A car tale

The GM EV1 came out in 1996, 26 years ago, and ever since then I've been saying, "My next car will be electric." However, as the saying goes, man plans and God laughs.

Of course, the EV1 was a bit of a novelty. First, you couldn't buy them, you could only lease them, in part because (I believe) they knew the batteries wouldn't last. Monthly payments started at US $500/month, which is equivalent to $950 today, and at the end of the lease you didn't own anything, so it was more like an expensive rental. Initially you could only get them if you lived in LA, Phoenix or Tucson because (I believe) they were worried about cold weather performance. But the real issue was a stated range of 70 to 100 miles (110-160km) with no charging stations anywhere. Nevertheless, they were a hit, which is why GM shut down the assembly line, cancelled the leases, repossessed the cars and crushed them. (I'm not kidding.)

In 1996 I was 27, making good money and had no kids: I could have afforded it. But my commute was 34 miles (54km) each way and my Dodge Colt - which I'd bought new in 1988 - was getting unreliable and I was always worrying if I'd get home or not. I wasn't going to pay all that money to have the same worry! (In addition, I was carpooling with two co-workers, and the EV1 was a two-seater, so that would have been awkward.)

I realized with my Dodge Colt that buying a new car was a sucker's game--the depreciation was ridiculous, and good brands were quite reliable--so I bought a 3-year-old Pontiac Sunfire convertible which, to this day, was my favourite car. I kept it until I moved to Pennsylvania in 2006, but when my relationship fell apart I decided to fly back to Los Angeles instead of driving, and I effectively abandoned it. (I honestly have no idea why I did that.) My ex-wife sold it for peanuts.

In 2007 car sharing - where you could rent a car parked on the street using your smartphone - had become a thing, and I went for three years without owning a car. However, in 2010 I got a job with a large consulting firm which required some travel and their standard package included either a BMW or a monthly stipend for using my own car. I hate BMWs for no rational reason. They were the status symbol for yuppies when I was younger, and I've always had a negative association with them. I did not want a BMW even if it was free! However, claiming a monthly stipend for using my own car when I didn't own a car seemed dishonest, so I decided to buy a cheap car and pocket the difference.

The Toyota Prius had been released worldwide in 2000 so I could have bought a used hybrid. The Nissan Leaf was introduced in 2010, so I could have bought a pure electric vehicle. However, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, I really loved having a convertible, and so I bought a used Peugeot 306 Cabriolet for £2000. The company stipend was £200 per month and I worked for the company for 4.5 years, so I did quite well out of it. I liked that car but when I decided to move to New Zealand I found -- for reasons mostly my own fault -- I couldn't sell it, and I ended up taking it to a scrapyard.

In New Zealand, my partner already had two ICE vehicles: A Toyota Wish (which I've never seen marketed anywhere else) and a BMW Z4, which her ex-husband had bought as a sort-of apology. (She divorced him anyway but kept the car.) The BMW was a two-seater and highly impractical for a young family -- plus it did nothing to change my feelings about BMW -- so we sold that about 6 months later. The Toyota Wish was a great little car but by 2016 the kids were outgrowing it. When some friends decided to leave New Zealand, I jumped at the chance to buy their Volkswagen Touran for NZ $10,000. At the time, all the hybrids were small four-seaters and the only EV that would fit five was a new Tesla Model X, which cost about NZ $70,000.

Fast forward to 2022, the 14-year-old Touran had several very expensive repairs and was no longer reliable enough to be our only means of transportation. Plus with two new drivers in the family we could definitely use a second car. New Zealand was flooded with used Nissan Leafs, but because they don't regulate battery temperature, you have no way of knowing their actual lifespan and I wasn't willing to take a gamble. About the same time, New Zealand introduced a "clean car rebate" and the cheapest new EV - an MG ZS SUV - cost NZ $42,000 after rebate. It comfortably sat 5 and had a range of 270 miles (440km), which was perfect. There was one problem: There weren't any available in New Zealand.

