Things get better for our heroes...

Well today is a new day, and as such we're in a much better mood than yesterday.

I guess I need to tell you all a little about the van. It's a 1989 Mazda L2000. It's a gas engine with a 5-speed manual transmission and like almost all cars in New Zealand (in fact all cars in countries that were colonized by England), the steering wheel is on the right. It doesn't have power anything. This means the windows, door locks, steering, brakes, etc. are all unassisted! The name Titanic came about because when I tried to drive it for the first time I couldn't believe how difficult it was to turn at low speed! But other than that its been very reliable. We had an incident yesterday when we realized our water pump (not the one on the engine thank goodness, but the one that pumps water into the sink in the back) was broken. So hopefully we can get that fixed somewhere. Until then we're just pouring water out of a 10 liter jug that we have for washing dishes and brushing teeth.

Because we bought the van for the 'buy it now' price of $7,000 NZD (about $5,500 USD) included were a 750W generator (which we still haven't run), a porta toilet (which we threw away because it was someone elses toilet and not very hygienic), and a TV (which we sold yesterday at a Pawn Shop for $15NZD (which bought us internet and a bar of chocolate - a pretty good trade considering we would never use it and it was very heavy and took up a lot of space). The van itself has about 270,000 km on the clock (so 180,000 miles), but burns no oil and really runs well. It might have something to do with the fact that New Zealand requires you to get a warrant of fitness for every car over 6 years old every 3 months.

Another funny thing - the car is carburated which means it has a choke lever on the dashboard! Who remembers that? More later...