Important Differences Between Australia and New Zealand part 2:

7) In Australia, moderate bushfire danger means that it probably hasn’t rained for a month, that there is a fair bit of dead wood and other fuel lying around, but the wind is low and it’s not particularly hot. In New Zealand, moderate bushfire dangers means that snow or liquid water only covers part of the ground, rather than submerging it completely.

8) In Australia, if your rugby team loses, you can turn to a number of other sporting codes to restore your national pride and sense of self worth. In New Zealand, if your rugby team loses your only option is to violently assault an Australian.

9) In Australia, if the earth moves for you it’s probably time to light a cigarette. In New Zealand, if the earth moves for you it’s probably time to move house.

10) In New Zealand, water shortages mean that it hasn’t rained today and everyone around will nod sagely when you say you’ve decided to take shorter showers. In Australia, water shortages mean that it will probably never rain again and if you wash your car on the driveway your neighbours will report you to the Stasi.

11) In New Zealand, grass is green. In Australia, grass is something you read about in books.

12) In Australia, when the roads to the snow say you need to fit chains, you probably don’t really need to fit chains. In New Zealand, if the signs say you need to fit chains, you NEED TO FIT CHAINS.

13) In Australia, the cheeky native parrots are white, dismantle street lights and eat farmers’ crops. In New Zealand, the cheeky native parrots are black, dismantle cars and eat lost tourists.

The sins of my people

There are few things you can be in New Zealand that are frowned upon more than being Australian. We are the Americans of the Southern Hemisphere. Every Australian is guilty of the following crimes until proven innocent:

Being undeservedly rich: Without even pretending to have checked the facts on this, it seems like incomes in Australia are higher than they are in NZ. Certainly people in NZ think so, which is why so many Kiwis head to Australia to work. Perhaps perceptions are a bit skewed because the Australians here are mostly cashed up holiday makers, but then the fact that there are so many cashed up holiday makers has to count for something.

Poaching Kiwi talent: There is always a steady flow of young New Zealanders heading for Australia to seek their fortunes and go surfing without wetsuits. This drain of talent is something that older kiwis both understand and slightly resent.

Being arrogant: It’s hard for me to judge this because I’m a pretty arrogant person, and so to live with myself I need to have a pretty insensitive arrogance-meter. It’s not clear whether this perception developed from the behaviour of Australians in general or whether this just reflects our cricket and rugby teams, but either way it’s now a national trait of which we’re all guilty.

Being dangerously overconfident: Sadly young Australian males have well and truly earned a reputation for coming to New Zealand, and getting injured or killed while participating in adventure sports. Sometimes it’s incompetence, sometimes it’s sheer bad luck, but the number of Australians getting out of their depth in NZ suggests some national overconfidence might well be involved. (On a sad and related note, an Australian snowboarder died recently at Mt Cheeseman. I don’t know the circumstances of this accident, but it sucks.)

Having a terrible accent: It’s true. Kiwis have no respect for our broad, friendly and welcoming accents. It appears that the respect and admiration shown universally by Australians for the Kiwi accent is not reciprocated. I can only express my deepest disappointment at what seems to be a genuine misunderstanding between the peoples of two nations.

Having an unfair share of beautiful women: Imagine if, rather than actually visiting Australia, you only saw advertisements for the place. You’d think all of our women were bikini clad babes who emerged from the sea and then accosted you about your bloody location. The truth (that there are a thousand times more applicants for The Biggest Loser than there are for Australia’s Next Top Model) can only be found by going to shopping malls around the nation, and we wisely don’t put those in our advertising material. Thus, some strapping Kiwi lads have expressed to me the notion that Australians are blessed with an unfair number of beautiful women.

Being patronising: It is true that there is a certain amount of condescension in the attitude of Australians towards our eastern neighbours. It’s hard to explain precisely why. Perhaps it’s because New Zealand is so small. I don’t have a map handy, but my impression is that the whole of New Zealand is roughly the size of greater metropolitan Melbourne. On the South Island, you can drive from the east coast to the west coast in less time than it takes to fly from coast to coast in Australia. This is a bit unfair though. New Zealand packs a fair bit of bad-ass into its limited land mass. If you took all the mountains in Australia and stacked them on top of each other they’d still be smaller than Mt Cook. Plus, some of the orcs from the filming of The Lord of the Rings movies escaped into the hills and have formed breeding populations.