We were told they'd be available in December so we patiently waited. In November, the local equivalent of Consumer Reports came out with a study showing hybrids were much more reliable than EVs. This was counter-intuitive, since the EVs had fewer moving parts, but the problem seemed to be new companies (especially Chinese firms, such as the one that had bought the MG branding) were new and still learning, plus they were trying to cram in new features. This scared me off a bit, and I decided to look at plug-in hybrids (PHEV) as a good compromise: The Prius PHV, for example, had an EV range of about 16 miles (26km), enough to get us to the airport and back. There weren't many used PHEVs available, and the ones that were sold for $3-4k over their non-plug-in counterparts. Even at current petrol prices, it would take a while to recoup that difference.

Then I saw a dealer listing a 2014 Prius PHV for $12k, which was the going rate for a regular Prius. I was sure there was a catch, but the car had just passed its Warrant of Fitness, so I knew it was roadworthy. I even got an independent inspection and he said it was great for its age. I decided that because the PHV versions are so rare, the dealer had unwittingly priced it the same as a regular Prius. I decided to buy it, even though the car was 220 miles (350km) away and I hadn't seen it.

Of course that's not the end of the story. We're also looking at buying a house, so I didn't want to eat into our downpayment. I was already aware one of the big banks was "virtue signalling" with a special interest rate for EV cars, so I contacted them. I have a great credit rating and plenty of cash, so I thought the process would take a few hours at most. So far it's been over a week, and I still haven't gotten a definitive answer yet. The issue does not have anything to do with me, but everything to do with their process: I had to fill out an online form with all my financial details, then they sent me an email which I had to respond to with all my financial details, then they called me and I had to tell them all my financial details!! At this point it's almost comical, except the dealer is getting very agitated that I haven't paid for it yet. The bank won't even tell me how the process works until I'm approved, so I don't know if they're paying the dealer or just giving me the funds. It's just nuts.

There are only a few flights from Wellington to New Plymouth and they are designed for commuters, leaving at 7am and 4:30pm, neither of which would work. On Wednesdays there is a 12:30pm flight and I intend to be on it tomorrow, even though I haven't paid for the car yet..Hopefully the dealer won't mind, and this will all work out. 

And maybe my next car will be fully electric.

Sparky humour

What did the electrician say right before his death? Don't worry, the power is off.

In the UK (and NZ) a sparky is an electrician. Oddly, there's no equivalent nickname for plumbers, carpenters, etc. But then, they don't have the sense of humor a sparky has. If a plumber installs pipes the wrong way, they leak. If a builder frames a wall the wrong way, it collapses. But a sparky can run electricity pretty much any damn way he wants and get it to work. The trick is that when you're trying to troubleshoot an issue, you basically have to reverse-engineer everything he did, with the added bonus that you can't see any of the cabling. I think they know that and so go out of their way to run wiring in the most convoluted fashion, just to amuse themselves knowing that for the next 50 years people will be trying to figure out what they did.

Our house was last renovated in the 50s, I'm guessing, based on the use of fluorescent strip lights in all the bedrooms. They looked horrific, even more so because the batten covers were broken or missing. When they started flickering, I bought floor lamps but they weren't hooked up to the switch so you'd have to turn on the fluorescent light to find the floor lamp!

About two months ago, someone showed me an LED batten designed to replace the strip lights. Whilst not ideal, the cost was reasonable (about $40 US) and they looked a lot better, so I bought one and put it in one of the rooms. It was fairly easy to install but there were two issues: 1) It wasn't exactly the same size, and someone had painted around the strip light, so this now exposed a chunk of unpainted ceiling; and 2) it was three times as bright!! Way too bright for a bedroom. 

I found another batten that was half as bright and installed it in the second bedroom. Again, installation was easy and it revealed a chunk of unpainted ceiling, but it still looked much better than the old light and it didn't flicker or hum. It was still a bit bright but it was OK, so I ended up replacing the first light with the same model. 

