According to
this article from the NZ Herald, the population of the South Island recently surpassed the 1 million mark.
Christchurch has a population of about 400,000. New Zealand, as the article points out, has a total population of about 4.2 million.
To put that into perspective, NZ is about 104,000 square miles, the same size as Colorado.
Or, to put it into a perspective most of my readers will understand, it is the same size as all the New England states plus the eastern part of New York (draw a line N-S from NYC through Albany, then nudge it over to the west a few miles).
Now send everyone who lives there to Canada for a week's vacation --except for the people who live in the Boston Metro area (for the sake of ease, we'll say everyone inside of 495).
Those 4.2 million people (give or take) will represent the total population of New Zealand.
Send 3 out of 4 of them to Maine for vacation, so now you have three million Bostonians on vacation in Maine, just like on Labor Day Weekend. ;) Have 1/3 of them (a little over one million) visit Portland to represent Auckland, and the rest spread out through the rest of the state. That's roughly the North Island.
Of the remaining 1 million in Boston, have 4 out of 10 stay home. That's Christchurch, with about 400,000 people. Spread the rest of the 600,000 through Mass, NH, VT, RI, CT, and eastern NY. That, my friends, is the South Island.
Now, one more thing: imagine that most of the geography was like New Hampshire and Vermont but surrounded entirely by water: hills, mountains, a few flat areas, and lots of coast. Now imagine that most of the roads (even the ones along the coast) were like Route 9 across VT, or the Kancamagus. No highways, everything 2 lanes, going through every little town along the way.
That is one of the many ways in which coming to NZ is like going back in time. When my grandfather used to bring my mom and aunt up to North Woodstock, New Hampshire from Connecticut when they were kids, the trip was an all-day affair, with most of it spent in traffic on Route 3.
The 112 miles from Christchurch to Kaikoura takes nearly 3 hours to drive. Dunedin, the next large city on the South Island, is 225 miles or a 5 hour drive away. You can make better time driving south because you're mostly driving through the Canterbury plains, one of the few flat areas in NZ.
One more note: from NZ, the next closest population center is Sydney, Australia, which is about 1250 miles from New Zealand, across the Tasman Sea. That's about the same distance as Boston to St. Louis.
Living in Chch, I don't really feel the distances. It's every bit a modern city (by 1980's standards). There's a lot here to do and see. But venturing out from the city, it's easy to get a sense of those distances. For example, last weekend we drove the loop from Chch to Ashburton, to Methven, and back. It was a 4 hour drive (not including the stops), and I just listed all the places we were. Ski season is over, so Methven, at the base of Mt Hutt, was pretty much a ghost town. Ashburton, which is surrounded by farms, would have been very much at home plopped down in the middle of Ohio or Illinois.
BTW, I do have more pictures to post, but internet services work differently here than in the US. Plans are not unlimited bandwidth, but are capped. Our plan, which I'm stuck with for the rest of the month, is capped at 5G traffic (downloads and uploads). Once we exceed that limit, our speed drops down to dial-up speed, making posting pictures to the internet a tedious and unreliable process. Our new plan increases the limit to 10G, and we pay $2/G if we exceed that limit, which is better than having our speed cut.
