After almost a year in Latin America I took a flight from Santiago de Chile to Auckland in New Zealand. I almost missed this flight due to snow on the roads between Argentina and Chile. My bus was cancelled so I ended up having to fly to Uruguay to get a connecting flight to Chile. The plan for NZ was to spend a month traveling around in a camper van watching some of the rugby and seeing some of New Zealand. It was strange to be back in an English speaking country although it did take a short while to learn kiwi. Here's a quick lesson: finish almost every sentence with 'eh!', call everyone 'bro' and use the phrase 'sweet as, bro' as much as possible.
Auckland City Skyline
We had free use of a friends camper van, the only problem was it didn't start. We found a mechanic who got it started and performed the Warrenty Of Fittness. The WOF is the New Zealand equivalent of the NCT. Not surprisingly it failed, 2 small problems that would take time and money to fix. The mechanic was advising us not to go ahead with the repairs saying that we'd be wasting money as we couldn't trust it and we could end up spending more and more money on it. He seemed
rather negative considering we'd be paying him to do this work. We thought this a little odd and even joked that he was probably trying
to sell a camper van.
We decided to take some time to consider our options, collect the van and maybe even find a different mechanic. As we were about to leave the garage he told us that his friend Dave had a camper van for sale and that it would be perfect for us!
Later that day we passed a camper van rental place in the city center. We decided to venture in and see if they had any cancellations. Everyone had told us that there was no way we'd be able to rent anything due to the world cup. Surprisingly they had one available that we could take the next day. Only downside is that they spray paint all of their campers with graffiti so each has an individual design. This I could have done without.
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