Rong turns to Rotorua

I woke up in Auckland this morning and am now at my hotel in Rotorua as planned. However almost nothing went according to plan in between.

I'm not one to try and cover up my own guffaws, so instead I'll just share them and invite you to read on for some good laughs at my own expense. Enjoy! :)

Best Laid Plans
More than any other morning on this trip, everything had to work out perfectly to get things to line up. I needed to get up, pack up, check out, walk 1Km to catch the 7:25AM bus to Hamilton, where I would arrive at 9:25, walk another 1Km to pick up a rental car, drive another hour and 3 minutes to Waitomo, leaving about 10 minutes to throw on my swimmers before my 11:00 booking for black water rafting. Tighter than the wetsuit I'd be wearing, that schedule left no room for anything to go wrong.

In short, it would be a terrible morning to sleep through one's alarm.

And so I did.

After all that debating last night about whether I could afford to sleep until 6 or should set the alarm a bit earlier, I rolled over this morning to be greeted by a red-lettered 7:02 on the clock, and shot out of bed like a rocket. 5 minutes later I wouldn't have had a hope and would have commenced alternate planning, but 23 minutes was just enough time to think I might be able to pull it off.

And so I did.

I literally ran up to bus as the driver was stepping on to go. Still not 100% healthy, and of course feeling worst first thing in the morning to begin with, I was sweating, shaking, rasping, and near ready to chuck chunks, but just collapsed into a seat and didn't move for half-an-hour. Eventually I was able to settle in, scarfed some buns and juice I had in me bag, then tried to catch a few winks.

Surprise!
I managed to doze off just as we pulled in to Hamilton, so I was nice and groggy for the demands of the next leg of the trip. A 1Km walk quickly becomes 2Km when you go 1/2Km the wrong direction first. I got my East-West right, but my North-South wrong, meaning I was going to have to test my cough-scared lungs again to get back on track.

When I finally got to Hertz, I had 58 minutes left for a 63 minute drive and was trying to figure out how to make up the difference given I'd already heard on the radio that New Zealnd was cracking down on speeding this year and pulling people over at 5Km above the limit as a rule. Better call ahead and tell them I might be a bit late.

"I'm sorry, we're closed due to flooding, but the dry tour is open"

Wha-???

I should have stayed on the line and figured out what to do next, but I was completely flustered, with Hertz guy asking me to sign stuff, another asking me on the phone what I want to do about Mother Nature, and my brain still trying to calculate how to get there by 11 for my canceled tour that it hadn't realized was canceled yet.

"I'll decide when I get there"

Wha-???

Why am I still driving there? Nothing and everything was making sense at this point, so I grabbed the keys and proceeded straight to the wrong car door! :)

I deftly pretended that's what I meant to do though. Real suave-like, I unloaded my bags into the passenger side, then walked to the other side without making eye-contact with Hertz guy so he wouldn't have a chance to reconsider letting me waive the insurance. Ignition still on the right of the steering column? All good then.

Have you heard the one about...
What do you get when you mix a Canadian driver with a New Zealand round-about?

Yup. An Accident.

I didn't get 50 feet out of the parking lot before I came within inches of full on broad-siding another car.

When I was on the bus I got thinking that after 3 weeks of being immersed in it, it no longer seemed weird that drivers were sitting on the right of the car. Plus I had been studying how Kori handled traffic circles in Sydney so I figured I was good to go with this whole left-lane-driving business. But then pulling up to my first round-about, I got stumped.

"whoa, this one's got 2 lanes, which one am I supposed to be in???"

Presumably, since I was going straight I probably shouldn't have been in the outside lane going past the first exit. But in my defense, that guy probably wasn't supposed to be taking the first exit from the inside lane either. I had to nail the brakes just to hold up inches short of slamming into the passenger on his shotgun side.

In his defense though, he was probably only in that lane because I didn't see him when I pulled into the round-about in the first place. :s

Thank goodness the brake pedal is still on the left of the gas pedal or that would have been ugly for sure. Unlike the turn signal. No matter how frantically my wipers flail on my dry windshield, other drivers still don't know which way I'm turning. I think I've got that one figured out now, but the rear-view mirror has also moved to the left, which I can't seem to get used to. Half the time still I glance right and use the side mirror instead without even realizing it.

