On-the-Road Tales

Lovely little city. Checked out the Parliament building in the shape of a beehive. In recent years, the Prime Minister, several key government members (Supreme court justice, atty general, governor general) and the most elder Maori representative were all…women – a country run by females. Yeah finally. haha. I was reading some possible reasoning for such a trend. NZ was settled by a lottery type system and people were on their own to make it or break it in the early days, independence and self preservation were required traits of succeeding in the wild and everyone was on equal turf. Kind of like the pioneers out in the western US but without a history. The new govt was small and mallable, NZ women were the first in the world given the right to vote! 27 yrs before the US. So hopefully this is a precursor of what comes – we are just a quarter decade behind in running the rest of the world’s industrialized countries too! The neighboring land to the East, Australia, had a slightly different historical progression. Since all the English and Irish prisioners were shipped there, the NZers often refer to them as the “convicts” next door. Funny and with a hint of truth!

Visited Te Papa, a recently opened musuem about New Zealands history, nature and geographically volatile position. I never realized how many tectonic fault plates this country sits on. It is chock full of earthquakes, volcanos, floods, and wind blasts that are capable of knocking down forests. Wellington experiences 40 earthquakes a day! Mostly unnoticeable but enough to register.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 3:22 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.