Driving in New Zealand

We've been in New Zealand for a week now and have had a great time in the North Island. We'll be heading down to South Island tomorrow where we'll be renting a camper van for 2 weeks. We've been impressed with the landscape of North Island, but considering how all of the North Islanders we meet tell us how much they love South Island, we're pretty excited to see what all the fuss is about.

Now, driving in New Zealand is a bit of a challenge. Actually, the windy, hilly country roads with no one on them are the best roads. Why? Because there's no one on them! New Zealand drivers are terrible, especially around Auckland. When you're driving down the road and you're not sure if the car coming out of the sidestreet or making a turn across traffic is going to do so, you'd better bet that they're going to. Even when you have no car behind you for a kilometer, sure enough the car coming out of the sidestreet will pull right in front of you. Ahhh... Fortunately we didn't have any major problems, but it does take some getting used to.

We rented our car from a small local outfit so we were a bit surprised when we got our rental car - a 1995 Nissan Sunny. It's not too often that we rent cars made before we graduated from high school! This car had 143,000 kms on the clock, which was quite a difference from the nice new Toyota Camry we had in Oz with only 5,000 kms on the odometer. The Sunny didn't have much pickup, so it was a bit embarrassing being passed by all the time on the uphills. Oh well.

The advantage of having such an old car? They didn't really care what happened to it. Which is good for us because we unfortunately got a big ding in the windshield from a decent sized rock kicked up by a passing truck. But they didn't seem to care when we returned it today. We had to travel through a fair number of roads that we're in the process of being repaved, which left a lot of stones and rocks to be kicked up. Now we understand why there are so many old cars in NZ - it just doesn't make sense to have a flash new car when driving on these roads (and with these drivers).

Back to the drivers. We really should have been tipped off by the lady at immigration who warned us a few times about being careful with the bad Friday night traffic leaving town. Like a cautious mother, she repeatedly told us to watch out on the roads. I think what she really meant was "First time in New Zealand? Oh boy are you in for a treat with these crazy drivers!" It's not too often that immigration officials give you driving advice.