We bought a Toyota Estima (pronounced "Eh-steam-a") from a dealer in Warkworth five days after our arrival. Overall, the car seemed clean and ran fairly well. There is a blood stain on the carpet in front of the second row of seats. We have made up all sorts of stories about that blood stain like we have one of the few cars from Japan that had a murder victim or maybe some woman gave birth on her way to the hospital. It is from Japan and so everything in the car is in Japanese. It is a bit of a gas guzzler or petrol pig and the windy, hilly roads of New Zealand don’t help the fuel efficiency. Petrol is $5 a gallon here, so we will be spending a lot on running the car. About five days after purchasing the car, we went horseback riding out in the country on a Sunday evening. When we got back to the car, it wouldn’t start. Not even a burp. Fortunately, Roger MacKenzie who owns the farm wondered if it just might be that the battery connectors are loose and voila, problem solved. As soon as they were tightened up, we were on our way. It did give us a bit of a scare for a moment, though.
