Local author Joe Benett is an English man who came to NZ thinking he would stay for a year and stayed for more than fifteen years. I've just begun reading his travelogue around NZ called A LAND OF TWO HALVES (2004). The style is vivid and utterly enjoyable. Here is an example:
"I have the smoky-voiced landlady of the Railway Hotel and the waddling Labrador and the factory-sized public bar to myself. I order a pie and a pint. The pint is half a litre, but the pie is the real thing. In fifth-form physics I learned that if you filled a matchbox with nuclei and then dropped it, it would sink fifty feet into the ground. New Zealand pies are similar." (13)
This is as close as the kind of humour I'd like to put into my writing. And I still have three-hundred pages to go along with his meandering trip all over the islands!
