When I was making the plans to come to NZ for three weeks, I knew that meant I’d have to rent a car. There’s really no way to get to the out-of-the-way places, and I’d heard driving was the best way to see everything.
The Kiwis drive on the left, just like the British, so I knew that I had to be ready to deal with that change. And, since I love pre-worrying whenever possible, I was very nervous about the whole situation. As Ernesto and my first week in Australia came to an end, I grew more and more concerned about the whole endeavor.
Things started out great when I went to the car rental agent. I have no idea why I can’t understand anyone in this area of the world, but I can’t. Aussies, Kiwis, Fijians, they speak beautiful, perfect English and I’m like an old man with an ear horn. “Heeeeeh??? Whadja say?”
The woman checks me in and is lyrically speaking in her Kiwi-English and I had no idea what she said.
“Eh, Tid, yeah? Noowkjifoijwk” She then flipped through papers and shrugged.
I heard, “No… something-something..” and had seen my paper but she didn’t stop on it, so I say, “Oh, it was there.”
“Hah! I know it’s there! (Laugh) Something-something…”
She shakes her head at me and I’m like “When did I become 80?”
But the convo goes on and I’m understanding 30% of what is said. Partially she is talking low and moving quickly behind the counter, but really, I don’t know why it was so hard for me to comprehend her.
At the very end she goes, “Sir… are you confident?”
I thought I had appeared cool and collected, but evidently I was sweating and laughing nervously and looked like a disaster.
“Yeah… Yes. I think…” I said.
She VERY tentatively slid over the keys to me. “Just…” she said, “be careful out there. kfjfoeijf Read the book in the car. Kjoijefiej ijfoiej… something-something…”
Ernesto and I go out to the lot (and of course get lost) but once we found the car, I put in the keys and just thought, “Welp.”
That’s white-person for “This is it. All I can do.”
I pull out of the spot and the car immediately is acting weird. It’s dinging and the accelerator feels very odd.
“Something’s wrong…”
Ernesto convinced me to practice in the parking lot a bit, which did make me feel better, but after two loops, red lights were still flashing and I felt like the car was barely moving.
“I’m going to go talk to the attendant,” I said.
Bless Ernesto for seeing that we just hadn’t turned off the emergency break. He lowered the lever and the car jumped to life. I jovially did one more lap in the lot, then turned out of the rental store… into a roundabout.
“Oh, god…” I said.
I expected driving on the left and weird turns, but I had completely forgotten about roundabouts.
When I was in college, they redesigned part of the campus to have one. Students literally just started calling it “The Death Circle.” No one in the US knows how to do a roundabout. They’re British nonsense things, like tea time, and the sport of cricket. Every time you went into that roundabout you just said a prayer and hoped for the best.
I have exactly 1 second to think about the roundabout before I rolled into it, so I just relied on my previous experience - and said a prayer and hoped for the best.
I did almost get t-boned immediately, but the car did slow down and I just had to stay in the thing for 90 degrees of the circle, so it all worked out.
By the end of that first week, roundabouts were the least of my concerns. That fear had been replaced by the one-way bridges that dot the Kiwi countryside. Basically, you come towards the bridges and one direction has a yield and one has a right of way. But the bridges are exactly one car length-wide, so…. good luck if you go too early. I also panicked about that nebulous time when the car has, but also doesn’t have, enough time to cross the bridge and you are the right-of-way car and WHAT HAPPENS?
The most terrifying one was a bridge that looped around the corner INTO A ROUNDABOUT. It was literally like when you play Mariokart and you put the difficulty on 200cc. What do you even do? I was in the yield lane but cars were spinning around the roundabout… how do you even know which one will fly off toward the bridge?!
And the thing about the driving is that it never got better. It felt as if the driving gods felt I need a good, Kiwi-fashioned challenge every day I was on the road. There was only one day that I just drove. And it was normal driving.
Day 1: Auckland - just started into the busiest city in New Zealand right at rush hour on Friday. #choices
Day 2: What I thought would be an easy drive to the coast was really a two-hour drive through mountains and 1.5 of that was 40km/hr s-turns up and down hills.
The craziest part of day 2 was that people FLEW up those mountains. I’m not exaggerating (I know… for once) when I say that my hands on the steering wheel were never static. It was left to the right to the left to the right for over an hour. And grandmas in SUVs would blow by me going 80km/hr - just snaking up the mountain like they were lubed up with butter.
Ernesto and I laughed that day because the signs got more and more dramatic - it was “Slow Down” “Slow Turn” and by the end when it was constant back and forth, the sign just said “!” - just an exclamation point.
Day 3: This drive was flat BUT we were lucky enough to be driving in the rain over fresh gravel. We turned on the TV that night and there were 6 deaths on the road in NZ that afternoon.
Day 4: The flat, normal drive day. #blessed
Day 5: This day started fine and I was 100p delighted to get 3 hours into our 4-hour drive and find that there was a full-blown 4-lane interstate (most highways in NZ are two-lane with the occasional passing lane opening up every 10-20 km). It was like being home!!! But that last hour…
So the interstate lasted about 20 km before turning into an s-turn nightmare on the coast. Rain started to pour down and, if you’re used to driving on the right side of the road, there’s a kind of buffer between oncoming headlights that I never appreciated until I was driving down a two-lane road, head first into bright car lights as my defroster struggled to get rid of the huge amount of fog on the windshield. FUN!
When we dropped off the car, I felt my whole body decompress. Like, it turned into spaghetti. I had no idea how much stress I had been keeping bottled up due to that car for the week.
I guess the lesson from that is - if me, my anxiety, and constant fear of one-lane bridges can make it a week driving in New Zealand, then literally anyone is capable of anything. I hope that the rental agent sees my file and knows that I survived. I can just imagine her saying something like,
“Oh, Nojkjoiejf, fvoeirk, something-something…”