US tourist in NZ who makes us all look bad
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Anonymous
So you can't deal with people reminding you to drive on the correct side of the road? Snowflake. |
Anonymous
Like we don't have intoxicated drivers driving dangerously here in the States? |
Anonymous
Hun, I have been coming and going from New Zealand for nearly 40 years. I used to live there. The kiwis have ALWAYS reminded visitors to drive on the left. Road fatalities in NZ is always national news. Kind of like the sunburn time on the radio. Because you know, no ozone and shit. |
Anonymous
The US does seem to have an unusually high % of trashy idiots. |
Anonymous
No, but do you think someone should be able to commit a crime in a foreign country and then run home like nothing ever happened without being called on it!”? |
Anonymous
My point is that this type of accident is not infrequent in any country where tourists drive on the opposite side of the road to what they’re used to. I lived briefly in a tourist area in the north of Australia many years ago. Unfortunately there were a few Americans who killed themselves driving on the wrong side of the road. Very sad. |
Anonymous
| Not sure why everyone is excusing this guy when they were so hard on Anne Sacoulas for doing the same in England. And this guy did it for 10 minutes and possibly was drunk. He didn’t kill anyone, but easily could have done so. |
Anonymous
In reality, there are many more newspaper articles in NZ about bad Asian tourist drivers. It's actually quite hard to switch between driving on different sides of the road. It's ok on a divided highway, but pulling out of a parking lot, or on a lonely road, you have to think quite hard. All the driving lessons that were drilled into you as a teenager now have to be performed in mirror image. In summertime, I'm convinced that all the senior journalists in NZ go on vacation. They tell the junior reporters left in the office to just write about road accidents. The rate of road fatalities in Virginia is higher than in NZ, despite Virginia having one of the lower rates in the US. The difference in media coverage is quite stark though. Maybe it's because there's about two degrees of separation in NZ compared to six here, so you're likely to know someone who was good friends with that guy who was killed in that horrible crash in Timaru or Taupo or Taranaki. |
Anonymous
Nothing in your response explains how this guy could have driven a full 10 minutes on the wrong side of the road with the driver behind him desperately trying to warn him. This wasn’t a momentary lapse, it was protracted and it could have killed someone. That is newsworthy in any country. |
Anonymous
Also, read the article. It says that based on his behavior at the scene, police suspected that he was intoxicated. While awaiting the toxicology results, he insisted he had to leave the country for family and personal reasons. This is certainly not very exemplary behavior by any account. |
Anonymous
| Anyone know this guy? |
Anonymous
Or people who drive on the wrong side. You always see the stories about people getting on the off ramp of the highway and driving. |
Anonymous
| I don’t think a US judge would be so lenient on a tourist committing DUI. |
Anonymous
For what it is worth, Americans do not have a monopoly on poor tourist behaviour. Chinese tourists are usually both loud and disrespectful when visiting sacred sites in the UK. The loudest tourists I have ever heard on the Tube were Italian. And so on… |
Anonymous
The badly behaved bachelor party travellers from the UK going to Amsterdam are notorious. |