Thousands of British & Irish Lions supporters will be descending on New Zealand this summer and the country’s top cities will be bursting at the gills.
This will be the biggest international sporting festival to hit the Land of the Long White Cloud since the 2011 World Cup and the Kiwis have been preparing for it for the past few years.
Many of the travelling Lions supporters will be made up of the Irish current living and working in New Zealand, Australia and further afield.
And who doesn’t want, or love, the Irish, eh?
https://youtu.be/XmiKKVMrwJ8
Well, one Wellington native doesn’t seem too keen on the British & Irish hordes descending on his town.
The Lions will be in Wellington on three occasions during the six-week tour and the city is currently 100 spaces short of the 1,300 camper van slots they have been projected to need.
The Dominion Post is reporting that the ‘Te Papa and Evans Bay sites are already fully booked, and campervans could end up being parked in Oriental Parade, as well as along Cambridge and Kent terraces’.
This would most likely mean that freedom camping will be permitted in other areas of Wellington – basically, tourists parking up their self-contained camper vans in other public spaces and park-lands in the vicinity. The stop-gap solution did not impress one irate local, who did not wish to be named. He told the website:
“The effect on us is we get up in the morning and see people brush their teeth and spit out on the grass, get dressed in front of us because they can’t get dressed in the vehicle.
“In a one-off situation, if everyone’s behaving themselves, then it shouldn’t be an issue.”
Some words of warning to Lions tourists – don’t spit your tooth-paste out on the grass and, for the love of God, get changed INSIDE your camper van.
If you do that, everyone should get along just fine.
