TrittyTime: “Sun and Steam – The adventures of a journey to Rotorua”

[Ed: Tritty wrote this for me after four rounds of the tournament, but my slackness from within the depths of chesstacular failure has led me to only post this now.  Apologies.  It also has a lot of inside jokes, as any great adventure of four twenty-somethings to a new country should. Nonetheless, it paints a reasonably accurate picture of the highs and slides of an amazing Tasman experience, and makes for quite the entertaining read.  All in-jokes may be explained by me on request, for a liquid fee.]

“Bro, sooo beached!”, “Man, Where you from?” “Where are all the sheep? No time for that, Bro!” Early morning text messages of these and other similarly inside-joke references were excitedly exchanged as the four musketeers (aka Fitzy, Casper, Dave and myself) begin to experience the natural high of excitement that came with our much anticipated trip across the ditch.  After nearly twelve months of planning, the big day had arrived.  We jumped on the flights from the not so sunny Gold Coast and drizzly Sydney and headed to New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland.

On arrival, we all did the masculine triple-S, got dressed into our black and white get ups and hit up the biggest 21^st Birthday celebration in town [Ed: Laura Spiller, daughter of NZCF president Paul Spiller].  Dumping our luggage and bottle of duty free Bacardi in Laura’s car, we walked in to find an array of gorgeous “biddy’s” who had put on their finest to attend.  Laura was clearly the star of the show, playing the role of the stunning Lady in the red dress. 

After probably two or three Montieths more than would be recommended by most health professionals, we headed to the viaduct to continue our first night in Aotearoa.  As we walked to the car park, it struck us that the vehicle which contained our luggage was no longer present; it turns out that Laura’s lovely parents had taken Ryan [Ed: Laura’s two year old son] home for some well deserved sleep (after destroying the dance floor) and had unsuspectingly taken our luggage with them!

Day two was a quiet day; we did some preparation for the tournament, but mostly it involved us chilling out, retrieving our luggage and getting stuff ready for the rest of the trip.  The next morning was a quiet morning before heading to Devonport for lunch, where Casper made the mistake of ordering seafood chowder and a burger.  The first was a mustard coloured liquid with a variety of dubious looking clumps in it, whilst the burger looked rather good until he (as is his want) removed anything which had not previously had a heartbeat! [Ed: Casper refuses to eat vegetables. Ever.]  This lunch experience was not enhanced when one of us made an ill-timed comment about Casper’s weight just as our slightly larger waitress came up to serve Casper’s food.  Post lunch, we were treated to an excellent afternoon by Murray Chandler at his luxury pad for some cocktails looking out across Auckland’s stunning harbour.   Memories from the remainder of that night are a little sketchy, although I remember being extremely bad at remembering what words I was and was not allowed to say, and always forgetting who had the question card… [Ed: in reference to two of the more difficult rules involved in one of the more notorious international games, ‘Kings’.]

Our final day in Auckland pre-contiki was spent checking out the sites, heading to Auckland’s highest point at Mt Eden and having an absolutely sensational burger from Fuel Burger in Mission Bay.  The weather was unfortunately rather miserable, primarily due to the hurricane which had barraged Norfolk.  Never having experienced winds with the ferocity present that day, it was amazing to have Mother Nature challenge my ability to walk in a straight line.  That night, we hit up trivia at the Camel backpackers’ bar – after 15 minutes, we had won ourselves a pitcher of the local brew by correctly identifying the four photos of Tinas handed out by our quizmaster hosts.  We then enjoyed ourselves with a mixture of Simpsons and 1960’s pop trivia and an exceptionally enjoyable game known as “quarters”.  Fortunately for us, given we were starting our Contiki tour the following morning, the night was pretty tame:  Nobody did karaoke whilst getting topless, lost important personal items or got convinced that buying burgers from an old bus lit up like a Grinchmas tree was a good idea.  [Ed:  By ‘nobody’, read: ‘Tritty’.  But he did easily win Karaoke.]

After checking in with our super cool tour guide Te, we jumped on the bus, and quickly settled into the role of troublemakers in the back few rows. We set off north on our way to the beautiful Bay of Islands and began to get to know some of our fellow travellers, meeting some fellow Aussies Paula and Caitlyn along with a rather exuberant American who we know as GG.  On arrival, several of us hit the water for our first activity, parasailing – basically being strapped to a parachute behind a speedboat on a 1200m rope, and being raised to 300m above sea level.  As is usually the case on Contiki, the first night was a pretty quiet affair at the Pipi Patch, with ONLY two contiki tours rocking up, painting their faces with fluoro orange dots and dancing the night away.

