No parking….. why on Earth not?! It’s a minor public road. No one and nothing is being negatively impacted by us being there. So why is it illegal?

It would be so easy to write light-hearted, happy blogs all the time. Palm trees and beaches. Or in the case of New Zealand mountains and rivers. But I think it’s important for us to take off the smile once in a while and write about some of the less savoury things. After all, life is about the bad as well as the good.

New Zealand is a spectacularly beautiful place. Some of the anchorages we have visited over the last year and a half have been very beautiful too, but none have been grand. That’s what New Zealand offers. But, when we envisaged what this place would be like (based largely on the reports of those who had come before us) we had also naively imagined a first-world country whose citizens were free.

Perhaps the most stifling aspect of so-called ‘developed’ countries that I struggle with is the lack of what I would call basic freedoms. At the top of this list is the freedom to take responsibility for oneself. To make decisions and live by the consequences, good or bad. That is how we learn, and how we grow as people. But most of us live in a world where we are denied this freedom, even in cases where our actions and decisions would have no impact on anyone else one way or the other. In my view, this is severely detrimental to the personal development of individuals and by extension society itself. Our world is moving day by day towards a situation where no-one is willing to accept responsibility for anything, especially themselves and especially where personal safety can be construed to be at risk. We even make big business out of buying and selling other people’s ‘risk’! For me the ability to get away from this is a major attraction of offshore sailing.

We had hoped that New Zealand would be a rare example of a first-world country whose citizens still had these basic freedoms. Where victimless crimes are not considered crimes at all. Alas, such is not the case. Unfortunately, like so many other countries, New Zealand is slowly suffocating itself with bureaucracy. It’s nowhere near as bad as the U.K. yet, but every day new laws and bylaws are being written restricting the freedoms of minorities while none are being rescinded and no laws guaranteeing freedoms are being written. The problem is that everyone belongs to some minority or other, so everyone gets hit in the end. Everywhere we go we see signs banning one thing or another and threatening huge fines for non-compliance. No parking. No dogs. No smoking. No camping. No access. No swimming. No walking. Trail closed. No boating. The list could go on for a very long time. No camping. Now that is one that we see many, many times a day and it’s such a shame because it’s going to destroy the freedom to do trips like the one we’re doing. With it will go a whole chunk of the tourism industry and whole communities will suffer. One inconsiderate camper leaves a bag of trash lying around and the next thing you know a ‘no camping’ sign appears. The result? More and more camper vans crammed into smaller and smaller spaces, looking unsightly and undesirable. One more bag of trash and whoops, there goes another camping site. But it all stems back to legislation.

New Zealand waste management really sucks, largely as a result of legislation. I had to drive 40km to drop off one gallon of waste oil at an ‘approved facility’ because nowhere else had the appropriate licenses for handling ‘hazardous materials’. Tell me – if a petrol station is not licensed to handle hazardous materials who is?! The result? People don’t bother. They dump it on the ground. No license required for that so long as nobody catches you. The same goes for batteries. In fact, the same goes for all trash. The reason that that inconsiderate camper dumped that bag of trash in the first place is because everything you buy in the shops is over-packaged and there is literally no-where else to put it. We routinely carry trash around for more than a week before we can find somewhere to dispose of it properly. There are very, very few public bins (none outside the three largest supermarkets in the town we were in yesterday) and the ones that are there have a deliberately tiny opening and a sign threatening a $400 fine for anyone caught using it for disposing of domestic waste.

Unfortunately all is not well in the land of camper vans. Especially in the South Island there is widespread and growing animosity towards people in camper vans not dissimilar to the way that gypsies in the U.K. are viewed, except that a good 30% of the vans here are flash motor homes with six-figure price tags and 40% are shiny rentals whose occupants are paying at least $150 per day for the privilege. We’ve had a man ride a scooter up and down the road past the camper vans screaming obscene abuse at us. People routinely honk their horns aggressively to wake us up if they spot us by the side of a road as they are driving to work, or go out of their way to visit the approved camping spots just so that they can abuse and harass the campers. As I write this we’re sitting in the van on the outskirts of Christchurch with 26 other vans because this is the only legal place to camp within 30 kilometres. It’s half past midnight and there’s been a local car treating the area as a racetrack and doing doughnuts for the last two hours. No-one will say anything because the last time someone confronted the angry locals here they had beer bottles hurled at them. One van even had fireworks lit underneath it as a not-very-gentle message that they were not welcome here. But we have no choice. We’re not allowed to camp anywhere else.

We had initially hoped to perhaps seek work here for a year before sailing on. Maybe we’d even fall in love with the place. Unfortunately it hasn’t happened. The South Pacific Cyclone Season is ending now. We have at least a month of work to do on Bob before she’ll be ready to sail and a long way to go next year. I’m antsy to get back up North and start work. Of course, that also means confronting the residents of Kerikeri once again, none of whom likes our campervan. We park it outside one person’s house until they complain and then park it outside someone else’s, trying to remain polite, compliant, sympathetic and friendly throughout in spite of the way that we are approached about it. The problem is there’s just nowhere to park that isn’t outside someone’s house (well, outside their wall/hedge really. All of them are bordered by impenetrable privacy barriers and the only time they need to see our van is when they turn in or out of their driveways). I’ve even thought of selling the van once we get up north and buying a car instead, just so that people would hate us a little less.

Good night.

Update the following morning: sure enough we received our wake-up call bright and early as a local motorist went out of their way to visit the camping area and thoroughly test their horn. At least we have the luxury of moving somewhere else when we’re not welcome. The town of Lyttleton will not be benefitting from our custom, nor, I suspect, the considerable custom of the occupants of all the other campers that are here.