So how's my driving?

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May 25th 2013

Published: July 2nd 2013

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Hamilton at night

In this update: my trip to Hamilton/Waitomo Caves, but first: how's my driving?

So far, I have:

• Hit another car: 1x
• Gotten another car scratched: 1x (well actually someone put the door open against another car..)
• Driven on the wrong/right side of the road: 3x (or was it 4?)
• Broken into a sweat because of the traffic situation I found myself in: a couple of times
• Driven off the road by accident: 2x
• Got into a car skid: 2x
• Driven the wrong way: a handful of times
• Driven some distance with the handbreak still on: too embarrassing to mention
• Gotten inexplicably stuck on a road that's not on the map: 1x
• Gotten honked at (I know I shouldn't have backed up on the highway, and you know, stop earlier at intersections): 2 times

So yeah, I drove quite a bit into Auckland with my handbreak on (and I wondered why the car was shuddering when I floored it and why I didn't make speed fast enough), while looking for someone's apartment and parking to the side of the road, I bumped a van (which had people in it surprisingly; they didn't bother to get out).

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"Oi! You got a native in your picture!" Dance instructions in the back.

The wrong side of the road thing was only when I just bought it. Ok and I got on one roundabout the wrong way. And I entered the parking lot of a fruitstall next to the highway from the wrong end. Whatevs.

So yeah, the (shifted) weekend of 18/19/20 May I finally broke loose from Auckland's grip on me, and travelled to Hamilton with Julie-Anne, a friend I met in Auckland. The road to Hamilton, which is the next big city from Auckland, is quite easy and straight. At Hamilton we visited the statue of Riff Raff, creator of the Rocky Horror Picture show, who has free wifi coming out of his 3-pronged lasergun :D
(check the pictures taken by locals)

Next morning we went for the Hamilton Botanical Gardens, and I finally got a taste of one of NZ's famous '4-seasons in one day'-days: light rains followed sunshine followed by torrential rains with some ice-cubes thrown in the mix. I'm not kidding, the hail at one point was the shape of small ice-cubes (4 mm diameter on the biggest ones). Pictures below (of the gardens).

Afterwards I wanted to see the Bridal Veil Falls (mucho impressive!),

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More natives at the statue. Check the ray-gun with free wifi.

and hey, why not try to find the Natural Land Bridge further down this windy, hilly, nigh-abandoned road? Ok, so for some reason we ended up on an unhardened dirt road through farmland that wasn't on the map, and neither of us know how we got on it since we just followed the regular road (right?) but after that detour we totally didn't make it before dark :P

Wild goats near the road, landslides that probably came down thanks to the rains (and I didn't always manage to fully dodge the ones already down on the road), going into a skid twice (once on a gravel road, once during heavy hail/rain on the asphalt) yet managing to survive all the time. It was raining to hard to go find the natural land bridge in the dark alas, even if there were glowworms to be found.

So on to Waitomo! After some heavy deliberation (there's like 20 cave tours to choose from) we did a walking tour of one of the big ones, which was more impressive than I expected from having seen some free caves earlier (crappy pictures downstairs). Doing it in a rubber inner-tire was an available

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Randomly lit bridge.

more expensive option, but, you know, not much money left (none actually).

And because of that, my next stop, after dropping Julie-Anne off at the bus in Hamilton, was Tauranga! More on that, next time 😊

Additional photos below

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