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Mark Moxon's Travel Writing

New Zealand: Kiwi Trivia

The beach at Whatipu
Whatipu Beach, near Auckland, is pronounced 'Fatty-poo', much to the delight of juveniles everywhere

Here are some interesting oddities that I noted about New Zealand, written during my six month trip around this wonderful country...

Nice Names

This is ridiculous. I've just been glancing through my AA map of New Zealand, and up on the east coast of the North Island, not a million miles south of Hastings, is a mountain. It's not a very big mountain at only 305m (Mt Cook is 3754m, by comparison), but what it lacks in height it more than makes up in its name. And what's the name of this mountain? It is, of course, the easy-to-remember:

Mt Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu

It almost deserves a visit just for a photo of the signposts. I bet the map makers are pleased it's on the east coast, so its name can stretch out into the Pacific...

Drinking Laws

Another interesting aspect of New Zealand is the law on drinking. The legal drinking age is 20, but if you're married and you're in the pub with your spouse, you can drink at 18; in other words, if you don't have your spouse with you, you have to be 20 to drink, but if you're with them you can drink at 18. Don't ask me why, but I'm surprised the country isn't full of kids getting married simply so they can get slaughtered at the same time as most other country's kids can. Or perhaps it is, and I'm already too old to spot them...


You always notice lots of odd little things when driving round a foreign country, and here's what I discovered when exploring of New Zealand's road system:

Lead Syringes

One interesting aspect of driving round New Zealand is that you can't buy leaded petrol anywhere in the country; this worried me to start with, because the car I bought didn't run on unleaded. It's no problem, though; instead you buy lead additive from the garage too, which comes in a little syringe for NZ$1 (that's one syringe per 20 litres of petrol). These syringes are commonly known as 'squirts', so you should ask the man to fill it up with premium, and 'add a couple of squirts' – as most petrol stations have attendants, it's all taken care of. So it seems that in New Zealand you can have little squirts in the driving seat as well as the petrol tank; OK, I'll get me coat.

North vs South

Compared to the South Island, the North Island looks a bit like a plucked chicken. Where the South Island has acres of untouched wilderness where the trees are random, ancient and indigenous and the bush bastards flourish, the North Island's forests are planted in lines, they're mostly made up of pine trees, and they're farmed. The hills that have recently been logged and are now covered in stunted baby trees look a lot like plucked chickens, with rows and rows of orderly blobs where there should be chaos. That's just one reason the North Island feels more developed; as one of the guys at my Auckland hostel said, wherever you are in the South Island, you feel isolated, and he was right. In the North Island, you feel almost cosmopolitan in comparison, even in the bush.