Head out on the highway: A drive through New Zealand's South Island

New Zealand is nature's revenge on the sheer ugliness of mankind

Last July, my wife who is a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University — and I am not afraid to say it — was idly browsing the internet when she came across a post that invited submissions of academic papers for a conference in Wellington, New Zealand. She asked me whether I wanted to come along. I demurred, saying we had been there in 2010. She said, “Oh, that was just Auckland, now it’s Wellington. We will also go to other places.” We argued a bit, and she won.

But I knew from a few previous such trips with her that while