My plan was to return the ultra-bright light but then for some reason I decided to put it in my office, which had a double strip light, even though I didn't have any problems with that light. I turned off the switch and pulled the old light down, just as I had done in the bedrooms. I hadn't really paid attention to the wiring because I'd already done this twice before. I connected the new light and flipped the switch just to make sure everything was working and...nothing. 

I thought maybe there was a loose connection so I turned off the switch, got on my step ladder, started checking the little screws clamping the wires and got a nice, little shock. 240 volts right through my hands. Thankfully I wasn't grounded and I was able to release what I was touching, so the only damage done was to my pride. Nevertheless, I decided to stop working on it for the night and deal with it the next day. 

That evening I noticed the light in the stairway was out, and later one of the kids mentioned the light in the bathroom was out as well. Putting two and two together I realised I'd screwed something up. My assumptions about how the light was wired were completely wrong, and it would take me two days to figure it out, in part because of two things:

1) The wire I thought went to the switch actually went to the upstairs bathroom. When I first checked it, the circuit was open (ie no current flow) but later on I checked it again and it was closed (ie short-circuited). I could not figure out how this was possible, but later I realised it was because the bathroom switch was originally off but a child had flipped it on (and left it on).

2) if you threw the bathroom switch the bathroom light wouldn't come on, but the stairway light did! I'm still not sure how that is possible, but I did realise the cause: After my first failure, I had disconnected some of the wires but left two wires connected. As far as I'm concerned, that was strictly voodoo. 

On top of that, the wiring was so old the insulation kept coming off in my hands and I kept having to shorten the leads to minimize exposed wires. There wasn't a lot of room to spare and I was very concerned that if I needed an electrician to install more romex, he was going to insist everything be brought up to modern code. 

The obvious solution was to hook the hot and cold wires together, but with one circuit closed I was sure I was going to short-circuit the entire house. However, I didn't have any other ideas so I hooked them up, grabbed the fire extinguisher from the kitchen and turned on the electricity. To my amazement, everything worked again!

Now you're probably imagining me working in my nice, clean office standing on a stepstool, but nothing could be further from the truth. Two weeks ago I'd dragged in three boxes of food from the Civil Defense (ie. earthquake) supplies, and I'd replaced all the expiring food but hadn't gotten around to finishing the inventory, so they were spread across the office. And the stepstool was just one step too short, so I'd brought in the only other thing I had: a full-sized aluminum ladder, which took up the entire room. It was so tight, if I dropped something on the wrong side of the ladder I practically had to take the ladder out of the room to get to the other side. (And yes, aluminum ladders are a poor choice when working with electricity, but I made sure I was wearing rubber-soled shoes.) 

The old strip light had space for the wire connectors but the new light didn't, so I needed to shove them into the ceiling, except the hole wasn't big enough. I could have gone to the garage for an appropriate tool but instead I grabbed a kitchen knife and started stabbing the ceiling. Eventually the hole was big enough and, 24 hours later, we haven't had a ceiling fire so I'm counting this as a win.

Photo: I did wrap everything in electrical tape before so I'm sure it will be fine.

The last thing was to snap the light to two clips mounted on the ceiling. I got one in but could not get the other, and eventually I gave up. So far one clip seems to be holding it. The other thing is the office ceiling wasn't painted, but appears to have had some sort of wallpaper instead. The paper had chipped and cracked and each time I brushed the light against the ceiling, large chunks flaked off. Some of them were big enough to drop in the bin, but most broke apart and needed to be hoovered. Oh, and the ceiling was fibrous, which makes me wonder if it had asbestos.

But the important point is that it's finished and I know better than to touch the electrics again...at least until this weekend, when I replace the heated towel rack in the kids bathroom.

Photo: The wires into the switch. Note the red romex with the single black wire--what the hell is that for?! 

Footnote: A few months after installing the light in my office, I noticed a slight odour that wouldn't go away. After ignoring it for several weeks, I finally took down the light and found the wall-paper like ceiling coating was discoloured, as if by heat. I couldn't remember which DIY shop I bought the light from, so I googled the model to see which came up, and found a recall notice! Apparently these light fixtures were starting house fires!! I immediately took it back to the shop and traded it in, very grateful that a little discoloration was all that had happened.

