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Happiness Is The Road
It was still raining when we woke up. The sky was gloom laden and the wet weather looked to be set in for the day. This wasn't the weather that had been forecasted. It was supposed to be dry today. We had brekky and left the camp site with the rain thrashing down. We drove to the Cape Foulwind lighthouse just a few kilometres away where we had intended to go on a walk along the coast to a seal colony. It was just too wet to get out of the camper van so we didn't bother doing the walk. We had a private viewing of a seal a few days ago at Castlepoint so we weren't too disappointed. In any case the seals here probably get sick to death of tourists turning up everyday and gawping at them. In a way we felt good to not be adding to this spectacle. The seals were just not meant to be. We had a look at the windswept and rain lashed coast for a bit and then drove into Westport which was a bit of a drab and nondescript place. We got some food at New World, got some petrol and then hit the road heading south along the coast. As is mostly the case the road was very twisty with quite a few hair pin bends. The quality of driving today was absolutely atrocious. There was someone tailgating us all the time with a coach driver in particular trying to force us off the road. This coach, full of tourists, was going to the glaciers and this impatient d*** of a driver was trying his best to kill them all. When it was safe I pulled over to let this k*** go past. He swerved off round the next corner. I wouldn't imagine that his passengers were enjoying their white knuckle ride very much! The drivers are just as appalling here as on the North Island if not worse. There's too many tropical trees in New Zealand for our liking. It seems that the vast majority of the population have gone troppo!. They're certainly impatient *******s. I have read that the New Zealand tourism industry employs one in twenty people in this country. That's a lot of jobs that would be lost if the tourists stopped coming. The scenery here is beautiful but it is offset by the nasty, mean, aggressive drivers and the generally miserable population. Our perception and experience of New Zealand has been seriously spoilt by the drivers here and we certainly will never be returning to this country. I have pasted below a newspaper article from The New Zealand Herald which confirms that we are not alone in being constantly shocked and angered by the kiwis driving. After I'd pulled over to let the manic coach driver get past we sat at the road side for a while and pondered why people are so nasty in cars and what the awful hurry is. We sat with the window open. This was a big mistake as we were very quickly invaded by sand flies that proceeded to bite the **** out of us. We've been bitten more in New Zealand than in Australia. The Australian mozzies have nothing on the Kiwi sand flies who are rampant in their voracity to bite you. After a breather we carried on along 'the road to hell' with more dangerous tailgating to contend with and eventually pulled off the road feeling washed up and shattered in Punakaiki, a tiny settlement right on the ocean and backed by huge cliffs abundant with lush rain forest. We checked in at the camp site which was next to the beach and got a nice spot from where we could hear the sound of waves crashing to the shore. It was still raining so we chilled out in the camper van for a few hours and watched the low cloud swirl and move across the hills. By early evening the rain had finally stopped and we went for a walk along the beach which was an absolutely beautiful and brooding stretch of timber littered dark sand and gorgeous pebbles. We walked the beach, hand in hand, having a laugh and watched the sun set over the sea. The sky was very dramatic as the sun slowly lowered over the horizon sending shafts of beautiful amber and orange through the clouds. It was a wonderfully calming end to a rather fraught day. We went to sleep to the calming sound of the ocean.
NZ DRIVING ANGERS VISITORS
Visiting drivers say they are shocked at the lack of courtesy and patience displayed by Kiwis. New Zealand may have just had its lowest road toll in six decades, but our drivers are just as rude and reckless as ever, visitors have told the Weekend Herald. The Automobile Association has echoed their complaints, describing the average car-bound Kiwi as "impatient" and "not very courteous", while a police traffic boss has told of New Zealand's history and reputation for aggressive drivers. Tamsyn and Mike Hicks yesterday returned to the UK after having been "constantly shocked" by Kiwi drivers and say our attitudes on the road is a regular conversation topic among other visiting Brits. "We've seen some crazy manoeuvres and a number of close misses - far more than you would ever experience at home," Mrs Hicks said. "The main reason for it, we found, was impatience. We saw it quoted in a guidebook somewhere that Kiwis are all very lovely and relaxed and gentle, but as soon as they get behind the wheel they turn into these impatient crazy people, and we just experienced that to be true." One constant problem was tailgating, she said, which the couple encountered no matter how fast they travelled. "We just find it infuriating, to be honest, but every time we read about crashes in the paper over here it was almost never blamed on dangerous driving - and generally always the road was blamed. "You can't blame the roads. It's just the courtesy and the patience." Mrs Hicks said she was shocked to find the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office advising prospective visitors to New Zealand that the country had a 2010 rate of 8.7 road deaths per 100,000 of population - compared to the UK rate of 3.1. One UK ex-pat, Aucklander Jamie Roberts, said the quality of New Zealand driving was "one of my rants all the time to my wife". "It's almost the first thing anyone ever talks about when they meet each other - you say, how are you finding it, and they say it's great - but the driving is crazy, it's like being in Greece or somewhere," he said. Mr Roberts, who has lived in New Zealand for several years and whose job has him cover around 70,000km of road each year, said he found having to take evasive driving manoeuvres was "alien" when he first moved here. "Coming from the UK, I never thought we were particularly safe drivers until I lived here," he said. "I'm not one of these Poms that whinges about other countries - it's a small price to pay to live here - but right from the top down, the attitude to driving is just one of those things like breathing." A quick Google search found several blog sites by UK tourists dedicated to detesting our driving. And travellers' bible Lonely Planet advised visitors to take care, writing that the country's roads were "often made hazardous by speeding locals, wide-cornering campervans and traffic-ignorant sheep". Automobile Association spokesman Mike Noon put the problem down to a combination of our drivers, vehicles and roads. "Our roads are quite unforgiving and, if you do make a mistake, it's likely you'll end up in a ditch or hitting a power pole. We've got a lot of roads where ... there's too much traffic and crossing the centre line can often mean hitting another vehicle." As drivers, we were impatient and uncourteous, "and that is not to our benefit", he said. Acting Superintendent Rob Morgan, national manager of road policing, acknowledged New Zealand had a "history and reputation for having aggressive drivers". He also said our many two-way roads did not help our statistics. "Other countries do have many more speed cameras and automatic ways of enforcing speed and other road behaviour, but nothing's ever simple as one answer - a lot of countries we are compared against have far more congestion than we do, and congestion lowers speeds and lowers impacts." He said complaints from tourists were common. "But that's always open to debate - for every complaint we get from a tourist, we get another complaint from a local complaining about tourists, so it's a bit hard to form those judgments."
