We rented a car at the airport. Nowhere is the gulf between fantasy and reality greater than in the renting of cars.

Ads show a smiling employee dropping a key into the hand of a
smiling customer. The sun is shining. The open road beckons.

The reality is a portable cabin in a dank carpark. It has rough wooden steps and too little room. It is staffed by the underpaid and patronised by the impatient. The man behind us was short and suited. He stepped from one foot to another, bubbling with thwarted self-importance. I was tempted to slow things down further by reading the rental agreement.

But the type was too small to read, and besides, there is no need. In the event of any misfortune, you know that it would exculpate the company and inculpate the customer. The agreement forms part of a softening-up process that climaxes with the offer of additional insurance to obviate the threat of excess payments. And though you drive year on year without a hint of mishap, suddenly the world has become a hostile place, and you just know that in the next five days, an accident is as inevitable as dawn.

So it was that I paid more to insure a rental car for five days than I do to insure my own for six months. And there is nothing new in any of this. The traveller has always been a mark to be exploited, a hermit crab between shells, exposed and pink and vulnerable.

It’s a long drive from Auckland to Kaitāia. Six-lane motorways flung us up through the city and over the bridge before shrinking to four as we reached the dormitory suburbs and then to three through the coastal settlements of holiday homes. Beyond that, we were into Northland proper and the Auckland money ran out.

There was abundant evidence of the recent storms. Roads were washed out, under repair, reduced to one lane. Bridges had gone. Detours took us through little places with long vowel-laden names. And it was raining again. Cattle and horses stood disconsolate under any shelter they could find. Life was compressed to a dark and narrow gap between earth and sky through which the windscreen wipers fought to clear a path. The stalks were on the wrong side of the steering wheel. I kept trying to speed up the wipers by indicating left. Somewhere around Kāeo, the rain ceased.

Our motel was cheap and full of roading workers who sat outside drinking beers, still in their hi-vis shirts. But most of the action in Kaitāia on a Thursday evening was in the laundrettes. There were several of them dotted along the main street, their steamy windows bright with light for the Edward Hopper effect, driers rumbling, the air heavy with moisture and the smell of detergent.

A pub next door was the sort of sparsely furnished beer barn that doesn’t sing of hope. Patrons stood at leaners waiting for Lion Red to kick in, to cast a little beauty.

One small restaurant had pretensions to posh. I peered in through the window at the empty tables, and was walking away when the door opened.

“Were you looking for dinner?” said the waitress, and I wish I could capture the tone of bright despair.

“Thanks,” I said, “but…” and ran out of words.

We had all the standard takeaway cuisines to choose from – fish and chips, pizza, burgers, chicken, Indian, Chinese, Turkish, Thai, though by eight in the evening, some were already giving up on further trading and were swabbing floors, putting stools on tables.

The man selling kebabs was no Turk. He gestured at a list on the till and told me I was to choose two sauces, his hand hovering over the plastic bottles. I chose aioli and barbecue, instantly regretted both, but he was already squirting. Back at the motel, I scraped most of it off and drank a lot of cheap Australian wine.

I’d left the light on in the toilet and the louvred window open. Every insect in Northland had accepted the invitation. I went at them with a jandal. They were so many there was no need to aim. The lime-coloured wall became smeared with successes. The maimed fluttered around the sink on their backs.

We went to bed early, drunk on the romance of travel.