rsc

I think one or both of us have already alluded elsewhere to the challenges of driving on the left. It wasn't really that bad, although right up to the end there was still something of a tendency to activate the windshield wipers when wanting to signal a turn, especially if there wasn't time to think about it before doing it. We also both took a while to conquer a tendency to go to the wrong side of the car (e.g.,

jwg coming back from paying for fuel when I was driving and coming around to the right in order to get into the passenger seat).

Incidentally, NZ rental cars -- at least all three of the ones we drove -- have a sticker in the center of the speedometer panel in the shape of a left-pointing arrow with the words "KEEP LEFT" on it.

Shifting gears with the left hand took some getting used to. The car we had on the North Island was an automatic (probably as a result of a screw-up by somebody at Avis), which made life somewhat easier for the latter part of the trip.

New Zealand is mountainous, and this means lots of steep, curvy, narrow roads. I had a tendency, which I eventually managed to (mostly) overcome, to drive too far to the left in an effort to stay out of the oncoming traffic. Since it's equally true in either mode of driving that the oncoming traffic is on the same side of the car as the driver, there must be some other explanation for this, and the only one I can come up with is that it is ingrained in my brain that there's a whole lot of car on my right when I'm driving.

The default speed limit on highways appears to be 100 kph; when coming into a relatively populated area we would generally see this reduced to 80, 70 or 50, depending on the density of settlement, and then restored to 100 after we had passed through the town. This would include some postings of 100 on roads that no sane person would ever take at that speed (which is not to say that there are not a fair number of not-sane NZ drivers). These winding narrow roads would often also have a dotted line dividing the two (opposite-direction) lanes, as though it were OK to move into the oncoming lane to pass (nobody was that crazy).

Some cognizance of this insanity was taken by the occasional billboard showing the circular speed-limit sign with "100" in the center, but with a series of multicolored rings around the edge, accompanied by the words "It's Not A Target", and an admonition to take actual conditions into account when deciding how fast to drive.

Road signs were, by and large, not difficult to interpret. It didn't take much cogitation, for example, to recognize "Give Way" as the equivalent of "Yield", especially when placed in the familiar triangle. Signs before intersections telling you which road went where tended to be placed a little too much before the intersection by our standards, and then not repeated, so that after quickly trying to figure out which road was ours we would sometimes have forgotten by the time we actually got to the intersection, at which point there was nothing to help us. There was one intersection, on our last day, where I would swear that the sign showed the place we were aiming for as being straight ahead, after which we came to a T intersection -- it turned out that we had to turn right, followed by a left after 100m or so; and how were we supposed to know this? (On later reflection, I suspect that close examination would have revealed that what appeared on the sign to be a continuation of the straight-ahead road was actually slightly offset to the right, but close examination is not generally an option at 100 kph, or even 50 or 60.)

One thing in our favor is that NZ is a fairly sparsely-populated country, which means that outside the cities (of which there are not many) there's not a whole lot of traffic, more especially since this was not really peak tourist season, being the tail-end of summer. I imagine some of the places we drove through would have been rather more crowded in January and February.

When we got into our car yesterday to go grocery shopping, I joked that maybe we should put a sticker saying "KEEP RIGHT" on our speedometer for a few days. Not really necessary, but I blush to confess that I did at one point activate the windshield wipers when intending to signal a turn.