Customer Reviews

A Land of Two Halves

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This book certainly looks good... the idea of hitch-hiking as a way of exploring a country and its society is clever - you meet a lot of different people and get to see parts that are not always up there on the "must see" list of tourist destinations - and, on top of that, Joe Bennett is a skilled and entertaining writer. But despite such promising credentials, it really doesn't work in the way it should.

The problems start with the sequencing of his journey, which is very strange. The first half of the book finds him shooting off from his home in Christchurch to the increasingly bleak far south of the South Island, before heading up the island's equally remote West Coast. Hitch-hiking through these areas, which are notorious for their sparse habitation and bad weather, is a pretty daunting task and, not surprisingly, he gets fed-up with it two thirds of the way round and heads back home. Problem is that, by doing so, he misses out the whole of the north of the South Island which is not only stunningly pretty (with often glorious weather) but which is also one of the most interesting areas of the country. His journey round the North Island is at least more logical, taking in most of the "important" areas. But by now he's clearly getting very bored with hitching (so much so that he rents a car for large sections), a problem that's then compounded by his hitting some pretty appalling late Autumn weather, begging the obvious question of why choose to hitch at this time of year?

Next up, the people he chooses to meet are pretty strange. Not everyone picks up hitch-hikers and those who do are, as he finds, often slightly odd and usually want to talk a lot about their slightly odd lives. Off the road, he clearly likes a beer or two and, as a result, spends huge amounts of the journey chatting to bar-proppers in small pubs and hotels. Nothing wrong with either activity, but as an insight into New Zealand society it's a limited and far from representative cross-section of people.

Finally, Joe's either a pretty morose kind of guy or the boredom & banality of standing by endless roads for hours on end waiting for a lift, followed by a booze-up with some fairly lonely people in a small town pub gets to him. Whatever the reason, he spends increasing parts of the book reflecting on the less attractive aspects of New Zealand life while describing uninteresting parts of the country in bad weather. Not unexpectedly, by the end of it, his & your bottle are most definitely in "half empty" mode.

Which is all very unfair. I've visited New Zealand many times and lived in Christchurch. Sure, it's small country that's a long way from anywhere and its people are continually grappling with an inferiority complex that comes from being small and remote. But it's also stunningly beautiful with, at the right times of the year, quite excellent weather and a population that must rank amongst the most friendly and interesting anywhere. It's a superb holiday destination and, for the right type of person, a quite wonderful place to live. All aspects of New Zealand that our increasingly road-weary and often downright gloomy guide fails to capture and which, as a result, leads to a very unbalanced insight into both the country and its people.

Bad news then? Well not quite, because he can write and his stories are not only enjoyable and often quite funny, but his wet & windy journey becomes, in itself, an entertaining exercise in personal endurance. And, on the way, he experiences a side of New Zealand that most miss which, in turn, stimulates him to ruminate on a number of interesting and important social issues facing the country. Just don't get fooled into believing that it's really like this because, unless you too are mad enough to decide to hitch around the place at the wrong time of the year, it's most certainly not.

Having been to New Zealand twice my wife and I contemplated moving there. Residing in a country is, of course, much different from being on holiday there. This book gives readers a look at the "Land of Two Halves" beyond what's been portrayed in the movies.

Hitchhiking his way on two separate journeys (divided between the North and South Islands), Mr. Bennett is given a lift from some very colorful characters. Some hard-bitten and jaded, others silent, a few as chatty as magpies. Like Australia, the Kiwis can be a rough-hewn, industrious lot, facing hardship with fortitude and good cheer. Some of the isolated towns, pubs and hotels are downright eerie, reminiscent of places that time forgot. Decor and furniture often dates from the 1950s, '60s or '70s and accommodation can be a bit threadbare.

Where Bennett really shines, however, is in his descriptions of what it's like when he's kept waiting for hours by the road without a ride. He manages to colorfully illuminate how it feels to stand with one's thumb jutting over the asphalt, on an isolated road shoulder with nothing to do but watch a bird hopping in the grass or a horse posing stock-still in an adjacent pasture. It takes talent to make such a situation interesting but that's exactly what he does. The middle-aged author thrives in such settings, having little time for the larger cities like Wellington and Auckland. He gives them short shrift.

Anyone wanting a glowing travelogue will be disappointed. This isn't an episode of Rick Steves' Europe. It's a realistic account of what a lonely traveler experienced by taking a satchel, walking to the edge of town and putting his thumb out. He vividly illustrates how it feels to try and time storm fronts and strategize over the best approach to where you want to go versus where your next driver is headed. It's life on the road by the seat of your pants.

I quite enjoyed this tale, feeling that I gained a more well-rounded perspective on a country I greatly admire.

English-born Joe Bennett was a teacher when he went to New Zealand at the age of 29. He was supposed to stay for just a year, but sixteen years on he is still there. This book covers the author's hitch-hiking trip around New Zealand. "In the trip I am about to go on, I want to see the place as clearly as I can." However, the main purpose for the trip is to find out whether Joe should stay or go when his dog dies in the next few years. Before I start this book review, I must make readers aware that this book is nothing like a traditional tour or travel guide.

