Climbing behind the wheel for the first time in New Zealand takes a bit of intestinal fortitude and a great deal of concentration. Maneuvers that seem automatic and mindless at home suddenly take a tremendous amount of effort. Case in point: knowing one’s left from the right.
Now, I have never had any difficulty distinguishing my left from my right. I write with my right hand, and I get my shoes on the correct feet with 100% accuracy. But the moment I climbed behind the wheel (on the right side of the car) and attempted to drive on the left (“left” rhymes with “beefed”), I got all fouled up. Glenn navigated for me through Wellington, and told me to make a right turn. “OK,” I obliged as I turned left. “That was supposed to be a right turn,” he said. “I did turn right!” I protested, and then realized that I had, indeed, done the opposite. No problem: three lefts equal a right, and as long as I remembered to turn left into the near lane, we were back on track in no time. It’s always a good idea to signal before turning, so I reached to signal the turn--and started the windshield wipers instead. Ah, the turn signal and the wiper controls are reversed, too. And the gear shift is on the left, but at least it’s an automatic, so I only have to be concerned about that at the beginning and end of a drive. Fortunately, the accelerator and the brake are exactly as they are in the U.S.
But a person gets used to sitting on the left and having the rest of the car to the right. It takes retraining the brain to have spatial awareness of the vehicle taking up space to the left of one’s body. I almost felt as if I were using a different part of my brain to drive, especially when we had the RV, which was quite a bit wider and taller than our van.
The traffic rules are similar to those in the United States, with some notable exceptions. In Masterton, where we live, there isn’t a single traffic light in the whole town. Instead, triangles are painted on the road as one approaches intersections to remind the driver to “give way” to other drivers. “Giving way,” or yielding, is a big deal here; one must always give way to the driver approaching or turning from the right. So, if I am driving along and need to turn left (which would be like turning right on red in the U.S.), and an approaching car wants to turn right (across traffic), I must give way to the other car to allow it to cross safely in front of me; but if oncoming traffic isn’t turning, I may go ahead with the left turn. The first few times I encountered this, I didn’t know, so I would wait to make my right turn, and the other driver would motion for me to go ahead. Apparently, it’s the law—and I just thought they were being polite Then again, they weren't so polite when I was the one turning left and didn't give way to the other driver.
When major roads cross, instead of an intersection, it’s a roundabout. A special give-way rule applies to these: the driver looks to the right, and as long as it’s clear, enters the roundabout toward the left. You drive around the loop clockwise until you reach the street you want, and then exit and move on. If you miss your street, you can just stay in the roundabout and circle an extra time (or two). Roundabouts are efficient, but they require more real estate than intersections.
Zebra crossings are pedestrian crosswalks in which pedestrians have the right of way. I’ve learned that as I approach one of these, I need to look along the sidewalks on both sides to determine whether there is a pedestrian who might decide at the last minute to step into the zebra crossing. The problem is that on the main drag in Masterton, Queen Street, there are about three pedestrian crossings per block; combined with all the cross streets to which the Queen Street driver must give way, as well as all the cars pulling out of parking spots, it’s like driving a slow-motion obstacle course.
Road signs can be more entertaining than in the U.S. In Carterton, ten or fifteen minutes south of us, instead of an authoritarian “Jake breaks prohibited,” the sign reads, “Carterton courtesy zone. Please drive with consideration.” A town half an hour from here announces, “Flatbush. Not a bad place to live.” And I was amused by visions of angry, stampeding goats when I saw, “Caution. Goats next 15 km.” If a sign says, “New seal,” it means that loose gravel has been thrown down on the roadbed. And then there are the yellow diamond-shaped signs reminding drivers to look out for the wildlife with their silhouettes of kiwi, seals, pukeko, and penguins. The other day I saw a mama duck and her ducklings dutifully crossing the road directly underneath the "ducks crossing" sign. Alas, I didn't have my camera handy.
Once I more or less mastered the basic operation of the car and the rules of the road, I had to learn to think of distances a bit differently. The metric system is pretty easy, really, as long as one doesn’t try to convert back and forth. It’s far better to have a general feel for how long a kilometer is. One hundred kilometers per hour is about sixty miles per hour, and the speed limit on many roads is 100. Easy enough—except that some roads are posted 100 and really should be about half that. Mount Rimutaka, for instance, is a winding, narrow road with switchbacks and high winds, yet the speed limit is posted in spots as being 100 kilometers per hour. You’d have to have a death wish to drive that fast! So if you are looking at a map and figuring how long it will take to get from one place to another, you can’t assume that you will actually drive at or near the speed limit. And since most roads are only two lanes, you can just about count on getting stuck behind a large, slow-moving vehicle. So when we were on the South Island, we thought that we could easily drive all the way south to Dunedin during our time there, but we made it only about half that far.
I should probably say a word about our car. It’s a used Toyota van; a model called “Estima.” I’ve seen other models that look identical to ours, but ours is special. We conducted the transaction from Tulsa via the Internet, so the nice fellows at Braders’ Car Court drove it down to Wellington and met our flight when we first arrived. But they never told us that the car had come from Japan. It’s quite Japanese. There’s a lovely female voice that greets us each time we turn on the ignition—in Japanese. It starts out “E T C tatobah…” and drove me crazy wondering what it said until my friend Kyle translated via Facebook. Apperantly, we need to insert an ETC card--some navigation card used in Tokyo. Beth named the voice “Mei-Mei,” a Japanese-sounding name. It took the girls a while to realize that I had no idea what the voice was saying; each time I started the car I’d say, “Mei-Mei says to have a good time at the beach,” or some such. All the controls are written in Japanese as well, so I was able to play the radio only after Katy and Beth experimented with it. Mostly it’s just punching buttons and seeing what happens. It has a GPS--set for Tokyo--and I can’t figure out how to reset it for New Zealand. No worries--there are only two main highways here, and I can usually find my way back to one of them.
All this said, I’m getting used to driving here, and after all the initial mental adjustments, it has become fairly automatic. A year from now, though, I’m going to get to do it all again—in reverse.
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