What you wrote is pretty definitive.
"If you're walking around riots zones with a helmet, it's hard to believe you're not up to trouble."
Salem Oregon BLMs get attacked by Proud Boys
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"If you're walking around riots zones with a helmet, it's hard to believe you're not up to trouble."
GFY - suggesting that someone wearing a helmet is "up to trouble" is asinine.
Art, someone threw a plastic bag at the kid. He had to defend himself by killing the guy. Totally justified.
Still waiting for the list of countries you've been to to make your comparison.
Canada Mexico Spain England
Well traveled or not well traveled it don’t matter. I have the internet. Brought to you by Al Gore. American!
Mexico party
Canada fish
Grandma from Manchester
Aunt from small town Spain
I’ve been fortunate to travel. Unfortunately haven’t for last 10 years.
Guy calls America a shithole country and I get called out for not traveling enough in the last 10 years.
RileyHawk I’m just trying to help. Lose the LOL. Youre past that stage in life. And you’re welcome
I spent two weeks in New Zealand about 8 years ago and it was absolutely amazing. I spent 5 days on the more heavily settled North Island and the remainder in the lightly populated South Island. Both are filled with amazing food and drink (especially wine and beer but their local sodas and whiskies are great as well), ridiculously over the top friendly people and fantastic scenery.
The thing to keep in mind when it comes to New Zealand is not that it’s necessarily “better” than the US because over the years by visiting all 50 states I’ve found equivalent spots to each Kiwi highlight, but the difference is that visiting New Zealand is like taking all of the US’ physical highlights including Hawaii and Alaska and then shrinking them down into two islands roughly the size of Florida.
But NZ has some long flat pure white sandbeaches in a subtropical setting like Florida. It has black sand volcanic beaches in a true tropical setting like Hawaii. It has pebbly and amber beaches in a temperate setting like those in California. It has frozen rocky coasts that look exactly like Bar Harbor in Maine. There are vast Fjords that look like what you get in Alaska and Norway. Large open sounds like the Puget in Seattle or what you find in the Canadian northwest. There are painted lakes and geysers like you find in Yellowstone. Massive underground caverns with underground lakes (that have a galaxy of little lights on the ceilings from glowworms) like you find in Kentucky and Virginia.
There’s high, Sharp and Rocky Mountains like you only find in the US in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and Alaska. There are low, smooth mountains topped with forests like the Smokies. There are large rolling hills that truly look unlike anything in America because while the features remind you of the hills outside of Yosemite, those are usually brown from the deserty atmosphere while the ones in New Zealand are as lush as the hills in Ireland or the Snowdonia area of Wales. There’s pancake rocks that look like the giant’s staircase in Ireland. There’s enormous glaciers like in Montana and British Columbia. The West Coast drive of the South Island is a picture perfect mirror for Big Sur and other Central California highlights of Highway 1. There are vast volcanoes that mirror those on Hawaii and Washington State.
I could literally go on and on, but instead I’ll just pull up some photos others took and hosted (mine are only on Facebook and Shutterfly) so you can see what I’m talking about. But essentially, New Zealand is all that is great about America...but shrunk down into an area smaller than Florida. So you can visit Hawaii on one day, Florida on the second, Maine on the third and Wyoming on the fourth.
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I’m heading to Greece in a few years. Lived there years ago and have friends and family there. It’s just me, so an easy decision.
Piha and Muriwai Beaches
White and gold sand Beaches in Abel Tasman
Fiordlands
Lake Wanaka
Kaikoura (my favorite spot, it’s mountains leading into the sea with a mile deep trench only football fields from shore where sperm whales eat the giant and colossal squids that feast themselves on the giant schools of fish you can easily catch within swimming distance of shore. And maybe best of all, the Marlborough Vineyards which makes the worlds best Sauvignon blanc are only 20 mins away or so, and you can have amazing wine to go with your fresh rock lobster or fish
Southern Alps
Rotorua
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I’ll post more because that’s the tip of the iceberg, I’ve just got to run at the moment.
That sounds real nice and all but have you ever had fresh Iowa sweet corn, a proper Iowa chop, and Dorothy from TG?Kaikoura (my favorite spot, it’s mountains leading into the sea with a mile deep trench only football fields from shore where sperm whales eat the giant and colossal squids that feast themselves on the giant schools of fish you can easily catch within swimming distance of shore. And maybe best of all, the Marlborough Vineyards which makes the worlds best Sauvignon blanc are only 20 mins away or so, and you can have amazing wine to go with your fresh rock lobster or fish)
Southern Alps
Rotorua
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You are very detailed in your account of NZ like an encyclopedia
I feel like you should be narrating a history channel HD show of NZ lol. I can certainly understand why you would love to live there with all the breath taking views. I would certainly love to travel more outside the US and that's a place I want to go for sure and you make me want to go even more! Tell me more about the life there outside of the eating and views? People, culture, etc. I just remember my dad telling me about NZ being one of the few places on earth that doesn't have anything poisonous on it (not sure if true about animals, plants or whatever). I used to look at pictures of it when I was a kid when I could. Sounds like I just need to do what you did at least to experience it.