Rethinking Karl Marx

I hate thinking. That's not true: I don't mind thinking, I just hate having my assumptions challenged. That may just be a sign of age.

I never studied Marxism - or any economic theory - at uni, but I was a rabid Libertarian when I was a teenager. I believed that personal liberty was paramount and the only legitimate function of government was to prevent one person from interfering in the peaceful activities of another. For me, that was the definition of "freedom."

This extended to the market, of course, and my argument was simple: A government, being comprised of citizens, can only do what its citizens are capable of; it does not have any magical powers. Therefore, any government interference does not "create" anything; it only forces people to behave in ways they would not normally choose to. To put this another way, if the Air Force wanted to spend two billion dollars on a new B2 bomber and they created a GoFundMe page that only raised $100 million, the difference -- in this case, $1.9 billion -- the government forcibly takes from its citizens via taxes. If citizens refuse to pay, they go to jail and their assets are taken. If they refuse to go to jail (and defend themselves) they are killed.

So for me, the definition of freedom necessarily included a free market, and in the post-industrial revolution, that meant capitalism. Even in the 80s, with corporate raiders, banking crises and a rising national debt (which had just hit $2 billion dollars!) I was unabashedly capitalist because I didn't believe government knew what was best, and all they could do was subvert people's free will and replace it with the desires of a few. In other words, all government intervention could do was introduce bureaucracy and corruption.

If I had problems with America's free-market system, you can imagine what I thought of socialist or communist systems. Now I won't deny I was a "cold war kid" (as described by Billy Joel) and was fed a steady diet of propaganda about the "Godless communists" (as described by Ronald Reagan). Of course, I conflated Russia, Communism and Karl Marx; the failure of one was the failure of all, making it easy to repudiate all three without thinking critically about any one of them.

My daughter is studying sociology and asked me to review a paper where she reviewed Karl Marx's approach to sociology. I was quite surprised because I'd always considered Marx an economist, not a sociologist, but here he wasn't talking about revolution or the value of goods, but instead about how society should treat its people. And he was doing so just after the first industrial revolution when society was completely redefining how people were treated.

Before 1760, most people were tenant farmers, and although they did not own their own land, they produced their own "goods" (in this case, food) which they sold for a profit. With the industrial revolution, Marx noted, most people no longer produced their own goods but instead sold their labour to the "bourgeoisie" who controlled the means of production. ("Bourgeois" was a medieval French term for a person who lived in a walled town that had become synonymous with the middle class.)

Karl Marx was asking what it meant to be "free" and, unlike me -- born into a society of wealth, social mobility and personal freedoms -- he came to a different conclusion. He argued that forcing people to sell their time in pursuit of wages, with no input or control over the finished product, not only devalued them as humans but also "alienated" them from their creative process and social relationships. They were no longer pluralistic individuals part of society but now simply cogs in a machine, incapable of being free.

Growing up in a capitalist society, I never considered any other option. The goal was to have in-demand skills which could command a high value in order to maintain a degree of freedom and a work-life balance. If you didn't have those skills, it was your fault, and you deserved to struggle. I always recognised how lucky I was to have in-demand skills, but I never considered how it would have affected my life if I didn't.

However, thanks to my daughter, I've been forced to question not only my world-view and my sense of worth, but also my views on Karl Marx. Whilst I still don't agree with his conclusions, I have to acknowledge that the questions we was struggling with 150 years ago are still valid -- if not more so -- today. For most people today, the only way to earn money is to sell themselves. Capitalism has turned the world's oldest profession into the world's only profession.

Moonlighting as a plumber

Initial LVR restrictions in October 2013 restricted banks to no more than 10% of loans beyond 80% LVR. In 2015, the restrictions were revised to target price inflation in Auckland, easing the restrictions to 15% over 80% LVR for non-Auckland loans, and increasing to 5% over 70% LVR for investor purchases in Auckland. In 2016 the restrictions tightened further on Auckland investors, to 5% over 60% LVR.

