Rolling green hills covered in farm animals. Quarries in the distance. Overpriced fuel and roads moving too slowly past empty roadworks. Incessant excessive rain and a passion for rugby. It seems I travelled half the planet to visit Wales.
The day started brightly. Actual sunshine, dry concrete below the car, a chance to view the great white land barge. It’s got a 2.3 litre V6 engine which means it gulps down gallons of expensive petrol without supplying any actual power. I was wrong on its age, it’s only from 2005, although it does have a minidisk player.
The cheap motel offered a price appropriate breakfast. Better than the $20 ones others offer but that I don’t buy. I made a cup of instant coffee, enjoyed a slow start to the day.
I needed the slow start, being awake at 2am then needing the 9am alarm to get me up. Only 180km to the next hotel but I managed to take a more scenic route. Much more scenic. That open farmland only lasted to the Coromandel Peninsula, which was where I’d hoped to find some scenery and where New Zealand decided to abandon its impression of the valleys of someone’s fathers. I turned left towards Coromandel, found myself on a narrow road by the coast.
That immediately highlighted something I’d already suspected: New Zealand has no idea at all about road design. The junctions aren’t great but the main motorway in the country has a speed limit of 100km/h. I know it’s a small country and losing drivers that fall off the end because they were going too fast would be bad, but really that’s a ludicrously low limit.
It’s not there for safety either. If it was they wouldn’t have the same 100km/h limit for a single carriageway road that winds around the outside edges of sea facing cliffs with solid rock on one side and the sea 8 foot away on the other, no barriers in case a bus comes around a blind corner on your side of the road.
I managed to miss it anyway.
They also wouldn’t have the same 100km/h limit for gravel roads, shaped like the convex top of a buried cylinder, winding their way up through mountains, a 35 degree climb with an 85 degree drop to the side. I did to be fair see a crash barrier. It had broken and was hanging off the cliff, almost rusted through, clearly decades old and never replaced.
This made driving fun. This made my driving less fun for others, as they’d come around a blind bend and find my car unexpectedly stationary. There was nowhere to park for the mini waterfall, for the multitude of forested gullies and vistas, for the marsh harrier eating carrion in the middle of the road.
I saw a lot of those, although the rest were all flying around. Metre wide wingspans, they’re lovely birds but quite shy. I have a photograph of one, turning its head to look behind and glare at me as it flies away.
I saw a lot of police cars too. Three in the first 4-5km before I left Auckland but then at regular intervals in the middle of nowhere too. I was doing 60 in what I was fairly sure was a 100 limit when one popped out behind me, put on his lights, hovered by my bumper until I pulled over.
I guess he was just scared of the road, once I was off it he accelerated and disappeared off ahead of me. I caught up again 10km later, two police cars being used as oversized traffic cones to stop other vehicles hitting a mobile home that had managed to break down while tucked inside a bend, blind from both directions.
I’d stopped for water when I found a shop open, a surprise given the date. Next door to it an ice cream parlour, doing superb business with the locals. Water in New Zealand is expensive, £2 for a 1.5l bottle, more for the posh stuff. The tap water is ‘boil it first’ in most places though so I’m taking the financial hit.
Towns in New Zealand are spread out and low rise, bungalows by far the favourite option. The towns I saw today were mostly tiny too, populations lower than the village I live in, town centres sized to suit. Even so every town had somewhere open, usually two places: a convenience store (invariably owned by someone that looked Indian) and a food place (more varied in who owned and/or was working there). I didn’t want to gamble on being able to get dinner so stopped for lunch at a Turkish restaurant that offered Indian food, pizzas and kebabs. Naturally I went for the kebab.
It was ok, but it was also at least 50% carrot. I think ‘no lettuce please’ may have caused offence.
That was in Coromandel, where I’d told my satnav to take me instead of going straight to the hotel. I did then let it know where we’re staying overnight but promptly ignored it, headed north out of the town instead. That’s where I found the mountains, the twisty turning seaside road becoming a twisty turning mountain one, steep and tree lined. Descending the other side I found another sea, the other side of the peninsula, soggy marshland bordering sparkling ocean. A man carrying a surfboard through the rain waved at me so I waved back.
The rain had started while I was going through one of the mountain passes. It ruined a number of landscape photographs, water on the lens even with the camera inside the car. That also deterred me from a kilometre walk along a mountain to find a viewpoint, although I did stop and admire the views from a couple that were marked.
Having gone far enough north, circled back around and found myself in Coromandel again, I did head towards my hotel. A sign told me I could see a waterfall so I stopped and went hunting for it. It’s in the Waiau Falls Nature Reserve so I had high expectations for Waiau Falls:
Really? All this rainfall and _that_ is all you can manage? Come on New Zealand, you need to up your game here. I have been to Iceland. I have seen water fall.
New Zealand does do pretty roadside rivers though.
Dinner ended up as snacks in the hotel room, nowhere nice offering cooked food. I have been promised breakfast in the morning.
Today’s drive:
Tonight’s hotel has a lovely name and is perfectly nice too.
Terrible internet connection though, but then with five or six hours driving and feeling tired, an early night will be welcome. Sadly I’m not coming back here so can’t borrow one of their spades for the hot water beach.
Late edit: Now that the people in the next room have returned, hotel is getting a serious ‘avoid’ recommendation. He’s excessively loud but she isn’t and I can hear what she’s saying in reply to him. They’re both a little quieter now they’re not shouting into a phone but I am hoping they go to bed early. Not letting them know how audible they are, they’re just having normal conversation.