Comparative nonsense

Notice anything different about this No Entry sign?

Before we came, we'd chatted with a fair few people who'd already been and there were a fair few more who, despite being very impressed, thought it eerily reminiscent of the UK, especially in & around Wellington and Christchurch. Some even use "Little England" as a synonym for Christchurch. We've not been there yet (not for that reason, but it's probably reason enough..) but I'd kind of expected to find the suburbs here in Auckland's to be a lot more familiar than they are. They're actually more reminiscent of Barcelona's urbanizaciones if anywhere, just definitively down-under, with a lot of things distinctly Kiwi rather than Ozzie in character.

For example, one thing we've done a lot of is grocery shopping. Supermarkets are pretty much the same the world over, although their trundlers are front-wheel-steer only and there are a lot more dairies to compete with. They're everywhere, super-convenient for shoppers and robbers alike, although convenience shopping doesn't stop with them: like Australia, you can get most basics at the servo and there's usually a "superette" (love it) on the main roads in & out of town. It's all about as English as Watties tomato ketchup.

Ignoring some inconvenient facts for a moment, New Zealand is also way bigger than the UK. It took a little over 3 hours driving to get from our old place in Durham to Heathrow airport, a journey which, on the map, seems to traverse a good chunk of the country. Drive from Auckland to the south coast and it will take you nine hours, and that's just the reasonably flat north island... add another nine and you might get somewhere near the southern highlands. For the averagely laid-back traveller, that's at least a three-day journey, and doesn't even account for the ferry between the two landmasses. It's no wonder it took those poor Hobbits so long to get to Mordor.

The thing is, it's so goddam hilly, the roads you see on the map are no indication of distance at all. If you flattened the buggers out they'd be twice as long. Seriously! It's big in a quiet way, like mountains or oceans which seem relatively small from a distance and vast when you get right up to them. We went tramping on Sunday, drove up into the Hunua mountains beyond the Napa Valley vineyards to a locked gate, at which point you have to get out and er, tramp. Looking for a picnic site and sporting totally inappropriate footwear, we followed a mud-laden trail through dense forest, overgrown with monster ferns and sinister creepers, which according to a large-scale map we found would be a kilometer maximum before we reached a viewpoint with fabulous views. It took about an hour. I swear it was nearer 5km... the view was indeed fabuolous (see pics) and the kids were amazing, but we had a classic bus-load of tourists at the top of the mountain moment when we turned to leave and found a perfectly good road round the corner providing an easy 10 minute stroll back to the car...

Anyway, about those inconvenient facts: the Kiwi landmass covers roughly the same area as the UK, give or take a receding shoreline or two (if one of the 48 volcanoes here decided to erupt, that could change quite radically of course) and there are famously more sheep here than people. Like about five times as many, and roughly 15 times fewer people than the UK, but it's really not that obvious until you go to the beach on a perfect sunny day & find there's almost no one there. That same Sunday we drove through Maretai, a really stunning seaside town with beautiful, turquoise crystal seas and spotless beaches fringed with shaded, grassy picnic areas; it was 12 noon and there were maybe 30 people there. The beach, which must be all of 3km long, was practically deserted. Out of the city, you do get this odd feeling of being vastly outnumbered by livestock. Across the road from the beach, a flock of wooly ruminants keep their heads down, hoping no-one will notice.

This is the reason NZ is so high up the chart of "per-capita" statistics; less than a quarter of the population of 4.2 million people live outside of the cities and burbs. The result is that the country has – per capita – more crime, more McDonalds restaurants, more Olympic medals and more dope smokers than almost any other country in the world. Everything you'd expect to find downtown New York is present in Downtown, Auckland City, but it's magnified statistically by the sheer dearth of people living anywhere else in NZ. Having the second-lowest population density in the world really does distort the stats as much as it scares the sheep: the fact is, this is one of the safest countries in the world to visit, it does crap at the Olympics and for the most part you can't find a Big Mac or score a bag of grass to save your life.

Not that we'd want to do either of those things, of course...