Merriam-Webster defines "moonlight" (verb) as "to hold a second job in addition to a regular one." However, I've taken a more literal definition.

Our property has been subdivided and now has three homes on one water connection. Normally when they do this, they put individual shut-offs on each property. (In New Zealand a shut-off is called a "toby" for some reason.) Of course, for our house, they didn't do this. Since Wellington doesn't meter water use, sharing a connection isn't a problem, only an inconvenience if you need to shut off the water for any reason.

For the flat behind us, the shut-off is on our garden tap (faucet) hose. It's not labelled and doesn't look like a shut-off; the only reason I know is because one day I shut it off...

Anyway, the point is that we don't have a shut-off for our house, and the kitchen tap (faucet) doesn't have a shut-off either. I don't know if this is a British thing or a New Zealand thing, but the pipes come straight out of the wall into the tap (faucet). In order to change a washer, you need to shut off the water to the whole house. Or in my case, I need to shut off water to three houses!!

So when our kitchen tap (faucet) started dripping, I just tightened the handle. When it started streaming, I tightened it more. When it started pouring, I tightened it more. Everyone complained they couldn't open it, and I don't know why I bothered: Tightening wasn't really helping. One night I measured it and found it was draining a litre per minute. That's over half a million litres (130,000 gallons) of fresh water wasted per year! Even though I wasn't paying for it, a sense of environmental responsibility goaded me to action.

So one night I went to the street and examined the tobies. I say plural because there was on on either side of my driveway, and no indication of which one was mine. I pried open the metal covers, expecting to see a valve, and all I saw was dirt. So I gave up and called a plumber.

New Zealand is going through a bit of a housing crisis. (There's even a Wikipedia page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_property_bubble). For much of this crisis, the Conservative government was in power and their response was, "Great, our property values are increasing!". Even though New Zealand was hardly affected by the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the Reserve Bank kept interest rates near zero for no economic reason. Loan-to-value restrictions were relaxed in 2015, so more people qualified for loans with less than a 20% deposit. And New Zealand is one of the few countries that doesn't have a capital gains tax, making property much more attractive than any other investment. (The government did introduce a capital gains tax for investors who flipped a property within five years, but all you had to do was register the property as your primary residence during that five years and you were automatically exempted!)

Of course, the Conservative government couldn't deny that housing was becoming unaffordable for most Kiwis so they did what any good government does: They blamed the Chinese. Seriously, even though less than 3% of home buyers were off-shore, the government pretended the issue was cash-rich Asians bidding up the market. Even though Labour won in 2018, sentiment was such that they passed a law forbidding foreign ownership. Two years on, it was shown to have had no impact in the housing market whatsoever.

The major problem, as the banks repeatedly pointed out, was immigration. New Zealand has always had a problem: A well-educated workforce with a small economy. There has always been a "brain drain" to other countries, particularly Australia, which could afford better salaries. In 2012, for example, 87,500 New Zealanders moved overseas, 60% to Australia, which was experiencing a mining boom. (Sir Robert Muldoon, Prime Minister of New Zealand, once famously said that New Zealanders moving to Australia "raised the IQ of both countries.")

However, in 2013 that mining boom collapsed, dragging down the entire Australian economy. By 2015, the Australian dollar had lost fully 25% of it's value against the New Zealand dollar, and Kiwis started returning en masse. They were educated, well paid, had cash reserves and needed housing. From 2015 to 2021, house prices doubled. In 2015, the median house price in New Zealand was $430,000. In 2021, it was $850,000.

And the underlying problem was that, because of the Conservative government's laissez faire attitude, new homes were not being built. In 2017, only 30,000 building consents were issued. In the same year, New Zealand had a net immigration of 70,000! Perhaps the government believed there were an extra 40,000 vacant homes around the country that could make up the difference?

