New Zealand: Road Works

One thing I didn't mention in my post about driving was the prevalence of road construction, or "works" as the signs call it. We seemed to encounter a lot of repaving activity, which may be related to the fact that, for all the scary aspects of some of the roads, bad pavement was not among them; NZ seems to take road maintenance seriously.

I was amused by the politeness of some of the signs. Where flagmen were active, there would be a sign saying "Please stop on request", as if you had an option (can you imagine such a sign in the US with the word "please" on it?), and at the end of the construction zone there would often be not just a sign saying "works end" but another one beneath it saying "thank you".

They use a paving method (now out of fashion hereabouts) that involves spreading gravel over a newly-tarred road, so that a recently-paved road has a lot of loose gravel on it (about which signs give appropriate warning, with graphics). By the way, the process we call "paving" is called "sealing" in NZ, so these gravelled stretches generally bear the warning "New Seal".

This caused some amusement in Napier, where our sea-view room also looked out over the street that runs along the beach, which had in fact been recently sealed, so there was a "New Seal" sign right below our balcony. Not too far along the beach there was a small "Marineland" attraction, and on occasion we could hear the barking of what I presume was a not particularly new seal.

New Zealand: one more sign

At Haruru Falls, a modest but very attractive waterfall not far from Paihia, was a sign that had either very neatly managed to lose a few entire letters' worth (and one partial one) of paint, or (much more likely) had been deliberately modified:

DANG=
No um ing
or diving
into falls

New Zealand: Newspapers

Each place that we stayed, there was one daily broadsheet newspaper available (I think there might have been some tabloids that we never actually had opportunity to obtain, even if we had wished to): the Press on the South Island, the Dominion Post in Wellington, and the New Zealand Herald elsewhere on the North Island. Apart from a few articles indicating a local focus (Christchurch, Wellington, and Auckland respectively), they all appeared to be written by the same people, or at least the styles were awfully similar -- rather breezy (jwg kept being amused by local colloquialisms), with a kind of libertarian/progressive slant (I know that may sound like a contradiction, but I don't pretend that I really got enough of the sense of the national politics to be able to sum it up any better). One of the hot issues of the moment was a bill that seemed to be about to pass the legislature that would forbid parents to hit their children, generally referred to as "the anti-smacking bill", which seemed to inflame a lot of passions on both sides (from what I could glean it looked ill-considered and unenforceable, but that wouldn't be anything new in any jurisdiction I'm familiar with).

When I say "broadsheet", I really mean it. Crude measurement using a standard US letter-size sheet indicated that the page width of these newspapers is about 17 inches. That made turning the pages, and folding them back once turned so that there was a chance of actually fitting the section onto the breakfast table, something of a challenge. (The page width of the Boston Globe is 12½ inches.)