You keep saying it's crowded...I don't think that means what you think it means

We are traveling in New Zealand during the peak travel season, not only for foreign visitors, but for Kiwi's themselves. This means that every holiday town in the country is, apparently, if you ask the locals who live there, innundated with people at the moment. We have encountered this sentiment time and again as we have traveled around. For example, we will ask an inn keeper for a dinner recommendation, and they will invariably tell us that we should be happy with what we can get, given the massive crowds, most restaurants simply wont have tables. We thank them for the information, then head into town to explore the offerings. There we find that we do, indeed need to take what we can get. It gets dark well after 9 pm here, so we take advantage of the daylight hours to go on hikes, visit botanic gardens, and generally enjoy New Zealand, before we pause to have dinner. So, most days we have dinner after 9 pm. By this time (and really most of the time) the towns are nearly devoid of people. The word "sleepy" comes to mind. Most of the towns where we stay only have a handful of restaurants, and only a fraction of those are open past nine. So, we do indeed find that we need to "take what we can get" when if comes to dinner, but not because of the crowds, rather because of New Zealand's early bed time. For the record, we are usually seated right away, the longest wait for a table being about ten minutes.

While we find the Kiwi's idea of a crowd charming, we have certainly found it advantageous as well. On New Years Eve we stayed in the resort town of Te Anau. The New Years festivities included a bonfire and live band in the park, and a fireworks show over the lake. Due to the very small "huge" crowds, we were able to walk out of our hotel room around 11:30, stroll to the park, get a spot right in front of the bonfire to enjoy the band and the warm crackle for about ten minutes, then stroll across the street to the lake to have a front row view of the fireworks display. We then strolled back to our hotel and were in bed by 12:30 so that we would be fresh for our early morning boat ride to Doubtful Sound.