The Bucket List

Hi, I’m Katie and I’m currently travelling around New Zealand with my boyfriend, in a camper van we bought on Facebook marketplace. 

Before I left the UK, actually before I’d so much as looked at the price of flights, my best friends Lydia and Eleanor, carefully curated a bucket list of activities for me to complete whilst I was away, as a 25th birthday present. Though they would have you think that this was a sign of their unwavering support in my future adventures and excitement to come and visit me when I was there… I think they were fed up of me badgering on about wanting to leave the country and boring them senseless, without having shown any sign of actually booking the trip.

The bucket list is majorly important for a few reasons: 

1. Not really a big reason but worth mentioning, had I not come to Nz after my friends went to such a great effort to make me a bucket list, I’d have looked like an ungrateful prat. 
2. It was the push I needed to actually see these plans through rather than add them to the ever growing list of plans that never quite leave the brainstorming stage, a list so long there is simply no room for anything else!
3. Eleanor passed away. 

So far in life, I have had 5 very close friends, 3 I chose for myself and then 2 who were a gift from my parents, though I haven’t always seen them that way. To lose one has been more difficult than I could ever put into words, Eleanor and I have been friends since we were 8. Whilst I’m not sure if I’ll ever share with anyone the details of our 18 years of friendship, just know that she was an incredible friend and woman and it obviously goes without saying that the bucket list now holds some emotional weight that it didn’t initially. 

With this in mind, let me paint you a picture, I have travelled over 18,000 km (kilometres, how very kiwi of me) across the world, bucket list and boyfriend in tow-its worth mentioning he had no say in any of this really and I think often wonders where he is and how he got here-he does make a great chauffeur though! I have briefly (!!!) checked over the bucket list, divided it into North Island and South Island activities, hopped in the camper and set off to explore the South Island first. We make it to Kaikoura, THE place to see whales in NZ, I’ve been excited about this since I went to Sea World in 2013 and came away carrying an immense amount of guilt and a 2 litre Shamu drinking cup, which I hid in shame after I watched Blackfish. 

We booked our whale watching tour through whalewatch.co.nz, they were brilliant, the tour was great, the boat wasn’t too busy and we were on the water for roughly 2.5 hours. I was feeling a bit emotional and homesick, I’d just found out my beloved dog, Pennifer Lopez, had been put down, I was about to get started on the bucket list, there was a lot riding on this whale sighting. I think the whale in question must have sensed this, as we hadn’t been out of the harbour 10 minutes and there, coming up for air, was Matimati, an enormous sperm whale- I cried! Not only had we found a whale, I haven’t had the best luck on wildlife watching tours in the past, but we saw him dive three times on our trip, a sight I’m convinced no one could ever tire of. We also saw several albatross, fur seals and Hector’s dolphins, the smallest dolphins in the world! 

My excitement was tinged slightly with the overwhelming thought of how much Eleanor would have loved hearing about this, so I rushed back to the camper and the free campsite wifi to update Lydia and cross the first activity off of the bucket list. In my head this was a huge deal, the first task completed, the beginning of this exciting adventure, naively at this point I also thought getting the first task under my belt also meant getting the most emotional part out of the way. So you can imagine my horror when I opened the bucket list and read in large capital letters ‘SEE HUMPBACK WHALES IN KAIKOURA’, suddenly Matimati the sperm whale didn’t seem quite so enormous. I laughed out loud, then I cried again and then I howled with laughter, for someone that had tied so much emotion to this bucket list you’d have thought I’d have perhaps studied it a little more closely. What amused me even more, the week afterwards I was once again consulting the list and noticed that one of my activities was to see the world’s smallest dolphins, I’d completed a task without even realising. 

I think it’s in my best interests that I don’t put so much pressure on the bucket list moving forward, to avoid a total breakdown. As you’ll see in future posts, in true Katie style this was just the first of many bucket list related slip ups. 

Total tasks completed: 1 

Total species of animal seen: 4 

Total tears cried: too many to comprehend! 

Each week I’ll be sharing my top 3 most listened to songs whilst road tripping around New Zealand, probably followed by a list of songs that I deem to be fantastic but that Tom has made me turn off. 

This weeks most listened to: 

1. Wet Dream, Wet Leg 
2. Brilliant Disguise, Bruce Springsteen
3. Swing Lynn, Harmless 

Songs that were immediately vetoed: 

1. Blister in the Sun, Violent Femmes 
2. Insane in the Brain, Cypress Hill