They Call Me Mr. Scoobs!

We woke up Thursday morning to a sunny day in Auckland and got ready to begin the next leg of our trip. I was already feeling much better (thank you, Zicam!), and Dustin was miraculously still healthy despite wading through piles of my used Kleenex over the previous 72 hours. Unlike our short trip to the Bay of Islands, we knew that the bus driver and majority of backpackers we started with on this leg of the journey with Stray would probably be with us for a while, so we hoped for the best.

We got to the bus and met our driver “Mambo.” (All of the Stray drivers have nicknames, given to them by their trainers, whose origins usually remain secret until the driver gets drunk enough to share it.) He was a cheerful guy, very tall, with hiking boots on and long hair that he seemed to be constantly running his fingers through to get out of his face. As we were driving out of Auckland, Mambo shared a number of little urban tidbits with us, like pointing out New Zealand’s “least secure maximum security prison” (there have been numerous break-outs) in the heart of downtown Auckland, which he noted “is conveniently located right next to a major bus stop, a train station, and, I kid you not, the largest gun shop in Auckland.”

We liked Mambo immediately. 

Our coach bus was nicknamed “Mr. Scoobs” (the Kiwis like their nicknames), and it quickly became clear that this old boy had seen better days. The first problem we noticed about Mr. Scoobs was that his air conditioning didn’t work. With 30 or so warm bodies on a bus without windows that open on a hot summer day, this created a kind of mobile sweat lodge. Throughout the course of the day, we also discovered that Mr. Scoobs occasionally would not start (as he refused to do when we stopped at a winery that day), wouldn’t go into gear once started, wouldn’t fully close his front door, and in an episode after midnight that night that will be described later, he started randomly producing a whining car horn sound that could not be turned off — an almost pitch perfect re-enactment of the VW van in “Little Miss Sunshine.” When Mambo finally managed to find the fuse box late that night and disconnect this terrible sound, he got back on the bus and declared to his grateful passengers with a wicked grin on his face, “That keeled the fuckah.”

More on our adventures with Mr. Scoobs and our awesome day on the water in Hahei to follow…

Comments

[Greg F]

"New Zealand’s 'least secure maximum security prison'"

Literally laughing out loud!

[Amanda]

Can you ask Mambo to give you nicknames?