And then there was Auckland…

With Erika’s beautifully well written journal entries I cannot aspire to match them either in style of prose or with subject matter with the city as our surroundings. We arrived in Auckland on May 6th and it did not match up to any other part of our New Zealand travels.

Our main goal in Auckland was to sell the Green Machine, and despite the blog that is named after it, our home for the last 3.5 months proved to be very difficult to sell. We listed it in two different car markets and various web sites but to no avail. The best offer was about $650 from a dealer.

We though of some other more creative options for the vehicle:

Option1 - driving 90 mile beach, as it has lots of soft sand and is not recommended for 2 wheel drive vehicles it would likely be lost to the Ocean as the tides rose… We negated this option due to the possible environmental damage although I believe that if we drained all the fluids from the Van first this would reduce environmental concerns and make us much more likely to achieve our goal of not making the distance of the drive.

Option 2 – Trading the Van for a Pizza, beer, and gluten free burger. This was a valid option and I am sure that I could find a taker in one of the cheaper hostels however it lead Erika to the idea of trading the vehicle for a good story (see option 3).

Option 3 – Trading the van for a stuffed and mounted fierce snarling hedgehog. This option is contingent on finding someone with a hedgehog of the above description or someone with a hedge hog who knew a taxidermist and was not attached emotionally to that hedgehog.

Option4 – Throw the keys at a pedestrian and run for the airport

Given the strangeness of all the above options should give you a bit of insight into our Auckland experience. We sat in the backpackers’ car lot with a lot of other sellers and very few buyers and went stir crazy.

Auckland allowed us to finalise the details of some of the rest of our trip however. We have booked tickets to a quiet part of Thailand far away from the political unrest and will be returning to Vancouver on June 14. Our adventures will be cut a month and a half short due to some of my commitments to a contract back in the ``real world``. I hope we have a relaxing time in Thailand as we will need it after impersonating used car sales persons in Auckland.

In the end we found a nice Scottish/Irish couple we thought were worthy of our beautiful van, but unfortunately when they did the mechanical check we all found that the Van was not quite worthy of them. It required $900 in repairs. I liked the couple and decided that it would be better to give it to them than a dealer and let the green machine have a new lease on life. In the end the price agreed was $400. Considering I originally paid $1000 almost 2 year previously for it I was not overly concerned.

We were quite glad to be unencumbered and free to leave New Zealand which we did in style with our executive class tickets to Perth, Australia and then next day to the beautiful heat of Thailand.