Getting Closer…

Well, I thoroughly enjoyed my time on the Coromandel Peninsula and I now have a new plane ticket. You wouldn’t believe what people are willing to charge for them. Take a look at my first search results from American Airlines:

I could almost buy my own plane for that.

Lucky for me I have an aunt whose google-fu is much stronger than mine. I’ve never seen a five-figure price tag for a plane ticket before, and Aunt Carol brought the number back down to three digits. Thanks, Carol! I’d say I owe you one but it’s a lot more than one.

Now I just need a passport—which, oddly enough, is easier done than said. For the past week I made countless phone calls and wrote countless emails trying to get someone—anyone at all: the US Embassy, the Consulate, the State Department, the airlines—to tell me what it would take to fly home without a passport. No one returned my calls or emails, and no web search would tell me what I needed to know. (Though as we’ve seen, my google-fu is pretty bad. Plus, I’ve learned through hard experience that an American phone gets really weird search results in New Zealand. Looking for “camp sites near me” I get hits for Camp David and Camp Lejeune.)

The key search term is emergency passport, which I’d never heard of until 8:00 this morning and which I could theoretically get my hands on this very afternoon.

Like I said, easier done than said. Without that keyword, every search result told me A) it takes a minimum of fifteen days to get a passport; and B) you cannot possibly fly without one. Neither of those things is true. But after a week of silence I finally had someone write me back. It was the US Consulate in Auckland, some four hours away from where I was camping on the Coromandel Peninsula. It said, “Can you be at our offices in Auckland at 8:30 on Wednesday morning?”

Well, no. But I can have a hell of a good time driving my monstrous rental car on the gravel roads of Coromandel, winding along the edges of mountains as fast as I dared to push it.

I shouldn’t badmouth the car. Getting a vehicle at all was a minor miracle. Every single rental agency at Auckland International was out of cars, yet somehow I found one the company never intended to rent out. It was uncleaned, unvacuumed—unhoovered down here—scuffed and scratched, missing a piece on the front bumper, and sporting a big white cobweb across the driver’s side mirror. Someone didn’t tick the right box in time, so I rented this loud, crunchy all-wheel drive monstrosity that wasn’t supposed to be listed at all. I didn’t get the last car at AKL, I got the car after the last car. So my good travel luck continues, passport or no passport.

This car is a heavy sumbitch. It rumbles and rattles. It guzzles gas like Immortan Joe. But it’s got four wheels and a seat, and it’s a lot of fun to drive on wet gravel roads. I know something about cornering on those roads, having ridden about a thousand miles of them on the TA. And here’s a thing I should have mentioned before: is it so weird to ride a road without pedaling! I discovered this on a bus ride a few weeks ago in Queenstown. We were going uphill and it wasn’t any harder than flat land. All you do is sit there, and somehow the wheels on the bus go round and round. My thighs kept bouncing up and down, convinced they had a job to do.

My plan this morning had been to hike the Coromandel Coastal Walkway, then drive most of the way back to Auckland for one last night of camping. (Again, a stunning feat to my bike-addled brain. 200 kilometers in hours, not days? Miraculous.) But my dumbphone grabbed a wisp of cellular signal out there on the tip of the peninsula, just enough to admit a few emails onto the smartphone phone-shaped camera. There was my message from the consulate. There was the keyword I was missing: emergency passport. Not fifteen days, not even fifteen hours. If I could get there, I’d have a passport this afternoon.

And so I do! It comes in Prince Purple, to announce to everyone on the plane that you party like it’s 1999. That’s the way to get your passport stolen. None of this set-it-down-at-the-airport-and-some-jackass-walks-off-with-it bullshit. I am not letting this one leave my person until I’m standing on American soil.

So, ticket, check. Passport, check. Ride to airport, check. But I’m not home yet. Keep wishing me luck!