Comey's Fear Quest in New Zealand.

New Zealand is a fantastic place with the most wonderful scenery. The bluest oceans
wash ashore at the foot of snow capped mountains. To find out all about it read a
tourist brochure, this is the story of my quest to scare the sh#@*&e out of myself.
I’ve a feeling the anti-fluoridation lobby wouldn’t be half as active in Ireland,
if they knew what the Kiwi Government puts in there water to make them all completely
nuts. Think about it, the first guy who decided to steal 40 foot of elastic out of
his Ma’s knickers, then jump off a bridge with it tied to his ankles, couldn’t have
been the full kettle of kippers.

The trip started mildly enough with a bit of sailing and Kayaking in the Bay of Islands.
Following by a lot of distinctly Irish weather (i.e. wet) and about 400Km of traveling,
play resumed in the form of tractor tubes strapped to our Arses, bouncing down a
river with the current. Surviving that, (and the fact that wed been drinking the
aforementioned water supply) it seemed obvious that we should sit into the tubes
and roll down the biggest hill we could find (It only resulted in one neck injury).


A couple of hundred miles and a few “interesting” encounters with the natives that
we couldn’t possibly talk about in this magazine later we arrived in Watimo. Here
the do a thing called “Black Water Rafting” essentially a wet muddy caving trip,
where in sections you grab a rubber ring, do a back-flip of a waterfall into an underground
river, kill the lights and float through the cave guided by glow worms. I also got
to drive another distinctly Kiwi invention the Jet boat. To get around shallow rivers
they slap V8 jet engines on the back of small boats. The Jet keeps the boat on top
of the water, and you steer by aiming the Jet. The problem with jet steering is that
you need full power all the time to control it, sliding one of these around the tight
course at warp factor 6 was not easy.

Possibly the top nutter sport destination on the North Island is Taupo. Jumping out
of a perfectly functioning Airplane at 15000 feet, and jumping 43 meters into a
river supported by granny Kiwi’s nicker elastic, didn’t even register on the brown
pants scale compared to “Rock ‘n’ Ropes”. One of taupo’s lesser-known attractions
is essentially a tight rope obstacle course 25 meters from the ground. The one that
really proved the colour of adrenaline is brown, was standing on top of a telegraph
pole, then jumping for a trapeze 3 meters away. After depositing Paul Barry at the
airport. I made a b-line for the south island where a Shark Dive.

This all may seem quite scary but the most freighting thing about this trip for me,
was the fact that I would be doing most of it alone. I put it off for a long time
for this reason. Of course I found my fears to be unfounded, I could write a book
(but Martha will only let me have 400 words :), on the people I’ve met and the experiences
we’ve had.