Part Three. Christa and I have just had the last of our hopes dashed as the bus for which we had so patiently waited passed us by, politely inviting us to eat its exhaust.


Minutes before the bus didn’t stop for us, Christa and I took this picture in the hopes of raising morale. You are able to tell that it was before the bus because I’m still able to fake a smile.

It was one of those moments so long hoped-for that when the opposite happens, you think someone’s playing a trick on you. Christa gave a strangled, animalistic, very frightening half-cry, and launched into a sprint, determined to catch the bus. I jogged feebly after her, yelling crazily that she simply could not catch a bus travelling downhill at eighty kilometres an hour.

Dejected and stunned, we slouched back into the Hampden Tavern, where the staff promptly informed us that the bus stopped in Moeraki, just outside the café, not in Hampden. Furthermore, there was no way to call a taxi this far out from any major city, but there was a bus that came every night at ten-thirty that we could catch.

So, accustomed to the now-standard three-hour wait, Christa half-slept while I watched golf on television, thinking only to reflect how remarkably boring golf was. Ten-thirty, then eleven, passed under our vigilant watch, although not so much as a Yugo passed by to lift our spirits. The bar owner, confused, suddenly remembered that the bus came six days a week, not seven, and it was our extreme bad luck. At this, our latest bout of misfortune, I giggled, very quietly to myself, so as not to alarm anyone. So many bad coincidences in one day—it was really very funny. One of the bar regulars, upon hearing our plight, proceeded to inform us, in rather colourful language, just how far up a creek we were. He cackled, obviously very drunk, and tried to lend us his brand-new truck to get home. He’d come down to Dunedin and picked it up eventually. Christa and I politely turned him down, claiming to be too tired. He apologized for misinforming us about the first bus, and we recognized him as the café manager from Moeraki, though he reintroduced himself several times, to my very slight amusement.

After a while, the bar owner’s wife, Brenda, offered us beds for the night, a gesture so nice that I couldn’t begin to express my gratitude. She then confessed that she was one of the many drivers who had passed us up on the road, and had felt a stab of horror and guilt when we showed up at her bar several hours later. We accepted her gracious offer, waving away the whole hitchhiking thing, and for the first time, utter exhaustion washed over me. Christa and I eventually gave in to our increasingly weighty eyelids, and Brenda took us to her house behind the bar, stoked up the fire, turned on two electric blankets in each bedroom, and with a smile, said she’d see us in the morning. Christa returned to the bar after a few minutes, determined to show her gratitude through social interaction, but I was at my limit, and collapsed into the softest, warmest bed in the history of the world.

The next morning passed without major incident. Curly, the bar owner, made arrangements for us to leave on the next bus out of Hampden, which would arrive in, surprisingly enough, three hours. Christa and I tried to show our appreciation by making him coffee, but I somehow managed to mix up the salt and sugar, and so we then tried our hand at cleaning the kitchen, something at which I am capable. After another stroll around the town and along the beach, we returned and had an incredible conversation with Curly. He told us about the land, the birds, how his barns used to be the city jail and morgue. He told us of his journeys all around the world. He told us of his more-than-slightly misogynistic political views, and through it all, I gathered that here, in a town with four stores, was a man that had lived a truly fascinating life, and knew it. I drank in his words, captivated, though with a feeling that Curly was somewhat out of place in rural Southern New Zealand. He himself seemed uncertain as to how he ended up in Hampden, with a bar and a family, but here he was, and he was bored. He halfheartedly described plans of selling everything and going to live on a boat somewhere in Australia, though he’d done that before, and didn’t seem too interested in things he’d done before.

As Christa and I walked out of his house and out of Curly’s life, I wished him luck on his next adventure. “Sure,” he replied. “Just gotta think ‘em up first.”



The view from Curly and Brenda’s kitchen the next morning.


The Hampden Tavern by daylight, our nirvana, our oasis in a dark, dark world of despair.

We boarded the bus grinning entirely too much, and calmly strolled through the door of our flat a little over an hour later, to the bewildered stares of Marco, Dan, and Hayley. We regaled them with our tale, and in return learned that Mandi, Alice, and Mandi’s roommates had all been picked up from Oamaru within half an hour, left a note for us in Moeraki, and had since returned to Dunedin on the bus that didn’t stop in Hampden and baked us we’re-sorry-for-abandoning-you cookies, which Dan and Marco promptly set into once they had confirmed we were alive.

I relaxed on the couch for a moment, basking in the early afternoon sun. What a weekend, I thought. And then: I wonder if I should ever tell anyone about this?

Nah.



Home again. It was a little emotional.