We really almost died only once because I forgot that I was driving on the left side of the road in New Zealand. After 4,000 kilometers of driving, that’s not a bad average. And, honestly, we probably wouldn’t have died because the other driver would have braked in time. But still.
I was turning right, which is the equivalent of turning left in America (unheard of since the last election), and I was looking right, which was my mistake. Another car was coming at us, T-bone style, from the lane of oncoming traffic. Chantal uttered something unprintable to alert me to my error, and I gunned the little Mazda across the lane and into a parking lot, uttering a stream of “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!” for absolution.
Depending on your specific persuasion, you might describe New Zealand as a country where vehicles drive on the left side of the road or the wrong side of the road. Whether or not you respond to “Keep Right” or “Keep Left” says a lot about you and where you live. So when we headed to New Zealand for 30 days of left-side driving, a lot of people wanted to know how I was going to cope.
But driving on the other side of the road was not that big a deal. In the cities, I just followed the traffic. And out in the wilds of the South Island, it didn’t matter. Roundabouts—of which there are approximately 6.2 billion in New Zealand—were simply a matter of imposing a sort of driving dyslexia upon myself: flip the script and follow the leader.
The biggest challenge was what I called “Kiwi Kilometers.” After 30 days and 4,000 kilometers of driving, from Christchurch to Milford Sound to Wellington to the Bay of Islands, I can safely say that there is not a stretch of road in the country that is straight and flat for more than 100 meters. Every bit of road climbs, dips, curves, and plummets, twisting right, contorting left, ascending, clinging to mountainsides, tracing fjords. It’s both thrilling and exhausting. And they’ve got the road signs to prove it:
I detailed the adventure of the Queen Charlotte Drive in a previous post, and that was not an outlier. Aside from the one stretch of motorway from Hamilton to north of Auckland, you drive on tight roadways that are narrower than the broad boulevards of America.
One of the things the Kiwi cousins wanted to know when we got back from our adventure was how we found the native drivers—they thought their own ilk were rude. But we didn’t spend a lot of time driving in the major urban areas, and the biggest observation I had was that the locals tended to tailgate while I was driving up or down some deadly stretch of mountainous roadway. It was their prerogative, and I happily pulled off the road to allow them to pass. Meanwhile, I found myself unintentionally tailgating many of the millions of camper vans crawling across the country. But I grew up in and around Boston, so it’s kind of coded into my DNA.
When you go to New Zealand, don’t worry too much about the driving—you probably won’t die. You’re going to get used to it, and you’re going to be fine. But make sure you give yourself enough time to recover from the adventures you’ll have and the places you go. You’ll need it.
Commentaires