Today is a drizzly, chilly, windy, very English sort of day. Which is ok, as we've made it a travel day. We're driving about 450ks from the Bay of Islands to Rotorua, probably the longest single stretch of the trip.
To assuage the boredom, and for your delectation, here are some top NZ facts. I love a good fact. FACT.
Get ready to have the living fact facted at you, fact fans.
FACTASTIC.
NZ has a landmass roughly equal to the UK and a total population of 4.2 million - roughly half the population of London.
There are more sheep than people by a factor of over 10: 43 million sheep.
And we brought them all with us: New Zealand has no indigenous mammals. Not one. (Unless you count bats, whales and dolphins.)
Which includes people. The Maori were here first, but not by much, in people terms. They arrived by canoe (what?!) around 700 years ago from Polynesia.
Dolphins have recreational sex up to 15 times a day. They have a perfect system of birth control: the female can choose when to get pregnant. Presumably when she finds a male she deems worthy.
Kiwi are nocturnal. People live out their lives here and never see one in the wild. They are endangered, largely due to threat from mammalian predators we introduced. They lay the largest egg in relation to their body size of any bird in the world.
In 1645 Dutch cartographers named the country Nova Zeelandia, after the Dutch province of Zeeland. Quite why is unclear, as its dramatic jagged landscapes hardly bring the famously flat Netherlands to mind. James Cook anglicised the name when he circumnavigated and mapped the whole coastline in 1769.
Early maps had the North Island, the Middle Island (what is now the South Island) and the South Island (what is now Stewart Island). Recently The New Zealand Geographic Board discovered that the names of the North Island and South Island had never been formalised. They only became official in 2013.
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