I no longer feel foolish about not leaving the airport, clearly my body knew what was what. Towards the end of the longer flight, from Beijing to Auckland, I was coughing and feeling a little raw of skin and by the time I arrived on Waiheke I was ready to collapse. Then, around 3 in the morning, I started getting waves of hot and cold, a terrible headache, and my skin so raw that I couldn’t bear to be touched. It was one of the worst nights I’ve had in a while, and certainly I haven’t felt this bad in a reasonable time. I suppose it’s the fallout of having to hug literally hundreds of people in the fortnight past, and the cold (though I think it might be the flu given how debilitated I feel) hovered overhead till I had returned before breaking. Well, it clearly didn’t realise that I have really a lot of work to do starting from today, but there it is, one soldiers on.
We are staying in a minute cabin, and I mean minute. There is one tiny groundfloor room; I can lie across the narrower side and touch the far wall. There is a counter with a kichenette against one long wall, and a sofa with failing springs along the other. Between them is a truly hideous machine made carpet in the Persian style. I have never longed for the standard AirBnb decor, courtesy Ikea, more. Along one short wall is a tiny breakfast table smashed into a corner with a leaning against it. This goes up to a vaulted loft containing a mattress. Along the centre the ceiling rises to about 1.5 metres. Along the sides it’s less than a metre. So it does feel like sleeping in a vault, one reachable only by a very slippery wooden ladder. There is also a narrow bathroom on the ground floor which is minute but surprisingly comfortable. There is no space to store anything anywhere.
But the outside makes up for all this. The cabin is set amidst native bush with lush greenery on all sides and green tinged sunlight in the late morning. At night the bush lights up with fireflies. Outside, on the dirt track leading to the compound, are set other houses, hidden amidst bush, at least one reachable only by a boardwalk over wetlands. Past the dirt track you leave the bush and the road and houses begin, and all around low, steep hills rise up covered in vineyards, with the sea beyond.