Plane Sailing

Well, not long now till I spend 24+ hours in a plane to get back to sunny ol’ London town. Luckily I get an hour stopover in LA on the way – phew! In the meantime I’m in Auckland again having completely not manage to make the south island. Spent the last few days up in the Bay of Islands, north of Auckland – another amazingly beautiful area of New Zealand. Hike up to a waterfall, then kayaked up to it over the mangroves – pulling fresh oysters from the mud on the way. Then a long drive down the west coast back to drop off the car – passing amazing sand dunes and stopping off to look at stupendously large trees, the kauris in cathedral grove. Amazing. We got there quite late, so had the biggest tree (2000 years old and 13m in diameter) to ourselves for some silent contemplation of just how frikkin’ big it is. Big.

And apologies for everyone who can’t get to my site via ultrahi.net. Enom, my DNS lookup provider, have now told me there was ‘some problem’ with my credit card but won’t say what. To rectify this I need to fax over a copy of my credit card and a copy of my latest statement. Muppets. Obviously this is not straightforward when you’re travelling round the world so it will be a few days to fix – plus, because they’ve disabled my account, I can’t even check to see which credit card I used to try and pay for the URL. Sigh.

In the meantime found a cool new language – sinhalese! This is one of the most wonderful looking scripts that I’ve ever seen, really curvy. Some of the characters look like cats or foxes and others like… well, let’s just say it’s rude and leave it at that, missus.