Did you know.....

In New Zealand it is illegal to wander the streets at night with your face blackened, and it is lawful to take a leak in the street provided that you maintain one hand on the rump of the horse while you leak, and you aim for the ground where the horse would leak onto. (Police Offences Act 1906).


Here are some more strange facts about New Zealand, just in case someone ever asks.....

	No capital city in the world is further south than Wellington.
	No part of New Zealand is more than 128 km from the sea.
	French Pass, which separates d'Urville Island from the South Island coast, is the only place in the world where two different levels of ocean can be seen at once.  This causes tremendously dangerous currents - sometimes the tide flows at up to 8 knots through the narrow Pass.  [The only time we went through there, we didn't know that.  Jeff said that was the closest he's ever come to putting our boat, Lady Fair, on the rocks.]
	More fresh water gushes up from cracks in the limestone at Waikoropupu, near Takaka, Nelson province, than from any freshwater spring anywhere in the world.  Over 2,100 million litres of water gush up every 24 hours.
	Fiordland National Park is one of the largest in the world at 1,228,348 hectares.  It is also one of the wildest and least populated.
	Fossil-bearing rocks in the Cobb Valley near Nelson have trilobites that are 550 million years old.
	Each year some 400 significant earthquakes are recorded in New Zealand, of which roughly 100 are likely to be felt without instruments, but aren't of sufficient importance to warrant public notice.  The biggest New Zealand earthquake in historical times was near Wellington on 23 January 1855.  It had a magnitude of about 8 on the Richter scale and was felt over about 940,000 sq km, tilting a block of land 50 m wide and 190 km long.  In Wellington the uplift was 1.5 m; great stretches of shore became permanently exposed (including what is now the airport).  The centre lay along the Wairarapa Fault, whose horizontal movement is estimated to have been at least 12 m compared with about 6 m for the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.  Despite this huge movement, only 12 people died in the quake, because Wellington was still sparsely populated at that stage.
	Less than 5% of the population of New Zealand is human - the rest are animals, giving one of the highest ratios of humans to animals in the world.
	The first all-female group of pallbearers was six sisters who carried their father's coffin in 1974.  Mr James O'Brien died on 1 June 1974, leaving eight daughters, 6 of whom officiated as pallbearers.
	More rainbow trout in the 2-3 kg category are caught annually in New Zealand than in the rest of the world put together.
	Energy consumption per head in NZ on a kilogram-of-coal equivalent is around 3,000 kg.  This compares with 6,845 in Australia, 10,888 in North America and 4,023 in Western Europe.
	New Zealand has more bookshops per head of population than any other country; one for every 7,500 people (compared with one for every 19,000 in England and one for every 50,000 in the USA).
	The shortest term of a New Zealand Prime Minister was seven days: Harry Atkinson was appointed on 28 August 1884 and resigned on 3 September 1884, beating the record of his immediate predecessor, Robert Stout, by six days.
	The youngest person ever elected to a city council in New Zealand was Miss Vicki Buck, who won a seat on the Christchurch City Council in a by-election in May 1975, at the age of 19.  Her majority was in excess of a thousand.  (Vicki Buck went on to become mayor of Christchurch.)
	A total of 194,000 men (67% of all NZ males between 18 and 45) served in World War II.
	There are more Scottish pipe bands per head of population in NZ than in Scotland