Dubstep, the voice of a generation

One of the many things I have to apologise for in New Zealand is my lack of enthusiasm for dubstep. For the uninitiated, dubstep is one of the millions of subgenres of electronic music. Since the classification of electronic music is slightly more complicated than sequencing the human genome, I have no idea where it fits into the scheme of noises that come from a laptop. It tends to follow the pattern of rambling along like generic electronic music for a bit, then turning into a mix of whooping and grinding noises (reminiscent of holding your car key in the “start” position for too long and having the starter motor start stripping the thread off whatever connects it to the engine). I suspect that the first part is dub, so that would make the whooping bit step.

Anyway, regardless of what dubstep actually is or sounds like, it’s very popular among the kids here in New Zealand. You can bet that any person under 25 who hooks their MP3 player up to a sound system will soon have the room whooping and crunching like a fire alarm being stomped on by Optimus Prime. Like all aficionados of electronic music, young dubsteppers are always pretty sensitive about their chosen genre and keen to defend it from people who reckon music should only come from appropriately certified musical instruments.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to dubstep. If I had to choose between Bindi Irwin’s latest orchestral prog-rock side project and dubstep, I’d be whooping and crunching along like a 17 year old updating their facebook status about their latest adventure in fruity loops. The thing is, if I had to choose between dubstep and something good, I’d probably choose the good thing. Among young folk in New Zealand, this is a serious offense. It’s like mentioning that time I went to a Shihad concert to see the support act (Cog, back when they were good) and left before the-greatest-band-that-New-Zealand-has-ever-produced-that-hasn’t-been-claimed-by-Australia finished their first song.

Unfortunately, indifference is not enough for the people here. I’ve taken to hiding my MP3 player, so that no one can look through my music and discover that I don’t have anything whoopy or crunchy enough for their tastes. God help me if they work out that Rage Against the Machine isn’t the name of some experimental electronic outfit that records the sound of mechanical goods being ground into a fine powder.

Fresh snow + road closures = Awesome

Last week I took a chance and decided to head to Christchurch to restock the pantry before (rather than during or after) a series of forecast storms rolled in. This turned out to be a good idea, because as I drove into town and ran my errands the weather report steadily changed from “a bunch of storms early in the week” to “snow, everywhere, in epic quantities”. Indeed, it seemed that a once in a decade snowstorm was about to hit the whole of New Zealand (the news said they last had snow in some part of Auckland in 1932). The people of Christchurch certainly paid attention – I went to four different large supermarkets and none of them had any bread. All that was left was crumpets, bagels and gluten free bread. This shows two things. 1) After a pretty exhausting series of natural disasters, when it comes to dire forecasts the people of Christchurch don’t mess around. 2) No matter how desperate humanity becomes people still can’t take gluten free bread seriously.

I drove in as the storm started and managed to crawl up the access road through the first of the fresh snowfalls. It turned out my timing was pretty good, because from that moment until roughly this morning (Thursday) the storm has been in full voice. We’ve had 85cm of fresh snow, but most if not all of the ski field has been closed during that time due to a mix of high winds, low visibility and avalanche control work. The wind has also been blowing up the valley, which has been piling snow up down low but blowing it away up high. In all it’s made for some variable, and at times awesome, skiing. Most of the skiing has been done at night under floodlights – the floodlights provide a bit more perspective and can actually make for better visibility than during the day.

To complicate matters, the highway between BR and anywhere has been closed since Sunday. This has kept a bunch of the same people at the field. The volunteer patrollers who come up on the weekends have only just been able to return to town (and their jobs/families/pets) today. As things open up there’s likely to be a flood of people rushing up to get in on the fresh snow. The fields on the range are only now managing to finish digging out their tow lines, bombing their avalanche start zones and opening their terrain so there’s likely to be a bunch of fresh tracks up for grabs.

