Kia Ora, Aotearoa: Walking in Auckland

And they say Asian drivers are bad....

There's something I've noticed about every big city I've ever been in; Paris, London, Tokyo, Rome, doesn't matter. Once you get there and are out on the street, you magically become invisible. No one can see you. You know you're there, because you can see yourself in the shop windows. But the oncoming people can't see you. They blankly stare ahead and look right through you. Of course they won't look you in the eye because then they'd have to acknowledge your existence and maybe get out of your way. It goes something like this:

You're cruising down the sidewalk when suddenly you spot a bogey on your 12. He's flying NOE, head down, typing. Then you think "I'm gonna have some fun with this SOB". So you go head to head at a gut-wrenching 4 knot closure rate, to see who flinches. You keep watching as you approach. You know he's on TCAS but his head still doesn't come up. At the last second when he sees you're serious, he breaks left. You still bash wingtips, but you come out on top because he's one of those small foreign-made units.

Well, we're now on our third rental car. We've got a Toyota RAV4. It's the third one. I gave up on the rental car company that was going to give us a car for $10.20 USD a day to leave in

Christchurch because they wouldn't guarantee me a particular model. You know how anal I am. So instead we bit the bullet and upgraded to a $19.22 USD a day RAV4. First we walked the 3 miles to the rental car depot so I could scope out the herd. Once I cut one out, we had to walk all the way back to the room because in order to get the sweet $19.22 rate, we had to book online. We're going to have the car for 85 days...this shit adds up. Anyway, being paranoid about having to come right out of the barn driving on the wrong side of the road, we carefully laid out our path back to the apartment on the walk home. Noting things like needed lane changes, etc.

Once we had the thing booked, we then had to walk the 3 miles back again to pick it up. They have this nifty car grading system. Gold equals new, Silver equals less than 160000 km, and Bronze equals 160001 to infinity. They did not have any Gold or Silver so we got a Bronze, but it only had 184000 km on it! We carefully and gingerly nursed the car back to the apartment parking garage and stowed it. Several days later when we (I) worked up the stones to drive it, we noticed that every time you hit a bump, it sounded like the front end was going to fall off and go under the car. I called the company and told them their vehicle was unsafe. Even though lawyers don't run the country here like they do at home, the word "unsafe" gets their attention. So I took it in and exchanged it. "You're in luck Mr. Lawson. We have a Silver to give you. No extra charge". Only 144000 km. The Silvers usually cost $3 a day more! Well, we got it home and parked it again. When we finally took it out for a drive it was worse than the other one. This one sounded like both the front end and the rear end were going to fall out. Plus it had no jack. So now we have Rav4 ver 3.0. This one is good. We took her for an expedition outside the city to the west coast. She's a keeper.

Is she cute or what?