This morning we say goodbye to Joost who has a midday flight home. I say home, but with the Icelandic volcano ash cloud crippling flight schedules, he might only get as far as Kuala Lumpur.
After taking advantage of the free internet at Freeman’s, I go to the Escape office to get money for the accommodation and meals we had in Te Kuiti when Olive broke down. They are very apologetic about what happened and give three days rental refund as well as money for our costs.
Afterwards, we journey northwards towards the Bay of Islands. At lunch, we stop at a scenic burger van. Well, a burger van propped up at a scenic lay by, where several breeds of roosters and hens have been abandoned and which they live happily off the scraps from the picnic tables. Some of these chickens are unusually furry. Maybe the excess fat from burger is good for their coat. We have seen a wide variety of bovine breeds in NZ too, e.g. brown ones with black spots, as well as vaguely Friesian cows, but with their white coat encasing their midriff they look like panda cows.
The man in the burger van is a very chatty Englishman. He agrees with me that New Zealand is the most beautiful country he has seen, though comments that the kiwis are not such a friendly folk when you are taking money off them rather than the other way around. I mention that I plan to go back home via the States, and it turns out that he has spent time in LA working as a chef. He has quite a posh accent for a burger guy, but then he does serve ‘gourmet burgers’ which are not cheap at NZ $9 for a cheese burger, though it does come with a tomato and red pepper relish.
He also mentions that it is not a legal requirement for drivers to have insurance NZ, which helps explain the large numbers of teenagers (the driving age is 16) driving big engine cars.
We take our time driving to the Bay of Islands, making a couple of stops on the way. One is a toilet stop in Kawakawa, which was the home of Austrian artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser (b. 1928, d. 2000). His most notable legacy to his chosen home town is the public toilets, which are signposted from the main road and which seem to be the town’s only attraction. It is another old mining town, but with the tram lines left in place down the centre of the main street.
I am not in the habit of taking a camera into public toilets, but here it is expected. The facilities, which I need to hastily make use of, are decorated by fragmented coloured tiles, like an anarchic mosaic, and there are bottles encased in the entrance wall plus some Maori style figures and symbols.
Our next stop is at another inviting looking beach with fluffy soft sand and where the sea seems calm except for the last few metres where the waves leap out and then collapse onto the shore like a fat man being suddenly felled. Little rip curls swallow up the tide as it falls on the beach instead of letting the water glide up the beach.
After stopping at our now favoured supermarket chain ‘Pak’n’Save’, we get to Piahia (Maori for ‘white man’) at the bay after dark, and go about 6km out of town to the ‘Bay of Islands Holiday Park’.
We are told on arrival that us campers are only allowed to use the one of the two kitchens, the other being for cabin holders only. The cabin holders kitchen is actually smaller than the campers kitchen, but it has a lounge, pool table, TV and fridge that doesn’t drip (unlike the other more run down kitchen) and, as the campsite is sparsely populated and there is nobody in the better kitchen, we make use of the relative luxury.
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