Day 9: Journey to Rotorua

Day 9: Friday, Jan 7, 2005

Journey to Rotorua.

• Sunburn status: Finally starting to clear up. Gone from "Tomato" to "Peeling Grapefruit". Still applying sunscreen religiously.
• Breakfast: Skipped.
• Class: Fell asleep a few times, got a nice dirty look for a wise-crack about New Zealand currency.
• Lunch: Extremely average.

Last night was pretty rough, so I woke up as late as possible. I’m starting to fall into my habit of showing up for class at about five minutes into lecture. Since there seems to be no appreciable tardy policy, this will probably continue. We talked John, our Biogeography teacher, into rescheduling class today so we could get an earlier start on the trip. We are fortunate to have a professor who understands our goals in this program and is willing to work with us.

TRIP BACKGROUND: Ryan, one of the bored co-ops prior to becoming a world traveler, decides we need to take a trip up to Rotorua, a city about 6 hours north of Wellington. The objective: Go white water rafting and/or sledging. Rotorua feels like Chattanooga in a way. With 42 people from Georgia Tech here, about 38 of us sign up to go. That’s a pretty impressive attendance ratio.

For the curious, sledging is an interesting activity which falls under the class of sports that people probably invented while drunk. This places it alongside sports such as snowmobile racing, curling, and jai-alai. The idea is that you take a boogie board, strap on some fins and a helmet, and take on the rapids solo. As you can imagine, it’s incredibly dangerous and therefore fun. People are stoked because we heard there’s one part of the river with a 23-foot waterfall. Check back for pictures for a better idea of how this works.

LOGISTICS: To get to Rotorua, we decided rental vehicles would be the cheapest and most convenient form of transportation. We booked four Toyota mini buses, which hold 11 people each. The vehicles resembled stretched out minivans. Like most of the vehicles in the country, you can tell these are designed with fuel economy in mind. Translation: they had tiny engines. The big hurdle for us is the driving on the left side of the road thing. Being a member of the minority that knows how to drive stick and is over 21, I am volunteered to be a secondary driver.

Driving these vans, on the left side of the road is quite an experience. First, the driver’s seat is located on the right side of the vehicle. Keeping this bulky box centered on the road is a challenge, because you’re used to doing it from the left side of the van. I note the other drivers in our group are having similar problems—all of the vans are hugging the left shoulder.

The controls of the vehicle are also different; the stick shift is still in the middle, so you shift with your left hand, and the turn signal is on the right side instead of left. We speculated this could be a coordination issue, but after a few minutes of driving it felt natural again. Fortunately, the pedals were in the “correct” order, as that would have led to a mechanical-bull-like ride.

ZOOM ZOOM: We Americans take our interstate system for granted. There is no parallel down here. When we leave town, we do drive for a stretch on a 6-lane “motorway”, but it quickly whittles down to a 2-lane country road with a speed limit of 100km/hr (~62mph). There is no parallel to our gargantuan 18-lane arteries that will drop you wherever you want at a leisurely 70mph, hills and small towns be damned. New Zealand roads fit neatly into the country-side, as if they are a part of it, hugging unobtrusively around mountains and serving as the backbone for small towns. If you’ve ever driven down US 1 in a rural area, this is what your typical NZ road is like.

TOWNIES: NZ towns seem to follow a formula which I pick up on after we pass through a number of them. First, the speed limit drops to 80 km/hr. Then, there is a “No Engine Braking” sign (for large trucks, so they don’t wake up everyone). Finally, a series of shops, strip-mall style, cling to the road for about half a kilometer or so. In the dead center of town, there is always a roundabout, then next thing you know, you’re back on the main road.

ROUNDY: There aren’t too many stoplights along the road, but they had something worse: roundabouts. If you’ve seen the Simpsons, you know the danger of roundabouts. If there is any significant amount of traffic, you could end up in one for days on end trying to get out. Fortunately for us, the ones we encounter are fairly empty and we proceed unhindered. They are also handy for performing “Michigan-Left” type maneuvers, where you want to turn to the far lane (Left-turn in the US, Right-turn here), but it’s too crowded, so you make the easy turn, hit the roundabout, and come back the other direction.

