Dialogue: How to survive a heartbreak motel

By DON DONOVAN

Since 1986, in the process of writing and illustrating five books on New Zealand, I've done more than my fair share of travelling. Right now, I'm part way through another tour, this time collecting information about country churches.

These excursions can work out a bit expensive, what with meals, petrol and accommodation, so, being self-employed and no longer the beneficiary of a corporate credit card, I usually stay nights in "middle- order" motels - the kind that cost from $60 to $90 a night.

Having in the past stayed in a few score of these average family overnighters, I've come to the conclusion that most of them are too damned dear, and some are so ordinary that they come close to D Block at Paremoremo.

With some few exceptions, motels of the middle-order and human beings are not generally made for each other. They are receptacles for a host of minor irritations. They are not user-friendly. For example, have you ever noticed how most motels have low-wattage light bulbs - 40 and 60-watters installed in sockets positioned as far away from the subject to be illuminated as possible?

Realising that there's not a great deal I can do about motels' awfulness, I try to see the funny side of them while ruefully imagining the culture shocks inflicted on visiting travellers, especially the fastidious Japanese, who don't all stay at the Centra.

The funniest motel I've ever stayed at was near the Manawatu Gorge. When my wife and I settled into our unit we found there were no chairs to sit on. So we asked if we could have some and were told that there weren't any but that if we would like to rent the Water Bed Suite for an extra few dollars, it had chairs.

We moved in, but had the worst night's sleep imaginable on what must have been the prototype of all water beds - no baffles so the tide ebbed and flowed every five seconds throughout a miserable night.

In Reefton one year we passed through a time warp and stayed in a flaking-white-paint-and-rusty-corrugated-iron motel whose furnishings were a perfect freeze-frame of the late 1950s. The lino, folkweave curtains and candlewick bedspreads were classics of the Walter Nash era, as were the extinct coke stove, which had been painted silver, the side-flaps toaster and the Laminex Stardust table with chromium-plated legs and matching chairs in cracked maroon vinyl with chrome studs.

It was equipped with a moulded plastic Ultimate radio in yellowed ivory, whose station selector - a circular display operated by a single, central knob - brought little other than a faint, strangled voice, perhaps from Venezuela, but gave off a strong, continuous, electronic fart accompanied by an acrid smell of burning electrics.

Needless to say, the hot-water jug was a triumph of chrome and bubbled black plastic, with a colourful display of green, red and black wires showing through the frayed fabric covering of its flex. The floor sloped but so did the bed, each inclination cancelling the other, thus affording us a comfortable night despite the nocturnal racket borne on the sea breeze from the local pub.

One of the great features of New Zealand motels is their hot water - there is always plenty of it. So hot, in fact, in many of them, that you can smell the water burning. The terrifying combination of volcanic water, impossible adjustment of the shower mixer control, and small children, must produce regular traffic for the scalds departments of the local emergency medical centres.

The pressure of these plumbing systems is invariably either sufficient to blast one out of the shower box or so little as to leave one shivering like a supplicant under a shower rose full of corroded holes, of which only the lower three are weeping.

In the Far North, one winter, we paid $70 a night for a superb view across the Hokianga Harbour.

We also got the mandatory one candle-power of illumination, a TV featuring neon worms and a small bottle of washing-up liquid that wouldn't have made you foam at the mouth if you'd drunk it. In this exemplar of motel meanness the owner had written, in indelible felt tip, the name of the motel on the blades of all the knives.

Our determination both to see the funny side and to make the best of bad situations has led us to develop a defensive survival kit and procedure. Now when we travel we take with us a 100-watt bulb, a 3m extension cord, a double adapter plug, corkscrew, wine glasses and a portable radio.

Our procedure upon checking in is: (1) Shove a bottle of dry white in the ice-making compartment of the fridge; and (2) turn all pictures to the wall, especially Spanish ladies, horses arising from the waves, negresses' heads and anything done by the proprietor's wife.

To be fair, I must say that occasional hospitality can make up for a whole pile of bad taste. Not long ago, when we arrived, tired, at Upper Hutt late one afternoon and found an empty complex of motel units that reminded me of a military transit camp, we flatly refused to pay more than $120 for one night and promptly telephoned a motel in Picton to ask if they could put us up if we took the ferry from Wellington, due to arrive very late that night. They not only agreed, they stayed up to await us after the ferry had been delayed and, in their archetypal country motel, they left us a little supper, the heater switched on and the electric blankets warming the bed.

Suddenly bad taste and bad design took a back seat. We stayed there again on the way back and, as an extra mark of our thanks, left our 100-watt bulb in their kitchen socket.