At 5:33 the minivan arrived to take us to the airport, check in was quick and easy as we had purchased a departure tax sticker (NZ$55 each!!) the day before. However passport control was slow, well at least for us it was everyone else sailed through! It wasn’t until we had both cleared passport control that I realised my document was in Lyns passport and vice versa, no wonder it was a slow process, but the officer never twigged as to the problem! We went into the lounge which was a little rowdy for 6:30AM, but it turns out that the NZ All Blacks were thrashing South Africa in Rugby (sorry Robert). Apparently Rugby is treated as a religion in these parts.
The flight was great, and yet again the crew were excellent, it’s so nice to treated as a human rather than as a piece freight! We landed in Auckland about 30 minutes ahead of schedule. Again immigration and Customs was a breeze, there were only about 4 people going through the “foreigners” line, we bypassed everybody. Next stop was to get reunited with the modern world; I bought NZ$19 SIM card that gives me 60 minutes calling, 5000 text messages and 500MB data, didn’t seem a bad deal.
Next to the car hire, phoned for pickup and got the usual “be there in 5 minutes” response. 5 minutes later we were in the van to rental office. From touch-down to driving out the rental place was under an hour.
The weather was partly cloudy and 16C, so not too bad. We headed SE towards our destination for the night about 400km away. We had planned a quick stop at the NZ war birds hangar at Ardmore aerodrome just south of Auckland. Last week end they were going to test fly a restored WW2 Mosquito aircraft, and we were hoping to see it, but unfortunately there was no one around when we got there.
Motorways don’t really exist except for a few miles around Auckland, but the roads are fine, most people obey the speed limits and are quite courteous. Once clear of the city, we were into green rolling hill countryside with a lot of cattle. It took some time before we found any sheep. This surprised me as I thought sheep outnumbered every living creature in NZ. We started to climb into more hilly country, and in the distance we could see some snow covered mountains (12 hours ago we could see white sandy beaches!) We eventually reached over 3000ft before descending again.
I wasn’t quite prepared for the lack of towns, or even villages, along the route. It really was quite desolate. Anyway we made it to the motel after another long day. Now it is time to crash. Tomorrow we cross over to the South Island on the car ferry.