A weekly ode to the joys of moaning about holiday, by Tim Roxborogh.
New Zealand and "nuclear apocalypse" aren't traditional bedfellows when it comes to word-association games. Nor is it what springs to mind when you think about driving around this beautiful country because it is just that: beautiful. We know it, most of the world knows it and there's a fair chunk of our collective national self-esteem tied up in it. It is why I will forever find it jarring when doing a road trip in Aotearoa and I find myself driving next to a recently felled section of commercial forest.
Those desolate wastelands don't just look kinda bad in the time it takes for the young trees to take hold, they look straight out of those television news shots of the Indonesian rainforest in the horror years that the monsoon doesn't arrive and the massive fires burn wildly out of control. Orangutans are misplaced, haze spreads into the airspace neighbouring countries and the environmental cost
is catastrophic.
So yes, I find it jarring, equally so for the fact I never read nor hear of anybody else complaining about it. And it's not just the commercial forests because if there's a good reason why any farmland that borders a main road needs to be barren and devoid of trees, then I'm all ears.
Part of the reason this issue is such an apparent "non-issue" is possibly because we're so wrapped up in continual self-back-patting over our undoubted natural beauty that we neglect to mention there's a way too high percentage of butt-ugly highway in this country. Surely that's not the look nor vibe we want to be giving tourists.
