David and Lili's World Tour

NEW ZEALAND

March 2014 - Citizens!

Kia Ora. We are citizens of New Zealand! We love our adopted home country, and we are proud of our shiny new, all black passports. To achieve this milestone, we had to live here for 5 years as permanent residents. We also had to swear allegiance to the Queen. Not a problem. Words cannot describe how happy we are to be Kiwis! Those 5 years flew by as we worked hard and played hard. In 2014 alone we tramped more than 300 kilometers along several Great Walks and other back-country tracks. Yes we are keen trampers, but all that walking served another purpose: we needed to get our bodies used to carrying backpacks, because we're embarking on another World Tour, around the world the hard way! So here we go... Australia, Timor Leste, Indonesia... Can we get to India with no airplane? Um, no. We're going to fly to Australia, but our goal is to minimize air travel in favor of epic overland routes...

Speaking of the Queen... I never discuss work in this travel blog, but I will make an exception because I worked directly for the New Zealand government, for the Tax Department. It was a great gig! As the Principal Solution Architect, I was across every I.T. change project in the department, big and small, tactical and strategic, and so I really learned how the NZ government works behind the scenes. I encountered competent professionals working hard to do the right thing. Great! As NZ often gets ranked as the World's least-corrupt nation, this makes sense, but I did see corruption in the small... The tax department implements the law, so who makes the law? I witnessed cases where the competent professionals in the "deep state" recommended doing the right thing with tax policy, well-researched proposals, but these were routinely rejected by politicians. The number-one example is the effort to prevent overseas money-laundering ala the Panama Papers, and to tax large fortunes, a largely failed effort. I encountered a fascinating difference between US and NZ legal language... I had to ask, what exactly do the legal documents mean when they refer to The Crown, and how does this relate to the City of London Corporation? ... My personal theory is that this question has everything to do with Brexit, the deeper explanation as to why certain politicians were so adamant about leaving the EU that they did not care about the largely negative consequences (follow the money to the City banks). I'll let you connect the dots yourself.

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