right…my long blog just got deleted. i am happy about this. so happy in fact that i want to destroy something…

remind me never to eat any of you home grown vegertables, slightly.

any way we got picked up from opanoni by a guy who not only looked quite capable of killing and eating us but owned a rabid looking dog. annika is scared of anything even resembling a dog this stems back to when she was attacked by(i wonder why julio is writing such a load of crap about me, he seems to be a lyer. in fact i had a dog at home for many many years and apart from that julio taught me the perfect way of killing dangerous creatures by grabbing their tongue and tying it around the mouth so why should any dog be a problem for me?????????????-annika)a 2 metre high wolf hound or something. i am not sure as to the truth of this as she claims she had to have sugary,but i see no scars!!!none!! any way have you leant nothing? you grab the tongue and make them choke themselves by inserting it down there gullets. sheesh. this technique works on all dangerouse animals, apart from shrews. all i know is that when a dog apears she sidles around me untill i am between her and the dog, presumably so that when i am being consumed by the beast she can make good her escape. so annika went in the front seat while i risked life and limb fending of the dog, hellbreath i shall call him, who seemed fascinated with licking my face. so this guy took us to kouri forest. and lo, we spent a happy day checking out the insanly massive kouri trees and going on walks. and then it began to get dark. er…maybe we should start hitching back? yes maybe we should. so we did. this was a lot harder than we anticipated. this forest seemed to be in the middle of a zone were driveing a car was frowned upon and walking favored. carswised by once an hour and usally in the wrong direction. for some strange reason the realisation that we would have to walk for 12 hours to get back to opanoni didn’t seem to dishearten us. we just plodded along every now and then we would hear a car, annika would stick out a hand and i would shine my invaluble head torch on it ans it was pitch black by then. but just before we comended our souls to the gods and nestled up to a kouri tree to sleep, a car going in the wrong direction stopped turned around and picked us. the lady driving called keri, was some sort of famous singer in auckland and she was going to her local pub to organise the karaoke night, when she had passed us. and even though her car was bulging with arcane karaoke devices and constructs. guess were her local pub was? opanoni! hot damn.it was a bit of a sqeeze, annika had to sit on my lap and she had to have a tv on hers. the combined wieght focusing on my belt buckle which began slowly to disembowel me. keri dropped us of at our hostel(about 20 metres from the pub) and said we should come to the karaoke, so we did. it was an interesting night. at one point keri intraduced us one of the locals. “this is sara she nice but one sandwhich short of a picknick.” she said heading to another table, and leaving sara with us. i grinned at sara amused by keri’s joke. sara looked back at me with blank eyes. the grin died on my face as i realised that keri was in fact not joking. sara turned out to be nice, as did her relations, bye which i mean everyone else in the pub. it was like a very friendly roysten vasey. also another moment of interest was when i went to the bar to get our daily supply of chicken, i was accosted by a hairy chap who apeared to be irish. he looked the sort of person who could quite easily be a hobgoblin in disguise. he cackled a lot and claimed he could readinto my soul. also he said that newzealand was first colinised by four foot celts. and also that the whole world is crazy and that we should all lean chinese as quickly as possible.
i forgot to mention but the day before that we went walking in the woods. the hostel owner gave us a lift to the start of the trek. at the start was a small round shop made of wood. we went in to have a quick look, and didn’t come out for maybe two hours. inside was a vast aray of carved wood and puzzles. a massive guy that looked like a bear, was demanding of a poor phone minion why he was being billed for someone elses stuff, fearly resonable i thought but the phone minion didn’t seem to get it. he finnished with the call and started talking to the hostel owner(she had come in with us) while wordlessy handing us some puzzles. we got to work on them but they were insanly complex. when we solved one or could do one he would show us and give us a fresh one, much amused at our ceribrial struggles. he was a great character, quite amazing. and his puzzles were classy. i fell in love with a japanese puzzle box, it took fourteen moves to open. the walk was fun also.
a few days later we tried to hitch to dargaville and then on to auckland. a jolly english lady took us to a very small town just forty mile to the south of nowere. on the way out of opononi we saw a guy holding a sign saying dargaville, he looked slightly unplesant. and i was glad there wasn’t room for the lady to pick him up as well. this town or more accuratly a collection of shacks, was to be our hom for the next year or so it felt. for some reason there were no cars, so we wiled away the time. annika carved a block of 50000 year old kouri wood she had picked up on our trip to ninety mile beach and i carved a small nutshell. after the first hour the guy we had seen earlier with the sign walked along the road towards us. i smiled and nodded, annika said hello. he looked at us like we were scum, and swept past us with out a word. he looked like a manicaly depressed serial killer who’s latest victim has given him the slip. i felt a chill go through me like i had been cursed. and so came into being the legend of devilman as we liked to call him. after two more hours a english guy in a campervan picked us up he was going to dargaville and wanted to stop of at kouri forrest first. “i feel sorry for that guy the bloke siad upon arriving at the forrest” we swivled around and lo, there was devilman complete with sign, trying to kill us with his bear eyes. we told him not to feel sorry for him becouse he was the antichrist. after the short stop we set of again. i tried not to look at the devilman as we passed, but i could feel his evil eye upon me. later on in dadaville we saw him again, and again he looked at us like he would gladly consumed our flesh. we were convinced he would turn up at our dorm in the middle of the night complete with shapend sign. aaaaaagh. the horror. the english guy took us to auckland the day after which was nice.

wack look at the time.
got to go.

julio