>>1932663Around Lake Benmore and McKenzie pass for different animals. It was a wild trip, the hunting with an ex president of the deerstalkers for 3 days was by far the best of it. The rest of the 2 weeks was driving tying to see as much as we could, including Christchurch (this was like 2 months after the shooting), over to the west coast, up to the north and on the interislander to Wellington, then to Rotorua and finally flying out of Auckland.
Notable differences were hunting attitude: in the states we have limited seasons, so we really go hard because there can be a lot of competition. The gentleman we went with had us up and out by like 8-9am instead of 4-5am and set up before dawn. Scouting was much more leisurely, not die hard beating bush. This of course could entirely be who I was with and where I was from limited sample, but I got the feeling it was more relaxed. Otherwise I would say the other big things are 1080, the absolute lack of siderails on nearly every road, and the fact you call cattle/venison land 'stations' instead of what we would call a 'ranch' or 'cattle ranch'. Meat pies don't really exist in the States. Your salmon are basically all landlocked while you've got gigantic trout. Kokanee here tend to be much smaller than big fat ocean kings (though those are shrinking). Monteith's is pretty good. Also your coffee was better.