Ghost town

On 3rd February 1931, an earthquake razed the town of Napier to the ground. Since Art Deco was in vogue at the time, it was rebuilt in such a style and is today regarded as the finest exposition of that architecture in the world. Which should make it a nice little place to stop for the night, and a great spot for photos.

The hotel I found myself definitely had a thirties feel to it. I'm guessing it hasn't been redecorated since. Wandering out into town around 8pm, I wondered if I hadn't missed a warning or something, as I appeared to be the only human being present in the "city centre". When I did finally see another person it was a little old granny hobbling along with her stick, which did little to assuage my fears.

The emptiness was perfect for taking pictures, though it was a cloudy night and the town wasn't looking too bright. Not only that, but I had forgotten the first rule of photography: To take a great photograph, you need a camera in your hand. Never mind, thought I, there's always the morning. I finally found a few people in the only restaurant that was a) open and b) not a kebab house: a steak joint inadvertently running a bit of a seventies theme.

Come the morning it was pissing with rain and still gloomy. No time to mince around unfortunately, with a four hour drive to Wellington on the cards and a bit of cricket I wouldn't mind watching. I walked around for about five minutes with my camera under my shirt, half heartedly grabbing a couple of crap pictures just to prove I'd been there.

Reminds me of Worthing...

Believe it or not, this is the Cathedral...

Luckily I managed to outrun the rain on the drive south, and found myself a nice spot on the grass at the Basin Reserve to watch the last session of the cricket. Compared to the Sydney Cricket Ground it's a bit like watching a couple of old codgers looping pedestrian leg breaks on Wisborough Green, but that kind of made it the perfect place for me at the end of another long day.

Making time

One thing I've tried to avoid over the last year is just writing accounts of my days: I did this, then I went there, then I ate this. I've read a lot of travel blogs and the ones like this are unutterably shit. So I've tried to be different; draw out themes and ideas that my travels present to me and that maybe mean a little bit more.

But that takes time and effort, and with my blog now about four days behind me, I'm going back to Plan A to make up time. Here's what you could have been reading for the last twelve months:

I left Hugh, Indri and Genghis on Sunday afternoon and drove south, planning to stop at Rotorua for lunch, on to Taupo and then across to Napier. Which was a stupid plan. With about four and a half hours' driving, and a couple of stops, I would see next to nothing along the way and arrive too late.

The stop in Rotorua was brief. It was always going to be, but about ten seconds after getting out of the car and inhaling the dense sulphuric air emanating from the all the hot springs in the area, I got back in and drove off. I don't have time to stop everywhere or see every place I want to see, which means you have to go with your instincts a lot of the time. And I instinctively don't want to eat lunch in a town that smells like a stink bomb factory.

Taupo seems nice, and a couple of friends will be arriving around 8pm, which is enough to get me on the phone to the ferry company, kick my crossing back a day and spend the night. I reward myself with a long hike up the river into the middle of nowhere, even breaking into a canter at times.

In the morning I decide I have time to take in the scenic volcanic loop drive around Tongariro National Park and go for a bit of a hike in the middle. The scenery is stunning of course.

Taranaki Falls, Tongariro Nat. Pk.

Mount Ruapehu, Tongariro Nat. Pk.

However long it looks like a drive in New Zealand might take, double it, they say. Hmmm. Halfway through the park and I'm thinking I don't even know what a New Zealand police car looks like, when I realise I do. There's one heading towards me about a quarter of a mile away.

Another one bites the dust

She's very nice, hands me my $170 ticket with a smile and an "awesome" (not what I was thinking) and I carry on at 100kph, a ridiculous speed for a long open stretch of road with nothing else on it.

This unexpected drop in velocity means it's gone 6pm when I finally get to Napier. The drive was stunning; winding through valleys and over mountains, stopping just the once for a powernap, as deep as it was brief, before I careered off the highway. With the mountains behind me, the vineyards of the Hawke Bay region begin, and it's a gentle, scenic cruise into town.

Boring wasn't it?

Social network

I've just watched The Social Network, and what a nice bloke that Mark Zuckerberg is. Really lovely guy.

Loathe him or merely hate him, without facebook I wouldn't have been heading from Auckland to Waihi Beach, where my old friend Hugh lives. We hadn't seen each other for twelve years, and would surely never have done so again were it not for that geeky little twat and his creation.

We headed north up the Coromandel Peninsula for a couple of days, driving the scenic roads in the inadequate Ford Focus I'd rented. We hiked to remote beaches, and finally wound up in Whitianga (Wh is pronounced as F in New Zealand, which will take some getting used to but could be a useful way of writing swear words).

With twelve years to catch up on, we got amongst the beers. It's reassuring to realise that for all the things that happen to us throughout our twenties, all the changes that take place, nothing really changes. Except perhaps that the hangovers get a bit more brutal as the years run out.

