South Island Road Trip: Extensive Social Commentary

Now, it's on to the biggest part of the trip, way back during "Spring Break" in the middle of August: the road trip to the South Island. You know how MTV simply said to themselves "Hey, let's put seven strangers in a house and follow them around with cameras, I'm sure someone will go crazy and they'll end up arguing the whole time" and The Real World was born? Our trip was The Real World's cousin. Fourteen relative strangers packed in three cars, staying 6 people to a room for two weeks on a trip that spanned nearly the entirety of a country should have raised red flags before we left, but it wasn't until probably an hour into the first drive down to Wellington (10 hours from Auckland, where we would take a ferry to the South Island) that it began to dawn on me what I was in for. Did I see dozens of truly beautiful landscapes and do things that I will never get the chance to do again? Absolutely, and I'll get to all of them soon enough, but I feel like it will be better served with the negativity out of the way.

There were three kinds of troublemakers on the trip. First, we had the self proclaimed leader of the trip who was one of three people to put it together and assumed the Mom role, only if said mother's children debated getting emancipated on Day 4. Entrenched firmly (and solitarily) in the "Let's all caravan even though everyone has a map and is 20 years old" camp, Mom also did things like judge people for sleeping in when there was nothing else to do and yell at people for taking too long to eat. Good times!

Next, we had the "I'm just doing what I'm told" group. While playing the role of the good guys, they often accentuated whatever problem other people (read: I) had with what was going on by taking the passive aggressive route and just playing devil's advocate when really the arguments would have been easily solvable if someone else with common sense just thought for five seconds. The amount of "Well, I don't really care's" and "It's not my decision's" from them contributed to the discontent as much as the third group, me (and to be fair, some of my car-mates)

I found myself in a tough position. With my background of running student government in high school and subsequently, dealing with other people's incompetence when executing simple tasks, I have a very low tolerance for not doing things efficiently. I also had no interest in planning this trip. There was too many things that could go wrong, and more importantly, too many people like myself to deal with. That is, everyone had an opinion and intended it to be heard. Some had more tact than others, but I can't help myself from suggesting more logical and simple alternatives when they exist. "Hey, maybe we should print out directions to our hostel so we don't drive around Wellington for a half hour at 1am." "Hey, maybe if the van wasn't in overdrive you wouldn't be using so much gas" You get the picture. Somehow, I was painted as the villain.

And yes, I also passive-aggressively pointed out that none of this was my responsibility, but if you put yourself in that role, people have every right to expect you to do it well, and if you fail, you lose the right to act like the boss. (Note: This is only the case outside of professional situations with actual bosses, as far as I can tell. This is also because nobody can call out their boss for being incompetent like you can call out a peer.)

But that isn't all that happened socially on the trip. My car formed a great friendship, and I thank them all for putting up with me. I couldn't be happier that Athina and Kristen wanted to drive with me and Meryl, and Rob's addition to the car was invaluable. Some of the best times of the entire semester were in that car with them (and on subsequent occasions when we were all together), so if there was a silver lining to everyone finally realizing that our group wasn't all made to be 15 best friends, its that we got to form a smaller group that turned out even better than that. And now, on to the actual trip!