March 20, 2008
Well, we´ve become quite quiet, haven´t we. New Zealand is not the best place to update a blog: internet access is rather hideously expensive and incredibly slow. And then backcountry camping for weeks at a time doesn´t really help. But most importantly, for us, New Zealand proved uninspiring.
I was more excited about going to New Zealand than any of the other countries on our trip (except when it involved seeing friends in Italy and India, and meeting family in Australia). But there´s such a gap between expecting something to be great, and having an experience that lives up to that expectation. Not that New Zealand isn´t lovely: the mountains are glorious and their national parks system, as run by DOC, is, if not the best in the world, really, really impressive. There is no park entrance fee, backcountry camping is allowed, there are thousands of trails, and you can get to all of the parks on public transportation, though that can be a tad costly.
But other than the parks, NZ is rather "iffy." The towns are unispired in their sprawling blandness, the food essentially English (so, boring), and the people are not nearly as nice as we had been led to believe. Not that they´re terrible, they´re just not as spontaneously generous as we´d thought they´d be. All of which is fine, except that we were "expecting" something rather different, and of course ended up disappointed. But the next place is always better, right?
