Cheaper than a Banana

After the whole banana incident, which I must add that Tom took with complete equanimity, it was still only about 6:30 in the morning (after a nearly 13 hour flight) and groggy and gobsmacked as we were, it was time to go find our rental car. 

We were renting from a company called Discount Car Rentals through a third party broker called ‘Economybookings.com’ so it shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise when we were taken by shuttle to a gravel lot some miles away from the airport and led to our car— a dusty old 2012 Toyota Aqua (incongruously colored bright orange) that had 114,569 kilometres on the odometer….

Weirdly, the radio, display screen, warning stickers etc. were entirely in Japanese, and the car was so old and so basic that it did not even have a single usb hub for charging our phones. [Our Uber from the airport to the hotel also displayed in Japanese and our driver told us that most used cars sold in New Zealand are actually used Japanese cars.]

Once on the road, despite a few rattles and odd engine sounds, the car proved easy to handle and quite fun to drive on the very windy roads we took up the east  and down the west coasts of the North Island. Only one thing utterly confounded us: the turn signal wand was on the right side of the steering column and the wiper wand on the left—the exact opposite of every car we have driven our entire adult lives.

It turns out that the muscle memory of flipping one’s left hand upward for a right turn and downward for a left turn is deeply ingrained and extraordinarily hard to override. We spent the entire 5 days we had the car turning the wipers on and off instead of signalling turns and lane changes—much to the confusion of other drivers on the road, I’m sure!

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