Some things remain the same though Drive still goes forwards. Neutral still goes nowhere no matter how fast you rev the engine. To back out of a parking stall, you still have to use reverse. Which I did. Eventually. Third times a charm!

In short, it's probably good no one had to share a ride with me. Pity the poor blokes that had to share the road with me though...

Everything I needed to know I learned in Kindergarten
This is an untrue statement. In order to survive and thrive in this fast paced world you have to learn something new everyday.

For instance, today I learned that no amount of yelling will get an oncoming driver to change lanes when you are the one in the wrong lane.

In my defence, at a distance of 1/2Km, an oncoming truck on the highway looks just like a car passing a slower one in Canada. However at 1/4Km away, it suddenly becomes crystal clear that something isn't quite right.

In that situation, instinct will cause you to scream "what the $%#&* is this guy doing?!?!" Fortunately, my brain immediately yelled back "wait a minute, what the #$%&* are YOU doing?!?!" and then told my arms to pull the car back into the left lane.

The look on that lady's face as we blew by each other, thankfully not in the same lane anymore, would have been priceless had I not been busy trying to get my heart to start pumping again.

Sheesh.

I'm lucky to be alive. Perhaps that's a right-of-passage everyone goes through when switching sides on the road though, because I did not have any trouble figuring out which lane to be in the rest of the day. At all. Lesson well learnt.

A wizard is never early nor late
Got to Waitomo in one peice and discussed the situation with the very helpful staff at The Legendary Black Water Rafting Co. I could do the 3 hour dry tour of the glow worm caves or try to come back another day. They only closed yesterday and were hopeful it would re-open tommorrow. They even gave me a free slice of cake and cappuccino while I sat down to see if I could manage to fit it in another day.

A little bit of creative juggling and long distance calling later, I left for the shire instead, arriving precisely when I meant to be there, as Gandalf would say. In short, I'm basically doing these three days in reverse now. Te Puia might have to get squeezed out in order to get back in time for the rafting on Thursday (which would be a shame as that's my chance to see live kiwis), and it's a lot of extra driving, but I'm just glad I'll get another chance to do it. New Zealand is an awfully long way to have to come back.

Money well spent
As you've probably gathered, getting used to driving on the wrong side of the road is mentally taxing... At least for me anyway. So is navigating unfamiliar roads. Rather than trying to do both, I decided to splurge and spend the $9.95-a-day for a GPS, and it's been a life-saver. I haven't found many (if any) deals on this side of the world, but this one pays for itself, assuming my life can be valued at least $1095-a-day.

I hadn't tried using one of these since the first versions came out but they've come along way since then. It's been a spot-on navigator, talking me through the directions with such ease I haven't even had to look at a map. Clearly the audio algorithms have been improved because it's been giving me the perfect amount of lead-time for whatever my speed is, including for 2 turns in a row when they were close enough to warrant it. I've also been impressed with the routes it has chosen, taking me through rural shortcuts and secondary highways that seemed to be saving a lot of time, while still avoiding anything unpaved, and letting me see parts of the country I never would have otherwise. It even switched the display to night-mode automatically as soon as it got dark enough outside. The last hour to Rotorua was dark and rainy, but having that thing tell me where to go made the drive to the hotel a cake-walk.

In short, I'll be eliminating any future vacation-driving stress by renting one of these bad boys everytime I drive unfamiliar territory from now on. Maybe by then it will even be programmed to tell me when I'm in the wrong lane. (This message has been brought to you by Hertz).

There and back again
Sorry, I just realized I touched on the shire tour but said nothing about it. It was both cool and lame. The cool part is seeing the pictures from when it was fully set up compared to how it looks now in it's mostly restored state, and hearing the incredible stories of the lengths they'll go to to create the magic of film. The lame part was that the entire set is less than 10 acres and the 1 hour walk through it could have easily been done in 15 minutes and still seemed slow.

It included a live sheep-sheering demo, which was also both cool and lame. You can add lambs to the list of animals I've petted on this trip.

In conclusion
New Zealand is GORGEOUS. Almost enough to cause you to drive off the road while staring at it. Sigh. Yyyup....

More than any where else I've been so far, this is a place I would love to come back to and just hang out for a few months. Or maybe years. And that exchange rate might just be enough to make me do it.