I arrived in Auckland, New Zealand just after midnight in early February 2019. It was unexpectedly humid that night. My body was exhausted from 22 hours of travelling but the jet lag was already kicking in and I felt wide awake on my way to the AirBnb I had booked for the first 2 weeks of my 6 week trip. I was the last stop for my airport shuttle and talking to the driver, I found out he was from Cape Town. He was excited to hear I was also from SA and we chatted the rest of the way about the current happenings 'back home'. It was already 2 am by the time I arrived at my destination, tired and now sleepy too, dying to get in the shower and then into bed.
I was greeted by the host couple, Carol and John who had kindly waited up to check me in. They showed me to my room, checked that I would be OK until the morning and went off to bed. Carol and John lived upstairs and I had my own room and bathroom just below them but we shared an entrance through the front door and essentially I was living in the house with them. It was officially Saturday morning and I looked forward to a weekend of rest. I set down my bags, grabbed my night clothes, towel and toiletries from the suitcase and made for the shower that was across a short passage outside my room. As I crossed the passage I was startled by the pet cat. It was a huge ginger cat, one of the biggest I had seen and he had glaring green eyes that glowed eerily in the dim light. They also had a grey, striped cat which was also slightly larger than necessary. Over the next 2 weeks that ginger cat in particular must have startled me another 10 to 15 times on my way to the bathroom at night. Sometimes he would be sitting right outside the bathroom door, sometimes he would appear out of nowhere and just be staring at me without moving at all. Creepy-ass cat. Anyway, once I entered the bathroom on that first night, I began to realise that Mr. Ginger (I never got his name), would be the least of my worries.
This lovely, country style home was situated on a former orchid, with lots of surrounding trees and the birds and insects, that usually hang out in trees I guess. I quickly noticed that my room (and subsequently every room I had seen in that house) had multiple daddy long legs spiders in every corner and crevice. There were webs on everything that had been stationary for more than a day. I would wash my coffee mug and leave it on the shelf to find it a day later with web strands dangling across it. There would be new webs on the bathroom ceiling above the shower with new spiders every second day, that I would have to hose off using the shower head.
The night I arrived, I was so exhausted that I considered sleeping on my suitcase because the webs dangling directly over the bed were home to at least 15 spiders. They looked like specks on the ceiling and only on closer inspection would you be able to see the strands of web that connected them. The room and the bed itself looked so fresh and welcoming that I decided instead to wipe down the ceiling with wet tissue paper. I stood up on the bed and wiped off one spider at a time. Everytime I broke a web, a long strand would swing down and I would duck to avoid it getting in my hair. I made sure to dust off the duvet and pillows afterwards in case any webs had fallen onto them too. I finally collapsed into bed at 4:30am and only woke up 12 hours later.
The spiders became part of life over the next 2 weeks and I had gotten used to checking around corners before going to bed and dusting my clothes down before wearing them (this was after I found a spider crawling around my suitcase). Don't get me wrong, the place was beautiful, cosy and actually clean in every other sense. I could tell by Carol's reaction when I asked her if she had any bug spray on day 2, that this was just a part of living in a nature reserve, which she and John took great pride in. John was actually a retired landscaper and you could see by the beautiful garden he had designed with water features, a swing set and a rock pool, that they were both in their element, living in the midst of nature. Their carefree attitudes quite rubbed off on me, and I never complained about the spiders to either of them, even when I found a large, hairy one making a home in the bathroom window. That one I was far too squeamish to take on with my dust cloth. I just maneuvered around it for 2 weeks, never taking my eyes off it whenever I sat on the toilet, just incase it decided to jump off the web. That spider was huge and the web grew thicker everyday.
After a few days of getting settled, I finally decided to brave the outdoors and started spending afternoons in the garden. It was nearing the end of Summer but the sun would only go down after 8pm. It was beautiful and warm in the garden in the afternoons. The sound of birds and insects chirping was so loud and continuous that I couldn't even take calls outside. I would sit on the picnic chair with my headphones on, listening to worship music and reading Kindle books on my iPad until the sun started to set and then I would go back inside and make my calls to SA, as everyone would just be starting their days there.
Carol was really sweet and would offer to take me grocery shopping or check if I needed anything whenever she would go out. Some days on her way to her yoga class in the morning she would drop me off at the office and talk all the way about her and John's travels and how they decided to start an AirBnb in the first place. She offered that I could use her kitchen upstairs if I ever needed it, but I was never in the mood to cook. Uber Eats and spicy ramen noodles became my staple. Sometimes their grandkids would stay over and it would sound like the roof above my head might cave in with the kids running around and yelling every sentence at each other. Carol would yell back her responses and never shush them or interrupt their games. Even though I was there for just 2 weeks, I really began to appreciate the free, relaxed lifestyle they led.
When It was time to move on to my next home, I was a bit relieved as the bathroom spider had now almost doubled in size and an ill-fated fly had been snapped up in it's web for a few days already. I woke up early that last morning so I could spend a few minutes taking in the serene garden one more time and thought to myself that I might actually have preferred to just stay here for the rest of my trip, not knowing what the next place would be like. I left to the office early that morning and while rushing out to meet my Uber I stepped on something strange. With a quick glance back to check, just in case it was Mr Ginger's tail, I spotted a dead rat that he had probably dragged to the middle of the freakin' passage the previous night and just like that, the romance of life on the reserve was over and that was the end of any notion that I might hang around there longer.
Carol kindly dropped me off at my next destination that evening. It was just 10 minutes away but dragging my suitcases around to the back of the property, beyond a wooden gate to a completely private little apartment, I felt like I had moved on to another adventure. This was it. The first time in 30 years that I had ever lived on my own! I will share in a forthcoming post about how the next 4 weeks absolutely changed my life, but first check out the list of lessons learned from my first 2 weeks in NZ and my time at John and Carol's.