Wednesday 12 November 2014

Bastard of a room

I like Dunedin.
There's a quiet bookish air about the place and an undercurrent of creativity I quite enjoy. It's an easy city to get around and on a good day it's not a bad looking place either. I have to travel to Dunedin every six weeks for work and it's a trip I look forward to. Usually I get away with booking my accommodation for this trip a week in advance, this time I wasn't so lucky. Apparently there is a car rally on in town and almost all the hotels and motels in town are completely booked. I must have tried ringing fifteen places only to get told the same thing: we can fit you in Tuesday, but Wednesday night is fully booked. 
"Fuck," thinks I. "I can't ring every bloody hotel and motel in Dunners. I might try that Expedia crowd." I hop on the phone and ring Bangalore and they find me literally the last available room in Dunedin. "Excellent stuff. Sorted." thinks I. 

I should have known that this room was going to look like Dame Edna's pap smear. I thought they said it was $138 for a night and was only billed for that amount. Either I had scored a night for free or something was amiss. It turned out something was amiss and misgivings came flooding to the fore when I turned into the street Guest House Paradiso* was located. The street was about eight inches wide and lined with houses that had to, just had to contain Scarfies, burning couches and frozen bags of poo in the freezer. I did an eight hundred point turn and parked the car while trying to maintain some sort of optimism.
It didn't last.


*Not its real name, but not far off.

What the photo to the right cannot adequately represent is the smell, the result of a 'fragrance diffuser, fruit burst edition'. I tried to open the window and throw the fragrance diffuser, fruit burst edition out and get rid of the smell. It turned out that the window was nailed shut and I was stuck with not only the smell of fragrance diffuser, fruit burst edition but also the stank of a beer fridge that hadn't been opened since the Crimean War. 
I looked around me. It was a visual tableau that I couldn't take in all of it at once. Maybe it was the clash of patterns, maybe it was the presence of two pairs of slippers by the door that turned out to be around six sizes too small.


The size is okay, I'm just not sure about the colour.

Overcome with sensory overload, I sank down on the bed and lay back. Blinking with disbelief, I saw that the ceiling was liberally sprinkled with flourescent stars, such as you would find in a small child's bedroom... not in a hotel room.
Well fuck me. 

I took to Facebook where the room captured the imagination of my friends who said:

"Has the set for Mrs Brown's Boys moved to Dunedin?"


"You're either staying in the 1970's or in Barbra Steisand's fanny."

"That's not a picture, it's a window to the outside world and it's actually black and white out there."

"Did you get kicked out of home?"

"You haven't booked into a hotel, you've broken into someone's house."

"Still, it's better than the halfway-house/brothel I stayed in in Malawi with suspiciously wet mattresses and a hole in the floor for a toilet." 

I jokingly said to this that my friend hadn't seen what was behind the single bed. Then I thought I hadn't seen behind that single bed, so I had a look and found this:



It looks ludicrous and it absolutely is, but it is unbelievably sinister as well. I was expecting to be chopped to pieces by a Chucky doll. One Facebook offsider speculated I was actually going to be killed by Susan Boyle, although I suspect he had secretly booked her to do the job but she lost the address when she ate it.

In reality, the only danger I faced was from static electricity from the artifical fibres of the bedding causing an electrical fire that would burn the fucking joint to the ground with me in it... after all, it's not as if I could get out the window if I had to, is it?



I forgot to mention the splendid view of Otago Harbour was on the other side of the house. I hope you like garden gnomes outside the window you can't open.
Just a sample of the twee picture frames that still carry the stock images in them from when they were purchased from the Warehouse when in a stupour of mind-altering drugs. Well you'd have to be out of your tiny mind to buy this, wouldn't you?
Ah, all this and shared bathrooms.
So the moral of the story is twofold if there is only one hotel room left in Dunedin when you need it and it's probably this one:
1. Expedia can get fucked.
2. Stay in Oamaru.

Friday 7 November 2014

You bastards

I'm sorry, but I could quite cheerfully tear your fucking head off.
You may donate significant amounts of time and money to worthy charitable causes and be in all respects an upstanding and reliable citizen, devoid of all malice, but if you are in front of me on the road you may as well be Graham Capill

I do a lot of driving on the open road these days, covering the entire South Island every six weeks. I enjoy long stretches of driving on empty roads: I think, I sing, I take in and appreciate the breathtaking scenery of the South Island, I listen to podcasts and lectures and generally enjoy my own company. It is meditatively restful and edifying and when the road becomes tricky and windy I relish its challenges: I enjoy picking the apex of the bends, attempting to come out with the best exit speed and position for the next corner (all done within speed limits that are blanketed to protect us from the least able drivers); I strive to make my passage as smooth as Jenson Button's own reknown driving style. As I fly through the Whangamoas, the Takaka Hill, the Lindis, or the Hundalees my fun comes shuddering to a halt as my progress is impeded by you... you fucker.

Takaka Hill
You. Yeah you. Fuck you.
It doesn't matter who you are actually and you might be innocuously and quite safely driving at respectable speed, but you are in front of me and I have to slow down: you are a hideously boring dumbo; you are a fly on my Eggs Benedict; you are the piss on my parade. As I slow down I will unleash a torrent of invective at you, tracing your family history with four letter words and imploring you away. I really don't hope that you die in a house-fire, but I will scream that at you. If you are a driving a truck in front of me I will surmise at great length and at ear splitting volume about how fucking rail fucking transport is a fucking grossly fucking underutilised fucking resource. But at least trucks generally pull over into slow vehicle bays, not like cars... or campervans.


Yeah, just you stay there until I've gone past,
or throw yourselves in that lake.
Campervans are a scourge on our roads. I am surprised that, given how widely they are hated by all drivers, the large yards that hold hundreds of the things at airports are not targeted for torching by a jihad of spiteful motorists. We are trapped in the tyranny of living in such a beautiful country. We entice tourists here and in turn they clog up our roads as they gurn and moon at lakes that are bluer than belief and jagged mountains that justify their remarkable name. My misery is manifested by more screaming, peppered with the term 'road-maggots'. I'm guessing that the cost of lost productivity to our economy thanks to these hideous, boring boxes dribbling along our roads is in the hundreds of billions. This figure may not be accurate, but I never said my ranting was reasonable either. 

Or even better...
Having been caught behind traffic, I will suffer until I can pass. I don't take unnecessary risks. I dutifully wait until an opportunity arises where the road ahead is clear and I am absolutely certain there is no on-coming traffic ahead that will be any closer than 100m away when I have finished my overtaking manoeuvre. In this respect I am a good citizen (my last speeding ticket was in 1999 and I have never had a serious road accident). But if other motorists could hear what I say about them, they would be mortified. If they could hear my vituperative abuse, campervan drivers wouldn't come back and would actively discourage other tourists. Truck drivers would carry on congesting my roads, but I would consider ridding New Zealand of road-maggots as a win.

Here's the thing though: I'm not even really angry. I'm not likely to pop a vein in my temple any time soon, it's just part of the catharsis of driving for me. I wouldn't even call it road rage because I genuinely don't feel angry and I enjoy heaping abuse on my fellow travellers. It's as much part of my journey as the singing, the sun and stopping off at breweries along the way.  So despite the loud, insistent and inventive stream of profanity that is aimed at you, don't take it personally. 
PS. I hate you.