Me? I always make sure that I have an itinerary ready. I may not have everything down to the details but I will have an eye on the time and a general idea of what to do and where to go. But most importantly, I will have planned on my nightly accommodations. A "Plan A" supported by a "Plan B".
As a result, nothing should really spring a pleasant or nasty surprise on the traveller unless something happens that is totally unexpected. I am pretty glad that nothing unpleasant happened on our trip to New Zealand's South Island. Except for time constraints that prevented us from fulfilling all our objectives - don't we always want more time on our holidays to do this and to do that? - I would think that we achieved about 80 to 90 percent of what we set out to do.
But there was one incident that caught both my wife and I by surprise on our first day on the road. About 15 minutes after we passed through Ashburton, the traffic in front of us suddenly crawled to a halt. Cars were pulling up by the side of the road.
I was driving and I got puzzled. Why on earth would that be happening? The Malaysian driver instinct in me suddenly took over. Without realising it, I began overtaking all those cars. And then suddenly, I saw why all those cars had stopped. It was this:
A truck was approaching from the other direction of the highway and it was carrying a small house! Really. It looked like a prefabricated house but nevertheless, still a whole house. A whole house, that is, which had been uploaded onto the back of the truck. It was a sight to behold. I had thought that this could only happen among the kampungs in rural South-East Asia but I could hardly imagine seeing this in New Zealand.
So what could I do but to join the other drivers and swerve myself out of the way of the on-coming truck? But of course, not before I grabbed the camera from my wife's grip - she was literally frozen with shock - and took this one precious picture...
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