I finished talking to the Quantas sales assistant and hung up the phone. Ciara sat there anxiously waiting for an answer. “What’s the verdict”, her mouth trembled as I slipped my phone inside my jeans pocket and gathered my thoughts. “We’re ok”, I finally said. “We’ve had to pay a change of flight fee but we’re back on track”.
“We filled the surrounding days walking through the seaside town snapping pictures of flailing surfers, tangled birds and awkwardly posed homeless individuals”
It turned out that booking a ‘Round The World’ package had been our saving grace in our moment of need. The sales assistant had first informed me that our tickets were stamped with the message ‘No Show’ but the fact that we were part of a ‘Round The World’ ticket meant it would be no problem to alter the dates of our return flights. The only snag in the entire situation was that since we had failed to alter our dates prior to the previous March tickets, we now had to incur a penalty fee. The amount to set everything back on track came to just over $400.
“Well there goes the promise of a few hot meals when we reach the bitter cold of the South Island”, I said to Ciara as I blew the steam from my over exhausted debit Visa card. It was still too hot to put back in my wallet so I left it on the dashboard to cool down a little. It’s edges were completely worn and frailed and it looked like it was threatening to crack in the upper right hand corner. I would need to take good care of it from here on out if I was to guarantee myself safe passage until the end of our trip.
Once we checked into a holiday park in New Plymouth (unfortunately there were no campgrounds in the vicinity so we had to pay top dollar for a gravel rectangle that barely fit our car), I logged onto the internet and checked my bank balance. That unexpected fee had definitely changed our circumstances and upon a quick calculation I deduced that by finely spreading our money over the next few weeks, we would just about have enough to see us through until our departure. We still had the car to sell but I was pretending it didn’t exist. We couldn’t rely upon that possibility. We were due to fly to California straight after and we needed to keep as much money for that as we could. The way we looked at it was that if we scrimped, saved and lived like beggars for the next few weeks and were unsuccessful in selling our car, we would still have enough money leftover to enjoy our time in the states. Selling the car was seen as a bonus, a prize for our efforts. Some nights we would talk about what the money from the sale of the car would be like but we quickly shook off such notions for imagination and fairy tale dreaming only led to giddiness and giddiness on the road led to errors of judgement. With our $400 protective blanket removed from the equation we would have to become extremely shrewd.
The nightly fee in the holiday park was too expensive to bear so we decided to stay for only two nights. We filled the surrounding days walking through the seaside town snapping pictures of flailing surfers, tangled birds and awkwardly posed homeless individuals. What can I say. We were getting the hang of this photography lark and now considered ourselves to be of the artsy kind. Although I won’t lie when I tell you that storing images makes me a little bit uneasy. It’s a new phenomenon that’s taken the world by storm and I can’t help but think that all these stolen moments of time will come back to bite humanity in the ass.
Just before we left New Plymouth we even managed to snap a shot of Mount Taranaki. Now before you jump to any conclusions. No, we didn’t climb to the summit. We didn’t even attempt a trek at all. Our glorious photo was taken on a beachside walkway whilst sipping coffee in the morning sun. Granted, a couple of hundred buildings were clearly visible in the foreground of the photograph but a little birdie has told me that technology is a wondrous thing and that it will be able to scratch all that detail away giving it the appearance of a monumental shot.
At the end of our third day, we packed up the car once more and continued south. The roads and towns in this part of the country contained no traces of Department Of Conservation campsites so we had to resort to our 1970′s map to seek for guidance. I noticed a couple of red campervan symbols dotted along the coast and with no other option but to trust the age old map, we drove off in their direction to seek a few nights shelter. Thankfully, the map held true to it’s course and the sites were still in operation. Each one was more deserted than the last but we didn’t mind. Completely off the beaten track and lost in the pages of history the Germans would have no way of finding these places.
Some of the sites actually turned out to contain more amenities than the officially advertised ones in our guide book. One of them even had hot showers and when a local saw how desperate we looked they gave us the key to the building and allowed us to wash for free. It was glorious. A free hot shower for as long as we wanted. We hadn’t had one of those since our Kerikeri days and even those had been moderately warm at best due to the amount of people staying in the house. On the road we had usually been restricted to meter showers whereby a dollar would get you three minutes of intense heat. The problem with this was that if you felt you needed more than the designated time allowed by the system it usually meant that lunch or dinner money was eaten up.
We managed to stay in that site for three nights in total. The showers I experienced during that time were some of the best I had ever witnessed. I allowed the heat to engulf my entire body and on more occasions than one I would wake up on the bathroom floor having after passing out due to the intensity of the water. It was marvellous.
On our final day, we waved goodbye to the site and hit the road once more. The pores in my body wept as the shower facility disappeared from sight but I vowed to return again carrying gifts of appreciation. We joined the highway and followed the signs for Wellington. The campsite we had stayed in during our previous visit was too far away to consider and we needed to stay closer to the port. With that I took out our trusty ancient map and opened it’s pages once more.∗
