www.DavidRussell.net.nz

Gisborne, New Zealand

DavidRussell.net.nz

My Skills & Work History

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Gisborne's main claim to fame, is that this is the place where Captain Cook first set foot to claim New Zealand, in October 1769. The other claim to fame .. .. .. is that it is the first city in the world to see the sun rise each day. It was featured three times in the world-wide television special to greet the year 2000 ... but I'll let you in on a secret ... the last sequence, showing the sun rising on the first day of 2000, was a fake ! It was a cloudy day - so no sun rise - the television producers used the tapes that they had shot the day before, during the last rehearsal.

As well as doing canoeing and tramping (what the rest of the world calls bush walking) I once sort of combined those. On the map. you might be able to see a river called the Motu River, which flows from near Matawai up north to the sea. Most of the way, it is in almost unexplored bush country, no roads anywhere near it. It flows through a lot of very high gorges. I did a four day trip. One day to walk in to get to the river, and then three days floating down the river on rubber dinghies. A group of about 12 of us, if I remember correctly. This is really wild country, and it is a big river. It was quite an experience. One of the rubber boats was an old one, and it kept loosing air, so we had to keep blowing it up as we rowed downstream. These were blow-up boats, remember, we had to carry them through rugged bush for a day to get to the river. We had to always be watching the weather, and the flow of the river. If it had rained, then we could have been trapped there for days, waiting for the river to lower. It would have been impossible to walk out, back to a road.

We were also a back up rescue team, as a couple of days in advance of us, two canoeists had travelled down the river (the first to ever do that.) If they had encountered problems, we were their back up, to help them get out. They had actually entered the river higher upstream, where it was close to a road (the only place close to a road, until it reached the sea). Fortunately, all went well for them - and for us. The local paper had quite an article, reporting our trip.

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