Train Jumping with a Buzz
By Jim Emmett
New Zealand
A couple years ago, I was backpacking through New Zealand. One night a friend and I were walking back from the pub, a little bit the worse for wear when we saw a timber train moving really slowly down the tracks. It was heading in the general direction for our hostel, so we decided to hitch a lift. We jumped up and sat on top of some logs to wait until our stop came.
Before we were really able to comprehend what was going on, the train sped up and completely changed direction – meaning wasn’t going our way home and it was travelling too fast to jump off. We spent a couple of minutes worrying about where the hell we were going and how we were going to get off, until we realised that worrying wasn’t going to do anything. And, we should embrace the experience and make the most out of it.
A chase ensued along the carriages, jumping from one to the other, finally realising our childhood dreams of emulating Indiana Jones (and Samurai Jack). Every now and again, we saw a bridge up ahead and had to lie face down on top of the train so that we didn’t get body slammed off it! After about half an hour of similar shenanigans, we saw a tunnel up ahead, which was much lower than the bridges we’d passed under previously. We clung onto the side of a carriage, intending to pull ourselves back on top once we emerged out the other side. We were quickly plunged into total darkness and the wind in the tunnel knocked us against the side of the train, threatening to pull us off. After about five minutes we still hadn’t come out of the tunnel and our arms were starting to hurt from clutching on to our precarious handhold on the train. It dawned upon us that the tunnel was probably going to go on for a while longer and if we wanted to be there when it ended, we should try to find some relatively solid ground. Luckily, after shimmying along the side for a while, we reached a foothold on the join between two carriages, just moments before speeding past a traffic signal which would have been far too close for comfort, had we still been attached to the side.
It took about an hour to get through the tunnel and, once through to the other side, I looked back to where we had come and realised that we’d just gone straight through the Kaimai mountain range! The train eventually slowed enough for us to jump off – not without injury – and after walking down the road for a bit, we met a trucker who had stopped in a lay-by. I asked him how far away Tauranga (where we were staying) , but he just laughed at us and told us to follow the road.
We began the long walk back to Tauranga, stopping at one point to sleep on someone’s porch, the only reasonably warm place we could find. After a couple of hours, the sun began to rise over the mountains, and all around us were hills and fields. It looked absolutely beautiful with the morning sun heating up the dew on the grass, to give everything a smoky look. But then we came across a sign, which said ‘Tauranga 100 km’. Then everything was ugly and I got a hangover and missed my bed. We spent the next couple of hours walking by the road, thumbs in the air, praying for a lift. Eventually this lady called Helen Godfrey (I refer to her as Hell-God now) picked us up and we discovered by some strange twist of fate that she was going all the way to Tauranga.
Needless to say we had never been happier to see another human, but alas this happiness was to be short lived. She was fairly normal to begin, but then switched and started taking about cars that ran on the magnetic field of earth, that Burger King was run by Satanists, how she had once married a Warlock who she had spirit battles with and covered with coal dust while he slept. Hell-God talked almost all the way home and what she was saying was even weirder than you can believe, and I started to actually fear for my life. When we finally got near to our hostel, both my friend and I jumped out of the car when Hell-God stopped at a red light, and ran all the way home with out looking back. Its not that we weren’t grateful, because naturally we thanked her before we ran and my friend left her $30 on his seat. It’s just that I just don’t trust mad people, and I felt a quick clean break would be better than a long goodbye, and the fact that I didn’t want her to find out where we were staying.
Needless to say, we eventually made it home and proceeded to tell all our friends about our adventure. None of them believed us initially, until this guy Peter told us later that he’d seen this guy a few days ago that looked just like me, 70 km out of Tauranga, trying to hitch a lift at about 8 in the morning. He was going to Tauranga to go surfing, but he makes a point of never picking up hitchhikers, especially ones that look like me.
