2022-11-16 — Day 2, Better Than Planned

Guess getting out of the habit of writing every day has its drawbacks when it comes time for keeping up with what’s going on while on vacation. 😬

So much has happened that I might not remember everything, but I will give it a whirl! 😬

Let’s see… The plane ride from Los Angeles to Tahiti, which I was hoping I would be able to sleep on because I was thoroughly exhausted, was… well… It might well have been one of the worst flights I’ve ever had. 😬

My seat was in the first row after one of the dividers between passenger sections (where the bathrooms are on large planes), so there were no seats in front of me. That actually wasn’t really the problem, as there was plenty of room for my legs. However, there was something a little less hospitable about that particular row, and that was this particular row was designed for parents with small children, and i got to be the lucky one who happened to win the lottery for sitting on that row but without having a child myself.

😶

The result? I had the… uh… pleasure of sitting in the same row as a family with two young children.

Now, that might not be much of an issue, as the plane left at 11 p.m., which would be a great time for the kids to… you know… go to sleep, but this particular family seemed not to relish being up late. Parents, child, and toddler…all up making lots and lots of noise playing or doing all sorts of things, as though it were 2 in the afternoon.

Have i ever mentioned I’m a light sleeper? 🙃

Yes, I’m definitely a light sleeper.

A very light sleeper.

Add that to the fact that little me didn’t know that they made USBC to 3.5 mm headphone jack adapters so that with these smartphones that no longer come with headphone jacks, you can still plug headphones in without having to buy the Bluetooth variety with the radiation that I don’t quite trust yet.

So I didn’t have the adapter, so I couldn’t plug in my headphones and use my white noise to hopefully drown out the raucous family.

The airline attendant gave out ear plugs, but those seemed to only focus the noise, drowning out the sound of the actual plane itself, but making it so the only thing that I heard was the family, which I heard quite clearly despite the earplugs.

And when that little toddler decided it wasn’t happy about something, man it cried.

Piercing it was.

There was no hope for sleep with that child nearby and awake. It felt like i imagine sleep deprivation torture might feel like– so exhausted that you feel like you could fall asleep any second and desperately want to, but completely unable to because someone keeps jerking you back awake.

It’s miserable.

Finally, about I think 2 or 3 a.m., The parents and children seem to think it was okay to go to sleep, so they finally did.

That was soooo nice, but then came along another joyous sleep deprivation torture tool.

As if the loud family weren’t enough, there was a curtain separating the compartments, and every time somebody would walk through the curtain and would swing the curtain to the side, it would smack up against my leg. And every time it smacked against my leg, if I was asleep, I…was no longer.

Super rough night.

But, we’ll just lock that joyous little experience up with a bow right now and move on because…

TAHITI!!!

After my failed attempt at getting a decent night’s sleep, I landed in Tahiti.

My ignorance was immediately on full display (though only to myself), as before the plane even touched down, I realized my mental picture of the island was just… Totally wrong.

For some reason, I thought the Tahitian Islands were somewhat… flat? I knew there were donut shaped islands with lagoons in the middle, but for some reason I had this vision of the islands being relatively flat. But when I saw the main island out the window of the airplane as we were coming in, it looked… like Hawaii: Super sharp mountain peaks, green with vegetation despite being near vertical in places.

So that was educational. 🙃

I had a 2-hour and 40 minute layover in Tahiti, and my goal, perhaps foolishly, was to get out of the airport, through immigration, through customs, through everything, and over to the beach to watch the sunrise, and then to make it all the way back through security and everything to my gate without missing the plane!

I didn’t start that effort off very well, though, as as soon as I was off the plane, I was taking pictures of Tahiti and whatnot, and didn’t even think about all of the many many people getting ahead of me in the immigration and customs lines. 😬

Oops.

That meant instead of being one of the first people in line early in the morning and out of the airport with the possibility of getting to the beach and sort of enjoying the sunrise, I was scared that I wasn’t even really going to get out of immigration before I had to turn right around and go back through security to my gate.

0 that fear proved almost prophetic: I made it through immigration, and then had my bananas and apples taken away at customs, and finally was out of the airport with about maybe 30 minutes of free time (as best I could calculate), before I had to turn around and go right back through security and head to my gate.

My oldest brother had recommended that I try and find a street vendor with fresh coconut water to drink directly from a fresh coconut, so with the severe time crunch that I was in, I figured that was probably my best option, as the beach was much further away than I could walk to with the time I thought I had, and I wasn’t keen on risking taking a taxi, not knowing neither the language nor the geography of how hard it would be to get to the beach and back.

So I made it out of the airport, got my passport stamped, and got a little bit of a smile from the immigration agent when he asked me how long I was going to be in Tahiti, and I said about an hour. 🙃

From there I wandered up and down the main road by the airport trying to find a street vendor that was open (It was about 6:00 in the morning by the time I got out of the airport). Unfortunately, I didn’t find any street vendors, but I did experience just a tiny bit of Papaette (can’t remember how you spell it off hand) early in the morning.

