Today we mostly just chilled and did some planning. I read a NZ newspaper and learned quite a bit. Apparently the Election Finance Act (see NZ Day 2) has unintentionally caused Labour a bit of embarrassment because they had to reveal some donations from a very wealthy guy named Owen Clark that they had previously denied. Interestingly, the business building we saw dedicated was called the Owen Clark Building because he donated money to fund it (though we didn’t know it at the time). People were also atwitter because at the dedication the PM didn’t give Owen Clark the tradition hongi or Maori greeting. I think it’s basically an “Eskimo kiss” – touching noses. Anyway, people saw this as an attempt to distance herself from Owen Clark, but apparently Clark is something like a prima donna and people are waiting to see what happens between him and Labour.
We also got the rent car we will be using for most of the rest of the trip. It’s as bad as the Australia rent car was good. It’s a Toyota Lucida (the next generation of Toyota Previa that was sold in the U.S. back in the ‘90’s and discontinued when the Sienna came along). It has every option that isn’t useful.
-They went to the trouble to install power locks on every door, but then put the only power lock switch on the driver’s door.
-They paid to install a little motor to fully close the door if you don’t get it closed all the way, but they didn’t make the sliding door automatic.
-They installed two power sunroofs, but only one of the rear four windows opens at all and it is manual.
-They installed a backup sonar that beeps all the time but decided not to include cruise control.
-They gave us a ski rack on top but no key fob to lock/unlock the doors.
The seats are very low; distance between the seats doesn’t do you much good if your knees are level with your nose.
[Addendum: we found out that lots of NZ cars are secondhand imports from Japan. This explains a lot, since our car has stickers in Japanese in it. It also has an extra mirror mounted on the back so the driver can see the back bumper, which makes sense if you’re trying to park in Tokyo traffic. The lack of cruise control might also be explained by this because I can’t imagine you would be able to do much cruising in Tokyo traffic.]
On the subject of driving, roads both here and in Australia only use white paint for road stripes. That might not sound like much of a comment, but it’s bigger than you think. If you see a road with solid white stripes on either side and a white dashed line down the middle it could mean a) an undivided road with one lane in either direction or b) one side of a divided two-lane road. I’ve driven on both, and they are identical. You just have to know what sort of road you got on.
No comments:
Post a Comment