I am so glad we decided to visit New Zealand as our last travel destination. What an indescribably beautiful country. It is a wonderfully strange combination of exotic and familiar- prehistoric tropical plants mixed with deciduous trees in fall colors, cute New England-ish houses and crazy wildlife. Even knowing that the deciduous plants are all invasive, they are very comforting. The laid-back pastoral lifestyle is sort of like what small-town America could be like if you subtracted the ignorance and xenophobia and guns.
Examples of how laid back New Zealanders are:
1. Since I’m used to a general “parking is for customers only” rule, I asked if I could leave my car in a parking lot while I walked around town— the response I got was a sarcastic “of course not!” Like my question was totally ridiculous. In some places in the U.S. you’d be towed!
2. It is totally normal to be called “Love” (As in being addressed as Sweetie or Darlin’).
3. Nobody dresses up to go out [this is one of my biggest peeves of Singapore. Going to the grocery store is a production and Chris and I both feel like slobs in our regular clothes]. People are kind of rough, just wearing their work clothes, no designer nonsense.
4. Kids and adults go around barefoot. Related to another Singapore peeve- sensitivity to temperature (wind does not equal cold, people). It was very chilly and we saw people driving cars barefoot, kids in their soccer uniforms going into stores barefoot to grab a snack, etc.
This relaxed attitude can also be combined with quaint small-town traits. We learned that any restaurant called a Café generally closed at 3pm, and everything else closed at 5. Eating out for dinner is not so common (I guess we’ve been living in SIngapore where your average adult may not actually know how to cook). This was OK since eating out was expensive- we took advantage of being in the meat capital of the world by pan frying some cheap high-quality steaks.
So when the sun started going down, things were actually wrapping up. When we were driving home from Waitomo Caves (a 3.5 hour drive) we stopped at a police checkpoint, and the officer asked where we were headed. We told him and he said “Whew, that’s a long drive, be safe.” As if it was the middle of the night. It was 8pm but pitch dark. The police officer’s concern seemed strange considering our parents drove 6 to 8 hour trips to New York, sometimes in the middle of the night.
The most difficult aspect of driving in New Zealand, harder to deal with than driving on the left, was simply how beautiful everything was. I enjoyed the freedom of driving through the countryside but I wanted to look at everything CONSTANTLY but the roads are so narrow and twisty that it requires a lot of focus. But this is what driving was like:
Look, sheep!
Look at that bird!
Wow, a rainbow!
Hey, now there’s two rainbows!
Man those sheep are cute.
Oh my god, look at the ocean!
Look, another rainbow!
It really gave a whole new meaning to driving just for the sake of driving. The karst topography where we were created many high points overlooking the ocean (sometimes ocean on both sides). The sun is VERY strong, and the sun hitting the water can either create intense beautiful sparking, or totally blind you. Sometimes we would drive to the top of a hill and suddenly it seemed like the ocean and the whole world was spread out before us, framed by the most brilliantly saturated green you’ll ever see.
Another really interesting thing about New Zealand, which I honestly didn’t know before, is that is has no indigenous land mammals. No predators. There are a bazillion awesome species of birds and they have no fear (or at least less than usual). There are birds that just hang out in fields, pecking at the grass, as if they were sheep. I like to imagine this lush island environment evolving peacefully by itself, Jurassic Park palms and ferns, this random mixture of birds that ended up there by accident, nothing hunting and killing other things, nothing really competing for resources because everything grows like mad. If you are born a Kiwi you are very blessed.
