His happy place

We can all relate to hatching bold plans at one time or another. Then they fall away. No one holds us to them, not even ourselves. But this is a story of a guy who had an ambitious idea that he followed through with and lived to tell the tale. In a book that he wrote. Britt Coker got the scoop.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant where one of the waiting staff told you that you had a nice arse? Me neither. But in Denver, Colorado, there was a guy who said it regularly to the customers in a diner where he worked. One of the other staff finally pulled him aside, curious to know the logic behind his brazen compliments. Was he hoping for bigger tips? Nope. Turns out he was a just a Kiwi guy with a funny accent. Sweet Ass. Sweet As. And what was Hap Cameron doing in Denver anyway? The answer once would have been ‘not anything for very long.’ For nine years he worked dozens of jobs and visited 34 countries across all seven continents. It’s in our Down Under DNA to travel the world when we’re young, but Hap had taken this plan one step further. His global travels were at the heart of a challenge, that sprung from a challenge.

Hap had a conventional life growing up in Richmond. Australia was the first country he worked in, aside from here, doing a summer job during university break. The seasonal job sucked, but not being in another country. “I remember just loving that experience. No one knew who I was, and everything was new and I just really loved that kind of feeling. I came back to my third year at Otago Uni with this edge to see the rest of the world. I thought, if I loved Australia so much, imagine what the rest of the world would be like?”

Hap scratched the idea of a postgrad diploma and once his final year at Otago was complete, he found himself on the quintessential New Zealand adventure of self-transformation, Outward Bound. A component of the Anakiwa programme is a 3-day solo stint in the New Zealand bush. Quiet panicking out the way, what do you fill the rest of your time with? Thinking. In Hap’s case, he hatched a plan which was to be the focus of the next nine years of his life and shape the decade that followed them. He was going to live and work in all seven continents before his 30th birthday. "It's expected [in New Zealand] that you're going to finish high school or uni and then go travel, whereas in America it's kind of frowned upon. In New Zealand it's very much encouraged, and I think that's really special and I hope we can hold on to that because I think that travel helps you grow as a person and gives you more perspective and just makes you a better person.”

“I worked a total of 32 different jobs ranging from being a dive master in Thailand to a volunteer in an orphanage in Mexico, to working oil rigs in Canada, to teaching English in Korea. My favourite one was in the Outback of Australia. I was a field assistant doing exploration in the mines. Sleeping under the stars, cooking on the campfires each night, that was one of my favourite jobs.”

Not surprisingly, Antarctica was the hardest place to get a job. He applied for years to do basic cleaning jobs on most of the bases. In the end, he went to the end. In the city of Ushuaia at the very bottom of Argentina, he spent a month trying to get work on a pole-bound ship. Eventually he got word of a job on a small cruise ship through a friend of a friend. Seeking an experienced silver service waiter (definitely not him) necessitated a slight tweak to his CV (don’t try this at home) and a small sacrifice for his sins (his hair).

“I loved my dreadlocks but I ran to the barbershop and had them cut off and I went from being this dreadlocked hippy to the next day being this six-star waiter in a tuxedo penguin suit. But that was the worst job because I've never had any experience and it was like 6-star service, so I remember lining up in the front of the dining hall with my little white gloves and suit thinking oh sh*t, we're going out to sea for 2 1/2 weeks. I’ve never been shouted at so much in all my life.”

Finally, on the 11th of the 11th 2011, Hap achieved what he’d set out to do. The pinnacle celebration was quite fittingly, on a pinnacle. Mt Kilimanjaro. All the places, all the people, the highs and lows, the interesting, tedious, challenging, wonderful jobs. Now he was all set to celebrate the milestone achievement and enter his thirties on top of the highest view in Africa. He gazed at the world from the mountain top and felt… nothing.

“What should have been this amazing moment that I had worked towards for nine years, I was just buried, like depressed and lost. I didn't know what was next for me because all of a sudden this thing that had given me direction in my life had gone away and I didn't know what I was going to do next. And also, my identity was Hap Working The World (his book title), who am I going to be now? So I went into depression.”

“I always say our hardest moments are our best teachers. I definitely learned a lot at that point. I learned a lot about myself and how I deal with things and what I need to stay in a positive mindset, and to this day, if red flags pop up, I need to get back to what I know. All those little things that we know we should be doing, but having gone through that, yeah, it was an eye opener for me.”

On the upside, one of the people he met on his travels was his future wife, Amanda. Their fortuitous meeting in Mexico is the reason he settled nine years ago in her hometown of Denver. In that time, Amanda gave birth to their two daughters and Hap gave birth to an idea. Real fruit berry ice cream. Not a new idea to us Nelson folk since we can bathe in melted berry ice cream every summer if we want to. But in the States, it’s a rarity. It was a passing comment on a trip back home that got him thinking. He was visiting friends, Dennis and Pip, who were long time berry orchardists who also make an ice cream machine called the Little Jem.

“They said to me, ‘all the Americans love this’, and that was the first light bulb moment. So I was thinking about it and I got to Denver and I realised they don’t have this kind of ice cream here and I’m like, alright, I'm going to bring it over and start an ice cream truck and sell this real fruit ice cream - which I later rebranded as New Zealand-style ice cream.”

Hap started selling his ice cream at fairs and festivals, kitting out a short bus with his Little Jem. Orderly queues soon formed as people gathered to get some New Zealand-style ice cream from Happy Cones Co. Just as Dennis and Pip had said, the American customers loved the taste of the creamy ice cream with the real berry fruit. So much so that Hap has since opened two Happy Cone Co stores in Denver with flavours that include hokey pokey and orange chocolate chip. It wasn’t a seamless expansion. Covid lockdowns were a massive challenge financially, but they managed to get through it. And now, that’s it for a while.

“I lost money the first year and I'm like, holy sh*t, what have I done. It’s been a challenging last three years with opening two shops through a pandemic and now I want to enjoy the fruits of my labour, spend time with my family the next couple of years, and after that see how I feel, maybe another shop, but for now just appreciate what I have.”

Hap by the way, is short for Happy, and very occasionally, he goes by Mark. Obviously, with a nickname like Happy he was a bundle of joy and pleasure before he could walk. Wait, that’s not it. He was a grizzly babe with a good-humoured father who gave him the moniker as a joke. As it transpires, the joke name lasted longer than the miserable temperament and although being happy is quite a thing to live up to, the adult version of Hap Cameron turns out to have a natural aptitude for it, especially when he’s making ice cream for people. The Happy Cones philosophy is Everyone Leaves Happier, him included. It’s his happy place, and maybe yours too. Hap is keen for some real Kiwi staff to go with the real Kiwi ice cream during the busy summer months.

“I'd love to be able to give some Nelsonians the same experience I had travelling around the world. To bring them over here and give them an experience of living here in Colorado. It's the coolest place as well and would just be so awesome to have that Kiwi sound and it gives me a bit of a connection back to Nelson as well, which I cherish.” hap@happyconesco.com

So email him if you’re interested. And if you happen to be someone who makes it behind a Happy Cones counter, by all means, amuse them with your gidday mates and yeah nah, no worries, but – and this is totally up to you - you might want to keep your sweet as to yourself.