Cars and driving in NZ

The average car in NZ is 14 years old. In North Island there is no frost and no salt on the roads. If you are a young buck, you fettle your Honda or Subaru by lowering the suspension, enlarging the exhaust and spinning your wheels after every turn. These people are called w*nk*rs in the local dialect. In town the roads are hugely wide. There is a side road near us that is at least three lanes wide. It has no traffic. [Note from Jenny – when cycling on it yesterday, she was passed by two cars!]

Apart from the above, everyone drives in a totally civilised way, keeping rigidly to the speed limit with no aggressive braking or acceleration. This makes crossing the road or turning out from a side road really difficult. You often arrive at, say, a T-junction: you have to wait for traffic to clear before turning but there is not a car in sight. You can’t just turn out because a car might jump out at you. So you wait…still no cars. Finally, one comes into sight half a mile away and moving very slowly, so you wait for it to pass. Then there is one more going the other way equally slowly, so you have to wait for it to pass. In England you would have squeezed into a constant stream of cars accelerating towards you at illegal speed but in NZ you somehow can’t. It can take ages to turn out into an empty road.

All the main roads here are two lanes, one each way. The gradients, bends and camber have to be seen to be believed. But people don’t overtake. Perhaps their cars are programmed not to. If you are a tourist pottering along looking at the view you will often attract two or three cars full of ‘working people’: vets; farm machinery engineers; a Ute carrying four sheep, who stick behind you until there is a passing lane even if the road is straight and empty. People have obviously forgotten how to overtake.

We would strongly recommend the car hire company we have used (New Zealand Rent-a-Car). They do reduced rates for cars over three years old. Neither the ‘vintage’ Toyota, nor the ‘vintage’ Mazda we got have caused us the slightest problem. The company has a bizarre and unique way of doing business: they provide the car you booked; no-one checks your documents; no unexpected surcharges are levied and they don’t try to sell you unnecessary insurance waivers. You return the car at night and post the key through the letterbox. I phoned up the following day to see if everything was OK all prepared to argue about the new scratches they claimed to have found or the amount of cleaning they had to do: “No, everything’s fine, why shouldn’t it be?”