Sorry for the Group Email

Travelling can be, if you put a little money into it, pretty luxurious. Four star hotels and first-class flights can be bought, concierges tipped, and, if you really spend some cash, you could go from your bed to New York without lifting a finger and roaring drunk the whole time.

But the biggest luxury in travelling – and there can be no dispute about this – is a man at the airport, holding a board with your name on it. Because instead of having to wrestle with buses or trains, or even a taxi, this man knows exactly where you’re going. He’ll carry your bags, make inoffensive small talk, and whisk you away in a people carrier. You can keep your four star hotels; I don’t want them. Give me a man with a set of arms and a seven-seater any day.

The Skylodge in Auckland isn’t a four star hotel. Luckily, it did provide a man with a car, a soft bed, hot showers, and a pervasive, lived-in sort of smell that reminded me of my Granny’s house. We’d taken two flights to get to New Zealand – one to Brisbane, and a longer one to Auckland, and we were exhausted. We fell gratefully into bed and set the alarm for eight the next morning.

New Zealand – and they really don’t make a big enough deal out of this – is three hours ahead of Australia’s east coast, so we tumbled out of bed at eight forty, with twenty minutes to check out from the hotel, pack our things and find the rental car agency.

Our Kiwi rental car was a nine year-old Nissan Sunny with a quarter of a tank of petrol, creaking suspension and a knackered drivers’ side door lock that could only be undone from the inside, which meant I’d spend the next two weeks unlocking Mendy’s door before I could get in. As soon as we got going it became clear that the Sunny also had a sticky accelerator, occasionally providing an unexpected and often alarming burst of speed, and a warped brake disc, which meant braking at high speed produced an alarming shudder, and at low speed a kind of gentle rocking sensation similar to that of being on a large ocean liner.

Luckily we always knew where we were going. Kiwis love nothing more than a free map. If you go to New Zealand you’ll be drowned in them, forever doomed to do battle with their confusing folds. These aren’t just crappy, no-scale tourist maps with tat-selling attractions marked on, but proper maps, complete with road numbers, distances and rivers. I’m not sure if it’s possible to actually buy a map in New Zealand but if it is I can’t imagine anyone makes much money from it.

We were heading to Karekare, where The Piano was filmed.

“Ah,” said the woman in the campsite office. “They filmed The Piano there.”

They had, but you wouldn’t realise Karekare’s status as a major film location just by visiting it. We had miles of black sand and ocean almost all to ourselves. That’s the thing about New Zealand: we were very nearly as far from London as it’s possible to be without getting closer again. Not many people come here and the crowds are easy to lose. Better yet, the roads are clear and smooth, people drive cautiously, and the views are rarely short of stunning. They make a ride through the Lake District look like a weekend in a Basingstoke car park.

That night in the campsite TV room a balding man ambled in.

“Mind if I turn on the news?” he asked.

The TV clicked through an assortment of stories about drug abuse, dangerous dogs and violent crime, and the balding man tisked his way through in sympathy. He turned out to be an ex-tourist bus driver and an authority on New Zealand’s best parts. He also turned out to have some startlingly muddle-headed views on America.

“9/11?” he said. “It was all done by the CIA, you know.”

“Really?” we asked. I like to think we kept the incredulity from our voices.

He scoffed. “Oh yeah. I’ve seen all the documentaries, you know.”

He paused, and leaned closer, as if parting with a little-known and dangerous truth.

“Did you know no building has ever collapsed because of a fire before?”

At this point, exhausted from chasing around Auckland all day, I fell asleep. As I woke up the conversation had come around to the moon landings.

“Yeah, it was all done in the studio. I’ve seen a documentary where the astronauts confessed.”

What might happen, I wondered, if he saw a documentary claiming Greenland was populated with talking peaches, or telling him to get a grip on reality, but I had to hand it to him: our paranoid new friend knew everything there was to know about New Zealand. By the time he went to fit himself with a new tin-foil hat and get ready for bed, we had a map liberally covered in pen marks.

“These three weeks’ll be gone like smoke. I’ve been travelling twelve years here and I still haven’t seen everything.”

He was certifiable, but he probably had a point.

Dave LOOK OUT! IT’S THE GOVERNMENT!