Visiting my youngest daughter in New South Wales over Christmas and the New Year, and my sister and assorted nephews and nieces in New Zealand for another week, supplied a fairly good taste, but no more than that, of some not very extreme Antipodean road. Quite a lot of it actually with many hours spent in cars and a bit of driving.
All motoring in Australia was in my son-in-law?s white 2-litre 325,000kms Daewoo Espero, a surprisingly sober and European-looking vehicle rendered slightly embarrassing by the previous lady owner?s hippyish bien-pensant slogans at both ends and the word ?anxiety? elegantly stencilled on the driver?s door. Its a/c didn?t work having lost all its gas, its clutch was almost worn out although not slipping, all the tyres ? one of which was the wrong size ? were inflated above 45 psi and the entire front passenger door trim, pull handle, window switches etc. had been ripped off apparently by a gorilla and stuck back on with gaffer tape by an educationally subnormal baboon, rendering the window operative only with fiddling and the odd spark. However the oil and air filter were clean, the steering, suspension, brakes and exhaust were all sound and it had the Aussie MoT equivalent. It was doing 28 mpg at first and seemed a bit reluctant in high gears uphill, having been used only for pootling very gently round town for some time past, but after some running using more than 2,000rpm, a couple of new tyres inflated to more moderate pressures and some long-distance cruising it was doing more like 33mpg and felt and ran far better. I now learn that the driveline is Vauxhall, Cavalier I suppose being mid-nineties. We must have done around 3,000 miles in it, the length and breadth of Britain but covering, sketchily at that, only the north-east quarter or sixth of NSW and a tiny slice of southern Queensland. Just to put what seemed quite a lot of driving in proportion.
On the road, a majority of Australians in that part of Oz, the most populous part, are very relaxed US-style drivers sometimes verging on mimsers. NSW is parsimonious with 110k limits so a lot of the time you are stuck behind people dead on a speedo 100 or below, frustrating to a press-on driver in a car that needs more Italian tune-up treatment to wake it up. A lot of the main roads are three-lane with lengths of two-lane, with well-signalled overtaking lanes distributed for traffic going both ways. As here, some drivers go faster than me but many seem to be going unnecessarily slowly. I was fairly careful not wanting to leave people with a subsequent shower of speeding fines?
Despite all the stylish multi-cylinder pick-ups ? many I suspect fwd V6s ? and some very snazzy customised older vehicles (I saw a particularly fine blue metallic flake 1932 Ford 2-door for example? along with all the properly customised or decorated old and new cars there are lots of Barryboy-style carp ones (but you have to start somewhere)?), the car culture in Newcastle where I stayed most seemed more about wheelspin than speed. Hardly anyone goes fast, or not where you can see them, but you quite often hear what sounds like a dragster melting its tyres just round the corner. Fishtailing double squiggles of rubber abound on the roads in town and country alike. The same is true in New Zealand where deliberate wheelspin ? ?unnecessarily prolonged deliberate loss of traction? or words to that effect ? has now become an offence attracting a fixed penalty.
In New Zealand there was a bit of weather and I drove my brother-in-law?s 2.5 Subaru Outback through a flooded small town, 9 inches of water along half a mile of main road, saw a Nissan Skyline coughing and choking in the middle of it? the Subaru was nice and quite rapid, felt hewn from solid, needed to rev a bit though.
Lots and lots of Subarus of all descriptions in both countries, with drainpipe exhausts in Australia where fruity exhausts are popular, and Mitsubishis, and Toyotas, and Korean things. Model names, trim and body pressings of Ford and GM products (as well as Nissan and Toyota) are subtly different from European versions creating a dream-like hallucinatory feeling. My sister?s diesel Fiat in NZ, even newer than the Outback, called itself a Punto but looked like a Grande Punto. I didn?t drive it far enough to know whether it really needed six speeds, but it certainly picked up speed nicely in second and third.
I greatly enjoyed the meat pies, fruit bats, wallabies, kangaroos, emus, a decent-sized carpet python and the greater and lesser Magellanic Clouds, nebulae far bigger and more visible than any in the northern sky. Wasn?t so keen on the mosquitoes, cockroaches and ticks (my toe is better thanks). People on the whole were genial, civic-minded, friendly, hospitable and kind. Petrol was half price and as here fluctuating rapidly up and down. My favourite Aussie road sign, which could save lives if adopted here, is a big red and white job facing the wrong way up motorway slip roads: WRONG WAY GO BACK . The best NZ could manage was SLOW PENGUINS CROSSING.
It?s horrid to be back. My car has acquired a squiggle of gold spray paint on the nearside which I quite like, but it needs a cat and an MoT. Will it pass? How much will the cat cost? Watch this space.
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