2006/05 NZ trip - Auckland |
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Thursday May 11th
We arrived in Auckland at 5 am in rain and wind, with three hours to wait until the camper rental place opened. Going through customs I had to have my hiking boots checked out and they found a seed burr skulking amongst the lugs. It was carefully extracted and consigned to the bio-hazard bucket.
We had a golden sunrise, but shortly afterwards the rain set in, and we had a damp wait for the shuttle van to take us to Pacific Horizons to collect our camper. It didn’t help that we had rented from a company called “EasyGo”, Pacific Horizon’s low budget brand name, so we ignored their shuttle until I realized it was the same company! Eventually, all went smoothly and we were quickly on our way in a two-berth Toyota Hi-Ace, very similar to those we’ve rented in Australia. It was a diesel, which was good for us, as diesel fuel is about US $2.80 a gallon, about the same as back home, while petrol is about a dollar more. It was an older model, but everything seemed to work OK, with a sweet gearbox and clutch, a lot better than the campers we’ve rented recently in England.
We stopped at a grocery store and had the usual fun sorting through the local foods. Some foods, like egg substitute, don’t seem to exist at all, but there were lots of different things for us to try, like curried soups and lamb sausages. I even took the risk of buying some New Zealand cheddar. I used to sell the stuff back in my Tesco days. It took a lot of muscle power to cut NZ cheddar, but the finished article was a top quality brick, ideal for building bomb shelters. It tasted much like a brick too! This new stuff was labeled “very tasty” which must be the local term for Canada’s “strong” or “fort”.
Auckland sprawls across a narrow isthmus, with the Tasman Sea on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other, so we were almost always within sight of the sea. This should have helped our navigation, but we ended up on the wrong motorway, crossed the same bridge three times, explored a number of dead-end roads, and made many U-turns before we found the road out through Titirangi towards Piha. New Zealanders drive on the left and their roads are mostly narrow and winding and connected by roundabouts, so it’s much like driving in Sydney or Melbourne. It’s not as busy as either.