After 16 hours on a fairly decent plane from Buenos Aires we landed in Auckland to be met with our most stringent customs checks so far.  We were aware of these before we left Buenos Aires and we had cleaned our camping stuff with this in mind, but none-the-less having to tick a box saying that you are bringing prohibited stuff into the country was proving to be a little daunting.  It was a good thing that all my training on the buses had led to me enjoying one of my best nights sleep on a plane ever (people who knew me before this would know that I never slept much on planes) and I was refreshed for this early morning ordeal.  You tick the little box saying that you are bringing a tent into the country and you are told to head down to the “biohazard control point”!!!  This turns out to be a, very friendly giant, Maori with rubber gloves.  With a good sense of humour he asked us a few questions and then explained that he would have to take our tent to the “biohazard” laboratory.  He assured us that this would not take long.  Credit where credit is due we had our tent back 15 minutes later, having been inspected for nasties and our cleaning had done the trick.  We spent the next 5 hours in that “airport style coma” until our flight to Christchurch.

On first impressions New Zealand was not up to much.  There are no historical buildings of note and Christchurch was like a shitty back-water English town rather than a major capital (being the administrative capital of the Southern Island).  We knew this was not our reason for being in New Zealand, but we had 24 hours to kill until we picked up our hire car so we made the best of it.  The best of it turned out to be an Asian food court where for very little money (by Kiwi standards) we could eat tons of really good Asian food.  We tucked into the best Thai since London and the best Chinese since China.  Sated we passed out with our jetlag kicking in.

The next morning we awoke early to head straight out to get our hire car which, (prepare for a shock) I was pleased to see, was an Automatic Nissan Sunny.  I normally would not want to drive an automatic, but as we are here to see the country I really wanted the simplest motoring that we could get our hands on.  Pleased with our hire (BTW it is high season here and we still managed to get this car for about £12.50 per day) we headed off to kit it out as we are living out of the car for 3 weeks (camping each night, so really living out of the car).  We bought a cooler bag for a fridge and we were complete.  We left Christchurch heading North with it in our minds to go right up to Nelson and then back down the West coast.  After 12 months of linear travelling (i.e. you decide on your next destination, buy a ticket and go where it takes you) we felt that we had to stretch our legs with this new method of travelling, so about 1 hour up the coast we turned left and started a 2 day cut through to the West coast.