After the fortified, post industrial desert that is California New Zealand seems neat and lush and almost impossibly tidy. The flyovers are discrete, parks numerous, streets clean, and cities mercifully free of homeless people, crackheads and whores.
There is also that peculiar mirror world quality that comes from being in a place so similar to home, but never quite exactly the same. A Japanese roboticist calls this gap ‘the uncanny valley’. The gulf that yawns when you stop anthropomorphosing the headlights and grill of a car into a smiley face and see instead how not quite human that android really is.
Luckily here across the Tasman the differences seem trivial in comparison to the warmth and hospitality of the locals. No-one would write home because they say jersey instead of sweater/ jumper, or cell instead of handy. Though it would probably be only Germans who might notice that difference.
In my time here I have visited three cities, each with the subtle differences and minor rivalries that may be found among brothers. Auckland the commercial hub and clear member of the trans-Pacific rim. Politically charged and culturally rich Wellington. University town Dunedin, bisected by the River Leith and filled with students and their haphazard dwellings. Of these there is a local pride in their decrepitude, and posters of ‘scarfie’ houses with beer bottles and broken sofas in the yards can be seen in offices and shops.
And so nearly ends these five months of travel. New Zealand is of course the last stop, and a transition, both climatic and cultural, from all the countries I have seen into that one small place to which I always return.
Home.
