A tourist's rental agreement was torn up yesterday after a display of erratic driving on the Otago Peninsula.
A vehicle registered to a rental car company overtaking on blind corners and speeding through road works was reported to police by members of the public about 5.45pm, Senior Sergeant Ian Temple said.
Police located the vehicle close to Dunedin.
The man was issued with an infringement notice and the rental car company revoked his rental agreement as a result of police inquiries, Snr Sgt Temple said.
The man's age and nationality were unknown.
Meanwhile, a Haast woman who confiscated the car keys from a Chinese tourist driving badly at Franz Josef Glacier on Monday says she did what any responsible citizen would do in the circumstances.
And Radio New Zealand reported that a Queenstown man who took the keys off a foreign driver on the Lindis Pass last month did so at the direction of a *555 operator.
The man's wife, Christine Wardell, told the broadcaster that she called *555 after seeing a foreign woman driving all over the road.
‘‘The lady on *555 said, ‘Could you please take the keys from the driver?' My husband was quite reluctant to do that, but I just stressed to him that that was what the lady was telling us to do,'' she said.
Police Assistant Commissioner road policing Dave Cliff said it was uncommon, but if there was an extreme threat and ‘‘imminent action is necessary to prevent a life potentially being lost'' then taking keys by a member of the public could be justified.
Sheri Wright and her friend Sol Norton were returning from Greymouth on Monday when they came upon a southbound rental car being driven erratically at Mount Hercules, between Hari Hari and Te Taho.
Mrs Wright said it was ‘‘fairly hair-raising'' as they watched the car cross the centre line in heavy traffic.
They stuck behind the rental car as they continued south towards Franz Josef.
Mrs Wright decided to confront the driver when the car, containing three generations of a family-of-five, stopped about 2.30pm.
‘‘I tapped on the window. I said, ‘I need to have your keys'. He looked at me vacantly.''
After a fair amount of ‘‘screaming'' to try to get the driver to understand, and the man's wife reasoning that it was ‘‘their first time'' in New Zealand, she succeeded in taking the keys.
‘‘We rang the Hokitika police to say we'd removed these keys.''
They had since been contacted by police over the incident. ‘‘We haven't had a rap over the knuckles, as such,'' Mrs Wright said.
She said they had only done the responsible thing. At the very least, the lives of five people in the rental car had ‘‘been saved''.
Buller High School principal Andrew Basher got more than he bargained for when driving home from Christchurch on Monday.
Having just crossed the Ohikaiti River Bridge, in the lower Buller Gorge, he was forced to stop when the car in front of him slowed and then stopped in the middle of the road.
As Mr Basher tried to pass the vehicle, he saw the driver, an Asian who looked to be in his early 30s, get out of the car and take a photo of a dead possum lying on the road.
Mr Basher said the tourist's actions were dangerous, but luckily, his was the only other vehicle on that stretch of road at the time.
‘‘I was concerned that he would think it was acceptable to actually do that on an open road . . . I didn't think possums were that exciting,''he said. -
- additional reporting Greymouth Star/Westport News