The road closures and rough weather have been tough on some of the other guests here. It is, in fact, Scone Grabbers’ Week. In what can only been a sign that the supreme being agrees with me that “Scone Grabbers” is an unsuitable name for anything involving small children, the young families up here have been plagued with gale force winds, freezing temperatures, a closed ski field and (the icing on the cake of suffering) a few rounds of gastro. They parents have bravely made the best of the breaks in the weather, and apparently the kids have had fun, but I hope everyone has a good long think about what they’re going to call their ski week next year.

It looks like the road is either open now or will be really soon, so I’ll hang out up here for a few days to see what the storm has left us, then I’m thinking about heading to some of the other fields that apparently got dumped on during the week.

Meteorology and the English language

It turns out that in certain places, at certain times, "beard" and "face" rime.

The truth about rope tows

OK everyone, it's time to take a deep breath and calm down. Rope tows are not that bad.

Before I came here, everyone was warning me about rope tows. The internet makes it sound like rope tows are only marginally more pleasant than being wrapped in tinfoil and put in the microwave. Common complaints are:

They're hard to ride (e.g. people say that riding a rope tow is equivalent to skiing black diamond runs in Australia).
They're steep (just yesterday someone claimed that the rope tows at Craigieburn are on a 45 degree incline).
They're exhausting (complaints range from sore arms to hands so fatigued they can no longer hold their nutcracker closed).
They're scary (some people won't go to ski fields with nutcracker tows).
They're dangerous (I've been told of broken fingers, elbows, etc).
They wreck your gloves.

First off, let's be clear. I'm not a snowboarder. Riding a snowboard on a rope tow looks abominable, and my sympathy goes out to those of you who are inexorably drawn to sticking both of your feet onto a single slidy thing and facing sideways (note the sliding sideways thing, because a nutcracker would be easy to ride on a monoboard). But as a skier, rope tows are no problem. If you're thinking about heading to NZ to ski at the club fields, take heart.

Rope tows are easy to ride. Despite their fearsome reputation, the ones at Craigieburn are fine (yes, they're a little steeper than some of the others, but they're also nice and slow so it's easy to get sorted out) and they're nowhere near 45 degrees. They're not exhausting if you actually listen to what the clubbies and patrollers tell you to do when you're using them. There are 80-year-olds riding these tows at Broken River, so if you find it tiring you're probably doing something wrong. They are scary in the same way that escalators are scary. If you think about getting sucked into that gap where the moving stairs go under the floor they maybe that's scary, but you probably couldn't get stuck in that gap without really planning it out in advance. They're only dangerous if you get your fingers stuck in the pulley, and all you need to do to avoid that is not hold onto the rope with your hands (that's what the nutcracker's for). I've whacked elbows and legs on the pulleys without breaking or bruising anything. And finally, they only wreck your gloves if you don't use glove protectors. Given that every place that has tows also encourages you to use glove protectors (and provides them) you don't have an excuse.

So, there you have it. Rope tows are a friend to all those who face forwards on their slidy things. They may not be as genteel as a chairlift, but you can get off a rope-tow halfway up the hill, and doing that on a chairlift is not recommended. In my experience with rope tows, getting up the hill is usually much easier and safer than getting down.

Important Differences Between Australia and New Zealand part 1:

1) In Australia, jokes about Kiwi accents are hilarious. In New Zealand, jokes about Kiwi accents are not well received.

2) In Australia, it is OK to be Australian. In fact, this is even endorsed. In New Zealand, it is not.

3) In Australia, a highway will have at least two lanes, and possibly more. In New Zealand, a highway will frequently have just one lane which will be shared by traffic moving in both directions.

4) In New Zealand, if a motorist encounters a large truck travelling in the opposite direction on a narrow dirt road, that truck will slow down and move to one side so that both vehicles may safely pass one another. In Australia, such a truck would accelerate and begin to swerve erratically from side to side.

5) In Australia, if you drive over a possum, you feel bad. In New Zealand, if you drive over a possum, you feel good.

Figure 1

6) In Australia, people are generally expected to be literate. In New Zealand, this expectation also applies to cows (see figure 1).