Too Many People Are Going to New Zealand
I travelled through New Zealand for many months, and there were parts that I loved about the country. There were also parts that I really didn&#x27;t like that seemed to be all about a culture which exists there which sees travellers as easy to take advantage of.<p>As a hiker, I was lumped into a category of travellers called &quot;backpackers,&quot; which created frequent distress. The street crime is very real. I was victim of an attempted robbery (luckily I got out on the better end of it, somehow), being charged different prices from locals, being given an enormous fine for sleeping in my car when I was sick and tired with a broken phone, and felt it was unsafe to drive any further. I also found erroneous over-charges on my credit card from two NZ businesses that I spent countless hours disputing until they were removed, and spent many nights in shabby, unprofessional hostels with undesirable staff.<p>The whole thing was a lot different than my experience backpacking around Europe when I was younger.<p>However, the nature is really incredible, and relatively unspoiled. There is so much to see in such short distances, and it&#x27;s one of the best places in the world for hiking. The international culture is wonderful. I made friends from all around the world. Some NZ&#x27;ers are incredibly friendly: I was invited into people&#x27;s homes, given meals and I hitch hiked around the South Island without any incident or problem (I somewhere read (cannot verify) a conspiracy theory that hitch hiking in the US was always relatively safe, but the CIA&#x2F;FBI created a campaign against it).<p>That said, many of the most famous and attractive places to visit in NZ were overwhelmingly packed with tourists. Milford Sound in February felt like I was in Beijing. Tongariro was swarmed with too many tourists doing the crossing, all lining up in file one-behind-the-other. Wanaka and Queenstown were a disaster, just too many people.<p>The worst problems were not even in the Bloomberg article. All of them seemed to have stemmed from working class New Zealanders who had hard-working lives that saw backpackers as an easy target.