When the Labour government came in to power, one of their first policies was "Kiwibuild" with the stated goal of 100,000 additional houses by 2028. Unfortunately they promised 1,000 of those houses would be available within a year -- when it turned out only 300 had been finished, the programme was largely ridiculed. However, it did have the effect of kick-starting the construction industry, and in 2021 48,000 building consents were issued, a 60% increase from 2017.

Which brings me back to my problem: I could not get a plumber for love or money. I tried several but they were clearly on bigger projects and coming out to change a washer wasn't on their radar. So the kitchen tap continued gushing. It was so loud, you could hear it over the television. It needed to get sorted.

So one night, as I was putting out the trash, I again opened the toby and started digging in the dirt. It wasn't long before I had exposed the valve, but I could not turn it. To be fair, it was inside a small pipe and I've been having issues with my shoulders, so I could not get a good purchase on it, but again I gave up.

One night I was in the garage, cleaning up. (I had recently installed a kayak hoist and gotten the kayaks off the garage floor, but that's another long, painful story.) I came across a very odd piece of metal that was bent and had a hook at the end; I have no idea where it came from or what it was for, but I realised I could insert it into the pipe and use it to leverage the toby closed. I waited until the wee hours, when the neighbours were asleep, and quietly snuck out to the street and managed to turn off the water.

I raced inside, disassembled the kitchen tap (faucet) and replaced the rubber washer. I went back to the street and turned the water back on. It occurred to me, since everyone in my house was also asleep, if something went awry the kitchen would be flooded by the time I got back to the house. I did it anyway.

Thankfully everything went fine. I went upstairs to find that not only was everyone awake, but my daughter had tried to take a shower at 1am and discovered the water was off.

(Who takes a shower at 1am?!)

Anyway, I was overjoyed but I didn't say anything; I wanted my wife to "discover" that the kitchen tap no longer dripped. Unfortunately, the next morning I discovered the kitchen tap was leaking almost as much as before! I googled it and noticed the tap was supposed to have a nut to keep the washer tight, which was missing on mine. That night, at 1am, I again sneaked out, turned off the water, disassembled the tap, found a nut that seemed to fit, and put it all back together. The tap leaked only a little bit.

While it was a marked improvement, I didn't understand why it was still leaking at all, so I googled it. It turns out, if you over-tighten the handle you can distort the brass "seat" the washer sits against, creating a leak. The solution is to get a "tap reseater" which is a little metal device that can gouge out the brass and create a flat seat. I bought one today, it's almost midnight and I'm just waiting for my dishwasher to finish so I can sneak out and turn the water off again....

P.S. It worked, sort of. As you can see from the photo, the seat was actually cracked and so water was leaking through the gap. The "right" solution would be to replace the seat, but that would mean drilling it out, tapping the pipe and then screwing in a new seat, which seemed like a lot of work. Instead I used the tap reseater to grind down the existing seat as far as I dare, hoping the washer could then cover the gap. I honestly didn't think it would make a huge difference but it reduced the stream to an occasional drip, which is good enough for me!

The $5000 vacation, part 2

This isn't really a part two, it's just another holiday that happens to cost about the same as The $5,000 vacation, part 1.

That holiday, three years ago, was the first "proper" family holiday we had taken.(At least, the first one that didn't involve tents.) And the reason we did it was because we were worried it would be the last opportunity for a family holiday -- our eldest was heading to Israel for a year, and then to Uni, plus the other two were now teenagers with their own interests. We just didn't know how much longer we had. 

A year later, our eldest was back from Israel and we were talking about another family holiday, this one to the UK as the kids hadn't been there in over ten years. I bought plane tickets in February 2020; a few weeks later, the world shut down.

(Thankfully they refunded our money, but not because of Covid: Our flights connected in Hong Kong and at the time there was a lot of unrest so the airline cancelled all flights.)

The New Zealand borders were effectively shut for two years. Kiwis could still fly but you had to spend two weeks in quarantine, so a two-week holiday meant four weeks off work plus an extra $2000 per person for the privilege of sitting in a hotel room 24x7. On top of that, people who were desperate to move back to New Zealand were fighting for those slots so it seemed highly inappropriate to take one for a quick holiday.