Contiki day 2 was an unpleasantly early morning to head out for our daily activities.  I headed to “Explore NZ” which started with us chasing dolphins in a catamaran, unfortunately they weren’t exactly a playful bunch, and once we were dropped into the water, the dolphins rapidly removed themselves from the area.  Even Casper and my best Michael Phelps imitations trying to keep up were insufficient to catch them as some of the most graceful creatures I have ever seen decided that our summersaults, duck dives and high-pitched squeals were inadequate entertainment.  A relaxing hour and a BBQ lunch ensued on the beach of one of the islands in the bay, before we jumped aboard Lion New Zealand, a 78ft sailing ship specifically built to compete in the 1985/86 Whitebread round the world challenge in which it finished second behind the Swiss yacht UBS.  Its preparation for this trip was winning the 1984 Sydney to Hobart race, so it was a pretty incredible experience being on a ship which is so important to New Zealand’s history.  After returning to Russell, New Zealand’s first capital city, we returned back to the bay where I rushed to the beach to get myself onto a Jetski.  Having never jetski’d on surf before, I ended up flying off on two occasions and as a result was seriously struggling to move for several hours afterwards.  The local pool hall had its weekly rowdy night, complete with free pool games for the ladies, so we thought it would be worth a gander and had a bit of a hit of pool with our Contiki compatriots.

After getting up once again at a slightly ridiculous hour, we departed the Bay of Islands for Auckland where we said farewell to some of our fellow travellers and our tour guide Te and bus driver Dave.  On the positive note, we got a bunch of new friendly faces that we immediately set out to corrupt!  We also got a new Bus driver and tour guide – Mikey Mike and Emmo (aka Elmo, Emo, Ringo, Hey You) and boy did these guys have a stupid amount of energy.  Having just completed a 15 day tour, the night before, the energy which they brought to the tour was outstanding.  We headed to Waitomo, which in the Maori dialect translates to Water Hole where we floated through caves, jumped off waterfalls and serenaded the glow worms.  That night, the Contiki crew schooled Kiwi Experience and the Hakka tour in consecutive boat races – with the local pub being completely evacuated to see the show.  Once again, for the rest of the night, not a whole lot really happened, just hung out getting to know our travellers more.  All in all it was a liberating night, in which our tallest member ended his night on a good note!

On our last day officially on our tour of the North Island we reached Rotorua which we would be calling home for the best part of the next two weeks.  The first thing we noticed were the gorgeous views, the lake is absolutely spectacular, and it was pretty clear that if the weather fined up, we would be matching our Queenstown experience from two years ago!  We then drove through town…. and that’s when it hit us.  For those who don’t know, there is a significant amount of Sulphur around Rotorua, and some areas of the place smell like a carton of eggs left in the sun for a week.  Rotorua was the clear highlight of the trip for me thus far White water rafting is amazing, I have never had an experience quite like going off a 7m waterfall in a blow up raft, absolutely incredible!  That was followed by a Hangi (Maori dish cooked in a box using the geothermal heat) at the hotel, and for me the clear standout – getting to do the Hakka.

We had a nice relaxing day before we headed up to Taupo and joined up with our Contiki travellers for an epic party on the cruise, which perfectly capped off our involvement in the tour.  We once again danced, sang, and drank well into the night before the tallest of our team once again performed well above his rating!  Other entertaining points from the evening were the hopping in and out of clubs through windows, one of the musketeers allegedly nearly crying, an extremely memorable game of drinking scrabble and one game of Contiki scrabble – All I can say is Good Game!

[Ed: a lot of in-jokes in this paragraph, but the key point to take from it is that I’m the best at scrabble.]

Once we arrived at our spectacular lake house in Rotorua we set ourselves up to try and get ourselves into chess mode.  We chucked on our massive TV, watched some tennis before settling down to the awesomeness of “Anchorman” – milk really was a bad choice!! When the alarm went off to get us up, it was with much regret that I was no longer on Contiki.  The weather had started taking a turn for the better and being inside for multiple hours wasn’t an overly enticing concept.  Nonetheless, off we went – and although the results were mixed it was nice to be back in the zone.  We’re currently past the halfway of the tournament, and Dave is coming =3^rd and I’m in the pack slightly behind him on 4 points.

[Ed: Tritty is far too modest at this point, leaving out a truly outstanding result that would have culminated in securing the FIDE Master title, had he won his final game.  It also included a draw with me, his first against a Grandmaster.  All in all, we can conclude that Tritty was very successful and performed well above his rating on this trip, both on and off the board.”