G’day, Gold Coast!

I suppose if you have to travel cattle class, then doing it between New Zealand and Australia is as good a place as any. No hitches getting through customs, though again that suspicious looking little lady was taken aside for an individual body scan. We obviously had to meet a pleasant customs officer to explain our admittance on the declaration that we were carrying illicit Marmite. He also asked if we had any soil on our shoes! The temptation to reply: “No, we’ve only walked on water” passed before it formed on my lips, and we feigned total surprise and innocence in our denial.

The rental car, a blue Hyundai Getz, was as new and unmarked as the previous one was not. It’s smaller but no problems with baggage, but it does have the most infuriating design characteristic – the indicators are on the right and the windscreen wipers on the left! I always used to cite a lack of standardisation in aircraft flight decks as being the nadir of human factors, especially where functions were reversed in location or sense, and spoke about watching cars turning left without indication but with their wipers going in the dry, or driving in the rain without wipers, whilst indicating to turn right. I’ll get used to it, hopefully before the accident!

The accommodation was easy to find after a 70-minute drive, thanks to the newly-awake TomTom. It’s fine but I guess we’d got used to having more kitchen functionality, and using my penknife to cut bread is an interesting operation. There is Internet availability in each room but at nearly £10 a day or £42 per week it’s easy to resist.

Oh, and it rained, proper tropical rain, not your temperate drizzle but real 10-minute flooding stuff. Never mind it’s warm.