Maria worked as an intern at Sussex Bylines last year.
I have a special connection with the Antipodes. My grandparents made the arduous journey by sea to Australia in 1964, and my grandma remembers spending most of the voyage ill with what she thought was seasickness, but turned out nine months later to be my mother.
They spent six years in Melbourne, having Christmas barbecues on the beach and checking underneath toilet seats for spiders. When I boarded the plane to Auckland from Hong Kong with my Kiwi partner (in the long tradition of Kiwis convincing their significant others to move down under), the thought of this painstaking ocean voyage made the eleven hours we were going to spend in economy class seem like a holiday.
After travelling across Asia for five weeks and staying in what felt like hundreds of hostels (with the most notable being in Thailand where we were woken to a rat scurrying across the floor and rooting around in our belongings), we were thankful to get to New Zealand, knowing this would be our home for the next three years.
When I was working as an intern for Sussex Bylines last year, I had thought a great deal about what articles I could write and the opportunity presented itself: a guide to New Zealand, but not just the things that everyone advises you about if you travel down here – the real, day to day experience of life beyond the waterfalls and mountains.
The long journey to Dunedin
We spent around four weeks travelling through New Zealand from Auckland to Dunedin, the second largest city in the South Island, and the differences between here and the UK were immediately apparent. New Zealand is enormous and almost 80% uninhabited, and there were times on our 1,400 kilometre journey where we were scared by the isolation.
On a particularly terrifying mountain road between Tongariro National Park and Napier (in the North Island), with no phone signal and no GPS, hours away from the next town, we became terrified by the idea the car could break down. In England, you pass from town to town with hardly any spaces between, but New Zealand is mostly these spaces.
When we arrived in National Park Village and found the petrol station closed, leaving countless people in our hostel stranded and an hour and a half from fuel, we learnt the necessary lesson of never letting the tank run down too low. Nobody seemed to mind too much though, with the view of Mount Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe behind the sports bar.
Life in Dunedin
We finally arrived in Dunedin, a small student town, in May and began hunting for flatmates. It is easy to see why the Scottish immigrants in the 19th century felt so at home here; it is Antarctic cold and unbelievably hilly, home to the world’s steepest street after the title was reinstated from Wales.
Here we discovered that things like double glazing, insulation and central heating were optional in New Zealand, and found ourselves wearing parkas indoors and frantically switching on the electric blanket at night. The Kiwi ‘she’ll be right’ attitude pervades into all walks of life. When the wind blows through the thin windows or the indoor thermostat reads seven degrees Celsius, the locals seem to content themselves by saying that this is a ‘young country’, and that building standards just have not quite caught up with the UK. Moving across hemispheres just in time to catch winter in two countries was not the wisest decision we made.
The old jokes about sheep outnumbering people remain true and the fields of the Canterbury Plains are full of cattle, ensuring New Zealand’s reputation as the producer of the world’s best butter remains intact. Despite this, it is one of the most expensive products in our weekly shop at $7.99 (£3.80) a block, and the cheese is abysmal. There is no cheddar or Red Leicester, only the omnipresent ‘Tasty Cheese’, which is neither especially tasty nor particularly resembles cheese, and we have not seen a decent block of Parmesan since we arrived. Our only comfort is that fish and chips are suspiciously cheap, tartare sauce is widely available, but mushy peas or the addition of vinegar are rare.
The absurdity of size and distances
Compared to other wildernesses, New Zealand’s only real threat is its size. There are no native predators and the wildlife you do see is often comical and unique rather than frightening. On our journey down south, we were followed through the woods in the Abel Tasman National Park by a very tame weka, one in the long list of New Zealand’s flightless birds, which can reportedly excrete its own body weight in faeces each day.
Knowing this, I was surprised to find that many Kiwis not only own cats but allow them to go outside and terrorise local bird populations. We currently live with three cats who (although valiantly doing their bit to eradicate Dunedin’s invasive rat population) have managed in the last few weeks to significantly decrease the local community of wax-eyes, a small bird with a distinctive silver ring round its eyes.
After nearly six months we still translate prices into pounds and, even with all the supposed similarities that New Zealand and Australia share with the UK, sometimes the absurdity of the distance is astonishing. It is easy to wax poetic about the scenery, the quality of life or the strange wildlife. If you travel here that will be what you notice, but a cross-globe move will force you to think longingly back on things like passenger rail, central heating and the BBC.
New Zealand is not just like Britain in the 1970s, or Tolkien’s Shire, or any other pop culture iteration we may have been led to believe, but it is wonderful all the same.
Maria will be writing occasional updates on her life in New Zealand.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
