Well four other lads from Devon all converged and we met in Auckland in this moment! It was quite an amazing time. The five of us 19 year olds brokered an agreement and we invested in an old 1948 Bedford post truck that had been converted into some mad liveaboard hippy home with stainglass windows and woodburner! We called her Clementine and fitted her out to carry six lads with a backpack. I was really proud of that work. With money running out, we filled up with food, advertised and found 3 backpackers to help cover the fuel costs and sped along at 12mph to the apple orchards for work.
There were all these immigration rules about controlling the movement of migrant workers but the simple fact was there just were not enough kiwis to pick the fruit for the orchard owners. So backpackers like us got the jobs. Hard work, you had to be disciplined, make every movement, every second, every moment count otherwise you wouldn’t get a good days pay. So we parked up, we worked and we saved. And we drove out into New Zealand with no-one elses agenda, ambitions or desires other than our own. We stopped when we wanted to stop. We moved when we wanted to move. Each young man left the truck at the time of his choosing and we sold her for the price we had paid for her. That was our expression of freedom.