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Outside Magazine September 2004

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Destinations: New Zealand
Godzone Quest (cont.)


	"It's about our relationship to nature": Hugh Cameron shoes an Otematata SUV at his South Island ranch (Graham Charles)

"A CIVILIZED SOCIETY exhibits five crucial characteristics—peace, art, beauty, truth, and adventure," the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote. "Without adventure, civilization is in full decay." By this logic, New Zealand must be the most civilized place on earth. In an atypical burst of immodesty, Kiwis call their two major islands, and the dozens of smaller islands that surround them, God's Own Country—usually shortened to Godzone. Since 1992, international visitors have doubled, and tourism has surpassed dairy farming as the number-one industry. Last year, New Zealand hosted more than two million foreign visitors, and its travel economy reaped US$4 billion.

You don't need special effects to see that the landscape is supernatural. The Colorado-size country is split into two mountainous islands of almost equal size, separated by 14-mile-wide Cook Strait. Three out of four Kiwis live on the volcano-peaked North Island, with one million concentrated in Auckland, the

At the risk of stereotyping an entire nation, most Kiwis have an endlessly optimistic "she'll be right, mate" way of attacking challenges. "We're mellow and down to earth, with a wicked competitive streak," says mountaineer Allan Uren.

nation's biggest city and the planetary capital of open-ocean yacht racing. By contrast, the entire South Island is home to fewer than a million residents, and multisport hubs like Wanaka and Queenstown (site of AJ Hackett's famed Kawarau Bungy Centre) are jumping-off points to Class V rivers and all the Southern Alps have to offer trekkers, skiers, and climbers.

Taken together, the two islands have 125 prime whitewater rivers, ocean within three hours of anywhere, 27 peaks that soar above 10,000 feet, 14 national parks, world-class vineyards, and no large land mammals that can maim or kill you. (New Zealand's most intense wildlife encounters are found offshore: Last November, a fisherman pulled up an 18-foot-long great white shark with an estimated 3,000 razor-sharp teeth; it had drowned in his net off Waiheke Island.) Add every shade of blue and green on the color wheel and it's no wonder that everyone in Hollywood wants to work on Peter Jackson's next New Zealand–based production, a remake of King Kong.

New Zealand's earliest inhabitants carried the adventure gene to these islands a thousand years ago. The ancestors of the Maori were Eastern Polynesians who crossed some 2,000 miles of the South Pacific by outrigger canoe. After British navigator Captain James Cook landed on the east coast of the North Island in 1769, a slow but steady stream of settlers followed. By 1871, the British colony was populated by about 135,000 mostly English, Irish, Scottish, and German immigrants; men outnumbered women two to one, which goes a long way toward explaining the infamous Kiwi bachelor mentality, not to mention the plot of The Piano. Since New Zealand became an independent nation, in 1907, the male-to-female ratio has evened out, and today the citizenry is 75 percent pakeha (of European descent), 15 percent Maori, and about 10 percent expats from India, Asia, Europe, and America. These late arrivals have come for the lifestyle and to partake of one of the world's healthiest economies. Belying the nation's pastoral image, biotech-based businesses now produce more than 70 percent of New Zealand's export earnings. Meanwhile, wine production has increased by 300 percent over the past decade. Evidence of rapid globalization is cropping up everywhere as fish-and-chips take-aways and pubs are replaced by sushi restaurants and funky espresso cafés.

But to boil the country's essence down to statistics would be like describing Manhattan solely in terms of the height and breadth of its skyscrapers. Factor in the triple play of the current zeitgeist—bungee jumping, Hollywood hobbits, and sauvignon blanc—and you've only accounted for half the spirit of New Zealand.

Peter Jackson, 43, can help explain the other half: "Kiwis are fantastic at being organic and fantastic at collaborating," he told a reporter last December. "They're very compassionate people."

Traditional values like team play and pragmatism ("Anything can be fixed with a piece of number-eight wire," goes a timeworn Kiwi catchphrase) have helped supercharge New Zealand's newfound confidence and ambition. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the world's largest survey of business launches, no other developed nation has a higher percentage of start-up ventures, almost all of which are owned by "opportunity entrepreneurs"—people who can spot a marketing niche and exploit it effectively. It's an epithet that describes not only Sir Edmund Hillary and Peter Jackson but a whole roster of overachievers: Sir Peter Blake, the late America's Cup–winning yachtsman; the All Blacks, rugby's perennial World Cup powerhouse; and actor Russell Crowe and director Jane Campion, both of whom were born here.

Even among the cream of the Kiwi crop, however, there's one caveat: Don't brag about your achievements to your mates—Kiwis don't do hubris. Kennedy Warne, 47, the founding editor of New Zealand Geographic, puts it this way: "If Hillary had summited Everest and come out with something lofty and rehearsed like ‘That's one small step for man ... ,' he would have been the laughingstock of his homeland." What Hillary said, of course, was "We knocked the bastard off"—the most telling quote in Kiwi history.

Hillary's 49-year-old son, Peter, has climbed Everest twice, swum with sharks off the Great Barrier Reef, and pulled a 400-pound sled across the Antarctic. I asked him why he thinks Kiwis are so keen for life on the edge. He laughed and said, "We want action for ourselves. We don't want to sit around listening to other people's yarns.

"We're a little country down at the bottom of the world," he added. "People have to be resourceful."

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