Driving on the Left

There’s a lot to love about New Zealand. The remarkably friendly people. The stunning landscapes. The fluffy, fruit-topped pavlovas. The chicken and ketchup-flavored potato chips. 

New Zealand does all these things right. Unfortunately, like their cousins in Great Britain, they do two things terribly wrong.

They put the steering wheel on the passenger side of the car … and they drive on the wrong side of the road.

I drove on the left once before, in Australia, but that was six years ago, on lonesome rural highways. There wasn’t much traffic, and our route took us up and down the same long road again and again. Easy peasy, as they say.

But on this pristine New Zealand morning — the day we headed out for the Coromandel Peninsula — things were different. We were renting a car a few blocks from our B&B, which meant that, from the moment we pulled out of the rental company’s parking lot, we would be driving in frantic city traffic. 

No one else seemed inclined to take the wheel, so I once again found myself getting ready to drive on the left. With the steering wheel on what we think of as the passenger side, even something as banal as climbing into the car feels peculiar.

Out of habit, I reached up to adjust my rear-view mirror, and my right hand brushed nothing but the right-hand edge of the windshield. When I got ready to put the car in gear, my reflexes once again put my right hand in motion; some ancient memory of gear shifts mounted on steering wheels came out of nowhere, and I found myself switching on the blinkers instead of putting the car in drive.

The pedals were in the same spots, so I was able to release the parking brake and step on the gas wihtout incident … but then, as I was bracing myself to make my first right turn into fast-moving city traffic, I gave myself a scare by switching on the windshield wipers instead of the turn signal.

In familiar conditions, most of the act of driving is automatic; our reptilian brain takes over, and we can concentrate on other things (conversations, texting, drinking coffee, shaving) while our body operates the car. Unfortunately, this works against you when driving on the left — not because you’re trying to eat or drink or tweet while driving, but because the entire time you’re driving, that normally silent reptilian portion of your brain is screaming: “Hey, you! You’re on the wrong side of the road!”

My reptilian brain screamed as I pulled out into traffic. (“You’re turning into oncoming traffic!”) It screamed when I took another right turn. (“You’ll be hit from behind!”) It began screaming so loudly, I actually thought I could hear it with my ears — but that particular scream (or, to be honest, more of a sudden intake of breath, accompanied by a sudden gripping of the dashboard) actually came from Clyde.

From his perspective (and, to some extent, I think it *was* a trick of perspective — after all, he’s not used to being a passenger on the left-hand side of the car), I was driving *too much* on the left. Cars on our left, according to Clyde, were perilously close. Walls on our left were centimeters from his door. The shoulder — or the embankment, or the car in the opposite lane — loomed all too large just outside Clyde’s window, and he responded by becoming as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

And this I could, pretty much, ignore — until we came to the roundabouts: those circular intersections where everyone dives in, never yields, and speeds around in a circle until electing to exit, very suddenly, to the left.

As we pulled into the roundabout, I heard a chorus of simultaneous voices.

From the dashboard, our GPS, in its crisp New Zealand accent: “Drive into the roundabout and take the second exit.”

From John, in the backseat, as we approached the first exit: “This is it. This is it! You’re supposed to exit! Don’t we take the first exit?”

From Clyde: “Next one, next one, next one — you’re passing it!”

From my reptilian brain: “YOU’RE DRIVING IN CIRCLES IN THE WRONG DIRECTION AND IT’S YOUR FAULT THAT EVERYONE IS GOING TO DIE!!!”

And that level of input, frankly, tripped some kind of internal breaker.

Me, sternly, to the entire car: “Do you want to drive?”

Them, meekly: a chorus of no’s. 

Me, my voice high-pitched and shrill and girly: “If you would like to drive, I would be happy for you to do it!”

Silence. 

I missed the turn. I turned around, I took the wrong exit. I turned around. I got back on the roundabout. I took the right exit, got on the local equivalent of the Interstate, and headed south.

We made it to the Coromandel peninsula without incident. The next day, we made it back — even driving along the twisty, curvy, blind-cornered, occasionally one-lane stretch of Highway 25 — without incident — and without any passenger commentary of any kind, except for the fact that everyone seemed very, very keen on telling what a great job I was doing with the driving.