The only hostel in Kaitia is full.
We're forced to hike to the end of town, where we let a room for the night in the dodgiest hotel you can imagine. It's across the road from Liquorking, and up and down both sides of the street, the other businesses have been borded up. The common area is full of stale cigarette smoke and poor lighting, worn orange carpets and peeling wallpaper. The manager is missing most of his teeth and wears a dressing gown, but welcomes us very kindly before launching into reminisces about his glory days in the hippie colonies in California. He leads us upstairs, where the smoke smell is generously mixed with mildew. The bed in our room is made up, but we spread out our sleeping bags, feeling wary. Crumbs from someone else are scattered on the bedside tables and there are stale popcorn kernels on the floor. The ceiling is waterlogged, sagging under the weight of mold.
We take ourselves out for dinner.
Next day, we take the 8:00 am bus back to Auckland. It's a 7-hour bus ride, and I listen to an audio book while watching the fields and the rolling shoulders of land. At first I'm cheerful, but after four or five hours I'm starving and I badly need to use the bathroom-- but there are no breaks until 2:00, an hour from Auckland. I get really cranky. I haven't had breakfast and I slept poorly. My bladder hurts, my stomach hurts, and the scenery is redundant. I begin to complain a little loudly. It doesn't help.
We spend two nights in Auckland, which now seems amazing compared with Kaitaia. Our hostel has clean, crisp sheets and fresh paint. We brunch in a sunny outdoor garden, enjoying decadent pots of tea, fruit, and hot buttered toast. We walk among crowds, window shopping, getting lost in the glory of city lights and buzzing patios. We eat our fill of rich Indian food: Masala, Tandoori, rice, papadams, chutney, and naan. We have missed the city life.
On a whim we overnight in Hamilton, which turns out to be a bust. It's basically one or two streets, full of restaurants which have closed down. It's Saturday night, but the sidewalks are eerily quiet. A steady stream of traffic is leaving town. We find an empty pub, where we order sandwiches and plan our escape. The server brings us ketchup ("tomato sauce" in New Zealand) in a rubber tomato with a hole in the stem for squeezing. I think about stealing it, to send home to my father. That might sound weird, but you have to understand: he has always wanted a rubber tomato.
Maybe I will find some of those for sale somewhere.
John takes the reigns and decides on our next move: east, to Rotorua, land of volcanoes.
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