[101km]

Wellington is like a smaller (and much more windy) San Francisco. Having just finished driving 12,000km tip-to-tip, that might be the one spot that's dense enough to amount to something.

I can't emphasize enough how rural the rest of this country is.

New Zealand is a victim of its success in tourism. Everything is geared towards that. Imagine living somewhere like Denver, CO but with SF prices and depressed software salaries. It's a wonderful place but even with all things being equal bureaucracy wise (and they aren't), the list of places ahead of Wellington is two miles long.

[peatmoss]

Wellington is the most beautiful city I’ve ever lived in, maybe the most beautiful city I’ve been to, and it’s where we assumed we’d be living when my wife and I moved to NZ some years ago. We spent 9 months before giving up and moving to Auckland. The winter was miserable. I’d never considered wind to be something that could make me so miserable in a place.

Kiwis joke that New Zealand starts at the Bombay Hills (the Bombay Hills are just south of Auckland, and so serve as a demarcation between Auckland and the far north and the rest of NZ). I wanted to love Wellington, but I ended up feeling much happier in Auckland.