After booking the tickets way back in mid-August, it was finally time to depart Australia and jump the “big ditch” to see the land on the other side of the Tasman. When we got to the airport, we had no idea on what to expect, seeing as it was the first time either of us had ever left the country, despite having travelled a great deal within it.As we passed through customs, there seemed to be airport people every five metres asking questions that were presumably designed to trip up would-be smugglers filling their underwear with live reptiles. After the barrage of queries as to flight number, destination, duty-free purchases, etc, we were free to sit around in the departure lounge and wait for the delayed flight.

We are slowly gathering that Di is a jinx toward flight departures being on time. Each time Di is on the plane, it does not take off on time, whereas when Trav travels alone, the plane trip is hassle-free, and once even got a free upgrade to business class instead of economy.

When we arrived in New Zealand, we went two separate directions to get through customs quicker. Di declared the camping gear and I went through the non-declarations gate to call the hire-car company since we had arrived just after 5pm, and we assumed the office would be closed. A problem with this was that Trav still had to buy a phonecard because the payphone did not take Australian currency, so there was a detour to the bank to exchange money and head back to the phonecard machine.

There were two steps to operating the phonecard machine:

1. Insert money.
2. Collect phonecard in slot below.

Unfortunately, the machine was only aware of half the instructions and swallowed up the money without delivering a card. This further delayed the process as Trav had to call Airport Operations and get them to come down and organise a reimbursement for the money in the machine. Ultimately, the phone call was able to be made (about 20 minutes after first picking up the receiver and realising the currency problem) but the office was still open because there were some people arriving at 7pm, so we need not have worried.

After the representative from the Apex Car Rentals picked us up at the airport, we were driving back to the office as he told us that they were just opening a new branch in Auckland, not the old franchise arrangement they had been working under until recently. As a result of this change, he told us, the office was fairly underdeveloped, and “we’ve got a floor but no walls”. We had a bit of a chuckle at this joke, but when we turned into the parking lot, he was not lying at all. It was just a floor and no walls. The only form of building on the site was a construction office, and we later found out they had to go to the office next door to use the bathroom until the office was completed.

Nonetheless, the papers were all filled out quickly, and we found we’d received an upgrade on the vehicle to the “touring” version of the Toyota Corolla, instead of the “economy” version. This was because I had requested a manual transmission, instead of an automatic, and they did not have a manual transmission vehicle in the “economy” range, which is what we’d paid for, so it was a free upgrade.

We drove into the city to grab some dinner and found a few subtle differences, such as Hungry Jacks being called Burger King in New Zealand. In hindsight, we should have expected it because Australia has the only departure from the Burger King name we are aware of, but it was a small surprise to find the same store with a different name.

After dinner, we went to the supermarket to stock up on groceries for the next few days and struggled with the game of “no brands here that you recognise, so you have to now guess which one you think will be nice but still inexpensive”. There were a few bonuses though - slightly different chocolate varieties that we did not usually have access to - kiwifruit, grapefruit, and rocky road. For the record, we were not brave/stupid enough to try the first two (sound horrible) but the third was delicious!

The other thing that bemused us about NZ supermarkets was that alcohol is sold in the aisles with the other foods like flour and sugar. Australian supermarkets, if they even offer alcohol, always have it locked away in a separate part of the store, but NZ supermarkets have it evenly distributed throughout the various aisles.

After groceries, we decided to drive to One Tree Hill. This imaginatively-named place is a hill with, well, you guessed what is on top of it… It was at this point of the trip that we discovered the New Zealand tendency to have good road signage for privately-run operations, and poor signage for free locations. After 40 minutes of driving through what seemed to be endless suburbs, and being forced to do about a dozen U-turns, we eventually managed to locate it.

We drove to the top of the hill and noted that the tree was a very old and frail tree, with roughly 20 ropes hanging off it, in order that it would be supported in the event of a strong wind. It looked like the tree would actually fall over in a gentle breeze, so the ropes were definitely needed. The tree was also not actually the original tree there, having been planted there in 1876 to replace the previous tree. It appeared that they needed to replace it again, but who would want to go see “One Seedling Hill”?

As with previous vacations, and the amazing ability of Di and Trav to encounter odd situations, we reset the votes and began our search for our SPOTD. This award is sort of like the Darwin Awards, but usually with far less drastic outcomes. It was during the drive trying to find One Tree Hill that Trav took out the SPOTD honours. Yes, we manage to fly all the way to another country, renowned among Australians for being a backward country that we need to pick on a lot for the fun of it, and yet it was Trav who started the ball rolling.

We’d just been reading the map to try and figure out where we were and how to get to the next suburb, and we’d worked out that we needed to turn left at the next intersection, which according to the map would be a nice large road. It certainly was, but it was not until Trav had turned left into it that he realised, it was not only a large road, but also a large ONE WAY road, and we were definitely not going the one way we were supposed to… Fortunately, the road was relatively empty at that moment and so we were able to quickly pull into a vacant car park and assess our options while five lanes of oncoming traffic went past us. After the road was clear, we set a new land speed record for a U-turn and left the scene very quickly indeed.

Onward to Waitomo tomorrow…

Categories: NZ 1999, Travel