2006/05 NZ trip - Auckland |
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We eventually got away in mid-afternoon with a few hours’ drive to Auckland, passing through heavy showers all the way. We camped in Manukau City, close to the airport. This was the first campground we’d seen that was close to full, probably because it’s convenient for the campervan rental places. We were assigned a corner spot and asked to “drive all the way in”. We did and it was a mud hole and we got stuck and had to be towed out by one of the owners. We were reassigned to what was promised to be a drier spot.
Tuesday May 30th
We had a bright sunny morning for packing, cleaning up, and leaving our surplus food in the kitchen to be picked up by some people beginning their trip. Most of the campgrounds in New Zealand have a well-equipped kitchen: cookers, fridges, microwaves, mainly for the people in tents. We had most of this on board so we just used their microwaves for nuking potatoes.
We met a number of Europeans at this campground and of course we got to talking about where we had been. A common reaction to our route was “You didn’t go to the South Island? You missed the best part!” They’d then go on to talk about how cold it was and how they’d been stuck somewhere for days in sleet and snow. We were happy with our route. We’ll visit the South Island on our next trip, at a warmer time of the year.
We had an afternoon flight so we had a couple of hours to kill, and headed to the Auckland Botanic Gardens, mainly so that Sandie could feed our remaining bread to the ducks, geese, sparrows, and even some pukekos. It is a beautiful spot with an amazing diversity of plants. They seem to be able to grow anything in Auckland, including some cacti and agave we’d last seen in Arizona. There was an amazing array of flowers for the end of the season.
It stayed sunny until lunchtime and our Moroccan bean stew of leftovers, and then the drought ended and we enjoyed a few showers. This completed our record for the trip: some rain every day of the trip.
We returned the camper to the depot. We were required to clean up the inside, but not the outside, luckily, as we had mud from wheels to roof. None of the other returned campers looked like ours: they must not like the logging roads.
The rental company shuttled us to the airport, and we shared the bus with a Brisbane couple. They had also noticed the strange “give way” rule in New Zealand. The rule says that if you’re turning left and there’s someone coming from the right you must give way. It sounded like the rule for roundabouts, but it applies at all intersections. It means that if you’re hurtling along to take a left turn and there’s someone waiting to turn right into the same street, then you have to stop and give way. It’s OK once you’re used to it but it seems a dodgy thing to do on a busy four-lane highway, where there is a fast lane going straight through. Some parts of Australia, like Victoria, used to have that rule, but they dropped it.
At the airport we were struggling to get our three cases below the international limit of 50 pounds each, a tough job when the three together weigh 149.9 pounds, but then Sandie found out that we were entitled to 30 kilos or 66 pounds, so we could relax. Airport security was a little basic, rather like the US in the 1980s and much faster to get through.
Air New Zealand served a great lunch and looked after us very well, again like the 1980s. It was about a three hour flight to Melbourne, crossing over a thousand miles of the Tasman Sea. Back in the early 1900s, New Zealand was being pressured by Britain to join with Australia to form one country. One of the colony’s politicians said there were 1201 reasons not to do it. 1200 of those reasons were miles and the other reason was that they bloody well didn’t want to!
The plan for our Australian trip was to visit with the family in Melbourne, load up our camper, and head out for the far northwest, but that’s the subject of our next letter.
Love to you all from Pete and Sandie 