New Zealand Nice

In my previous visits to New Zealand with my family as a teenager, I found the Kiwis to be the most openly friendly and generously kind people I had ever encountered. Several times during those visits, complete strangers invited our entire family to their homes for a meal. Then, New Zealand’s population was only about 2.5 million, and fewer than 240,000 people visited each year, making tourists a bit of a rare breed, especially in smaller cities and towns.

Before our current travels commenced, I wondered if these qualities had been preserved in the intervening half century, as New Zealand’s population doubled and diversified, tourism skyrocketed and twenty-first century technology linked it ever more closely to the rest of the world.

Although we were never invited to anyone’s home on this journey, I was struck, as I had been earlier, by the helpfulness and open friendliness of almost everyone we interacted with, from store clerks and hotel staff to bus drivers and restaurant servers—even the customs officer who fined Tom $400NZ for a banana was pleasant and kind!

As Tom had never been here, his impressions were new, but even he could not stop remarking on the welcoming nature of the people we encountered–their responses not the remote, superficial pleasantries usually doled out by those in the service industry, but given with genuine engagement, interest and connection in even the most fleeting of interactions.

Some of it may have to do with New Zealand’s fairly slow emergence from the isolation of the pandemic—tourism peaked in 2019 at about 4 million visitors, but nowhere near that number has returned in the four years since then. While we saw several cruise ships in our first week in the country, we never encountered big crowds anywhere, even in very popular places like the Bay of Islands, Mt Cook, Queenstown and Milford Sound. We never had any trouble booking anything and saw a lot of ‘vacancy’ signs in motels even though we were travelling in the height of southern hemisphere summer.

The Kiwis we interacted with—most of them in the service industry—may have been especially welcoming to returning tourists, but I don’t think that entirely explains their continuing friendliness.

New Zealand, even with over 5 million people, is still an uncrowded country, blessed with fabulous scenery, fantastic weather, excellent infrastructure and a seemingly progressive political culture (i.e. free universal health care), less social divisiveness, and at least to our eyes, quite a lot of prosperity.

Though we drove and rode trains through city and countryside, we did not encounter even one remotely depressed area or slum, saw very few homeless and observed a great deal of respect for the indigenous Māori culture. In fact, New Zealand seemed to us one of the most stress-free modern environments we have ever visited. All of this seems to contribute to the Kiwis’ perpetual niceness.

And all that friendliness seemed to rub off on us as well. We tend to be travellers that, as the English put it ‘keep ourselves to ourselves’ but in NZ somewhat uncharacteristically we struck up conversations everywhere we went, finding some ‘small world’ moments along the way. On the hike up towards Mt Cook, we stopped to have a rest at a table shared, we learned, by some fellow Brits, who hailed from the beautiful Yorkshire village of Helmsley, which we have cycled through several times. On the boat ride through Milford Sound, we began talking to a woman who grew up in Petaluma and had found memories of ice skating at the Charles Schultz rink in Santa Rosa.

On the train ride to Christchurch we chatted at length to two sisters who sat across from us playing a card game I’d never seen before. They were Australian and had grown up in various mining towns throughout the country, stories of which were very interesting to both of us, as we, too, had both lived in (former) mining towns. They showed us how to play the Dutch game and even gave us an unopened pack of the playing cards to take with us. And on the shores of Lake Pukaki, we conversed with a young couple from Germany who were taking advantage of their year’s fully paid parental leave to travel the world with their six month old baby.

In America, one midwestern state has a reputation for welcoming friendliness, politeness and kindness widely described there as ‘Minnesota Nice’. I have not spent enough time in Minnesota to judge whether their cultural stereotype is true in reality, but after  three weeks of touring in New Zealand I can say with certainty that it definitely deserves the appellation ‘New Zealand Nice.’