Overrated New Zealand

Of all the countries we have visited on our expedition, probably the most disappointing has been New Zealand. However, before you throw your arms around and screw up your face in incredulous disbelief, read on. We are not philistines, who cannot appreciate what is in front of them, nor do we like to go against the grain just because everybody is going a certain way. Simply, we think New Zealand is overrated. Let me explain. Have you ever been to see a film after you have spoken to various people and read numerous reviews that have told you how amazing it is and, in doing so, inadvertently hyped the film to the point where you had to see it and you were consequently expecting big things from it? And then all your expectations accumulated into anti-climax and disappointment when you discovered that, while the film was really good and you were glad you went to see it, there was no way it could have lived up to all the hype it was receiving through various forms? I’m sure you came away wishing that you had held no pre-conceived ideas about the film so you could have formed your own opinions about it. Know what I mean? Well, this is exactly how we felt about New Zealand.

There is no doubt in our minds that New Zealand is a beautiful country on both islands and it would be hard to convince you otherwise on account of the photos we recently posted but the fact is, any remark by anyone previous to our visit there usually consisted of something like ‘I loved it’ or ‘New Zealand is amazing’ or ‘I want to emigrate there,’ and so on. So, as you can imagine, we went there with all kinds of positive expectations that no country could live up to. What we found was that the north island looked a lot like Wales in terms of the green hills full of sheep (incidentally there is actually 40 million sheep to 4 million people in NZ), ruggedly beautiful deserted beaches and small, scarcely populated villages of not-so friendly people. Unlike in Wales though, New Zealand’s towns and villages contained little or no historical value and consisted of faceless, pre-fabricated buildings, which consequently formed places seriously lacking in soul or character. The south island is more alpine with mountains and glaciers, glacial lakes and the kind of scenery that comes with it. Certain places of interest billed as “voted number one in New Zealand’s 100 must-see places to visit” paled in comparison to those you might see in, say, Canada. And therein lay the problem. Without trying to sound pompous and conceited, we have been across the Canadian Rockies. We have seen this kind of scenery before in a place that is even more epic. We acknowledge that to not evaluate it in its own right and compare it was unfair, but that is exactly what we couldn’t help doing since the scenery was so similar to places we have been, either those attached to England or across the Atlantic.

 

There is another aspect to my argument here, in addition to the country being unhelpfully overhyped for us. Those who professed to us that New Zealand is amazing undoubtedly visited on holiday with a significantly different monetary budget. When you are able to pay for skydiving, bungee jumps, helicopter rides over glaciers and every boat trip offered around a lake, of course it’s going to be bloody amazing! If we were on holiday there is no doubt those things are exactly what we would have done too. But it brings up an interesting consideration. Why should a place be amazing because of the things you did? Can’t it be amazing without them? If the answer is no then surely the place itself is not actually that amazing. After all, when it comes down to it, in the grand scheme of tourism a holiday is a chance to meet a country’s representative – its metaphorical sales rep who will show and sell all the good bits while everything else gets conveniently and temporarily shoved in a corner until you’re gone. To see what a country and its people is really like, one would have to spend a significant amount of time there assimilating into society and allowing it to get under their skin. I am not suggesting that we have been able to do that in many of the places we have been to, such is the nature of our trip, but perhaps we would have liked some of them more if we had spent extended amounts of time there, even New Zealand. It is important to form an opinion of a country as it is with no ideas pre-attached but in this technological day and age, where one can acquire information from inescapable amounts of communication, this is impossible. What I am sure of, though, is that those countries we visited with little or no preconceptions about them very often left us with very positive and favourable views, enough to make us want to go back there. And more often than not, it is the people of a place that significantly determined our opinions of it – the old adage that it is the people that make a place is truer than you can imagine.