Youth up waiting for buses to go to school, delivery trucks bringing their goods to the local stores, lots of people on bicycles likely on their way to work and what not, little tiny houses tucked off the main street with Polynesian women saying goodbye to their children for the day, at least that’s what I think I was seeing. I tried talking to some of the locals, but nobody spoke English well enough to really communicate, and my French is pretty terrible.

In the end, unfortunately, there was no fresh coconut to be found within the distance that I felt like I could safely travel without risking missing my flight, so I ran back to the airport from where I had gone, went through security, and got there just in time to hear my name called over the loudspeaker because I hadn’t gone through the transfer line to the gate for my connection to New Zealand, so they didn’t know where I was having gotten on the plane, but not having gone where I was supposed to go after getting off the plane. 🙃

Funny enough, after I made it through security and back to the gate, it was probably another maybe hour before we even boarded, so I would have had time after all. But oh well, I got a real taste of Tahiti, even if it was only just a tiny morsel. It was certainly more than just sitting in an airport waiting for my next flight.

And hey, i got my passport stamped. 🙃

I think I got a little bit of a nap on the flight from Tahiti to Auckland, and when I couldn’t sleep, I just played hold’em poker for hours on end because the headphones they provided on the plane were so bad that you couldn’t even hear the movies that they had available to watch. Sounded like somebody talking underwater.

So I won tens of thousands of dollars in fake poker money because computer personalities are easy to figure out and bluff against or know when they’re bluffing, and I’m sure they give better hands to the human player, so they have fun winning. 🙃

Auckland!!!

The first views of Auckland were much more like what I was expecting from to Tahiti, relatively flat ground on the coast as far as I could see.

Thick clouds, and a bit of rain greeted me upon arrival, and once again my common sense evaded me, and I started taking pictures right after getting off the plane instead of beating the crowd to the immigration and customs lines.

Gratefully, though my passport wouldn’t work in the quick-entry booths, I was able to skip ahead of probably 300 people to be nearly first in line through the other standard booths. And then, though I was way far back in the customs line, the particular line that I was standing in suddenly melted down to almost zero, and I was able to walk forward probably in front of another 100 people or so because my line suddenly opened up and went forward when none of the others did. That was nice 😊

New Zealand is super strict bio whatever laws, or whatever you want to call them. We had to declare if our shoes had touched wilderness area outside New Zealand, or if any of our camping equipment had been used before. If we didn’t declare it, we could face a $400 fine. 🙃

Finally got through all of that, enjoying the little differences in communication practices, like instead of an exit sign, it said “way out.” 🙃

Met up with Chase just outside of the customs area where he had been waiting for me for like 7 hours. 😶

We caught each other up, and I realized that I didn’t have the right electrical adapters to charge my phone in New Zealand because they use a different plug system. Of course, the prices of stuff in the airport with sky high, so I didn’t want to pay for the adapters in the airport stores, so we picked up our packs, I filled my drama dairy bag with water, and we started our trek out of the airport. I talked to one local New Zealander before we walked out of the airport who directed us to go to a department store called the warehouse, and we found one that was very close to the airport and started walking.

Before we started walking though, I started coming down pretty heavily, soaking one of my feet already before we’d even go on a quarter of a mile. I realized my little poncho that I was hoping would cover. My pack was a button style poncho, so it just popped itself apart and wouldn’t keep my pack dry, so my pack was getting wet, I was getting wet, and it wasn’t shaping up for a very good recipe when the North Island was looking at seven straight days of rain in the forecast.

😶

We walked from the airport to the warehouse store, where we bought some stuff, including big garbage bags to hopefully keep our packs dry, but we were already pretty wet and the prospect of backpacking through a soggy New Zealand North Island for a week was not very appetizing.

So… I started getting online. Looking to see if we could rent a car, which we both decided was probably a good idea, but the cheapest car rental was $157 a day in New Zealand money which was like $100-ish a day in American money, and that was the absolute cheapest we could find. Find. The next cheapest after that was $500 a day in New Zealand money which is like $300 a day in American money.

A quick calculation of rental prices revealed that it would be just as much to rent a car for 15 days in New Zealand as it would be to buy a cheap car, so I jumped on Facebook marketplace, found little Toyota Avensis wagon for sale, had the owner meet us at the Taco Bell we were in to stay out of the rain and that was right next to the Warehouse, took it for a brief test drive, handed him 1500 New Zealand dollars that Chase grabbed as his daily limit from the ATM, then had him drive us back to the airport where I changed a whole bunch of my American money, and handed him another 1000 New Zealand dollars, and we were on our way!!! He dropped himself off back at his house, and we… drove away.