Cathedral Cove

Orokawa Bay

I spent a few nights just chilling out back in Waihi Beach with Hugh, his lovely wife Indri and their friendly but psychotic dog Genghis. We swam, ate, watched DVDs (two series of The Inbetweeners exposing a gaping chasm between Indri's sense of humour and ours) and successfully chased Genghis around the neighbourhood before he managed to kill any other dogs or children after I unwittingly let him escape.

I could have spent the next couple of weeks doing the same, but this is meant to be a road trip. One last adventure, one more journey of discovery, as far away from home as it is possible to be. There'll be no slouching for the next couple of weeks, I thought, as I got behind the wheel of the Ford whucking Focus and took to the highway for one last time.

Auckland: the view from the top

Everyone slags off Auckland. Get out as quick as you can, they say. Shithole. Dump. Worst place in New Zealand. I'm not in a position to judge that last bit just yet, but I really can't see what the place could have done to deserve this kind of vilification.

It's a city, so I'll apply the cake metaphor. It's probably a cupcake. Nice sponge, not a lot in it, no unexpected bursts of flavour, though neatly iced and fairly tasty. Won't make anyone's top ten cakes in the universe, but if you had to eat it every day, it wouldn't kill you.

It's not Auckland's fault but it feels like a sort of no-man's land to me. I've left Australia, but haven't begun the chronically under-planned Kiwi road trip that will fill up my final weeks. There's not a massive amount to distract the passing nomad, so I ride up the Sky Tower to take a look over the city.

The next day I received an email from my big sister. We'd been talking about travelling, the possibility of me continuing to do so, and the absence of structure and routine in my life. She remarked that from her experience of reading travel literature;

People were always climbing hills, searching for vantage points, as if somehow there would be a place from which to see life with greater clarity, as if perspective were the key

Melbourne

Cities, I've been thinking, are a bit like cakes. They all look different, taste different and have different things in them. They're iced differently, or not at all. But for all their dissimilarities, they're still all cakes. Same basic ingredients, same process, same result. Cake.

Melbourne is different. It's more of a kitchen sink cookie of a place; a little bit of everything. Aussies slate it for the weather, but being English, that's never bothered me. Beneath the ever-changing skies, it is an edgy, arty and interesting city that is constantly reinventing itself.

The centre of town is a grid of big streets, but in between them are the famous laneways; gritty alleys where tiny cafes, bars and shops hide among the rubbish bins of the big chainstores. And I think this might be why I love Melbourne so much; because most of what is so great about it is obscured. It hides in dark corners while the bits of the city that resemble all others bathe in light.

It's not a naturally beautiful place like Sydney, so it is made great by the people in it and the things they have created. It's busy, like all cities, but if you look carefully you find moments of calm and stillness that seem missing in other cakes.

Rings of suburbs orbit the nucleus of the CBD, each with their own character; each vibrant, dynamic and unique. Not unlike a miniature London, smaller and more compact yet with more space, and never claustrophobic.

The food in Melbourne is incredible; cared for, thought through and loved. From the little lunch joints wedged down Centre Place to the three hat restaurants, Melbourne eateries are outstanding. Coffee is the source of great pride, and much squabbling over who's turning out the best cup. It doesn't matter - you might get the odd dud, but on the whole the coffee is life changing, and unquestionably the best I've had in anywhere in the world.

All this means I'd been anticipating my return to Melbourne for much of the year. It's been hovering just above the horizon, a shimmering sun. I've forced it to the back of my mind most of the time, because arriving will also herald the end. Back in amongst it this time (I lived there for five months in 2009) I somehow feel like a bit of an intruder. It's a city made for living in more than visiting - the sadness of your impending departure will always cloud a short visit.

And that's how it felt this time, like I kept myself back to save myself from getting hurt. I rolled around a few old haunts: Section 8, the bar in the middle of town consisting of some wooden crates and a couple of old shipping containers all fenced in by chainlink; MoVida, the best tapas restaurant outside Spain; New Gold Mountain, a slick, stylish and brilliant cocktail bar lurking behind an unmarked door.

This post has been sitting undrafted for a while now. I'll never be happy with it because I can't convey in words how amazing Melbourne is. Many things I've deliberated and pondered over have held me back from writing more as I move, so I'm posting it anyway, and moving on. It's not going anywhere, after all, and knowing it's there is somehow reassuring.

Ashes to Ashes

Quite frankly, it's piss poor. This is supposed to be a travelogue, blog, log, whatever, and yet I have only posted two things in the last month; one saying I need a holiday, and the other that I have decided to do fu*k all for the next however long. As far as retaining what lingering reader interest may have survived the last year's laborious nonsense goes, this must surely be the death knell.

