Warning

If any of my readers are ever considering hitchhiking in New Zealand, beware of the area around Cheviot. Cheviot itself is a wide spot in the road (pop. 390), but the people around there are very, very friendly and helpful. I know, because I got rides with people from that area several times, and at some point they'd turn off on a road to nowhere (well, to their homes, probably), leaving me stranded.

"Are you sure you don't want to stay at our place for the night?" they'd say. "It's no trouble. What if you don't get a ride? You could be stuck here all night."

And me, the idiot, would reply, "No, no, it's no problem. I'm sure someone will come along."

If this ever happens to you, take them up on their offer, especially if it's towards the end of the day.

I once spent two hours waiting for a ride at one of these turnoff points, with my then boyfriend. Just as it was getting dark and we were about to give up and look for a soft spot on the ground to sleep on, an insane old fisherman in a beat up pickup truck with several crates of beer on the back screeched to a halt and asked us where we were going.

"Kaikoura," we said.

"Jump in," he said, and we did, idiotically grateful.

He told us that he often picked up hitchhikers there.

"It's a bad spot," he said. "Not much traffic. You could be stuck here all night. Happy to help!"

Of course we did not know he was insane. He just seemed rather jovial. We climbed into the cab, and ... well, I guess we should have been warned when he told us he knew the road like the back of his hand and could drive it blindfolded, but we were so relieved to get a ride that all we did was thank him effusively. We probably thought he was harmless because he was old.

Ha. Ha.

That old guy drove like a madman. He hardly seemed to look at the road, so perhaps he was right about the blindfold thing. But he seemed to have perfected a sort of no-hands driving method as well, waving his arms as he told us a series of increasingly wild fish stories which we only half heard because we were busy holding onto various bits of the truck and each other and trying not to shriek. It was not so bad for the first bit but once we got to the hills it was terrifying, and we were mad to stay in the truck. (When we talked about it later we discovered that I was determined that if my boyfriend wasn't complaining then I wouldn't either, and he said that he was waiting for me to complain, and when I didn't he thought that if I could cope then he could too. How's that for stupid?)

At some point our frighteningly jolly driver asked if we would like a beer. Thinking he would have to stop the truck to get the beer from the back, and welcoming that prospect, we accepted. He responded by cackling dementedly and taking the next hairpin bend EXTRA FAST so that the crates would slide across the back of the pickup to his side and he could lean out through the window and grab a can for us, still driving at full speed. We told each other later that if he'd stopped we probably would have risked sleeping rough rather than get back into the truck. But as it was we were too terrified to think straight, and concentrated on holding on tight as we hurtled over the mountains in the dark. That beer maneuver was the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced in a vehicle. Most of him wasn't even in the cab. And he did it TWICE. Frantic cries of, "We'll share this one!" did not prevent the second occurrence, because he wanted one for himself as well.

The beer did not help our nerves, but we survived, so I suppose I shouldn't complain.

"You guys were a bit quiet," said our benefactor as he finally dropped us off at our destination. "Never had a ride like that before, eh? Told you I knew the road! Got you here in double quick time, too! "

"You certainly did," we agreed. "Er, thanks very much."

"Going anywhere tomorrow? Want a lift?"

"NO!" we chorused. "I mean, no, thank you."

He was still cackling as he drove off. We could hear him.

People think that hitchhiking is dangerous because of the risk of assault, theft, rape, murder, and other crimes that occasionally happen. But those sorts of incidents are very rare. I have met the biggest hitchhhiking danger in New Zealand, and he is probably still hanging around Cheviot, waiting for his next victim. He'll probably be about ninety by now, but I very much doubt that will stop him.

Thing the Fourth

The Editter has written about her holiday down south in New Zealand. One of the pictures is of the lupins around Lake Tekapo, and it brought back a memory, which I will call Thing the Fourth, since it is another thing you did not know about me.

