The South Island

New Zealand has about five million people and three quarters of them live on the North Island. So I choose to start my visit on the South. I flew into the South’s largest city, Christchurch, and checked into the smallest hotel room I’ve ever seen. My last room was about a thousand square feet. This one, including the toilet and shower, was about a hundred.

It was new, modern and green-themed. Here, small is chic. The bed runs the width of the room. Luggage is stored under the bed, the closet was a bar that folds down from a wall and one wall was mirrored to make the place look bigger. It also had a large flat screen TV, mood lighting and state of the art communications. It made as good a use of space as the International Space Station. And with a $38 price tag, the place was packed.

The next day, after a short trolley ride around Christchurch, the road was calling to me and I picked up my rental car from New Zealand’s version of Rent-a-Wreck. My new ride is a ten year old Nissan with 175,000 kilometers on the odometer, its fair share of dints and rust spots, and a cassette deck for tunes. Fortunately, I brought along a portable CD player. James Taylor sounds just a good through headphones as a car stereo.

Traveling south, the city quickly gave way to pastures of sheep and cows. It reminded me Sonoma County. To my right lie the Great Southern Alps; but they’re quite a distance off and the flatlands roll all the way to the ocean. A little further south and it started looking like Southern Oregon; a little further, it opened up to a very Oregon-like coast. In a few hours I’d found a room in Dunedin and headed out to look for Yellow-eyed Penguins on the Otago Peninsula.

I got lost trying to find my way to the peninsula, pulled into a Quik Mart and asked directions. A friendly Kiwi said “Sure thing, Mate.” He got out a map, marked where we were and where I needed to go and told me to keep the map.

World news is all about the U.S. economy. And before going into the store, he asked what impacts our housing and stock crisis had on me, when I thought things might turn around and what I thought about our new President. I took my time reading the map he’d given me, and as I queued to leave my new friend pulled up next to me, handed a canned rum and coke (very popular down here) through my window and told me to enjoy the drive.

The next day, I headed even further south thinking I’d have lunch in Invercargill before heading northwest towards Fiordland. With my tourist book guiding me, I saw waterfalls, blowholes, sea caves, then more waterfalls. I was lucky to make it to Invercargill by dinner. Many of the best sights were on a sixty mile long dirt road that ran along the coast.

Being so far from everything, I thought New Zealand would be void of people. But the opposite is true. Tourists, in their camper vans and tour busses, are everywhere. Every tourist spot has people speaking German, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. And those tour busses travel the same dirt roads as my dented rental.