I’ve already mentioned how fortunate I was to have Liz as a road trip buddy in New Zealand, but I’ll say it again: I had so much fun traveling with her. We laughed a lot—both at funny things we said and ridiculous situations we found ourselves in, like leaving a camera on the hood of the car and driving for ten feet before realizing it. We made a good driving/navigating team—she drove, I squinted at a map and made my best guess, which only resulted in turning around about half the time. We even sang Christmas carols together on the drive through the Taupo Volcanic Zone, two sopranos belting out the first verse of just about every hymn we could think of as we hurtled down the first straight road we’d seen in the whole country.

The gray skies and green hills of central North Island

Liz was a little more used to the roads in New Zealand than I, considering she’s from northern Ontario, and many Canadian roads are similarly unsealed (read: teeth-rattling gravel). What neither of us was really prepared for was how small the roads were (major highways were two-lanes just about everywhere except around Auckland and Wellington), how much they twisted and turned (we never quite got used to turning a blind corner and hoping we didn’t meet anyone crossing the center line coming the other way), or how un-signed they’d be.

Putting a lot of signs all at once doesn’t make up for the lack of signage in a thirty-kilometer radius, NZ.

I should say, we’d see signs sometimes, but the road might have changed names somewhere along the way, and if our map wasn’t detailed enough, it wouldn’t show the name change, so we couldn’t be sure we were on the right road. Also, road signs would point out what town we were eventually heading toward, but in the same manner as if that were the next town over, so we’d see a town name with an arrow and think “ah we’re here” but then no town would materialize and twenty minutes later we’d finally be there.

Getting around the dairy country where Liz’s friends lived was particularly bewildering. The landscape was all similar—large hills with turf that look like it had been molded into many tiny ridges, the occasional collection of black rocks, and lots and lots of cows. Liz knew the area a little since she’d worked there for a few weeks, but she’d only ever driven one route. As soon as we deviated from that route, we were lost. On the day we drove to Waitomo, we borrowed the GPS from Liz’s friends, but even the GPS got turned around in the labyrinth that was central Waikato roads. The best was when the GPS had us turn right when we should have turned left, and it took us a good 40 minutes to sort out the mistake.

All this backtracking and second-guessing was mostly just fun, until it rained. And it rains a lot in New Zealand. Our worst rainy drive was probably the twenty kilometers between Franz Josef and Fox Glacier. It was 7 in the morning, Liz had been rained out of her tent the night before, and we were climbing a mountain road in the pouring rain to make it to our tour on time. Many kudos to Liz for getting us there alive; all I could do was say over and over, “It’ll be fine, we’ll get there in time.” (Since I alternated this with “I don’t know if I can do this hike” and Liz then had to reassure me, I think I wasn’t actually that helpful.)

An ominous start to an awesome day

At home, driving in sketchy conditions with poor signage can be helped with a boost from the radio, but our little Nissan Sunny rental only had a range of 78-86FM, and for the most part, we could only get one station, if any. Those mountains really did the job on scrambling any signal we might have got. Our radio was hung up on 84.0—any time we hit scan, the numbers would zoom past, 83.183.283.383.483.583.683.783.883.984.0. Boom. There it would stay, desperately trying to transmit something no doubt awesome—rock n roll, lotta soul, cosmic jive?—but not actually giving us so much as a faint crackle of static. Good thing we had lots to talk about, and the occasional song to belt from memory. When the radio did come to life, it was oh so good. The occasional Maori tune, some current New Zealand pop songs, and then the most amazing array of ‘90s Top 40 hits. Ace of Base, Backstreet Boys, Alanis, Enrique… wonderful for a nostalgic singalong or two, horrible if it’s all you could get for years!

On the way to Greymouth

This doesn’t even get to one-way bridges and cow rush hour, but that’s a post for another day. Basically, everything about road tripping in New Zealand was familiar enough to be comfortable and strange enough to be fun and funny—an ideal combination, especially when you’re sharing it with someone who feels the same way.

Liz and me in Taupo