Tomorrow we reach the half way point of our two weeks travel to parts of the New Zealand South Island and Wellington.
My travelling companion likes to have an itinerary planned and transport and accommodation booked. I like to arrive in a country with my return air ticket and no more than the first night's accommodation secured. We've compromised and made advance bookings for about half the journey.
Last night we were in a motel in Fox Glacier on the west coast. We had no bookings for the next couple of nights. Just the way I like it. We were not tied down and could do anything we wished (as long as all the viable accommodation options were not booked out).
We did a couple of searches and found a sheep station close to the geographical centre of the South Island. It looked good, until we read the user reviews on the accommodation booking website.
It turned out that the owner was a redneck who would make judgmental comments about the life choices of his guests. He virtually told one young university student that his university course was useless.
We looked elsewhere and came up with another possibility further south, with spectacular mountain views, where the owner was a strict vegetarian. With this choice, we would not have to face grilling from a redneck, and it's likely the values of the vegetarian would be much closer to our own.
With AirBNB you need to message your potential host to persuade them that you are worthy to stay in their accommodation. I told our potential host that I liked it that she preferred vegetarians. That was true, but she took that to mean that we were vegetarians. 'Very nice to hear that you are vegetarian!' she wrote.
Would we maintain the pretence that we were vegetarian when it wasn't true? Perhaps it would do no harm. Until we visited a salmon farm earlier in the day and could not resist buying two ultra fresh salmon fillets for dinner in the evening.
When we arrived at our host's farm in possession of the fish, we had to confess that we admired vegetarians but were not actually vegetarians ourselves. We had to negotiate how we would cook our salmon fillets without offending the vegetarian sensibilities of her family. If we were to cook them.
Initially she suggested freezing the fish and taking it with us when we leave. We agreed that would not work and she graciously organised an electric frying pan with an extension cord so that we could cook it well away from the house. She also set up a table and chairs outside for us to avoid us having to eat our non vegetarian meal on her family's vegetarian dinner table.
The salmon was delicious but I did go to bed wondering if I would have preferred to be judged by a redneck rather than a strict vegetarian.