Today started out extremely well because I woke up and didn't feel as sick as I felt on Wednesday or Thursday, so we're making progress! After having some nice homemade breakfast (French toast) we headed out in the morning for our big adventure back into the city for….our dental checkup! Since we've been serving for a year, it was time for us to have our midservice dental checkup so why not have it during the early part of our vacation and get it out the way. But before that, we actually had to find our way back into the main portion of the city – thank goodness Carol (the person's house we're staying at) left us a map of the Auckland area to use. It was a Godsend because we could not have found our way around without it. Josh drove and I played the part of the navigator. Other then a few mistakes on the roads coming up a lot faster then they looked on the map, we had very few problems on this particular trip – must be getting use to the whole right hand drive thing (even though it still feels weird for me not to be driving even though I'm on the left hand side). It took us about 30 minutes to drive back into the city and it really wasn't that hard to navigate – we simply followed a lot of cars around us if the area was kind of confusing. Once we arrived at the dental place it was a pretty quick in and out session (if you call being in the place for an hour and a half quick – but we had a cleaning and a checkup). After I was done, I made a quick trip over to ANZ to deal with a little money problem I was having and learned a nice (although impolitely given) lesson on international banking. Even though all banks deal more with numbers and digits then actual cash now a days, they can't quickly do international transactions – it still goes through some archaic processing scheme. Now I tend not to be negative on this but I have to say that the folks at ANZ were just extremely unhelpful to me…all they had to do to put my mind at ease was call a simple number in the states but they just flat our refused…they kept throwing 'It's not our policy, blah,blah,blah' in my face. I did my best to be nice and try getting them to actually help me but they just kept refusing and refusing. Glad to see that policies override decent customer service. So even though banks can take your money out from anywhere in the world (they're connected enough to do that!) they can't easily put money into another bank or deal with cashiers checks. Didn't know in such a connected world we still had those limits on us – but you live and learn. Travellers cheques folks, it's the way to go when you're outside the states.
Anyway, after my not so nice visit with ANZ, I met back up with Josh and we headed back to the house for a bit of a rest. We then got in the car for a nice little drive in the northern Auckland area – might as well use the car while we had access to it. If you look at a map of New Zealand, directly above Auckland is a loop like area that splits from the city of Auckland. We travelled around that loop, first going to the west on Motorway 16 (It's been a real challenge not to call them interstates, we've decided their more like highways). It was a beautiful drive and we really got to see parts of NZ that many PC volunteers who come to NZ never get a chance to see. We were trying to find a way to hike up Mt. Autuanai but couldn't find an exit for it, so it kind of evolved into a nice scenic drive. The best part of the drive was when we drove across the interior of the island from Motorway 16 to Motorway 1 through Workworth. This route was just filled with rolling mountain views and gorgeous vistas. There were points were we actually had to just stop and take pictures because these sites were so beautiful (even though these spots in particular weren't deemed 'scenic'). It was a great experience to just take in all the eye candy of hills, mountains and trees after being in the same place for over a year. In fact, a lot of the mountains reminded me of my many drives between Nashville and Knoxville during college. You wouldn't really expect that kind of lushness in a place this far towards the south pole, but the diversity of plantation is simply amazing. Another amazing thing was that the further north we went, the warmer it got! This whole place is just like a bizarre version of the states, I tells ya. But it was still a lot of fun just to drive along and enjoy the place without having to be tied to a schedule or anything like that. Once we reached Motorway 1 on the other side, we headed back down towards Auckland.
As we were driving down M1, there were a ton of cars going OUT of Auckland on M1 – it seems that a lot of NZ folks go north for the summer, so it was a good thing we took M16 otherwise we would have been stuck in traffic for hours. Even going back into Auckland was a great time of just taking in all the sights – heck we saw people out enjoying the beach in what felt like 69 degree weather. In all the whole trip probably took us about 3 hours to do but it was definitely a unique experience that I won't soon forget and it's something that we couldn't have planned while in Samoa and isn't that the best part of any adventure?! Anyway, once we got back to the house we just kind of chilled and vegged in front of the TV – because after a year of having limited access to the television you just want to enjoy it as much as you can. I think the big theme of today was just – freedom. Freedom to do what we wanted and enjoy NZ in a unique way that's different from how volunteers have enjoyed it before. Free to travel and free to chill – not a bad combination for another day of vacation.
Weird New Zealand things:
- There seems to be an inordinate amount of roundabouts in this country! Almost anytime you get to a point where four cars would meet, there's a roundabout.
- Now some of you may be wondering why was this post called 'A Kiwi Drive'. Well New Zealanders are sometimes called "Kiwi's" (it's an affectionate term, not derogatory – as far as I know) and since we were driving around enjoying the NZ countryside, it's called a Kiwi Drive. What is a Kiwi? It's some sort of bird that's unique to NZ. I don't think it's found in the wild anymore – I think you can see it only at the zoo or a preserve. But this country identifies with that animal and thus adopted it's name.
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