Karori

Karori is Maori for "rollercoaster."* It's in a valley in the hills above Wellington, about 160 meters (500 feet) above sea level.  To look at a topographic map, it appears quite smooth and orderly, with the main road running along the basin of the valley:

However, that purple covers a difference of 70 meters (230 feet)! Birdwood Steet, for example, is only 600 meters long but rises by 50 meters!  Karori Road varies from 139 meters to 178 meters, and it's not a simple grade but a series of hills and valleys.  The drive to Wright's Hill (the green blob at the bottom) is 3.5km but climbs another 150 meters!  In other words, Karori is a cycling nightmare.

I bought a used bike off the Internet, sight-unseen.  It was the wrong size, rusty and the gears didn't work--but it was cheap!  I took it to the local bike shop which only charged me $40 NZD for a standard service, and the gears worked perfectly--for a day. The next day they were frozen in place again.  However, I didn't bother complaining because I realised that I would never change gears in Karori -- I was either climbing straight uphill in first gear, or screaming downhill at terrifying speeds.  There was no point shifting gears so I could go faster!

That said, it could be worse. According to this article, when Karori was settled in 1840, the only access was a Maori footpath! By 1843 they had built a road along Curtis Pass, about 260 meters above sea level. It was so steep that passengers had to walk up one section as the horses couldn't pull them! In 1897 the residents voted to pay £4000 to build a new road. It was supposed to take 6 months but took 3 years and cost £8000.  It was still good value, as today it is still the main road into Karori.  (For a suburb of 15,000 people, there are only 3 roads that access it!)

My point isn't to complain about the hills or the roads or even my bicycle, but to compare Wellington to San Francisco.  You see, SF is the only place I ever wanted to live in the US, and I appear to have done just that. In addition to the hills, the bay, and the weather--if  Mark Twain's "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" were true (it isn't) he would have felt right at home in Karori--even the ethnic diversity is similar, with Wellington about 76% white and 16% Asian, while San Francisco is 49% white and 33% Asian.

Of course, there are some differences: Somes Island has a wildlife sanctuary rather than a maximum security prison; in the Mercer 2014 International Quality of Living Survey, Wellington was ranked as the 12th best city in the world while San Francisco was #27; Numbeo.com calculates it costs 30% less in Wellington to maintain the same standard of living as San Francisco; and where San Francisco has 837,000 residents crammed into 47 square miles (that's 17,179 people per square mile!), Wellington city (including Karori) only has 200,000 people over 112 square miles (roughly 10% of SF's population density!)

So perhaps I found an even better version of Baghdad by the Bay.

* Of course I'm making that up.  Maori for "roller coaster" is takai rōnaki.