Although the border controls kept Covid out of New Zealand for almost two years, they finally failed and suddenly we were having 20,000 new cases per day. Stopping 50 cases at the border was recognised as inconsequential and they dropped the managed isolation process. (They're still only allowing kiwis until 2 May, at which point most anyone can visit.)

So quarantine was no longer an issue and Easter was coming. In New Zealand, like most Commonwealth countries, Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays so you get a four-day weekend. Unlike most Commonwealth countries, Australia and New Zealand don't observe Remembrance Day in November (Veteran's Day in the US) but instead observe ANZAC day to commemorate the Australian and New Zealand soldiers sent to Gallipoli in 1915. This year, ANZAC happens to be the Friday after Easter, so you can get ten days off but only take four days of holiday. I had requested that time off last December, long before I had any plans.

We had just done a road trip of the north island in December and a camper van tour of the south island in January, so we talked about an international holiday. We didn't want a long-haul flight or even a layover at another airport so there were only two options, Australia or Fiji. And Australia kind of sucks.

(Of course that's not true. I quite enjoyed my visits to Sydney and Melbourne, and I know there's a whole continent left to explore, but now that I am a New Zealand citizen I am contractually obligated to insult Australia at every opportunity.)

My wife and I had been in Fiji twice for layovers heading to the States. Fiji doesn't mind if you leave the airport and so that's what we planned to do. Unfortunately, the first time I went through the wrong door and we got stuck in the international terminal for six hours. The second time we went through the right door and spent the afternoon swimming and eating at a resort hotel across the road. It was lovely and we talked about going back, but there were always too many other places to go. Now it was perfect.

It didn't hurt that Fiji Airways was having a sale.

Like New Zealand, they also closed their borders for 18 months which, for an island nation dependent on tourism, was quite impressive. They re-opened their borders in December with a vaccination rate around 69% and, although they had a spike in January, right now their case rate is just 38 per million people. (New Zealand, by comparison, has a vaccination rate of 78% but the current case rate is 3,330 per million!!) So they are highly motivated to get international visitors, plus historically April is the shoulder season. We're staying on the main island because that's where the medical services are, which is just an unfortunate reality of our lives now. However, we're going to spend three days on the south coast (near Pacific Harbour), then a day in Denarau followed by two days on the north coast (Volivoli). We didn't opt for all-inclusive resorts (those are still insanely expensive) but we are staying at nice resort hotels on the beach.

Both girls decided to join us for part of the week but then they needed to fly to Auckland to attend a youth seminar. Our youngest wanted to go to a Scout camp over the weekend, and although he could have joined us after, I don't think he wanted to fly on his own. We booked the flights,  hotels, rental car, airport shuttle, travel insurance and budgeted NZ $50 per person per day for food and entertainment. The total came to $4,842 NZD for a week in Fiji, just $150 less than our 10-day trip to Christchurch three years ago. This time, though, I did budget to feed the kids!

All that's left now is to cross our fingers and hope our world doesn't change again in the next four weeks...

New Zealand heatmap

Google photos created a "heat map" of my last 7 years in New Zealand. Still a lot of places to visit...

Food processor

A few years ago, my wife's food processor died. I had brought my small one from the UK, but it just didn't cut it. We were pretty skint at the time but I looked up some recommendations and found a used one on Trademe (our equivalent of eBay) that looked good, so I bought it.

My wife hated it.

To be fair, it came with 32 pieces (I counted!) and none of them worked particularly well. When I had to shred 10kg of potatoes for hanukkah, I would put the end bits through the machine two or three times, and still had to pick out the chunks. Recently she tried to make falafel and it was struggling with soaked chickpeas. That was the last straw: She wanted a new food processor.

Not to make the same mistake, I looked up some recommendations, identified three models that looked good and then took my wife to three different shops to see them. She liked the mid-range model and I was about to shell out NZ $324 for it.

