Road Trip - Day One
Thames to Te Kaha and back to Opotiki.
For the first time ever I managed to delay the departure until a reasonable hour. 11am Friday the Matriarch and I finally left her delightful home a short way out of Thames. We were “On the Road Again”, as she so likes to sing whenever going anywhere, bound for a trip around the East Cape of New Zealand’s North Island. Despite having grown up in New Zealand I had never been on that particular journey. The Matriarch sought to fix that, thereby introducing me to what she feels is a spectacular length of coastline. I was happy with that idea, being a scenery junkie, and sat in the front passenger seat eagerly awaiting my first glimpse of New Zealand coastline for several years.
Cows are not coastline. I’d already seen quite enough of cows during my trip. But I waited, assuming that the Matriarch must have known what she was talking about. After all, you’re around as long as she has been you’re bound to pick up information the younger generation lacks, no? No.
Our first scenic stopover was Te Puke. Te Puke is, according to my “trusty” travel guide, quite the bustling metropolis during kiwifruit season. She expected it, therefore, to be a fairly prosperous town. It seemed, then, to be the perfect place to stop and have lunch. So we pulled up next to a little shoplet called Te Puke Home Cookery. Promising? Maybe. It didn’t exactly deliver on those promises. The most memorable thing about the shoplet was the sign in the window. “Wanted: 3 bedroom house to rend.”
We decided instead to try our luck at the Te Puke hotel. After all hotels usually put on a good pub meal, don’t they? Bladders swollen beyond recognition we practically ran inside. I barely noticed the state of the place on my way through. I should have become suspicious when the Matriarch magnanimously suggested I empty mine first. It could have been worse, I suppose. There was toilet paper. That’s very important. It also had a questionable bundle of paper towel in the only hand basin. Gingerly I pinched a clean-looking bit between the tips of my thumb and forefinger and set that aside.
I wet my hands before looking around for the soap. The two manky-looking bars I disregarded right away. I’d rather be poisoned by my own germs, thank-you-very-much, and this was not shaping up to be a place where you wanted to play with bar soap. Hooray, there was a gel soap dispenser on the wall. It even looked to still have gel soap in it. I pumped the dispenser. Nothing. I pumped it again, ever the optimist. What came out was distinctly not gel soap. It had obviously been waiting to actually be used for so long it had spoiled. Who knew soap could even do that? With a shudder I washed the long-dead gel soap from my hand and departed.
By then the Matriarch was good and ready for her adventure. As she brushed past me I smiled my most genuine smile. “Good luck.” Although her experience was less unpleasant than mine, after all I’d already cleared the sink of its little present, she exited with a disgusted look on her face. “I think we’ll find somewhere else to eat,” she told me. “Let’s,” I replied and we fled, leaving the smell of beer and desperation long behind us.
We did eventually find a good café. It took three laps of the main street but we eventually departed Te Puke fed and a little wiser.
We travelled onwards and I commented on the lack of coastline. “It’s just over there,” she assured me. Over the hills to which we were travelling parallel. Pacific Coast Highway my… On through Whakatane and past Ohope with the odd tantalizing glimpse of water to prove that we were indeed near the sea. Then we reached Ohiwa and I wished we’d stayed on the other side of the hills. Ohiwa, you see, is Maori for manky mud flat. It is an oyster farm and not much else. The jasmine growing wild all along the side of the road fails to cover the distinctive odour of oysters. The combination was memorable. Windows up, we carried on.
Opotiki, the Matriarch suspected, had the last supermarket we’d see that day so she decided we’d stop off to pick up supplies for breakfast. And some wine. By that stage I was very much of the opinion that the wine was mine. Then it was off to Te Kaha where we would hopefully find a place to stay at the Te Kaha Hotel, an establishment which claimed in the Pacific Coast Highway free travelers’ guide to be beachfront luxury. You get what you pay for with travelers’ guides it seems. That or “beachfront luxury” in the so-called Bay of Plenty really is a manky, rusted out tin shed that the locals had converted to a bottle store.
We went back to Opotiki and got the last room left in the entire Bay of Plenty region. The Opotiki Masonic hotel, while far from five star accommodation, managed to narrowly beat out the other option which was sleep in the car. Narrowly. I began to reconsider when, at about 2 am, a burglar alarm went off somewhere nearby and simply didn’t stop.
I decided to write Day One off and hope for the best with Day 2.
Tagged: adventures, Travel.