Driving stories - January 3, 2009

Ah, another rainy day! Looks like the New Year has brought the Millers bad weather in New Zealand. As Colin mentioned yesterday, our hostel was a nice house situated in the middle of the rainforest. Since it was rainy and foggy, it was nice to relax in the evening and sleep in this morning. Our only plan for the day was to get ourselves to the northwest area of the south island called Abel Tasman National Park.



The fog was not as thick this morning, so we could see a bit more of the rough ocean. We decided to do a little cave exploration on our own after breakfast. It was exciting to finally use our headlamps for something other than sleeping in hostels. The cave had a marked “trail” in it, so it wasn’t really exploring on our own, but there was no guide with us. After the cave exploration, it was another quick walk to the beach before leaving the west coast.

During the drive we hit some really rainy sections, but as we got closer to the northwest it seemed to be clearing up a bit. We spent four hours driving, and reached our destination, a town called Motueka, around 2:30pm. It wasn’t sunny, but it also wasn’t raining. When we got to Motueka, we realized we took photos on the camera without the SD card in it! So, we have photos on the camera, but we don’t have the connector for the laptop. We quickly got the SD card in the camera, and took some photos on our drive to the very northwest corner of the South Island – an area called Golden Bay. Unfortunately, the rain seemed to follow us from the west coast and once we got over the mountains it was raining so hard we could not see the bay up close.




Disappointed, we returned to Motueka, praying for some better weather the next two days. The forecast says sun – let’s hope NZ weathermen are much better than those from the U.S.! We have a two day expedition set for Abel Tasman with kayaking tomorrow, camping overnight, and then walking and taking a water taxi on Tuesday. Fodor’s tells me this area competes with others for the highest amount of sun, while the west coast is known for all its rain. They were right about the west coast, so let’s hope they are also correct about this area.

Since the last two posts haven’t included too much exciting information, I will share here some of our struggles with petrol stations (aka gas stations).



NZ understandably has small towns. It’s two small islands. It’s a small country. NZ also understandably has few gas stations in those small towns. Not many automobiles on the roads drive the roads of this small island country.

Travelers must remember to plan ahead. The distance between some of those small towns are easily underestimated. In two instances, we have underestimated those distances. Sure, we take the blame for such a misstep. The problem, however, is that the few gas/petrol stations that do exist are annoyingly unreliable outside of business hours.

Twice we have white-knuckled a drive with the fuel tank sinking dangerously below “E”. Perhaps we exaggerated our fears because, after all, we drive a glorified golf cart. [See for yourself in the 12/26/2009 posting.] Nevertheless, we would breathe a sigh of relief as we finally came across a gas/petrol station only to find that we would be forced to use a blasted machine that doesn’t take American forms of payment! More on this later…