Category: Countries

As I gaze across the grey waters of Lake Wakatipu, and the soggy car park in between, I think I wouldn’t mind right now being in the 43°C weather of Melbourne. I’m wrong: I’d be cursing my lack of effective air conditioning; but I’m bummed out anyway at Nature’s air conditioning here, of three days […]

I was struck with awe—in fact, terror—when I pulled up at 6 PM to Queenstown, tourist haven of the South Island, to be greeted by a young man impersonating a moose in front of a moving bus. It wasn’t Janet Frame’s awe at the big smoke’s granite and bustle. It’s an altogether more dysfunctional awe, […]

The rains caught me at Dunedin, and I didn’t walk around much. Even if the rains hadn’t caught me, I wouldn’t have walked around much. Dunedin is the one New Zealand city that the Lonely Planet does not include a walking tour for, and there’s good reason for that. Dunedin is absurdly hilly. I had […]

Oamaru is small and flat, like Nelson. But where Nelson is sunny and cheery, Oamaru is windy, with a chill that flies in out of the bowels of Antarctica. Where the tourists around Nelson are ambling hippies in broadshorts, the tourists around Oamaru wear layers of wool, and huddle. Where Nelson looks forward, past the […]

I came to New Zealand not knowing much about the place, and I still don’t. What I pick up, unavoidably, I refract through my Australian understanding of the world. To that understanding, New Zealand is not Ulan Bataar or Abidjan: it’s not completely foreign, and much is familiar. There are surprises, but they are scattered. […]

Akaroa, “Long Harbour”, is a harbour on a crater on Banks Peninsula, 82 km from Christchurch. Captain Cook thought it was Banks Island, and that’s how he named it. Ten million years ago, as the volcano rose from out the sea, he would have been right. The volcano has done its rising now, and what’s […]