[Taniwha]

I'm a kiwi, I don't think people are against visitors per-se - it's the enormous amount of poo they leave behind that they ought to be packing out - it's particularly a problem because we have a culture of 'freedom camping' - stopping on the side of the road for the night, but now we have tens of 1000s of camper vans without builtin facilities piling on the roadside poo

PS: Lord of the Rings was a movie it's not actually what we're about

[IcelandDave]

We've had the same problem here in Iceland over the past 3 years, and it's only getting worse. We (the locals) call them "toilet paper tourists". It's a classic example of what economists call ´externalities´; i.e. great for the camper van companies (they make "shitloads" of money, pun not intended), great for the toilet paper tourists, who have a vacation on the cheap, but the cost is dumped (again, not intended) onto innocent 3rd parties in the form of degraded environment and diminished experiences. Oh, and good for importers of pot noodles and cat food.

[mkingston]

Me too. But I'm a bit out of touch. I'm aware roadside camping waste has been a mainstream issue for a while, but are many in NZ talking about pressure on environmentally sensitive areas? Is that a very big part of the conversation? (This article might cause one to believe as much).

[Taniwha]

If I look at the local newspaper and the periodic airing of grievances, it's all about camper vans and piles of poo, and then maybe about people who can't safely drive on the left side of the road

I think there probably are isolated areas that are now seeing more people than they ever have but most locals don't get there either - DoC (the government conservation arm) is quite capable of closing places if required

[stmfreak]

Maybe start requiring rental campers to have built-in facilities? This seems like a bit of hypocrisy to complain about visitors pooing just like the locals.

[Taniwha]

some of them do, there's a move afoot to require all of them, but some are tiny and pretty barebones.

The locals generally aren't travelling the country and pulling over into a picnic area when it gets dark, they're going there for a few hours and aren't as likely to need to poo, but it's their back yard.

Ideally we simply start building more public toilets, but the cost of that's going to fall on local property tax, there's no easy mechanism to separate enough money from tourists in vans to pay for this - our new government seems to be looking at an airport arrivals tax ($20 or something) to try and cover both this stuff and some of the costs of providing more protections in the National Parks, which the previous govt starved.

Meanwhile we fine people caught camping where they shouldn't and who make a mess, but about half skip out without paying them (from Monday's local paper)