Nomads in New Zealand (part 1)

Arriving at Auckland's international airport put me in mind of our last long-haul flight; from Ottawa to Paris. I don't think I'll ever truly adjust to jetlag, as our first day in Auckland was only slightly less surreal than our first day in Paris after an eight-hour flight. The body rebels, reeling from the mismatch of time and space. It's like your spirit travels at its own pace and gets separated from your body, and the spirit just has to catch up on its own time.

New Zealand has a rigorous environmental security program. When you arrive, you are obliged to fill out a form declaring anything remotely objectionable in the realms of animal, mineral and vegetable. There are bins on your way from the arrival gate that allow you to toss anything you think might get confiscated; there are heavy fines for anything the environmental screeners might find you trying to sneak into the country. There are spot checks and sniffer dogs. It's not actually that big a surprise; to know a bit of New Zealand's history with introduced species, it makes an awful lot of sense that they are being so cautious. We declared anything and everything that we thought might not stand up to scrutiny, but in the end, we didn't have a problem, and we even got to work our shoes onto a special cleaning matt to remove any traces of foreign soil.

Outside the airport, and away from the stress of environmental security, the familiar other-worldliness of jetlag began to creep into the edges of my psyche. In theory, we should have been fine: we boarded the plane near the end of the day in Bangkok, had a period of darkness on the plane, and got off the plane around noon in Auckland. To look at it on paper, it more or less resembled a day. But the body knows differently, and lets you know about it. For me it just comes in the form of an insistent, subconscious demand: YOU WILL SLEEP NOW.

A few phone calls and a bus ride took us to the Oaklands Lodge, a hostel in a suburb outside of Auckland. It was a fair adjustment to pay seemingly outrageous prices for room and board; we weren't in Nepal any more. But the place was nice and friendly, and perfect for collapsing in a heap at three in the afternoon and sleeping solidly for seven hours.

We had figured out on the plane coming over that we wanted to adjust our schedule in New Zealand and Australia slightly; instead of spending two months in each country, we would spend three months in New Zealand, and one month in Australia. Both countries have so much to offer: there was just no way we would be able to see everything we wanted to see in Australia in two months. By contrast, you can see a lot of New Zealand in three months. The only question that remained was how we were going to see it. There were essentially two options: going with a tour, or going under our own power. While a tour is the most efficient way to go, there are all the limitations involved with it. Little choice about where and when, and they were also quite expensive. Going on our own meant getting our own wheels, and in that respect we could rent or buy a campervan, which as well as giving you the freedom to go where you want, saves you a lot of money on accomodations and food, as you can cook your own meals.

After crunching the numbers, we decided to see what we could buy in the second-hand backpacker van markets. Given that we were going to travel for about two months, we would be looking at spending about the same if not less money than on a rental, and if we sold it to someone else, had a good chance of getting our money back. Essentially, in the worse case scenario we could leave it on the side of the road at the end and be no worse off than if we had rented. In the best case, our cost of travel would basically be free, less the cost of petrol.

We quickly discovered we were in a great situation as buyers, which drove us more towards a decision to buy. The tourist season was ending with the end of summer, and people that had been travelling in campervans were now selling; many more than people that were buying. So we had our pick of a large selection of vans, and we decided to be very picky. We wanted something with automatic transmission, so we could both drive; we wanted diesel rather than petrol for the cheaper fuel. We wanted something relatively new so we wouldn't constantly be worrying about something going wrong. We saw many vans, met many couples trying to sell, felt badly when we figured out we couldn't help them out. One couple became quite desperate; their flight leaving in six hours, stuck with a van they couldn't sell, the guy told me I could have it for a thousand dollars. But it just wasn't what we wanted, and as the old adage goes, if it looks too good to be true...

Our van, nicknamed P.B. - Pinot Blanc.

After a week of biding our time and adjusting to New Zealand, we finally chanced upon a newer vehicle, a 1996 Ford Econovan, equipped with just about everything you could think of for a cross-country adventure. We decided to go for it, and bargained a great deal. Within the next two days we had bought a few extra things, a few days of groceries, and set off. The Ford was a manual transmission that ran on petrol: in other words, exactly the opposite of what we had been looking for. But as a 1996 model, it was actually one of the newest vans we had seen, which meant we would have an edge when it came to selling it in two-and-a-half months' time. Seeing the misery that some sellers were experiencing, we knew we wanted all the help we could get when it came time to sell.

Our road trip itinerary was pretty wide open, in my opinion, the best itinerary you can get for a road trip. In case you don't know the general geography of New Zealand (which was us when we got there), the country consists of two islands: north and south, separated by a four-hour ferry ride on the Cook strait. As New Zealand approaches the winter months, the south island gets colder than the north, so we decided that we would make a relatively quick pace to go south, and then head back north at a more relaxed pace.

The day of our departure from Auckland was a bit chaotic, and we set off later than expected; in the end we made our destination for the night a campground about three hours to the east of the city, in the Kauranga valley. It was definitely a trial by fire for us both, with me as driver and Amy as navigator: not having driven since France, on an unfamiliar side of the road, again with manual transmission, in a van that drove like a bus (well, maybe not a bus, but bigger than the mid-size cars I was used to). As if that wasn't enough, there was a constant clanging coming from the back of the van that we couldn't immediately identify; and just as we were getting used to the drive, the sun went down and plunged us into darkness just as we left the major highway and entered the very rural backwater. The campground was ten kilometers down a narrow gravel road that twisted and turned, climbed and dived, and caused the clanging in the back to turn into a full-on scrap metal cacophany. By the time we pulled into the campground, our nerves were shot. But we made it.

