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So as you all know we are using a bus called 'Kiwi Experience' as our transport around New Zealand. We have a pass called 'The Funky Chicken'. Now if you do this by their rules and stick to the itinerary it will only take 20 days to do the whole trip, we have 2 months in New Zealand. So that is quite a difference! They do however have optional hop offs and if you can actually work out the buses and there is space to get on the next bus then you can jump off at one of these places. We have so far had a bit of difficulty with the buses so haven't been able to stay longer at any of the other places, we finally worked it out that we could have 2 nights in Tongariro National Park. We found a place on the internet where we could get a double room for cheaper than a dorm (crazy I know). So we booked 2 nights in a nice private room in the beautiful National Park... or so we thought!!
Every time we had spoken to anyone at the office or a driver to sort this out their reaction had all been the same 'Why are you going there?'. You would think this joint reaction may have given us an indication that maybe it wasn't worth doing the hop off, but with so much time we did it regardless. We soon realised that it warrented this reaction.
We pulled up to National Park Hotel, which looked like an abandoned wooden shack. All the doors were locked and no one in sight. We finally found the guy who owns it, didn't really seem to have a clue what was going on but showed us to an outside room, with a double bed and not enough room to swing a cat (if we had a cat). It was clean enough but definitely not what we were expecting. And it was freezing, the miniscule heater stayed on for the remainder of our stay. He also pointed us in the direction of the backpacker kitchen stating 'I don't know what kind of state it's in?', immediatley filled us with confidence. With fridge goods in hand we headed to the kitchen, the first word that came to mind, grotty. It clearly hadn't had a clean in a while and had a bit of a funky smell. I opened the fridge and an egg came tumbling down and landed right next to my only pair of warm boots. It was close. So with egg cleaned, food in the fridge (against my better judgement) and backpacks squeezed into our box we thought we might go and explore. The weather however had other ideas. Absolutley peeing it down. We settled down to watch some Dexter in the room. Now I don't want to bore you but that is pretty much what we did for the remainder of our stay there. We managed to get out for a grand total of 15 minutes for a small wander before the rain got too heavy again. The only other thing that happened was a long blast of a air raid siren, mid afternoon, which we both thought was rather wierd.
So our nice little holiday dream had been well and truely squashed but we kept telling ourselves, we are still in New Zealand and it could be worse. This worked for a while until the thought of stepping foot in that kitchen again to cook dinner actually repulsed me. When I suggested that Mr Nat West shouted us a burger for dinner, Matt didn't put up much of a fight. So a burger in our bellies we settled down to a bit more Dexter (suprise!). A very relaxing 2 days which I suppose did serve it's purpose, we used up a little more time and didn't spend any money. Certainly an experience, if the weather had been different then it would have been a lovely place to spend a couple of nights but hey ho, off we go...
- comments
del you're right ; it could have been worse. at least you had Dexter to watch!