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Uniquely New Zealand

Overview

Uniquely New Zealand is a Touring, Camping and Sailing Guide enabling one to get to the places in New Zealand that "Packages" can thankfully still not reach. It concentrates on the things that make New Zealand special and what has shaped the country, its people and their leisure activities. We are convinced that the simpler the lifestyle one is prepared to adopt the closer you will get to the real New Zealand and the better you will experience it's scenery, wildlife and sports. So what are the special and unique things that bring us back year after year that you should not miss.

We cover our own experiences of activities such as sailing, fishing and camping which are fundamental to the Kiwi way of life. The content draws extensively on our "Letters from the Antipodes" Emailed to friends the last 15 years with pictures added on our return to form a comprehensive touring guide. There is a lot of information but much of it is still organised chronologically. If you want specific information on, for example, a place you are thinking of visiting or an activity please try the Search Engine which has a complete index of every word on our sites and is updated weekly.

We have tried to extract information from the chronological organisation into specific pages which are accessible from the bottom of this page. We however have not been good at keeping these updated as often as we should.

Touring

These pages form a record of our travels in New Zealand over the last 24 years. We usually try to make the pages self contained so their is a certain amount of duplication when we return to favourite places. All the pages are generously provided with pictures, in the early days from film cameras and digital images taken from our video cameras which had still facilities. From the begriming the text had small thumbnail images which could be clicked to give an enlarged 'popup' image in a new window. By 2005 we were only using our new digital cameras and the new 'popup' images were provided in two sizes to cover different screen sizes and also to allow bandwidth reduction when mobile or on slow connections.

During the 24 years both the Internet and hardware has not stood still and there are now some new factors to consider, in particular many people including ourselves are now accessing our pages from Smart Phones and Tablets which are unable to handle popup images well, in most cases they open them in a new tab. We are now offering an option (the default) of using an Overlay technique most often called a Lightbox Effect. This is now available on all the NZ touring pages from 2004 onwards although the automatic scaling works best on pages written in the latest web standard HTML5. The final stage of changing the pages on the web site to a fully Responsive and Mobile Friendly design is well advanced and pages satisfying that criteria have a green Mobile Friendly icon* after the link. Touring and Sailing pages prior to 2004 are best viewed on a standard computer or laptop as they use popup images and do not use the latest web standard HTML5. The display settings can be changed on pages with images on the bottom right corner.

Most recently, we have started to increase the size of new 'Lightbox' images from 600 x 450 pixels to 800 x 600 pixels. We have working back to 2004 increasing the size of most of the older images but you may still find a mix of sizes when they have been reused.

Pages prior to 2004 are best viewed on a Computer or Laptop

Background and Reference Information

All these pages have now been updated to HTML5 (with Lightbox Style Overlay pictures where appropriate) and are mostly fully Responsive and Mobile Friendly and display a* icon.


Before You Leave

I would be very pleased if visitors could spare a little time to give us some feedback - it is the only way we know who has visited the site, if it is useful and how we should develop it's content and the techniques used. I would be delighted if you could send comments or just let me know you have visited by sending a quick Message.

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Content revised: 7th July, 2020