Legendary Friendly

“We here in the ‘west island’ like to cling to that old cliché of New Zealanders being slightly simple sheep-botherers, so it’s a bit of a shock when you get there and realise how wrong that stereotype is,” The Sydney Morning Herald’s “resident globetrotter” Ben Groundwater writes. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in a Wellington café, a Nelson pub or a Dunedin restaurant, everyone’s just being unaffectedly nice to you. When an Australian [immigration] official would be sizing you up and considering snapping on a rubber glove, the New Zealand officials, mad buggers, are making casual chit-chat. My dad went through Auckland airport last week and the immigration officer flipped through his passport a few times, then looked at his card. ‘Have we only got you for six days?’ she asked Dad. ‘That’s a shame.’”