EARNHARDT: I finally get my chance to drive about halfway through the 8 hour trip. After sitting through an hour of traffic, aimlessly chatting with the other riders, and shooting off a few hundred photos, there’s really nothing else to do. Our van, in terms of occupants, wasn’t the ideal van for a new driver to be learning the ropes. First, imagine riding with your mom: “Slow down! You’re not in the lane! Fasten your belt! What are you doing?! Look out for that car!” Now, multiply your mom by six, and you have somewhat of an idea of how my ride went. While one backseat driver is rough, when you have 1 passenger seat, two middle row, and three backseat drivers teaming up on you, things can get aggravating.

Needless to say, I had no choice but to egg them on. Unfortunatey, the van lacked any significant power, so the next best opportunity was to take turns at high speeds. Fortunately for me, we had just entered a nice winding stretch of road with speed limits of 20-30 km/hr in spots, so I had some fun with it. Lisa casually comments a few times that I’m scaring her, which, coming from someone who drives like Dale Earnhardt on Atlanta roads like Ponce De Leon, is a compliment.

It’s hard to speed in New Zealand. According to the locals, they set up automatic speed trap cameras that you can’t see, so speeding is never a good idea. Granted, that’s provided you can even get a loaded van up past 100km/hr, which turns out to be quite a challenge. Besides a traffic jam at the beginning of the trip, we make decent time and arrive that night in Rotorua.

HOSTEL: This brings us to one of the more interesting parts of the trip, the Hostel. I’ve never stayed in a hostel before, so this would definitely be a new experience for me. Hostels are common in nearly every country but the US, so anyone’s who traveled abroad before is probably familiar with them. For the uninitiated, a Hostel is basically a cheap-ass motel that saves money by lumping you into rooms with other people, sometimes random.

The hostel we stay in is called “Cactus Jack’s” and is themed quite well. If you look in my pictures section, you’ll see some interesting photos. The place has an air of being well-planned out, meticulously cared for, but aging and shabby at the same time. It feels like a converted house in some places, and like a low-budget theme park in others. One part of the hostel has a string of rooms filling stereotypical western motifs. One of the guys stayed in a room done up like a jail house, and the bathroom on that hall was labeled “The Shit House”.

The hostel caters to backpackers and college students like ourselves, so we meet some interesting characters. The owners ask us to stay quiet after 10PM, so we try to respect that. A handful of people want to go out, the rest are exhausted from the trip and want to get an early start tomorrow and go to sleep. Having slept a bit in the van, I go check out one of the bars near the hostel, but am disappointed with the beer and the people there and head back.

IN THE NAVY: When I get back to the hostel, I chat with a handful of other people from our trip sitting in a commons room. After a few minutes, one of the hostel caretakers wanders in, a diminutive but tough-looking Kiwi in his 40’s or 50’s. A veteran of New Zealand’s Navy, he lives up the part by cursing like a sailor, using “fuck” as an adjective, noun, verb, and punctuation. He chats us up for a bit, “Why the fuck aren’t you guys out on the town right now?” and we end up in a long conversation with him about New Zealand politics and world events and more.

We learned a lot of interesting things from the season Kiwi. New Zealand’s Navy has about 12 boats in it. The New Zealand dollar used to be worth way more than the American dollar. Nuclear ships, including American ones, were recently banned from docking here. The Kiwi is obviously agitated about this, as American sailors dumped tons of money into the local economies when they landed. Like most Kiwis I’ve met so far, he’s not a huge Bush fan, making fellatory comments about Tony Blair and Bush, and sodomistic ones about the Australian prime minister.

We eventually retire for the night, ready to get up early for our adventures tomorrow. The room sleeps 8, but fortunately we’re all exhausted and fall asleep quickly. Two of the guys are being cheap and don’t want to pay for a room, so they sleep in the van. If we were by a river, the scene would have been perfect.

--P