Two countries
While the North and South islands are separated by only 20 km of water, they have quite different landscapes. Mountaineer T. H. Scott found this when he moved south. In 1950 he wrote:
‘I felt immediately and overwhelmingly that I had come to a quite different country …. Here then was a vast kind of land, whatever its size on the map, giving a sense of great distance where herds of grazing animals might roam, where grain plants might grow and a people wander. This had always been for me the meaning of continents.’ 1