Or is it? Maybe I wasn't sleeping, but waiting. Poised menacingly like a tightly coiled and pissed off cobra, waiting to explode in a fury of travelling, eating, cooking, photographing and writing brilliance the like of which the world had never seen. But no. I've just been watching cricket.

Many years ago I was an angry ant of a teenage England football supporter. Spilling beer, shouting and chanting mildly offensive drivel. Around that time I worked with an absolute gent (who was probably only 25 himself) called Danno, who once confided in me that he would rather see England win the Ashes (Cricket - England v Australia) than the World Cup (Football, Soccer). I smiled politely and secretly worried about him.

It might have been the eight years as a bookie, when my patriotism yielded to fiscal pragmatism, but I ended up wanting England to lose things, football especially. When I stopped being a bookie, I assumed my patriotism would return, but it didn't. And it didn't because in order to be patriotic, you need to feel pride, and eleven cashed up bogans strutting around a football pitch failing to replicate the form they show for their paymasters whilst carrying on the pretence of representing their country provokes anger and resentment, not pride.

Cricket is different though. Test cricket is the quintessence of a sporting contest; endurance, technique, consistency, teamwork, planning and execution. The Ashes, to an Englishman or Australian, are the pinnacle of that most refined of sports. And the Boxing Day test match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) is the highlight of that.

Two Englishmen, a Frenchman and an Australian....

If you are interested in cricket, you know what happened, if you're not I won't bore you; suffice it to say that we utterly destroyed them. It was very special indeed. So special that, after two days at the MCG I decided to shelve a few plans and spend the first week of 2011 in Sydney watching the final match of the series.

Day 4 at the Sydney Cricket Ground

Five consecutive days of test cricket is an epic thing to watch. Even more so thanks to the demolition of Australian cricket engineered on the field, a rotation of great company in the stands, and the effervescent humour of England's travelling supporters, the Barmy Army.

Nic and I looking smug on the final day at the SCG

By the final day there were no Aussies left, just a large, vocal contingent of English people there to watch the denouement; the final decapitation of the old foe coming just a few minutes before lunch. Amidst the celebrations though, came a slight shuddering twinge. England's victory arrived courtesy of the brilliant execution of a masterful plan; Australia's demise the result of hubris. Greatness never resides long in the same place; those which were great once are small today, and those which were small have become great.

Happy New Year

Right, I'm back. Well, sort of. I was always going to go quiet when I hit Australia. If I've only learnt one thing, it's that I can't write when I stay in the same place and am surrounded by friends. Solitude and flux are prerequisites for my scribbling.

New Year's Eve lends itself to decision making. I've written before about standing on the cusp of things; borders, countries, continents. Decisions. Journeys. When the anticipation of something new mingles with reminiscence over things past, the mind can achieve moments of remarkable clarity.

Here's what I wrote a year or so ago in my first post on this blog:

I don't generally like New Year's Eves, but they do afford one the obvious opportunity, obligation perhaps, to reflect upon the previous twelve months. They also sharpen your focus upon the last one, and force you to join the dots. A year ago I had that moment standing on a balcony of a beautiful holiday home in Fairhaven, down the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia. I gave myself a year to sort things out.

This year, feeling bloated and suffering from a massive sugar crash, I strolled outside for a breath of fresh air. Leaning on the gate and staring out into a beautiful, cold night's sky, I decided I was probably only halfway to being where I want to be. If it took me a year to get halfway, I'd better have one more to take care of the rest. So that's what I did. I deferred the great decision for twelve months, and resolved to hit the road.

This time round it was different. It's been a long year, and I've managed to fit a lot in. How much of it will stand the test of time? What have I really learnt or discovered? How many pillars will remain standing when the tides of time have washed all the other memories away?

The first thing I realised was that there is no halfway. There will never be a New Year's Eve when you can sit and tell yourself that you are there; nothing left to achieve. So it's not a question of apportioning time, or the years, to some great quest or journey of discovery. That journey is your life, and you'll know when you're finished, because you'll be dead. Between now and then, it's simply a question of how you're going to get there.

So I didn't make any grand decisions this time, rather succumbed willingly to the reality that this is life. But at the same time I gave thanks for all the incredible things I have seen and experienced this year. I thought about what I had learned, about the world, about how old, beautiful and incredible it really is, and how I would carry that knowledge with me into the next year, and use it to guide me. And I guess, if I'm honest, that made me think that I would probably not stop travelling just yet.

But being on the other side of the world from your home is tough. I'm lucky enough to be made welcome into other people's homes and families in Australia. But the warmth and love that they extend reminds me of what sits waiting when I get home, and what doesn't too. So maybe next time it won't be a whole year.

A ball started rolling in 2010, and I don't think I'll ever want, or be able, to stop it.