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| Lantuna Hostel in Auckland |
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| Coraglen Water Gardens |
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| An Unspeakable Horror Lurks At Hotwater Beach! |
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| The Hippy Camper |
Leaving The Lantuna hostel to pick up the camper van from Auckland airport, we caught a cab driven by a pleasant Fijian guy, bemoaning the injustice of his credit card provider.
It was a bad sign.
When we arrived to pay for the van, our credit card did not work. It would have been fine if we could have paid on our debit card. I began to feel the prickle of annoyance as I called the UK call centre to straighten things out, all the while shifting uncomfortably under the disbelieving gaze of the child sales person on the other side of the desk whose expression said something between 'time waster' and 'is my commission slipping away?'
I fell at the first fence as the credit card security questions foxed me.
I wouldn't have minded but for the fact that I had taken the trouble to call them before we left, to authorise this very payment from outside the UK.
So. No joy, despite my calm and measured responses.
Google will undoubtedly introduce the 'cyber-throttle' feature soon, for just this circumstance. Until then I had to content myself with a patient attempt to reinput my personal data.
Still no joy.
Privately, I resolved to destroy my credit card provider when I got home, expelling each one of its thankless staff to a life of penury and grinding the very fabric of its existance to dust before the wind. It turns out I needn't have bothered. They went bust without me lifting a finger!
I clearly have an awesome gift.
Do not make me angry.
Unfortunately, this awesome gift did not extend to persuading the sales infant to take my word of honour to pay for the van when I returned it. Even when I offered my £10 digital watch as security. After pleading, bowing and scraping, he agreed to take the payment from my debit card, subject to a 2,000 NZ dollar additonal bond. I was ready to haggle, but with Clare's head in her hands and the look in his teenage eye saying his coffee break was near and if the deal wasn't done by then, we would be walking around New Zealand for the next three weeks, I capitulated.
Leaving the airport on Route 1 from Auckland, I vented my frustration on a cloud of passing butterflies with my newly acquired windscreen of death.
Feeling slightly better for it, we began the journey up an extreme gravel mountain road from Tapu to Coroglen, with ravines falling away to the left and rock faces to the right. For two hours the camper van slid and fish tailed on the shale road. I wrestled to control the wheel while reading the small print in the insurance clause of the hire agreement, noting with dismay that only death on tarmac was covered.
After sanwiches at Tauraru, we stopped at the Coraglen Water Gardens. After the wettest February on record, landslips had washed out many of the paths, as we were to discover had happened all along the coast ahead of us.
We stopped at Thames for provisions and paused for the brief amusement of signs advertising the 'Thames Tug Off' before pressing on to the highlight of the day, Hotwater Beach.
For the last 7 million years, aquifers have risen through subteranean thermal vents causing scalding water to surface in the sand.
For two hours and five NZ dollars we hired a spade and dug a watery hole in the famous beach. By careful adjustment of the hot and cold veins of water that flow through the sand, using dams and trenches, a comfortable bath temperature can be achieved by the experienced bather. For the novices like us, the experience consisted of brief moments of tranquility, interspersed by scalded yelps and icy blasts. As we became more canny, stealing other people's temperate water supplies became the best strategy for moderating the freeze-boil cycle.
Pink in the middle and blue at the edges, we decanted to the camper van, thrilled with our first day on the road.
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