Both bodies of water flowing against each other creating a chaos of waves in every direction. Breathtaking.
Now we are nearing the end of our journey. We are trying to find a place that has a piano that we can stay at for a week and just write music and relax. We've been hitching for 2 weeks straight and its quite exhausting.

Photos will be posted next time.

nooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh

Egmont, Mount Teranaki

Zach and I climbed a 8,261 foot tall Volcano. Here are some photos!

A message from the future!

It's 2011 here! I'm now speaking to you from the future.
It's a good year, look forward to it!

Happy New Year!

Waterfalls

The past week has been amazing. We got picked up hitching out of coremandal by two really great people, Faye and Julian. Faye is from the UK and Julian from France.

Zach and I had no real destination to head to, and neither did they. We drove south for a while and ended up at a DOC campsite. The first night we hiked up to a waterfall for a swim, and afterwards proceeded to rock hop our way down the river back to camp.

 

The next day we went to a crazy park full of art, sculptures and musical instruments hidden in the trees. A place for anyone to leave art. It was awesome. We found a bunch of bells and drums made from scraps of metal, wood, and plastic, and played music there for a while.  

(We have a video of us playing, but it takes to long to upload right now. I'll post it in a day or so.)

That night we got to another campsite. There was a mass of kids there, and when we pulled up, they were all over us. Julian had his poi out, I pulled my hula hoop, and we had a bunch of juggling balls. They thought we were a circus. They were the sweetest kids ever. All from 3 years old, to 12ish. Zach pulled out his guitar and and as soon as he started singing they all sat around in full attention. We played with them for hours, and their parents invited us to their camp for dinner. A plethora of food, including a traditional Maori Hangi. It was all amazing. That night Faye, Julian, Zach and myself, went for a night hike up to another waterfall to see some glow worms.
There are few times in your life when you get to experience something so beautiful you don't know what to do. The glow worms were without a doubt one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. We were walking through a jungle by a quietly babbling steam alone with thousands of little glowing dots all over the trees and under over hangs. They looked like blueish green stars. It felt like being in a fairy tale. It was unbelievable. There is no way to describe, or explain it. No one else was out there. We got to the waterfall, climbed down, stripped naked and dipped in pool under the glow worms. It was one of the purest experiences I've ever had.
Staying true to our seeming tradition of waterfalls with our new traveling partners, we drove down to a place called Rainbow Mountain. I had been given directions to this "secret" hot spring the third day I was here on Waiheke island. I've been waiting to go for a while. Just as the days before, my mind was blown. Unlike every other hot spring I've been to, cold rivers with pockets of hot water, this was an entire river of warmth. Every part of the river was warm. We walked down to a place where the water dropped. A good sized waterfall of pure natural hot water. Amazing.

 

We swam there for hours, jumping off the falls, swimming, laying in the current. Without a doubt the best hot spring I've been in.
More adventures to come. Zach and I now part with our friends in a place called New Plymouth. A strange place to spend new years, but we'll see what happens.

Talk to you next year!