On the wrong side of the road. 🙃

It doesn’t take that long to get used to being on the left side of the road, but getting used to the blinkers being operated by my right hand, after 2 days of driving, is still confusing to me. 🙃 (Yes, I’m a little behind, is this is telling the story of just day one in New Zealand, and I’m standing here where we parked our car, and it’s now day three in New Zealand but we’ll get caught up!)

After Chase and I bought our little Avensis, we got out of Auckland as quickly as we could, taking a northwestern route and bypassing the freeway so we could drive through the country. We took highway 16 away from Auckland until it looped back around with highway one. It had been raining quite a bit, so all of the rivers that we saw were completely muddy. We found one on the west coast before we got back to highway 1 where we decided to stop and take a swim. Chase has a super super nice drone that he got out and sent up way high in the air and took amazing photos of the sunset where we were.

The river emptied out into the ocean probably less than a half a mile from where we were, close enough that the back wash from the ocean had made it to where we were, so the river was just slightly salty. Given how cloudy the water was, and given the fact that it was slightly salty, I was pretty concerned about there being sharks that might have come up the river to the point where we were at, so our dip in the river was a rather brief one. We did, however, because of the drone and good cameras, get fabulous pictures. It was absolutely gorgeous. If WordPress weren’t so stingy on how much storage they let me have, I’d upload a bunch of pictures, but you’ll just have to take my word for it now until I post them all online later.

After our little dip in the river, we looped back around to highway 1, and drove up to Whangarei. The countryside was absolutely gorgeous everywhere we went, with bright green rolling hills, beautiful trees of all sorts of different varieties, including some that looked like they were cell phone towers back in the United States, but we’re actually real trees that were just perfectly symmetrically aligned all the way up from bottom to top.

Originally, we had planned to drive all the way up to Cape Rienga that first night (of course, when I say “planned,” , we didn’t really have any plans whatsoever, because both of us showed up in New Zealand with not even the first idea of what we were going to do. Except that at some point in time we were going to go to Hobbiton. Other than that, we didn’t have a single plan for what we were doing or where we were going.

Anyway, as I was driving north towards Cape reinga, I saw a sign for fun at a falls, so instead of continuing north, I pulled off a couple miles to the east out of our way. Our way. That turned out to be a pretty good decision, I think, as we were both tired, and Chase had been sleeping while we were driving, and we were able to park the car in the parking lot of the waterfall and stay there for the night, The sun having already gone down hours before.

And that was basically our first day! My friend John and I years ago when we were in college would go on weekend warrior trips around the country, and we didn’t plan very well either. But we had so much fun and had so many great experiences that we came up with the phrase “better than planned,” and I think that’s exactly what Chase and I are feeling right now. We could have planned stuff, but so far we’ve had such a great time and had so many cool experiences that it just sort of. Feels like it’s better than we could have planned it. 😁

It’s been a blast!

We blew up our little sleeping pads, and set them side by side in the back of our little Toyota wagon with the rear seat folded down, through all of our food and other stuff in the front seats and behind the front seats, and bid day one farewell.

New Zealand is absolutely gorgeous. The people we’ve met so far have been very nice, gas is expensive, but not as bad as I thought it was going to be. It’s around $6, a gallon American, but our little Toyota seems to be getting decent gas mileage.

Oh! I forgot! Before we got back to highway 1, we pulled in to get gas, we bought some electrical adapters and what not to charge our stuff up, and when we came out to our car, it wouldn’t start!

So there we were in a foreign country, with a car that we just bought, no tools, and as Chase said, that little experience has been one of the highlights of the trip just because no matter what happened, it was going to be an adventure. He was staying positive, and I actually wasn’t really that worried either. Which was pretty cool. It was just a thing.

However, I was already feeling naked without my tools, and now our car wouldn’t start, and we didn’t have anything except for a lug wrench and a metal kitchen fork that Chase found in the spare tire area 🙃.

Listening to the sound that the car was making, I figured it was a voltage problem of some kind, as when I would turn the key, The lights would come on the dash, but when I tried to actually turn the key far enough to start it, the lights on the dash went out, which usually means there’s a voltage problem. Battery, and the cables were a little bit loose, but not so loose as to think that the voltage wouldn’t be getting through, but when I pulled the cables off there was so much rest and corrosion that I figured it was probably just a bad connection, so I used the kitchen knife to scratch the rust and corrosion off the cables until I was sure that there would be a solid connection, and then I put it all back together, and it started right up!

The power of the kitchen knife!!! The car breaking down totally

Ok. So that concludes our first day in New Zealand. As I am writing this right now, we’re only a few miles away from Cape Reinga.

For those interested, you can stalk us. 🙃

See my real-time location on Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/QCc3sJMMSP7itgcY8

Love and hugs. 😊

Lift the World

~ stephen