Rotorua – We’re clattering down towards the end of the road, and every cell in my body can feel it; that juuuuuust-pre-exhaustion of a well timed marathon. We’re ticking the last of the boxes in the North Island, but nowadays when we make friends with other tourists, we’re the ones giving advice rather than taking it.
On that subject – did you know that every single New Zealander is a part-time tourism adviser? This has astonished us through every single day of our journey, up to and including yesterday, when we visited the Mission vineyards for a bit of free wine-tasting, and the guy cleaning the fountain outside had more to say about our route to Rotorua than the woman in the i-SITE. (The apex of this particular phenomenon, though, was the wino who took Dave and I under his wing when we were searching for our restaurant on Friday night in Wellington.) These people are as comprehensively enthusiastic about our maximum enjoyment of their country as we are – more so even. When was the last time you could say that of a Canadian? But then again, Canada sucks.
We’re old hands at driving NZ’s roads, too; that torturous pretzel-logic that sees at least one person in the car chanting “left” multiple times per hour if it seems like the driver is in any jeopardy of pulling out into the right side of the street at any point. Left is right, green is red, the shotgun seat is (of course) called gunshot. Chris II has proved a much more capable hand at the uphill pass than Chris I, and if I continue to have a particular talent for ferreting out massive trucks to fly towards around every turn of every mountain road, well, so be it.
We’re sick of meat pies. Fully fucking sick of them. This is our own fault. By the time I was taking a runner on a cheeseburger pie yesterday – imagine a McDonald’s cheeseburger, baked in a pie, including ketchup – I was quite committed to never laying lips on the miserable things again. If we had started in the North Island and worked south, as originally planned, would the meat pie have even happened? The pies at Fergbakery in Queenstown remain the champions of the whole trip, and that was two long weeks ago now.
Here in Rotorua – which is best pronounced in Scooby-Doo voice, “RO-ROH-ROO-AH!” – we have ended up in the party hostel to end all party hostels – best pronounced “RUH-ROH!”. We checked in to the site of bikini-clad spring breakers in the heated pool, and the advisory that we’d missed the wet t-shirt contest by a couple of days; but then, we and all of our hostel-mates got caught in an unbelievable typhoon last night, so we pretty much got the contest anyway. On hostels, the Adventure Backpackers in Queenstown and the Wanaka Bakpaka (yep) in Wanaka remain the best; this one right here, Base Rotorua, is far and away the worst. The mileage on the rest varies somewhere in the middle, though the overall average has been good.
Finally zorbed yesterday. The experience was about as you’d expect – I yelled “ZOOOOOOOORRRRRRBBBBBB!” at the top of my lungs all the way down the hill. We made up some zorbing codes for use by the staff in case of emergency; “We have a red zorb!” means the occupant of a zorb is bleeding heavily; “White zorb! White zorb!” is a zorb struck by lightning. Unfortunately, neither of these happened – though Dave did manage to jump his zorb out of the track, for which no code words were prepared.
Meat pie count, trip thus far: 12
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