1 Greece 113 deaths
2 Romania 111 deaths
3 United States 106 deaths
4= Bulgaria, Poland 102 deaths
5 Latvia 97 deaths
6 Croatia 96 deaths
7 Lithuania 90 deaths
8 New Zealand 87 deaths
9 Portugal 79 deaths
10 Belgium 77 deaths
18 Australia 60 deaths
30 Great Britain 31 deaths
NZ DRIVING ANGERS VISITORS
Visiting drivers say they are shocked at the lack of courtesy and patience displayed by Kiwis. New Zealand may have just had its lowest road toll in six decades, but our drivers are just as rude and reckless as ever, visitors have told the Weekend Herald. The Automobile Association has echoed their complaints, describing the average car-bound Kiwi as "impatient" and "not very courteous", while a police traffic boss has told of New Zealand's history and reputation for aggressive drivers. Tamsyn and Mike Hicks yesterday returned to the UK after having been "constantly shocked" by Kiwi drivers and say our attitudes on the road is a regular conversation topic among other visiting Brits. "We've seen some crazy manoeuvres and a number of close misses - far more than you would ever experience at home," Mrs Hicks said. "The main reason for it, we found, was impatience. We saw it quoted in a guidebook somewhere that Kiwis are all very lovely and relaxed and gentle, but as soon as they get behind the wheel they turn into these impatient crazy people, and we just experienced that to be true." One constant problem was tailgating, she said, which the couple encountered no matter how fast they travelled. "We just find it infuriating, to be honest, but every time we read about crashes in the paper over here it was almost never blamed on dangerous driving - and generally always the road was blamed. "You can't blame the roads. It's just the courtesy and the patience." Mrs Hicks said she was shocked to find the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office advising prospective visitors to New Zealand that the country had a 2010 rate of 8.7 road deaths per 100,000 of population - compared to the UK rate of 3.1. One UK ex-pat, Aucklander Jamie Roberts, said the quality of New Zealand driving was "one of my rants all the time to my wife". "It's almost the first thing anyone ever talks about when they meet each other - you say, how are you finding it, and they say it's great - but the driving is crazy, it's like being in Greece or somewhere," he said. Mr Roberts, who has lived in New Zealand for several years and whose job has him cover around 70,000km of road each year, said he found having to take evasive driving manoeuvres was "alien" when he first moved here. "Coming from the UK, I never thought we were particularly safe drivers until I lived here," he said. "I'm not one of these Poms that whinges about other countries - it's a small price to pay to live here - but right from the top down, the attitude to driving is just one of those things like breathing." A quick Google search found several blog sites by UK tourists dedicated to detesting our driving. And travellers' bible Lonely Planet advised visitors to take care, writing that the country's roads were "often made hazardous by speeding locals, wide-cornering campervans and traffic-ignorant sheep". Automobile Association spokesman Mike Noon put the problem down to a combination of our drivers, vehicles and roads. "Our roads are quite unforgiving and, if you do make a mistake, it's likely you'll end up in a ditch or hitting a power pole. We've got a lot of roads where ... there's too much traffic and crossing the centre line can often mean hitting another vehicle." As drivers, we were impatient and uncourteous, "and that is not to our benefit", he said. Acting Superintendent Rob Morgan, national manager of road policing, acknowledged New Zealand had a "history and reputation for having aggressive drivers". He also said our many two-way roads did not help our statistics. "Other countries do have many more speed cameras and automatic ways of enforcing speed and other road behaviour, but nothing's ever simple as one answer - a lot of countries we are compared against have far more congestion than we do, and congestion lowers speeds and lowers impacts." He said complaints from tourists were common. "But that's always open to debate - for every complaint we get from a tourist, we get another complaint from a local complaining about tourists, so it's a bit hard to form those judgments."
1 Greece 113 deaths
2 Romania 111 deaths
3 United States 106 deaths
4= Bulgaria, Poland 102 deaths
5 Latvia 97 deaths
6 Croatia 96 deaths
7 Lithuania 90 deaths
8 New Zealand 87 deaths
9 Portugal 79 deaths
10 Belgium 77 deaths
18 Australia 60 deaths
30 Great Britain 31 deaths
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