Just like the title suggests, this book consists of two halves. The first half of the book covers his travels on the South Island of New Zealand, while the second half covers the North Island. "The North Island is different from the South Island. It has a different history, a different geography and a different climate." These differences are very much covered as he describes his experiences while hitch-hiking around both the larger and smaller towns. Since he is somewhat of an outsider, he also covers the issue of the national identity - "The question of national identity is raised so often and so tediously that there are times when New Zealand's most prominent characteristic seems to be wondering whether it has any prominent characteristics." As people who have been to New Zealand will know is that the country is beautiful and full of contradictions. The author believes that there are plenty of distinctions about New Zealanders: "What about the vaunted practicality, the no-nonsense earthiness, the number-eight-wire ingenuity, the rugged independence, the compulsion to travel, the willingness to work hard?" Joe Bennett covers all these subjects fantastically and full of wit. Some of the language used might upset some readers, it covers the issues realistically. After weeks of travelling from Invergarcill and Bluff at the south point of the South Island to Cape Reinga at the north point of the North Island he also manages to find the answer to the main purpose of the book: "It will be good to have a young dog around again. And it may perk up my old dog in her years of decline."

Yes, I do like this book. The author discusses the hidden realities behind New Zealand. It discusses the most important details of the larger towns on the South and North Island of the beautiful New Zealand. I believe that this book does two things. First, it provides tourists with a good introduction into the 'real' New Zealand, which is not covered within the traditional travel guide. Second, it is an enjoyable read. I have just one issue with the book. I believe that the author has 'cheated' in the second half of the book when he decides to stop hitch-hiking and decides to hire a car. He also becomes somewhat less detailed in the last quarter of the book (homesick to his dog??). I still recommend this book to all (potential) visitors to New Zealand.

Being a Brit myself, over here in NZ for good (I hope), after around 4 years living and working here, Joe Bennett's writings struck a real cord. NZ is an excellent place to live and tour, and the real value is in its people - but like all busy folks it's easy to drift into the daily grind and forget why we're here.

The timing of world travel readers dipping into this book is fortunate, against the background of Lord-of-the-Rings-plus-100%-NZ-plus-All-Black-Rugby Domination-plus-America's-Cup-performance-plus-cheap-accomodation-and-decent-flight-prices gloss, so as to show a more down-to-earth view. Bennett's view should not be seen as cynical (as I note critics' views), and an awareness of what the book is about should be allowed to sink in.

Here is an older and settled guy, hitching around a wild and woolly land populated with interesting (and eccentric most times) and kind people, in a young country that's just recently re-forged its own identity as a Pacific Island chain the other side of Asia (or USA, depending on your persective) from the parents that abandoned it. Look at it as a view of NZ drawn from interaction with it's salt-of-the earth locals, and enthusiastic visitors. Bryson meets gnarrly Brit wit - Excellent.

Joe Bennett's two books, WHERE UNDERPANTS COME FROM and HELLO DUBAI are excellent and well written. A LAND OF TWO HALVES is whiny and negative. More about hitchhiking and pubs than New Zealand, it could pretty much have been set anywhere. I learned very little about New Zealand and more than I needed to know about Bennett's personal habits. From a very good writer, this book was disappointing.

I read a lot of travelogues, in fact it's pretty much all I read. Historically, my definition of a good travelogue is one where: 1) I'm disappointed when it's over; and 2) I want to go visit the subject place(s). After reading this book I'll have to change that definition. While I found this book interesting and engaging, and was a bit disappointed when it was over (it did feel like there was more territory he could have covered), it made NZ sound like a somewhat bleak, blighted and boring place. I now have much LESS interest in going there. Thank you, Joe Bennett for saving me the trouble.

I love Joe's book and have re-read it 3 times thus far. I've written two popular NZ travel/outdoors guidebooks (NZ Frenzy), and thus I'm very familiar with tourism and travel within NZ. My opinion is that this book, not being a "glowing travelogue", is not the one a potential visitor to NZ wants to read. For all its faults, "Straying from the Flock" Straying from the Flock: Travels in New Zealandis a much better get-psyched-to-go-to-NZ primer (the only book of this type available to potential travelers). Joe's book is different. Joe is a successful newspaper columnist/satirist in Christchurch, most of his humorous writings pointing out the ironies of general NZ life. He writes for a Kiwi audience, not so much for a traveler audience.
That said, this book is a poignant account of a middle aged man who takes off on a hitch-hiking jaunt across NZ. This book is about Joe, his keen sense of humor, satire, and irony....all taken on the road in New Zealand and full of the troubles a middle-aged hitchhiker would face. His trip is brutal at times---bad weather, bad people, bad luck! I laugh out loud at both his insights and travails. For people living in NZ, this book is a fun laugh, but for visitors getting primed for a "trip of a lifetime", leave this book for when you return from NZ. You'll laugh more when you've already had first-hand experience of NZ, rather then when you are fantasizing about your first trip to NZ. Hope this helps....Cheers, scott

