Traveling in Otago.

My family and I are traveling around Otago on a work/holiday excursion. We flew to Dunedin and rented a Toyota Corolla for a week. Here are my observations of what it is like to drive here. I have driven up and down the South Island before, but this time some things struck me.

Dunedin is a tricky place to drive. The main arteries are fine but once you get off the beaten track there is much windy, hilly, narrow road weirdness with many side street merges and other unexpected yield intersections. That would not be too much of an issue except for one thing: Dunedin drivers. I never would have thought that anything could be worse than Auckland drivers, but there is a sub-set of Dunedin drivers who consider tailgating and horn honking to be the standard approach to vehicles in front of them regardless of speed or traffic conditions (or stop signs and red lights!). Not cool.

We left Dunedin after a couple of days and are in Cromwell on our way to Wanaka after spending some time on the North Otago coast. The Mackenzie Country landscape is impressive. But here again we encountered primed-for-road-rage tailgating arm wavers and finger-givers. Mind you, I learned to drive in South America and have been in NZ 22 years, so I am not plodding along below the speed limits on the wrong side of the road. In fact, given that there is a wife and child in the car, I tend to average around 100 kph on the open roads and whatever the speed limits are wherever I am located. My days of being a Formula One wanna-be are over but I am not drooling on my seatbelt as of yet.

It was not until after a tailgating, arm waving incident as we were entering Cromwell that I realised what was partly the reason for the road craziness. Our car has a rental car license plate holder. It dawned at me that people would see the car (a generic white late model Corolla), look at the license plate and see the rental car plate holder, and then decide to turn into bullying a-wipes to some foreigner. I say this because I chased the last of the miscreants after all the tooting and bumper-riding arm-waving, and boy oh boy were they surprised to see that it was an older Pakeha male who was at the wheel of the car that they had been harassing. You could see the dim-witted gears clicking as it dawned at them that they had been ball-busting someone who could just be from HERE! Someone who was willing to pull over and then chase them down while stuck in small town traffic! That really seemed to adjust their attitude.

Forget the old saying about the shadow of the future hanging heavily over present decision-making. For car bullies like these, the future holds no consequence. Moreover, it clearly has not dawned on them that even Kiwis do the fly/rental car thing in-country. I should note that in all instances the bug-eyed mouth frothers were Pakeha, which is not surprising given the demographic around these parts.

Mind you, I live out near Piha in West Auckland, and that iconic beach town is a magnet for foreign tourists, who funnel over there from all over the region. That makes the Piha Road a nightmare at times, as visitors drive 60 in 100kph zones, slow down to take photos from their cars, cross the centre line, at times head the wrong way, refuse to pull over in slow vehicle bays and generally turn local frustrated and impatient commuters into homicidal maniacs. But on the open roads of Otago there is no such concentration of gagglers, so the bullys should have little reason to be annoyed.

The same day we got to Cromwell I read an editorial in the ODT about the approach to foreign drivers. Let’s just say that there may be a slight hint of racial bias in the calculation to target rental cars for intimidation and abuse. That makes things understandable but not excusable.

In any event we are enjoying the lake and local sights. But I am much more sympathetic to the hapless foreign tourists who, through no fault of their own, get fire-breathing Rambos on their tails just because assumptions are made about who drives rental cars in Otago and Southland.

Consider the birds

In the USA, the Spotted Owl evokes the spectre of trivial busybody environmentalism. This species has been extremely well propagandised by the forestry lobby and other anti-environmentalists as a symbol for “putting other species ahead of humanity”. But it is not so in New Zealand (although there is Powelliphanta augusta). For a hint of what the public response to Gerry Brownlee’s plan to mine Schedule 4 of the conservation estate could be like, look no further than the firestorm which has erupted over the YouTube video showing Norwegians shooting protected native birds, among other things.

kererū

This has been a pretty persistent story. It’s been at or close to the top of the Stuff “most read” list for going on three days now; at the time of writing, it’s #1. It’s third on the NZ Herald website’s NZ section. It was in almost every dead-trees paper with a national news focus in the country on Friday. It’s featured prominently on One and 3 News (and consequently RadioLIVE), Radio NZ National, Newstalk ZB, and is at present the third-placed story on English-language Norwegian news website News and Views from Norway and has made Norwegian-language mainstream news there too, as well as action from Norway’s own environmental agencies. It’s drawn outraged official comment from DoC and the Conservation Minister; but notably not (as far as I can see) from the Minister of Tourism. There are 400-plus infuriated comments on the original YouTube clip, and 300-plus on the Fish’n’Hunt Forum, the oldest and most popular NZ internet site for discussion of hunting and fishing topics. Stuff.co.nz has a poll up, and the results are quite clear, for what they’re worth:
stuffkererupoll

This outpouring of righteous fury has not come about because of the death of a few birds. None of the species shot by these hunters are so close to extinction that the loss of an isolated handful of individuals will critically harm the population. The reason for the response is that this sort of thing offends us deeply and personally. It is antithetical to who we are as New Zealanders, and it is as if a little part of each of us dies with those birds.

I wrote a few days ago that the task for the opposition, for conservationists and those who love the land and its wildlife was to relegate mining Schedule 4 to the “political too-hard basket”. More specifically, that task for those people — and for the 74% of (notoriously reactionary) Stuff respondents for whom these events are a grave injury — is to see the proposal to mine Schedule 4 as the same thing on a much greater scale, which it ultimately is, and to respond in kind.

Update 30 March: A vivid event like the one discussed above often primes the media and public to pay closer attention to similar events which previously might not have been newsworthy. Dog attacks are a case in point. So it is with this case: the release and eventual death of a weka, hardly endangered but well-loved, from Hagley Park, is now news.

L