No Internet Access For You!

Some of you have noticed my lack of online presence since I left Auckland. I've only written sporadic e-mails, there are far fewer Facebook status updates, and I've only managed to throw up a total of three blog entries in the sixteen days I've been in New Zealand.

Part of this is because I've been on the move constantly since leaving The Big Smoke. (Auckland's a lot like Toronto. Not only do the two cities share a nickname, they also receive a fair amount of vitriol from the rest of the population of New Zealand and Canada respectively.) I've been up to the Bay of Islands, right up north to Cape Reinga, down to Rotorua, out to Gisborne and around the East Cape. I'm now sitting in Waitomo with a little time to kill before my bus leaves in fifteen minutes. Even when I have been in a place more than one night, I'm just constantly out doing... stuff. Luging, caving, tramping, drinking, hot-tubbing, eating, and so on and so forth.

But even if I was staying still and doing nothing but sitting in hostels all day and night, there would still be one thing preventing me from being online all the time:

Internet access in New Zealand is freaking expensive.

When I was in Auckland, I was staying in a hostel with free WiFi access. Apparently, my hostel experience in Auckland is the exception to the norm in New Zealand. I didn't think anything of it at the time because free Internet was what I'd gotten used to in South America. That's right, even in some of the most backwater places in South America, I was getting free WiFi. In a First World industrialised nation like New Zealand, I'm paying through the nose for it almost whereever I go. I could pay for it more than I have been, but I'd rather save up the money for the aforementioned luging and caving and tramping and drinking and hot-tubbing and eating and bungying and skydiving.

Hey, maybe the reason it's so expensive here is because New Zealand is so progressive.

Maybe the only reason it's free in South America is because South Americans haven't quite advanced to the stage where they've realised that they can make oodles of cash from backpackers desperate for e-mail and Facebook and blogs and BitTorrent and Flickr.

Sometimes, I hate progress.