New Zealand Jan 12 - Feb 17

I'm in Queenstown (starting drafting this entry there, now I'm in Te Anau) at the moment, and it feels a bit strange to be writing about these places and days past. Time has been flying by, but it also seems like we've been traveling for a long time. Being on the road, on the go all the time, and living out of a soccer mom van (a Toyota Estima) makes one lose sense of time and place. Every holiday park, communal kitchen, public toilet, and dairy (deli/convenience store) starts to blend in and look the same, not to mention most of the tiny villages dotting the lengths of New Zealand's gritty state highways.

Auckland is a really nice city, although parts of it remind me of other cities. A friend said, after some extensive travel, that cities started to blend together for her, and they started to look the same. Auckland, Sydney, San Francisco, Honolulu, Buenos Aires, Lima are beginning to blur into one big urban entity for me these days. But language, faces, particular nooks, and especially, cleanliness are what make places unique in my memory. Auckland, and New Zealand in general, is extremely clean, and trash in public spaces is few and far between.

The below is a public park in Sydney. It's a bit hard to tell in this picture, but all the white dots are white plastic grocery bags. The entire park was covered in these plastic bags blowing in the wind everywhere like in American Beauty except it wasn't beautiful, it was just plain dirty.

In any case, New Zealand is pristine and beautiful so far (starting week 4). It's a very developed country that is quite under-developed at the same time. That thought to be explained in future entries...

First view of New Zealand


First view of Auckland