Kia Ora - Tuesday 29th Dec 2009

Not the orange juice beloved of my childhood trips to the cinema but Maori for welcome.

I have been having a great time. I collected my hire car on Tuesday 29th and set of with some trepidation to drive myself out of Auckland. The first obstacle was that I was driving an automatic which I have done before but a long time ago. Luckily Auckland was very quiet as it is still the Christmas holiday period. (It seems really strange seeing Christmas decs every where whilst it is so warm) . In 5 mins I was on highway 1 the main road which runs north to south on the North Island. That soon changed from a two lane highway to an ordinary single lane road. The drive was very slow to start with and there were big traffic jams caused by the amount of holiday traffic and the steep slopes on some of the hills which causes vehicles to back up behind large slow moving lorries. There are a lot of passing lane but they are hair raising because as you speed past the vehicles in the slow lane you can suddenly run out of passing lane and be face with a large lorry coming the other way. Luckily speeds here are low compared to England. Top speed is 100 kph which I think is around 60mph. Still fast enough for a nasty accident if you are not careful.