Driving in New Zealand

Kiwi drivers rail about dangerous overseas drivers with whom they are forced to share New Zealand roads. They should not. From personal observation I can attest to the fact that the natives are pretty crappy drivers themselves. I back up my opinion with a recent report from their transportation officials who note that us foreigners account for just 4% of total accidents. I'm pretty sure some of that total is because it's easy to be scared to death while behind the wheel in New Zealand.

We took some video the other day to try to give a good idea of a typical Kiwi road experience. Since I was first here in the 1980's the road network has definitely improved – there are now distance markers along most roads and some points have actual guard rails although I don't exactly understand the logic of their placement. For the most part it seems if a drop is only a couple hundred feet it doesn't really rate a rail – the trees and brush breaking will indicate where your car left the pavement.

That's prone to happen, too, since most roads are twisting and hilly and the speed limits seem pretty high for the terrain. That's why most of the time I'm clinging to the passenger strap over the door of the car hoping centripetal force doesn't send us off into the abyss as we go from hair pin turn to hair pin turn with a pack of impatient Kiwi drivers hot on our tail. Tom can get pretty white-knuckled zooming along as fast as he dares while the leader of the trailing pack looks for a spot to pass the slowpokes. The feeling of doom is intensified in some spots because breakdown lanes aren't a big priority here either – if you're lucky there's a yard between you and the hillside or the cliff. In some spots there's literally only a foot of gutter to stop the road from flooding. Most roads are so narrow that it's not wise to hog any of the other lane either – at any turn a car going the other way is liable to appear and rip off parts of a vehicle impinging on its lane.

Tom is very good at left-hand-side driving. My only jobs are to chant, “Keep left, keep left,” when we exit car parks since it's so easy to revert to the opposite side of the road when other cars aren't around to show you the way. I also fiddle with recalcitrant car GPS. So far our rental cars have had interesting kinks that make finding our route more difficult than expected – there's a lot of recalculating and not just of the GPS's part.

It also takes some concentration to safely cross busy streets since we're trained to look the wrong way to check oncoming traffic. It's good to have a partner around in these situations – if only to corroborate your feeling that Kiwi drivers are just as bad as some of the ones at home. 

Road travel is exciting enough in daylight so we're happy to retreat to the cottage at dusk. Driving after dark here has an additional hazard – foraging kiwis. Running over the endangered birds is headline news in New Zealand, not a recommended method to make foreign friends. Hitting a kangaroo in while we're in Australia may cause more automotive damage but I'm not sure it's more dangerous than flattening the national symbol of New Zealand, no matter how small...