I used to hitchhike, in New Zealand. And I loved it. Not having the money to go anywhere was just an excuse, really, a way to justify doing something I wanted to do anyway that everybody said was dangerous and a young woman on her own shouldn't do. Actually the most dangerous thing that ever happened to me was being picked up by a bad driver, and I wasn't hitchhiking alone that time. Most of the time I got picked up by very kind people who told me how lucky I was to have been picked up by them, because YOU NEVER KNOW, it's terribly dangerous, do your parents know you're doing this? (The answer to that was no. If I was traveling from home I used to get my mother to drop me off at the bus stop, and as far as she knew I was on a bus.)

On one of these hitchhiking trips I'd taken the ferry from Wellington to Picton on my way back to Dunedin, where I was living at the time, and then had to face an interminable wait for the next ferry to arrive because the cars always got off first, which meant there was no traffic for the hitchhikers by the time we got onto the road. While I was walking along (because walking is less boring than just standing there, and also the hitchhikers needed to space out a bit because we'd started off all in an intimidating clump) I met up with a Swiss woman who was also hitching, and we started chatting and decided to join forces. She wasn't feeling very well. She had tropical ulcers, which she'd picked up in the Philippines and had had treated there, but they were back.

We had a great trip, anyway. Our first ride was with a guy in an antique car who had passed us (and all the other hitchhikers) several times, going back and forth along the road, and was obviously going nowhere very fast. We were pretty surprised when he stopped. He told us he couldn't take us far, he was just tuning up the car, but perhaps we'd enjoy the ride anyway. We did. It was a great car, although it didn't go very fast. We waved at other hitchhikers as we cruised slowly past, feeling like royalty, and they did gratifying double-takes when they saw us in the car. They hadn't even bothered to stick out their thumbs, the same car had gone past so many times.

I can't remember if there was another short ride or two after that, but the longest ride we got that day was all the way to Christchurch, with a professor of geology. That was also fun, because he taught us about the landscape we were seeing, took us to see a seal colony, bought us icecream, and was generally an interesting and entertaining person. But my Swiss friend was becoming increasingly uncomfortable and feverish, so when we got to Christchurch we asked him to drop us off at the hospital.

At the hospital she caused a minor sensation. It's not often you get tropical diseases popping into A&E in Christchurch. Every doctor in the place wanted to look at her legs. I sat in the waiting room and watched reruns of Faulty Towers, which appeared to be on a loop on the monitor. I think I saw four or five episodes, back to back. I tried to imagine what it would be like if you were waiting for serious news.

"I'm afraid we had to amputate."

"BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA aha aha ... ha ... ha ... pardon?"

Penicillin put her right (no, they didn't amputate), but she was not able to walk easily, and the hostel we stayed in wasn't that comfortable for a sick person, so the next day we decided to hire a car to go on to Dunedin, where she could stay with me until she recovered. We found a car hire place that had a really cheap deal, which made the decision easier.

So we stocked up on chocolate and drove to Dunedin. We went via Lake Tekapo. It was not exactly a shortcut, but neither of us had been there and we wanted to see it. It was summer, between Christmas and New Year, and the lupins looked just like the ones in The Editter's photo.

In fact the colours were what impressed most of all. It must have been a dry summer, because the vegetation was not green but brown, aside from the purple of the lupins. It was an overcast day, but not grey. The sky was white. And the lake (which is fed by a glacier) was a unearthly shade of translucent green. I had never seen water that colour before. With the purple ground, green lake and white sky, it was like being on another planet. It was stunningly beautiful. And cold.

On the way back (via Timaru) we even picked up our own hitchhikers, a couple of German guys who had, it turned out, been standing by the side of the road for half a day waiting for a car to come along. I have never had such pathetically grateful passengers. I thought they were going to kiss us when we offered them chocolate as well.

"Didn't anybody tell you this isn't a good place to hitchhike at this time of year?" I asked.

"Well, yah," they said, "But when they said there wouldn't be much traffic we didn't realize they meant two cars a day."

And before you ask me whether you're actually allowed to pick up hitchhikers when you're in a hired car, I will tell you, no, it is not allowed. It was written in the contract I'd signed, so picking those guys up was probably some sort of crime. But I discovered that when a couple of hungry, shivering Germans wave frantically at you from the side of a long stretch of empty road you don't worry about things like that, especially when you haven't seen another car for well over an hour. Those guys had miscalculated badly.

What was I supposed to do, drive past and wave?