New Zealand
What's this bit all about...
This isn't trying to be a tourist guide or a replacement for the CIA World Factbook, but I've tried to include some of the more common questions I get.
How big is it?
Dumb Question, or not? When I returned to the UK after a three week holiday everybody I met asked me if I had seen things that we hadn't even been near. Yes, there are only around four million people (and thirty million sheep) but how big is the place itself?
....bigger than the UK. Hands up those of you who thought it was the same size as Wales?
This tighter map makes the distances a bit clearer to those of us from the UK.
Local to where?
On most maps, NZ is tucked away in the corner, but all of us - the United States Immigration & Naturalization Service excepted - know that the world is round and that the round reality often differs very dramatically from our idea developed from the rectangular version.
It even lets you get to Fiji from London without flying via the US or Mexico.
Imagine that.
Remote as NZ looks on your usual flat world map, it's nothing as to how it looks as a half globe centred on Auckland. For a businessman, shipping your product on a three hour airfreight flight gives you a market of under four million. The same coverage in Europe, centred on Frankfurt say, gives you almost half a billion.
So yes, it is remote. Middle of nowhere. Of course <PeterDrucker> in the Knowledge Age, value is in bits not atoms</PeterDrucker>.
The left map is a normal, physical map which shows how little there is on this half of the world. The right map is shaded according to population density. White represents a population density too low to count. Apart from Indonesia and a glimpse of the Chinese coast, the only significant populations visible on this map are Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Auckland region's 1 million people don't even register.
What's the weather like?
Weather depends on a lot more than just the latitude, but this map gives you an idea of what kind of summers and winters NZ gets by mapping the latitudes onto the Northen Hemisphere.
Note that Auckland is almost exactly on the opposite side of the world from Gibraltar.