"If I've got nothing to read I feel like an amputee. In earlier hitchhiking years I often found myself in foreign lavatories with nothing printed but my passport. I can still recite, more or less, that lovely piece about Her Britannic Majesty's Principal Secretary of State requesting and requiring, in the name of Her Majesty, every wop kraut dago mick and spick not only to let me pass freely without let or hindrance but also to bandage any wounds I may incur and lend me a fiver to get home. Or else." - Joe Bennett in A LAND OF TWO HALVES

Joe Bennett, born and raised south of London, England, took up permanent residence in New Zealand in 1989 at age 29. Sixteen years later, he wrote LAND OF TWO HALVES, a travel narrative that describes his hitchhiking circuit of the North and South Islands of his adopted country.

Besides enjoying Bennett for the travel essayist he is, my interest in this particular book was catalyzed by the magnificent New Zealand mountain topography as seen in such recent films as the The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition) - topography that is located on the South Island.

What I enjoy most about Joe is his curmudgeon-in-training worldview, his ability to delight me with descriptive imagery, and his self-deprecating humor. The first is illustrated by his observation of those he finds in Queenstown, South Island:

"... it's full of the young, wearing the sort of trousers that have zips at the knee and that can be turned into shorts by a flick of a Velcro tab, or into a rucksack, or a four-wheel drive amphibious vehicle with drinks cabinet and emergency whistle. A disproportionate number of the young people are British. I constantly eavesdrop on boastful discussions about parapenting and hangovers, conducted in accents that I can place to the nearest soap opera."

(Not being familiar with the term "parapenting", I had to look it up; it's paragliding by another name.)

The author's imagery and self-deprecating humor are represented by his experiences with motels - and one in particular on the North Island:

"I didn't stay in a motel till I was twenty-five when I hitched down the west coast of the States. Motels were the cheapest places to stay and the cheapest of them were seriously dire. They resembled temporary porn studios - and some of them probably were, though rarely while I was in them. But they established my mental template for a motel room, a sort of Platonic ideal of grunge. It's this room (in Rotorua). Dark, humming with the noise of close traffic, a narrow sink, a leaking tap, don't-care joinery thick with paint, a tissue-thin pillowcase with the ghosts of stains washed into the once pink cloth, a ceiling of stippled plaster, each stipple minutely tipped with dirt like a smoker's tooth, a dented kettle that won't switch itself off, and beneath it a laminated wooden tea-tray, bleached and buckled and chipped by time and chance and a thousand transient forgotten guests. Every one of those guests has left a molecule of self. The air's like gravy ... The room is so authentically dispiriting that I like it. I head out to pootle in a good mood."

("Pootle" means to walk about exploring.)

Mind you, Bennett's narrative does justice to (at least) the physical beauty of New Zealand, particularly the South Island. However, I'm not sure that the local tourist boards or chambers of commerce would always find his observations concerning the related amenities and activities helpful, especially as he readily admits to loathing the usual touristy stuff. And hitching isn't the way most would choose to do an itinerary. I certainly wouldn't.

More recently since the release of A LAND OF TWO HALVES, Joe wrote and had published Mustn't Grumble: In Search of England and the English, an account of his return to and exploration of England to discover if it was as he remembered it after an absence of two decades. It was, and yet wasn't; grumble he did. I could relate particularly well to this book as I've visited the United Kingdom -my favorite destination on the planet - multiple times from 1975 to 2010, and Bennett's observations on things changed and unchanged seemed right on. I enjoyed MUSTN'T GRUMBLE immensely.

An avid traveler myself, and one not afraid to go it solo, one passage in A LAND OF TWO HALVES was particularly resonant:

"The man-with-a-book is a restrained sort, cautious, sensible, polite, wary of danger, little more than warm and breathing furniture, barely affecting the place he occupies. By ten o'clock he's back in his motel bed, well-fed, content, and still reading. His adventures are the adventures of others, the word-made pictures in his head."

Bennett has now joined Bill Bryson as the two travel essayists whose writings I'll endeavor to indiscriminately acquire and read, come what may. Such an author, for a bibliophile of whatever reading tastes, is a pearl beyond value in a lifetime of reading.

I learned more about Joe Bennet's bodily functions by reading this book than about any aspect of New Zealand. He enjoys drinking to excess with strapping NZ country boys and peeing off of cliffs. There, you don't have to order this book, unless you enjoy reading about being a repressed homosexual misogynists who cares nothing for nature's grandeur. Oh, and I defy you to find a paragraph that is not chock full of metaphor or simile. Joe, do us a favor and stay out of the travel literature genre.

Joe's books are uniformly great, and this one is no exception. I've never been to NZ (I don't count the hour I spent in the airport at Auckland) but traveling with Joe is the next best thing....