You are very detailed in your account of NZ like an encyclopedia
Well my main takeaway was that Kiwis are so incredibly nice and giving that they make Canadians seem like they’re from the Bronx. Even when they’re angry with you, they literally grit their teeth, smile and offer to help you out.
I’ll tell a couple of stories.
First, a really interesting thing about the New Zealand culture is how much juice and milk they drink. When you stop in an American convenience store that has 5 drink fridges, you’ll typically see one that is filled with various energy drinks, three that are filled with sodas and one that has teas, coffees, milks and juices. In New Zealand that same convenience store would have one filled with sodas and maybe some low caffeine vitamin based energy drinks (at least when I was there the American style high dose caffeine drinks were regulated as medicine), one or two filled with teas, one filled with juices and one filled with all kinds of milks. Not just a wide variety of flavors (and they have FAR more than standard American chocolate and strawberry milks, but coffee, lime, lemon, blueberry, blackberry, vanilla, green tea, coconut, hokie pokie (a common NZ flavor, it’s essentially butterscotch and toffee flavored), orange, kiwifruit, star fruit and so on), but they also have multiple manufacturers of flavored milks. Just like some Americans only eat Jif, Peter Pan or Skippy flavor, they have loyalty to milk manufacturers/brands. So the Kiwis absolutely LOVE milk and it’s got an unusually important part of their culture.
That love of milk extends to their lodging. Every hotel and B&B in New Zealand other than the large international chains like Holiday Inn gives you a free pint of milk every day as part of your stay. On one of my first nights in New Zealand before I knew better, I was pulling in late (10 or 11 pm) in to a small hotel outside of the Glowworm Caves. Apparently, if you’re going to check in after 7 you need to call and let them know even if it’s a decent sized hotel like this one. So when I tried to check in there was no one there. I saw there was an after hours call in number and when I called it, I could hear it coming from a managers cottage on premise. So after calling several times, I banged on the door for awhile. Finally the guy came out and you could tell he was effen ticked at being awoken. He begrudgingly let me in and I could feel the hate radiating from him. But at the end, all he did was very politely suggest I call ahead if I’m running late (and one snarky comment about properly Looking up a countries cultural differences before going there) and at the end he said that because I didn’t call ahead he didn’t have milk waiting for him at our room but he would bring me some along with some free cookies while I was unpacking.
So the Kiwis are obviously ridiculously nice, but they’re also far more “outdoorsy” than the great majority of Americans and bike, hike and hitchhike FAR more than we do. Even going to work or the pub that way. So when I would talk to a Kiwi about the distances I was traveling between days. Sometimes 2-4 hours to the next stop, they acted as if I was driving for four straight days and it was impossible. Because your average KiwI, if he or she has a car at all, uses it only for transportation around the immediate area and seldom goes on long car drives like a typical American (or REALLY long car rides like I do around the US and Canada).
Another interesting thing which was odd to Americans (at the time, it has been 8 years so maybe it’s changed) is that there really are only two driving speeds. Essentially 78 mph for anywhere not in a city and 32 when in a city. And especially in the South Island where the largest city is only about the size of Tallahassee and there are tons of tiny towns numbering in the 100s not tens or hundreds of thousands, the definition of city is pretty sketchy. So on the one hand there are speed traps where you have to slam on the brakes to avoid tickets all over the place to slow down for “city” driving and on the other hand you can be on some really tight, twisty mountain roads with no guardrails to keep you from flying off...and the speed limit is almost 80.
The first time I got busted by a Kiwi cop in a little speed trap town, they were ultra polite. Asked if I knew their driving rules, gave me a laminated sheet with their rules and then warned me that there would be plenty of other speed traps along the way. The second time I got busted, the cops were still ultra polite, asked if I knew the rules and needed a copy and then wrote me a ticket but he explained that because I was a foreigner if I didn’t plan on coming back to New Zealand then I didn’t need to pay it but if I wanted to be let back in for a second visit all of the speeding tickets would need to be paid before I returned. So ultra polite, ultra professional, ultra helpful (they also both asked if I needed directions and/or restaurant or Lodging help) and completely different than what I was used to in the US.
