road trip
i joined up with my bus to start my loop around the north island on wednesday morning, and found myself in a transit van with three female passengers, including, unbelievably, two swiss germans, my crazy maori driver nancy, and her best mate, unconverted essex girl anna. the atmosphere was thick with oestregen, so i hid on the back seat and caught up on some sleep. we arrived in hahei, on the coromandel coast, to grey skies and murky drizzle, the worst possible weather for a beachside location. still, it cleared sporadically, and the beach and limestone formations were pretty enough, though not particularly exciting.i really bonded with nancy and anna: although nancy is our driver, she is basically treating this as a xmas road trip for her and her mate. for this to work out she need equally slack passengers, who don't mind hungover late departures and missed stops: unfortunately, she hadn't counted on the swiss. the swiss germans are a complex people, ranging from utterly, heart stoppingly, loveable, to downright cold and unfriendly. while daniella (see you in zurich for a jogurt!) is verging towards the latter, fabienne is as anal as they come, and with some swift teutonic chat has got daniella on board too. cue numerous clashes with nancy, who wanted to take it easy, and fabienne, who wanted to get everything that she paid for.
i actually have a fair amount of sympathy for fabienne's perspective, and at the beginning of my trip nancy's slackness would have driven me to distraction too. but nz has been so uninspiring for me, and left me so deflated and unmotivated, i'm pretty much just cruising through now, enjoying meeting people and having a few beers, but barely registering my surroundings. it's the complete antithesis to my normal travel ideology: normally i have my nose in my lonely planet, and am bounding excitedly from place to place. but i just think this place is such a fucking scam, and so mediocre in so many ways, that i can't lift myself out of my disinterested malaise, so am travelling in the way that i used to, no still do, hate seeing other people do it. what a waste of a month, both time and money wise.
sadly fabienne is not as weary as me yet, so the niggling arguments have continued, much to my amusement. we spent the next night in raglan, a surf beach (sea, sand, same same), and i have now arrived in rotorua for christmas. it is absolutely deserted, but i can live with that: i want new years to go off big, but i'd quite like a xmas of quiet introspection.
posted by bicrom @ 4:56 am
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