Vern: At 5:30am the alarm tore us out of a deep sleep. It was still very very dark outside, but we dressed, slithered through into the front seats and defrosted the windscreen. Then we rolled out of our rest stop and back on to the Kawhia Harbour road. We only had an hour. The tiny beach town of Kawhia is where the first Maoris landed in New Zealand and the canoe on which they arrived is buried here in a sacred place. It's unmarked so as to keep it sacred. We, h...

Vern: This was my favourite day in New Zealand. It started slowly with a side of the road breakfast and a drive into the 'Kiwiana capital', Otorohanga. In order to get travellers to stop here, they've tried to make the town's main road a celebration of all things Kiwi, so cut-outs of pavlovas, jandles (flip-flops), and Kiwi birds hang off the street lights and blow around in the wind. The jacked up I-site tourist centre then cleverly sells T-shirts decorated with...

Vern: A thin sheet of ice covered the windscreen of the campervan that morning and I had to use the plastic shovel (which we'd bought for burying our landmines but never needed because of the abundance of public loos in New Zealand) to scrape it off. Dodging the law, we crept out of the campsite at 6:30am and with nothing pressing to do (such is road life) we returned to the parking spaces along side Kuirau Park in central Rotorua and set the kettle boiling. It w...

Vern: The closest town with a tyre-shop was Taupo and we pulled in there to get our two punctured tyres patched. Thirty bucks per puncture plus two bucks per each new valve. Hmm, okay fine. Balancing? No thanks, it's not OUR car. But it'll be bumpy. Don't care. (I don't know why people would ever buy ex-rental cars). The mechanics hoisted the car up and got started and we set out to empty the waiting-room coffee machine to get our money's worth. Then one of the ...

Vern: Andrea, by now very confident in the righthand side driver's seat, headed us northwards up the North island and we occasionally recognised towns and roadside features which had whizzed past in the opposite direction just 23 days before. Outside of tiny Foxton we blew through the intersection with Puke Puke Road, which I presume connects the only residential suburb with the pub. In Sanson, the next town we passed through, Andrea pointed out a little stall wi...