NZ Rocks

Just back from 18 days tiki-touring the South Island of New Zealand, the more I travel in NZ (or overseas) the more I love this place!

We heavily relied on our Garmin GPS 76Csx to get us around, using the NZ Open GPS maps (with Zenbu POIs built in) it works just like a mini-hardware-Zenbu. Very cool for knowing exactly how far it is to that next petrol station over the Crown Range (Can the Daihatsu Sirion (or affectionately known as The Sirloin) do 65km on ‘empty’? Turns out it can! )

It was also pretty cool to see and use the work of the Zenbu user community first hand. I was always happily surprised to drive past some random cafe / shop / restaurant in the middle of nowhere and find that it was accurately on the maps. Nifty!

I also happened to come across the NZ wiki page for OpenStreetMap (or OSM) and was surprised to see a full section on Zenbu and a note to “contact Zenbu”! OSM is a free editable map of the world, like Google Maps but with an open license. I’ve contacted the NZ OSM mappers and hope to see Zenbu POIs populating OSM soon. The more places that Zenbu data goes the better!