I’m wet and cold and ready to believe that I have made a huge mistake

I’m wet and cold and ready to believe that I have made a huge mistake.
The other problem is the time of day. The difference between New Zealand time and Greenwich Mean Time is a round 12 hours (leaving aside the one hour of British Summertime). In a sense, things could not be more convenient: you do not have to move your watch-hands at all. You merely have to declare to yourself that it is, in fact, dinner-time not breakfast-time. In practice, the strain of eating buttered toast every day for dinner and lamb shanks and seared tamarillos with wine for breakfast can get you down.Not that I have anything to complain about.

It’s the people who fly from Los Angeles to New Zealand who really have grounds to be confused. Say your plane leaves LA on Saturday evening, it will arrive in New Zealand twelve hours later the next day in the morning – Sunday morning, you suppose Except that, in fact, it will be Monday morning. You will have crossed the International Dateline on the way across the Pacific and an entire Sunday will have vanished from your life forever.Coming back will be equally disorienting. If you leave New Zealand early enough in the morning, you may have the pleasure of arriving in Los Angeles on the previous day in the evening.No wonder people want to go bungee jumping in this country.

International tourists to New Zealand need the correction in perspective that only hanging upside down from a piece of elastic can give you.Yes, the pavements are stained wet in Wellington and umbrellas blow inside out, just like in (say) England And yes, people also seem to speak English here But other things are grotesquely unfamiliar. Purple flowers with giant flabby petals quiver under the weight of dew. It is cold here (honest!) but to judge by the flora you have to wonder whether it ought to be the tropics.Is New Zealand deliberately disorienting? I have just been to the new national museum known as Te Papa, in search of answers to the problem. Spiky green leaves, dangling tendrils and scaly pods drip rain from every tree and shrub. I’VE JUST lost a week from my summer by flying into the middle of winter by accident.