Monday, March 28, 2005 (Auckland – New Zealand NI)
One look at the weather prompts a change in
plans. A brief reminder of what our former lives were like. A ragged our hostel
but strangely comfortable. I just can't resist a permanent Internet
connection.
Day 385 (195). We said goodbye to John and the
very first B&B that we’ve ever stayed in this morning. It was a very
positive experience all around even if it was a bit outside of our usual
backpacking budget. We only made it as far as the car parked in the driveway,
however, before we decided that a change in plans was going to be necessary for
today. The Coromandel and its Hot Sand Beach was originally to be our
destination for this morning but the sky was overcast with low cloud and there
was rain in the air. The weather looked very depressing indeed. The outlook
looked extremely drab and not particularly conducing to having a good time
buried in sand on the beach during low tide. A snapshot decision was made to
skip the Coromandel after all and to head directly to Auckland
instead.
With the new plan now in
effect, I didn’t want to set off straight away and run into the problem of
patchy mobile phone reception so we sat in the driveway for a while ringing
around all the backpack hostels in Auckland. Not unsurprisingly, most places we
called were either fully booked or too expensive. I was really starting to get
worried when one place we called finally decided that they could put us up for
the next two nights after all. With a place to stay now sorted, we set off and
headed north.
The three and a half
hour journey to Auckland might have been quicker if it hadn’t been for all
the road works we had to navigate through. New Zealand is one of the more
developed countries we’ve visited on this trip and the all too familiar
spectre of traffic road works left us both with a bit of a nasty reminder of
what life might be like when we return back home again in a few weeks from
now.
I called ahead to the airport to
verify that they still had our rogue piece of missing baggage. They did, so we
diverted there to collect it instead of driving directly into the city centre.
It was a bit of a logistical problem trying to figure out what to do with the
car whilst I dashed in to collect my autographed boomerang but Sandy managed to
drive around the block a few times and thus was successful in avoiding those
nasty parking attendants that won’t let you stop the car for more than
half a second.
By the time we made it
into the city, the familiarity of road works, airports, city traffic and so on
had temporarily converted us both back into normal, non-travelling human beings
with all the stresses and tempers that go with it. We were both tired and
irritable from the journey and extremely glad to have finally found the hostel
after several wrong turns, dead ends and one-way systems. Unfortunately,
whomever it was that was managing the hostel was nowhere to be found so we had
to sit and twiddle our thumbs for an hour or so. Truthfully, this little bit of
a timeout did the both of us the world of good. One of the reasons I in
particular was thrilled that this hostel still had a room was the fact that they
provide free broadband Internet access. I was keen to try it out and noted at
least three computers in the house that were hard wired. I’ve been unable
to hook up my laptop anywhere ever since we left Hamner Springs and I was dying
to get another update out of the door. We’re near the end of our time here
in New Zealand and I also wanted to get a new batch of photos online. Once one
of the computers became vacant, I unplugged its network cable to plug into the
laptop. After a bit of network re-configuration, I was completely ecstatic to
see the connection working at full strength and wasted no time in taking care of
all my Internet chores.
The owners
finally arrived and we were able to check in. We were given a pretty ragged
double room with a very hard bed. This entire hostel is a very ragged affair, in
fact, and it’s clear that the owner of this house is lethal with a few DIY
tools. Pretty much everything here is either broken or half fixed using only
those bits and pieces you might find in a Blue Peter episode (non-English folk
will not understand that last bit – sorry). Nevertheless, it would be our
home for the next couple of days and nights and we did our best to make
ourselves comfortable. I spent a fair bit of time on the Internet before Sandy
emerged from our room after her nap to badger me into getting up off the sofa to
take her out to get something to
eat.
Since we’ve pretty much
exhausted all our food supplies, dinner this evening had to be of the
‘going out and finding a restaurant’ type so that’s what we
did. The main restaurant district is just around the corner from us here so we
walked around until we found a nice little off the main street restaurant to sit
and enjoy a lovely steak dinner at. We had a lovely evening right up to the
point that the bill arrived. Not only had we been charged a whopping NZ$4,50
(€2,61) for a small glass of cola but they had slapped on that bloody
fifteen percent Easter holiday surcharge too. There was no indication that this
was going to be the case until the bill actually arrived on the table but I was
just too tired to argue the point in the now busy atmosphere. I did my level
best to put it out of my head – which took all the energy I could muster,
but there you go. I spent the rest of the evening glued to the laptop. What can
I say, you can take the boy out of the technology but you can’t take the
technology out of the boy.
Posted: Mon - March 28, 2005 at 10:32 PM