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we left Auckland and now we’re very busy . . .

Friday, March 2nd, 2007

Ok, I haven’t written in a few days because we’ve been busy doing stuff about which to write, right? We rented a car, a tiny little toyota hatchback with a 1.3 litre engine, on Wednesday and left Auckland for good. We had planned on visiting the Coromandel peninsula, which isn’t far from Auckland, stopping in particular at a place called Cathedral Cove, and then we figured we’d make it down to Taupo for the night, which is about 200 km south of the Cove. As we learned, you can’t always judge travel time by distance, because sometimes the road goes through mountains and is super twisty and trecherous. We were also dealing with the whole driving on the wrong side of the road thing, which made the drive up to Cathedral Cove nerve-wracking. If it hadn’t been so scary, the drive would have been absolutely beautiful, as it wound through mountains covered in thick rainforest type vegetation.

[read on]

cheap beds

Tuesday, February 27th, 2007

One of the problems, as we’ve discovered, with hostel dorm rooms is that it only takes one person who snores, or one person who gets up super early, or one person who comes back super late and super drunk, or, as in our case, one person who stinks like a damn monkey. This guy is terrible. For those of you who remember him, this guy puts Stinky Kyle to shame and I’m talking by a long shot. He’s in a whole different league. He’s playing a different game. It’s disgusting. I’m glad we’re leaving tomorrow.

So we’d heard before that people who visit NZ often buy a cheap car when they arrive and sell it again when we leave. We’d already decided that we weren’t going to be here long enough, that every day was just too precious to waste trying to buy and sell a car, and so we weren’t going to do that. In Fiji, though, we talked with someone who’d recently come from NZ who raved about how’d done it and how great it was to have a car, which got us thinking about it again. We looked around for one quite a bit yesterday ad ended up back where we started: thinking that it was too risky, too time-consuming and too expensive to buy a car.

We rented a car instead. It’s still pretty spendy, but it’s comparable with what bus tickets would cost and it gives us way more flexibility. We’re getting a tiny little Toyota with a 1.3 litre engine and we’re picking it up tomorrow morning, leaving el stinko behind for good (fingers crossed).

Auckland seems like a nice city, but I’m the sort of person who is almost convinced that phrase is an oxymoron. We spent the whole day today walking around central Auckland and we’re moe than ready to get the hell into the bush, to get out “tramping” as they call it here. I don’t know why they don’t just call it hiking like everyone else, but Kiwis are Kiwis. Different is good, right?