Best laid plans

So The Rattler got me a whole 22km up the road from Auckland before a new, more sinister rattle appeared, this one accompanied 30 seconds later by billowing smoke from under the hood! Luckily I had just enough time to exit the motorway and turn onto a side street before she completely died on me. Yep, a whole 22km! Ah, the good times we had. This all happened this last Sunday mind you, when I had just set out for Taiwawe Bay to do some work for a property owner up there. I called Andrew (the afore mentioned property owner) to tell him what had happened. He was heading up Sunday night as well, just a couple hours behind me. He helped me push my Chariot into a parking space at a gas station, we arranged for a tow to a local garage and we were off. We'll get back to the car in a bit.

Taiwawe Bay.


We arrived after dark, but it was close to a full moon that night and the view of the bay was spectacular. I tried in vain to capture the sublime scene on film (or the digital equivalent) but if my camera has specific settings for night time shots I don't know what they are. Every attempt at a picture just came back completely dark. Oh well. The daytime shots the next day were pretty good. Andrew has a vision for his property to return all the plant life to native bush. That means getting rid of all the non-native tree species including poplars, willows, and pines. He hired a couple of arborists to do the skilled cutting with the chainsaws, and a nice Australian couple, Liam and Sewane, who answered the same ad that I did, and I served as the unskilled labor hauling the cut branches down the hill to the chipper. I have to tell you, I have never worked so hard in my entire life! And I wasn't even getting paid! The trade off was two days of work and then we (the unskilled labor force) get the run of the place for the next week or so. But I don't even get that because I have to get back to Auckland with Andrew on Tuesday because of my broken down lemon of a car. but more on that later. After about ten hours of repeatedly trudging up the hill, grabbing another pile of branches, and dragging them down, we knocked off for the day. Took a nice refreshing dip in the Ocean, then the six of us (Andrew, the property owner; Collin and Jimmy, the arborists; and Liam, Sewane, and I, the unskilled labor) climbed into Andrew's boat to go fishing. We caught about thirty Red Snapper, but only one was legally big enough to keep. By the time we got back from fishing, our roast lamb supper was almost ready. Jimmy fileted our Snapper and cut it into bite size pieces and Andrew provided some wasabi and soy sauce, and we enjoyed some fresh sashimi as an appetizer. Not too stinking bad! The roast lamb was fantastic as well.

The next day we only worked for six hours. The arborists had more pressing things to do with their chainsaws, so we the unskilled labor, spent our time ring-barking pine trees. Ring-barking is where you cut about a three inch band about a half a centimeter deep around the entire circumference of the trunk--cutting a 'ring' into the 'bark', ring-barking. This kills the pine. We were able to ring-bark about 40 pines in those six hours. Cooled off with another dipin the ocean, had a nice lunch and then it was back to Auckland for Andrew and me. Andrew is an architect and he had a presentation he needed to work on so he let me drive the three hours back to Auckland. It's a good thing too, I need the practice. Driving on the left still just feels inherently wrong!

My lemon

The garage I had my car towed to seems to think that I have a pretty good case against the garage that performed the mechanical inspection on my car before I purchased it (and actually perfomed some repairs before I drove it away). Andrew agrees, and he's seen fit to act as sort of my advocate in dealing with the first garage. He seems to think that he can convince them that its in their best interest to repair my car at no expense to me. We'll see. If not, I'll have to write it off as a $2500 object lesson on the perils of being too trusting, and start all over again on the car search. If so, the repairs will probably take a week or so. Either way, I again feel trapped in Auckland. It's like Michael Corleone said about the mafia, "I try to get out, and they just pull me back in!" The good news is that Andrew has been so incredibly kind to help me out. Not only with dealing with the mechanics, but also by allowing me to stay at his place until everything gets sorted.

I know this whole stumbling, bumbling, frustrating, and expensive start to my New Zealand adventure will ultimately be one of those things that I can look back on and laugh, but at present it just doesn't seem too funny. Just gotta keep plugging along I guess. Will keep you posted--hopefully will have some good news to report soon.

Cheers.