Given the opportunity to take three weeks’ winter leave, we decided to come to New Zealand, despite the 36-hour journey, 24 of it in the air, over which we will draw a jet-lagged veil. (Later note - we had not been warned about landing for refuel in the US and so had not got ESTAs. We tore round Heathrow trying to find an internet connection and apply. It was very hairy but Adrian was a whizz. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘problem’.) We arrived in Auckland having left Heathrow with de-iced wings, to find a cool, still, overcast morning, while we waited an hour for our car hire pick-up. The A2B website being dodgy, they had expected us on the date our flight left UK, rather than arrived NZ so had written us off as a no-show and had no cars available. After much charging round the site, they discovered a dull Nissan, with no poke, but hey, it’s wheels. Petrol is the same price in dollars per litre as we pay pounds, and still they require pre-payment as the Sikh station owner lamented – they have lots of drive-offs in the capital city.
So we left, for the more rural, friendly towns elsewhere. First up was Rotorua, the thermal spring centre of North Island. The State Highway One leaves Auckland in a two-lane swagger, then peters out for ever into the single carriageways we know and love as B roads.
We stopped for lunch at an old hotel at the site of a British/Maori battle which bore testament to the bravery of the indigenous army and the experience of the Brits plus a smacking of luck/cunning and a misunderstanding about a white flag. The Maori culture is genuinely and officially respected as part of national identity, which promotes self-respect and authentic cultural development in ways not evident in the US or Australia, for example, or other colonised countries such as those of South America. New Zealand’s conscious political plasticity of the last twenty years has been remarkable and skilful: its adherence to ecological principles, educational investment and internal cohesion is manifest. The new National Government, however, is proving contentious and rather stupid. But more anon. Currently, to Rotorua, where geysers spurt and mud bubbles on pretty well every street corner – fenced but accessible, and sometimes, just a heap of stones faintly wisping in a car park. Our hotel has five pools; swimming, bubbling, sulphurous, hot, warm and paddling. We tried most of them before strolling round town in a jet-lagged daze, inspecting Government Gardens (with belching mud pits), Kuirau Park (with steamy squelchings) and Ohinemutu, a Maori village with a spluttering geyser (he was the choleric guardian of the church and Meeting House who’d met Prince Andrew and thereafter, became a Windsor-ite). Whilst pre-empted by a nightcap at the luscious and historic Princes Gate Hotel, not even the gingerbread fretworks, mahogany staircases and bijou balconies could keep us from our beds.