From Nelson the next stop on the Kiwi bus is Westport, the journey's not bad with a nice freezing cold lake to jump in but Westport is a bit of a dive.
It was the first day on the bus that I had managed to stop myself signing up to do an activity so when we arrived at the hostel I had a bit of time to kill, time I spent attempting to go for a run. As soon as I got to the beach at Westport I had to stop running because I'm not very fit and sand is hard to run on. Westport is weird and the first place I have visited in New Zealand where I wouldn't want to live. The back streets I ran down made me feel like I was going to be witness to a drive by. Most houses were in a state with rubbish dumped in the front gardens or cars rusting away or burnt out - one of which had a swastika spray painted on it.
The town was dead and the only people I saw were boy racers or oddballs talking to themselves and staring at walls. Because of the in-bred clan of Westport I turned my run/walk back to the hostel where I pretended to Shauna and Tyler that I had enjoyed myself.
Dinner of fish and chips ($4.60 - first NZ bargain) lead to a couple of drinks and when our group of Kiwi bus folk had dwindled to just me I got chatting to some locals, all of them weirdos in some way. It was a pleasant evening drinking until 3 with a cringe worthy moment rubbing noses with a Maori like an eskimo kiss. He asked me 'Whut thu fuck are yu doing? Yu just touch for a couple uf secunds. Where huve yu seen thut shit?' I told him it was what I thought I'd seen him do but in my half-cut state I probably did think eskimos and Maoris have the same greeting.
I was told that to talk like a Kiwi you replace all the vowels with 'i's but it's different depending on the Kiwi you're talking to. The only constants are that if something is good it's 'sweet as', anyone you know is 'bro' and after a statement they turn it in to a question by saying 'eh' (aye) so in my opinion New Zealand is sweet as bro eh. Westport however, is rubbish.
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