While I was looking for the box, she looked on Trademe and saw a listing for the same model, in Wellington, closing the next day. Current bid was $20.

The next day I put in a bid and we got it for $21.

We picked it up today and it's perfectly fine. My wife got one she's happy with and she saved us $300. She's pretty amazing that way.

My next step was selling our old one. Unfortunately while I was photographing it I discovered two cracks and two missing pieces, but as long as I can get more than $20 for it, we'll come out even.

Freedom camping

New Zealand shuts down for three weeks around Christmas and New Years. Everyone is forced to take the time off and, because it's the middle of summer, everyone goes camping. We were reluctant to do anything this year because, after two years, Covid had finally gotten into the community. However, at the last moment we decided to do a driving tour of the north island to visit friends and family. We spent a week driving from Wellington to Auckland and back around and, while it was great to see everyone, I really hate driving. We covered 1700 kilometers (just over 1000 miles) and I was very glad to get home.

Of course, because everyone goes camping over that three week period, there's a slump immediately afterward and I got an email from a campervan rental agency that a 2-bed self-contained van was on sale for NZ $95/day. It's normally around $250/day, which I think is ridiculous (I can get a flight, hotel and rental car for less!) so I was intrigued. Wellington celebrates its "anniversary day" in early January (to commemorate the arrival of the first settler ship on January 22nd 1840) so we had a holiday coming up, and we still had some credits from our aborted Queenstown holiday 14 months earlier.

The next thing I knew, we had a 6-day/5-night driving holiday of the south island planned!! This would "only" cover 1100km (about 700 miles) and would include Milford Sound, Doubtful Sound, Franz Josef glacier and Arthur's Pass. It also meant we could visit Gloria, a deconsecrated church that a friend's son had painted bright pink.

In my head, a self-contained campervan meant freedom camping. With one of the lowest population densities of any country (#211 of 250 countries according to Wikipedia) and one of the highest natural beauty densities (a standard I just made up), being able to camp on public land throughout New Zealand, for free, was considered a birthright. Unfortunately, a few people -- mostly young, overseas visitors -- took the opportunity to travel cheap and leave a mess, which the locals did not appreciate, so in 2011 New Zealand tried to reign this in. Unfortunately,  they left it to the local councils which created a hodge-podge of rules and restrictions with no transparency, so to find out if you could camp somewhere you practically had to go to the site and look at the signage!

New Zealand tried to make exceptions for "self-contained vehicles" (essentially motorhomes and campervans that had their own toilet) but the only requirement was the vehicle needed a blue sticker saying it was self-contained. A lot of people just printed their own sticker and it quickly became meaningless.

New Zealand also has a large number of "holiday parks" which are a mix of tents, vehicles and cabins with communal kitchens and toilets. We've camped at holiday parks several times and they're brilliant, but if I already had a kitchen and toilet, I was affronted at the idea of paying $50/night! In addition, I wanted to wake up someplace where I could see water or mountains, not a neighboring campervan. However, with no real guidance we left it to the fates, and here's what happened:

Day 1: Parked at a holiday park for $48. (I thought it was $24 but it turned out to be $24 per person.)

Day 2: Parked at a  holiday park  but only paid $15 by promising not to use the communal kitchen or toilets. Lovely view of the lake.

Day 3: Parked in the parking lot of the AJ Hackett bungy experience.

Day 4: Parked in a  holiday park for $40.

Day 5: Parked at Lake Brunner for free. Fantastic view.

So it took us five days but we finally figured it out, and it was lovely.

Actually, the whole visit was spectacular. I've got about 130 photos (and a few videos) of the trip here.

After we got home, we got an alert that there had been a covid "location of interest" at the Christchurch airport about two days before we were there. While we were not at risk, it was just a reminder that New Zealand travel was going to become much riskier. Unlike the rest of the world, we really haven't had to worry about covid for the past two years, so this is quite new for us. I expect we're not going to be travelling any more in 2022, but hopefully the numbers will have peaked and fallen and we can travel safely again by the end of the year, in time for the next three-week shutdown.