The next day was spent sorting out the contents of the van to see what we had purchased. Boxes and bins of all kinds of bits and pieces; blankets, pillows, fishing gear, a cooking stove (the source of the rattle, and easily muffled) and propane tank, tent, sleeping bag, books, maps, everything. By the time we had reorganized everything into a way we could actually find things, it was noon. So began our new schedule, dictated by the sun and the moon. Because we didn't want to risk the car's battery by keeping the interior lights on, when the sun went down, that was essentially the end of the day. And because we would go to sleep relatively early, we would be wide awake an hour before the sun would rise. We did look into other options to give us some light to read by: battery-powered lights, rechargeable and not, but they were essentially not worth the effort and cost in batteries. In the end we found some great candles, which not only warmed up the van in the cold south, but gave a very cozy light.

The way out of the campground was much easier to navigate by daylight without the clanging, and so, we made our way eastwards towards the northeastern coast of the northern island. I figure the whole of our trip has, in a way, prepared me for driving in New Zealand. Driving in France introduced me to roundabouts and re-introduced me to the mysteries of manual transmission. Driving in the French alps with Mary and the Ardeche with Ronna steeled me to seeing perilous drop-offs out the car windows, breakneck turns and narrow roads. Driving in India acquainted me with unusual road obstacles and hazardous weather conditions. Even so, none of it really prepared me for what we were to drive through in New Zealand.

New Zealand is essentially a mountain range running north to south through both islands. People say that the south is more mountainous than the north; but to my perception, they're both chalk full of mountains. To make a road across and around the country, you would follow the path of least resistance, where it is easiest to construct said road. The end result of this is a road which is constantly turning left and right, up and down. You are never bored when driving these roads, which are helpfully signed with the appropriate speed to make the turns. While the speed limit for main highway roads is 100 kilometres per hour, the speed on curves averages around thirty, and at some points, fifteen. You'll climb up a mountain side, switching back and forth up a road, only to drive down the other side. The engine temperature will rise dramatically as you spend twenty minutes climbing, and then you can effectively put the car in neutral and coast downwards for the next twenty as you ride down the other side. You feel like you are rarely heading towards your destination. And to top it all off, the countryside is just so interesting to look at.

We began to tell people, when they asked us for our impressions of NZ, that the nature of New Zealand is very similar to Canada: it's just compressed into a tiny island-sized package. Every ten kilometres or so, the countryside completely changes. One minute, you're driving through a gorge, twisting and turning perilously; the next minute, you've entered a plain, stretching wide open for kilometres. Meadows of sheep will graze next to meadows of cows, and in the background will be a forest of coniferous trees, shooting up in the incredibly fertile soil to fuel a rich lumber trade. In the rich pasture lands, you see impossibly lush green hills, rolling into the distance, so pudgy the look like moss-covered balls of play dough.

Sunset over Napier's coastline.

Crossing the north island towards the east through the twisting-turning gorge, we emerged onto the coast at Tauranga, which gave us our first view of the Bay of Plenty. The road followed alongside the water (rising and falling, but not turning so much). As an Ontario boy, it's uncommon for me to see a body of water that goes on over the horizon. Our driving took us through Whakatane and Opotiki, normally bustling towns whose tourist trade was waning from the end of the season. From there we wound our way towards Gisborne and Napier, regions famed for their grapes and vineyards. We actually over-indulged a bit with the region's grapes, so we didn't sample as many vineyards as we might have liked, but from what we tried, we very much enjoyed. As we stopped for the night on our way, we began to learn the ropes with what the locals call "freedom camping" - essentially, finding a place out of the way to stop, closing the curtains and hoping no one would mind. No one did. Napier was an excellent place for freedom camping, the local city council actually setting aside a small space of land looking out onto the ocean for the motorhome set to park on for two nights and then move on. It was the windiest night I've ever spent, the van rocking on its wheels, the wind howling and the waves crashing. I slept like a baby.

We visited "opportunity shops" as we drove cities and towns on our way, looking for little things to make our van more comfortable. After months on the road with just our packs and fragmented possessions, it was an opportunity to spread out, and be reminded of what it's like to have a place to keep your things. Our previously loved acquisitions were small but significant: a lid for a pot, a new sweater of infamous New Zealand merino wool, a new teapot. After drinking one too many glasses of wine out of plastic mugs, we lucked out at a wine shop, who sold us some fancy Spiegelau glasses for a pittance because they had actually just taken over the shop, and couldn't access the store's computer.

As we pressed further south to tour that island before the onset of winter, we passed through Carterton, the defacto paua shell producer for New Zealand. Paua shell is that distinctively irridescent, rainbow-hued shell that adorns much of the jewellery that comes from the country. It's harvested from a clam-like sea creature (the Paua) by hand, with a carefully-regulated code of conduct for the skin divers who pluck them from the sea bed. It's actually illegal to use any kind of SCUBA equipment to harvest them, as a few years of over-harvesting dwindled the numbers of Paua to dangerous levels. But now with these regulations the Paua is flourishing and business is booming. After they're brought up from the sea, there's a long process of sanding and cutting, polishing and perfecting, to produce a dozen or so pieces that are sculpted into various forms of jewellery. Amy found several raw pieces that will undoubtedly make unique items when we return.

From Carterton we drove the next day to Wellington, to catch the Bluebridge ferry to the south island. These ferries are massive ships, capable of taking thousands of passengers and dozens of cars at a time, with multiple levels, cafes, lounges and even a movie theatre. As it's a four-hour crossing, it can get pretty boring, and there are a variety of things to keep you occupied. Apparently if the wind gets choppy enough the ferry can get stranded on heaving waves until it's safe to dock; fortunately, this didn't happen to us. We stayed out on the deck, watching the land retreat until the wind made it too chilly, and then spent the rest of the time below decks, waiting for our arrival onto the South Island.