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I put this into Google Translate "Detect Language" and all it came back with was the same wall of text under the language, "Narcissist Raconteur."
You are very detailed in your account of NZ like an encyclopedia
Before I traveled to New Zealand, I went on some travel forums to ask questions about food and lodging in individual cities and I had tons of Kiwis offer to cook for me so that I had “real” Kiwi food and otherwise offered to show me around. I actually took up five of the offers. I had a movie production assistant in Wellington invite my wife and I to private tour of the Weta special effects shop and then we had a private dinner at her home where she made a pounded and fried Paua (a small NZ abalone) steaks as an app, traditional rosemary lamb roast with roast vegetables including kumara, some pavlova for dessert with the giant local blackberries that are twice or three times the size of standard American Farmed blackberries and some great pink Pinot Noir from the Central Otago region (side note, the Kiwis really love rose made from Pinot unlike the Americans who only drink it red and both the Kiwis but especially the Aussies prefer red sparkling wines not white and pink and are disbelieving that it’s nearly impossible to get a sparkling red wine in the US). In Christchurch, the local food critic took us around town to show off the major portions of earthquake damage and then took us to his favorite burger bar for local venison burgers (deer is not native, but farmed red deer from Scotland are their most important herd animal after sheep) and to a Cambodian restaurant he loved. In Oamaru, a local pub owner offered us free food and drinks at his establishment and then took us on a night time hike around town to catch the thousands and thousands of Little Blue Penguins who slept there during the night before swimming back out before daylight (they’re essentially pests to the locals as they nest under and around their houses). Just outside of Rotorua, a full blooded Maori invited us to a local hangi (essentially a NZ luau but with roast lamb instead of pig, tons of roast seafood and lots of raw oysters, clams, Paua and other mollusks) that they were hosting for a North Korean Consul General so it was my wife and I, some Russian “tourists”, the North Korean Consul General delegation and a bunch of Maori tribesman. And finally, while in Kaikoura I spent the night at a B&B but was moving on the next day. When the hostess found out we were fishing in the morning and then moving on, she offered to cook our catch for us for free. We came back with 6 rock lobsters and tons of filets from orange roughy, blue cod, red cod and sea perch. She made us a feast of one rock lobster each and a filet of each type of fresh fish and offered to mail the rest back to us in the States, but we asked her if she wanted the rest of the meat and lobsters for her B&B or personal use instead which she happily kept. We had the best meal ever with splitting a bottle of the best local Sauvignon Blanc from the Marlborough Region (even better than the large commercial products we get shipped here, this was small craft wineries in the area we mostly went to), butter poached rock lobster and panfried local fish all on her deck overlooking the ocean with white topped mountains looming in the back.
So when I say the Kiwis are friendly, I mean each stranger there will probably do more for you than even your best friend back home. They literally get joy from making others happy. And just like the Irish and Scots, they love singing in pubs while they chug local wines and beers. There’s not really a popular large brand of beer, each town has its own brewery and/or brewpubs that makes “the local beers” and that’s what you drink. Each beer is really a craft product, not a large scale mass produced swill like you get in America if you don’t seek out the craft breweries. And the wines...everyone has a local favorite winery and there’s more than just one wine region. There’s as many famous wine regions in New Zealand as there are in California with 11 main “regions”. Marlborough on the top of the South Island is the one that is rightfully the most famous as their Sauvignon Blancs are the best in the world, bettering the French and American versions. And Hawke’s Bay is famous for making good quality Chardonnay, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. But my favorite is the Central Otago region in the dead center of the South Island. Their pink Pinot Noirs taste like light and crispy strawberry juice and their red Pinot Noirs have a richness and depth of flavor that even the best French reds can’t match. And the Kiwis drink them all by the gallons.
In regards to the animals...yes there is literally only one poisonous animal native to New Zealand and that’s the katipo spider which is a close relative to our black widow and labeled Endangered. For a long time it was considered mythical and not real so it’s never lived in large numbers.
But as for the rest, no poisonous wasps, scorpions, snakes or insects to bother you. Frankly there are no mammals native to New Zealand either other than one species of bat. When humanity showed up, there were only birds and a bunch of insects. The freshwater lakes and rivers were also devoid of large fish other than the giant native eels. So humanity introduced salmon and trout to fish for and red deer and Australian possum to hunt.
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Awesome information and I thank you for taking the time to write it. Clearly you have a place in your heart for NZ and I'm glad you were able to share it with me. It all sounds so very interesting and the people sound great! I think I've got some planning to do here next year
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