Dialogue: Can't let down the good folks of the country

I rather like it down here in the wilds of the Horowhenua/Manawatu. The locals are kind and concerned. Particularly, they are concerned to know whether it is true that all Aucklanders are up themselves.

To date, four friendly locals (two hairdressers, one shoe-repair person and one knicker-vendor) have, upon hearing the name of my city of residence, asked me to comment on rumours that Auckland is the deepest moral cesspit in the known universe.

"It's pretty mental up, there, eh?" they ask, eyes wide with anticipation as they wait for me to furnish lunch hour with an account of Queen St's latest open-air orgy. "It's all sex and money, eh?" (In fact, nobody I know in Auckland gets within co-ee of either most days of the week but I answer in the affirmative. I kind of decided on the spot that it was better that the Manawatu thinks of us as degenerate, rather than impotent.)

Anyway, God bless the good folk of the Tararua foothills. At the very least, they ask their questions politely - just as I do my very best to keep a respectful tone when asking New Zealanders in the rural band exactly why they like to set up home in a river of cowflop.

Essentially, in all Aucklander/south-of-Aucklander conversations today, what you have is two New Zealanders asking each other how the other can stand his or her life for longer than an afternoon. Given that the rubes have the money these days, it pays to deliver your end with tact.

In all seriousness, too, you learn a bit from each other when you meet in the flesh. In the general run these days, rural New Zealanders and urban New Zealanders see each other only via the news on telly.

I was thinking about all this recently when I found myself unexpectedly talking through the night with a couple of guys from the tiny North Island town of Marton.

It happened the day that a couple of Auckland friends and I made our annual trip out of Ponsonby Rd and into the unknown.

I think it went like this: our car ran out of gas in the middle of the night on a deserted back road a few feet short of Foxton (our navigator, if memory serves, had been terminally stoned since Waiouru). We were just reaching for our cellphones when we realised something: we were not alone. We under the knee-rug in the back seat had been joined by a local at some point. He was sitting on the far left of the seat, smiling and nodding and contributing to the conversation when he felt he had something to say.

It was a little weird. He just sort of dawned upon the picture like a hologram, but he was real. He must have climbed into the car and then, politely, waited for everyone to come around when we were helping the navigator to sleep it off.

Then, we realised that he was not alone. Outside, his friend lay on the ground, waving up at us through a rain of sheepflub as he sucked petrol out of his Belmont through a length of hose (that, one suspects in hindsight, he might have carried in the Belmont for this express purpose).

It transpired that both of these guys were farm-hands, or something along those lines, and that they lived just out of Marton and had done so all their lives.

Like everyone who was present, they were about 30. Like everyone who was present, too, they were more or less written off.

This, perhaps needless to say, made for a pretty good roadside party. It certainly made for excellent conversation, even if everyone was conversing at once.

They wanted to know all about life in the big city - neither of them had travelled even as far as Wellington since they were children. They wanted to know what urban New Zealanders wore, what they looked like, what they ate, and whether there were movie stars in Wellington.

The guy outside even wanted us to describe exactly where Wellington was.

We stayed up all night together - it was one of the great all-night yakfests. Part of it was kind of pot-induced, but it still held up the next day.