That’s us left New Zealand. Overall, to cover pretty much the whole country in a little over 3 weeks was probably a tad over ambitious. It didn’t help that the motorhome was a big old rattly shed, which to some extent restricted where we could go - rather than wild camping we had to really be on a site most nights in order to recharge, refill and dump. This, combined with the generally poor roads made distance driving a challenge. Powered sites tend to be at least a kilometre from population centres and given the weather we encountered made going into centres a chore rather than a pleasure. We caught up with four different groups of friends who we knew from Alicante and Edinburgh which was good and weird given that three of them lived in Blenheim but didn’t really know each other.
As far as NZ itself goes, I feel it’s massively overrated. It has some beautiful bits, but its a hell of a long way to go for scenery that is on our doorstep in Europe - much of it was strongly reminiscent of Ireland, NW Scotland, the borders, the cheviot and the lakes, and that’s before you include the likes of Scandinavia and the highland and wildernesses throughout europe.
Apart from maybe half a dozen proper towns or cities most places are soulless settlements that are shut down by 8 o’clock in the evening. Pubs are pretty infrequent and outside the main half dozen centres or tourist hotspots are shut by 8. Young people are rarely seen in most of them, but to be fair are rarely seen anyway. Most of the places you see on the map are essentially hamlets with maybe a shop, a church and a few scattered farms and houses. Most don’t have a pub but do have some kind of liquor store, so I assume everybody gets shitfaced at home - the draconian drink drive laws are probably responsible for that - random breath testing is common - I was stopped and tested for the first time in 51 years of riding and driving! Aced it though.
It’s very expensive everywhere for everything, but I assume wages are commensurate.
There were fewer sheep and cows than I was expecting - much former sheep country has been turned over to vineyards to produce huge industrialised quantities of characterless bland whites, and as for the reds the less said about the vast majority of them the better. There are lots of independent breweries which produce the kind of overmarketed cloudy fruit flavoured ipas so beloved of Mr Anchor but not so us traditionalists. The amount of Roadkill is incredible - 95% must be possums, introduced from australia but now considered a pest as they predate on NZ’s few remaining flightless birds. NZ has no native land mammals fact fans. Everything with fur has been introduced either by the first nation settlers (who predated the 6 species of Moa to extinction in a little over 150 years) or by the european settlers who arrived soon after.
So would I return? Probably not. I’m glad we’ve done it, but getting there is a pain for something like an empty version of the UK - it’s a bloody long way away.
Demographics are also changing rapidly - migration from the sub-continent is marked and combined with the previous incomings from vietnam and Hong-kong probably keep the country going - nearly all low wage service jobs are filled by recent migrants. Many retail and service businesses are now chinese or indian owned, much as is happening the world over.
Onto the next stop now…..
