This morning we finally got the planning together, but I just wanted to write a little summary of how we got back on track.

The original plan was to drive to Rotorua on the 16th, spend a day there, and then drive on to Napier and take a flight to Dunedin on the 19th. Well, cyclone Gabrielle had other plans, and this is what the Napier/Hawke’s Bay area looks like at the moment.

We decided it would be best to stay out of that area, and we found a flight from Rotorua to Christchurch (on the South Island), and quickly booked that. Because all that was left then would be fixing transportation between Christchurch and Dunedin, and that’s only 400km, so how hard could that be?

Turn out it’s incredibly hard, and there basically aren’t any rental cars left on the island. The was nothing available in Christchurch for the coming 3 days, except maybe if you rented for a week from some company with a dodgy website with broken captchas, and who didn’t send any form of receipt when you reserverd your car..

Ok, next plan might be to fly to Queenstown and drive back? Nope, no cars in Queenstown.

How about driving to Wellington, and the taking the ferry to the South Island, and then driving all the way to Dunedin with the car we currently have? (it would be 3 days of 4-5h driving, but doable). No luck. Turns out that everyone wants on that ferry, so there might be tickets available in a couple of weeks.

At this point I was getting a little worried, and our options for getting from Chirstchurch to Dunedin were basically taking a 4h taxi drive (if any taxi cab bought it), or there might be a 6h bus trip, but we went to bed instead, and got a worried night’s sleep.

Turns out that this was the right move, as the next morning, Malin found a flight from Wellington to Dunedin on the 19th, quickly booked that, and then set about cancelling everything else we’d booked the night before. Phew! So the current plan is to spend 2 nights in Rotorua, then take a chill drive down the country across a mountain range, sleep over in Wellington on Saturday, and then fly to Dunedin on Sunday :)