North & South

Highway Fever

NEW ZEALANDERS abroad can be a tough crowd when it comes to scenery. Whether you’re from the South Island, with the Southern Alps on your back doorstep, or our biggest city, with its Hauraki Gulf vistas available from a range of volcano tops, thresholds for scenic wonder are naturally set pretty high.

We’re hard to impress, though most of us try to be polite about it, nodding appreciatively at the not-very-spectacular peaks and not-exactly-pristine beaches.

No, to get Kiwi travellers really excited, foreign hosts are better to just let us drool over their infrastructure.

Reporting back to friends and families on our return home, we’ll touch on the historic buildings and famous landmarks, but save our superlatives for the convenience of the rapid-transit systems, width of the motorways and size of the airports. Could

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