So here’s the thing. We really enjoyed our month in New Zealand, it’s a fantastic place to visit unless you are a relentlessly urban person or only enjoy beaches. But I was reflecting on our blog entries for the month and trying to work out what was missing; somehow they didn’t feel like such an engaging body of words.
I think it’s a lack of the exotic. In the rest of our travels we’ve been entirely outside of our life back in England, we were finding the new and different around every corner. Sometimes it gave me things to marvel at, other times things to moan about, and other times a good laugh. All that ended up in the blog, or at least the best parts. Nothing in New Zealand is so very different to England. Nothing in the culture, anyway. The wilderness and wildlife is totally new and right up our street, but that’s best shown in photos.
I’m not missing the exotic myself, this is a fine respite from the sometimes hair-pulling effect of travelling around Asia. The blog might be missing it a bit, though.
Related Images:
That’s a good summation, we found the Maori ‘culture’ to be present where it was varnished with the stink of exploitative tourism, aside from that the harsh reality is that the Maori seem to have been subjugated to underclass status, many of them littering the streets, bottle in hand, of humdrum towns like Kaitaia which we visited en route to the promising sounding 90 mile beach. The best/worst statement we heard about NZ prior to our visit there was “you’ll love it, it’s just like England in the 30s”, ie lacking all the immigrants which actually give our country that exotic imprint NZ lacks!
Hm. Now you make me wonder whether that is what attracts so many Brits to emigrate there – they talk to us about the peace and the beautiful landscape, but perhaps what they really see out here is the England they wish existed back home.
As for the Maori, I was interested to discover that the best current theory is they arrived in NZ around 1350AD. That’s only 400 years before Cook arrived, so it’s probably more accurate to call them a first wave of colonists rather than ancient indigenies. Not that this forgives the second wave of colonists’ treatment of them!