Day one in the North Island

We landed in Auckland at 11am and made our way to the Luck Car Rentals office.

We were offered the opportunity to repeat our acquaintance with a Tin Chariot, but with a slight sense of guilt and disloyalty, we opted for a $5 per day upgrade to a Nissan Insipid - a symphony of beige plastic with radio controls labeled in Japanese, but offering a larger engine and boot.

And so we set of through heavy Auckland traffic to a stretch of what we would recognise as bona fide motorway as we headed North on Highway 1 to Paihia on the bay of islands - a three hour trip.

New Zealand is experiencing one of its driest summers on record. We however, have a suspicion that the name Perkins translates to “Rainmaker” in the Moari language.

We had a wet drive.

And so we arrived at Paihia and had our first view of the Bay of Islands. Beautiful!