No Pictures

BY SIMON DENNY

We had to give the car a bit of a clean as we had to give it back the next morning. We had a rather dodgy map but knew we were in the right area. There were no signs and after about an hour we were about to give up when Jon spotted it. It was dark by now but we managed to get a picture of it. After cooking up some food in the van we then went to the minus 5 degrees bar. We have a similar one in London. We were given big jackets and gloves. The bar is made all of ice, including the glasses. There were some really good sculptures in there but they would not let us take poictures. The novelty of being cold soon wore off and we went to another bar. There was a big casino in the centre of town. We had used their parking so we had to go inside (convenient for Jon) whilst Jon enjoyed the roulette I enjoyed the free hot drinks. We then had to find somewhere to stay for our final night in the van. It was late and quite a built up city so we settled on a relatively quiet road. I will miss our little moon roof we had, at night you can open it up and see lots of stars. I will not miss waking up and having to drive to the nearest toilet in order to pee though! The next morning we did just that and stayed parked up in order to get our stuff packed up. Jon noticed a hole in one of the mens cubicles (think Shameless, if you have ever seen that episode) and we noticed in the hour we were there that way too many men were using the cubicles. Bit much for a Saturday morning but we were sure we had stumbled accross a little hunting ground for Auckland's gay men.

We were running late for dropping off the van so we knew we would have to pay a $10 penalty which wasn´t much. Now, with this company you had to bring the van back clean. We could not find a car wash but had noticed brushes to clean windows and buckets at most stations. So, in true backpacker style we washed the whole van down with the window brush and rinsed it with a watering can. The man in the garage must have thought we were nuts and was giving us a confused look. When we went to take the van back half an hour late we found the office was closed. I called them and we were meant to take it to their office near the airport but no-one had told us, this meant we didn´t get charged for being late. So we drove there and I managed to pursuade a cab driver dropping someone off to take us to the airport cheaply. We were not due at the airport for another 3 hours but as we were close there was no point going back to the city. With 3 hours to kill before check-in we got a free shower and caught up on our diary.

Once checked in our flight was delayed by 2 hours which meant another 5 hours waiting around. They gave us a voucher which we spent in the bar, well what else is there to do in an airport. I felt rather merry when we finally got on the plane!



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