One small step...

We flew out of Invercargill on the 2nd of March, with all our crap! (Note to self, pack lighter when going further abroad than Aussie!) Flew from Invercargill to Christchurch, ChCh to Auckland, Aucks to Brisbane.

Arriving in Brisbane in a state of sweat, humanly unatural. A huge stroke of luck on our part meant that we could stay at a Craig’s place while he was at work, an awesome apartment in Ascot with his flatmate, Luca (no doubt he was judging us as we arrived with no job prospects, no car, no idea!)

Another lucky thing was that Dicko and Julie live right next door to Craig in the same apartment unit. We had many nights of drinking beer & wine, while the lovely Julie cooked awesome meals and Dicko was producing gourmet BBQs.

Luca made us dinner one night, a delish Italian pasta dish - taught us a thing or two about Italian cooking, Mr Eak has been putting these new skills to great use!

After many many days wandering the streets, trawling the internet and many trips on public transport. We decided to hire a car for 2 days to be able to see some cars that were in the Gold Coast and a bit further afield which saved a million different buses and trains. We saw heaps of cars and their owners were a bit different, Eak was being paranoid after our previous Corolla excursion which was too expensive (everyone knows the story!). All the cars we saw were crap, no they were shit! And some of the owners were playing Chinese mind games with us (I wasn't into it, they were liars too and that turned me right off!

Our Echo Baby with freshly wired spotlights to spot Kangaroos! 100W lights each

 

So we saw the Echo on Wednesday after a last minute decision to go see it and then bought it on Friday (09/03/12) it’s a 1999 Toyota Echo, paid $4600 (way too much but the car is really nice) for it and 175,000kms. One careful lady owner, her name was Roslyn, she was such a sweetheart lady, so good to us, the car was clean, well serviced and what we were after without the Chinese mind games - 3 signs that all was good in our world!

Roslyn also gave us some "Roo Zappers" - She bought them for her son but felt it imperative that as we were driving to Roo infested territory then we really needed to fit them! Eak did and on the drive up to Emerald we didn't hit one animal = good luck OR the "Sonic Animal Guards"?

Buying a car in Australia suuuuuuucks, you have to look at cars online, then contact the owners, then organise a time to meet them, then listen to their bullshit spiel about how awesome their car is (when in most cases it wouldn't pass a WOF in NZ! They have this "road safety certificate", I learnt about this when dear Jade was leaving Melbs and had some tool fail her car. All they check are tyres, lights, suspension, the windows, blah blah blah.

AND THEN, we spent two hours in Burleigh QLD Transport trying to change the car registration into our name. Eak didn’t have enough points of ID for this silly lady and we could not prove that we lived anywhere. Thank god for Richard! He saved our bacon, we found out later by the Emerald QLD Transport ladies that it was just unlucky and we had a particularly anal lady. Typical!

xxxx Love Shahn & Eak