Unusual Facts on New Zealand
* New Zealand was the first democracy in the West that gave women the right to vote.
* Dunedin city of New Zealand boast of housing the country’s oldest university, first newspaper
and first botanical gardens
* No part of New Zealand is more than 128 km from the sea.
* More fresh water gushes up from cracks in the limestone at Waikoropupu, near Takaka, Nelson
province, than from any freshwater spring anywhere in the world. Over 2,100 million litres of water
gush up every 24 hours.
* Less than 5% of the population of New Zealand is human - the rest are animals, giving one of the
highest ratios of humans to animals in the world.
* New Zealand has more Bookshops per head of population than any other country; one for every 7,500 people
(compared with one for every 19,000 in England and one for every 50,000 in the USA).
* The indigenous Maori name of New Zealand is ‘New Zealand Aotearoa’. Translated into English, it
means ‘New Zealand, The Land of the Long White Cloud’.
* New Zealand has one of the highest car ownership rates in the world, with 2.5 million cars for 4 million people.
* The share of New Zealand in the world export of sheep meat is around 54 %
* New Zealand invented bungee jumping.
* 24% of New Zealand families have only one parent.
* New Zealanders make only about 2% of their journeys by bus and fewer than 1% by rail
* Unlike the human population, the majority of New Zealand's sheep are based on the South Island,
where there are more than 20 sheep for every human!
